Mountain Storm

By Charles McRaven

Widowed mountain minister Carroll Lewis and his music director Maran MaComb stumble onto a plot among disaffected ex-military and biker communes to lash out at what they see as a repressive system. But the violence is to be blamed on all the wrong people, and the deep pockets behind them, super patriots gone over the edge, don't know when to stop. Add Maran's real job description, a warning from Carroll's buddy the state cop, and a harmless mountain retreat becomes a powder keg. Not what he signed on for, and when the bullets start to fly, they don't know friend from foe. What was supposed to become his quiet life among the faithful backwoods folks turns into a cliff-hanging survival fight for Carroll and the woman who's not just his quiet piano player.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781597055222

Book preview

Dedication

For Linda, who went back to the earth with me

fifty years ago

One

I’d seen a picture of the church in the regional directory, but that had been a summer scene, and it hadn’t prepared me for the haunted, almost sinister look of the place. Dying trees, gaunt against an overcast January sky, sent branches like claws toward the fading white of the building. Damn place looked like something out of a Charles Addams cartoon. Oh, there I go again. When am I gonna lose the profanity? Got to get used to the new me.

But maybe that assessment wasn’t so far off, considering the other, undercover reason I was here instead of at some other dwindling-congregation church.

I sat in my old pickup starting to wonder just what in the...heck I thought I was doing in this place. About a half-inch from cranking up and careening off down the gravel road before anybody else got here.

Nah, you’ve never run from anything, guy.

There was a totally out-of-place bicycle leaning against the church wall. One of those no-nonsense jobs serious athletes ride. Somebody here already? On a bicycle? I thought of the steep, twisting, gravel roads and the sharp mountain air you had to take in a little at a time on a day like this.

By contrast to the worn building, the cemetery was well-tended which only added to the stark scene. A little brush or old weeds against the tombstones would’ve been a better picture somehow. Well, mountain people put a lot of store in family, whether still living or not, and you just didn’t let a cemetery get rundown.

Jean would have painted it if she’d still been alive—maybe with a stray cow nuzzling the ground for remembered grass. She could always insert life and even a touch of humor into a scene. Remembering our life together, I found it tough to imagine this as my new home, my new profession.

Everything would change here from the relative familiarity of my former home half a state east to my entire routine. It was as if I could feel a page turning, the rasping and swish of the paper printed with what I had accomplished in over half a lifetime, and what the letters would spell for me now.

And that lifetime, thanks to Jean, had been another major switch from the hardscrabble years of my youth and young adulthood. Never, drinking and fighting and raising hell with my country counterparts, could I have imagined the life with that good woman that somehow lay ahead. I would never understand what she saw in the boy I was then that she could possibly want.

I’d spent my scarce money on banging old cars back together so I could race them down impossible country roads at insane speeds. On bad moonshine and cheap beer, a chip on my shoulder the size of the Virginia Tidewater. If I’d had sense enough to pick a loser, there he was in the mirror, scars and all.

Now, Jean wasn’t a saint. She liked a good time as much as I did, but somehow she managed to find something in me that fueled a little hope, and she worked with that. Thanks to her, I’d managed to turn the occasional construction gig into a permanent thing eventually. Stopped blowing my pay on the same Friday I got it and tried to stay out of fights more.

Until I woke up one morning actually married to that woman, with a small but sound business of my own, in spite of the odds. Had moved a few counties away from my former non-reputation, but against those same odds, that’d seemed to work.

And over time, I’d learned to deal with the shit-heads (no, I couldn’t call them what they really were now) in more subtle ways than knocking their lights out. That was maybe the hardest part: having to take stuff I’d never stood for before. From arrogant pricks who desperately required killing.

And never in a gazillion years could I have imagined shoe-horning in a college education one or two courses at a time. First one in my family to do so. Damn—no, gosh—Jean was proud of me for that.

But no way in...could I have conjured up the demented idea that one day I’d actually become a minister of the Gospel.

The first cars started to arrive, jarring and shiny and looking all alike. Some working manure-smeared pickups, too, and a minivan just turning in behind one of them. I hadn’t stepped out of my old Jeep truck yet which was easily the roughest vehicle there.

