Judas Wept

By David Eubanks

Adam Manning was a great kid, a courageous missionary kid, whose dream was to return to the United States one day and become a great preacher and bring the nation back to Christ. In a very short time, he’d made great headway on his goal, and he’d never once thought about running for office until Asa Mudd, a leading candidate running for the presidency, ask him to join him on the ticket. They were both true Christians. Being vice-president would make a great platform from which to call the nation back to their moral roots. Sounded good, but Mudd’s party had lost its way. The forecast for the party was glum, demographics turning against them, the country’s values shifting away. How could they win? Well, by doing what they had to do; campaign on a message that would please the center and get that swing vote. On the other hand, they risked losing their conservative Christian supporters doing that, appeasing liberals with all that mealy-mouthed talk. Enter the nationally-revered Reverend Adam Manning, the symbol of all those values the party’s legions had long prayed over. With Adam on the ticket, they could still win, couldn't they? Implement their real agenda once they were in office. Maybe. Judas Wept explores the morally ambiguous and dangerous path that the Reverend Adam Manning follows on his way to the brink of a national tragedy. (Contact the author: [phone]

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Eubanks
• Release date: Feb 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9780989242820

David Eubanks

Philip David doesn’t have any place he considers home. Philip David was probably born to drift, and that’s what he does. Where he can find a place to sit, he writes. By the grace of whatever watches over him, he would say, he latched on to a computer. The paper he once used tended to get wet. Now all he needs is a dry location with an electrical outlet. From the fingertips of this peripatetic author comes tale after tale of suspense, ambiguity and consequences. He invites you to see the world through his eyes, a world you may have missed.

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Judas Wept

By

David Eubanks

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Judas Wept

By

David Eubanks

Published by Sycamore Books Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 David Eubanks

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-9892428-2-0

Introduction

Adam Manning and I were about as much alike as Lucifer and the Lord though there’s no good reason for that. We should have come out the same, like Gladiolas that after a few years all turn peach color no matter what color they were when planted. Missionary life is supposed to do that, and it mostly does just that. You put people in the same pot and water them with the same thoughts and recite the same things day in, day out, year after year and all the individuality bleaches out into a single frame of mind.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling him or me Lucifer or God. I stopped seeing the world in good versus evil, black and white terms early on in my life when I was supposed to be turning peach.

Adam started out red. I say that because I thought he was cut out to be the passionate true believer. Not the tepid believer, but the leader with the fire in him. He read the gospel and found a whole good message intact, while I couldn’t get past how incomplete it was. You had to love Adam for his optimism, though.

I suppose that’s why I reconnected with him the way I did and helped him the way I did—ultimately helping him win the nomination for the vice-presidency of the United States. What could I do, he asked for my help.

So we formed a team, Mr. Peach and Mr. Paisley, the latter being me, of course, with my hopscotch morality. Which is to say, not so humbly, I think I give my morality more assiduous thought than your missionary type, so my color, no not color, my colors are a little more complicated.

Our great adventure is all over now, and I can’t tell you what color Adam is even now, that is, in terms of Gladiola science. I thought he was peach, and on other days I think he was always been a red one. Maybe he’s plaid now, you tell me.

Chapter 1

This is how I remember it. Joseph Manning, the oldest of the brothers, shot himself about noon when he figured everyone would be awake and most people would be home having lunch. The Wrights next door heard the small pop coming from Joseph’s .22 gauge rifle but had dismissed it. Adam, his younger brother and the second oldest child, heard it and got to the old chicken coop first. He climbed a short ladder into the raised wooden, room-sized structure where Joseph alone made his bed. Adam says he remembers to this day the smell of cordite still hanging in the air.

What the neighbors paid attention to was Adam’s loud scream, then a minute later, Mrs. Manning’s, which came after she scrambled up into the coop and found Joseph lying in his bed, the rifle by his side. Peter—he was one year younger than Adam—arrived not a minute after that. When he saw Joseph, he dropped to his knees, placed a hand on Joseph’s hip and turning to his mother said, You did this.

Mrs. Manning went crazy. She shrieked and swung at Peter. She was yelling at him to get out and flailed at him wildly again and again as he ducked and scooted away. Adam said he tried to restrain her, but she pushed him away hard, kicking at him when he fell, and screamed some more. You too. Get out! Get out! Get out!

