Yoke of Iron

 

 

Twenty-four year old Pastor Jenkins’ ribs filled with helium as he and community volunteers in his small town parsonage hammered the final nails to complete his new church.  He glanced at the high school across the two-lane road, his former high school, and thought of his twenty-four year old wife whom he met there in the tenth grade.  The final thumps of the hammers wisped to vapor between the church and the diner twenty miles away where she waited tables.  Pastor Jenkins closed his eyes and sent her the lightness he felt in his body.

 

He had abandoned a seventy-year old church a mile and a half down a winding road to let it serve as a mausoleum for the dead buried in the cemetery in the back.  He enlisted volunteers to maintain the upkeep of the old church.  He sneered at doing so.  The old church served the interests of the past, a past no amount of praying could change.  Hammer in hand, he foresaw his new church, with its pews sparkling in the kaleidoscope of the stained glass windows, attracting new parishioners to his faith and, with a bustling activity room, casting away the boredom impregnating the bellies of five or six high school girls each year.  The moment the final nail had been hammered, he kissed the cross dangling from his neck and through it whispered to his wife, “It is done.”

 

Now forty, Pastor Jenkins’ light brown hair hid the creep of gray.  Hints of bruised crescents slept under his eyes.  He wore jeans and a collared short-sleeve shirt, a compromise between his youth and his encroaching middle age.  Since his wife’s passing, he no longer kissed his cross.  Useless, he threw it in a desk drawer along with thumb tacks, staplers, paper clips, and an old sock he was saving to find its mate.

 

He lingered in the pews straightening Bibles and books of psalms.  His heart thumped.  A woman sixteen years his younger dangling a cross from her neck sat in the pews and gazed ahead at the stained glass windows.  The cross hung between her softball breasts and pointed directly to the V between her white thigh-length shorts.  Her aqua eyes pooled against the cascade of her lush black hair flowing down her back.  She reminded Pastor Jenkins of his deceased wife.

She bowed and prayed whenever Pastor Jenkins tidied nearby.  A million words paralyzed his tongue; uttering the word ‘hi’ confused him like a trapped bishop on a chessboard.  He sat three feet away from her, close enough to drink in her gentle fragrance.  Her head hung.  His mouth was paste.  The words jumbling in his head formed, “I love you,” but he gobbled them back.  She peered at him out of the corner of her eyes.  He sank into her familiar aqua eyes, and his breath stopped as she opened her mouth.  Her eyes shot down.  She held her cross, kissed it, stood up, and left.  Pastor Jenkins watched her till the church doors closed.  He sighed, ‘fuck,’ and plodded down the hall to his office. 

 

He sunk in his chair, staring at a computer screen that wouldn’t write a sermon for him.  Pastor Jenkins turned agnostic the day he flipped a picture of his dead wife to face his barren office wall, yet his church position charged that he issue words of spiritual comfort to a congregation of believers.  He spoke of life events rather than the Bible and viewed Sundays as a huge group therapy session.  Members of his congregation interspersed “Isaiah 58:12” and the like in his sermons anyway, so he didn’t care about his Bible lessons.  This Sunday’s sermon faced a blockade—his indulgence in a wonderful stomachache over the woman in the pews.  He replayed their moment together, lost in a wakeful dream.

 

A steaming mother barged into his office at around four pm gripping the nape of a retreating fifteen-year old boy.  “Pastor, our boy is going straight to hell, and he’s going there mighty quick if you don’t take him off our hands today.”  She slapped Tits for Twats on his desk.  “Look at that filth.  He was grabbing himself in ways God didn’t intend.  He needs a man of the Lord to put some God into him.”

The pastor squirmed at her last sentence, but sometimes being God was the only conduit to enable him to help people.  He sized up the kid and his mom.  The kid cowered toward the doorway.  His cutoff denim shorts inched off-center, his T-shirt looked as wrinkled as tin foil, and his hair was mussed up.  He stood about 5’ 2” and barely hit a hundred pounds.  Pastor Jenkins had never seen him before.  His mother Pastor Jenkins knew from services.  She would sit alone in her long pastel dresses and dainty hat quietly until his sermon when she would unleash dozens of passages from the Bible.  Pastor Jenkins would often nod in response to her mutterings under the pretense that he actually knew what she was talking about.  In his office, her cruddy polyester pants, food stained cotton shirt, old sandals, and pinned-up hair shouted, “Hurry up!”  She stood squat, built like a rugby player.  Both mother and son sported red faces.

