The Visitation (4 page)

But now the breeze played across the deserted grassy slope and the cottonwoods stood stark against the sky all by themselves, just as one would expect on a warm April day. He was gone. Just like that.

J
UDY’S EAT-A-LONG AND TAVERN
was one of those low-budget enterprises you usually find associated with out-of-the-way towns like Antioch. It was a one-story, sagging structure with weathered siding and a neon sign atop the roof that used to say EAT before it broke nine years ago. Even without the neon sign, the building still shouted at passing motorists with the words
JUDY’S—Since 1955
painted across the front in huge white letters. Besides the three grain elevators immediately south and Bud’s Shell station across the street, it used to be the first thing you’d see driving into Antioch westbound, and for that reason became one of the town’s prime landmarks.

Judy Holliday ran the place and did most of the cooking, although she’d taken on an assistant fry cook so she could get off her feet a little more often. She had to be pushing seventy by now, but she still got up early and drove herself hard—that, she told me, was what kept her so young and attractive. Back when Antioch was the nearest and best place to store and ship grain, Judy cooked meals and brewed coffee for truckers, farmers, ranchers, and railroad workers. When the truckers switched to the interstate, she kept on cooking for the farmers, ranchers, and railroaders. When the farmers and ranchers sold out and the railroad abandoned the northern route, Judy cooked and brewed for whomever was left: the local folks, the small farmers at lunch, a few truckers who serviced Antioch on their way somewhere else, and people who still had trouble making meat loaf, like me. To hear her tell it, she had been too busy to notice any change in the amount of business. It was never that great anyway. As for the broken “EAT” sign, she said, “To heck with it. Nobody’s gonna read it anyway.”

Judy’s was located on the east edge of town, and when I say “edge,” I mean abrupt edge. Antioch has no suburbs, no outskirts. Like a model railroad laid out on a square table, the streets and buildings occupy a tight, one-mile square grid and do not extend beyond that. In this part of the country, there is land for building towns and there is land for farming and ranching, and the two never mix. If you stand in Judy’s parking lot, you’re in town. Take one step east and you’re in a wheat field. Stand at the east end of Myrtle Street and look west, you’ll see early postwar homes comfortably arranged along the quiet oiled streets without sidewalks. Look east and you’ll see acres of plowed, featureless farmland as far as the horizon. The other end of Myrtle Street is easy to see, by the way. The street, like the whole town, ends abruptly at another wheat field only a mile away.

My rental house was at the end of Myrtle Street on the west edge of town, with a quiet neighborhood to the east and that once serene, now mysterious hill with the cottonwoods to the west. This evening I had to get out of there. I was still smarting from Rene’s two-by-four, and somehow that messy little house only worsened the pain the longer I stayed.

I also felt a serious need to see and talk to some people I could be sure were real. I checked all around that hill and those cottonwoods for footprints, trampled grass, anything that would show someone had been there, and didn’t find a thing. That scared me, not so much that I saw someone on that hill, but that I thought I saw someone. I needed some time in the real world.

Judy’s was only a short hop over to the highway and then a one-mile drive through the center of town. I locked up the house for the first time since I’d moved in and drove my Trooper.

I passed by the old Methodist church, Kiley’s Hardware, and the Baptist church, where a week-long revival was underway. What was that evangelist’s name? I am not kidding: Everett Fudd. Once again I felt the strange sensation that I was viewing the town in a home movie from the ’40s. Over half a century ago, somehow, this town materialized on the prairie, liked the way it was, and froze that way. Yes, some new buildings had appeared over the years. Our Lady of the Fields had a new brick structure, forced upon the congregation by a deep underground spring that swallowed up the old one. Every so often there would be a fresh coat of paint on a storefront, like that weird, Pepto-Bismol pink Don Anderson chose for his appliance store. But those were only minor changes to over a half-century of sameness.

Many things about the town were normal enough. We had our local Kiwanis club and Grange, our Amway dealers and Jehovah’s Witnesses, our Cub Scout paper drives and youth group car washes. Our high school played other small-town high schools and our cheerleaders did silly fund-raisers like rocking-chair marathons and jog-a-thons. We had a parade every Fourth of July, and Amos Sjostrom always took part with his old hay wagon and Clydesdales.