By the next morning, Mrs. Manning had told about everyone that there was no note, no notice, no suspicion of any kind that anything was wrong, though everyone in the camp thought otherwise.

But there was no denying that there had to be something just a bit suspicious about an 18 year-old boy committing suicide, essentially at home, firing the gun within earshot of his mother. I believe everyone at the Requena Cocha mission camp thought he wanted her to find him, with his life's spirit freshly escaping him in the willful transition from the here and now to eternity. I concluded, as I think everyone else in the camp did, that it was neither an accident nor a spontaneous act, but in the Manning household there were sharply differing opinions.

***

The funeral service was held in our chapel, which was located near the center of the camp. It looked like every other structure only larger. They all looked alike. Whitewashed wood slats on the exterior, grey corrugated steel panels for roofing, screens for windows. There were three dozen homes, or large cabins you might call them, that were positioned adjacent to the pathways that laced their way around the flat path of land the military had cleared out many years earlier.

It looked a little like any suburban town, grass around and between homes was cut low though it was a thin covering. You could always see the orange earth underneath. Frankly, it was a pretty tame place to live, which was much different that the church people back in the states had in mind. That was good for donations, of course, paying us to live with tarantulas and snakes and jaguars, like we had to fight them off every day, which was not the case at all. So we let them kind of believe what they wanted to by not correcting their misconceptions. A good missionary is a good salesman, first and foremost.

So they held the funeral. I sat in the first row opposite the Manning family across the aisle. I was fixated on Adam, who was standing alone, front and center on the altar, singing a goddamn hymn. I thinking that there was no way in hell he should have been made to do this. But he did it. Duty to God and all that.

So I sat there watching the sweat forming on his forehead, and he’s pumping out the song like a little angel. Disgusting. And this sweat is like a lake about to flood, but he wouldn’t wipe it away and it was making me nervous, like wanting to swipe a crawling fly away from your friend’s apple pie. What was he waiting for?

Christ, it was nerve racking, but finally a single bead of sweat broke free and slowly trickled down the bridge of his nose and into the tears in one eye. It stung, of course, and made him clench his eyelids. I think every time Adam closed his eyes, he prayed, so I could imagine him inwardly calling upon God to provide the power to stay strong, and he held on to the final note of his hymn with only the faintest little crack in it.

But that little crack shook him and he glanced at his mother seated in the front row. I leaned forward to look at her too. If he was looking for support, he wasn’t going to find comfort there, of course, his mother sitting there with this implacable assassin’s gaze on her face. Funny how you can sense the virtually imperceptible, like the way all the underlying muscles in his face went tense and still for one arresting nanosecond, looking at her, wondering something like, where in the hell was her mercy.

So he was standing there, in the center of this raised wood platform in the camp chapel, facing a congregation staring back at him from twenty-five rows of hand-made pews, with a center aisle right down the middle, unfinished wooden slats for a floor. He seen it from that view a thousand times, but I bet it seemed strange that day.

Behind all that was a white wall of equatorial sunlight outside that made black silhouettes of those standing at the back against these tall, screened windows. It was just after noon, when the jungle heat started to close in on you, air the texture of moist cotton balls. I never got used to it. God-forsaken place to live.

So I was sitting there, wishing this would get over, when someone off to the side of the pews announces the next hymn and the pages start flapping. Just at that moment, Adam lets eyes drop to behold that closed wooden coffin resting before the altar. Of course, it was the body of Joseph Manning. Adam’s chest heaved, you could just see the grief rising in his limbs and his knees weakened. I saw him teeter slightly. Then he closed his eyes again. Prayer time. And got himself together, ready to proceed like the good soldier he was.

When he opened his eyes, he didn’t seem so strong, and looked over at his brother Peter, who sat at the very end of the row next to his three sisters and as far away from his parents as he could get. They were sitting at the other end of the pew. So there was Peter, sitting with one arm draped over the pew’s back, bare feet resting limply on the floor, staring out the screen to his left, looking totally uninvolved with the whole thing.

Adam turned the pages of his hymnal, glancing up repeatedly at Peter who continues to sit resolutely ignoring the proceedings, just making his quiet little statement. Adam can’t find the hymn, and the congregation shifting and coughing. Church makes you cough. It’s very odd. Then everything went quiet, people wondering if Adam has the wrong songbook or something, I suppose.

