11. THE HARVEST FESTIVAL

Oh to be a vicar for a day...

From this new perspective he looked around him.

Daisy Rowbottom was on the front row, gazing adoringly up at him, the smallest romantic tear oozing from one of her eyes as thoughts of a most irreverent and unholy nature formed in her mind.

He could almost read her thoughts, could almost savour the tainted passion that lay behind them.

“What on Earth are we doing here?” he asked, aloud because being loud is what he, as a Vicar, almost always was. He knew that. It was the driving force behind the man who had unwittingly offered him refuge from a bullet.

“We are waiting for our Lord to summon us!” wailed a voice from the back, though the church was so small that the back wasn’t as far from the front as you might suppose.

“Amen,” simpered Mrs Macready, who had lost three sons in a joyriding accident not a year ago and who was frantically waiting to be called to join them.

He cleared his throat.

“Dearly beloved,” he repeated in the sepulchral voice, “we are gathered here in the presence of Almighty God...”

“But why?” murmured Daisy Rowbottom in an impassioned voice barely loud enough for him to hear. But he did hear. And he caught the impassioned nuance that produced it.

“We are here to praise the Almighty,” he found himself intoning, and then “but they’re not my words! I’m here because I was shot! In the heart, probably, but shot enough to be killed!”

“I’ll fight a duel over your wondrous love,” sang a voice from the middle of the congregation to the tune of all things bright and beautiful, “I’ll take a blade to the Rowbottom woman and fight to the death! For you are mine, reverend, and always will be…”

“What’s she saying the harridan!” demanded Daisy Rowbottom, “who is it that will thwart my love?”

“I am Miranda Tinkle, and my love for his holiness is true!” shouted the woman in the middle of the tiny congregation.

“Get on with it!” growled a grumpy male voice from nowhere, “I’ve got a pint waiting for me at the pub and I want to hear about the Hereafter before I get there!”

Albert Tench blinked back his own tears, and snarled his reply, out of the depths of his soul, words that he’d been wanting to say for ever, it seemed.

“We’re all going there, sooner or later,” he remonstrated, “we’ll all be out there among the stars, searching through an endless vacuum for the sense of things! And we’ll all pop in occasionally, back here, keeping track of what our lives might have been had we been kinder and more considerate to our fellow man. And had we not careered down that unmade road on a bike we couldn’t understand...”

There was a judder, and he felt himself being clumsily pushed to one side. Had the stomach of the body he was inhabiting been really his he would have vomited there and then.

“Let us pray,” intoned the owner of that body with a sense of anger making it shake, and Albert squirmed, silenced for the moment as the very religious and holy Reverend Cornelius Hope took over.

“We are gathered here today,” he insisted, “ to acknowledge the glory that is all around us and to make these offerings garnered from the soils of our land, to the Almighty who gave them their life.”

Oh, thought Albert, seeing sense for the moment, it’s a harvest festival service, is it? We’re thanking an invisible force in the skies that may or may not exist for the labour of an overworked farmer who most certainly does exist!

Then he continued as the Reverend Cornelius Hope, “all that is worth having and knowing on this Earth was given to us by the Almighty… to care for, to use for our benefit and most of all to love...”

“I can’t love the b******s that joy-rided my sons to Heaven!” screeched Mrs Macready.

“It was your eldest at the wheel,” chided Daisy Rowbottom, “I saw him while I was waiting her for his holiness to take me to my bed!”

“Please,” begged the clergyman, apparently shocked, “there’s no need to be so … empirical!”

“I love it when he uses such big words,” simpered Daisy. “He said I was flatulent when we woke up yesterday morning, and I loved that, the sound the words made as they rolled off his tongue, flatulent, who wouldn’t want to be called that!”

“Please!” begged the irate vicar, blushing until his face looked as if it was about to explode.

“It’s not him I love, cuckoo,” sighed Miranda Tinkle unhappily, “but the shadow inside the man. I know he’s there, I sense it. I sometimes feel his heart beating next to mine in the night when I know that I’m all alone. There’s no man there next to me, just the rustling of the wind in the eaves and baby sparrows in their nest in the elder as its branches stroke my windows… but I feel his heart beating like a drum, and then he swerves to one side, hits a damned rock and is gone for me for ever under the wheels of a Christmas day tractor, and all my happiness has gone with him...”

“You shouldn’t have so much cheese before you go to bed, and then you wouldn’t dream so much,” pronounced the Reverend Hope, “they do say that cheese brings on indigestion and indigestion brings on nightmares...”

“What about forgiveness?” asked Mrs Macready, “my sons are in need of forgiveness! They didn’t mean no harm, of course they didn’t, when they pinched that car, they just wanted to have some fun at high speed down the High Street, and when they saw the baby all they wanted to do was smash into it. I know it sounds all wrong, but they’re only lads, aren’t they, and they never knew the tractor was coming the other way until it was too late, they were so intent on gunning that stolen car into the little mite...”

“Some things will never be forgiven,” hissed Daisy Rowbottom, “not even by our father which art in Heaven, hallowed be his name!”

“I can’t have all this jabbering!” roared the vicar, “I’m here offering the harvest from the fields into the arms of our Lord, in gratitude for His bounty, and all you can do is jabber on about joy-riding and babies!”

“Now, darling, take it easy, you know what the doctor said...” prattled Daisy Rowbottom from the front row.

“They missed the baby,” sighed Mrs Macready, “they might not have missed it, but they did. They were good lads, and sometimes kind to their mother”

“They hit the tractor instead,” hissed Daisy, “serve the little hoodlums right! Always up to wrong-doing, they were, and they got their just desserts!”

A bubbling voice inside the Reverend Cornelius Hope tried talking to him. Sit down, it said to him, sit down before you fall down, sit down before something unnecessary explodes in your aching head, take a break…

But there was no chair there, and the pulpit was high above the congregation.

So when he fell in a dizzy faint brought on by too much arterial blood pressure and a weakened set of heart valves sent him tumbling downwards, there was a sort of natural reaction as his head struck something hard and cold close to the ancient floor of the not so ancient church.

“He’s only gone and...” were the last words he heard (from the lovely and ultra-affectionate Daisy Rowbottom, and when he opened his eyes he found himself dressed in the tiniest possible skirt and standing on an evening street corner, watching the cars go by.

© Peter Rogerson 22.05.19