The devil’s boots don’t creak (Scottish Proverb)

Pastor Mitchell was leaning back in his chair, feet on his desk, phone balanced on his shoulder. “Uh huh,” he was saying. And occasionally he said, “go on.” The church was small, his study was at home, and this is what accounted for his wife appearing suddenly in the doorway.

“Just a sec,” he said to the person on the other end. “What? . . . Okay, call me later.” He hit the talk button because he was no longer doing so, and put the receiver on top of a stack of commentaries that enlarged at great length on St. Paul’s second extant letter to the Corinthians.

“I am picking Sandy up after her rehearsal, and then we are hitting Costco. We will be home before dinner, but if the oven beeps you should be able to hear it in here.”

“I hate it when you leave me.”

“You’re a dear and a love. But would you get the casserole out if you hear the beeping? Thanks bunches, sweetie. And since that is your sole responsibility for the next hour, you should be able to do exegesis like crazy. Or whatever it is you do in here.”

“I hate it when you leave me.”

Cindi stuck her head back in. “Did you see the paper this morning? About Camel Creek?”
“No, but that was George on the phone just now. I got the lowdown.”

“What are we going to do about Cherie?” Cherie was Cindi’s cousin, and had been at Camel Creek forever. And being an attractive woman, one who was at Camel Creek forever, this meant that some years earlier she had been the recipient of some of the Rev. Lester’s more earthy ministrations. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, she was doggedly loyal to the humidity levels of Camel Creek, and would have nothing to do with the high mountain air of Grace Reformed.

John muttered to himself, and then answered, “I could call her up and invite her to church here. And she would certainly think and perhaps say that she was grateful for the invitation, but she prefers to worship where people love each other. I think I’ll pass.”

“I’ll say they love each other.” Cindi was then down the hall, and out the door.

Grace Reformed was a small Reformed Baptist church, and Pastor Mitchell had been there for twelve years, which was something of a record for Reformed Baptist churches in that area of the country. The previous three pastors had been there for about a year and a half each, and the last of the three had been the kind of fellow who typed long doctrinal screeds to errant fellow ministers, single-spaced, and with typing up the sides of the margins. Some thought that he had mastered the art of typing with his fists, and sometimes with his knees. Anyhow, his pulpit ministrations had left the congregation in an exhausted frame of mind, and parishioners would go home after the message, recline on the sofa and pant. The sermons were of the “all grace, no slack” variety, and more than a few worshippers were concerned about just how much more grace their families could take. But after the last of these three gentleman imploded one Sunday in the pulpit, the search committee decided to try something a little different, and went on the recommendation of somebody in the church’s cousin, instead of the recommendation of the bishop. Now Baptists don’t have bishops, at least not that anybody admits to, but at any rate the bishop was very angry and Grace Reformed was drummed out of the elite corps of regional churches.

But according to one old timer in the church, Pastor John Mitchell himself had been like “a balm in Gibeon, or maybe it is Gilead. Something with a G, but not Gotham.” At any rate, the congregation perked up again like a sun-fried plant that somebody left on a deck with full southern exposure while the family went on vacation for two weeks in August, and which an unexpected someone decided to water at just the right time and in the right amounts when they got back. The thing looked like a miracle. The slow bleed of families away from the church was stopped, the church stabilized for a number of years, and just in the last six months three new families had joined. In Grace Reformed terms, this was considered a massive revival, and everybody was more than content. Pastor Mitchell had been in 2 Corinthians for two years now, and was only in chapter seven. This, compared to his predecessors, made him a speed demon, and the only reason he was going as slowly as this was that he kept getting distracted by pastoral needs, and he kept turning aside to use the text to encourage people.

This was a novelty, and given the history of the church, he might not have been able to get away with it had his personal appearance not been just right, providing a certain amount of camouflage. He was a regular Tishbite—gray beard, bushy eyebrows, and slender build. And though he didn’t eat locusts or wild honey all that much, he still managed to look like a cross between Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist and Gandalf. But for all that he was only forty-two, and very spry. He did not take a staff with him into the pulpit, but all younger children in the church felt like he must have an invisible one up there with him. The kids were regularly on the edge of their pews, Sunday after Sunday, waiting for him to part the waters of the baptistery in the middle of a sermon. He looked severe enough that no one really noticed that he was not severe at all, and this meant that no one had a conscience attack or felt like they were going soft in their Calvinism because he always looked like he was being strict with them. So things were swell at Grace Reformed.