It’s quiet enough to draw Peter out of his trance, and I watched as he turned his eyes toward Adam; he’s got his head lowered, got a scowl on, and he gives Adam this teary, cold glare. Adam reads Peter’s emotion and he starts coughing, trying to release the chokehold that glare had on his diaphragm. He manages to gulp a short breath of air started singing again. Tough stuff, that Adam.

Adam’s final hymn was his mother’s favorite and the last of her personally selected hymns, The Old Rugged Cross. We’d heard him sing it several times. Adam, you see, was a chosen one among the youth there—the truest believer, the amazingly articulate liaison between the elders and the youth; they relied on his influence, to carry the word. Their little Jesus in residence. And he was a fine singer too.

All residents of the mission were present at the ceremony, and as I later picked up in bits of conversation, all but the Mannings were astonished as I was to find Adam singing at the funeral and not Elsie Toner, a lady who customarily did the singing at all the other formal occasions of this gravity. They all wondered why, but I knew how it came to be.

I happened to be standing just outside the Manning’s home the night before when Adam’s father, Durell, sitting at the kitchen table, tried to object to the idea Mrs. Manning had raised. She was insisting that Adam must sing. Durrell says, But Mother, perhaps it’s too soon for Adam… But Mrs. Manning comes back with, Durell, that’s enough. People will be expecting Adam to sing. End of discussion.

I thought it was inhumane. Everyone in camp knew it was Adam who had first found Joseph struggling for his last breath, dark blood oozing from the hole in his temple. The shock would surely have had anybody, certainly a brother, blinking away that vision like that for weeks, or months, or even years, but now, only two days later, he stood up there alone, voicing the sweet melodies of praise for the Lord and everlasting life for his brother’s soul. What grit he had.

Elwood Brittain, a family friend, gave the sermon. There was no minister in our mission camp. We were taught to believe that we each had a personal relationship with God that was not to be constrained by an intermediary—even an ordained minister would fool with the communication.

Not that we didn’t respect a preacher. We had some visit the camp, and they’d let occupy the pulpit for a guest sermon—not that very many ministers bothered to come to our camp, tucked way up in the northeast section of Peru, deep in the Amazon jungle as the map would show you—but the worshippers would never relinquished the idea that we were governed only by and directly from God, no matter how many preachers came to speak.

I used to think that it made everyone think they had this direct line to the truth, when in fact it only seemed to create an exponential number of interpretations of God’s word, each of them hearing something different but indisputable at the same time. How do you work that out? You chant. All day long, you speak these safe clichés to one another: God acts in mysterious ways. The Lord willing. Blessed are the meek. It was an echo chamber.

I listened to this drivel for seventeen years, and, yes, I am including my precognitive years in the count—I think that’s when I first began objecting to all of it—and my favorite was one they never spoke, Jesus wept. As I believed he surely would have, if he’d been witness to what went on in that camp.

But what they believed mattered little to me. I had in my mind formally rejected the whole damn thing by the time I was ten or eleven, I’d say, and chose to keep quiet about my thoughts. I never tried to talk to Jesus about it either. Not even once.

And I had it easy. On the other hand, you might wonder how Adam kept his faith with parents like he had.

I’ve got to tell you about his father Durell Manning.

Adam’s father didn’t say a word at Joseph’s funeral. And he might have, like other father’s would have were he able, but he was Louisiana born and raised, living way back in the bogs where most people never got past grade school—if they could even find one.

I know Mrs. Manning could have done it. She often spoke to the women’s groups, but women didn’t preach to husbands at Requena Cocha; everyone knew what the gospel had to say about that. Not that she would allow the head of her family to disgrace them all with his meandering thoughts and his mangled, swamp-skanked dialect. Gospel be damned, the head of the Manning family would not speak.

I could imagine how she’d handled it. But Durell, we don’t want to add any embarrassment to this, do we? He’d just swallow it.

She typically didn’t swat him all that hard as she ruled, instead she’d give him the perfunctory respect due a father in front of the children and visitors like me, saying things in those patronizing, sweet tones, but when she was ready, she corner him with an insistent question to which he could not calculate an answer. Wagon wheels slipping in deep mud.

Maybe she thought she was cleverly invisible to others, but the five Manning kids had certainly become familiar with his dumbfounded look and could mimic it in their little schoolyard dramas. Looked just like him.

