Visiting preacher sets church on fire
A visiting preacher in the Midwest set the church on fire during his sermon, landing himself and five others in the hospital.
Sunday started out like most others. While Papa was frying up some bacon and eggs, Aunt Mary stepped out to check on the garden like she did every morning in growing season. This was the only gardening she didn’t wear her gloves for, checking the dirt to see if we needed to water each morning. If the dirt was dry, we’d pull a bucket of water from the rain barrel or hose, and water each planting spot, marked neatly by a popsicle stick that had the seed name written with green Sharpie.
I stood by as Aunt Mary set her hand down on the dirt like she did every other day, ready to fill the bucket since it hadn’t rained in a few days. Aunt Mary touched the ground without really looking, and turned to nod at me, signaling to me that we needed water. As I watched, seeds that we had planted just the day before started to sprout and I gasped, dropping the bucket to point at the bed she was touching. Aunt Mary looked down and recoiled and we could actually see the moment when the sprouts stopped growing.
“Well, I’ll be darned!” That’s the closest Aunt Mary ever comes to swearing, and even that doesn’t happen often. “Step over here, Evie, let’s see what happens when you touch it.”
I did as she said, leaving the bucket where I’d dropped it, and reached down into the garden bed. Nothing happened. She set her hand back on and the sprouts expanded as we watched. When she pulled her hand away, they stopped.
“Henry,” she called through the open window, “I think you should see this!”
Papa rushed right out from the kitchen to see, and watched the plants growing as Aunt Mary touched the dirt, then stopped again as she pulled her hand away. He scratched his hair, which he does sometimes when he’s thinking. “I’ve never seen anything like it. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you had those seeds in the ground two weeks ago.”
We just stood there for a few minutes looking at our garden until Papa said we’d better get through breakfast before church time. Papa was actually going to work, but Aunt Mary would drop me off at Momma’s church before heading to the Catholic church nearby. Momma had worked in the church office until she got really sick, and she still found the energy to go to that church every Sunday until the end, so the people there were like family to me. Aunt Mary said that suited her just fine, as it gave her some alone time with God at her church.
I sat with my friend Charlotte and her parents at just the right spot in church. We weren’t too far forward, so Preacher Markham, who was visiting, didn’t have clear eye contact with us. But we weren’t too far back either, where Preacher Anderson sat on the rare occasion that she turned her pulpit to a visitor. She was sweet as could be outside of worship, but heaven forbid she spot you talking during a guest’s sermon. “It reflects poorly on our community,” she’d say the next week, at the start of her sermon. “We’re more polite than that.”
I wasn’t really listening at the beginning of his sermon, just enough to note that he had planned one sermon, but was talking about something different. I was thinking about the garden and Aunt Mary, but Preacher Markham was getting louder as he spoke, sounding very upset. I tuned in as he opened the Bible and read, “And there will be signs in the sun and moon and stars….” He paused and looked around the church. “Did we not see these very signs two nights ago? The powers of the heavens will be shaken.“
There were some murmurs running through the church, and when I looked back, Preacher Anderson was standing, but still hesitating to interrupt her guest. I wondered what I had missed in his sermon so far.
“And what of these powers people suddenly claim to have?” He flipped quickly through the Bible, perhaps a bit careless in his haste, as he searched for another passage. “Such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. These are surely the end of days, we must not let ourselves be led astray by these works of Satan!”
Then I heard, for the first time, an underlying speech. The real meaning to his words, if you want to call it that. I zoned out on the preacher’s words for a minute and listened as he spoke instead about his fear and confusion, in a state just short of panic. I was pulled back to reality as Preacher Anderson strode to the front, her calming voice attempting to override the panic he was creating with the words everybody else was hearing.
And then a laugh rang through the church. Bobby Anderson, our preacher’s nephew, stepped into the aisle toward his aunt. As he stumbled on his unsteady feet, three paper butterflies, in colors remarkably similar to our church bulletin, fluttered around his head, swooping in and out of his reach.
Preacher Markham gasped, pointed at little Bobby and proclaimed, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!” And again I heard a second sentence, simultaneously emerging from the preacher, this time shrieking, “Burn the witch!”
I started to moved towards Bobby as flames leapt from Preacher Markham’s hand toward him. Bobby’s mother, Moira, threw herself in front of the flames, which bounced off of her and ignited the paper butterflies. They spun out of control, each one landing on books or paper and spreading fire from there.
I heard a crash as some of the men from town tackled the visiting preacher, stopping the stream of flames spewing from his hand. Preacher Anderson turned to me and said, “Evie, your father!” I heard the underlying, “Get help!” in her exclamation, though I didn’t need it to understand her meaning. I bolted for the door and out toward Main Street, shedding my fancy Sunday shoes as I ran, making record time to the nearby police station. As I crashed through the door, I shouted out, “Church! On fire!” while I gasped for breath.