In Sunlight or In Shadow Read online

  The sea was guilty and quiet, like it had just eaten.

  He’d been to too many funerals anyway. You can’t pastor for all that time and not get a little tired of it. Very tired.

  Cold and still.

  Not just the day.

  Poor decrepit old bugger in the church. He’d been getting colder and slower for years until he just stopped altogether and froze.

  The sound was beautiful. Local children from the Sunday school with a mournful and ethereal version of Elvis’s “Rock a Hula Baby” from the awful 1961 movie Blue Hawaii. Funny and silly and bizarre and sad.

  Just like his life.

  Billy had got him started on the ganja after he told him about The Cancer. Showed him articles from the internet written by many “leading health professionals,” Billy had said, in that odd way he had of sounding like an infomercial whenever he was telling you something he believed to be important.

  Billy said, “Of course it won’t cure you but it alleviates stress and combats the nausea from the chemo,” a tidbit he quoted from the pompous hipster clerk who had sold him the marijuana at the dispensary in Portland. The clerk had implied while saying the opposite that in fact the marijuana might indeed cure cancer.

  Jefferson had told Billy that he was not taking chemotherapy treatments, that he felt, now he was in his eighties, it was just a way of making things worse on the road to the inevitable and that Doctor Naismith didn’t think it would have much effect anyway. Billy hadn’t paid any attention to that. He had an endearing and infuriating way of being deaf to anything that got in the way of his theories. So the two old men took to sitting on the beach smoking fine legal herb and waiting for death or a cure. Also, Jefferson really enjoyed the marijuana. It made him feel calm and goofy and unafraid, which were things he was not when free of its influence.

  At least not at first.

  It had bonded him with Billy, really the last person he thought he’d have shared his final days with. Billy the distracted passionate believer in a myriad of mysteries who had hounded him for years with questions about Jesus and the disciples and the Ark of the Covenant and aliens and Atlantis and, for an alarming couple of weeks, the spiritual benefits of tantric sexual practice, which Billy lacked a partner for but was enthusiastically practicing on his own.

  Jefferson had explained patiently over and over again that, as an octogenarian and Presbyterian, not to mention a minister of the church, many of these subjects were outside his area of expertise. Particularly, and please let’s never bring up this subject again, the tantric sex.

  He admired Billy’s spiritual hunger, though; his desperate appetite for “The Unexplained” remained ravenous even as the man himself hurtled into his dotage. And Billy was compassionate, driving four hours to Portland to buy good legal pot for the reverend every week even after Jefferson had told him it was unnecessary.

  Billy liked the marijuana too, of course. He had learned to make a joint from an instructional video on YouTube. They had tried various methods of imbibing—the pinched single paper-type joint favoured by incarcerated white supremacists and 1920s flapper girls—the idiot frat boy bong method—they even tried making brownies but years of being catered to by mothers and wives had left them both hopeless in area of food preparation. They eventually settled on the Rastafarian three-cigarette-paper-style joint with the cardboard roach. It seemed to be the most religious way of going about the business of getting high.

  The ceremony of preparation was almost as important as the inhalation of the sacred smoke.

  They had known each other for over seventy years, not friends all that time, of course, but in the same grades through elementary and high school. Jefferson had left town to go to divinity school, a credit to his deeply devout parents, and returned to become the third generation of Adamses to attend to the spiritual needs of the town. Everybody was very happy about this; the community then was almost all fishermen and their families and these are people who love continuity. It’s reassuring when you deal with something as capricious as the sea.

  Billy had taken over his father’s auto repair shop and married Barbara French. They had two daughters who he lost touch with after Barbara had left him, with the girls, to shack up in Prescott, Arizona, with a photocopier salesman she had met at a sales conference in Vancouver.

  So Jefferson and Billy had been aware of each other but never connected in any real way until Jean had died. Jefferson had never entertained the thought that his wife, ten years his junior, would go before him but just a month after her sixtieth birthday and two months after his seventieth she had fallen over in the kitchen, having had a massive heart attack. The doctor told him later that she had probably been dead before she hit the floor, which was meant to be a comforting thought but Jefferson found little solace in it. It seemed such an unfairly masculine way to die, although she had always been a very robust woman.

  Their only daughter, Molly, didn’t even return for the funeral. She had fled to California after high school and, after becoming a Scientologist, considered her parents to be “suppressive persons” with whom she must avoid all contact when they had unwisely questioned the validity of her religion over their own.

  His parishioners had been wonderful in the way that most people are after a sudden death, considerate and helpful and practical, but in the way of the world they were all ready to move on after Jean’s death much sooner than Jefferson was. Not Billy, though. He kept showing up every night. Month after month. No doubt the fact that he had no one else to talk to helped fuel his altruism, but Jefferson found that he started to look forward to Billy’s visits, putting the kettle on at seven o’clock every night, getting ready for the inevitable.

  As time drained away the two old men who had lived their entire lives a few miles from each other started to learn each other’s stories and in the way of those who no longer care about ridicule or shame they told each other of their failings. As husbands, as fathers, as lovers, as men. Of course, this sharing of failings led to an affection between the two. A trust that only the condemned are capable of.