And so she had dispatched Durell to the Brittains to ask Elwood to handle the speaking in their hour of grief. Frankly, I’m sure both Durell and Mrs. Manning felt spared when he agreed.

Elwood began the service. All rise, he said, standing behind the lectern, raising both hands as he spoke the way real preachers did—all of their kind believing apparently that the congregation couldn’t figure which way was up without a visual clue. All rise…this way.

The Mannings, like the congregation, rose in unison, except Peter, who remained seated. Durell saw this and turned momentarily to Mrs. Manning, his face is contorted’ he was begging, the poor man, for a hint of instruction. What should he do?

I hoped I wouldn’t get caught gawking, but he was a something to behold. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He had this curly hair that drooped over one eyebrow despite applying what had to be a ladle’s-worth of hair cream, which I believe he did every day. Maybe the look worked for Elvis Presley, but it made Durell’s hair gleam in the sunshine like hot tar.

He had on his best tan pants, the only color of pants I ever saw him wear, and his only collared shirt, a white-and-blue plaid shirt that made him look conspicuously overdressed after appearing every Monday through Saturday in sun-bleached, pocketed tee-shirts.

So he was turning his head to Peter then back at Mrs. Manning, looking beseechingly as his head swiveled between the problem and the problem-solver. Back and forth, back and forth, like a hyper vigilant little birdie deciding whether to take a drink or take off.

He finally fixed a gaze on Mrs. Manning, his one lazy eye searching aimlessly off to her side, his other focused directly at her, whereupon she nodded very slightly to her right, towards the aisle. Durell, his despair still clearly consuming him, correctly took that as his cue, stepped into the center aisle, and offered her his arm as they had surely discussed at home several times earlier that morning.

Mrs. Manning joined him and turned to face her fellow missionaries. She wore a black dress that I’d never seen her wear before, but apparently had stored it away since their arrival at Requena Cocha years ago. Nobody wore black. Black absorbed the jungle heat and was a totally undesirable garment in the unrelenting swelter we lived in, a silly color to be worn in the tropics she once said. I once heard her voice this opinion concerning some preacher from Minnesota who showed up to preach to us wearing black vestments. At home, she privately chided him, but Peter overheard her and told me. Yet protocols that day demanded black, and she would never contradict protocols even if her sweat glands ran dry.

Her hair was impeccably stacked up as usual, a blond-white dome of tightly woven wire. Her tiny blue eyes looked like dots, two sharp taps of a ballpoint on plain white paper. They were small eyes, but they were good. Could see through walls, I was convinced. Her mouth was the most revealing feature, conveying so much emotion by showing absolutely none. It was a mouth like a straight line scratched on polished marble, it didn’t seem to move. You might not know she had one—until she opened it to strike. But when her mouth was at rest, she conveyed such contempt. Mind you, I said she conveyed so much emotion, not so many emotions. I believe she had just the one.

As the girls exited past her into the aisle, Mrs. Manning discretely snapped her fingers at Peter, commanding him to join the exodus. Peter got up, but balked as he approached the aisle and held up the procession until Mrs. Manning confirmed her direction, and as deft as a tree lizard’s tongue, her hand dashed out to pinch Peter’s kidney and drew him into the procession. He swatted her hand away and darted up the aisle fast like a prisoner heading for the fence.

Outside, Joseph’s coffin swayed atop the shoulders of six pallbearers who led the mourners down the orange dirt path that looped around the camp. They inched along, kicking up a low cloud of dust around their shuffling feet, murmuring indecipherably as they moved toward a shaded half acre of land designated as the community cemetery only the day before. It was Requena Cocha’s first funeral.

Elwood continued with the comments graveside, reading from something he held in one hand. It is in our faith and knowledge of the Lord’s promise of everlasting life to those who believe in Him that we can, with our hearts full of sadness at this tragic loss, say that it is also with joy in our hearts that we commend the soul of Joseph Michael Manning to be at home now with our Lord. Let us pray.

While the others were praying, I worked myself up to the front of the group where I could see what was going on. Peter stood uncomfortably at the end of the line of family members, still buffering himself from his parents with his sisters. Adam was standing next to Durell, and I saw Durell tentatively wrap a hand around Adam’s drooping shoulders, like he was sure to be caught doing wrong.