Even so, you didn’t have to live here too long before sensing it: Antioch was a town looking forward to the past. I used to notice it in the churches of Antioch, especially my own:
Do the old things again, just do them harder
.
Back out of the slump. Don’t go forward, you’ve never been there
.
Replay the memory, it’s always better
.
That old-time religion was good for our fathers and mothers and it’s good enough for us
. I knew Brother Fudd was singing the same tune down at the Baptist church, just him and the same dozen people every night, “taking the town for Christ.”

I don’t know why all this began to wear on me after fifteen years, but suddenly it did.

For the entire fifteen years that I pastored, I never went inside Judy’s. It was, after all, a tavern as well as an eating establishment, and there are places a Pentecostal Mission pastor in a small town like Antioch just doesn’t go. I took the big step soon after I resigned, however, for two simple reasons: I wanted to know what kind of people were in there, and I was hungry. I tried Judy’s broiled chicken over rice with mixed vegetables and salad and found it quite satisfactory. I tried the twelve-ounce steak the next time, and the pasta salad the third. The barbecued half-a-chicken was good the fourth visit and a little dry the fifth, but four out of five good visits wasn’t a bad score.

By then, I’d gotten word second- and thirdhand that the talk had started: The former pastor of Antioch Pentecostal Mission was backsliding and giving in to the world. I viewed it as a step forward. After all, I’d never been here before. I’d never gotten to know these people. This was new for me. And while I never even tried to develop a taste for beer, I liked Judy’s coffee. All that to say, I became a regular customer and continued dropping in whenever the prospect of cooking my own sorry little meal seemed too overwhelming.

“Hey, Trav!” Judy called from behind the bar, her hair a white fright wig and her apron stained with gravy. She called me “Rev” the first few times I came in, but as soon as my ordination papers lapsed, I let her know. She and the other regular customers have called me “Trav” ever since and have acted more at ease around me, although I still get junk mail addressed to “Rev. and Mrs. Travis Jordan.”

The interior of Judy’s was just one more example of how Antioch was frozen in time. Back in the days before taste, a clever restaurant trendsetter must have bought up all the dark wall paneling and red and orange shaggy carpet in existence, sent sale announcements to every backward, small-town, greasy spoon restaurant in America, and retired with a small fortune. I’m guessing Judy was one of his first customers. She made no apologies, however. Her carpet displayed several darker shades after so many years of traffic, spills, and cigarette butts, but she didn’t seem the slightest bit interested in replacing it or anything else. The dark walls were hiding the film and dirt just fine. The wood tables and booths were so solid she only had to replace the red-and-white checked tablecloths once a year.

The bar was in the back, well stocked, with ten stools. Five of the stools were occupied today. I got a wave of hello from Greg and Marc, the contractors, both wearing billed caps and flannel shirts—the back of Greg’s shirt was torn wide open at the shoulder but he wore it anyway. For two months after they introduced themselves I thought they were half brothers, but finally Marc admitted that they didn’t have the same mother either, and they had a real laugh over that. Two stools over from them was George Harding, the retired wheat farmer. He didn’t talk much but he didn’t grumble much either, so he fit in. Skip another stool and there sat Linda and Irv, local truckers somewhere in their early forties. They’d been living together unmarried for eighteen years. The sin of it aside, they’d put up with each other for so long I honestly felt the relationship would last. They said hi. Occasionally one of the five heads would turn toward the television hanging on the wall. Right now, there was a basketball game in progress with the sound turned low.

The rest of the place had a nice dinner hour going. I saw plenty of regulars and the jukebox was thumping away, just one big subwoofer in a gilded box. My favorite booth by the front window was empty, so I took it, setting my hat and coat beside me on the bench seat. Gildy, Judy’s granddaughter, brought me a menu and silverware.

“Hey, Travis. Mind if I join you?” It was Brett Henchle, the chief of Antioch’s three policemen. He was in uniform, wearing his gun and badge, and I figured he was on his dinner break. A Vietnam vet with shrapnel still in his leg, he was big enough for this or any job that required occasional head breaking.

