The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

“Cursed are the evildoers!” Pastor Paul cried to the congregation of the Little Church in the Ravine this past Sunday. “God will smite them and their wicked ways!” he exclaimed as he held his battered leather bound King James version above his head, a mighty instrument of the Lord. “Just as he punished the wicked in Noah’s day, so will he punish them now!” And with that he pounded his Bible to the plywood pulpit with a resounding bang that stunned his flock.

“There is no escape from the Lord’s Judgement! The Sodomites are drowning in their own sin. The EndTimes are truly upon them! They will be judged just as each and every one of us will be judged. Only the repentant will be saved. Only those who renounce their sins. Ask yourselves, each of you, do you want to drown in a sea of fire? Do you?”

Pastor P. was sorely agitated, obviously. The assembled sinners were squirming in their metal folding chairs, quiet as the condemned. Down in Houston the waters were rising by the hour. The Great Flood, as Paul had predicted many a Sunday service, was finally upon them. The news from Texas was grim and getting grimmer. No one was to be spared in a city of millions. People were being rescued off their roofs, by fishing boats and helicopters. Houston was one gigantic lake with no escape.

Pastor Paul had paused for effect and was just about to exhort once more, lifting the Bible up for another hammerblow, when Sarah Jensen suddenly stood up in the middle of the aisle where she had been sitting. Her mother lived in Houston and she hadn’t heard Word One since the hurricane took out power and communications to the city. Her mother was 83 and certainly no sinner, Sarah had been thinking. She lived in a groundfloor apartment by herself, managed to get around with the help of a walker, lived day to day by herself. Sarah was fearful she would be trapped in that apartment with no one to help her and here she was 2000 miles away listening to Pastor Paul ranting about Judgement Day.

She had stood up, but once up, she couldn’t move. Just stood there like a small tree in the torrential current of Pastor Paul’s fiery sermon. It was as if she had risen to leave, perhaps. Or …. what? Catch her breath? Every eye in that congregation waited expectantly for her to do something. To speak. To sit back down. To leave the church. But Sarah didn’t move. Finally tears began to fall from her bowed head, slowly at first, a hot trickle, then a constant stream. Someone touched her hand. Pastor Paul seemed to be speaking, maybe to her. How long she stood there, she didn’t know. And when they helped her to the door and then to her car, she didn’t care. It seemed like it was raining all over the world.

Sarah’s mom called later that afternoon from a Red Cross shelter. Some Samaritan in a fishing boat had motored down her block calling to folks who might still be trapped indoors. He heard Sarah’s mother answer from inside her apartment and he carried her out through the brown swirling floodwaters to his skiff. The man had another elderly gentleman on the seat beside her and in the back were two dogs her rescuer had found swimming side by side. The man by her side said to her over the noise of the outboard motor once they were under way, “Kind of a small Ark, ain’t it?”

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