 

Pastor Jenkins took up the offer.  “Okay, I’ll have a talk with him. Why don’t you come by and pick him up at nine tonight.”

 

“God bless you, Pastor Jenkins.  You’re a Godsend and don’t you forget it.  Matthew, you best listen to the Pastor, or else you know what comes next.”  She wagged her finger.  “I said, you know what comes next, right, young man?”

 

“Yes, maam.”

 

His mother left the office, her shoes echoing angry stomps down the hallway.  Pastor Jenkins closed the door.  Shaking, Matthew looked at his feet.

 

Eying the kid, Pastor Jenkins sat down.  “There’s a chair with your name on it.”  Pastor Jenkins dropped an open hand toward the chair on the other side of his desk.

 

Matthew sat.  “Thank you, sir.”

“You can call me Pastor Jenkins, or Pastor, or some just call me Pastor J.”  The Pastor smiled.

 

“Yes, Pastor, sir.

 

“Um, you can drop the sir.”

 

“Yes, Pastor.”

 

“What do you prefer to be called?  Matthew, Matt, Matty?”

 

“Matt.”

 

“Well, Matt, it’s nice to meet you.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

“What comes next, Matt?”

 

“I’m sorry, sir, er, Pastor?”

 

“Your mother said something comes next if things aren’t straightened out here.”

 

Matt dropped his eyes away from the Pastor’s.

 

“It’s okay.  You can tell me.”

 

“I get spanked.  Hard.”

 

Pastor Jenkins peered more closely at Matt.  Pastor Jenkins had helped too many Matt’s who felt the sting of a belt on their pants.  “How hard?”

 

Matt stared at his shoes.

 

“That hard, huh.”

 

Matt nodded his head.

Pastor Jenkins covered his weary face with his hands.  Jesus, what’s with all the whipping in this fucking community?  He sighed and stared at the shelves full of books on his back wall.  Most belonged to the pastor before him and bore titles like, Good Deeds in the Face of Evil, The Bible and Man’s Need, and a few versions of the Bible as well.  Pastor Jenkins dusted them once a month to make it appear he read them.  He turned to his desk where he eyed a photo of a naked woman, spread eagle pushing her breast up to lick her nipple.  His eyes lingered, the naked pussy and tits reminding him of his sex bomb wife and their shared elephant libidos exploding in hundreds of ways to slide his hard-on into her velvet slit.  He refocused.  “So, this is your magazine, eh.”

 

Matt shook his head yes.

 

“All right, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.”  Pastor Jenkins pointed to the shelves behind him.  “See this white book next to the blue book?  In between those books is an accordion file.  I’m going to put your magazine in that file, and whenever you want, you can take the file to the bathroom down the hall.  My office is nearly always open.  Anybody asks, say you’re studying.”

 

Matt’s eyes and jaw popped open.  “What?”

 

“Take them to the bathroom, lock the door, and have fun.”

 

Matt fell speechless for several moments.  “But this is a church.”

 

“Think God doesn’t know what you do at home?”

 

Matt turned red.  “Isn’t the church sacred, though?”

 

“What’s sacred is in your heart.  That bathroom is not sacred.”

“Okay.”  Matt screwed his face.  “Um, what do I do if you’re in the office?”

 

“Come in and take them.  Knock first.”

 

“That’s it?  You’re not going to do anything to me?”

 

“I’ll applaud, if you want.”

 

“No, no.  What about God?  Is He going to do anything to me?”

 

“My blessing is God’s blessing.  He won’t hurt you.”

 

“Okay.”  Matt’s face remained red.