Pastor Mitchell reached for one of the commentaries and twaddled it back and forth for a moment. But then he put it down, and reached for the phone again. One of the visitors that they had intermittently had over the past year was an old college roommate of Pastor Mitchell’s, a stockbroker named Brian. He was not a member, or even what you would call a believer, but he came semi-regularly, and the two men got along well enough. Pastor Mitchell remembered that Brian had told him about six months ago that he was “seeing” Chad Lester’s wife. Brian had shuffled and scraped his feet in the parking lot while they had talked about it, and he had done so in such an industrious manner that it suggested he was studying a new dance step. “They are going to be divorced anyhow, the guy’s a real toad, all over but the paperwork.” Pastor Mitchell had been looking for an opportunity to talk with him further about things, and this appeared to be it.

He looked up the number of Brian’s brokerage firm, and punched the buttons pastorally, and the quiet beep-booping filled the study.

“Brian? John. Hey, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about Mrs. Lester, and what with the blow-up over at Camel Creek today, I thought that maybe we should get together. You still seeing her?”

John Mitchell sat quietly for the next ten minutes as a torrent of information flowed over him. Finally, when the flow had subsided to about knee high, he decided to attempt wading upstream a little bit. “So this is really a theological problem for you?”

An excited murmuring came over the line.

“I mean that you believe that Chad Lester is guilty of every sexual offense a man can be guilty of, except for the one he is actually accused of, and it makes you wonder if there is any justice in the world or, if there is justice, whether it is dabbling too much in literary ironies.”

Something like a strangled shout came over the line.

“Okay, okay. Want to get together for lunch? Friday? Great . . . fine. We should go somewhere that is an unlikely place for any of the elders of Camel Creek to be . . . no, not Hooters. And I was joking anyhow.” When the time and place were set, and Brian expressed his thanks multiple times—he really wanted to talk to somebody—John hung up the phone. He rocked back in his chair and stared thoughtfully at the picture of his family on the opposite wall, just above the sofa covered with multiple stacks of books, all of them written by men with fifty pound heads. Most of them were now deceased and John used to declare from the pulpit that being dead had done nothing but add to their orthodoxy. For her part, Cindi had often told him that he was the theological equivalent of a mad scientist, and had added the corollary that sofas were for sitting on.

John Mitchell had only met Chad Lester twice. The first time had been at the governor’s prayer breakfast, and the meeting had been brief and cordial. John was new in town at the time, had not a clue, and was prepared to be friends with everybody. But the second time was about five years later, after he and Cindi had walked cousin Cherie—who was alternatively clingy with and hostile to her helpful relatives—through and around the emotional crater left after her three day affair with the pastor. The ministerial luncheon was scheduled just two weeks after Cherie’s grand meltdown, and John had only been barely able to contain his desire to extend the right hand of fellowship to Chad’s left ear, and to do so in a less than tender fashion. But he had resisted the temptation manfully, and had walked away from that encounter with the devil a nobler soul. At least that is what he told Cindi for about three weeks afterwards, at the end of which time she told him he lost almost all his treasure in heaven about two and half weeks before.

His reverie was of some duration but he was finally interrupted by a distant sound, the significance of which John thought he might know. What was that? It sounded like somebody was punching buttons on the phone with a monotonous regularity. What could that be? After a couple of minutes in communion with what appeared to be a real puzzler, John jolted in his chair. The oven! He jumped down the hall, and slid into the kitchen the way he always did when nobody was home. He wasn’t sure that the apostle Paul would do something like that, but there was no clear prohibition of it anywhere. And besides, his socks were slippy.

The surface of the casserole was nicely brown, just the way he liked, and he put the oven mitts back in the drawer, highly pleased with himself. He was getting a drink out of the fridge, since he was there, and the door from the garage opened and Sandy bounced in, followed by Cindi.

“Hi, Daddy,” Sandy said, and kissed him on the cheek.

Cindi looked at the casserole on the counter, and said, “Way to go, champ.”

