Frances, in her hunting cap, had her eyes on the truck ahead of them. The older widows were holding their breath while their associate minister trashed the director of youth programming.
“I happen to have the original recording of Johnson singing ‘Cross Road Blues,’” he bragged, repellently. “Back when I lived in Greenwich Village—you know, I used to live there, in New York City—I’d find old 78s in junk stores. During the Depression, the record companies went out in the field and made amazing authentic recordings—Lead Belly, Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson. I was working with an afterschool program in Harlem, and I’d come home every night and play those records, and it was like being carried straight into the South in the twenties. There was so much pain in those old voices. It helped me understand the pain I was dealing with in Harlem. Because that’s what the blues are really about. That’s what went missing when the white bands started aping the style. I can’t hear any pain at all in the new music.”
An embarrassed silence fell. The last daylight of November was dying in crayon colors beneath the clouds on the suburban horizon. Russ now had more than enough to be ashamed of later, more than enough to be sure that he deserved to suffer. The sense of rightness at the bottom of his worst days, the feeling of homecoming in his humiliations, was how he knew that God existed. Already, as he drove toward the dying light, he had a foretaste of their reunion.
In the First Reformed parking lot, Frances lingered in the car after the others had taken their leave. “Why did she hate me?” she said.
“Ronnie’s mother?”
“No one’s ever spoken to me like that.”
“I’m very sorry that happened to you,” he said. “But this is what I meant about pain. Imagine being so poor that your kids are the only thing you have, the only people who care about you and need you. What if you saw some other woman treating them better than you were able to treat them? Can you imagine how that might feel?”
“It would make me try to treat them better myself.”
“Yes, but that’s because you’re not poor. When you’re poor, things just happen to you. You feel like you can’t control anything. You’re completely at God’s mercy. That’s why Jesus tells us that the poor are blessed—because having nothing brings you closer to God.”
“That woman didn’t strike me as being especially close to God.”
“Actually, Frances, you have no way of knowing. She was obviously angry and troubled—”
“And stinking drunk.”
“And stinking drunk at noon. But if we learn nothing else from these Tuesdays, it should be that you and I are not in a position to judge the poor. We can only try to serve them.”
“So you’re saying it was my fault.”
“Not at all. You were listening to something generous in your heart. That’s never a fault.”
He was hearing something generous in his own heart: he could still be a good pastor to her.
“I know it’s hard to see when you’re upset,” he said gently, “but what you experienced today is what people in that neighborhood experience on a daily basis. Abusive words, racial prejudice. And I know you’re no stranger to pain yourself—I can’t even imagine what you’ve been through. If you decide you’ve had enough pain and you’d rather not work with us right now, I won’t think less of you. But you have an opportunity, if you’re up for it, to turn your pain into compassion. When Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, what is he really saying to us? That the person who’s abusing us is hopelessly evil and we just have to put up with it? Or is he reminding us that the person is a person like us, a person who feels the same kind of pain that we do? I know it can be hard to see, but that perspective is always available, and I think it’s one we all should strive for.”
Frances considered his words for a moment. “You’re right,” she said. “I do have a hard time seeing it that way.”
And that had seemed to be the end of it. When he phoned her the next day, as any good pastor would have done, she said her daughter had a fever and she couldn’t talk right then. He didn’t see her at services the following two Sundays, and she skipped the circle’s next trip to the South Side. He thought of calling her again, if only to resupply himself with shame, but the purity of the hurt of losing her was of a piece with the season’s dark afternoons and long nights. He would have lost her sooner or later—at the latest when one of them died, very probably much sooner than that—and his need to reconnect with God was so pressing that he seized on the hurt almost greedily.