Four Deacons Drove Out My Father, So I Brought Them to Their Knees novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Back Pew
Naomi sits in the back pew of the church that threw her father out, holds the chairman's hand a beat too long, tells all four deacons to come to her father's house tonight and screws a new bulb into the porch light.
My father died in Atlanta with a letter from this church in his sock drawer.
The letter put him out of Greater Bethel Missionary Baptist, and the chairman of the deacons had signed it for the whole board.
Now I sat in the back pew with my father's burial program folded in my fist.
The whole board was coming down the center aisle toward me, four men in black suits shaking hands with the visitors.
The choir in gold robes sang them down, and nobody in that building knew what I had come to do.
Eleven years ago, six weeks after we buried my mother, my father stood up at prayer meeting drunk.
He shoved over the communion table, and the wine ran across the floor to my shoes.
I was seventeen, and I sat in the third pew.
The board voted him out that same week.
The letter said the door would open the day he asked, and he never asked.
In eleven years, not one of those four men wrote to him, called him or drove to Atlanta.
I watched them as they came.
The chairman walked first, tall and slow, with silver at his temples and a gray fedora held against his chest.
He stopped at my pew and held out his hand.
"I'm sorry for your loss, young woman," he said.
His voice was a baritone I remembered from the Sundays he read the announcements, and a gold tooth showed when he spoke.
"The whole church is sorry."
He did not say my father's name.
I had listened for it, and none of them had said it in eleven years.
I took his hand, and I did not let go.
His palm was warm and dry and wide, and I held it one beat past polite, and then another.
His eyes moved over my face, and I watched him understand that something was happening.
His thumb slid once across my knuckles, and he looked down at it, surprised.
"Deacon Pettway," I said.
"Miss Gervais."
He knew exactly who I was.
Behind him the other three had stopped in the aisle.
The thin one in rimless glasses was the funeral director, Calvin Joubert, who had telephoned me in Atlanta about the burial.
The big one with the shaved head was Lucius Mobley, and he had stopped laughing.
The square one with the white buzz cut was Abner Toliver.
He had coached football at my high school and once sent me to the principal for talking in the bleachers.
All four of them were looking at my hand in Isaiah's.
"Deacon," I said, still holding on. "I want to thank all four of you in person, tonight, for what you did for my family."
The woman in the front pew turned her head.
"Come to my father's house," I said.
Isaiah's mouth closed over the gold tooth.
"Miss Gervais, I don't believe..."
"Young lady," Abner said.
It was the voice that used to clear a gym.
I smiled at him, and it was a smile only the front pews could see.
"I'm not asking," I said.
Nobody answered me.
I let go of Isaiah's hand, and I walked out through the last note of the recessional with my father's program in my fist.
The house on Texas Street had been shut for eleven years.
It smelled of dust and closed windows, and every chair wore a bedsheet.
On the plane I had written a list of four names and a date, Easter Sunday, when every pew in that church would be full.
I pulled the sheet off the kitchen table and threw it in the corner.
I found a lightbulb in the drawer where my mother kept them, and I stood on a chair and screwed it into the porch light.
At dusk I switched it on.
At seven a gray truck stopped at the curb.
One man got out with a covered dish in both hands.
He stood by the truck a long time before he came up the walk.
I opened the door before he could knock.
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