Matthew 13
The thing about Judah Beaumont on a Sunday was that he meant every little bit of it.
That was what I couldn't get past. Standing at the back of Grace Eternal in a blue dress — something plain, something that didn’t put the letter S on my chest — watching him at the pulpit, I kept waiting for the seam.
The place where the pastor ended and the man I knew began.
I couldn't find it. They were the same person. That was the problem.
He'd found me before service. In the vestibule, while Darlene was arranging the programs and Sister Ruth was doing her pre-game warmup of squeezing everyone's hands.
He'd come through the side door with his jacket on and his Bible under his arm and he'd looked at me across the room and walked straight to me like the twenty other people in the vestibule were furniture.
His hand went to my back.
“You look rested,” he said, his voice warm and pleasant.
“I slept eight hours.” A lie. Six, maybe. I'd spent two of them on the ceiling, thinking about my preacher — like a good Christian.
“Good.” He pressed his mouth to my temple, lips warm and soft. Right there. In front of Darlene, who became very interested in her programs, and Sister Ruth, who became very interested in us. “Stay after,” he said against my hair. “I want to show you the garden.”
“The garden.”
“It needs attention. I thought you might have some ideas.”
He pulled back and looked at me with those Sunday eyes — the ones that were doing something complicated that I'd stopped trying to decode — and then he was gone, moving through the vestibule, shaking hands, saying names, being the version of himself the town had built its faith around.
Sister Ruth materialized at my elbow approximately four seconds later.
“The garden,” she said.
“Apparently.”
She made a sound that contained an entire paragraph.
He preached from Matthew 13.
I know it because I looked it up after, needing to see the words on the page rather than just hear them in his voice, which did things to sentences that sentences couldn't do on their own. It was a whole literary blasphemy that I won’t get into at this very moment.
Just know that Judah Beaumont had a way with words that us, mere mortals, rarely did.
He started quietly. He usually did — that was the thing about him, he never opened at full volume, never gave you the thunder first. He built to it. He let the room come to him.
“Jesus looked at the crowd,” Judah said, “and he spoke in parables. His disciples came to him afterward and asked — why? Why parables? Why not simply say what you mean?”
He paused. Let it sit with the people.
“And Jesus quoted Isaiah.” He opened the Bible.
Not because he needed it. He had it memorized.
The book was a prop, or maybe a courtesy — something for the congregation to look at so they didn't have to feel the full being looked at.
'You will be ever hearing but never understanding.
You will be ever seeing but never perceiving. '“
The room was very still.
“He wasn't insulting them,” Judah said. He stepped away from the pulpit.
He did that sometimes — walked the space in front of the altar.
“He was disassembling them. Diagnosing. There is a particular kind of blindness that is not a failure of the eyes. The eyes work perfectly. The information arrives. And the mind—” he touched his own temple, “—the mind decides not to process it.”
Mrs. Tureaud, three rows from the front, adjusted her big purple hat.
It was an ugly hat. With a yellow bird that reminded Tweety from the cartoon.
“We call it denial,” Judah continued. “We call it discretion. We call it minding your own business.” The faintest edge in it now.
Sharp enough to feel, soft enough to ignore.
“Isaiah called it a sin. God says to the prophet — go, tell this people. Tell them they will hear and not understand. Tell them their hearts have grown dull.” He let the word land.
“Dull. Not evil. Not corrupt. Dull. Worn smooth by the practice of not seeing what is directly in front of them.”
I was sitting in the fourth row now — had moved slowly closer and closer subconsciously until I found an empty spot. I had a program in my hands that I had folded into a small tight rectangle without noticing.
“St. Francisville is a town of good people,” Judah said.
His eyes moved across the congregation — unhurried.
“Good, decent, God-fearing people who love their families and tend their gardens and show up every Sunday.” A pause.
“And I stand here every week and I wonder how many of you are hearing. And how many of you are simply—” he turned a hand over, open, offering nothing “—present.”
The silence in the church spoke of more than just held breaths. It spoke of fear of God’s judgement. No. Worse. Of the fear of Judah’s judgment. God had become an abstract concept in St. Francisville.
The God that ruled here was Judah Beaumont — I understood it now.
