Small Town, USA

We sat in the church pews on a sticky summer afternoon as the Reverend talked about how God is like a mighty fortress.

“God is our refuge and strength, an ever present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and the mountains be carried into the sea-”

Bennett leans over and begins to whisper the lines as the Reverend repeats them. 

“He maketh wars to cease.”

“He maketh wars to cease-”

I nudge him. “Knock it off.”

He continues. “He burneth the chariot in the fire.”

“He burneth the chariot-”

“Quit it!”

Bennett laughs quietly. 

“Lighten up. You don’t have to take everything so seriously, Addie.”

The Reverend continues and I do my best to pay attention. But like Bennett, I know the words by heart and the Reverend’s voice seems to match the lazy and humid air. I stifle a yawn. The cross hanging on the wall behind the pulpit glints in the sunlight, and I wonder if anyone knows who made it. Did the carpenter have to be blessed by a priest before he was allowed to build it? Or could anyone nail two pieces of plywood together and give it to a church? Did the Reverend pick that cross out special or had it been there as long as anyone could remember? I thought of the time Nelson Roberts poured the communion wine for the Christmas Eve service and then told everybody he had decided to become an atheist, and poor Mrs. Montgomery fainted right there in the front row because she thought he had gone and poisoned her with the blood of the Devil.

Bennett looks nice with his hair combed and he’s wearing his Sunday best even though it isn’t Sunday and he hates to dress up. People expect a lot from the Turner boys just because their father’s the Reverend, and since Calvin left, all that pressure falls on Bennett. They expect he’ll go to seminary someday so he can be a Reverend too and he smiles and tells people he’ll do it but I know he hasn’t even opened his Bible since his fifteenth birthday when his brother stormed into the middle of a service and told the Reverend he was leaving to California that night and hell would freeze right over before he was coming back. Now Bennett doesn’t want to spend any more time in a house of God than Judas wanted to make an appearance at the last supper. He tries hard to do the right things but he’s no Calvin, and sometimes he’ll skip church to smoke cigarettes with some boys from another high school by the river. 

The Reverend taps the pulpit.

“If you could now turn to page 52, we’ll have Mrs. O'Connell lead us in song.”

A melody echoes from an out of tune piano on the stage. A woman starts to sing.

“I heard they were drinking,” Bennett says while thumbing through the hymnal.

“Who was?”

“Joshua and his buddies in the car. I heard they were all wasted on his grandaddy’s ‘shine and barely made it down the drive before they were flipped over dead in the ditch.”

“You don’t know anything about anything. And what difference does it make anyhow?”

“Makes it less sad. The fool went and brought it on himself.”

***

The Reverend did a lot of funerals. He did weddings sometimes and the occasional baptism, but funerals were his specialty. He had memorized all the verses about sadness and mortality, and knew all the right things to say when people asked about what happens after we’re gone. His wife died nine years ago, and after that people started saying he was attuned to Heaven and the angels, so he just became that way one day. 

A woman sat in the front row crying. Joshua’s mother. The man next to her whispered something and rubbed his hand along her arm, but she shrugged it off and cried louder. Her hat was crooked and her hair was tangled up in it. The buttons on her shirt jiggled when she took a breath and the top one was left undone because she hadn’t fastened them correctly. 

The Reverend began to lead everyone in prayer.

“Our Father, who art in Heaven…”

The church joined him in unison. I folded my hands in my lap and mumbled the words quietly. Bennett kept his eyes fixed on the cross. 

***

I squint as I walked into the sunlight outside after the service. People begin filing out of the church in a sea of black and navy blue. The Reverend stands on the dusty wooden steps and shakes the hands of people walking past, with many a “bless you,” and “God be with you,” and children ran up and down the walkway while their mothers chat about Mrs. Johnson, the “poor dear” and her dead drunk son. I walk towards Bennett’s truck. He takes good care of it since Calvin left and had spent the better part of the summer fixing it up and even applied a whole new coat of paint to the thing so it would look newer than it actually was. He climbs in and the engine roars to life.

“Can I drive?”

Bennett rolls his eyes. “That’s a riot.”

“Move over, I’m serious.” 

“Addie May, if anything were to happen to this damned beautiful Ford, Calvin would kill me dead and then come after you and you know it.”

“You shouldn’t say words like that.”

He raised his eyebrows. “What? Damn?”

I look at the floor.

“You just go ahead and tell the Reverend then, Addie. Maybe that’s all you’re ever good for. Just watch out for lightning in case God decides to strike you down for associating with a heathen like me. Jesus Christ.”

I feel the color start to rise in my cheeks and Bennett knew he’d won. The skies were blue and the sun was shining but I glance out the window just in case.

He lit a cigarette.

“Fine then, but if the Reverend asks me where you were on Sunday, I’m going to tell him the truth.” I close the door. “Are we going back to your place?” 

