Bless Me Father (The Golden Cherry #1)

Chapter 1

The Welcome to St. Francisville sign had a bullet hole in it.

Not fresh — rust had settled into the edges of it years ago — but nobody had patched it, which I took as either honesty or laziness, and I was choosing to call it honesty because I'd driven six hours and I needed this to work.

I needed a lot of things to work lately.

The town unfurled slowly, like all old things do.

Small houses, narrow roads that trickled into something bigger.

Spanish moss hung off every oak reminding me of curtains reduced to tatters.

There was a certain violence to it — the nature itself was cautioning against it, and yet I pressed the gas pedal harder.

A filling station came next. Then a diner with a hand-painted sign. A hardware store that looked like it hadn’t changed owners since before the change of millennia.

The main street was clean and very Southern, which is me saying everyone knew everyone and no one wanted to be the one whose storefront brought down the property value.

I'd grown up in a town like this. Different state, same bones. I knew exactly how it worked: who you sat next to in church told people more about you than anything you could say with your mouth.

Which meant church was my first stop.

Grace Eternal sat on the edge of town, set back from the road, trying to maintain some dignity.

Old stone, 19th century at least, but the windows were new — stained glass that caught the morning light and threw color across the gravel like something out of a painting.

Beautiful. Made the back of your throat ache a little.

I sat in my car for a full minute looking at it.

It's just a building, I told myself. It's just a job posting.

I'd answered a listing I'd found on a church community board three weeks ago.

Administrative assistant, community outreach coordinator, food bank management.

Room and board negotiable for the right candidate.

I hoped I was the right candidate, because I had about two hundred bucks to my name and no other plan.

The posting had been written with care that suggested the person who wrote it actually meant it; it went into detail about what they expected and what they offered, and I had taken a gamble, knowing perfectly well that a church was not a place I wanted to be.

Yet it was what I knew best.

I'd been moving between short-term rentals — which was a polite term for crappy motels — for the better part of eight months; I was twenty-three years old and I was so goddamn tired.

It had felt like a sign. I know how that sounds.

Trust me, I'm fully aware of how that sounds.

I got out of the car.

Sunday service had already started when I slipped in through the side door and almost toppled a vase. Why was there even a vase? By the door no less.

I caught it at the last moment, the decorative branches poking me in the cheek and almost taking my eye out. I barely managed not to say a ‘shit’ or a ‘fuck’ inside the House of the Lord.

I set it back, pressing it against the wall, and ignored the dirty look a woman in a purple blouse gave me. I should’ve been giving the dirty looks, that blouse was god-awful. And I’m saying that as a Christian.

The church was full — and I mean full-full, wall to wall, not a polite Sunday showing.

Every pew packed. Old women in hats. Families with children somehow sitting still.

Men in their good shirts who looked like they hadn't planned on being here and had come anyway. I eased into the back row next to a woman who had the air of Channel No. 5 and maybe the residue of yesterday’s drinking — but who’s counting, right?

She gave me a single assessing look before returning her attention to the front of the room.

I followed her eyes.

I want to be precise about my first impression of Judah Beaumont because I have thought about it since, and I think it matters, the exact order in which I understood him. Or rather — didn’t.

First: he was tall. Well above the average. 6’4’’, 6’5’’ at the very least.

Second: he was mid-sentence, and whatever he was saying, the room was holding its breath around it.

Not the polite held breath of people being patient.

The real kind. Two hundred people getting sucked into an odd stasis because the pastor had put a jam of sorts in the space-time continuum. That kind.

Third — and this is the part I keep coming back to — he didn't look like a preacher. Or rather, he looked exactly like one, which was the problem I couldn’t seem to come to terms with.

Clergy have a type, you see. A softness around the middle.

An earnestness in the eyes that comes from years of being the person who sits with people at their worst. Judah Beaumont had none of that.

He stood at that pulpit. Dark hair, pale eyes — wrong on his face in a way that made you keep looking to figure out why.