“I hovered over it the whole time,” he said.

“Pastors shouldn’t tell such dreadful lies,” Sandy said.

“I know. I’m trying to taper off. How was Costco?”

“A perfect madhouse,” Cindi said. “Sandy, tell your dad what you heard at school.”

“Oh!” Sandy said, and paused to collect herself, in order to present the story as she thought it deserved to be presented. There was nothing particularly different about this story—she did the same thing every night, with all her stories.

“You know that Trey is in my class? Well, Trey is friends with the Lester girls, and in homeroom when Mrs. Jordan was taking prayer requests he said that they said the accusations against their dad couldn’t be right because Robert P. Warner, that’s the guy in the newspaper, was living with a woman named Mystic Union.”

“I am not sure I am following the argument,” Pastor Mitchell said. “Was it an argument?”

“Oh, I don’t know that—I don’t know what they were saying, or how much Trey was messing it up.”

“And Mrs. Jordan let Trey say all that?”

“She was trying to stop him. And Ryan—Ryan from our church—was yelling, ‘Overshare! Overshare!’ from the back of the room.”

“So why should I be interested in this? Help me out here.”

Sandy laughed. “Don’t you remember who Mystic Union is?”

John Mitchell stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, scratching his beard. Suddenly his eyes widened. “Mrs. Winmore!”

Pastor Winmore had been the pastor of Grace Reformed prior to John, the one who blew up one day in the middle of Romans 9—an easy thing to do, admittedly—and after he had been committed to the state hospital, she stayed in the congregation for about six months, although she was only present for about three months of John Mitchell’s initial tenure there. She had been a very quiet woman, but one day she apparently decided to go on an epistemological bender. She had grown up Dutch Reformed, become a Reformed Baptist at Bible school, and had married the Rev. Winmore as a consequence of this, or perhaps the other way around, and then had settled into the stereotypical role of a pastor’s wife. She was a strikingly handsome woman, with shoulder length black and gray hair, but it was not the kind of gray hair that was wispy and stuff, but rather thick and full and long and rich. She looked like a boomer lady in a television commercial for osteoporosis medicine, the kind of lady who did not really need the medicine, but who might look as though some day soon she could.

One day something snapped, like a dry twig in a Deerslayer novel, and after she divorced Pastor Winmore, off she went to a healing school specializing in naturopathy, herbs, channeling, and other forms of New Age hooey. She had transferred her membership to Camel Creek, but only as an intermediate step to founding her own idea of a Buddhist temple in the back of a store front in the older part of town. She changed her name to Mystic Union, and became exceedingly garrulous, up to and including occasional radio spots advertising her herbal remedies. She had been really quiet for all her years as a pastor’s wife because she was one of those rare individuals whose wise and sagacious appearance was immediately contradicted as soon as she opened her mouth. In conservative Christian circles this necessitated a certain wariness in speaking, as a few unfortunate incidents at Bible studies had made clear, but she had now suddenly veered into a setting that made all such discretion most unnecessary.

“So, Mystic Union is living with Robert P. Accuser Guy?”

“According to the Lester girls, according to Trey, with Mrs. Jordan vainly trying to get her foot on the brake,” Sandy said.

John Mitchell began to feel like something hot and wet was crawling up his spine. As of an hour and a half ago, the events at Camel Creek had seemed to him like an event on the local news horizon, which at sea is about eight miles away. That is, the events may have been interesting, but were certainly something that could be ignored when it came time for him to get on with the affairs of his life. But then, within that aforesaid hour and a half, three separate points of personal connection had started yelling at him, trying to get his attention. There was Cherie. There was always Cherie. There was Brian, attending Grace Reformed pretty regularly now, and he was dating the wife of Chad Lester. And now here was the ex-wife of his predecessor, living together with the accuser of Camel Creek’s resident holy man. This was beginning to feel like a set up. John began to look suspiciously around the kitchen.

“What do you want?” Cindi asked him. “I’ll get it for you.”

“I want,” John said darkly, “answers.”

“You’re the pastor,” Sandy said brightly. “I bet those are back in your study.”

Pastor Mitchell cleared his throat, and humphed back down the hall.

“Ten minutes!” his wife called after him.