crawled into the bed forwards, which always embarrassed Natalie so. Reverend Hoyt tucked him in. It was a foolish thing to do. Esau was fully grown. He lived alone and took care of himself. Still, it seemed the thing to do.
Esau lay there looking up at him. He raised up on one arm to see if the cat was still there, and turned over on his side, wrapping his arms around his neck. Reverend Hoyt turned off the light. He didn’t know the sign for “good night,” so he just waved, a tentative little wave, from the door. Esau waved back.
Esau ate breakfast with the cat in his lap. Reverend Hoyt had turned the phone back up, and it rang insistently. He motioned to Esau that it was time to go over to the church. Esau signed something, pointing to the cat. He clearly wanted to take it with him. Reverend Hoyt signed one rather gentle “no” at him, pinching his first two fingers and thumb together, but smiling so Esau would not think he was angry.
Esau put the cat down on the chair. Together they walked to the church. Reverend Hoyt wished there were some way he could tell him it was not necessary for him to walk upright all the time. At the door of Reverend Hoyt’s study, Esau signed, “Work?” Reverend Hoyt nodded and tried to push his door open. Letters shoved under the door had wedged it shut. He knelt and pulled a handful free. The door swung open, and he picked up another handful from the floor and put them on his desk. Esau peeked in the door and waved at him. Reverend Hoyt waved back, and Esau shambled off to the sanctuary. Reverend Hoyt shut the door.
Behind his desk was a little clutter of sharp-edged glass and a large rock. There was a star-shaped hole above them in the glass doors. He took the message off the rock. It read, “And I saw a beast coming up out of the earth, and upon his head the names of blasphemy.”
Reverend Hoyt cleaned up the broken glass and called the bishop. He read through his mail, keeping an eye out for her through the glass doors. She always came in the back way through the parking lot. His office was at the very end of the business wing of the church, the hardest thing to get to. It had been intended that way to give him as much privacy as possible. There had been a little courtyard with a crab apple tree in it outside the glass doors. Five years ago the courtyard and the crab apple tree had both been sacrificed to parking space, and now he had no privacy at all, but an excellent view of all comings and goings. It was the only way he knew what was going on in the church. From his office he couldn’t hear a thing.
The bishop arrived on her bicycle. Her short curly gray hair had been swept back from her face by the wind. She was very tanned. She was wearing a light green pantsuit, but she had a black robe over her arm. He let her in through the glass doors.
“I wasn’t sure if it was an official occasion or not. I decided I’d better bring something along in case you were going to drop another bombshell.”
“I know,” he sighed, sitting down behind his littered desk. “It was a stupid thing to do. Thank you for coming, Moira.”
“You could at least have warned me. The first call I got was some reporter raving that the End was coming, I thought the Charles had taken over again. Then some idiot called to ask what the church’s position on pigs’ souls was. It was another twenty minutes before I was able to find out exactly what you’d done. In the meantime, Will, I’m afraid I called you a number of highly uncharitable names.” She reached out and patted his hand. “All of which I take back. How are you doing, dear?”
“I didn’t intend to say anything until I’d decided what to do,” he said thoughtfully. “I was going to call you this week about it. I told Natalie that when she brought Esau in.”
“I knew it. This is Natalie Abreu’s brainchild, isn’t it? I thought I detected the hand of an assistant pastor in all this. Honestly, Will, they are all alike. Isn’t there some way to keep them in seminary another ten years until they calm down a little? Causes and ideas and reforms and more causes. It wears me out.
“Mine is into choirs: youth choirs, boy choirs, madrigals, antiphonals, glees. We barely have time for the sermon, there are so many choirs. My church doesn’t look like a church. It looks like a military parade. Battalions of colored robes trooping in and out, chanting responses.” She paused. “There are times when I’d like to throttle him. Right now I’d like to throttle Natalie. Whatever put it into her head?”
Reverend Hoyt shook his head. “She’s very fond of him.”
