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The Ministry is a Signal Blessing … one of those Royal Gifts which our exalted Lord Jesus gave to his Church, when he rode in Triumph into Heaven.

Reverend Joseph Estabrook
Concord, 1705

Joseph Bold had practiced going up and down the steps of the pulpit, but this morning, approaching them in the company of Ed Bell, he paused on the first step in flabbergasted surprise. It was as if a volcano had erupted in front of him. Someone should have warned him about the way the light rebounded from the windshields of the cars on the street and rocketed through the windows of the church to land on the pulpit wall in watery images of the old panes of glass. Pulling himself together, he mounted the top step and sat down beside Ed in one of the pulpit chairs.

Ed glanced at his protégé, and grinned encouragement. The man seemed rattled. Joe smiled wanly in reply.

The two of them were nearly hidden behind the pulpit. Deprived, the congregation stared at the top of Joe’s head, eager to get another look. Their new pastor seemed plausible enough. He was tall and gaunt. His receding hair fell limply forward over his face, which was pensive, a little sad. The sadness was reasonable, everyone decided, considering the illness of his wife. Homer Kelly was reminded of Hawthorne’s minister, the one who wore a black veil to conceal his private woe.

Maud Starr was particularly pleased. She quivered with curiosity, quite taken with Joseph Bold. Her first glimpse of his ailing wife had whetted her vulturish appetite. It was obvious that Claire Bold was not long for this world. Carrion, thought Maud, not forming the word in her mind, only the image of what it meant. Shrugging off her black coat, she pulled her sweater tight.

Round balls, thought Joe Bold, looking out left and right at the visible portions of his new congregation. Round balls on stalks, the heads of his new parishioners. To Joe’s nearsighted vision they were vague and out of focus. Soon they would become separate people with names of their own, eager for salvation of one kind or another. They were important people, Parker Upshaw had said, doctors and lawyers, professors and bank presidents, board chairmen and administrators. They certainly looked prosperous. In this church the problems of urban poverty were seventeen miles away in the city of Boston, although, according to Ed Bell, the outreach committees were stretching their arms north, south, east, and west, like the missionary societies of old who had spread their kindly interest far and wide, sewing for the remote populations of Africa, converting the heathen Chinee.

Joe tried to control his alarm. To his fuzzy vision the men and women sitting in the pews around him’ looked calm and undisturbed by trouble, as if they had solved all of life’s problems. There were a great many gray heads among them. The congregation was more elderly than he had expected. What could he possibly say to them, when his own soul was clenched in despair? What did they want of him? Why were they all here, surrounded by the paraphernalia of Sunday morning, the fresh flowers, the red carpets, the old hand-planed pews, the pewter collection, plates, the organ with its sacred measures, the high notes of the sopranos, the low notes of the baritones, the hymns and prayers? Didn’t they know how shaky the whole apparatus was? Glancing up at the ceiling, Joe saw it full of holes, bare to the sky between ruined walls, smashed by sledgehammer blows. In the last century the corner posts had been buckled by Charles Darwin, and the shuddering vibrations were still cracking the plaster, rotting the joists and sills, unsettling the foundation. Why had the world been made two ways at once, so beautiful and so terrible, both at the same time? Joe glanced at the sermon in his hand, an outline on a single page. Then, dropping his gaze, he studied his polished shoes. His sermon was ready, his shoes were ready, he had cleaned his fingernails. For what? All at once Joe felt unequal to the task of giving meaning to the accoutrements of piety. He had an impulse to run down the pulpit steps and snatch up Claire and run away.

Ed Bell was rising to welcome him. The moment had passed. The service had begun.

Ed performed his task with easy grace. He was the benevolent spirit of the morning, the jocular intermediary between pastor and congregation. With comfortable affection and kindly jokes, he expressed the selection committee’s pride in its choice. Then he called on the members of the committee to rise in the congregation and read their separate welcomes, the ones Ed had written for them in the middle of the night. When the readings were over, he clapped Joe Bold on the shoulder and shook his hand and sat down.

It was Joe’s turn. Standing up, gripping the reading desk, he thanked Ed Bell, he thanked the committee. His melancholy face grew animated as he began to speak. To the congregation his voice was surprising. It wasn’t strong and vibrant and oratorical. The Reverend Bold had apparently never learned to summon great drafts of air from his lungs. Only a trickle worked its way past his larynx. His speech came out cracked, a little absurd, with broken edges, as though he were merely talking, not declaiming from a pulpit. Impulsively he called for the first hymn as if the notion had just occurred to him.

