The woman beside me exhaled softly. I glanced at her with a raised eyebrow. Then at the one next to her. And the one next toher.I wasn’t exactly sure what was happening but it seemed the preacher had said something profound.
My eyes narrowed at the pulpit.
He kept reading and preaching and the women kept gasping and nodding.
Huh, I remember thinking. Not the typical preacher effect.
And yet, he didn’t sound like a cult leader — which had been my firstverywrong thought. This wasn’t a cult. A cult didn’t rightly know it was a cult. They thought they were acommunity.This — this town — this church, they knew what they were — and at that moment, I still didn’t.
I remember staring at the man at the pulpit, this good-looking pastor in his long sleeve shirts and his polite smile, and thinking: he may just be the real deal. Which sounds like a strange thing to think. He was a pastor. Believing was, presumably, the job description. But I had grown up around men who used scripture like my father had used his belt. I knew the difference between a man performing faith and a man who had actually staked something on it.
Judah Beaumont had staked something on it.
I thought that should have been reassuring. Ifiledit away as reassuring mind you, and ignored the part of my brain that was saying that's not less dangerous, Mercy, that's more.
The preaching ended and I introduced myself to a woman named Darlene. She was a nice Southern woman — very pious. Very — I sigh —southern.That’s the word. Southern. Her — once — dark chocolate hair were peppered with grey strands and lines around her eyes that had, perhaps, been fine in her thirties, had evolved to deep grooves. It told me enough about her — told me I could trust her. Those were smile lines, my mama had taught me, and people who smiledgenuinely, enough for the lines to take,could notbe bad people.
Mama — I’m putting my trust in your education.
What surprised me about Darlene, though, was how much energy she had for heat like this. I was sweating to heaven and back, praying to catch a gasp of something air-conditioned, but Darlene looked like she was ready to run a marathon.
She led me through a side door off the sanctuary, into what must’ve been the administrative wing, chattering all the while about the church’s history like it was her own family tree. “Built in 1872, you know, by the Beaumonts themselves. Solid stone, withstood hurricanes and floods and Lord knows what else. That’s the kind of foundation we stand on here.”
I nodded, wiping a bead of sweat from my temple, trying not to let my discomfort show. The air in the hallway was cooler, at least, filtered through vents that hummed and rattled, but I thought that’s just them being honest about their working conditions.Nobodywanted to deal with this weather — not even those bornintoit.
Darlene stopped at a door marked “Office” and pushed it open without knocking. “Pastor Beaumont's expecting you,” she said, and smiled like this was simply a wonderful thing. “He asked that you wait in the side office. He'll be along once he's finished greeting.”
“Greeting” was a twenty-minute operation. I sat in the small office off the vestibule and listened to the sound of two hundred people filing slowly past, and the low thread of his voice moving through all of it — a word here, a hand on a shoulder there, someone's name said with enough specificity to make clear he actually remembered who they were. I'm good with people. I know the difference between good with people and this.
When the door opened, I stood.
He was taller up close — as if that was even possible.
He looked at me.
“Mercy Evangeline,” he said — his voice slow and deep like nice, sweet sun-warmed molasses. Itdidthings to me.
He'd read my application, he knew my name, but there was something in the way he said it — unhurried, like he was trying the sound of it — that made me feel briefly, inexplicably, like I'd been found.
That’s the feeling that makes a believer, isn’t it?
“That's me,” I said, and then felt immediately stupid because yes, obviously, I was the only other person in the room.
Something moved in his expression. Not quite a smile. The near-miss of one.
“Sit down,” he said, and took the chair behind the desk, and I sat.
His eyes were pale grey in the light from the window. He had a stillness to him that I would eventually understand was not peace but the thing that lives on the other side of it. I didn't know that yet. I just knew it felt like being looked at by someone who was actually seeing you, and that it had been a long time since I'd experienced that, and that I was embarrassingly susceptible to it.
“You drove from Hattiesburg,” he said.
I took a breath — not because I was lacking it — but because that’s what people do, and said, “Yes.”
He tilted his head slightly. “Is something the matter?”
“The matter?” I echoed.
His grey eyes narrowed and he smirked. “You sound… exasperated.” The way he said it, I should’ve known then he’d be trouble.
