Over the Plain Houses. Julia Franks

without a pre-thought sermon, the Lord had given him the words. The trick was to step aside and get out of the way, to lay down whatever other thing you figured needed saying and let the Spirit through. Now he gripped the pulpit block and surveyed the congregants. His mind was a blank. He listened. The room was still, expectant. The lady from the extension office was sitting very close to his wife. She regarded him with no expression at all, but he had an idea of her thinking. Like every other person from every other brought-on organization, she saw them as curiosities. That’s how come she kept her hands folded careful in her lap and her face unlined. She was young, even pretty, her hair full and auburn-colored, gold light winking from her ear lobes. She was the only woman in the room to wear jewelry. Even the sinners left their fancy things at home on church day. The lines that came to him then were from Peter. Let it not be the outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel.

      But that wasn’t from the Spirit. That was him. He set it aside and kept his mind loose. The faces in front of him seemed pure and childlike, and in that moment he too felt peeled-back, young. From somewhere inside him the sermon rose up.

      “The Jews,” he said, and the words were a gift, the surest proof he had of the Lord’s favor. “The Jews were waiting for a king with a fancy gold crown to sit above everyone and rule the people and tell them what to do.” He paused to let the picture lay down in people’s minds. “But that ain’t what happened.”

      There was a shift of appreciation in the congregation.

      “Instead the King came plain. Wearing rough clothes and talking simple talk.” Just like you and me.

      The audience said yes without saying yes, all eyes on him, a few nods. “And on that last night, He knew that someone He loved would betray him.”

      Irenie and Mrs. Furman were sitting straight up now, alert, brows slightly raised. There was something similar about their posture that Brodis found troubling, even though they didn’t seem aware of one another’s presence. Only him. Only Jesus. But there they were, among the sinners, where they both of them had chose to sit, even for some reason his own true wife, as if she didn’t know how that choice would cast a doubt on the status of her soul.

      He willed his mind back to the image of Jesus. “He knew His neighbors and His loved ones would pierce His flesh with nails and spit upon Him while His blood soaked the earth.” He paused to let the image take. Then he bellowed. “And what did He do about it?” The question suspended itself above the congregation, an enormous glass balloon that would either float or crash, depending on what Brodis said next. “He lowered himself, that’s what. In place of getting angry, in place of shouting and making threats, He lowered himself, ladies and gentlemen.”

      The room was perfectly still. The little boys in the last row had stopped passing whatever object it was they’d been sharing. Next to them, his son Matthew stopped looking out the window. He’d grown up ten inches over the winter, gangly and loose-jointed and full of the Kingdom of Heaven.

      “And what did he say to those gathered around him? And what did he say to the fellow who was going to betray him? He said, ‘Let us give thanks.’”

      “Now.” Brodis scanned the congregation. “All are invited to take part in the washing of feet.” At his side, Haver Brooks had prepared two trays, on each a row of saltine crackers and a glass filled with grape juice.

      About half the adults stood. The woman from the extension office moved her legs to one side to let Irenie pass, and it seemed to him that there was some acknowledgement or comment that passed between them. Then the congregants and the members were milling at either side of the pulpit. Haver broke in, “Will the older members be seated first.” There was nervous joking about who might be considered older. Brodis let the jitters and awkwardness settle some, until the grayhaired had seated themselves in the front pews, women on the right side with their feet crossed at the ankles and tucked under the pews, men on the left with their feet planted block-like in front of them. Most of them were farmers. A few, like the Rickersons, had bottomland, but most were like Brodis: tilling the watersheds and the ridges and every slope in between. The people who owned valley land anymore went to the Free Will church in town.

      Brodis felt calm. There was no one made a move to touch his footwear. Instead, faces pointed toward him, waiting for the instructions they heard every year, the silence stuffed with an energy that would have embarrassed him under other circumstances. Haver gave each of the standers a terrycloth cutting. Some of the men tucked it into the galluses of their overalls, and some draped it over a shoulder. There was no one looked at the enameled pans resting on the oilcloth on the table next to the pulpit. The two Hogsed boys stood next to it, waiting. The kettles steamed on the coal stove, and the hiss was the only breath in the room.

      Lem Thompson took the pulpit, his skin creased and lined as an old saddle and his gaze pointing in two directions at once. Since birth, the wandering left eye had empowered him with seeing and knowing more than he saw and knew. Now the old man set to reading with an energetic chant, each phrase punctuated with an intake of air that in another preacher would have been a rest but in Lem was the tightening of a ratchet wrench. “‘Now-when-Jesus-knew-that-his-hour-was-come, ah.” Each quick breath cranked the sermon up. “He-began-to-wash-the-disciples’-feet, ah.” The sentences constricted, sped, tightened, until Lem stepped away from the pulpit and from the printed word, and his eyes drilled down on the congregants and the foot washers both at the same time. “And-do-you-think-he’s-feeling-shame?”

      The voice of the congregants was immediate, members and sinners alike. “No!”

      Brodis stole a glance at his wife. She had closed her eyes the way she did when she was trying to figure out what she was feeling.

      Meantime Haver raised up the hymn, and Lem didn’t even acknowledge it. If anything, the old man began shouting louder.

      “Jesus-Christ-got-right-down-on-his-knees!”

       Blessing and honor, glory and power. . .

      “And-bowed-down-before-the-disciples!’’

       Bow unto the ancient of days. . .

      “And-took-up-their-feet-and-bathed-them!”

      Spontaneous voices rose up from the crowd, as if cheering Lem on. That was the way it started. Always with Lem. A sudden resentment bared itself naked in Brodis’s soul, a rusty artifact uncovered of its own accord. He willed himself to look at it and dust it off, ancient and corroded as it was. Then he willed himself to set it aside.

      The music swelled. “The-scriptures-say-that-a-Christian-is Christlike, ah. But-what-does-that-mean?”

      Murmurs from the congregation. Brodis saw that Joe Rickerson was crying.

      Meanwhile the older Hogsed boy took the first kettle from the stove and began pouring the hissing water into the pans. The younger followed with a pitcher of cold.

      Now Lem spoke with deliberation. “Brothers and sisters, all who are seated, as you are servants of the Lord, you may remove your shoes.”

      It was the instruction they’d been waiting for. Eleven heads and eleven torsos moved forward to untie eleven pairs of boots. Each man’s full attention went to the unlacing, as if the task were new to him and required his full concentration. None gawked down the row at his neighbors’ feet, blue-veined and exposed like genitals. None joked about ugliness or fust the way they would in the logging camps or any other place where men lived together too close. But Brodis knew these men. Like him, they worked on the mountains, uphill, through creeks and branches and snake-infested forest. They worked for every piece of food they put on the table. And yet, they had come here, of their own accord, in their puniness, with their feet naked and red-wrinkled, looking to be better men. And he was kin with them.

      He glanced at the women on the other side of the aisle. Irenie’s feet were pale and freckled. He turned his head. Did his wife submit her soul to the Lord? What was she thinking about right now? Why hadn’t she taken her rightful place among the saved?

      Lem’s