Charmed, the parishioners rose to sing. At the organ in the balcony, Augusta Gill turned to her keyboard and congratulated herself on her new freedom to choose the hymns. Joe Bold had confessed to her his total ignorance, his helplessness in the face of printed music. “Oh, that’s okay,” Augusta had said, privately delighted. No longer would the congregation be forced to struggle with unsingable horrors chosen for their aptness of thought, no longer would the service be cluttered with ghastly musical frights that looped up and down the scale with frisky eighth-note runs and idiotic dotted rhythms. From now on she would have a free hand to choose the best and nothing but. Terrific. Augusta pulled out the stops for a majestic run-through of Old Hundredth, a hymn recommended for the beginning of worship. It had sixteenth-century words and music. You couldn’t get older or better than that.

All people that on earth do dwell,
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice;
Him serve with fear, his praise forth tell,
Come ye before him and rejoice.

Then the covenant was spoken. The minister recited it with the rest of them, reading it respectfully from the order of service as though he knew the words were still theirs, as though he hadn’t earned the right to them yet. The Lord’s Prayer was repeated, the collection was taken, another anthem was sung by the choir.

Joe watched the choir stand up in the balcony in their black robes like dark columns. They were opening and closing their mouths, gazing intently at their music, their eyes flicking up now and then to glance at Augusta. Joe was envious of the way they stood so steadily, charged with life and vitality, while Claire in the front pew was huddled against Lorraine Bell, her sturdy health destroyed. Joe folded his arms and listened as Ed Bell rose to read the lesson.

“They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary, and they shall walk, and not faint.”

It was time for the sermon. The congregation braced itself. It was now or never. Would the man pass muster? Politely they settled themselves to listen, their critical faculties astir as their new minister stood up once more and put on his glasses.

But as he cleared his throat and stared at his page of notes, there was a disturbance in the last of the box pews on the south side of the church. Joe Bold glanced up in surprise to see a large man in a brown suit throw himself against the door of the pew, snap the latch, and blunder up the aisle, shouting.

It was Howie Sawyer. Homer Kelly lunged after Howie and caught him just as he turned to the side and tried to wrench open the door of the pew where Charlie Fenster and his wife were sitting beside Carl and Betsy Bucky. The congregation sat transfixed, craning their necks, staring in horror as Homer and Charlie dragged Howie back along the aisle and through the vestibule and down the steps outside. Joan Sawyer followed them, her face blank with despair. So did Arthur Spinney, the local medical man. Ed Bell walked quickly down the pulpit steps and hurried out after them.

Soon Howie’s meaningless cries faded. A shocked silence settled on the congregation, broken by a fit of coughing from George Tarkington, who suffered from emphysema. George got up too, and hurried out-of-doors.

It was an appalling interruption. Shaken, the members of Old West Church tried to calm themselves. As their minister gathered his wits and looked once again at the notes for his sermon, Homer Kelly came back in, pushed open the broken door of his pew, and sat down beside his wife. Charlie Fenster came in top, and took his place. As Joe cleared his throat, Ed Bell walked softly up the aisle to the pew where his daughter and his wife were sitting with Claire Bold.

Hunched over the pulpit, gripping it tightly, Joe began his sermon. He did not smile or make jokes. He was not learned like old Mr. Jennings. His sermon was not stuffed with quotations like raisins in a pudding. It was a homily upon the return of moral courage in a time of trouble, on the sources of renewal in moments of fear and doubt. As he finished and called for the last hymn, Joe wondered in what period of ebullience he had delivered the sermon for the first time, in which year of his Pittsburgh ministry? Yesterday he had picked it out of his file for only one reason.

Lorraine Bell guessed the reason. Sitting beside Joe’s wife, helping to hold her erect, she recalled the text he had chosen from Isaiah: They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles. The sermon was for Claire. Joe had been addressing the needs of his wife rather than those of his eager and inquisitive congregation.

But they were obviously gratified. Glancing discreetly at each other in satisfaction, they swung into the hymn Augusta Gill had chosen for the end of the service. The verses were by Milton, the music was Handel’s.

Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord, for he is kind;
For his mercies aye endure,
Ever faithful, ever sure.

It had been all right, decided joe Bold, walking down the aisle. The board chairmen and college professors had begun to look less formidable. He was no longer intimidated. Turning around at the door, he lifted his hand for the benediction.

But then there was another calamity. Instead of a solemn blessing from their minister, the men and women of Old West heard only a gasp. Joe Bold was running up the aisle. His wife had slipped off the bench. She was lying on the floor, with Ed and Lorraine Bell kneeling over her.

Alarmed, the congregation stood uncertainly, then fumbled out of the pews into the aisles. The service was obviously over. Looking back over their shoulders in concern, they drifted toward the doors.

Only Maud Starr took pleasure in the dread events of the morning. Pulling on her buzzard coat, she stared at the new minister as he stooped over his fallen wife. Soaring over them at ceiling height, Maud circled lower and lower, beak and claws extended.