The Bible on the Coffee Table

The thing that caught Marcus off guard was the Bible.

It was a Thursday in October, late enough that the game had gone to commercial for the fourth time and neither of them was really watching anymore. Ray had come over after work the way he did most weeks, still in his boots, and he’d taken the end of the couch he always took, the one with the cushion that had given up years ago. Marcus had brought him a Coke. They had talked about their mother’s knee, and about the truck, and about whether the Cowboys were going to do anything at all this year, and then the conversation had gone into that comfortable silence brothers can hold without either of them reaching for something to fill it.

Then Ray leaned forward, pulled a worn black book out of the bag by his feet, and set it on the coffee table.

Marcus looked at it for a second longer than he meant to.

It was a Bible. Not a small one, not a phone app, not one of those thin gift editions somebody hands you at a funeral. It was thick and soft-cornered, the leather gone pale along the spine where a thumb had ridden it a thousand times. There were slips of paper sticking out of it at four or five different places. One of them had handwriting on it.

“What?” Ray said, without looking up.

“Nothing.”

“You’ve got a face on.”

“I don’t have a face on.”

Ray licked his thumb and turned a page. “You’ve had that same face since you were eleven. You had it when I told you I was moving. You had it at Thanksgiving.”

Marcus set his Coke down on the arm of the chair. “I just didn’t know you still —” He stopped. There was no version of the end of that sentence that wasn’t going to sound like what it was.

Ray finally looked up. He didn’t look angry. That was almost worse. “Didn’t know I still read it,” he said.

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“It’s what you were going to say.”

Marcus exhaled through his nose. On the television, a truck drove through a river for no reason anybody could explain. “All right. Yeah. It’s what I was going to say.”

His brother nodded slowly, like a man confirming something he’d already written down. And then, to Marcus’s genuine surprise, Ray laughed — not a bitter laugh, just a short one, the kind that comes out when something has been sitting on your chest for a while and somebody finally names it.

“Everybody thinks that,” Ray said. “I had a guy at work ask me if we were allowed to own one.”

“Well.” Marcus rubbed the back of his neck. “You’ve got to admit, from where I’m sitting, it looks like you traded a whole lot of Bible for a whole lot of —” he moved his hand in a circle, searching, “— incense.”

“That’s fair,” Ray said. “That’s how it looks from there. I’d have thought the same thing three years ago.”

They had been raised in the same pews. That was the part Marcus kept coming back around to, late at night, when he was honest with himself. Same church on Highway 6, same tan carpet, same Vacation Bible School with the felt-board Jonah and the whale that came apart at the seam. Same hymnal. Same aisle.

Marcus remembered walking that aisle. He was nine, maybe ten. Third verse of the invitation, piano down to almost nothing, the lights turned low enough that going forward didn’t feel like being watched. He remembered Brother Kimble’s hand on his shoulder, the smell of the man’s aftershave, and the words afterward, said over him like a benediction and repeated to him for the next twenty-five years: It’s settled now. Once you’re in His hand, nobody can take you out of it. Nobody. Not even you.

He had believed that all his life. He believed it now. It was the one solid floorboard in a house that had, in the years since, developed a fair amount of give.

And Ray had walked that same aisle. Two years later, same hymn probably. And now Ray crossed himself backwards and called a man Father and had a corner of his living room with candles in it, and Marcus did not know, honestly did not know, whether his little brother was still saved or whether he had walked out of the hand that nobody was supposed to be able to take him out of.

That was the thing he had never asked. Three years now, and he had never once asked it out loud.

“Can I ask you something,” Marcus said. “And you’re not going to like it.”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you still believe you’re saved?”

Ray closed the Bible over his finger to hold the place. He took his time. Marcus had noticed that about him lately — the not-answering-immediately. It irritated him in a way he couldn’t defend.

“I’d answer that,” Ray said, “but you’re not going to like my answer, either.”

“Try me.”

“Which one do you mean? Have I been saved, am I being saved, or will I be saved?”

Marcus stared at him. “That’s a dodge.”

“It’s not a dodge. I promise you it’s not.”

“It’s three answers to a yes-or-no question, Ray. That’s the definition of a dodge.”

