God Don't Come Here No More
3.0
3.0Chapter 1
1409words
"WOE UNTO THEM THAT CALL EVIL GOOD, AND GOOD EVIL."
The sun rose high above the shoddy church, casting no shadows and showing the aged building clear as day. White paint chipped off like sunburnt skin, the steeple leaned slightly to the left from a summer storm years ago. Weeds lined and crept up the base of the building, like nature threatened to take it back. The chapel sagged, as though it bore too much of the weight of the sinners of Ashford.
Inside, the congregation gathered; a collection of sweat drenched Sunday best, cheap cologne, and paper fans waving in futility. Many held their hands up to the heavens, others bowed their heads in reverent prayer. Pastor Ezekiel Harlow, a large towering man made from brimstone, paced before the congregation. Sweat glistened and pasted his black hair to his head, his cheeks hot from heat and passion. Stains dripped from his armpits and clung onto his back. He spat each word of sermon like hellfire, the veins in his neck and face pulsating.
"The devil don't always wear horns, people," he crowed. "Sometimes he speaks softly. Sometimes he smiles. Sometimes he says what y'all been aching to hear!" The crowd murmured amen's and nodded along. "But the Lord does not change! Scripture does not bend, church. And the righteous? Hell, the righteous do not follow after shadows."
Mary took her cue. She laid her fingers onto the first chords of the following hymn. They'd been slick with sweat from resting them underneath her thighs that now peeled free from the wooden bench. The keys stuck slightly, as if the organ too had begun to wilt. She played anyway, like she always did.
The music swelled, filling the gap of brief silence and fire. The congregation rose as Pastor Ezekiel barked out the hymn, off key. Mary kept her eyes trained to the hymnal, careful not to look up at her father or the congregation. Or the empty back pew where Grace once sat.
She allowed her mind to start wandering, tuning out the church.
She was thirteen again, Grace was twelve. They laid on the wooden floors behind the pews, creek water sprawling beneath them. Grace carefully pulled out bristles and spurs, holding Mary's head in place between her long arms. Even for her age, Grace was always tall and lanky. Too long and an anxious ball of limbs.
Mary trained her eyes onto the rafters above her, counting the wooden panels. With the way the ceiling cracked and sagged, it was hard to give a definite count. Grace then looked from her spot in Mary's curls and gazed her hard brown eyes into Mary's. "Do you ever think about Hell?" she asked softly, wavering slightly on the h.
Mary had furrowed her brow. "No, 'cause I'm not goin' there."
Grace stopped messing with her hair and looked away, her flyaway brown hairs glimmering gold in the afternoon sun like a delicate halo.
"I might be," she mumbled.
Mary tore her gaze from the ceiling. She reached up and grabbed Grace's face firmly between her hands, pulling her so close their noses touched. Mary looked at Grace hard, scanning her eyes and the sullen grey bags underneath. A new scar scabbed on her chin but the old one across her forehead had finally healed, now only a pale pink.
"You're not goin' to Hell," Mary said with a childish stubbornness. "You're good. The best person I know."
Grace's eyes finally met Mary's, swimming with something unreadable.
The organ stuttered beneath her fingers. Someone in the congregation had began singing the wrong verse and the hymn crumbled into an off key confusion.
Mary blinked, focusing back to the pages of her hymnal. Words and notes sprawled across the page, some notes of ink beginning to fade with age. Grace was gone. She had been for years. But the ache in her eyes, that unreadable look, stuck to Mary like the sweat on her Sunday dress.
She continued through the hymn, drudging along like bones through mud.
The crowd filed out in a sea of polyester and perfume, not lingering too long as the sun beat down mercilessly. Mary stood beside her father, shaking sweat drenched hands and murmuring soft blessings to weeping mothers who lost sons in the war. The population of Ashford was already quite small, reaching barely to three hundred, but that population had been cut down significantly with the draft. Mothers already received pieces of their son's in boxes or was greeted one morning to something that wasn't their boy that left.
Mary had seen what the war had done to Bethany Greengrich's son, their neighbor for the past twenty odd years. A new habit of beer in the morning and whiskey in the afternoons accompanied by screams and bloodied noses from his too-young girlfriend. Bethany still hauled him in for church, complete in a crumpled tie and last night's spirits on his breath. One time when Mary went to shake his hand after service, his girlfriend's dried blood still remained underneath his finger nails. Mary heard that they were expecting a child in eight months and would marry in three. She prayed for the child every night, hoping the child would become the Todd Greengrich she had known in her youth- always laughing, always kind. He was the extroverted kind, the one to always make sure there was no odd one out in any game.
She recalled the times when the other boys down the street would gather at his house for flag football, Grace and her would watch from the sidelines. The boys would always pick on Grace- too soft spoken, too strange. "Faggot!" they would shout and point. Any time Todd saw or heard the teases and name calling, he would step in. "Ain't your momma fucking the quarterback?" They quieted real fast after that.
So she prayed. She prayed for the boy with a good heart and for the man that he'd become.
She didn't pray for Grace. Not anymore.
Mary felt the sun scald the back of her neck as the last of the members of the church peeled out of the grass. Her father clasped a heavy hand onto her shoulder before turning back into the church. Inside he would gather their things from the office- her purse and hymnal, his Bible and notebook. After that, they would climb into their car and head to the town's diner for a silent brunch, a ritual they had kept for the past eight years since her mother passed. Sometimes congregation members would come and sit, pitying the wifeless Reverend Harlow and his motherless child. Newly made widows would spend the most time near him, going as far as cutting his steak and anguishing how lonely the house was without their husband.
She gazed outwards, listening to the cicadas scream out from the grass. But as the hot summer winds brushed her cheek, she saw a figure down the path shift against a tree down the gravel path.
It strode carefully, slowly towards her.
A long summer dress billowed in the breeze. Wedges dragged and crunched the pebbles as it came closer into view. Mary began to make out the dark brown hair that appeared almost black drifting long behind her. Suddenly, she was in perfect view. Her angular jaw, her sharp nose. Her deep sad brown eyes.
Mary's breath caught as the woman stopped, now a foot from her.
"Hey preacher's daughter," Grace said. Her voice was husky and low but full of the familiar warmth that still made Mary's heart flutter.
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