Universal Harvester(32)

Michael’s text today was from Luke 17:31. “I want to start with Luke, seventeen and thirty-one,” he began; he spoke very slowly with his eyes on the book before him, not looking up. He paused, still with his head down, and remained silent for so long that Irene’s mind began to wander out into open space. “Simon,” he said after a while, extending his hand awkwardly toward a young man seated near Irene.

Simon got up. As long as he’d been sitting still, Irene hadn’t noticed that he smelled, but the movement dislodged the scent; it was strong. He stood and began reading from a well-worn Bible. “‘In that day, he that shall be on the housetop, and his stuff in the house, let him not go down to take it away; and he that is in the field, let him likewise not return back.’ Thank you, Father,” he said, and then sat back down again.

“Thank you, Father,” echoed Michael, belatedly, after what proved to be the first of many long silences. “We find the Lord saying the same thing in the book of Matthew. It’s a little different there. Matthew…” He broke off again.

In the space that opened, Irene remembered a Matthew she’d known pretty well at college—he went by Matt. She felt ashamed, remembering Matt in church, even a church as modest as this one. She tried banishing him from her mind, listening hard and focusing. But in the long quiet Michael left between one thought and the next, Matt found all the room he needed, roaring through in his Plymouth Fury all red and shiny, the upholstery on its backseats soft and warm.

“Matthew specifies what the worker in the field might go back to his house to get,” Michael continued finally. He looked out over the seven in their chairs, and also at Irene, his gaze stopping on each of them as it went. His blue eyes were very bright. “Lisa. Twenty-four, seventeen and eighteen.”

It was the woman Irene had visited with in front of the Astro Theater. She, like Michael, looked much as she had on the day Irene had seen her; the same dress, the same simple shoes. “His garment,” she replied, looking up from her Bible.

“His garment,” said Michael, after a long pause. “Let not him that is in the field, turn back to take his garment.” An even greater silence followed; Irene thought about Grace Evangelical. Everyone all dressed up at the holidays. Peter in his suit at Christmas services, just the two of them. Before the wedding, before Lisa, precious Lisa, whose dolls now had conversations about going to the movies. Where had the time gone?

Michael looked pained; he closed his eyes. “Think about the worker in the field,” he said, impossibly slowing his rhythm even further, not raising his voice but speaking as if to a friend across a table in a diner late at night. “Think about that worker in the field at midday. How he looks out there after half a day’s work, when the hour comes. Sweating. Sunburned. There’s a reason why Luke wants us to see this worker in the field, why Matthew says you don’t go back for your clothes. It’s not just that God doesn’t mind if you’re dirty,” he said.

This time he paused for a full minute, still with his eyes closed, eyebrows knitted together; everyone looked up at him, waiting, trying in private degrees of failure or success to keep their minds focused on the message.

“The dirt’s a sign,” he said, finally relaxing his face and opening his fiery blue eyes. Their gaze looked over the congregation and at the back wall. They appeared, to Irene, like sapphires.

*

The freezer in the garage was full of beef: even in frugal times, there were plenty of steaks in the Sample house. Irene retrieved a prepackaged box of four and entered the house through a door that led from the garage directly into the living room. Peter was on the couch, watching a baseball game. He got up when she came in; he wasn’t overceremonious about it, but he wasn’t ever going to be the sort of person who stayed in his seat when his wife entered the room.

“It’s three o’clock,” he said. He didn’t raise his voice, but there was a pleading note in it. Tell me something.

“Sorry I’m so late,” she said, smiling earnestly, taking hold of and gently squeezing his hand, slowing but not breaking her stride as she headed for the sink, where she put a stopper in the drain and began running warm water.

“It’s three o’clock,” he said again. “You left at ten thirty.”

“Well, I went to Council Bluffs,” she said, taking the steaks from their box: they were vacuum-sealed in plastic. She set them under the running water.

“Well, I know that,” he said. “But that was four and a half hours ago.”

“I didn’t go shopping,” she said over her shoulder, addressing him directly; she didn’t look down or away. There was more innocence than defiance in her expression. There is no defense against innocence.

“Irene,” he said, not knowing how else to respond.

“I found a new church,” she said, turning off the water. The sink was half-full. The steaks floated there like fat little boats.

“We didn’t know where you were,” he said. “I had to make excuses to Lisa.”

“Oh, Peter,” she said, crossing again to the living room. “Yes, I imagine. I am so sorry. The time just got away from me. I did mean to go to the store, too.”

“You left at ten thirty,” he said again.

She took a step toward him, so that he’d see her face, all of it: her lips, her eyes, her forehead with its two gradually deepening furrows.