“That’s all you need to care about, darling,” his mother said, and gave him a brief, hard hug.
“I’m hungry,” he said. “What’s for supper?”
Now he hung in the black, blind, but not deaf, listening for the voice, the one Reverend Gene Martin called the still, small voice of God. Reverend Martin had us listened carefully to David’s story not once but many times over the last seven months, and he seemed especially pleased by David’s recounting of how he had felt during the conversation with his parents after he had finished talking with Mr. Ross.
“You were completely correct,” Reverend Martin had said. “It wasn’t another voice you heard at the end, especially not the voice of God .. . except in the sense that God always speaks to us through our consciences. Secular people, David, believe that the conscience is only a kind of censor, a place where social sanctions are stored, but in fact it is itself a kind of outsider, often guiding us to good solutions even in situations far beyond our understanding Do you follow me?”
“I think so.”
“You didn’t know why it was wrong to take the credit for your friend’s recovery, but you didn’t need to. Satan tempted you as he tempted Moses, but in this case you did what Moses didn’t, or couldn’t: first understood, then withstood.”
“What about Moses? What did he do?”
Reverend Martin told him the story of how, when the Israelites he’d led out ofEgypt were thirsty, Moses had struck a stone with Aaron’s staff and brought water gushing out of it. And when the Israelites asked to whom their thanks should be directed. Moses said they could thank him. Reverend Martin sipped from a teacup with HAPPY, JOYOUS, AND FREE printed on the side as he told this story, but what was in the cup didn’t exactly smell like tea to David. It smelled more like the whiskey his dad sometimes drank while watching the late news.
“Just one little misstep in a long, hardworking life in the service of the Lord,” Reverend Martin said cheerfully, “but God kept him out of the Promised Land for it. Joshua led em across the river-nasty, ungrateful bunch that they were.~~
This conversation had taken place on a Sunday after-noon in June. By then the two of them had known each other for quite awhile, and grown comfortable with each other.
David had fallen into the habit of going to church in the morning, then walking over to the Methodist parsonage on Sunday afternoon and talking with Reverend Martin for an hour or so in his study. David looked for-ward to these meetings, and Gene Martin did, too. He was immensely taken with the child, who seemed at one moment an ordinary boy and at the next someone much older than his years. And there was something else: he believed that David Carver had been touched by God, and that God’s touch might not yet have departed.
He was fascinated with the story of Brian Ross, and by how what had happened to Brian had caused David, a perfect late-twentieth-century religious illiterate, to seek answers.
. . to seek God. He told his wife that David was the only honest convert he had ever seen, and that what had happened to David’s friend was the only modem miracle he’d ever heard of that he could actually believe in. Brian had turned out fine and dandy except for a slight limp, and the doctors said even that might be gone in a year or so.
“Marvelous,” Stella Martin replied. “That will be a comfort to me and the baby if your young friend says the wrong thing about his religious instruction and you wind up in court, facing child-abuse charges. You have to be careful, Gene-and you’re crazy to be drinking around him.”
“I’m not drinking around him,” Reverend Martin had replied, suddenly finding something interesting to look at out the window. At last he had returned his eyes to his wife. “As to the other, the Lord is my shepherd.”
He went on seeing David on Sunday afternoons He was not quite thirty himself, and discovering for the first time the pleasures of writing on a perfectly blank slate. He didn’t quit mixing Seagram’s with his tea a Sunday-afternoon tradition of long standing, but he left the study door open whenever he and David were together. The TV was always on during their conversations, always punched to Mute and tuned to the various Sunday afternoon athletic contests-soundless football when David first came to Reverend Martin, then sound-less basketball, then soundless baseball.
It was during a soundless baseball game between the Indians and the A’s that David sat mulling over the story of Moses and the water from the rock. After awhile he looked up from the TV screen and said:
“God isn’t very forgiving, is he?”
“Yes, indeed he is,” Reverend Martin said, sounding a little surprised. “He has to be, because he is so demanding.”
“But he’s cruel, too-isn’t he?”
Gene Martin hadn’t hesitated. “Yes,” he said. “God is cruel. I have popcorn, David would you like me to make some?”
Now he floated in the black, listening for Reverend Martin’s cruel God, the one who had refused Moses entry into Canaan because Moses had one single time claimed God’s work as his own, the one who had used him in some fashion to save Brian Ross, the one who had then killed his sweet little sister and put the rest of them in the hands of a giant lunatic who had the empty eyes of a coma patient.
There were other voices in the dark place where he went when he prayed; he heard them frequently while he was there-usually distant, like the dim voices you some times heard in the background when you made a Ion distance call, sometimes more clearly. Today one of then was very clear, indeed.
I/you want to pray, pray to me, it said. Why would you pray to a God who kills baby sisters? You’ll never laugh at how funny she is again, or tickle her until she squeals, or pull her braids. She’s dead and you and your folks are in jail. When he comes back, the crazy cop, he’ll probably kill all three of you.
The others as well. This is what your God did, and really, what else would you expect from a God who kills baby sisters? He’s as crazy as the cop, when you get right down to cases. Yet you kneel before him.
Come on, Davey, get a life. Get a grip. Pray to me. At least I’m not crazy.
He wasn’t rocked by this voice-not very, anyway. He’d heard it before, perhaps first wrapped inside that strong impulse to give his folks the impression that he had called Brian back from the deep reaches of his coma. He heard it more clearly, more personally, during his daily prayers, and this had troubled him, but when he told Reverend Martin about how that voice would sometimes cut in as if it were on a telephone extension, Reverend Martin had only laughed. “Like God, Satan tends to speak to us most clearly in our prayers and meditations,” he said. “It’s when we’re most open, most in touch with our pneuma.
“Pneuma? What’s that?”
“Spirit. The part of you that yearns to fulfill its God- made potential and be eternal. The part that God and Satan are squabbling over even now.
He had taught David a little mantra to use at such times, and he used it now. See in me, be in me, he thought, over and over again. He was waiting for the voice of the other to fade, but he also needed to get above the pain again. It kept coming back like cramps.
Thinking about what had happened to Pie hurt so deep. And yes, he did resent God for letting the insane cop push her down those stairs. Resented, hell, hated.
See in me, God. Be in me, God. See in me, be in me.
The voice of Satan (if it was indeed him; David didn’t know for sure) faded away, and for awhile there was only the dark.
Tell me what to do, God. Tell me what you want. And if it’s your will that we should die here, help me not to waste time being mad or being scared or yelling for an explanation.
Distant, the howl of a coyote. Then, nothing.
He waited, trying to stay open, and still there was nothing. At last he gave up and spoke the prayer-ending words that Reverend Martin had taught him, muttering them into his clasped hands: “Lord, make me be useful to myself and help me to remember that until I am, I can’t be useful to others. Help me to remember that you are my creator. I am what you made-sometimes the thumb on your hand, sometimes the tongue in your mouth.