I am sitting in a church pew. This chapel is empty. It’s lunchtime, and I’m supposed to be meeting an old friend here since I am passing through town for a book tour. Gene is the father of a guy I grew up with, and he has always been good to me.
The church secretary told me to wait in the sanctuary. The lights are off. Sunlight comes through the stained glass windows.
The whole world has shut down because of the coronavirus. Schools are closed. Restaurants have closed. Major League Baseball is cancelled. This morning, I saw a mile-long line of people outside a Birmingham grocery store. I don’t know what they were buying, but they looked afraid.
Gene works at this tiny church. He is the maintenance man here. It’s a part-time gig since he is almost seventy-eight.
This church gets smaller every year. Some of the younger parishioners are trying to grow the congregation by promoting the church. But the elderly folks in the congregation aren’t interested in this. “I’m not running ads,” the elderly preacher
said at a recent meeting. “You don’t have to advertise a fire.”
I hear the door open. Gene’s sleeves are rolled up, he has dirt smudges on his forehead. He’s holding a wrench. His white hair is a mess.
“Sorry,” he says. “I gotta cancel lunch, we’re fixing the water heater.”
I follow him to the back room where three old men are crammed against a water heater. These are deacons. They are ticked off and fussing:
“Hold the flashlight steady! I’m blind over here!”
“I’m trying, but your feet keep getting in the way.”
“GIMME THE WRENCH!”
There is a special way old men gripe when they’re fixing things and becoming frustrated. It’s pure wrath. It spews out of them like poison. It happens to us all. You can take a soft spoken man who walks on water; who never…