I wasn’t anybody’s stereotype of a new pastor, and I found myself speculating on which vehicles might contain suspects.

No, no eager young seminary grad with cookie-baking wife and obligatory two small children. I was past fifty, widowed, and God hadn’t seen fit to give Jean and me kids. I’d phased out my construction business after the double-strike of her death and, a couple months later, a crushed leg that left me with a limp.

I’d guessed the Big Guy was telling me He had other plans for me. Totally different plans. And there was the other thing...

These mountain people apparently didn’t care that I wasn’t the standard-issue preacher. My training had been abbreviated (no Greek or Hebrew), part of a program to supply small churches that couldn’t afford the salaries and perks today’s pastors needed. Hey, none of us is so holy he doesn’t need to pay the bills. But I could make it on this half-time pay. Reminded me a lot of growing-up when a dollar looked about as big as a bedsheet.

So here I was ready to start my ministry among these four dozen of the faithful and live out the remainder of my career-change/calling. The rest of why I was here would remain my own secret.

THE MUSCULAR MAN WITH the deep-set, intense eyes was meeting with the leaders of the band of survivalists encamped outside Bluefield, West Virginia. The three men from the remote mountain enclave had driven to town in a ragged pickup truck—about as anonymous as possible in that region. The four were seated in a restaurant booth at the back away from the few other customers. It was snowing outside, and the roadside place shone its lights out against the falling curtain, a haven in a world huddled inside for warmth.

And you’re absolutely certain this Walker has been to the police?

Fer sure. He was tricky to track, but we borrowed two cars nobody’d know, an’ switched off follerin’ him, Mr. Bonner, the biggest man, Lyle Kurtz, said. Met with two state cops an’ a feller in a suit, little coffee place in town. Sent in m’sister’s boy—Walker don’t know him—they live here in town—an’ he heard just a little, but enough t’be suspicious.

Did you confront him later?

Did. Back at th’ place, couple days later after I’d been t’town fer supplies. I told him th’ boy had seen him in th’ coffee place, knew him f’m seein’ him with us before. Denied all of it; said it musta been somebody else.

Bonner sighed, straightened his back realizing he’d been hunched forward over the table. This was a complication, a danger, and one that demanded immediate action. And they’d let days go by before contacting him. That sloppiness couldn’t be tolerated, but you could push these unstable people only so far.

Well, men, you know what has to be done then before there’s more damage. Shut down everything, right now. And take care of Walker, of course. He looked intently at each of the three in turn, his eyes boring into them. The big man nodded, also sighing, his stubbled face showing regret. The other two, one lean and sharp-featured, named Don Avery, the other—Alan something—short but blocky, powerfully built, looked to Kurtz, the obvious leader. Bonner was reminded of flanking bird dogs honoring a point by a setter in the field.

He was also aware he had just ordered a murder. Didn’t matter that he wouldn’t do the actual killing: he was more than an accomplice. But the operation was in jeopardy, and that was just going to have to be more important than the life of a government plant in their midst. Probably DEA or ATFE. Whatever. There’d be a firestorm afterward: raids, interrogations, but there was simply too much at stake to risk.

Jist hate it, th’ way he done us. Kurtz shook his head sadly, pursing his lips. I like ole Walker.

But he’s clearly betraying us, and we have no idea how much he knows or what he’s told. If they’ve found out a little, that can lead them to a lot more. We can’t let this go any longer.

Nossir, we can’t. Well, y’ll hear f’m us, prob’ly t’morrow. Guess Walker’ll have himself a little accident on that bad road, this snow an’ all. We’ll do it clean since he’s prob’ly government, some way.

"And be prepared for a raid, so clean out the whole place. Now, as soon as you get back. I’m surprised you haven’t been raided already. And if anything like this ever comes up again, be sure to call me immediately." The men nodded, glancing at each other. This was a direct order, one they’d known would come, but the actuality of it, which now they couldn’t put off, hit each one of them. When this man said a thing had to be done, it had to be done.

Carson Bonner slid out of the booth, leaving a large manila envelope on the table. It bulged.

There’s enough in there to keep the bunch going till this blows over, he assured them, knowing the money would soothe any feelings he might have ruffled. He left the café, going to a dark Blazer parked outside. The wind buffeted him, and he envisioned the road ahead, which he hoped would lead him out of this storm, on the way to another camp, in another state.

