In the event of apocalypse, if God doesn’t step in to save the worshippers at First United Methodist Church from calamity, district attorney “Cowboy Bob” Macy will have to suffice. The silver-haired lawman sits stoic as a statue across the aisle from Becca and Ben, two pews up, the white Stetson he wears on TV cradled in timeworn hands. A pearl-handled pistol pokes from Macy’s coal-black suitcoat. Rumor is he can shoot the tail off a rattlesnake from two hundred feet. That he sleeps with one eye open, in nothing but boots, his guns hung from a holster on the bedpost.
He has sent more men to death row than any other prosecutor in the country.
“If I had half the enemies Bob Macy does,” Ben likes to say, “I wouldn’t count on the power of prayer to protect me, either.”
The preacher plays to Macy in his closing.
“People are always asking me for proof of God’s existence,” he says. “I tell each and every one of them the same thing. I tell them I won’t give witness at a jury trial.”
Macy smooths his silk colonel bow tie and allows a ministerial grin.
“What will they do with this . . . evidence?” the preacher says. “Sit in judgment of the Lord’s divine grace?”
The word reverberates above the hollow thock of hymnals sliding into pew-back pockets. The flock can sense the imminent burst of wisdom before benediction, and many are ready for deliverance unto the heavenly promise of a summer’s Sunday brunch.
The preacher says, “Faith is not a verdict, my friends.”
First Church held its first service the first Sunday after the land run in 1889. It was the first Christian congregation assembled in Oklahoma Territory, the first official house of worship in downtown Oklahoma City, and the last place Becca ever imagined she’d be bending her head in prayer. She was raised Church of Christ by her mother’s sister after both parents drowned trying to ford a low-water crossing, their truck washed away in a freak flash flood. Aunt Mabel used to joke that the only difference between a Methodist and Baptist was that the former would tip his hat to the latter when they met in the liquor store.
The post-sermon scatter has the frenetic feel of a fundraiser. But Ben’s not here to be moved by the heavenly spirit. He’s here to mingle, to mine for gold in the more mundane strata of this city’s movers and shakers. An earnest “Amen,” then Ben’s off and running at the mouth, rubbing shoulders with this councilman and that judge, nodding to a previous deacon’s mistress, clapping the broad backs of oil barons and businessmen and at least one leathery television personality.
Becca doesn’t wholly approve of the man Ben becomes in these moments. Nevertheless she loves to watch him work. There is a visceral physicality to his charms, a whole touch-and-go stratagem underlying the charismatic hands. The knuckles brush an arm, the fingers squeeze an elbow, and before long Ben has broken into that close-guarded personal space where luck is made. Ben thaws district attorney Macy’s cool front with a joke he’s been perfecting, some blue bit about an Amish emergency brake. Soon Mayor Giffords has dropped in to listen and the three of them are cracking wise like truant choirboys.
Becca abandons Ben to his devices. It’s her turn to teach Sunday school, the grown-up kind, and it wouldn’t do to be late. She navigates the colonnaded church campus, with its warren of intersecting hallways and quiet, cloistered spaces architected to encourage awe, heading for the bunkered atmosphere of the lower-level lecture halls. She is already picking apart the pastor’s sermon. Faith might not be a verdict, she’ll give the man that much. But it most certainly is a trial. Or trying, might be the better term. She feels tried, trying to keep her faith.
She has been teaching here for over a decade, down in the dry-walled classrooms where the real tests of faith take place. This particular group is marketed as Solid Start in the sanctioned church literature. But the members, mostly young married couples, jokingly refer to themselves as “the Teamsters” because, really, they’re just trying to stay together despite the union-busting thrust of these modern times.
A few new faces today, so Becca has everyone sit in a circle, group-therapy style, and introduce themselves. First there are the regulars: Helen and Dale Baker, Gloria Pickering (who always comes alone), and Stephanie Kehoe (her husband Albert is out with the flu today). Then the newly minted Wilcox family, young Tripp and his blue-eyed bride Brenda, both of them still bronzed and glowing from the honeymoon in Hawaii. And a whittlestick-thin woman who runs the battered-women’s shelter up the street, Joanne Perry.
“I’m scouting for reliable support networks that our clients can fall back on after they have left the facility,” Joanne says. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to just sit and watch.”
“Are you usually S.O.S., then?” Gloria, the outspoken black woman who is always trying to keep it real, says to Joanne.
