The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors (3 page)

The scenario played in his mind. And he responded to it, as he'd been unable to respond to her, and he touched himself, as he had done so many times in the past, and as he'd known he would do from those first moments in the bar.

Afterward, driving home, he thought: Next time I'll do it. Next time for sure.

The Hereditary Thurifer

STEPHEN L. CARTER

I

A
MANDA SEAVER TRACED
the sign of the cross above the bread and wine and waited for the magic. There had been a time in the yet recent past when the act of consecration had sparked in her an elemental tremor, as though in response to a raw electric shock, followed by a prayerful buzzing in her ears, damping the sound of Sunday shoes on thick carpet and creaking pews as parishioners rose and gathered at the altar rail with its heavily polished dark surfaces that had known the folded hands of generations of communicants.

But no longer.

Candles flickered to either side. The chalice winked gold. The vestments lay heavily along her slim arms. Arranging her face in an expression of proper sobriety, she held the Host in her right hand and the glittering chalice in her left, lifting both toward Heaven in accordance with the rubric of the Anglo-Catholic tradition. The congregation shuffled uneasily before her, three hundred faces, most of them black, observing, assessing, judging. She chanted the litany with care, reading the prayers rather than reciting from memory because the Episcopal Church of Trinity and St. Michael, here in the heart of Washington, D.C., disdained the contemporary Eucharist with which Amanda was familiar. Beside her, the deacon, yellowy face locked in permanent disapproval, turned pages in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and pointed to the proper lines. Amanda felt grateful and angry at once, worrying about her own feelings when she should have been thinking about the consecrated Host she was about to distribute. Today was her first Sunday as rector of TSM, as the younger members called it, and she knew she had not been these people's first choice, nor their second, nor their tenth. They had sent the bishop of Washington a list of a dozen traditionalists they could accept as their new leader.

The bishop had sent them Amanda.

They're good people
, the bishop had instructed her.
They just need to be shaken up a little
.

Meaning:
Teach them to think like we do. Bring them into the twenty-first century
.

“And although we are unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee any sacrifice,” Amanda reminded the flock, secretly begging God to restore the magic, and, at the same time, avoiding the gaze of the deacon, whose ability to read her innermost thoughts she found both appropriate and scary, “yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offenses, through Jesus Christ our Lord”—frantically signing over the bread and wine, as though the intricate gestures of her craft could conjure afresh the faith that had slipped behind her with the years.

But she felt nothing. No stir, no magic, no miracle. A thin, tasteless wafer and heavily watered wine. Calling the congregation to the altar, preparing to offer the consecrated Host on its gleaming silver tray, Amanda Seaver imagined that the greatest mystery facing her was how long she could pretend to possess the belief she lacked.

She was pardonably mistaken.

II

Amanda slipped out of her vestments in the sacristy, laying them in the waiting hands of a trio of older women, two black and one white, who represented the altar guild. At her former church, a dying all-white congregation near Boston, she had counted herself lucky to scrounge a single sixty-year-old acolyte for Sunday services. Here, the mass was choreographed with a precision that would have done credit to Westminster. Leaving the sacristy via the narrow hallway behind the altar, she overheard the women whispering.

“When they said a woman, I didn't know they meant white.”

“So what? I'm sure she won't stay long. You know what I'm talking about.”

“Oh, pooh. You can't believe every story—”

“It was terrible, what happened.”

“It was a long time ago.”

Then Amanda was out of earshot.

The hallway exited into the Lady Chapel, a room arranged with altar and pews in mimicry of the larger sanctuary where she had just celebrated, so ineptly, the mass. In the chapel Amanda found, off its hook, a thurible: the container for the incense Trinity and St. Michael no longer used. She lifted the small vessel, felt a twinge of sadness at the dust that had accumulated on its golden surface, and the several deep dents that made it unfit for service. She wondered who had pulled the thurible down and left it sitting on a pew. One of the children, she decided: the younger acolytes, unable to sit still, who relaxed in the Lady Chapel when their presence in the sanctuary was not required.

She returned the thurible to what she hoped was the proper hook, then climbed the short stair to the parish hall for coffee hour. She put on a smile and stood very straight, because nobody here seemed to slouch. She shook hands, accepted stiff and formal welcomes, said how happy she was to be here. She wished it were true. At thirty-nine, with a decade of ministry behind her, Amanda had longed for the barricades. The idea of being thrust into the midst of an African-American congregation had thrilled her. But she had never before been around so many black people: not black people like these. They had, most of them, money and breeding, in many cases generations of both, and if their expensive clothes didn't tell you, the parking lot full of German imports would. They voted Democratic, but their politics verged the other way. Few described themselves as “black,” or even “African-American.” They seemed to prefer unusual formulations, chief among them “darker nation.”

Making her, Amanda supposed, a representative of the paler nation.

Roaming the parish hall, she sought out and thanked the choirmaster and the deacon, the chalice bearers and the acolytes, but only the children so much as smiled. The adults looked at her askance, maybe because of her color, or because she had been imposed on them, maybe because—

I'm sure she won't stay long. You know what I'm talking about
.

—because they knew what the woman in the sacristy was talking about. Trinity and St. Michael had gone through three interim priests in just over a year before the bishop chose Amanda. She had talked to two about their experiences, and both had hinted that all was not well at TSM, but they were older white men, and she had put down their furtiveness to an uneasiness around people of color. Now, crossing the room toward the coffee cake, she remembered how one of them had complained that the congregation was too protective of its secrets. She had taken him to refer to, say, finances, or even gossip; only now did she wonder whether the secret was something else.