I thought about the restaurant. The waiter with the fresh tablecloth. Mrs. Tureaud's eyes sliding sideways and then away.
I thought about Thibodaux Senior cutting off two teenage girls mid-sentence.
I thought about Billy and the missing Celeste flyer.
Hearing but not understanding. Seeing but not perceiving.
Judah's eyes found me.
He didn't hold it long. A second. Maybe less. But it was enough.
“The good news,” he said, turning back to the room, and his voice warmed, opened up into the register that made two hundred people exhale simultaneously, “is that Isaiah's diagnosis is not a death sentence.
Jesus doesn't abandon the crowd. He keeps speaking. He keeps offering the parable. He trusts that somewhere in that room—” he spread his hands “—someone is ready to hear.”
The woman beside me exhaled softly.
Just like the first Sunday. Same exhale. Same quality of relief.
I looked at the man at the pulpit and thought: he believes this. Still. Even now, I thought it.
That should have made things simpler.
It made them considerably worse.
After service he found me on the front steps.
The congregation moved around us the way water moved around a stone — naturally, without friction, everyone finding a reason to pass close enough to see and then moving on. He came down the steps and put his hand on my back and said, low, near my ear: “Walk with me, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart. In front of Sister Ruth and Mrs. Fontenot and the deacons and everyone else who'd been constructing this narrative for weeks without my full participation.
I walked with him.
The garden was at the east side of the building — old, overgrown at the edges — raised beds that had been productive once and were going to seed.
He walked me through it with his hand still at my back, pointing out things, asking what I thought about the beds nearest the wall, whether lavender would take in this climate.
He was asking me about lavender.
“You don't actually care about the garden,” I said.
“I care about the garden.”
“You care about being seen walking me through it.”
He considered this. “Both things can be true.”
I stopped walking. He stopped beside me, close enough that his shoulder was against mine.
“This morning,” I said carefully. “The sermon.”
“What about it?”
“The part about willful blindness.” I looked at him. “Were you preaching at them or at me?”
His expression did the thing it did — nothing, and then something, and then nothing again, too fast to catch. He looked out at the overgrown beds for a moment.
“Matthew 13,” he said, “is a text about the nature of understanding. Who has ears, let them hear.” He looked back at me. “I preach what the text calls for, Mercy.”
“That's not an answer.”
“No,” he agreed. He reached up and tucked a piece of hair back from my face — that gesture, the one he used like punctuation. “It's not.”
Behind us, somewhere near the front of the church, Billy's laugh rang out — easy and bright — a man with nothing on his conscience and a full flask. Mrs. Arceneaux's voice rose in response, not amused.
Judah's mouth curved. Barely.
“The lavender will take,” I said.
“Will it.”
“South-facing wall, good drainage. It'll take.”
I pretended I knew what I was talking about. I didn’t. It was horseshit — had never not-killed a plant in my entire life.
But it sounded like it was the truth.
I was learning.
He looked at me for a long moment. The midday light was doing something to his face.
He knew what I was doing.
I knew he knew.
He cocked his head and shot me a genuine smile, a little mischievous.
“Good,” he said. “Plant it.”
You’re bluffing, he was saying. I know it. You know it. Prove it.
I don’t know why but it felt oddly thrilling, trying to reach him where he was. Trying to prove to him that I could play his game. Maybe even become better at it than he.
He pressed his mouth to my temple again — the same spot, the same pressure, like it had already become habit.
“You’re a quick learner,” he whispered only for me to hear — and walked back toward the church.
I remained standing in the overgrown garden, looking at those dead flower beds, trying to figure out how to fake the growth of lavenders.
By the end of the month Judah expected me to move in with him. I didn’t say no, which said more about me than it did about him. I write it off to the heat of Louisiana, and maybe the fact that I was starting to enjoy our unspoken challenges. And this was one of them.
The box was left on his side of the bed.
He was already gone.
It was matte black, no ribbon, no flourish. A card sitting on top of it.
Wear this.
My heart did that little flip before it started its quickened beat against my ribcage.
I sat up and opened it.
The lingerie set inside wasn’t soft. It was lace, sure, but it was something more than that, too. The deep crimson was threaded tight into patterns that felt almost…
Well.