Joanne looks tired. “Esso . . . ess?”
“Single on Sundays. Like me, unless I can raise my man from off the couch. He’s like Lazarus, that one.”
“Yes,” Joanne says. “I am S.O.S. for the foreseeable future.”
Nobody takes issue with Joanne’s presence, so Becca opens her Bible and reads from Genesis: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
Brenda Wilcox smiles and laces her well-manicured fingers in with Tripp’s.
“How can this passage help the Teamsters?” Becca says. She has spent very little time preparing, having learned that the more spiritually instructive discussions take on an animated, wandering character beyond her jurisdiction as mere class moderator.
“I don’t get it,” says Helen. “Doesn’t cleave mean split?”
“Cleave also means cling,” says Becca.
“It means once you’re married you have to reprioritize,” says star student Tripp Wilcox. “When conflicts arise, your new family takes precedence over the old one.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not right,” says Helen. “Cleave means cut.”
“Just take my word for it,” says Becca.
“Does anyone think it’s funny we mostly talk about when things will go wrong?” asks Gloria.
“This from Gloria,” says Stephanie. “African queen of the worrywarts.”
“Funny ha-ha or funny, you know, sad?” says Helen.
“Watch it, Stephanie, with the whole African queen thing,” Gloria says.
“Morbidly funny,” Dale says.
“I don’t like this word,” says Helen. “This word makes me feel fat.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, Gloria,” says Stephanie.
“You’re thinking morbidly obese, Helen,” says Dale.
“Am I, Dale?” says Helen. “Is that what I’m thinking?”
“I’m saying,” Gloria speaks up again, “we exist in reference to a negative, rather than a positive. As a group, I mean. Our purpose seems reactive. Or defensive. Something.”
“Ironic,” says Dale.
“I’ll say,” says Helen.
“You’re overthinking it, Gloria,” says Stephanie.
“Someone has to,” says Gloria.
“Instead of funny, I mean,” Dale tries to explain.
“Go to hell, Dale,” Helen snaps.
This last exchange sends Joanne, who has been observing with diplomatic aplomb, into hiccup-fits of laughter. Brenda Wilcox has squeezed the tan clean out of husband Tripp’s poor little hand.
Becca wants to warn the Wilcoxes that time won’t abide their newlywedded bliss for long. Don’t let go! she wants to shout at Brenda, or twenty years from now you’ll be trying to reach him across an uncaring chasm of children and jobs and rote daily routine. The mindless drudgery of honey-do-this lists can have a more corrosive effect on devotion than infidelity.
The only constant in life is that you will be changed by it, Becca wants to say. And your love will need to keep pace.
But instead she says, “Everybody say this with me: Leave and cleave.”
The class drones the words in dutiful singsong.
“This rhymes,” Becca says. “The rhyme makes it easy to remember. When you’re at the end of your rope or, wits, whatever, you can repeat it like a charm: Leave and cleave! Then make the right choice and, like Tripp said, focus on siding with the family you’ve chosen, not the one you were born into.”
“But this doesn’t get us any closer to understanding the text,” Helen complains. “Repeat after me! It’s child’s play. I want to understand how the Bible can help Dale and I stay married, Becca. Not just recite nursery rhymes.”
“It doesn’t matter how you find intimacy,” says Becca. “Just that you do it.”
Dale begins laughing but chokes it short after a sharp look from his wife.
“Commitment won’t come from the Bible,” Becca says.
“Where will it come from then?”
“From . . .” Becca hears herself start, before she’s even had time to think. “. . . listen. It’s from . . . it takes time. Time and independence. Elbow room. You’ve all heard the saying. If you love someone, set them free. If they come back, they’re yours forever.”
“Oh this is rich!” Gloria slaps her knee, cackling. “I can’t wait to tell this to my sister’s husband’s girlfriend!”
Becca is no longer so enamored with the whole notion of mystical redemption, this take-it-or-leave-it ticket to paradise. “Doubt is the fastest route between Heaven and Hell,” Aunt Mabel used to say. But any backsliding on Becca’s part has occurred at a more glacial pace. Which is why she keeps volunteering here, to slow the slide. She has seen marriages brought back from the brink by the power of a tender word or two. It’s a more wonderful vision than any of the biblical miracles she can imagine.
And shouldn’t this count as a kind of faith?