“Okay.” Ray opened his hands. “Then let’s do it your way. Yes. I have been saved. Something real happened to me, and it happened at a particular time, and it isn’t undone. I’d say the same about you.” He tapped the cover of the book on his knee. “But Paul writes to people who are already Christians — people he’s not doubting, people he calls saints, people he’s glad about — and he tells them, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. That’s Philippians. Chapter two. You don’t hand a man a hammer and tell him to work on a house that’s already finished.”

“That’s sanctification,” Marcus said. “That’s not salvation. Those are two different things.”

“See, that’s what I was taught too. And I’m not saying they’re the same thing. I’m saying Paul doesn’t slice them up as clean as we do.” Ray flipped, found something, ran a finger down the page. “First Corinthians. ‘The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.’ He’s writing to a church. To Christians. Present tense. Still going on. And then over in Colossians he says when Christ appears, then you’ll appear with him in glory — that one hasn’t happened yet to anybody in this room.” He looked up. “Past, present, future. Same salvation. Three tenses. I didn’t make that up. I just got taught to only ever say the first one.”

Marcus felt his jaw set. He knew the feeling. He had the same one in business meetings right before he said something he had to walk back.

“John ten,” he said.

“I figured.”

“No, hold on. Let me say it.” Marcus leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Jesus. His own words. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me, and I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. And then He goes further, Ray. He says the Father’s greater than all, and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand. Two hands. Belt and suspenders. That’s not me being clever, that’s Christ.”

“I love that verse,” Ray said quietly.

“Don’t do that.”

“I’m not doing anything. I do love it. I say it to myself in the truck.” He held up a hand before Marcus could get going again. “But look at what He actually promises there. He says nobody can pluck them out. Nobody can snatch them. That’s a promise about His grip against everything outside the sheep — wolves, thieves, hell itself. It’s a promise that He is stronger than every force that would come and take you.” He paused. “It’s not a sentence about whether a sheep can wander off on its own legs.”

“That’s a distinction you’re inventing.”

“Is it? Read me the verse before it.”

Marcus didn’t reach for the book. He didn’t have to. “‘My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.’”

“Follow me,” Ray repeated. “Present tense. That’s how He tells you who the sheep are. Not the ones who followed once at a summer revival. The ones who are following. That’s His definition, Marc, not mine. It’s sitting right there in the same breath.”

“Romans eight,” Marcus said.

“Okay.”

“‘Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’” He had not looked at a page. His mother had made him memorize it in the fifth grade for a ribbon. “You want to tell me what that leaves out.”

“You,” said Ray.

The room got quiet in a way the television could not cover.

“Say that again.”

“It leaves out you.” Ray’s voice hadn’t gone up. That was the maddening part. “Look at the list. Death, life, angels, principalities, powers, height, depth. Those are the things a church getting hunted through Rome was scared of. Paul’s answering the question can the world take God’s love away from me — and the answer’s no, it can’t, not any of it, not ever. That’s the whole comfort of the passage.” He shook his head slowly. “But he never puts my own unbelief on that list. He never writes nor my own hard heart, nor my own turning away. He’s not answering that question there. And I don’t think we get to make him.”

“So now you’ve got God’s love with an exception clause.”

“No. I’ve got a God who won’t hold a man against his will.” Ray’s hand had tightened on the cover of the Bible. “That’s not a smaller God, Marc. Isaiah says it flat out — your iniquities have separated between you and your God. Not the devil’s iniquities. Not Rome’s. Yours.”

“Isaiah’s writing to Israel under judgment—”

“And what are we?”

“Don’t do that. Don’t do the thing where you—”

“I’m not doing a thing—”

“You are absolutely doing a thing, you’ve been doing it since you got here, you come in here with your tenses and your—”

“You asked me!”

They both stopped.

The game had come back on. Somebody had scored, apparently. The little crowd noise went up out of the speakers and filled the room by itself for a few seconds, and neither of them said anything, and Marcus became aware that he was standing and did not remember standing.

He sat down.

“That’s Mom’s chair,” Ray said, after a while. It wasn’t. It was nothing like Mom’s chair. It was a stupid thing to say and they both knew he’d said it to say something.

Marcus laughed, one syllable, and put his hand over his eyes.

