Cage's Bend by Carter Coleman

empty.” He starts up the center aisle, reciting along with the congregation from memory: “For behold, you look for truth deep within me and will make me understand wisdom secretly.”
    The congregation sits down before we reach the empty pew. I feel their eyes on us. Cage smiles like a movie star, guiding Sylvia up the aisle with his hand on her elbow. A teenage girl with long blonde hair smiles back at him. From a high lectern a woman begins to read the lesson. Sylvia sits down, Cage kneels beside her. I sit down just as the congregation rises to sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Nick sings louder than anyone and he sings well. After the hymn everyone remains standing while an old bald priest with a hearing aid comes down the center aisle where an acolyte holds a big Bible open to the Gospels. I’m trying to follow the reading from Luke when Cage whispers, “Didn’t you used to hate it every Sunday when the ushers passed the plate and everyone tossed in dollar bills? Like Pop’s salary was coming out of the plate, like we were a family of beggars, you know?”
    “Yeah,” I whisper back. “It made me feel like Dad was inferior, like he became a priest because he couldn’t make it in the marketplace.”
    “Think of what a good speaker he is. He could have been a great politician. And he was a good role model.” Cage smiles. “Did you ever want to be a preacher?”
    I laugh through my nose.
    “The Holy Ghost never summoned you to the pulpit?”
    “No.”
    “I feel the Holy Ghost creeping up on me now,” Cage says a little too loud as everyone in the congregation sits down except for him.
    A woman across the aisle glances at us.
    “The Holy Ghost is calling me to be its instrument,” Cage says a little louder.
    “Sit down, Cage,” Sylvia whispers.
    “Let me by,” he says softly, smiling.
    “No,” I say. “Sit down now.”
    Placing one hand on the railing, he vaults over the pew front and dashes forward in time to cut off the old priest, the only other person in the church standing, at the steps that lead up to the pulpit.
    A few feet away the rector is seated in a tall ornate chair in front of the empty choir stall. A heavy man with a black beard and warm eyes, he looks puzzled. When he rises to his feet, his face grows stern and he says in a salty voice, “Cage Rutledge, what on earth—”
    “I beg your pardon, Father Farlow, but the Holy Ghost has summoned me to preach this beautiful summer morning in your stead,” Cage says loud enough for all the congregation to hear. Father Farlow must see the light in his eyes, for he suddenly looks cautious and says nothing. Cage bows to him and then to the old priest, who, with a confused expression, is adjusting his hearing aid.
    Cage brushes past him and mounts the lectern. He projects his voice the way he did when I saw him at the Vanderbilt theater in
Fool for Love
two years ago: “Good morning, brethren.”
    I realize my mouth is hanging open. I shut it as my mind goes into a mode akin to once when I was driving Cage’s car near Sewanee, spinning out of control on ice, and time seemed to slow down, and I calmly recovered from a couple of 360-degree turns while absorbing every detail. I turn around to gauge the response of the congregants, who appear to have woken up from a daydream. A couple of young married men are grinning while their wives look concerned and a number of elderly folks can’t make out who is in the pulpit. The mother of the girl who smiled when we walked in now looks suspiciously at me.
    “I won’t keep you long,” Cage says in a deep, confident voice. From a distance he appears to be a specimen of perfect health, tan and handsome in his blue blazer as if he had just stepped off a yacht.
    Two ushers, who look like they’d played football twenty years before, have come to the far end of the aisle behind the rear pews and stand waiting for a signal from the rector, who looks at Cage with a sympathetic expression. One of