Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [127]
And yet, to this very moment, God had still not answered any of those prayers; perhaps it was his cross to bear.
In point of fact, God seemed now to be taunting Winterly— outright laughing at his requests even—by dumping him in this place; the stern pet owner reaching down and holding the scruff of His puppy’s neck, rubbing the animal’s nose in its own filthy thoughts and needs.
“If we don’t attend to the little things as if God were watching,” Pastor Winterly said, quietly to himself as he checked the time on the town clock now so far behind him, “He will eventually remind us…that we have fallen short…in His eyes.”
Winterly had not gotten over the girl from Toulon, and so God had brought him here. With some purpose. For some lesson. To test him.
Was he passing? Was he failing?
He looked around at the few people near him. A man gardening the flowers near the edge of the creek. A woman carrying groceries from her car. Two small children playing near their thatch roofed home.
Surely these children could not be damned for their sins.
He thought about their shamelessness. Or more correctly he thought about their lack of shame rather than some intentional flaunting of what they knew to be wicked. He wondered if he’d ever been so comfortable in his own skin as these innocent children were now, playing delightedly unencumbered in the gentle pleasures of warm sun and cool grass. He tried to remember a time when he was so unconcerned with the looks and the size and the shape of God’s first, true gift to the souls He calls His children—their very form and substance—and felt suddenly saddened that he could not.
His mother would never have allowed such memories to exist. She would never have permitted him to feel anything but shame about his nakedness. She didn’t even like the possibility of accidentally seeing him—or rather parts of him—in the tub. To avoid it, she had sat on a stool near the bathroom door, averting her eyes and scrubbing him with a sponge on the end of a long stick. Beyond that, she made the infant Winterly cover himself with a washcloth whenever she had to bathe him, which was once a day, every day, until he was old enough to be trusted in the tub alone.
And even then, isolated and unobserved, knowing his mother’s distaste for what existed between his legs, he still carefully covered it.
Winterly watched the woman unloading her groceries for a moment and only looked away when he realized he was making her nervous with his stares. Why should she be nervous? He was obviously a chaste man of the cloth. She was the one parading herself in an unacceptable manner, wasn’t she?
As if in answer to his unspoken question a small, wind-up airplane smacked Winterly in the side of the head and snapped him back into the moment. A bit shocked, he looked over as one of the children—a small girl—ran toward him to retrieve the errant, balsawood projectile.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really sorry.” Then she paused, waiting for the minister’s reaction. When Winterly said nothing, she quickly pointed to her friend standing near a tree. “He did it.”
The pastor smiled warmly at the child and kneeled down to pick up the now slightly skewed toy as the girl continued to apologize. Winterly unbent the wing of the little, rubber-band-powered Cessna and shushed her gently.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It just surprised me. Didn’t hurt at all, really. Here.” He fished in his pocket for the candy he usually kept there for the children of his parishioners and found one still there from last week’s sermon buried under some change.
“Here,” he repeated, offering her the sweet. “See? I’m not mad, in fact…”
Suddenly a woman began screaming.