When the prayer was over, Elwood nodded to the pallbearers to proceed. They began to lower the ropes supporting Joseph’s coffin into the grave. As the coffin had nearly reached bottom, a damn rope snapped, and the six men, practically getting pulled in the whole by the weight of the coffin, shuffled frantically to regain control but couldn’t do it. The coffin fell with a loud thump. It made everybody feel suddenly sick.

The startle released the compressed grief Adam had been holding in all this while, and he let out a cry, a single, short uncontrollable burst, and when he felt another coming on, he tried to restrain it. He inhaled, desperately gulping for air, but that only made him choke on the force of the grief welling up that would not be denied. He simply had to let go of it, and I stood there wanting to shout to him, let it go, Adam, for God’s sake, let it go! My throat constricted till it hurt. His relief finally came in the next moment where I believe I witnessed Adam split wide open at the soul.

I was new to grief, to be fair, but at the time I didn’t know anyone who could contain such a volume of emotional pain. He fell down to the ground, where his whole body seized up and started twitching in these wrenching spasms.

It was a horrible sight. Adam, our good Adam, always-doing-the-right-thing Adam, faithful Adam, was being tortured for being that good boy, for having done his duty. Put up there in front of all of us to sing over Joseph’s dead body. Forced to act like it was all business, like he wasn’t already ripped in two by his brother’s suicide.

I hated his parents for that, and I wanted to scream at them and I was about to when Adam got up to his feet; I’ll never understand how. He turned his face to the heavens, and raising both trembling hands skywards, jettisoned a spew of grief like so much molten lava, and screeched such an unearthly, soul-emptying wail that I thought I would faint.

I don’t pray, but I would pray not to ever hear anything like it again.

I looked at Mrs. Manning and saw she was glaring at Adam, hoping, I believe, to try to catch his eye but couldn’t. Adam had slipped down on the ground again, knees bent, his forehead meeting the dirt, two flexed hands pressing against his temples. Durell winced at Mrs. Manning’s thrusting elbow. She nodded at Adam. Durell responded by grasping one of Adam’s arms and lifting him from the ground. He bent close and said something into Adam’s ear. Adam did not respond and slumped limply, held aloft only by Durell's grip. Durell then addressed Adam with both hands, grabbing each shoulder and shaking Adam, demanding he pay attention. The idiot.

Adam appeared to nod, and Durell released him. But it was no use; Adam was beyond control. He fell straight to the ground again, landing in a twisted contortion, face up, one heel under his own back. Durell waved a palms-up gesture of appeal to Mrs. Manning, whose face had slowly congealed into this expressionless descent into a private hell of humiliation. Good for her.

For a few moments the membership, clearly mortified at the tragic scene, stopped their shuffling and sniffing. The silence encircled the Mannings in a vignette set against the still backdrop of all those invasive eyes and ears. Durell stood straight up for a moment and briefly glanced at those standing across the grave from him. His lips were pressed tightly together like he would when he was trying calculate something difficult. What should he do next?

Crushing confusion was closing in on him. His hands were twitching and jumping nervously at his side—I thought he was going to have a seizure—until he made a decision.

He bent down to slip one arm under Adam’s neck, the other under his knees, and lifted Adam from the ground. Then, keeping his eyes cast downward, he pivoted away from the grave, and holding Adam in his arms, worked his way through the parting assembly and stiffly lumbered down the path toward their home.

Elwood ended the service with a stammering invitation to an evening service and dispersed us. Mrs. Manning, keeping her head up, marched away without comment, her eyes fixed on the horizon and her children following in single file.

I saw all the Manning children at school the very next day.

***

That day had to be among the very worst of Adam’s life, though there would be one other that could compete. Among the many terrible details surrounding Joseph’s death, there was an issue that hung over everything, though it was hidden behind the obvious horror and pain of the event. It was quietly ignored. That’s the way they handled matters of this kind, when they didn’t fit their expectations. Nonetheless it was more important than anything to Adam, and what he made of it points to the way Adam persistently clung to his beliefs through any calamity.

The next day, after school, Adam, Peter, and I walked together in silence toward Big Root, a swimming hole formed by a small inlet shaded by a huge eucalyptus tree that hung over the bank, its huge roots inspiring the name. This time we walked the long route around the outer loop of pathway that avoided the usual route around the south end of camp that now led past the cemetery and Joseph’s fresh grave. It was not discussed; we simply sensed our mutual desire to avoid the grave and our steps automatically took the bend that turned toward the administration buildings.