 

“Oh, come on.  Think nobody knows?  We all know.  Everybody does it.  Me.  The secretaries down the hall.  The classmates you’ll meet tonight. We just pretend we don’t.  Relax.  Have fun.”

 

“Okay...but with your blessing, right?”

 

“With more than my blessing.  Let me just look through the magazine first, okay.”  Pastor Jenkins’ heart pounded.  “There are some things that are not healthy for someone your age to see.”  He tore out a page of a woman photo’d from behind on all fours, huge tits drooping, spreading her waxed vagina, and smiling back at the camera.  He shredded it into his wastebasket.  The naked woman looked like a younger version of the aqua-eyed lady wearing the cross in the pews.  “For the over eighteen set.  Sorry.”  He leafed though the remaining pages.  “They look all right.  Here’s your accordion file.  You’re all set to go.  Knock ‘em dead, tiger.”

Matt stood up, looking at Pastor Jenkins with his head cocked like an uncomprehending dog.

 

“You know, someone usually uses the bathroom for a long time about now.”

 

“Okay.  Thanks, Pastor.”

 

“No problem.”

 

Pastor Jenkins’ sermon began flowing out of his fingertips:  Mistakes.  Who among us has not made one?  It is in our nature to be imperfect.  I am imperfect, you are imperfect, the people sitting next to you are imperfect.  [Pause for passage mumblings]  I ask you, do you honestly expect anyone in this world to be perfect!?  Would you, an imperfect person, want to live up to the standards of a perfect person? 

 

 I wouldn’t.  [Pause for effect]

 

Raising a child…Matt returned looking flushed and calm.

 

“Tough assignment, huh,” Pastor Jenkins deadpanned.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“You’re lucky it’s a lab class.”  Silence.  Matt looked at him for more direction.  “Anyway, the course isn’t over yet.  We’ll have some new textbooks later.  Think you can handle that?”

 

“Yeah.”  He chuckled.

 

“Good.  You washed up?  Washed your hands?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Good for you.  A+ for today.”

 

Matt smiled.

They walked down the hall to the activity room Pastor Jenkins re-dedicated to his wife after her passing a year earlier.  A cacophony of voices burst out door.  School lunch tables zigzagged around the room, their locations changing daily depending on the whims of the students.  About fifty high school students and two parent volunteers buzzed around the room.  Many students sat in groups chatting or playing cards, others studied in cubbyholes, while two tick-tocked a ping-pong ball.  One parent volunteer joined in a card game, another lolled around the room ensuring the students were getting along—as friends only.  Pastor Jenkins’ Rule 1:  No hanky panky. 

 

Pastor Jenkins carried a smile in his eyes.  “Let’s introduce you to some of your schoolmates.  They have a blast here.  A lot of them come here after dinner, but we usually have sandwiches or pizza or something just in case.  We got billiards, ping-pong, some kids bring cards, whole bunch of stuff to do.  And there are some quiet places for you to do your homework--ah, school homework, that is--alone or with some friends.  Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Jackson are monitoring the room today--they’re nice.  The kids who come here are good people.  Some are religious, some aren’t.  And...there are some kids here whose parents use more than a hand to learn them.  Any concerns?  Questions?”

 

“Um, not really.  Sounds nice.  Actually, are they friendly to new people?”

 

“Mmm, smells like you’re getting pizza tonight.”  Pastor Jenkins grinned as they entered the activity room.  He whistled to get everybody’s attention.  “Hey everybody.  I’d like to introduce you to Matt.  He’ll be joining you for some fun and pizza tonight.”  He winked at Matt.

 

Matt meandered around the room.

 

“Hey Matt,” an acne-face girl seated with a hand of cards looked up at him. “We’ll deal you in for the next round.”

“Okay, thanks.”  Matt looked back at Pastor Jenkins with a slight smile.  Pastor Jenkins gave him the thumbs up, and watched from the doorway for a few minutes.  The kids seemed to be accepting Matt fine enough.  Pastor Jenkins panned the room.  He saw the usual--laughter, studying, friendships.  No sex.  “I hope this room helps you feel better, wherever you are,” he thought to his wife.

