Chapter Text
It must've been some sort of hypnotism, because the church had always been there when it arrived one day. Everyone agreed that the church had been there as long as living memory, but some of them seemed to know deep down that it also hadn't been there the day before.
There wasn't a need for more than two churches in Lea. If it weren't for the cussedness of humanity, there wouldn't be a need for two. People have got to have something to be "at each other" about, as Mama said, which was why they had two, the Baptist church put up by the early settlers and the Lutheran church by the Germans. A great many Germans had come to Texas a few generations before, and the three or four dozen adventurous souls who went to the very northern edge, who settled in Lea in the Panhandle, were Lutherans.
The Baptist church was a small white affair with a gabled roof and big windows, buckets of paper fans on shelves at the back to battle the summer heat. It was on the east end of town, the first thing you saw entering Lea proper if you were coming from Oklahoma. The Lutheran church was southwest of town, near Lon Platter's place. Being newer it put on airs, with a high roof and fine woodwork throughout. But all told it wasn't much bigger than the Baptists' when it came down to it, at least so the Baptists grumbled.
There never was a church of any kind, let alone a little fancy-windowed thing with a handful of miniature spires, across from the bank and next to the Dry Goods on the main street (the only street) of Lea. Not until one day there suddenly was, and always had been. Of course it always had been there.
Nobody went to it. It had no priests. The window glass was cracked and the door was shut, and anyway who would build a church like that, all close stone walls, in such hot country? But all the same, it was there, a sad little monument to some other man's god.
A handful of the outlying farmers who went to the Lea Baptist -- Wheeler Baptist was closer for some but there had been A Falling Out over music years before -- said that on a hot April day in 1930 there had been terrible lightning in the sky one night. It wasn't like normal heat lightning, but looked like the clouds were ablaze, like perdition had finally come. Maybe that was when the church came, the church that had always been there.
Or maybe it was in 1929, the day of the crash, though the crash hardly registered in Lea. They'd already been struggling for some time, trying to grow more to make more, only to find the more they grew the further prices dropped.
But nobody knew for sure when it came. They only knew it had, also, always been there.