At the lakeside, we all assumed a position, not knowing just what we intended by being there together. It was quiet there, all but for the small peki-peki boats motoring across the lake, doing a business that took them back and forth across the lake several times a day.

Adam pressed his back and the crown of his head against a tree and considered what was overhead. If you looked up you could see through the filter of palm leaves the miracle of Peru’s endless blue sky and among the trees the perpetual commute of innumerable species of birds.

Peter sat on the bank with his feet dangling in the water, confident as we had benignly become that neither snake, turtle nor otter would dare interfere with his relaxation. I tried to busy myself by skimming rocks across the surface of the inlet, commenting on the distance of my throws.

Of course, there couldn’t be anything else on our minds but Joseph, considering what happened. We each had our own distinct relationship with him, but Adam was the closest to him. They talked a lot, debating their values in oblique ways; that is to say, neither directly persuading the other of anything, but merely expressed their opposing views—on religion, in particular.

I spoke first, just to break the silence. I think Joseph was the first to swim all the way across and back, wasn’t he? Nobody said anything for a long while, and I started thinking of ways I could just leave.

Joseph was never afraid of anything, Zeke, Adam said.

He had more guts than all of us put together, Peter said in a confrontational tone. I wasn’t going to dispute that, but I didn’t get Peter’s aggressiveness.

I picked up several wet clods of orange earth, formed them into spheres, and launched them one by one as far out as I could into the still water. I threw my last pitch with a fury and stumbled forward, out of balance, and dropped one knee to the ground. I was out of delaying tactics and blurted out what we all knew had to be talked about.

You think it was an accident, Adam? I asked.

He could have gone to college next year. He could have got away, Peter piped up. It sounded to me like he was putting the finger on Joseph, accusing him of making a bad choice.

We were quiet for a while. Mother told dad it was, Adam finally responded.

More silence followed and Peter drew his feet out of the water and stood up. He shoved his hands in his pockets and starting pacing in circular patterns, something boiling up inside him, I supposed.

Then out of nowhere I surprised myself by saying, "I heard my dad telling Uncle Ralph that it was no accident. I mean, think about it. It was a rifle. You don’t accidentally put the muzzle up to your temple, do you?"

Adam turned toward me and spoke to me very slowly in a very serious tone, like he was being forced to explain to a moron that an apple actually will fall to the ground every time you let loose of it. He could have dropped it. It might have just gone off. His hands fell to his sides, then he held his palms open to me, wanting me to say I was wrong for not having thought of that before I raised the question.

Peter stopped pacing and spoke without facing me or Adam. It was not an accident, Adam. Get real for once, He barked this at him, full of exasperation, which was an unusual thing to witness—Peter being the reserved one all the time.

You don’t know that, Adam shot back at him.

"I do know. Peter pivoted toward Adam, pointing a finger at him. He had enough of this, this whole thing. This, this farce," Peter shouted while he waved his hand in a sweeping gesture toward the camp.

Farce? Well, aren’t you the intellect, Peter. You don’t know what God intends, and you—you don’t even have a relationship with God. What would you know?

Well, if you’re saying I’m not an idiot… .

The lines were drawn right then and there. Adam held onto his faith in Joseph and God, and Peter wasn’t buying it. Me? I simply thought the whole thing was a damn shame, and that nobody could ever claim to know exactly why Joseph did what he did. Believe what you want.

A tense silence took hold again, and even though a cool breeze blew in off the lake just then, the kind that typically encouraged us to lazy around a while longer, I felt like we all wanted to disappear somehow. There was going to be no resolving their dispute, so I stupidly suggested we all go for a swim. No one answered.

Adam stepped over to the lake, put his hands back in his pockets and stared out. That was just like Adam, returning to a civil peace as soon as possible. Letting it go. Forgiving whatever. Amazingly enough, nothing was ever going to shake his faith.

Peter started walking off, away from us toward the path, then stopped for a moment, cocked his head to the side and before he left said in a low growl, It was suicide. Adam refused to be provoked, and continued staring out at the lake.

From appearances, you would have thought Adam had the matter settled in his mind, but he hadn’t. Not quite yet. Not as he explained to me what happened next.

Chapter 2

Adam described how a crescent moon provided a soft cast of light well enough to reveal the path