The Welcome to St. Francisville sign had a bullet hole in it.
Not fresh — rust had settled into the edges of it years ago — but nobody had patched it, which I took as either honesty or laziness, and I was choosing to call it honesty because I'd driven six hours and I needed this to work.
I needed a lot of things to work lately.
The town unfurled slowly, like all old things do. Small houses, narrow roads that trickled into something bigger. Spanish moss hung off every oak reminding me of curtains reduced to tatters. There was a certain violence to it — the nature itself was cautioning against it, and yet I pressed the gas pedal harder.
A filling station came next. Then a diner with a hand-painted sign. A hardware store that looked like it hadn’t changed owners since before the change of millennia.
The main street was clean andverySouthern, which is me saying everyone knew everyone and no one wanted to be the one whose storefront brought down the property value.
I'd grown up in a town like this. Different state, same bones. I knew exactly how it worked: who you sat next to in church told people more about you than anything you could say with your mouth.
Which meant church was my first stop.
Grace Eternal sat on the edge of town, set back from the road, trying to maintain some dignity. Old stone, 19th century at least, but the windows were new — stained glass that caught the morning light and threw color across the gravel like something out of a painting. Beautiful. Made the back of your throat ache a little. I sat in my car for a full minute looking at it.
It's just a building, I told myself. It's just a job posting.
I'd answered a listing I'd found on a church community board three weeks ago. Administrative assistant, community outreach coordinator, food bank management. Room and board negotiable for the right candidate. I hoped Iwastherightcandidate, because I had about two hundred bucks to my name and no other plan.
The posting had been written with care that suggested the person who wrote it actually meant it; it went into detail about what they expected and what they offered, and I had taken agamble, knowing perfectly well that a church wasnota place I wanted to be.
Yet it was what I knew best.
I'd been moving between short-term rentals — which was a polite term for crappy motels — for the better part of eight months; I was twenty-three years old and I was sogoddamntired.
It had felt like a sign. I know how that sounds.
Trust me, I'mfullyaware of how that sounds.
I got out of the car.
Sunday service had already started when I slipped in through the side door and almost toppled a vase. Why was there even a vase? By the door no less.
I caught it at the last moment, the decorative branches poking me in the cheek andalmosttaking my eye out. I barely managed not to say a ‘shit’ or a ‘fuck’ inside the House of the Lord.
I set it back, pressing it against the wall, and ignored the dirty look a woman in a purple blouse gave me. I should’ve been giving the dirty looks, that blouse wasgod-awful. And I’m saying thatas aChristian.
The church was full — and I mean full-full, wall to wall, not a polite Sunday showing. Every pew packed. Old women in hats. Families with children somehow sitting still. Men in their good shirts who looked like they hadn't planned on being here and had come anyway. I eased into the back row next to a woman who had the air of Channel No. 5 and maybe the residue of yesterday’s drinking — but who’s counting, right? She gave me a single assessing look before returning her attention to the front of the room.
I followed her eyes.
I want to be precise about my first impression of Judah Beaumont because I have thought about it since, and I think itmatters, the exact order in which I understood him. Or rather — didn’t.
First: he was tall. Well above the average. 6’4’’, 6’5’’ at the veryleast.
Second: he was mid-sentence, and whatever he was saying, the room was holding its breath around it. Not the polite held breath of people being patient. The real kind. Two hundred people getting sucked into an odd stasis because the pastor had put a jam of sorts in the space-time continuum. That kind.
Third — and this is the part I keep coming back to — he didn't look like a preacher. Or rather, he lookedexactlylike one, which was the problem I couldn’t seem to come to terms with. Clergy have a type, you see. A softness around the middle. An earnestness in the eyes that comes from years of being the person who sits with people at their worst. Judah Beaumont had none of that. He stood at that pulpit. Dark hair, pale eyes — wrong on his face in a way that made you keep looking to figure out why. A dress shirt, good quality, sleeves buttoned to the wrist in this heat, which even I noticed, and I tend to missa lotof the mundane things.
He was reading from Job.
“Where were you,” he said, and his voice carried across the room, “when I laid the foundations of the earth?”
He paused. Let the silence do something.
“God is not asking for an answer,” he said. “He's reminding Job of the order of things.”