We usually spent the afternoons at Bennett’s house but he and the Reverend got into it sometimes and today he had a fading shiner to prove it. 

“I’m dropping you off first. I got some things to do. I’ll come by tonight.”

We drove the rest of the way in silence. 

***

There wasn’t much outside the town square. The church, movie theater, and grocery store were the biggest buildings in it and people didn't usually need more than that. It was a pretty quiet town: the type of place where someone was born and died and lived in between. There was a gas station by the school and we had one cemetery that had been dug up and moved around a couple times in the past hundred years, the most recent time to account for the shopping mall that was supposed to go in but never did. People didn’t have a lot, but they had enough. 

Nothing ever seemed to change. It wasn’t that everyone was lazy, more just there was no reason to fix what wasn’t broken. Most everyone’s grand achievements had been reached by the age of eighteen and the high school quarterbacks were praised like heroes until they died. Everyone knew everybody else and there wasn’t a chance a bit of social news wouldn’t reach their ears before the sun went down on Sunday night. Everyone knew who drank too much and who was cheating on their wife with the kindergarten teacher, and they built certain people up and stuffed them full of their own dreams in the hopes someone would do something with them. People put more faith in the Reverend than they sometimes did in the Lord, and they tried hard to fill up Bennett with their fallen ambitions. 

It felt real and honest and hollow at the same time.

***

Night started later in the summer and I sat outside with a book on the edge of the front porch under an expanse of dark sky. I heard Bennett’s truck turn onto the gravel road and two yellow headlights cast shadows onto the white-washed fences. He parked in the driveway and killed the engine. I shifted over to make room for him on the step.

“What’s that?” 

“Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass.”

“Is it any good?”

I shrugged. “Since when do you care about poetry?”

Quiet thunder rolls in the distance and it smells like rain. A light clicks on in the kitchen. Bennett pulls out a cigarette and lights it up and the smoke clings to the humid air a minute before dissipating. 

“I’m leaving, Addie.”

A door closes and I hear the beginning of a muffled argument next door. I don’t need to ask him why.

“Where?”

He draws again on the cigarette. 

“I don’t know yet. Maybe out west to see Calvin on the coast. I know someone in Nebraska I can stay with for awhile until I figure things out.”

I nod.

“I’m not a kid anymore, Addie.”

A breeze begins to flip slowly through the pages and I closed the book.

“Everything will turn out okay. I’ll be fine.”

I sense it isn't me he is trying to convince. 

We sat there for awhile in the quiet. I look into the yard and think about the time Bennett had tried to climb a giant oak tree when we were ten even though everyone thought it was crazy. He broke his arm getting down, but he had scaled the whole thing before the Reverend and the cops showed up with a ladder. No one had ever been able to talk Bennett Turner out of something he was determined about.

Three boxes were loaded in the bed of his truck. 

“Anyway, I’m hoping to reach Little Rock tonight and head on to Nebraska from there.”

I nod again.

“Maybe I’ll call. I just need something different.”

He takes one last draw on his cigarette and stamps it into the dirt. The gravel crunches as he walked back to his truck and the engine gives a low rumble like it knows there are a lot of miles between here and the coast. I watch the truck as it turns onto the main road and continues towards the highway until I lose sight of it near the horizon amongst the stars. 

 ***

Bennett was the talk of the town on Sunday. After the service, people swarmed the Reverend and asked where their golden boy had gone. He told everyone that Bennett was staying with his grandparents in Atlanta and was going to finish high school and seminary out there too. One of the women told the rest that she knew Bennett had secretly up and joined the Army, and another one swore she’d heard there was a mystery girl and a wedding ring involved. 

I eventually stopped telling people and they eventually stopped asking. It didn’t matter anyhow. A part of them wanted to postpone the truth, hoping that, wherever Bennett was, he was living out what they knew they were destined for in another life. They had stuffed him full of expectations and it made me smile to think that no one would ever know the bulk of their hopes and dreams were packed away forever in the back of a beat up pick-up truck somewhere in southwest Nebraska.

Reviews

[M.E.Lyle]

What a great, down to earth kinda' story. I felt like I was right there, wishing my expectations onto Bennett.
One little thing, and it's something I have problems with too. Sometimes you write in the present tense when you should be in the past tense. Most of my earlier writings were full of this kind of error. If someone hadn't mentioned it to me, I might never have known.
Great stuff.

[Chris Shaw]

Wonderful read of small town mentality. You have a real way of getting your reader inside your characters and their surroundings. Thoroughly enjoyable. Well done. I normally stick to poetry, because that is what I know best, but I am pleased to have found this story.

Chris

[Relic]

The fact that no one read and reviewed this is their loss. This is an excellent story. Bennet reminds me of someone I know. Small towns put a lot of their hopes in one person and are sometimes disappointed.

An enjoyable read that captures the essence of one small town in the USA. Awesome writing.