  It was easy to learn about Billy, of course: he barely stopped talking and he’d tell you everything, but every so often he’d ask a question and shock you with the profundity of his attention to the answer.

  He eventually got Jefferson’s two biggest secrets out of him. One of which even Jean had been unaware of.

  Jefferson was adopted and he was an atheist.

  Billy was scandalized and intrigued by the adoption news. He had considered Jefferson a purebred Yankee—his name was Adams, for God’s sake! Billy became obsessed with locating Jefferson’s birth parents, which was impossible as the tracks had been covered up years ago by his adoptive parents, who never wanted the shame of their infertility to be discovered by the town. Jefferson had only learned of it himself from a deathbed confession from his mother by way of an explanation of why he was an only child and why his ears were so big.

  He had dismissed the story as the last ramblings of a OxyContin-addled alcoholic geriatric at first but had asked his father about it, who was still alive at the time, although withering away at Primrose Pathways—a facility for senile clergymen who required twenty-four-hour care.

  His father had confirmed the verisimilitude of his mother’s story and added the shocking information that they had bought him as a baby from dirt-poor sharecroppers while on an evangelical trip to Mississippi just after Christmas in 1934 or ’35.

  Jefferson had told Jean, and for a while they had tried to unearth any further information, but both his parents had died that winter and there was no one else to ask or talk to.

  “You’ll never find who I was now, and anyway, everyone will be dead. What’s the point?” Jefferson told Billy.

  But Billy thought that it was important to know the truth about yourself, plus you could find out everything now because of the internet.

  There was nothing to find out, of course. No record or website has that kind of ancient illegal
information on it. The internet search eventually led to Billy’s outlandish assertion that Jefferson was in fact the twin brother of the late Elvis Presley.

  Elvis had been one of twins born to a poor sharecropper in Tupelo, Mississippi, at exactly that time. His brother Jesse was stillborn, but it was Billy’s assertion that that was in fact untrue and that the devout but profoundly impoverished Gladys and Aaron Presley, fearing that they could not care for two babies, had sold one infant child to poor, barren, God-fearing church folk from the North.

  Jefferson had actually started laughing when Billy told him this. A big, deep, throaty laugh, and Billy was grateful; he hadn’t even seen the old man smile since his wife had died.

  They left the secret of Jefferson’s bloodline in the dust.

  The other secret was more troublesome. That one only surfaced because of the dead whale.

  It was a bright cold day in April and they had just finished a large spliff of extremely potent Mexican gold. The effect of the plant was so strong that any speech between them was impossible for a while, so they just sat at the top of the dunes looking with watering bloodshot eyes at the massive decomposing corpse of the mature North Atlantic right whale that had been dumped on the shore by a murderous spring tide the previous day.

  Billy, of course, had been the first to speak, telling Jefferson he’d Googled the whale, and then both of them dissolving into hysterical laughter for ten minutes.

  When they recovered and sat in the calming, almost post-coital bliss of shared drug-induced hilarity, Billy explained that he’d learned on Google that the North Atlantic right was one of the most endangered species on earth.

  “They reckon there’s only about five hundred or so left,” he told Jefferson.

  “I’m not surprised if they keep throwing themselves on beaches like this” Jefferson replied, after a long pause.

  “It was old, I reckon it was dead before it hit land,” said Billy.

  “Like Jean,” said Jefferson. “I miss her. It’s been over ten years and I keep expecting her to turn up. Strange that, isn’t it?”

  “You’ll see her again, when you go to your reward,” said Billy in his softest, most conciliatory tones.

  Jefferson gave a little laugh that Billy didn’t like.

  “You don’t think so?” he asked.

  Jefferson said that actually, no, he didn’t. He said that he had seen a lot of people dispatched to their “reward” over the years. Young and old, good and not so good, healthy and sick, and they all kind of looked the same when they died. Sort of empty. Like it was over. Done.

  Billy asked if he even believed in God, and Jefferson, much to his friend’s distress, said that no, he didn’t. He said that he used to, but that as he got older and life delivered more and more rare and smelly dead whales to his beach or other beaches up and down the coast, he thought it was a fairy story. Something to stop people losing their minds with despair. That’s why he continued to be a clergyman long after he ceased to believe in the lie, because he saw it was a way for him to provide succor to people who would have been distraught without the Big Story.

  “I read a book about that. When Bad Things Happen To Good People. It really helped.”

  “Billy, bad things happen to everybody. Good and bad. It has no pattern, it’s all nonsense.”

  “You can’t really believe that!”

  “I can’t believe anything else,” said Jefferson sadly.

  Billy was shocked that he’d been preaching what he believed to be a lie all these years. Jefferson said that he was just like an actor, playing a role for the entertainment and comfort of the customers.

  “What’s the point of preaching about God if you don’t believe it?” squeaked Billy incredulously.

  “I suppose it just sort of became a habit. I was just taking care of the family business. It’s a job. Where’s the harm?”

  “The harm is that it’s not the truth. You are not saying what you believe to be the truth!”

  “In my opinion, the truth is vastly overrated,” said Jefferson firmly.

