In 1984, on bleary-eyed Sunday mornings, when the Holy Spirit was less of a shout and more of a whisper, there was Sunday school with Miss Flynne. Ah, Miss Flynne, the slight young woman barely escaped from girlhood who stood meekly at the front of their chaos. She would raise her hand halfway, then use that hand to adjust her glasses, as if she had never intended to quiet them. She would clear her throat gently, then louder. She was pretty when she stood at the edge of anger, her cheeks flushed, her soft mouth a firm line.
Miss Flynne sometimes took off her shoes and socks in those moments when it seemed the chaos could never be put back inside the box, and Cohen always marveled at the exquisite whiteness of her feet, the slenderness of her toes, the bright glossy green of her toenail polish. It seemed rather fancy to him, and also a bit strange. Weren’t her feet cold? His own mother rarely took off her socks in their house. It seemed like something the people in his church would not approve of if they knew about it.
But who in the church besides her Sunday school class would ever see her bare feet? Who would ever see her as he did in that moment, removing her shoes, her socks? She moved slowly, and he could tell she no longer heard the children but had become completely engrossed in that small unwrapping. She draped the bright whiteness of her socks over a chair at the front of the room, and that was when he saw her initials close to the top, almost hidden under a frill of lace.
HMF.
He knew the F stood for Flynne, but what of the H? The M? He spent those first chaotic moments of Sunday school trying to guess Miss Flynne’s first and middle names.
Heather Madeline?
Harriet Madison?
Holly Miriam?
He sighed. It seemed a nice thing to contemplate on a dreary Sunday morning while the anarchy of the class boiled around him. But a certain kind of stillness settled in the room as Miss Flynne took advantage of the greatest weakness of any nine-year-old: curiosity.
At the front of the class, she situated a felt board with felt Bible characters that somehow stuck, and they stared out at Cohen. Without saying a word, Miss Flynne went about arranging the flat people on the pale blue board, and that quieted some of the Sunday school students. They wanted to see what the morning’s story would be. She moved slowly, either out of great concern for the careful placement of the flannel people or because she was delaying the moment she would have to confront the children.
When the scene was set, she lifted her Bible up in front of her bright green eyes and spoke, and when she read the Bible, she became a proclaiming angel, and no volume level was unattainable. She was transformed from a timid mouse to some kind of powerful cherub. The children froze in place, waiting for their imminent demise.
Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand. Belshazzar, whiles he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem; that the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, might drink therein. Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the temple of the house of God which was at Jerusalem; and the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, drank in them. They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone. In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king’s palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the king’s countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another.
At the words “came forth fingers of a man’s hand,” every child finally went silent, imagining a bodiless hand carving lines in a plaster wall, frightening the most powerful man in the world. Jared Simms, sitting at the back of the class, sucked in his breath and held it. Little Mary Everett, the same age as Cohen but the height and weight of a five-year-old, peed in her chair. Cohen knew because she did it often and he expected it in moments like that. He saw the drops begin to drip from the metal folding seat.
The vision of a bodiless hand haunted Cohen’s dreams for three solid nights, so that sometimes, even when he was awake, he thought he could see the hand coming toward him through the reflection in his window, index finger extended, preparing to write some portentous message on his own wall. Or perhaps directly on him, the way God had marked Cain.
What would that hand have written? What message could have possibly prepared nine-year-old Cohen for the future of his childhood, the crumbling of his family, or the arrival of the Beast?
He was so young. He knew nothing of messages that could terrify a king. He knew nothing of a lions’ den or the heady aroma of red wine when a person’s nose was deep inside the stemmed glass. He knew only of hot summer nights, lying on the sanctuary floor, listening to his father’s voice rain down, or cool Sunday mornings in the basement of the church, staring from Miss Flynne’s green eyes to her green toenail polish to her white socks still perched on the chair.
HMF.