Yes, this operation was big, and there were bound to be slipups here and there, more so with these disaffected, social dropout, basically unpredictable men and a few women. But the end result would change this whole country, he and his backers believed, and the country was long overdue for that change.

Carson Bonner could always justify his actions with that reassurance: what he and these men were doing was right. So right that nothing could be allowed to stand in their way. You just had to take the long view and not get tangled up in the little stuff.

Like offing a spy.

THE BEARDED GIANT IN the minivan was Ed Sargent, the elder who’d headed the three-strong search committee I’d met at the regional face-to-face cattle show in Richmond. Now one of my bosses, actually. He grinned a big hello, took my hand in his big paw, and presented his wife Janie, a solid woman with just a hint of a mustache, who looked like she could and did run their farm herself. I knew Ed sold insurance, along with the inevitable business of running cows on the steep, Grant Wood-like hills that bordered Big Run.

After a couple more introductions and names I’d have to learn, I mounted the steps and paused in the double-doorway of the sanctuary. The few (so far) faces were turned toward me, of course, and I pasted a smile on, nodded a greeting. But what intrigued me was the woodwork: hammerbeam trusses, curved oak pews, dark pine Gothic arches standing out against old white plaster walls. The expected Celtic cross behind the raised walnut pulpit.

Whenever this church was built, the folks had believed in doing it right, despite today’s musty smell. Had to be old echoes of the voices of long-dead members, preachers here subdued, maybe even listening somehow.

A real pedal organ and an upright piano, at which sat a striking woman maybe in her early 40s, just beginning a quiet old hymn. I hoped she wouldn’t put the congregation to sleep. Or me, either. She gave me a smile with her eyes. Nice eyes: blue. Her hands kept playing, but the look that passed between us didn’t seem to want to end. Natural enough, I guessed: we’d be working together here in the back of beyond. The two of us were the entire staff, really.

But even not being remotely insightful, I imagined myself much as a specimen on an examining table under those eyes. No, that’s too clinical. She was appraising me sure, and seriously, but with a touch of...warmth, maybe? Empathy? How much did she know about me? Could she know the other reason I was here? No, that's impossible. Anyway, I felt something tingle inside me...

Hey, cool it; probably married to the sheriff. Besides, you’re not shopping for another woman.

I surfaced again, then Ed gave me a quick tour of the tiny fellowship hall, my office, the kitchen, two classrooms. The bathrooms had been remodeled along with the kitchen, done in that quickie plastic flooring and acoustic ceiling, the beginning of a planned complete restoration. Good luck there: I’d noticed the creaking floors and the water stains in the sanctuary from old roof leaks. Windows practically welded shut with layers of paint over more cracking paint.

I got into my Ecclesiastical robe, hung the little silver cross around my neck, and then made it a point to go introduce myself to the accompanist. I waited till she’d finished the last notes of her current hymn. Caught a bit of her scent, a faint fragrance that reminded me of the woods somehow.

Carrollton Lewis. I offered her my hand, remembering it shouldn’t have mortar stains or grease on it these days.

Maran MaComb, Reverend. I’m new here, too. Smiled with her eyes again, along with a little upturn of a nice mouth. Hope to put together a small choir, glancing over the assembling congregation. Then she started another livelier piece with her right hand with her eyes back on me. I felt myself color a little. She wasn’t that pretty, but yeah, I guess the word striking does say it best. Sheriff was lucky. But I did notice she didn’t wear a ring which a lot of married women don’t nowadays.

Great. I heard there wasn’t one here. Resigning myself to the monotony of my own voice.

Maybe we can rescue each other. Another smile.

She was good on that old piano, and I breathed an inaudible thanks. Some of the small churches I’d practice-preached in had no accompanists and others had the expected sixty-year-old widows, ramrod-straight, gray hair in a bun, hammering the notes into submission. But wait a second: I’m in that age category now, too. No pointing fingers here, guy.

I couldn’t shake the shadows off my first impression of the church through that first service. The place was gloomy despite Maran’s upbeat pieces she mixed in with the hymns I’d chosen to fit my sermon. Few of the congregation could sing, I discovered, but they gamely attacked the old favorites in every key. Maran didn’t wince. Has her work cut out for her.