  Billy was profoundly uneasy about his friend’s revelation but, using his almost superhuman powers of optimism and denial, he put it down to the effects of the cancer and the strong Mexican bud.

  Billy had never once in his entire life entertained the notion of the absence of an all-powerful God who worked in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform. He wasn’t an idiot; he was just blessed with Augustinian faith. He actually had a quote by St. Augustine in framed needlepoint on his kitchen wall.

  “Trying to understand the mind of God is like trying to pour the ocean into a cup.”

  A gift from the wife who had deserted him for a better option.

  They met by the whale every day and watched it decay, making sure they stayed upwind of it as after a while the stink became nauseating.

  By the time the giant rib cage became visible, looking like the ruins of an old church draped in rotting flesh, Jefferson stopped smoking the reefer.

  He told Billy he no longer needed it, citing the example of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  Billy nodded knowingly.

  “Because marijuana turned you into Mr. Hyde, a monster who didn’t believe in God?” he asked, by way of confirming his theory.

  “Absolutely not,” replied Jefferson. “At a certain point in the story Dr. Jekyll realizes that he needs the potion to stop himself from turning into Mr. Hyde, the opposite of its original effect. The potion had changed him. That’s happened to me. When I smoke now I get nervous and scared like I used to, but if I don’t take it I feel better and relaxed and groovy.”

  “Do people still say groovy?” asked Billy.

  “I do,” answered Jefferson.

  “So you still don’t believe in God?”

  “Yup. Still don’t.”

  Billy decided he didn’t want to talk about this anymore so he stopped, and Jefferson, being his friend, let him.

  It was long into the summer and the whale carcass had almost disappeared by the time they put to sea. Billy had borrowed the little wooden boat with outboard motor from Dennis Mitchell, who had been a bit late on his payment for the new transmission on his truck and was looking for a way to extend his credit. Jefferson’s physical decline was almost as dramatic as the dead whale’s and he too was wasting away rapidly. The idea was that the two men would go fishing, but they both knew that it was just a last day out for the old minister before the end.

  They puttered out of the old stone harbor into a gentle swell on an opaque grey sea. There was no wind and the distant horizon was obscured by a haze only marginally lighter in color than the water. The view was limited, but they were both old men who knew their way around. They knew where they were going.

  Jefferson sat quietly looking out over the bow, and when they were out of sight of land Billy cut the engine. The two men sat in silence for a while. Unusually, it was Jefferson who spoke first.

  “You know,” he said, “I suppose, one way or another, when an atheist dies he’s no longer an atheist.”

  They smiled at each other, but their moment was interrupted when the boat suddenly lurched violently to one side, almost pitching them both into the water.

  “What the hell was that?” whispered Jefferson.

  “I have no idea,” said Billy.

  They were still panicked when off to their side about fifteen feet from the tiny boat the enormous tailfin of an adult North Atlantic right whale breeched the surface then slammed down again, baptizing them in freezing salty water and pitching the boat sideways once more.

  “Quick, start the engine!” yelled Jefferson.

  Billy pulled the ignition cord, but in the time-honored tradition of outboard motors it refused to start at the crucial moment. He was still trying when they felt the boat lift gently out of the water.

  The whale was underneath the hull.

  The boat rose slowly about two feet from the surface on the great creature’s back, then gently and quietly the
whale set it down again.

  They looked over the side in awe of the monster that held the power of life over them. The head was next to the boat and it rolled on its side so that its black shining eye looked directly at them.

  They watched silently as the giant beast moved slightly away and slowly circled their craft three times clockwise before returning to the murky depths without so much as a ripple on the surface.

  The two old men stared at each other for a moment and then, as if they’d rehearsed it, they both yelled at the same time, screaming like victorious sports fans. They yelled and laughed and punched the air in triumph.

  After a few moments they got quiet, catching their breath.

  Billy held Jefferson’s gaze. Made a decision, darted forward and pushed his friend over the side. No one spoke. No noise. Jefferson didn’t cry out, but Billy watched him follow the whale out of sight.

  The Reverend Jefferson T. Adams, beloved and respected minister of this parish for over fifty years, pulled deeply on the Jamaican-style joint and inhaled the smoke. He listened to the music inside the church and assumed Billy had chosen it. “Rock a Hula” indeed!

  He couldn’t help but smile.

  Elvis Aaron Presley, dressed in one of the more outlandish sequined outfits of his later Vegas years, sidled up to him.

  “Hey, brother, really good to see you.”

  Jefferson turned to him, noting that actually they really did look alike.

  “This is just the hallucination of a dying brain, isn’t it?” said Jefferson.

  The old god of rock shrugged.

  “I don’t know, man. You can overthink these things,” said the dead king.

  It was no surprise to learn that STEPHEN KING had no time for anthology commitments, but his feeling for the subject kept him from dismissing the proposal out of hand. “I love Hopper,” he wrote, “so I’ll table this for the time being.” Later he chose the painting he’d write about—on the slim chance that he should find the time. “There’s a painting, ‘Room in New York.’ I have a repro of it in my house, because it speaks to me.” It evidently spoke persuasively, and “The Music Room” is the happy result.