It was terrible, what happened.

Amanda supposed that whatever they were talking about must be written down somewhere. The church kept meticulous ledgers. Surely anything horrific enough to drive the new rector away would have been recorded—

Then she was cornered by Mrs. Routledge and Mrs. Madison, black women of a certain age and class, who sized her up from beneath their oversize Sunday hats and explained that she should not take it personally, theirs was just a congregation unused to newcomers. Amanda naturally wondered what they meant by “it,” but found herself too cowed to inquire. And this attitude would have astonished her classmates back at the divinity school, for her outspokenness on every issue under the sun, whether the authenticity of the epistle to the Hebrews or the racial diversity of the reading list for systematic theology, had been a legend around the quad.

Somebody else drew her away, wanting to discuss her reasons for choosing the contemporary rather than the traditional form of the blessing at the end of the service. Stumbling through an explanation of how, through force of habit, she had said “among” rather than “amongst,” Amanda heard the two women murmuring behind her:

“I don't think anybody's told her.”

“It's such a shame, poor lamb. Well, she'll find out.”

III

After ninety minutes—the coffee hour lasting nearly as long as the service—Amanda escaped gratefully to her office, a cramped, sunlit chamber whose three leaded windows overlooked the pretty churchyard. The walls were lined with shelves, and most of the books seemed to belong to the church: Amanda had little room for her own. There was a fireplace but it was sealed. There were several closets, most of them stuffed with peeling hymnals and ancient lists of prayer requests. One closet featured a mousetrap in the corner, a discovery she did not consider auspicious.

Hunting for personal space, she opened a drawer in one of the shelves, and found candles. In another she discovered several small cans. She opened one and took a whiff of the clayey powder inside then thanked Whoever was possibly paying attention that TSM, for all its reputation as a church in the old “bells and smells” tradition, had forsaken the use of incense, which secretly gave her headaches.

“It's agarwood,” said a voice from behind her. “Made by Benedictine monks. The finest incense available.”

She turned to find a fortyish man in slacks and dress shirt and tie, but no jacket. His hair was sandy in color, and at first she thought him one of the church's few white congregants. Looking closer, she realized that he was black, but with skin so light in hue that he might easily have passed.

“I don't think I've had the pleasure,” she said, fumbling to close the can like a child caught searching for Christmas presents.

“Christopher Taite.” His grip was strong yet somehow patient, the gaze of his light-gray eyes steady yet appraising. Despite willing herself not to, she noticed that he wore no wedding band.

“I saw you at the service,” Amanda said, a bit stupidly. “You sat in the back.”

He had no comment on this intelligence. He had managed, in a single smooth movement, to transfer the canister from her hands to his. Now he unscrewed the top and inhaled.

She waited for his head to snap backward. Instead, he nodded approval. “Seems fresh,” he said.

“Perhaps you might consider reinstating the use of incense during mass. It seems unfortunate to let it go to waste.” He gestured toward the door. “I believe that the congregation would be appreciative.”

“I'm a little surprised that they ever stopped using it. This seems”—she searched for an inoffensive way to put the point—“a place where traditions are important.”

The visitor nodded, handed the container back to her. The solemn expression on his pale features never flickered. “The traditions are indeed important, but the traditional use of incense ended because of a rather trivial misunderstanding.”

Amanda held on to the jar, not sure whether returning it to the drawer required some ritual with which she was unfamiliar. She sensed that Christopher Taite was the sort of man who would correct her, patiently and ruthlessly. “Which misunderstanding is that?”

“They stopped using incense,” he said, “after the murder.”

IV

They were walking in the churchyard, Amanda and her new acquaintance. The graves, she soon realized, were laid out mainly along the high outer wall, on either side of the cinder path. In the middle were trees and flowers, lovingly tended. It occurred to Amanda that none of her tours of the facilities had taken her deeply into the cemetery. She had peered from the door and pronounced it beautiful. She wondered whether her hosts had sensed her silent shirking when confronted with what Professor Gyver, back at the div school, used to call the Big E and the Big O, Eternity and Oblivion.

Christopher Taite seemed comfortable here. He walked with his hands linked behind his back, ear cocked toward her like a professor listening to a slow but promising student. He explained that his family had provided for over a century hereditary thurifers at Trinity, and later, after the merger, at Trinity and St. Michael. Trinity, she knew, had been an all-black Episcopal church, founded before the Civil War. It had merged with St. Michael, a dying but upscale white congregation, in the pandemonium of the 1960s.

“Do you by any chance happen to know what a hereditary thurifer is?” he asked with insulting patience.

“I know the thurifer carries the incense.”

A brisk shake of the slender head. Traditionalists liked their traditions perfect. “The thurifer carries the thurible. The thurible holds the incense. In the strict Anglican tradition, the title of thurifer was often hereditary. It ran in families, devolving usually upon the first-born male child.”

“Like primogeniture,” Amanda murmured, working hard to get a smile out of him.

“Precisely,” said the thurifer, never missing a step. “Here.” He pointed to a wide patch of earth set off by a low metal rail. Easily two dozen headstones were encompassed within the border, with room for several more. “This is where the Taites are buried. My older brother.” He pointed. “My father.” He pointed, again and again. “Two uncles, my grandfather, his older brother, their father. All served as thurifers at Trinity, or here. I was the eighth in the line, and, as I have no children of my own, I may be the last.”

“I would assume it's permissible to select a new thurifer.” Again she smiled. “Even if he—or she—isn't a Taite.”

The frown on the unlined face deepened without shifting. “That would be up to the rector.”