“I’m not trying to take it from you,” Ray said. “The assurance. I want you to hear me say that out loud. I’m not standing over here with a crowbar trying to pry up the one board you’ve been standing on your whole life.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“I’m telling you the floor’s bigger than that board.”

Marcus let his hand fall. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Then let me say it plainer.” Ray opened the Bible again, but he didn’t look at it; he just held it open on his knee like a man holding a door. “Fifteenth of John. Christ says I am the vine, ye are the branches. And then He says — and this is the part that got me, this is the part I sat with for about four months and could not get around — He says every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he taketh away.”

“That’s the false converts. The ones who were never—”

“In me, Marc.” Ray’s voice cracked on it, just slightly, and he brought it back down. “In me. That’s His word for it. Not the ones nearby. Not the ones pretending. The branch is genuinely in the vine, really joined to it, drawing real sap out of a real trunk. And He says abide. He tells living branches to keep abiding.” He closed the book. “That’s not Him threatening you. That’s just what it is to be alive and joined to something. Your arm’s really your arm. Nobody’s going to sneak in and steal your arm. But it stays alive because it stays connected.”

Marcus was quiet for a long moment. On the screen, a man in a headset was very upset about something.

“You know what I keep coming back to,” Marcus said finally. “It’s not the verses. I can go around on verses with you all night, and you know that, you’ve got no advantage on me there, seminary or no seminary.”

“I didn’t go to seminary.”

“Whatever you people have.”

“We have a guy who owns a hardware store.”

Marcus snorted. He hadn’t wanted to. “What I keep coming back to is — if it’s not settled, then what is it? Because I’ve watched you. You go to that thing on Wednesday nights, you fast off half the food in the world, you got up at four in the morning at Easter—”

“Pascha.”

“—at four in the morning, and I want to know, honest to God I want to know, when do you ever get to rest? When do you get to just have it?”

Ray sat with that one.

“I don’t think I know how to answer that in a way that’ll sound like rest to you,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what it actually feels like.” He turned the Bible over in his hands. “It doesn’t feel like a test I’m afraid of failing. It feels like being married.”

“That’s a dodge too.”

“It’s not.” He glanced up. “You and Dana. Twenty-two years. You stood up there in front of everybody and it was real that day — you were married when you walked out of that building, all the way married, nothing pending, nothing partial. Nobody would say you were sort of married that afternoon and would finish becoming married later.”

“Right.”

“And also you’ve spent twenty-two years working it out. Every day of it. And nobody thinks that’s a contradiction. Nobody hears you say marriage takes work and goes, oh, so you’re not really married, or you’re trying to earn it.” He shrugged. “If I told you tonight that your wedding day was real and complete and also that your marriage is something you’re still living out — would you accuse me of splitting it into two things? Or would you say, yeah, obviously, that’s what a marriage is?”

Marcus didn’t answer.

“That’s all I’m saying about salvation,” Ray said. “It’s not a receipt in a drawer. It’s a person. And you can’t have a finished relationship with a living person.”

They let it sit.

After a while Marcus got up and got them both another Coke, and stood in the kitchen longer than the errand required, looking at the calendar on the fridge with their mother’s appointments on it in Dana’s handwriting. He could hear the game going in the other room. He could hear his brother not following him into the kitchen, not pressing, letting him have the minute.

That was new too, come to think of it. The old Ray would have followed him in.

When he came back Ray had the Bible closed on his knee and both hands folded on top of it, and he was watching the television without seeing it.

“I don’t want to do this if it’s going to cost us,” Ray said.

“Do what.”

“This.” He gestured between them. “I’ve got — Marc, I’ve got about four people on this earth I can say anything to, and two of them are you and Mom, and I am not going to trade you for the pleasure of being right in a living room.”

Marcus sat down. He turned the can around in his hands a couple of times.

“Can I tell you what I was actually thinking?” he said. “When you pulled that out. Before I got my back up.”

“Yeah.”

“I was thinking, three years ago I told Dana I figured you’d stop reading it. That whatever this was, it’d take that from you first, and then the rest’d go with it.” He looked at the black book on his brother’s knee, at the pale spine, at the little paper flags with handwriting on them. “And then you set it down on my coffee table with your thumbprint worn into it.”