A dress shirt, good quality, sleeves buttoned to the wrist in this heat, which even I noticed, and I tend to miss a lot of the mundane things.

He was reading from Job.

“Where were you,” he said, and his voice carried across the room, “when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

He paused. Let the silence do something.

“God is not asking for an answer,” he said. “He's reminding Job of the order of things.”

The woman beside me exhaled softly. I glanced at her with a raised eyebrow. Then at the one next to her. And the one next to her. I wasn’t exactly sure what was happening but it seemed the preacher had said something profound.

My eyes narrowed at the pulpit.

He kept reading and preaching and the women kept gasping and nodding.

Huh, I remember thinking. Not the typical preacher effect.

And yet, he didn’t sound like a cult leader — which had been my first very wrong thought. This wasn’t a cult. A cult didn’t rightly know it was a cult. They thought they were a community. This — this town — this church, they knew what they were — and at that moment, I still didn’t.

I remember staring at the man at the pulpit, this good-looking pastor in his long sleeve shirts and his polite smile, and thinking: he may just be the real deal.

Which sounds like a strange thing to think.

He was a pastor. Believing was, presumably, the job description.

But I had grown up around men who used scripture like my father had used his belt.

I knew the difference between a man performing faith and a man who had actually staked something on it.

Judah Beaumont had staked something on it.

I thought that should have been reassuring. I filed it away as reassuring mind you, and ignored the part of my brain that was saying that's not less dangerous, Mercy, that's more.

The preaching ended and I introduced myself to a woman named Darlene.

She was a nice Southern woman — very pious.

Very — I sigh — southern. That’s the word.

Southern. Her — once — dark chocolate hair were peppered with grey strands and lines around her eyes that had, perhaps, been fine in her thirties, had evolved to deep grooves.

It told me enough about her — told me I could trust her.

Those were smile lines, my mama had taught me, and people who smiled genuinely, enough for the lines to take, could not be bad people.

Mama — I’m putting my trust in your education.

What surprised me about Darlene, though, was how much energy she had for heat like this. I was sweating to heaven and back, praying to catch a gasp of something air-conditioned, but Darlene looked like she was ready to run a marathon.

She led me through a side door off the sanctuary, into what must’ve been the administrative wing, chattering all the while about the church’s history like it was her own family tree.

“Built in 1872, you know, by the Beaumonts themselves. Solid stone, withstood hurricanes and floods and Lord knows what else. That’s the kind of foundation we stand on here. ”

I nodded, wiping a bead of sweat from my temple, trying not to let my discomfort show.

The air in the hallway was cooler, at least, filtered through vents that hummed and rattled, but I thought that’s just them being honest about their working conditions.

Nobody wanted to deal with this weather — not even those born into it.

Darlene stopped at a door marked “Office” and pushed it open without knocking. “Pastor Beaumont's expecting you,” she said, and smiled like this was simply a wonderful thing. “He asked that you wait in the side office. He'll be along once he's finished greeting.”

“Greeting” was a twenty-minute operation.

I sat in the small office off the vestibule and listened to the sound of two hundred people filing slowly past, and the low thread of his voice moving through all of it — a word here, a hand on a shoulder there, someone's name said with enough specificity to make clear he actually remembered who they were.

I'm good with people. I know the difference between good with people and this.

When the door opened, I stood.

He was taller up close — as if that was even possible.

He looked at me.

“Mercy Evangeline,” he said — his voice slow and deep like nice, sweet sun-warmed molasses. It did things to me.

He'd read my application, he knew my name, but there was something in the way he said it — unhurried, like he was trying the sound of it — that made me feel briefly, inexplicably, like I'd been found.

That’s the feeling that makes a believer, isn’t it?

“That's me,” I said, and then felt immediately stupid because yes, obviously, I was the only other person in the room.

Something moved in his expression. Not quite a smile. The near-miss of one.