 

Pastor Jenkins cut to his office but found himself malingering in the pews, straightening books he’d already straightened, wiping imaginary dust off the benches.  His eye caught someone at the side door.  He brightened in anticipation but dropped like a sinkhole.  It was Mrs. Jackson.  His face burned red.  “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath.  “How’s Matt doing?”

 

“Great.”

 

“Can I help you with anything?”

 

“No, just wondering if Matt needs anything.”

 

“He should be fine.”

 

“Okay.  Sorry to interrupt.”

“Nah, I should get back to writing my sermon.”  Pastor Jenkins inched out of the pews, muttering, “Fuck,” again, and strode down the linoleum to his office.  He dropped in his seat.  He turned the picture of his wife around and held it close to his eyes.  The aqua-eyed, black-haired woman in the pews looked so similar to his wife.  His chest ripped apart as he relived the hours waiting for the wife who never made it home a year earlier.  A note of loving apology he found too late separated a lifetime of togetherness from an empty vial of sleeping pills in the woods.  His helplessness gnawed at him.  He saved souls, but he couldn’t save his own wife’s breath.  He replayed imaginary conversations with her, convincing her that she hadn’t failed their daughter, that he bore the responsibility, too.  He shook his head as he stared at his wife’s smiling face.

 

He jumped in his seat.  The woman from the pews stood before him.

 

They locked eyes and froze.  She flinched first and looked at the ground.  He turned his wife’s picture toward the wall.  She met his eyes again.  Her voice quivered, “Since we never say anything in the pews, I figured we might try here.”

 

“Yeah, that’s a good idea.”

 

She looked down and winced at the torn up picture of the woman in the wastebasket.  She squeezed her cross.  She edged toward the doorway, but she’d brought a small picture frame to force herself to talk to him.

 

“I brought you something.”

 

“Wonderful!  Let’s see.”  Pastor Jenkins squeaked like a schoolboy.

 

She handed the picture frame to Pastor Jenkins.  “I got my picture taken at my new job.  I’m just a secretary, but...it’s okay.”

 

“I love it!  You’re so beautiful.”  Pastor Jenkins smiled, admiring her picture.  “Can I put it on my desk so I can see you everyday?”

 

“I would like that.  A lot.”

 

Pastor Jenkins’ mouth turned pasty.  “A secretary.  When did...?”  ‘Christ, what a stupid question,’ he berated himself.

 

She dropped her head.  “About a year ago.”

Pastor Jenkins set her picture on his desk, still looking at it to avoid eye contact with her.  ‘Say something, you idiot.’  He turned to her and forced a cackle.  “Hey, we’re finally talking.”

 

“Yeah.”  She smiled and bowed her head.

 

“Oh my God.  There’s a chair.  I’m so sorry.”

 

“Thanks.”  She paused as she sat.  “I like seeing you in the pews.”

 

“Me too.  I mean, not me.  You, I mean.  What am I trying to say?”

 

“I understand.”

 

“Um, have I ever missed you during Sunday services?”

 

She dragged the wastebasket away from the desk, out of his view, beside her.  “People kind of stare, so I don’t go.  I pray a lot at home, though.”  She drew her hand between her breasts and grabbed her cross.

 

Pastor Jenkins peered into her aqua eyes.  “I can’t believe you’re here.”  He opened the drawer with the lonely sock and fished out his cross.  He draped it around his neck, and the cross dangled on his chest.

 

“May I see that picture?”  She pointed to the turned picture of his wife.

 

He hesitated, then gave it to her.  “You look so much like her.  It’s amazing.”

She propped his wife’s picture up on the desk and prayed.  A minute later, she gave it back.  She wrapped herself with her arms.  She couldn’t look him in the eyes and mostly scanned the floor.  Her eyes zeroed in on the wastebasket where ripped up pieces of her body flirted her cunt to the world.  She hung her head and hugged herself harder as water piled in her eyes.

 

“Dad, can you come with me to mom’s grave?”

 

 

 

Bio:  James Green is an up-and-coming writer.  In addition to “Yoke of Iron,” he is refining short stories, poetry, a novel, and starting a novella.