Lightning
By Larry Griffin
I remember when it all started, or when others claimed that it began, or at least the sign, for some believed in signs and God. It was in the middle of the week, a Wednesday afternoon, I think. School let out about three fifteen. For some reason I was in the basement of the church playing Ping-Pong with my best friend, John Henderson--we had never heard of table tennis. It was September, and there had been some rain falling when we had gone inside the building. We had not noticed that the storm had progressed after we had gone inside. But we must have been aware of the lightning and thunder.
We went on with our back and forth tick, tock, tock, Ping-Pong game. Then a cannon-like boom illuminated the room as bright as hundreds of photographic flashbulbs, all discharging simultaneously. A bright, glowing, rolling, speeding ball of light rolled across the basement floor. I thought for a moment that Mt. Sinai had split and this was the Second Coming. Then it was gone. John Henderson and I got out from under the Ping-Pong table and ran out the single side door simultaneously into the downpour outside. We ran a block to the next corner. We stopped. "Goddamn!" I half whispered to John Henderson as I turned out of breath.
"What was it?" John almost inaudibly whispered.
"Lightning," we both agreed.
Trustees who checked over the building the next morning concluded that lightning had struck the bell steeple. Many small, odd-shaped, black burns appeared in the corners of an upstairs Sunday school room. The lightning also left a large black burn on the stuccoed corner of the steeple base's exterior.
The little old ladies who belonged to the Women's Missionary Society that met every Thursday afternoon had something new to discuss. They smiled every time the subject came up. They half joked about what it meant or what the church had done wrong. Between their dentured smiles, they asked if this were a warning. Everyone laughed and they soon forgot their jests about warnings from God. But occasionally as the people visited outside the church after Sunday service, like they always did, an old lady would point a bony arthritic finger to the black burn on the side of the steeple.
The church did not repair the damage, because the deacons and trustees in an emergency meeting decided that the church then did not have enough money to repair and repaint the building. While they had funds for everything, the building fund would not cover the cost of repairs. They considered using monies from the mission fund to repair the building, but then decided that Brother Baxter could put that money to better use at his mission in Taiwan.
Four months passed after lightning struck the church. That Sunday, I had gone to Sunday School. We discussed the wisdom of Solomon. How wise old Solomon told the boys from the girls impressed me. During the discussion, I sat across from Kathy, Brother Bob's daughter. Brother Bob was our minister. Kathy, a girl of average height carried her few extra pounds of weight, so that she appeared plump, but not overweight. Her bleached blond hair fell to her shoulders. A neat dresser, she always looked attractive. Her eyes, her overwhelming characteristic, had that indescribable something about them. Kathy and I were the same age and she was in my class at school. During the discussion of Solomon, Kathy got up and left the room. When she did not return, the event did not alarm me, because I had taken biology when I was a sophomore. I thought I knew why girls frequently got sick. We sat in the same Sunday School room with the still present lightning burns in the corners. The bell in the steeple right above us rang, so after a quick dismissal prayer, we all filed downstairs to the sanctuary.
On the back pew in the seat next to the aisle, I sat by Rob, Brother Bob's son. A year younger than I, Rob and I had become good friends since the time he taught me how to blow smoke rings with a box of cigars we had smoked together two years earlier.
After Old Lady Brown finished the prelude, the audience stopped their whispering and waited for Brother Bob to take his place behind the pulpit for the opening prayer. I glanced up and noticed that he was not in his usual seat on the podium. Then, the adjacent door that led to the pastor's study opened and Brother Bob stepped out. It took him hours, it seemed then, to go those short twenty feet to the pulpit. During this eternal time, I noticed his flushed face and he seemed to have lost his "glow," which some preachers have and he had always had. I could tell that he was troubled. He reached the pulpit. He took a long deep look all across the congregation. "I . . . I . . . ," he stammered.
Then he gazed at the congregation again, and I realized that he looked not at the people, but instead he focused on the space between them and himself.
"I . . . I . . . don't . . . ," he tried to start again, but he broke. He began to cry. He bawled. He cried hard as only a man can do. I thought he wept as hard as Jesus of Nazareth must have in the Garden of Gethsemane. Amid his tears, he motioned to Brother Tom, a deacon on the podium that day who substituted for the absent song leader. Brother Tom, a taller though younger man, came up and put his hand on Brother Bob's shoulder. For a minute, they looked like father and son. Brother Bob stepped off the podium and walked slowly to the back of the church to the pew where I sat. Here he bent over me, large tears rolling off his cheeks into my lap, and he said to Rob, "Come on."
Rob and Brother Bob walked out of the double door at the back of the church. All this time the room remained tomb quiet. Then after Brother Bob and Rob left, a silent but ominous curiosity began to build in the room that was almost deafening. Above this silent din, Brother Tom said, "I don't think you realize it, but Brother Bob's daughter is pregnant."
I imagine that from where Brother Tom stood the congregation took on the appearance of a huge piece of Swiss cheese, their gaping mouths representing the holes. I knew now why Kathy had left Sunday School that morning. The silence remained. Brother Tom gave a dismissal prayer. I was glad. I wanted a cigarette.
The congregation filed out of the church. They did not even whisper. I had never seen such a display of reverence. As if they were leaving the funeral of a close friend, an odd quiet respect filled the silence. No one remained outside to visit that Sunday. And it was only ten minutes after eleven. I could tell by the way the old ladies tugged at their husbands' arms that they were impatient to get home. To their telephones.
I slid behind the wheel of my black '56 Chevy, and John Henderson got in on the other side. We both looked at the black burn on the steeple and then at each other. I lit my cigarette. We drove home.
Kathy carried her baby through the rest of her senior year. Early in the spring, all the students took turns feeling the baby kick. The baby always kicked in sixth hour chemistry. Perhaps not surprising, really, because, we later found out, our married chemistry teacher, whom Uncle Sam drafted into his army in the middle of the year, fathered that child. When it came time for the baby, Kathy went off somewhere and had it. She returned and did not even know the sex of the baby she had carried.
I stopped attending church soon after that, probably because I started college. Later my parents moved from Ramona, and Brother Bob and his family moved the year after we did. To Arizona, I believe. The black patches on that church steeple still burn in my memory. Mrs. Henderson, John Henderson's mother, later told me that Brother Baxter's mission in Taiwan burned to the ground and was no longer operative at all.
BACK