Brodis didn’t move.
Uncertainty flickered into Matthew’s eyes. “Through Jesus, I mean. How come He didn’t tell the lawyer that he had to go through Him?”
A moment passed and Irenie realized she was holding her breath. The kettle on the stove hissed, and she poured the water too fast into the dishpan. The steam rose up in a cloud.
Matthew pressed ahead. “Or likewise whenever Mark says, you know, that he, that he who believes in God and is baptized shall be, shall be saved, and he that believes not. . .”
The sound of Brodis’s sigh cut him off, then the thud of his boots hitting the floor, the creak of the chair as he came to his feet. Brodis reached into his pocket and withdrew an object Irenie couldn’t see but guessed to be his pocketknife. When he held it out to his son, she saw that she was right. He opened it with his thumb and turned it handle up. “Take this.”
Matthew took the knife, hope and confusion raising up his features.
“And go on out there to the edge of the yard and cut you a switch.”
For the first time, the boy looked at Irenie. Her response came unbidden before she thought to make it, an immediate and tiny shake of the head. Don’t say no.
Matthew’s features collapsed, and he didn’t look her way again.
But Brodis must have noticed, because he stood and looked around. Irenie turned back to the sink so that her husband wouldn’t spy the anger in her face. Nobody said anything.
Then the door opened, and the cold blasted into the room.
“Come back here,” Brodis barked.
The door widened and Matthew’s face appeared. “Sir?”
“Get your coat.”
Matthew did. The latch clicked shut behind him. Only then did Irenie seize the minutes. “Brodis. . .”
His stare made her tiny, his answer immediate and swift. “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, Irenie.”
There’d been a time she’d tried to tell him about the receding, and the way the lake shrank into itself. But he’d looked at her so squarely that she’d stopped. “You’re keeping the bad,” he’d said. “You’re nursing it.” And it might be he was right. Maybe she was saving the wrong things, like the memory of the little girl buried in the tiny pine box. Either way, she couldn’t see confiding in him.
But now she made herself say it. “For asking a question?”
His eyes pinioned her to the drain board. “His heart ain’t right, Irenie.”
Irenie stared back. It wasn’t true. There wasn’t a thing in the world wrong with the heart of Matthew Lambey. But before she could say so, the door opened, and her son entered, a look of woe on his thin features. He laid the switch on the table.
Brodis sat down. In place of looking at the switch, he spread his knees and put his hands on them, bending his face toward the floor as if lost in contemplation. After a moment, he looked at his son. “Look here, Matthew. You’ve been grubbing potatoes ever since you was this big.” He held his hand parallel to the floor. “You know that whenever the furrow is cracked good and deep it’s something there. So you dig. And you might get a fair size potato or might be a medium one or sometimes you get only a small one. But you dug it up and now you got it. Can’t put it back in the ground. Can’t say, ‘I don’t like this potato because it’s too skinny or too round or too ugly and got too many black spots.’ No. You take that potato because that’s where your sustenance comes from. That’s your food. You take it and you’re thankful because without it you’d die. Only a stupid man throws the ugly potatoes away.”
Matthew was still standing, eyes sliding toward the wood stove. “Yesser.”
“And only a prideful man refuses the potato with the blackened eye.”
“Yesser.”
“But that’s what you’re doing with God.”
“Yesser. . .” Matthew didn’t sound convinced. His eyes skipped from the stove to Brodis to Irenie and back again to this father. “Sir?”
Brodis cut him off in a dead level voice. “No. You wanna take the parts of the gospel that are fat and smooth-skinned and pleasant and keep them for yourself. And you wanna throw the disagreeable parts away.”
“I don’t wanna throw them away. I just thought they were supposed to—”
“And you’re finding disagreeables because you’re looking for them. You’re grubbing in that potato patch expecting to find black ones. Looking to find something ugly. God’s word is like anything else. If you expect to find something you don’t like, that’s exactly the thing you’ll find.” Brodis scrutinized his son’s face.
“Yesser.”
“There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death.”
“Yesser.” Matthew’s eyes flickered from his father’s face to the floor and back again.
“The Kingdom is set up in the heart of the people.”
“Yesser.”
“Not in their heads.”
“Yesser.” Eyes on the floor.
“I know that there are some like your Papaw believe you have to bend your faith in order to get along in the real world. He calls it compromise. But that don’t hold water with the Lord.” Brodis paused and reached for the switch. Then he waited for his son to look up. “You see this?”
“Yesser.”
Brodis flexed the switch. “Bends, don’t it?” He pulled the ends closer to one another.
Matthew looked worried.
“Bends pretty far, don’t it?”
“Yesser.”
“The more you bend it, the easier it is to bend a bit more.” The stick was almost doubled now. Brodis touched the two ends. “What was once straight now goes both ways. A direct contradiction.”
“Yesser.”
Brodis squeezed the two ends together. The stick made a cracking sound and began to splinter. “See that?”
“Yesser.”
And still Brodis flexed. “Just about broke in two but it still bends.” More cracking. The green fibers resisted until they couldn’t. The pith split. A thread of bark held the two pieces together. “Come here.”
“Yesser.” Matthew stared at the splintered stick, an expression of alarm on his face.
Brodis proffered the fractured limb and peered into his son’s face. “There’s all manner of people out there who’ll tell you how to believe.” He almost sounded as if he was pleading. “But you gotta understand. The thing you’re compromising is your own soul.”
The features in Matthew’s face had widened and spread. “Yesser.”
“Comes a point when a man can’t tell the difference between a bending and a breaking.”
“Yesser.”
“And you know and I know that the scriptures come from the Almighty. If He was to be mistook about Heaven, then He could be mistook on anything. And then why would we believe His gospel at all?” Brodis gripped Matthew by the shoulders. “If a man can’t hold true to his believing on the small stuff, how can he hold true on the stuff that really matters?” There was an undercurrent in his voice that Irenie couldn’t name, something that in another man she might have identified as fear.
Matthew didn’t answer.