Ray didn’t say anything.

“So I don’t know what to do with that,” Marcus said. “Because that’s not what a man’s Bible looks like when he’s quit on it.”

“No,” Ray said. “It’s not.”

“And it made me mad. And I don’t fully know why yet.”

“I think I might,” Ray said. “But I don’t think tonight’s the night for me to say it.”

Marcus shook his head. “No. I’ve had enough of us dancing around it tonight. Say it.”

Ray looked at him a long moment, the way you look at somebody before you step off a curb into traffic you’re pretty sure has stopped.

“You’re not mad about the verses,” Ray said. “You’ve been scared for me since the day I told you I was converting. Not scared I’d joined a cult — you got over that in about a month. Scared for my soul, Marc. Scared I’d walked myself right out of the hand nobody’s supposed to be able to pull you out of. And tonight I show up still reading the same book I’ve always read, still — by your own words — not looking like a man who quit, and it didn’t fix that fear. It just took away the one clean rule you had for managing it.”

Marcus didn’t say anything for a while. On the television, a man was explaining a replay nobody had asked him to explain.

“That’s not all of it,” Marcus said finally. His voice had gone quieter than it had been all night. “That’s most of it. Not all of it.”

“What’s the rest?”

Marcus looked at his hands. “The rest is — if you’re right. If it’s not settled at the door, if it’s a whole life instead — then it’s not just you I’ve got to wonder about. It’s me. It’s Dad.” He hadn’t said that name once all night, and it came out smaller than he meant it to. “I made my peace with where he’s at a long time ago, Ray, on the strength of one prayer he said when he was seventeen years old. And you’re sitting there telling me that peace might’ve been standing on one leg the whole time.”

Ray didn’t reach for the Bible. He didn’t reach for anything.

“I can’t tell you where Dad’s at,” he said. “I want to be straight with you about that — I don’t get to know that, and I wouldn’t trust anybody who told me they did. What I can tell you is what my own Church actually teaches, because I don’t think anybody’s ever given you the real version of it. We don’t believe God’s mercy stops at our front door. We believe He’s merciful in ways we don’t get to see the edges of.” He paused. “What we don’t get to do is tell ourselves it’s finished and stop showing up.” He finally looked over at his brother. “That’s not a smaller hope than the one you grew up with. I know it doesn’t feel that way right now. But it’s not smaller.”

Marcus let out a breath he seemed to have been holding for a while. “I don’t know what to do with that either,” he said.

“You don’t have to do anything with it tonight.”

They sat with it. The game went to commercial again and neither of them noticed.

“Hey,” Marcus said, after a while, around the two-minute warning. “Read me the vine one again. The whole thing, not just your part of it.”

Ray looked over at him.

“Don’t make it weird,” Marcus said. “Just read it.”

So he read it. The whole passage, start to finish, in a living room with the television on mute and two cans sweating on the coffee table.

When he finished, neither of them reached for the remote. The silence went on a beat longer than the two of them, left to themselves, would ever have let it go — the kind of quiet that isn’t empty, the kind you don’t fill because filling it would be rude to something. Marcus had the strange, brief sense that the room held a third presence that wasn’t going to say anything either, and that whatever had just passed between them hadn’t only passed between the two of them.

“Say that last part again,” Marcus said finally.

Ray didn’t ask which part. He knew. “‘If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and withereth.’”

“No,” Marcus said. “Before that.”

“‘Abide in me, and I in you.’”

Marcus nodded slowly, the way a man nods when he’s filing something away in a place he knows he’ll have to come back to. Neither of them had changed his mind about anything at all. But the question he’d carried around for three years — whether his little brother was still in the hand that nobody could take him out of — had stopped being the only question in the room. It had company now. His own name was on the list too. Somehow that made it easier to carry, not harder.

He stood in the driveway with his arms crossed against the cold while Ray got in and got the door shut and rolled the window down the way he always did.

“Same time next week?” Ray said.

“Bring the book,” Marcus said.

Ray grinned at him. “You bring yours.”

Marcus waved him off and went inside, and stood a minute in the dark hallway, and then went and found it on the shelf in the back room where it had been sitting since the spring.