The Outsider by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

the congregation. We are a Congregational church, not a tool of bigots and fools!”
    â€œAnd if he comes in and raises hell?” Klein asked.
    â€œI’ll be there. My word, Mel, if there’s one pledge I made to myself, it’s that Leighton Ridge will not become another Greenwich.”
    â€œAnd how did you get the telephone?” David was asking Lucy. “Other people wait for weeks.”
    â€œThe perks of the cloth, Millie calls it. Tell them it’s for the rabbi and they hustle it right along.”
    Klein was worrying about the lights. “If there’s no electricity in there, Marty?”
    â€œIt’s there. You get back home and start sending your people over this way, and David and I will take care of the church.”
    Lucy found a bucket, some old towels, soap, and two brooms. Martin was still sweeping the aisle while David and Lucy worked frantically to get some of the loose dirt off the pews, when the first of the congregants began to arrive. All three gave up and went into the tiny parson’s refuge or study — too imposing a word for a room seven feet square.
    â€œYou’ll want it lit, won’t you?” Carter asked. “The sun will be setting in about fifteen minutes or so.”
    â€œOh, yes — yes, indeed. Lucy, I forgot about the prayer-books. In the trunk of the car.”
    Lucy dashed off for the prayerbooks. Carter switched on the lights. Jack Osner joined them in the parson’s refuge, where he picked up on Klein’s worries about Congregational objections.
    â€œYou’re all my guests,” Carter told him. “There will be no objections.”
    David was unfolding his robe. Osner held it for him to slip his arms into the sleeves, and then he put a small velvet cap on and placed his prayer shawl, his tallis, over his shoulders. He felt strange, divorced from himself, outside himself, watching apart from even himself as more and more people crowded into the already crowded parson’s refuge, Lucy to assure him that the prayerbooks were being distributed, Joe Hurtz to report a count — two hundred and eleven people and more coming, every pew in the little church packed solid — Della Klein asking for more prayerbooks. There were no more. Shelly Osner squeezed into the tiny room, surveyed David, and told him that he looked positively beautiful. David, smiling, uneasy, kept nodding.
    â€œI think he ought to be alone,” Mel Klein said, with surprising sensitivity. “Let’s give him a few minutes alone.”
    Then they emptied the room, and David drew a deep breath, and then another and another. He said in a whisper, “I am a priest of the dead.” He had taken time that morning, before returning to Connecticut, to write a three-page sermon, and now he took it out of his pocket, glanced at it, and then crumpled it and threw it away. Then he walked out onto the bimah, the little platform at the front of the old church, and said, almost harshly, “We will begin with the greeting to the Sabbath. We have too few prayerbooks, so try to share them.” He looked at a sea of faces, and wondered what was wrong with him. Almost all of them were young, the kids he knew and had known for years, at Fort Dix, in England, in France, who had come here from all over Fairfield County because they heard there was a rabbi in Leighton Ridge and because it was Captain David Hartman of the 45th Infantry Division, and because someone had stuck up an old story from Yank on the wall of an army surplus store. Inwardly, he groaned, Oh, shit! Why that damned story? And then he recalled, all in a flash, the time Colonel Patman informed him that he was going to put him in for an M.O.H., and he had lost his temper and called the colonel names that could have replaced the medal with the stockade; and now here he was in Connecticut, conducting a Jewish Sabbath service in an old Congregational church that was packed with young