I gestured to the bench seat across from me. “Have a seat. How you doing?”

“All right,” he answered, and I could tell he didn’t mean it. He sank onto the bench and then looked around the room, bothered about something, trying to work up to saying whatever it was. He didn’t get there before Nancy Barrons came along. She owned and edited the Antioch
Harvester,
our local, twice-a-week newspaper, and I surmised from the cassette recorder and notepad that she was working. “Hi. Am I interrupting anything?”

Brett seemed thankful for the reprieve. “No. You go first,” he said, scooting over.

“You sure?”

“Just let me hear what he says.”

She slipped in beside him and set the notepad and recorder on the bench, out of service for the moment. That was like her. She was going to talk as a friend first and be a reporter second.

She was in her thirties, an independent sort, with auburn hair pinned up Katharine Hepburn style, single but dating a columnist in Spokane. She was into natural foods, a little yoga, and probably voted for Clinton, although she often took him to task in her editorials. We’d had our disagreements, sometimes nose to nose, mostly through her editorials and my dissenting letters to the editor, but it never got nasty. She won a few—I had to concede I only had half the story on Christopher Columbus. But I won some myself—she turned dead set against partial-birth abortion.

“How are things going?” she asked.

I wasn’t about to go into the details of my afternoon. I only replied, “Strangely. How are things going with you?”

She laughed. “Strangely.”

I noticed Brett smiling as if agreeing.

“Did you hear about Sally Fordyce seeing an angel, and the weeping crucifix at Our Lady’s?” she asked.

My grimace and nod clued her in. “Kyle Sherman told me about it earlier today.”

Nancy looked at the table as she asked, “See that couple over there?” I glanced discretely at a young couple in a booth across the room. “They came here from Moses Lake to see the crucifix for themselves. They believe in it.”

“Did it weep for them?” I asked.

“No, but they still believe in it. They’re going to get a room over at the Wheatland Motel and then spend the day at Our Lady’s tomorrow, as long as Father Vendetti lets them stay.”

“To . . . ?”

“To see if it’ll cry again.” Nancy lowered her voice. “She has leukemia.”

I closed my eyes, sighed, and felt grief for them. “How did they find out about it?”

“His mother attends Our Lady’s. She called them.” She leaned forward a little, her voice still low. “Travis, I don’t know what to think about all this. It sounds like something that should go in the paper, but . . .” She flipped her palms upward, at a loss. “You’ve been there and back. Any perspective on all this?”

“Are you skeptical?” I asked her.

She smiled. “As always.”

I gave a little shrug. “So am I.” I stole another glance across the room. “So I see a bit of tragedy.”

“Tragedy?” She set her notepad in front of her and clicked her pen. “May I?”

I nodded, then mentally reviewed the names, the faces: Sally Fordyce, Arnold Kowalski, Dee and her friends, this couple across the room. I stopped when my own name came up. “This kind of thing reminds me that it’s a crummy world out there, and there are things we have no easy answers for. When people are hurting, they start grasping. When the world hands you a pile of sorrow, you look beyond the world for some kind of relief, or at least an explanation. That’s what a lot of religious experience is all about.”

Nancy scribbled down my thoughts. “You think I should say anything about the cloud sightings?”

“If you write about any of this stuff, you may as well.”

She smiled and nodded, understanding my point. “All the same thing in your book?”

“I’m not trying to be derogatory.”

“Sure.”

“I just want to emphasize that these are very
human
events. People are involved, and people have wants, wishes, fantasies, earnest desires . . . and pain. Lots of pain. Given that, people can be very creative. They can hear things, see things—you follow me?”

She nodded affirmatively. “Gotcha.”

“Off the record . . .” I prompted, and she put down her pen. “I had a lady once tell me she saw Jesus standing right next to me while I was preaching. I knew another young fellow who claimed he saw a demon fly in his bedroom window. Also a little girl claimed to see an angel on top of her neighbor’s roof. People have told me all kinds of things. It’s nothing new.”

She seemed a little nonplussed. “And you don’t believe them?”