As Expected

Grocery shopping is my idea of hell. But it’s a necessity, so I do it every week. I make the twenty-five-minute drive down the mountain to the nearest supermarket and submit to my fate. The drive is unremarkable. The shopping is unremarkable. Nowadays even the weather is unremarkable. Things go just as expected. They always do. “Hell hath no surprise in store for thee!” an earnest preacher once intoned. Occasionally, though, a drudge is granted a glimpse of what passes for heaven.

For instance, on a recent descent for groceries, I was seized by an urge. It came out of nowhere. I was driving along when, on a whim, I pulled over in front of an old graveyard alongside the road. I have passed this spot—and the church that stands opposite—many times on my way to and from the infernal supermarket. I’m always saying to myself: “I should stop and investigate that place someday!” Well, this was the day. I got out of the car and started strolling, without purpose, among the lichen-encrusted headstones. To avoid suspicion, I pulled out my phone and took a few pictures.

It wasn’t long before a man wearing a slouch hat emerged from the church across the road and came over to greet me. He was the pastor. He was a smiling fellow, around my age, who introduced himself by saying: “You seem more interested in this graveyard than in my church. How about it, what do you say, let me give you a tour of the church. I’ll take you up there!” He pointed at the soaring steeple across the road. “We have a huge brass bell up there. It was cast in Troy back in 1853. You should see it! You should hear it!” Being in a remarkable mood myself, I said, “Sure!”

The pastor led me across the road from the graveyard to his church. Inside, the air was cool. The big room of worship was tidy and well-lit, soothing in that way old wooden churches are after having been closed up for a while, what with their empty pews and prayer books and hymnals.

“Let us proceed!” We head up the stairs.

“Look at the craftsmanship in this carved railing!” To touch it is to join hands with the myriad faithful whose palms, over the generations, have rubbed it smooth as a cloud. Up we ascend to the choir loft and beyond, up along narrower, steeper wooden stairs worn fluent by the feet of many a forgotten sexton. We pass through a small door into tenebrous chambers still more hushed. “Watch your head!” He holds onto his hat. We enter a dim room. It has an open ceiling with hand-hewn beams of oak. The bell rope dangles down from a hole. The pastor gives it a tug. Above us the great bell commences ringing and the oak beams start groaning. The whole church structure is reverberating.

“Onward!”

We resume our ascent, this time along a rickety wooden ladder through a narrow passage. We emerge upon the steep, copper-shingled slope of what had been the original church roof, an area that at some point in the building’s history was enclosed by the base of the steeple. From here another ladder leads up to another narrow door. When that’s opened, light pours down. Here is our final pitch.

“Up we go!”

At last we stand inside the spacious steeple itself. Bars of sunlight stream in through gaps between the slats of the steeple walls. Here in the middle of it all, suspended in an imposing wooden structure, is the great bronze bell. We stand and admire it for a few moments before the pastor points toward a little round window on the front wall of the steeple.

“Have a look!” he says. I’m still in a remarkable mood, so I do.

It’s a dizzying prospect. I can see the graveyard far below. A car is passing on the road. I can hear the fluttering of wings. Are they inside or out?

“Wow,” I say, “being up here is just about the last thing I would have imagined happening today!”

And the pastor, smiling, still wearing his hat, says “Praise the Lord!”

The descent now beckons, as the ascent did. We retrace our route, down the ladders, down the stairs, through the solemn chambers of quickening shadows cast by a hundred years and more of a congregation’s ardent devotions—until we arrive at the door through which we entered. I thank the pastor for the tour and exit his church.

The rest of the day went as expected.

©John P. O’Grady
Originally appeared in The Mountain Eagle on August 28, 2020