“Right.”

“You didn’t go past Me-Maw’s, did you?”

I rolled my eyes, as if to ask if he was really that stupid, and Jacobs laughed some more. I loved that I could make him laugh in spite of everything that had happened. “I cut through Marstellar’s field.”

“Good lad.”

I didn’t want to go, and I didn’t want him to go. “Can I ask you one more question?”

“Okay, but make it quick.”

“When you were giving your . . . um . . .” I didn’t want to use the word sermon, it seemed dangerous, somehow. “When you were talking in church, you said lightning was, like, fifty thousand degrees. Is that true?”

His face kindled as it only did when the subject of electricity came up. His hobbyhorse, Claire would have said. My dad would have called it his obsession.

“Completely true! Except maybe for earthquakes and tidal waves, lightning is the most powerful force in nature. More powerful than tornadoes and much more powerful than hurricanes. Have you ever seen a bolt strike the earth?”

I shook my head. “Only in the sky.”

“It’s beautiful. Beautiful and terrifying.” He looked up, as if seeking one, but the sky that afternoon was blue, the only clouds little white puffs moving slowly southwest. “If you ever want to see one up close . . . you know Longmeadow, right?”

Of course I did. Halfway up the road leading to Goat Mountain Resort, there was a state-maintained public park. That was Longmeadow. From it you could look east for miles and miles. On a very clear day, you could see all the way to the Desert of Maine in Freeport. Sometimes even to the Atlantic Ocean beyond. The MYF had its summer cookout at Longmeadow every August.

He said, “If you go up the road from Longmeadow, you come to the Goat Mountain Resort gatehouse . . .”

“. . . where they won’t let you in unless you’re a member or a guest.”

“Right. The class system at work. But just before you get to the gatehouse, there’s a gravel road that splits off to the left. Anyone can use it, because that’s all state land. About three miles up, it ends at an outlook called Skytop. I never took you kids there, because it’s dangerous—just a granite slope ending in a two-thousand-foot drop. There’s no fence, just a sign warning people to keep back from the edge. At the Skytop summit there’s an iron pole twenty feet high. It’s driven deep into the rock. I have no idea who put it there, or why, but it’s been there a long, long time. It should be rusty, but it’s not. Do you know why it’s not?”

I shook my head.

“Because it’s been struck by lightning so many times. Skytop’s a special place. It draws the lightning, and that iron rod is its focal point.”

He was looking dreamily off toward Goat Mountain. It was certainly not big compared to the Rockies (or even the White Mountains of New Hampshire), but it dominated the rolling hills of western Maine.

“The thunder is louder there, Jamie, and the clouds are closer. The sight of those stormclouds rolling in makes a person feel very small, and when a person is beset by worries . . . or doubts . . . feeling small is not such a bad thing. You know when the lightning’s going to come, because there’s a breathless feeling in the air. A feeling of . . . I don’t know . . . an unburned burning. Your hair stands on end and your chest gets heavy. You can feel your skin trembling. You wait, and when the thunder comes, it doesn’t boom. It cracks, like when a branch loaded with ice finally gives way, only a hundred times louder. There’s silence . . . and then a click in the air, sort of like the sound an old-fashioned light switch makes. The thunder rolls and the lightning comes. You have to squint, or the stroke will blind you and you won’t see that iron pole go from black to purple-white and then to red, like a horseshoe in the forge.”

“Wow,” I said.

He blinked and came back. He kicked the tire of his new-old car. “Sorry, kiddo. Sometimes I get carried away.”

“It sounds awesome.”

“Oh, it’s way beyond awesome. Go up there sometime when you’re older and see for yourself. Just be careful around the pole. The lightning has chipped up all kinds of loose scree, and if you started to slide, you might not be able to stop. And now, Jamie, I really do have to get rolling.”

“I wish you didn’t have to go.” I wanted to cry some more, but I wouldn’t let myself.

“I appreciate that, and I’m touched by it, but you know what they say—if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” He opened his arms. “Now give me another hug.”

I hugged him hard, breathing deep, trying to store up the smells of his soap and his hair tonic—Vitalis, the kind my dad used. And now Andy, as well.

“You were my favorite,” he said into my ear. “That’s another secret you should probably keep.”

I just nodded. There was no need to tell him that Claire already knew.

“I left something for you in the parsonage basement,” he said. “If you want it. Key’s under the doormat.”

He set me on my feet, kissed me on the forehead, then opened the driver’s door. “This caa ain’t much, chummy,” he said, putting on a Yankee accent that made me smile in spite of how bad I felt. “Still, I reckon it’ll get me down the road apiece.”

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you, too,” he said. “But don’t you cry on me again, Jamie. My heart is already as broken as I can stand.”

I didn’t cry again until he was gone. I stood there and watched him back down the driveway. I watched him until he was out of sight. Then I walked home. We still had a hand pump in our backyard in those days, and I washed my face in that freezing-cold water before I went inside. I didn’t want my mother to see that I’d been crying, and ask me why.

 • • •

It would be the job of the Ladies Auxiliary to give the parsonage a good stem-to-stern cleaning, removing all traces of the ill-fated Jacobs family and making it ready for the new preacher, but there was no hurry, Dad said; the wheels of the New England Methodist Bishopric moved slowly, and we would be lucky to have a new minister assigned to us by the following summer.

“Let it sit awhile,” was Dad’s advice, and the Auxiliary was happy enough to take it. They didn’t get to work with their brooms and brushes and vacuums until after Christmas (Andy preached the lay sermon that year, and my parents almost burst with pride). Until then, the parsonage stood empty, and some of the kids at my school began to claim that it was haunted.

There was one visitor, though: me. I went on a Saturday afternoon, once more cutting through Dorrance Marstellar’s cornfield to evade the watchful eye of Me-Maw Harrington. I used the key under the doormat and let myself in. It was scary. I had scoffed at the idea that the place might be haunted, but once I was inside, it was all too easy to imagine turning around and seeing Patsy and Tag-Along-Morrie standing there, hand in hand, goggle-eyed and rotting.

Don’t be stupid, I told myself. They’ve either gone on to some other place or just into black nothing, like Reverend Jacobs said. So stop being scared. Stop being a stupid fraidy-cat.

But I couldn’t stop being a stupid fraidy-cat any more than I could stop having a stomachache after eating too many hotdogs on Saturday night. I didn’t run away, though. I wanted to see what he had left me. I needed to see what he had left me. So I went to the door that still had a poster on it (Jesus holding hands with a couple of kids who looked like Dick and Jane in my old first-grade reader), and the sign that said LET THE LITTLE CHILDREN COME UNTO ME.

I turned on the light and went down the stairs and looked at the folding chairs stacked against the wall, and the piano with the cover down, and Toy Corner, where the little table was now bare of dominos and coloring books and Crayolas. But Peaceable Lake was still there, and so was the little wooden box with Electric Jesus inside. That was what he had left me, and I was horribly disappointed. Nonetheless, I opened the box and took Electric Jesus out. I set him at the edge of the lake, where I knew the track was, and started to reach up under his robe to turn him on. Then the greatest rage of my young life swept through me. It was as sudden as one of those lightning strikes Reverend Jacobs had talked about seeing up on Skytop. I swung my arm and knocked Electric Jesus all the way to the far wall.