Clem experienced a petrification so literal it seemed as if his body might shatter if tapped with a hammer. His father was begging. And not even to any avail. Sally Perkins had walked out, and half the group was following her, crowding the doorway in their eagerness to side with her. The old man watched them with dumb animal bewilderment.
Ambrose, whose position was unenviable, suggested that Russ lead a breathing exercise while he went and reasoned with the defectors. Again the old man nodded submissively. Among the church kids who remained when Ambrose was gone, Clem was surprised to see Tanner Evans.
“I want us all to breathe,” the old man said, a tremor in his voice. “I’m going to lie down—we’re all going to lie down and shut our eyes. All right?”
He was supposed to keep speaking, to lead the group in a visualization, but the only sound was the buzz of the defectors downstairs. As Clem lay in the heat and tried to breathe, his mind went back to Becky: how his father had always wanted her to be his special friend, and had seemed to resent that Clem was also her special friend, had tried to separate her and Clem and have a private relationship with each of them, and how peculiar it was that he’d singled them out, since Becky was popular and Clem could take care of himself. Neither she nor he needed extra attention the way, for example, their younger brother did. Perry was rich in gifts but poor in spirit, and their father, who in public made such a big deal of attending to the poor, found nothing but fault in Perry. And now the same thing had happened in the fellowship. Instead of ministering to the socially needy, his father had tried to separate the popular kids from Ambrose and take them for himself. He wasn’t just weak. He was disgusting—a moral fraud.
Hearing footsteps, Clem sat up and saw his father following Ambrose out of the room. No one was even pretending to do the breathing exercise now. Tanner Evans looked at Clem and shook his head.
“You know what?” Clem said. “I don’t want to talk about it. Can we just not talk about it?”
There were murmurs of relief. His peers understood.
“I’m not quitting the group,” he added. “But I think I might go home now.”
He tottered from the room and down the stairs as if he’d been excused for medical reasons. Back at the parsonage, he went straight to his room and locked the door, picked up an Arthur C. Clarke novel he’d borrowed from the library, and absorbed himself in someone else’s world. Two hours disappeared before he heard a tap on his door.
“Clem?” his father said.
“Go away.”
“May I come in?”
“No. I’m reading.”
“I just want to thank you. Clem. I want to thank you for what you said tonight. Can you open your door?”
“No. Go away.”
The pain his father’s weakness caused him was like an illness, and it persisted in the weeks that followed. At the next Sunday meeting, he reminded himself of Tim Schaeffer, a boy from the group who’d had surgery for brain cancer and returned to meetings for two months before he died. Everyone wanted to be Clem’s partner in trust-building exercises, no one gave him shit if he didn’t feel like opening up with his feelings. Rick Ambrose told him, privately, that he’d witnessed few acts of greater strength and courage than Clem’s standing up to defend his father. Ambrose proceeded to confide in him, ask for his help with logistical decisions, and make an affectionate running joke of his atheism. Never referred to, but obvious to Clem, was Ambrose’s recognition of his need for a new father figure.
He no longer respected the old man. Having glimpsed his fundamental weakness, he now saw it at every turn. Saw him exploiting Becky’s politeness to drag her on their Sunday walks, saw him distancing himself from their mother at church functions and chatting with other men’s wives, heard him blackening Rick Ambrose’s name because young people liked him, heard him reminding people who didn’t need reminding that he’d marched with Stokely Carmichael and integrated the swimming pool, saw him gazing at himself in the bathroom mirror, touching his shaggy eyebrows with his fingertips. The man whose strength Clem had admired now seemed to him a raw blot of egregiousness. Clem couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. He was giving up his student deferment to show his father what a strong man did.
The smoke in the Chicago-bound bus and the weather outside it were enforcing an early twilight. Snow falling on the cornfields dimmed and smudged the furrows and stubble, the distant cribs. The baby in the seat behind Clem had invented a word, buh, and fallen in love with it. Each time she said it—Buh!—she squealed with fresh delight, at intervals timed perfectly to keep him wide awake. Without his taking any action, the bus was carrying him forward, toward the task of telling his parents that he’d written to the draft board, away from the violence of what he’d done to Sharon. The depth of the violence was becoming ever more apparent, his aching more grievous. The only relief he could imagine was Becky’s blessing.