Confluence - 7. Reverend Fielden Takes a Position

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Ogilvy.”

Mrs. Ogilvy looked up from the medical records piled on her desk. “Hello, Mister Owen.”

“I wonder if Doctor Layne might have a moment to see me. Just for a minute.”

“I’ll let him know you’re here. He’s been so busy. So many new patients. You understand.”

“I do understand, Mrs. Ogilvy. It’s nothing urgent if he can’t spare the time.” Owen sat between a shabbily dressed man trying to suppress a cough and a matronly woman rubbing her ankle.

Mrs. Ogilvy disappeared through the door to the infirmary, then reappeared and beckoned to Owen. “Just wait in the far-left examination room and he’ll try to see you in a moment,” she whispered.

“You’re an angel,” Owen whispered.

“So I’ve been told.”

Owen waited only a few minutes before Layne appeared.

“Anything wrong, Paulie?”

“Yes. I never get to see you. And I’m exhausted. Ellie’s covering for me.”

“My dear sir, if you didn’t want to be exhausted, you chose the wrong line of work.”

“I just need something to keep me going.”

Layne raised his eyebrows. “Maybe you should go to Doc Lawson for one of his coca leaf pick-me-ups.”

“There’s only one pick-me-up I need.” Owen wrapped his arms around Layne and pulled tight, then drew back slightly and kissed him deeply.

Layne lingered in the kiss for a moment, then held Owen’s wrists and pushed him away. “That will have to do. Now go on before someone sees us.”

“Yes, Doctor.” Owen turned and stepped back out into the office.

Layne and Owen had been too absorbed to notice Mrs. Ogilvy enter the infirmary and, catching a glimpse of them in the examination room, return silently to her desk.

**************

Reverend Fielden fiddled nervously with his notes as his church filled for services on the last day of June. Doc Lawson glared at him threateningly. Arthur Evans and Bert Lippincott were keeping a critical eye on Fielden as well.

Owen sat near the front, as usual, Layne at his left, Ellie at his right, and his mother at Ellie’s right. The congregation stood for the first hymn, “River of Life.”

“Getting to be our song,” Layne murmured.

“If they only knew the things it makes me think of,” Owen whispered.

Blessed river,

Let me ever

Feast my eyes on thee.

Fielden stood at the pulpit and surveyed the congregation. Lawson, Evans, Lippincott. The Aiken brothers. Ellie, Owen, Layne. Little old ladies in black. Fashionable young ladies in their best. Those who came for a dose of religion, those who came to socialize, those who came eagerly and those who were dragged here every Sunday. No getting around it -- the sermon was not going to please everyone.

“What a beautiful day, today, the last day of June, 1872,” he began. Some faces showed perplexity; Fielden seldom commented on the weather. “In a few days we celebrate Independence Day. There will be picnics and a parade and fellowship and that’s all as it should be, on the day celebrating liberty. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are what our forefathers fought for, and they are wonderful things. But let’s think for a moment about what we do with all that liberty, and what happens when we pursue happiness.

“The ancient Greeks had the first democracy. We owe them a great debt for that. But they were not without faults. They were not without vice. They were not without sin.

“Saint Paul spread the gospel in Greece. In his epistles we can read of his struggles with those people, how he struggled mightily against that notorious weakness of the Greeks --” here Fielden leveled his gaze at Layne, then at Owen -- “as I read from the book of Acts, chapter 17, verse 21: ‘For the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.’

“See, the Greeks, and the people of Athens most of all, had freedom in abundance, and what were they using it for? To chase every little new idea, to try every new fad, to pursue anything just for the sake of novelty. They were captivated by every flashy new idea that came along, like a crow forsaking good sense to pick up a shiny piece of tinfoil, like a fish about to get hooked by a gleaming lure.

“And the Greeks weren’t the first to be so easily swayed. The children of Israel knew the true God, the only God, but time and time again they betrayed their covenant with the Lord, seeking something new, something exciting, something different -- the false gods of their neighbors. As the prophet Amos says, in chapter 13, ‘And now they sin more and more, and have made them molten images of their silver, and idols. Therefore they shall be as the morning cloud and as the early dew that passeth away, as the chaff that is driven with the whirlwind out of the floor, and as the smoke out of the chimney.’

