The town knows the preacher's secret.

Cross sat with his black-brim hat on his lap. He wanted to shift in the uncomfortable wicker chair again to adjust his wallet in his right rear pocket, but thought against it when he saw the old woman’s glassy eyes on him. She was sitting on the couch and crying softly into a handkerchief, shaking her head on occasion and moaning “No, no no gawd no” whenever her diaphragm would relent from its uncontrollable seizures. Cross welcomed the sound of her wailing, which muffled the annoying tic-tock of the grandfather clock sitting next to the door leading into the kitchen. Everything about the quaint, homely living room—including the clock—annoyed him.
    The woman looked up for the third time since Cross had first given her the news. “Are you sure?” she asked again.
    “Ayuh. Conner’s the boy, sure enough.”
    She began to cry again. Soft, rhythmic wails muffled by the red square of cloth holding a wad of mucus at the brims of her nostrils.
    “Missus Tremaine,” he said. “I got to go. I got a service to prepare for. I’m sorry bout your son.”
    The woman nodded, composing herself for a few moments to tear a tissue from the box sitting on the small glass coffee table, which Cross had provided upon telling her the news. It broke apart when she blew her nose. She tossed it aside and returned the handkerchief to her eyes. “Do they know anything?” she asked. “Anything about what happened at all? My boy doesn’t play down there. I know he doesn’t. I’ve punished him for going near the weigh station off of ninety-four, for Christ’s sake, and that’s not nearly as dangerous as the train yard.”
    “They’ve got a good cop on the case,” Cross said. “Smart one, from the state patrol. If there was any wrongdoing, he’ll find it out, sure enough.”
    The woman embraced Cross, then followed him to the front door to let him out. “Thank you for coming to tell me, Father.”
    Cross nodded and put his hat back on to cover his round, balding forehead which had already grown slightly burned from earlier in the day. He walked outside, where Dexter was sitting patiently on the hood of the Cadillac, picking at his fingernails with an idiot’s determination. He looked up when he saw Cross standing at the foot of the old porch, surveying the dry afternoon air with a deep breath.
    “Did she cry?” he asked.
    “Course she cried, you dummy.” Cross walked over to the car and opened the driver’s-side door. “Get in already.” He started the car, tapping on the gas pedal a few times to juice up the cranky old engine. It coughed to life, coughed again before smoothing out.
    “Five years ago, sure enough, there would have been more people around to see him,” Dexter said once they were back on the main road.
    “Don’t say that,” Cross said. “It’s a bad habit to start.”
    “Say what?”
    “Sure enough.”
    “Did I say that?”
    Cross turned to the boy just long enough to see the distant look in his dull, grayish-blue eyes. Dexter’s shaky mop of blond hair was tossed over his forehead and ears, making him look even more dense than usual. The boy, seeing Cross’s look and perhaps sensing his annoyance, turned away and mumbled and apology to the open side window.
    “No,” Cross finally said after a moment of thought. “Things in this town ain’t the same, you’re sure enough about that. Before you were born, there was a time when all three of the mills downtown were running.”
    “What’d they make?”
    “Didn’t make anything, you dummy. They manufactured.”
    “What’d they man-you-factor?”
    “Steel.” Cross turned onto Plymouth Avenue, toward the small cluster of shops making up the majority of downtown—two long blocks of two-story buildings nearly identical save for the shade of brick and the signs on front. Beyond the commercial property, he could see the steeple of the church hiding behind Roy’s barber shop. “Why’s it so quiet today?”
    Dexter shrugged, not answering. He was still looking out the window. Cross frowned and stopped at the first stoplight. Clouds had begun to move in from the west, cooling the air brushing across the preacher’s exposed arm hanging out of the open window. Moisture, too—there would be a storm, he concluded, soon enough. Sure enough.
    “Something you’re not telling me?”
    Dexter shook his head. “No, sir.”
    “You sure about that?”
    “No. I mean, yes. Yes, I’m sure, sir.”
    The light turned green. Cross turned onto the church’s main road, passing it and pulling over on the next block. Even before he had passed the church, his church, he could see the large group of people standing on his lawn. Still, he drove on, even though his fingers had begun to grow clammy as they gripped the steering wheel with a greasing of cold sweat.
    “Boy,” he said quietly, turning off the car. “If you got something to say, you tell me right now.”
    “Nothing to say, sir.”
    Cross opened the door and walked up to the boulevard, keeping his hat on so the setting sun behind his ranch-style home would stay out of his eyes. He heard the boy’s door open and shut, but did not turn to see where he had gone.
    The crowd of people—men, mostly, from the neighborhood—were easily recognizable. They were parishioners from the church, regulars, working people from the last remaining factory and owners of downtown’s shops. One of them, an older man by the name of William Buckley, was standing on the sidewalk, his fat arms crossed over his thick chest and his grizzled chin dipped into his heavy neck.
    “What’s this all about, then?” Cross said. “Ain’t no Bible study today, if that’s what you’re all thinking.”
    “We know what you did,” William Buckley said. “That trouble with Molly Tremaine’s boy and all.”
    Cross hooked his thumbs into his pockets and let his weight shift onto his right leg—his good one. “Do you now.”
    “You knew the boy wasn’t supposed to be around the train yard,” Buckley said. “You knew he couldn’t see all that well.”
    Cross looked around for Dexter, but the idiot was nowhere in sight. “Suppose I did. But ain’t nothing I can do about it, now.”
    “You can make your amends,” Buckley said. “Like you always teach us to do. You can make penance for the death of that woman’s only son.”
    Cross felt his chest burn. He looked at everyone else in the crowd. “And what do you all got to say about all this? You think I should pay for a mistake? What say you, you goddamned mob of idiots! You think the sheriff is going to stand for this?”
    Some shifted their feet uncomfortably, more yet turned their heads away when they met with Cross’s eyes. But William Buckley remained steadfast.
    “The damage,” Buckley said, “it’s been done. No point in getting the law all tangled up in this mess.”
    Cross looked around the large group. They were feeding off of Buckley’s strength like a plague of parasites. “Suppose not.”
    “Your boy didn’t feel nothing,” Buckley said. “Herb Tillman made sure of that. So let’s just let bygones be bygones and let everything else run its course.”
    Cross looked over Buckley’s shoulder, to his house. The front door had been kicked open and was now hanging by only the lower hinge. The lights in his boy’s room were still on. He stood motionless as the crowd began to disperse, slowly at first and then faster when only a few people remained between Cross and his home. The boy was gone. Cross took a step back and sat down on the hood of his car, taking off his hat and laying it on his lap.
    “Sure enough.”