Decoration Day by Vic Kerry Page B

have believed us. You’d have left as soon as you arrived. I knew last Sunday that you were different. Typically we put out an ad for a pastor a month before Decoration Day. Every other year one or two answer it. We take the more likely of the two. No one answered the advertisement this year, and then you came of your own will. The One God talks to you and tells you to save us.”
    David couldn’t deny this, but Marsh implied the light was the thing holding the town enslaved. That couldn’t be because God spoke from that light. He needed help, divine help. Prayer was the only answer.
    “I need to pray about this,” he said.
    “We can go back inside,” Marsh answered.
    “I need to pray at the church.”
    “I don’t think that is such a good idea. You are the most susceptible to the thing there. It is trying to stop you.”
    “I pray there, or I leave town. I’ll walk up the mountain and climb over the rock fall.”
    Marsh looked at the ground. “So be it. If you will stay and try to help us, then I will oblige you, but wear this.”
    He reached in his pocket and brought out a necklace with a talisman on it. The small silver charm looked like the weird star at the church. Marsh handed it to David.
    “What is this?” He took it and put it around his neck. The dreams and fever had been powerful, so if this small thing could ward it off, then David would use it.
    “A fetish of the thing that curses us. The metal has protective powers. The shape is its symbol.” Marsh pointed to the house. “Let’s go back in, and I’ll have Thomas return you to the church.”
     
     
    David knelt on a small wooden rail before the pulpit. A velvet cushion padded his knees against the hardness of the wood. He prayed. The words flowed from him. They weren’t eloquent or elegant, just what he needed from God. The Lord had led him to this place. Now he’d discovered what the town wanted from him, but he needed more of what the Lord wanted for him. The revived evangelistic fire inside him sputtered with Marsh’s revelation. He couldn’t help feeling that, like Christ, he was the lamb being led to the slaughter. The prayer said all this and more. David ended with amen but remained kneeling where he was. Drops of sweat rolled down his back. The church pulsed with heat.
    Until today, every time he’d entered the sanctuary, the place felt comfortable if not cool. The newfound heat seemed strange. This part of the building had no electricity, so no heating that didn’t require someone to stoke a fire of some sort.
    “Whew, if it ain’t hot in here,” Hester said from the back of the room.
    David turned to see the frumpy maid walking down the aisle between pews. She fanned a rag in front of her face as she did. He stood to greet her.
    “Why in blue blazes did you put the woodstove to heating?” she asked.
    “I didn’t. The place was like this when I got here,” he said.
    “Got to fix that. You’ve got water in that apartment, don’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, fill up the bucket I keep down behind the pulpit and bring it back for me to pour on the fire in the woodstove,” she said. “We’ll sweat off ten pounds in here if you don’t. I just wonder who lit that thing.”
    “Perhaps it was an altar boy getting ready for tomorrow,” David said, stepping onto the pulpit platform.
    “What altar boys? We don’t have any of those.”
    He stopped and looked at her. “Mr. Marsh told me that an altar boy would light the chandelier before services tomorrow.”
    “Don’t know why he told you that. Ain’t been any altar boys in years and years. I light the chandelier.”
    “Maybe he doesn’t know that.”
    “Oh, he does. Sounds to me like he’s lying to you. Hurry up with that water before I die of a heat stroke. I still got to tidy up a bit, and can’t do it in a sweltering place like this.”
    David stepped down past the pit and found a tin bucket. He filled it from the sink in his bathroom and brought it back to