“And so it was with the Greeks, with their idols of heathen gods carved in marble. Idols of silver, idols of marble. Beautiful to the eye, but sinful, deadly to the soul. Marble statues of gods and men, the Greeks made -- naked, shameless, inciting the heart to unnatural lust. And as the prophet Amos said, people who are so misguided will last no longer than the morning mist and dew."

Reverend Fielden's voice grew louder as his sarcasm sharpened. "But such things were done simply in the pursuit of happiness, weren’t they? Weren’t the Greeks simply appreciating beauty? Weren’t the Israelites simply trying out a new god or two, like trying on a new hat? It’s a funny thing. When we pursue happiness by chasing whatever happens to catch our eye at the moment, the latest fad, we end up with a handful of ashes. But when we pursue holiness, we end up with happiness.

“That great scholar of the Scripture, Matthew Henry, in his book The Pleasantness of a Religious Life, writes: ‘The pleasures of sense are fading and perishing; as the world passes away, so do the lusts of it. That which at first pleases and satisfies, after a while cloys and surfeits. But the pleasures of religion will abide. If an immortal soul makes the eternal God its chief joy, what should hinder it from rejoicing evermore?’

By now Fielden’s voice was an intimidating roar. “One thing the Scripture makes clear: the consequences of abandoning the plain, simple, godly life, the established life whose virtue is familiar and certain, for a momentary diversion, are severe. What else were the people of Sodom guilty of, but an unnaturally intense interest in the new strangers among them? And God did not spare them. God rained down fire on the city of Sodom and consumed the city and its whole valley in flame.

“As we contemplate our liberty this Independence Day, then, let us consider the wise use of that liberty. Our forefathers knew that mere liberty was nothing without the guiding hand of Providence and God’s laws, steadiness of mind and purpose, and trust in the plain old ways. They knew that the pleasures of the senses and the appeal of novel fascinations would not only not lead to happiness; they would lead to destruction.

“Let us pray.”

As the congregation rose to recite the Our Father, Owen’s heart raced. The sermon was obviously directed at him and at Doctor Layne. The ‘notorious weakness of the Greeks’? And what was the soda fountain but an idol of marble and silver in Fielden’s eyes? And what about the eyes of the congregation? He looked around. Everyone seemed to be stealing quick, disapproving glances at him.

“They know,” he whispered to Layne.

“Shush. Keep calm,” Layne murmured, his eyes straight ahead.

“They all know. They’re looking at us.”

“No one knows anything. Don’t panic.”

Owen glanced over at the Aiken brothers. Jonas’s face was red with anger, and Walter was clenching his teeth. Owen tried to control himself for the rest of the service but found himself shaking.

As the last hymn ended, Layne said quietly, “We need to talk about this.”

Owen ignored him, grabbed Ellie’s hand in his right and his mother’s in his left, and rushed out.

Layne watched the three depart and tried to steady his ragged breathing.

********************************

Jordan ran his hands along the marble-white skin of the shoulders and back as he fucked the eager hole. Increasing his tempo, and encouraged by the moans from the man below him, he climaxed with a grunt.

The man panted. “I swear, my boy, you restore my faith in God,” he said.

Jordan smiled. “Oh, I bet you say the same thing to your wife.” He patted the pale buttocks.

“If she could fuck like that, I probably would. Can you stay?”

“You know I have a night shift at the mill. Between you and my sister and the mill and the pharmacy, I’m getting by on two hours of sleep as it is.”

“Silly of me to ask. I can’t stay myself, anyway. I can get away with ‘tidying up the vestry’ only so many times before Letitia gets suspicious.”

Jordan shook his head. “Why? Why must I be so attracted to middle-aged white married men?”

“I don’t know why, but I’m intensely grateful.”

“Well, then, same time next week, Reverend Fielden?”

“Call me Joe, please.”