I made eye contact a lot, maybe sort of trying to locate the sheriff or whoever, but also trying not to stereotype the good folks out there. Sure as I did, the obvious logger would turn out to be the bank president over in town and the patrician silver-haired lady would run the local cathouse.

Now stop this crap; this’s a church. It was going to take some time for me to make the necessary transition: the construction business isn’t noted for its spirituality. And what a step up even that’d been...

My formal installation would be next month with some of the area ministers, elders, and my former pastor and folks from our old church two counties away. So this Sunday’s service was mercifully short, ending in a blur of shaken hands, un-remembered names, and the usual compliments on the sermon. Which I was sure they’d forget before they got home. Didn’t matter: I was here to give them their weekly dose of religion whether it soaked in or not.

Ed and the other elders were listed in the bulletin, which his wife Janie printed, so I’d pegged them. One other oily good old boy who probably ran a used car lot somewhere was named Royal Bledsoe, about the only other name that’d registered. He was maybe just over sixty: blocky, beefy hands. His wife, who I thought I remembered, was named Belle or something like that. She was his mirror-image, and I flashed on the old rumor that these mountain people didn’t marry much beyond their communities full of cousins. Or maybe that wasn’t just a rumor.

The last car left, and I went back inside from my hand-shaking post to escape the chill and lock up. I’d turn the heat down in the sanctuary as instructed, setting it on low in the kitchen and bathrooms to keep the pipes from freezing.

Maran MaComb was getting into a lined leather jacket, her sheet music tucked in a small backpack. A colorful red scarf was stuffed into a pocket.

Need a ride? I’d thought she’d already left.

No, I’ve got my bike. Thanks.

In this weather? I could imagine the wind chill.

Oh, this’s a mild spell. I’ll drive Dad’s Bronco when it snows.

You live with your parents?

Since my divorce, yes. They’re not in good health, and we couldn’t afford anyone else...

Didn’t mean to pry. I guess it’ll take me a while here to sort out who’s kin to whom, married to whom.

"And sleeping with whom? You’ll find out this is a regular soap opera, Reverend, underneath all the proper exteriors. Modern-day Peyton Place. No worse than in a city, but just as tangled."

Okay, she called a spade a spade. I liked talking with her, wanted this to last a bit longer.

You said you were new, too.

Just to the church. Pianist died a month ago, and I’ve always taught music, so the few bucks are welcome. And maybe I can sort out what I believe, too. Finally. A look at me. Well sure, I was the pastor...

I’ll start a small study group on Wednesday nights soon. That’s the best way to get ideas, discussions going. I learn a lot from them myself. Yeah, sort of ‘I’m on page five; see if you can catch me.’

Maybe. Not a whole lot to do around here anyway but run over the mountains to Staunton, and that’s not very lively either. She was on the way out, but stopped.

What about you? The gossip is you’ve just crashed on the old McElhenny place, man of mystery, first church and all. Mid-life crisis? My turn to pry. The eyes again.

About it. Got maybe a year’s work to patch up the place. Yeah, I’ve been sort of nudged toward the pulpit last few years. Then pushed hard out of the construction business, I guess. Take me some time to get past mentally pounding nails and digging ditches and into the new role, I’m sure.

Good sermon, so you’re off to a solid start. Pause. You don’t happen to sing bass, do you? Twinkle, this time.

Thanks, but afraid not. But I’ll help you cajole at least a quartet out of these folks. Pick a time to practice.

We’ll do it. See you, Rev.

She was tall, athletic body. Not sexy exactly, but good to look at. I stopped myself before I could slip into speculation about that body. Hey, I was a preacher, but I wasn’t a dead one. Okay, she rode a bike, probably worked out. And home with the folks surely trying to get over the hurt of the divorce.

I’d studied counseling as part of my training and would certainly hear from others recovering from every kind of scar. Well, part of the job...But surely Maran was too sophisticated to confide in me, probably a good thing.

Okay, maybe her lively music would dispel some of the spookiness from this place. Or maybe some details of the soap opera she’d mentioned would spice it up. I’d get my ears full soon, I could be sure. I’d already noticed covert glances and a wink or two between some non-pairs of the faithful and doubted if I’d be shocked at what went on outside Sunday mornings here.

