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“That’s the worst.”
We walked along silently. My face burned. It was as bad as I’d feared. Now I was too distracted to remember what was on my list, and I couldn’t possibly pull it out. I’d look like a complete fool.
He stopped suddenly across from the KTD. “I wish people would do something,” he said. “Everyone just seems to accept the fact that it’s closing.”
“What can they do?”
He started walking again, looking down at his feet. “Oh, I don’t know.” He sounded irritated. “Maybe nothing that could help. But you can always do something, and anything is better than just giving up.”
He was talking about me, I was certain. He thought I was just giving up on conversation, that I was an idiot, a small-town lump. I looked around—at the trees, the concrete sidewalk, the grass, the Byrnes’s blue Chevrolet parked at the curb. Wasn’t there anything to talk about?
“What do you think about the president’s heart?” I asked, suddenly remembering.
“It’s his head I worry about,” said Reverend Vaughn glumly.
At Sylvan Elementary, we sat in the playground shelter, shaded from the hot afternoon sun. The picnic benches felt extraordinarily hard. I hadn’t noticed that before. I watched as an occasional breeze stirred the canvas swings, each hanging limply above its own little dust bowl.
“How’s your case coming?” he asked after a while.
“I don’t know. Okay, I hope.”
“It’s hard to relax when something like that is coming up. Nothing else is important.”
“I know.” My mood picked up instantly. I had an excuse for being a dull companion.
“For what it’s worth, I think this whole thing will blow over,” he said.
“Why?”
“I think the judge will realize that whatever happened, if anything really did happen, it will never happen again.”
“You think?”
“I bet. Besides, you’ll have your minister there speaking up on your behalf.” He pounded his chest, Tarzan-style, and I laughed.
“How’d you end up as a minister, anyway?” I asked.
“You mean, how’d I get into this line of work? That’s the kind of thing boys ask prostitutes.”
“Oh, no!”
“Just kidding.” He leaned back, stretching out. “Actually, it was sort of an accident. I don’t come from a very religious family. We were what I call potluck dinner Congregationalists. We’d show up on Sunday and for the big events but never think about church the rest of the week. At least, I didn’t. But when I went away to college, I started hanging out at the chapel. I don’t really know why, except that I didn’t fit in well at school. It was just a little college, in Iowa, and everyone seemed to be a football player or a wrestler. But all the students had to go to chapel on Sunday, and, after a while, I found I was looking forward to those chapel services more than anything. It didn’t have much to do with religion—in some ways just the opposite, I suppose. I secretly gloated that everyone at this dumb little school had to stop whatever they were doing and come to the service. There was something equalizing about it. That, and I loved the organ music.”
“Really?” I’d never taken organ music very seriously. The sound is so loud and pompous and windy. Tom can burp at will, and once, on one of our rare mornings in church, he’d belched in tune as the organist played a hymn. I was the only one who could hear him, fortunately. It was amazing—disgusting, but amazing. “Faith of Our Fathers! Living Still,” exactly in tune, right out of his stomach. Afterward, I asked him to repeat it, but he couldn’t manage without the organ blasting away. That was before Reverend Vaughn joined the church.
“An organ’s so melancholy,” the minister said. “The music fills me up. I could listen to it forever.” He put his foot up on the bench and hugged his craggy knee. His pantleg slipped up a few inches and flashed a bit of color—he was wearing argyle socks, with streaks of bright red.
“But it wasn’t until after college that I decided to become a minister,” he continued. “At first, I went back to my hometown, Wilcox, Iowa. It’s small, a lot like Katydid, only a lot farther from a big city. My dad worked in the bank there, and he got me a job in the bank, too. I hated it, though—all those numbers, everybody talking about money. I was miserable, so I started hanging out at the church. It was a nice place to go to be alone. And people used to go in there and practice on the organ.”
“It sounds lonely,” I said.
“Well, not really. I’d have a book and read, or sometimes I’d just sit there and think. I rather enjoy being alone.”
“I guess you’re lucky.”
He shrugged. “Perhaps. But I wasn’t even alone that much, because pretty soon the minister noticed me. He was an old guy who’d been there for years. I don’t think he quite understood, but he was rather touched that I came around. Nobody else who was young wanted to get near the place. Sometimes, he and I would talk about religion—I’d had a couple of courses in college and knew some ideas. He was quite enlightened about some things, actually.”
Reverend Vaughn sighed and put his foot down. “Well, eventually, he started telling me I had ‘a calling’ for the ministry.” Reverend Vaughn made quote marks with his fingers. “ ‘A calling.’ It was mostly just that he was thrilled that someone was paying attention to him, poor old guy. But I suppose I halfway believed him. So I quit the bank and went off to divinity school.”