“So she’s been filling him with a lot of Bible stories and scripture. Has she been taking him to Sunday school?”
“Yes. First grade, I think.”
“Well, then, you can claim indoctrination, can’t you? Say it wasn’t his own idea but was forced on him?”
“I can say that about three-fourths of the Sunday school class. Moira, that’s the problem. There isn’t any argument that I can use against him that wouldn’t apply to half the congregation. He’s lonely. He needs a strong father figure. He likes the pretty robes and candles. Instinct. Conditioning. Sexual sublimation. Maybe those things are true of Esau, but they’re true of a lot of people I’ve baptized, too. And I never said to them, 'Why do you really want to be baptized?’”
“He’s doing it to please Natalie.”
“Of course. And how many assistant pastors go to seminary to please their parents?” He paced the narrow space behind his desk. “I don’t suppose there’s anything in church law?”
“I looked. The Ecumenical Church is just a baby, Will. We barely have the organizational bylaws written down, let alone all the odds and ends. And twenty years is not enough time to build a base of precedent. I’m sorry Will. I even went back to pre-unification law, thinking we might be able to borrow something obscure. But no luck.”
The liberal churches had flirted with the idea of unification for more than twenty-five years without getting more accomplished than a few statements of good will. Then the Charismatics had declared the Rapture, and the churches had dived for cover right into the arms of ecumenism.
The fundamentalist Charismatic movement had gained strength all through the eighties. They had been committed to the imminent coming of the End, with its persecutions and Antichrist. On a sultry Tuesday in 1989 they had suddenly announced that the End was not only in sight, but here, and that all true Christians must unite to do battle against the Beast. The Beast was never specifically named, but most true Christians concluded he resided somewhere among the liberal churches. There was fervent prayer on Methodist front lawns. Young men ranted up the aisles of Episcopal churches during mass. A great many stained glass windows, including all but one of the Lazettis, were broken. A few churches burned.
The Rapture lost considerable momentum when two years later the skies still had not rolled back like a scroll and swallowed up the faithful, but the Charles were a force the newly born United Ecumenical Church refused to take lightly. She was a rather hodgepodgy church, it was true, but she stood like a bulwark against the Charles.
“There wasn’t anything?” Reverend Hoyt asked. “But the bishops can at least make a ruling, can’t they?”
“The bishops have no authority over you in this matter. The United Church of Christ insisted on self- determination in matters within an individual church, including election of officers, distribution of communion, and baptism. It was the only way we could get them in,” she finished apologetically.
“I’ve never understood that. There they were all by themselves with the Charismatics moving in like wolves. They didn’t have any choice. They had to come in. So how did they get a plum like self-determination?”
“It worked both ways, remember. We could hardly stand by and let the Charles get them. Besides, everyone else had fiddled away their compromise points on trespassers versus debtors and translations of the Bible. You Presbyterians, as I recall, were determined to stick in the magic word ‘predestination’ everywhere you could.”
Reverend Hoyt had a feeling the purpose of this was to get him to smile. He smiled. “And what was it you Catholics nearly walked out over? Oh, yes, grape juice.”
“Will, the point is I cannot give you bishops counsel on this. It’s your problem. You’re the one who’ll have to come to a fair and rational decision.”
“Fair and rational?” He picked up a handful of mail. “With advice like this?”
“You asked for it, remember? Ranting from the pulpit about humility?”
“Listen to this: ‘You can’t baptize an ape. They don’t have souls. One time I was in San Diego in the zoo there. We went to the ape house and right there, in front of the visitors and everything, were these two orangitangs…’” He looked up from the letter. “Here she apparently had some trouble deciding what words were most appropriate. Her pen has blotted.” He continued to read “‘…two orangitangs doing it.’ That’s underlined. ‘The worst of it is that they were laying there just enjoying it. So you see, even if you think they are nice sometimes…’ etc. This, from a woman who’s had three husbands and who knows how many ‘little lapses,’ as she calls them. She