If only I’d known.

The reason, but by no means the only one, I’d come to this place called Big Run was the impression the search committee had given that this was an old-time mountain church, conservative in the non-right-wing-screamer sense. I wasn’t into touchy-feely contemporary religion with its too-tolerant political correctness. But neither was I an exhorter or a fire-and-brimstone preacher.

You’ll like those folks, my mentor, George Baker, had predicted. Old-line Presbyterians like you, God bless ’em. And it’d take dynamite to change ’em.

Okay, I wasn’t out to change anybody except to help open a door whenever I could to the faith. I know I couldn’t have made it through Jean’s long ordeal of dying without the beliefs she’d slipped into me over our years together. It’d been rough, but I was now long past blaming God for being indifferent to our, and all, human misery (the big turnoff for most folks). Part of the answer was and is He’s putting us through the hardest test there is, that of our faith, and a test has to have its land mines.

I was here and ready, I hoped, to help other people on their faith journeys. Simple as that.

No, it really wasn’t.

I wandered among the gray tombstones seeing Civil War soldiers’ monuments, old family names I recognized from the brief introductions. Compact tributes: Beloved wife. Angel. Friend to all. Remembrances. Funerals were no fun, of course, but I saw them as celebrations of lives well lived (and a lot that weren’t). And the few words I could say had seemed to help those left behind. Being there for them, that was about it.

Okay, I wouldn’t be in again till Wednesday, being part-time. Answering machine would catch the usual pitches for church trappings and routine hits for contributions. The members had my home phone number for emergencies, so I was outta here.

I folded my awkward length into my little pickup which was all I’d kept from my construction business. I figured its four-wheel-drive would get me around this steep community in most of the bad weather I knew would come. It’d already started, of course, but as Maran had said, this was a lull of sorts: no snow, no ice waiting to slide you off a cliff somewhere.

Get the woodstove stoked up at home, get better settled in, unpack some boxes. I’d begged off on a couple of invitations to Sunday dinner with just that excuse. Next Sunday after the service was the monthly potluck, so I’d get fed then, no doubt.

This would maybe actually turn out to be what I’d hoped for, I mused, as I drove the twisting mountain road: a quiet rest of my life away from contracts and building inspectors and bankers and deadlines and the cheap bastards—oops—who didn’t pay. Oh, there’d be the tangles Maran had mentioned, but they came with the territory. And again, that’s what my job was now. Try to help wherever I could.

But the feeling of foreboding that came with that cadaverous structure wouldn’t leave me on the drive to the rundown little farm that was home now. Had to remind myself that a church is the people not the building. Not easy for an ex-builder. The other thing was a sense that there were things going on under this peaceful surface I’d been warned about.

Two

Maran MaComb pushed her body hard pedaling up the steep, twisting hills above Big Run. Not much traffic here, so she didn’t often have to pull over to the ditch to let a pickup truck or one of the teenagers’ low-slung cars with the big pipes roar past. She knew most of the older people here, waved at them, even the newer arrivals from wherever they’d fled. The community was a friendly place, and it didn’t take long for most people to fit in.

Or not.

She thought again of the new minister and how unlikely for a contractor to become pastor of a rural church. He obviously believed in what he was doing, believed he’d been led to this place. Maybe so, but that hadn’t been the way her own life had unfolded. Oh, maybe her sense of duty, of serving mankind wasn’t really so different from his after all. But trusting in a vague God hadn’t been part of her M.O.—couldn’t well be with the work she’d done.

But Carrollton Lewis, now. Nice guy, gentled maybe by the loss of his wife and this choice of a profession. Gangly, still pretty tough from years of outdoor work, not a hard man to like. He’d do okay here among these folks who didn’t ask much out of life.

Yeah, just gas for the good old boys’ pickups and beer on Saturday nights, she mused, coasting down a long grade. And the obligatory hour on Sunday mornings that let them feel better about all the other crap they got into during the week.

No, that wasn’t fair: the farm folks were solid, always had been. And there wasn’t any industry near, so except for those who drove over the mountains to the Shenandoah Valley and the factories, most were still pretty close to the soil. Some light construction working for the city folks who had vacation cabins built, some logging still, some truck driving. Not much different from anywhere else in the country today.

