Lazarus

The rain ticked and tocked in broken time on the metal walkway cover between the sanctuary and the auxiliary building. I walked around to the front and inside. The deacons, Todd and Robert Anders, smiled and said good morning and handed me a program. They’re brothers but they look nothing like each other. It’s a big family. My daddy said they must have been from different milkmen and he died before I knew what that meant. I miss him a lot. Sometimes I think my mama’s sense of humor died with him.

The last time I went to church was the Sunday before Easter. Spring had reneged on its promise. Snow was all over the news in the Northeast and the Midwest. In North Carolina, it was raining and blustery cold.

Daffodils, hellebores, nightgown-pink quince, and bright yellow forsythia glowed in the cloudy light and gleamed in their raincoats along my mother’s driveway. My Sunday shoes splashed wet in the pea gravel. She had already gone to Sunday school.

I knew I was leaving home soon. The small riot of spring flowers seemed tragic to me. A funeral in a French movie. I had worked my way up to manager at a sandwich shop by being hired just in time for the entire former staff to be indicted for pilfering the cash drawer and doctoring daily sales. In 2012, a year out of high school, good work was hard to find.

I learned how to keep the books anyway, which is how I got the job at a church in Charlotte. My mother knew someone who knew someone who was looking for someone to keep the books at “an enormous church.” I wondered why they didn’t just hire a CPA. I understand now that they wanted someone with as little experience as possible who was still mathematically sound.

The church I was going to on the last day I would ever go to church was the church I grew up in, Turkey Run Baptist Church, two turns from our house. Not enough time for my car to get warm before I pulled into the gravel drive. As I drove back to the gravel lot, I searched the graveyard to my left one more time. Gray stones gathered in the wet green grass, spreading out towards the pasture and the woods, far outnumbering any living congregation I had ever seen inside, even when I was young and people went to church. I wondered why the preacher didn’t just come out here and preach to the stones.

I stepped out and the rain blew sideways into my car. I had a wool fedora that I bought on my one and only trip to New York City when I was 17, and I had to hold it with my left hand to keep it on my head. The rain was thin, cold, and persistent. I didn’t bother to lock the car. I wondered if I should have brought my Bible. I couldn’t remember where I’d put it. I was already gone, but not quite there.

I always sit up front so I don’t fall asleep. Walking up the aisle, the red carpet was so thick I wobbled sideways in my flat soles. It was always like that. I think women in heels had an advantage, where they could at least stab themselves a solid footing. I sat down about the fourth row back.

The farm kids came in from Sunday school and sat down in front of me in camouflage and Christian rock band hoodies. The only black person in the whole church was a farm kid. I don’t know why his parents didn’t come, or maybe he was adopted.

The piano was left of the pulpit, facing it from down on the ground. Behind that was a soundboard with red and blue and yellow glowing lights. The piano player had to run sound too. Above the soundboard, there was a projector. On the screen hung from the back wall, there was a bright picture of palmettos against a blue sky. There was nothing more out of place on that cold wet day. They’re not even palms. I hate when people do that, they just say, “Well, palmettos are close enough.” If it’s a palm you want, get a palm. And how about some real palm leaves? They couldn’t be that hard to find.

Anyway, the preacher was sitting in his chair beside the pulpit, smiling, not looking anywhere or at anyone specifically. He seemed like an old buzzard in his black tasseled loafers and plaid jacket, his lean nose and face, skinny just short of a skeleton with his bald egg head. His head was like a tombstone. In fact, as I looked around, the church resembled nothing so much as a graveyard with all its old gray stones. All the young people were collected right around me, the farm kids in front of me and a young mother behind me with her infant. The rest of the congregation was so old, we could have just gone out to the graveyard and dug a bunch more holes and thrown everybody in and gotten it over with.

The piano player sat down and started banging on a wild hymn that couldn’t find its key. She hit a note so far off one time that the woman behind me said, “Oh!” It sure found its rhythm though, a hard pounding like a hammer on a roof or an angry elephant. I could see Jesus marching double file into Jerusalem with his apostles all holding wooden rifles over their shoulders like a drill team. She leaned into the hymn book with her glasses on her nose, her back bowed, and her chin in her lap. She looked like an old hog. The preacher stood up and everybody stood up. I noticed the choir for the first time.

The preacher said something about a hymn number. The words were printed in the program. Everyone mouthed the words but had a hard time finding the melody and the piano was no help. The choir, which had died off down to seven members, was the only anchor in the sleepy storm.

After the mysterious hymn, the preacher called the children to the front for the children’s sermon. A nice middle-aged lady with a haircut from twenty years ago stepped up and one of the farm kids joined her from in front of me. Four children materialized from somewhere in the room. She called them all by name.

“Do you have a friend?” she said. “Raise your hand if you have a friend?” They all raised their hands.

She looked at one and said, “I bet you have a lot of friends.” And then to everyone, “What do your friends do for you?”

Without waiting for an answer, she said, “Well, sometimes when I’m in a bad mood, my friends cheer me up. Do your friends do that for you?”

One boy got the spirit and shouted, “I got lots of friends at school!” People laughed.

She said, “You have lots of friends at school. That’s nice. Jesus had lots of friends too. Did you know that? He had a good friend named Lazarus. Well, one day, Lazarus got really sick. His sisters sent for Jesus and told him Lazarus was sick, but Jesus couldn’t get back right away.

“Well Lazarus got worse and worse. By the time Jesus got back to see him, do you know what happened? Lazarus had died. Isn’t that sad? And do you know what Jesus did? Jesus brought him back to life again!”

“Wouldn’t it be great to have a friend like that? Would everybody like to have a friend like that? Well you do. His name is Jesus. Robert, would you say the prayer?”

The farm kid prayed. I wondered why Jesus didn’t come back and bring Turkey Run Baptist Church back from the dead. I felt like years were slipping off of my life just being in there.

The preacher said something about a Billy Graham television event that you should invite your friends and family and coworkers and neighbors over for. It would be just a few minutes and you could talk to them about your faith afterward. It was a way to spread the gospel. Isn’t Billy Graham dead, too? How is he going to be on TV? Isn’t TV dead? Who watches television anymore? You can find anything on a computer these days. Was the Turkey Run sanctuary a velvet-carpeted time machine?

The whole sermon was about how Jesus had conquered death for us by, you guessed it, dying. The preacher talked about how he would get a new body when he died. Well he needed one. I was twenty years old and ready to leave that little brick crypt and run like a buck. I’d finally have a place of my own. I wanted to meet some girls. Stay up late. I don’t know.

Live.

— Jonathan Byrd