Testimony

Chapter 1: The Recorder

The cassette recorder had belonged to Delia.

Micah Stanton turned it over in his hands, feeling the weight of it — heavier than he remembered, or maybe his hands had just grown weaker. It was a Panasonic RQ-2102, silver and black, with a carry handle on top and two round speaker grilles that looked like the eyes of some patient animal. Delia had used it to record choir rehearsals back when her voice still held and the choir still had enough members to rehearse. That was fifteen years ago, maybe more. Time had a way of collapsing in Bethel, Kansas, where nothing much changed except the people doing the not-changing.

He set the recorder on the kitchen table, next to a shoebox of blank cassettes he'd ordered from a catalog. The tapes had arrived in a padded envelope three days ago, and he'd left them sitting on the porch until Loretta Briggs from next door brought them inside, scolding him gently for letting packages sit in the weather.

"You'll ruin whatever's in there," she'd said, setting the envelope on his counter with the particular authority of a woman who had been looking after him since Delia's death.

"It's just tapes, Loretta."

"Tapes of what?"

"Nothing yet."

She'd given him a look — the look she gave when she suspected he was being difficult on purpose — and left him to it.

Now Micah sat alone in the kitchen of the house he'd lived in for fifty-three years. The house was small and wooden, painted white so many times that the layers of paint were probably thicker than the clapboard underneath. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen that opened into a living room, a back porch that looked out over a yard that sloped down toward Bethel Creek. The creek was low this time of year, September, just a trickle over smooth stones, but Micah could still hear it if the windows were open and the evening was quiet enough. This evening was quiet enough.

He unwrapped one of the cassettes, a TDK D-60, and slid it into the recorder. The mechanism accepted it with a satisfying click. He pressed the red record button and the reels began to turn.

For a long moment he said nothing. He listened to the tape hiss, that soft white noise like wind through grass, and he thought about what he wanted to say and to whom he wanted to say it.

Then he spoke.

"Grace. This is your grandfather. I suppose you know that, or you will when someone tells you whose voice this is. I am Micah James Stanton, and I am eighty-one years old, and I am sitting in my kitchen in Bethel, Kansas, on the twelfth of September, and I want to talk to you."

He paused. Took a breath. The breath rattled slightly in his chest — the congestive heart failure announcing itself, as it did more and more these days, a wet percussion beneath his ribs.

"I have met you three times, Grace. The first time you were six weeks old and your father brought you here for Thanksgiving. You were so small I was afraid to hold you, and I have held a hundred babies in my life. The second time was at your other grandmother's funeral in Baltimore, and you were four, and you wore a blue dress and you asked me why people were crying. The third time was two Christmases ago when your father brought you out here again, and you were eight, and you sat on the back porch and watched the creek for an hour without saying a word, and I thought: that child knows how to be still. That is a rare thing."

He stopped the tape. Rewound it a few seconds. Played it back. His voice sounded old and thin, like something transmitted from a great distance. But it was clear enough. He pressed record again.

"I am making these tapes because I have things to tell you and I may not have enough time left to tell them in person. Your father — my son Charles — he would say I'm being dramatic. He would say the doctors haven't given me a timeline and that I should stop acting like every day is my last. But Charles has always trusted doctors more than he trusts the feeling in a man's own body, and my body is telling me something, Grace. It has been telling me for a while."

Outside, the light was going. The Kansas sky turned colors in September that Micah had never seen anywhere else — not that he'd been many places. A deep amber at the horizon, bleeding up into violet, then into a blue so dark it was almost black. The prairie stretched out flat in every direction from Bethel, and the sky sat on top of it like a bowl turned upside down. You could see weather coming from fifty miles away. You could see everything coming, if you paid attention.

"I want to tell you about this town," Micah said. "About this church. About your family and what we built here and what we almost lost. I want to tell you a story I have never told your father, and I want you to understand why I never told him, and I want you to understand why I'm telling you now."