But yeah, Carroll Lewis, easily the most eligible man within a couple of counties. Not that she was searching for Mr. Right. Got that out of her system a long time ago, convinced that Paul had been him.

More like Mr. Wrong who couldn’t keep his pants zipped. But don’t dwell on what’s past: got my assignment, got my parents, and, yeah, a new guy in town. But nothing’s gonna come of that, no way in hell.

And really, if the new pastor somehow found out her background, the things she’d done—had to do—all those years in D.C. and all the hellholes her work had taken her into, he’d probably...No, forget any craziness about a rural romance. Wrong two people, for sure.

It was nearly dusk, and the light from her parents’ windows glowed a welcome. There were definitely worse places to be at this stage in her life. She coasted to the porch, put her bike away, muscles burning just enough to assure her she’d spent a profitable hour and a half.

BY THE SECOND MONTH at Big Run Church, I had a feel for the sentiments of my flock. Most were pretty far right in their politics and wanted their pastor to slant the Gospel that way. Back-country Presbyterians have had the reputation of being rock-hard in their beliefs, and these folks weren’t having any of the liberal reforms urban churches were embracing.

Bible says homosexuality’s an abomination, an’ that’s all there is to it, declared Jacob Wentz, a creek-bottom farmer. Jake was bent, weathered, with a hook nose that got places a while before the rest of him. Ain’t that right, Reverend?

Right there in Leviticus, all right, I agreed. But Scripture also says: ‘Judge not, lest you be judged.’ Got to look at more than one side of things, I’m afraid.

Confusin’, that, all right. He shifted a chew of tobacco, thought about it. And you said we was to hate th’ sin but love th’ sinner. Be hard t’do, but I reckon that’s right, too.

But all this same-sex marriage stuff, his wife, Ella, worried. Where’ll it all lead to? Seems like some folks high up in th’ church are just aimin’ to tear it all apart, people leavin’ an’ all. Sure glad y’ain’t takin’ us that way, Reverend, like some of them town churches. Ella was something out of American Gothic even if Jake was a lot more fierce-looking than the old guy in that painting. There wasn’t an ounce of extra weight on either of them, typical in these mountains, I was finding.

I had to admit to what George Baker had called old-line beliefs myself. Never liked the idea of watering down the Gospel to fit whatever lifestyles people were into this year, or even this week. My conversion from Godless punk to fundamentalist hardcase had been unlikely, and it’d taken a long time. But it’d been complete, seemed like. So, yeah, I guess I wasn’t out of sync with my congregation.

Couple of folks who’d retired to these mountains I noticed reacting to some of my conservative pronouncements, but I always backed these up with multiple Scripture references. And tried to leave room for other interpretations. Invited them in post-sermon discussions. Maybe I’d learn not to do that when I got more experience.

On Wednesday evenings, we started gathering for those study sessions, and as I’d told Maran MaComb, some lively discussions resulted. Tony Molino and his wife Isabel always had more tolerant viewpoints than the others, and I encouraged them to express them.

Back in Baltimore, we had unmarried couples in the church living together, Tony told us, and they were good people. We just said the thing to do was live and let live. Can’t see what’s wrong with that.

What’s wrong is lettin’ that sorta thing go on is a step down into th’ sewer, Jake Wentz’s booming voice insisted. Oh, it goes on ’round here sure, but not in th’ church.

Yeah, right. And a lotta other stuff, I'm sure.

I’d get them started on a Scripture passage then sit back and let them talk. Of course, whenever someone made a point, he or she would look to me for support, so I’d encourage them all to dig into their varied study Bibles for more information. See what the concordances referred them to. I tried hard not to take sides.

Roy Bledsoe, the car-dealer lookalike, came a couple of times but couldn’t take the broadminded comments I allowed. He’d get red-faced and sputter that he didn’t come to church to hear New Age crap—get that in the media every day. On Sundays, I’d see him nodding in his pew at an Old Testament reference to God’s wrath I’d used to make a point in a sermon. Here was a man who liked his religion straight up, no chaser. Okay, takes all kinds, and I wasn’t here to judge. Besides, his wife,