“Sit down,” he said, and took the chair behind the desk, and I sat.

His eyes were pale grey in the light from the window.

He had a stillness to him that I would eventually understand was not peace but the thing that lives on the other side of it.

I didn't know that yet. I just knew it felt like being looked at by someone who was actually seeing you, and that it had been a long time since I'd experienced that, and that I was embarrassingly susceptible to it.

“You drove from Hattiesburg,” he said.

I took a breath — not because I was lacking it — but because that’s what people do, and said, “Yes.”

He tilted his head slightly. “Is something the matter?”

“The matter?” I echoed.

His grey eyes narrowed and he smirked. “You sound… exasperated.” The way he said it, I should’ve known then he’d be trouble.

“No. Everything’s fine.”

He eyed me for a moment, letting the calmness of a post-sermon church on Sunday wrap around us. I could hear cars outside, the murmur of voices — but not inside the church. Those were flowing in through the cracked window behind him.

“Hattiesburg,” he said again. “That's a long way to come for a job posting.”

“I wasn't finding what I needed closer to home.” A careful answer. He'd get the same answer the same way if he asked again. I wasn’t playing around.

He considered me for a moment. Then: “What do you need?”

Not what are you looking for. Not what brings you to St. Francisville. What did I need.

“Beg pardon?” I remember saying and going red in the cheek for it.

It didn’t catch him off guard. He was well aware what he did to people — what he did to silly little Mercies.

“I asked what do you need?” he repeated, slower.

I should have been put off by the presumption of it. I should have thought: who the hell asks that in a job interview. Instead, I heard it and felt something in my chest go very quiet and thought: oh, that's a dangerous question to ask me right now.

I needed coffee.

Food that didn’t have a microwave on the packaging.

A place to stay.

But most of all, I needed money.

I said none of that to him.

“Stability,” I said eventually. “Work that matters. A place to be useful.”

He should’ve spotted the bullshit from a mile away. Maybe he didn’t because I had actually meant it. I was good at being useful if I had set my mind to it, and I had, indeed, set my mind to it.

He nodded, slowly.

“The position is yours,” he said and leaned forward, his voice doing that thing charismatic voices did — dipping well below reason — “If you want it.”

I blinked a few times. Weighed his words. “Don't you want to ask me anything else?”

His glance lowered to something on his desk which I couldn’t see from where I was sitting, but I assumed it was my CV.

“I have your references.” He folded his hands on the desk. Nice hands, I noticed. Long-fingered. A faint scar along one knuckle. Some rings — silver on his pinky finger and one thick band on his thumb. “And I've been doing this long enough to know what I'm looking for.”

I thought about asking what that was. Long legs that looked good in her Sunday best? I didn't have long legs so I didn’t ask.

That’s a lie, actually. I did have long legs. I was 5’9’’.

“When would you want me to start?” I asked.

“Monday,” he said. “Darlene will show you the apartment above the food bank. It's small but it's clean.” He paused. “Welcome to St. Francisville, Mercy.”

He said my name again the same way. Like a souvenir he had just paid for.

I got up from the chair and I thought I saw his eyes slipping down my body, but I was hot, there was barely any air in his office and I might’ve been hallucinating.

Pastors didn’t check people out.

Well — alright, sometimes they did and that was not very pastorly of them.

Outside the air felt even hotter, and I realized I had no goddamn clue what I was doing in a place like Louisiana. I thought I saw a gator cross the street with the corner of my eye, but that could’ve been a shadow of a dog. A dog that looked mighty like a freaking gator.

“Oh Lord,” I muttered to myself as I descended the steps and walked toward my car. There was no way I had chosen this to anchor down.

The apartment above the food bank was, indeed, clean.

And that was about everything it was. Walls were white, the ceiling fan shook off at least an inch of dust the first time I turned it on, and the shower had practically no pressure.

But it, for sure, was better than a motel room with a dead rat in the sink.

For sure.

So, I unpacked my one bag and stayed.