He pressed stop. Set the recorder down. Looked at his hands — long-fingered, dark-skinned, the knuckles swollen with arthritis, the nails kept short and clean. Preacher's hands, Delia used to call them. Hands that had held Bibles and babies and the shoulders of grieving widows and the rough pine edges of more coffins than he could count.

Hands that had written a letter, once, that changed everything.

He got up slowly, holding the edge of the table, and went to the window. Bethel was out there in the gathering dark — not much of it, just a few dozen houses, a gas station, the post office, the feed store that had closed in 1998 and never reopened. And the church. Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, sitting on its little rise at the east end of town, white clapboard like his house, with a steeple that leaned slightly to the south, as if permanently braced against the north wind. His grandfather, Isaac Stanton, had built that church in 1879, fourteen years after the end of the war, with lumber hauled from Topeka and nails donated by a Quaker family in Lawrence. Isaac had been born enslaved in Virginia. He walked to Kansas because someone told him there was land there for Black folks, and there was, for a while, until there wasn't, until the promises dried up like the creeks in August. But Isaac stayed. He built the church and he preached in it and his son Solomon preached in it after him and Micah preached in it after Solomon, and now Micah was eighty-one and there was no one to preach in it after him.

Charles had made that clear a long time ago.

"I don't believe in God, Dad," Charles had said, sitting in this very kitchen, twenty-five years old and freshly armed with a doctorate in philosophy from Johns Hopkins. "I respect what the church means to you. I respect the history. But I can't stand up there and say things I don't believe."

"Nobody asked you to say things you don't believe," Micah had replied.

"You've been asking me that my whole life."

That was the conversation that broke something between them. Not violently — there was no shouting, no door-slamming. The Stanton men didn't operate that way. It was more like a hairline fracture in a load-bearing wall. You couldn't see it, but the structure was compromised. Everything after that was courteous and careful and slightly wrong.

Micah went back to the table. Pressed record.

"Your father is a good man, Grace. I want you to know that before I say anything else. He is thoughtful and kind and he has a mind like a diamond — hard and bright and able to cut through anything. But somewhere along the way he decided that thinking and feeling were enemies of each other, and he chose thinking, and that is a choice I have never understood. Because in my experience, Grace, the truest things I have ever known came to me not through my mind but through my heart, and when my mind caught up later it was always surprised by what my heart already knew."

He stopped. That was enough for tonight. His chest was tight and his legs ached and the pill he was supposed to take at eight o'clock was sitting on the counter next to a glass of water that Loretta had set out for him before she left.

He took the pill. Drank the water. Went to the back porch and stood there for a moment, listening to the creek, watching the first stars appear over the prairie.

Tomorrow he would tell Grace about the flood of 1961. About the night the water came up so fast that his father Solomon waded chest-deep to the church to rescue the hymnals — not the pews, not the organ, the hymnals — because Solomon said you could rebuild wood and metal but you couldn't rebuild the penciled notes that three generations of Stantons had written in the margins. How to sing "Amazing Grace" the way Isaac sang it. Where to breathe in "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." The particular emphasis on the word "home" in "This Little Light of Mine" that made it sound less like a children's song and more like a declaration of war.

Solomon saved the hymnals. The church flooded to the windowsills but didn't collapse. They rebuilt. They always rebuilt.

But that wasn't the story Micah needed to tell. The hymnals, the flood, the rebuilding — those were the stories everyone in Bethel already knew, the ones Micah had preached about a dozen times. The story he needed to tell was harder. Darker. It involved a white man named Herbert Crenshaw and a night in 1967 and a choice Micah had made that he had been praying about ever since.

He went inside. Locked the door. Turned off the lights. Lay down in the bed he'd shared with Delia for forty-seven years, the left side, always the left side, even now.

"Lord," he said to the dark ceiling, "give me the words. And give me the time to say them."

The creek whispered outside. The house settled around him. Micah Stanton closed his eyes and slept.