Chapter 166: The Lord Keeps What Is His

/Stroud’s Third Person POV/

The same snow was still coming down on St. Jude’s at dusk when Pastor Gideon Stroud climbed the three steps into his pulpit and looked out over a hundred and three people who needed him to be certain.

The nave was full, as it was every evening.

Families in the pews with their coats on and their breath showing, the old people nearest the two kerosene heaters, children on the floor in the aisle on cushions brought in from campers, and the lanterns on their hooks along the stone walls turning all of it gold.

Thirty-one of those children were wearing new coats from the Dunmore mall, with the tags still on half of them, and Stroud had done up every one of those zips himself with cold fingers, kneeling in the snow outside the parish hall, and he thanked God for them one more time before he spoke.

"A thousand shall fall at thy side..." He didn’t need the book for this one. "And ten thousand at thy right hand... but it shall not come nigh thee."

A hundred and three faces, and every one of them turned up to him.

He was good at this, and he knew it, and he had never once been ashamed of knowing it.

The Lord gave a man his gifts to use. A voice that carried to the back pew without strain, a face that looked like it had never told a lie in its life, and a way of saying a thing so that frightened people stopped being frightened for exactly as long as he kept talking.

"There are demons in the valley tonight, as there were last night. They’re standing in Walter Hart’s fields in the snow. They’re standing on the Dunmore road. And they’re standing at the edge of the lake drinking from it like cattle..." He let that sit on them. "But not one of them is standing here."

Nobody in the nave so much as breathed as they stared at the man God had put before them.

"Not one of them has set foot on this ground, and not one of them will..." Stroud went on, his arms fanning wide, his voice booming. "This is the holy land! And the Lord keeps what is His!"

They believed him, every one of them. He could see it go through the pews, shoulders coming down and hands letting go of other hands.

The little Huff boy in the third row coughed into his mother’s shoulder, a wet, deep cough that had been getting worse for three days, and Darla Huff pressed her palm to his forehead without taking her eyes off God’s messenger standing before her.

Stroud saw that, as he saw everything from up there, and he went on with the psalm.

After the blessing came the sharing, as it did every night, and the sharing was the part the camp talked about afterward.

Bert Coyle and two of the men carried the crates in from the parish hall and set them on the altar steps, and Stroud handed it out himself: tinned peaches to the families with children, flour and lard to the women who cooked for the fires, batteries, candles, a case of cough syrup with the first bottle out of it going to Darla Huff before anyone else, and the last six coats, which went to six men who had given theirs to their wives.

Every item out of Dunmore passed through his hands first, and every person in the camp knew it had.

"Thank the Lord, not me," he told each one, and each one thanked him anyway.

There were only two rules in the holy land, and he’d made them both in the first week.

The first rule was the Ark.

What the helicopter carried home under its tarp was the Lord’s business, and whoever looked upon it would die, the same as the men of Beth-shemesh had died for looking into the Ark of the Covenant.

He’d preached that sermon on the seventh night, with the cage sitting in the vestry behind him, and he’d never had to preach it again. The curtains closed by themselves now when the rotors started.

The second rule was that nobody in the holy land was buried.

The camp’s dead lay in state before the altar for one night, under a clean sheet with four candles burning, and in the morning they were gone, and Stroud told the camp the Lord had taken them, and that was that.

Arnie Voss had gone to the Lord on the morning of the twenty-third, and the trestles he’d lain on stood folded against the wall by the altar steps now.

Nobody asked where the dead went after. People didn’t, when the answer was the Lord.

Darla Huff waited for him at the foot of the pulpit after the sharing, with the boy asleep on her shoulder and the bottle of cough syrup held against her chest in both hands.

"It’s three days now, Pastor." She was thirty, thin, in a blue Dunmore Transit jacket over two sweaters, with dark half-circles under both eyes, and she kept her voice down for the boy. "He’s burning up, and the syrup don’t touch it... I don’t know what else to do but pray."

"Then pray, Darla. That first." He put his hand on the boy’s back and felt the heat through the new coat, and the rattle in it when the child breathed. "And tomorrow, after breakfast, walk up the road to Walter Hart’s and ask the young man there for medicine."

"The one with the military helicopter?"

"A man who flies a helicopter has fuel, and a man with fuel has friends, and friends have medicine..." Stroud smiled at her until she managed one back. "Walk up in the daylight. Stop at the bottom of the drive by the mailbox and wait there, and they’ll come down to you. Show him Petey, and tell him the pastor sent you."

"Yes, Pastor." She was already crying, out of gratitude, and he patted her shoulder twice and let her go.

She would go, and the young man would help her or he wouldn’t, and either way Stroud would learn a great deal more than he’d learned on the drive at noon.

If they helped a sick child, they had a doctor behind that wall, or medicine, or both, and the next time Stroud walked up the road he would know what to ask for.

If they turned away a mother with a feverish seven-year-old, a hundred and three people would know exactly what kind of men had come to live at the Hart place, and they’d know it from Darla’s own mouth.

He walked back to the rectory through the snow with the lantern, thinking about the drive.

The young man had come out to meet him alone, further out than Walter had ever stopped him, with his hands empty and a cat on his shoulder, and he hadn’t been afraid, nor had he looked beaten by the demons.

That was the first thing Stroud had noticed, and the most glaring. He had met a great many frightened men in twenty-four days, and the young man on the drive had not been one of them.

The second thing had been the house.

No smoke from the chimney at noon on a winter day, with June Hart inside and the demons closer to her windows than they had ever been.

They were sitting in the dark in there, with the stove out, so as not to draw the demons to the light.

Stroud had seen whole streets do the same in Dunmore in the first week, and every one of those streets had been a graveyard inside a fortnight.

Walter Hart would sooner freeze his wife in the dark than bring her to the light. Three times he had been offered the holy land, and three times he had refused it, and he had put his boy in the dirt of the front yard like a dog.

Stroud had baptized that boy himself. He had held him in the font at four weeks old with his whole hand under the small of his back, and he would carry that grievance to his own grave, and he was not ashamed of that either.

And the third thing had been the cat.

The camp had owned three dogs in the first week. All three had gone under the fence on the first night the Ark came home, and never come back, and nobody in the camp had wondered why but him.

Animals always knew before people did. The young man on the drive had an animal that knew, and he had watched it know, with that flat look on its face.

Stroud had walked back down the drive with the growl at his back, thinking that the Lord had set his helicopter down in the wrong yard with the wrong man in it.