The Pastor's Daughter

Chapter One

In 2008, Charlo, Port Elizabeth, which is located on the coast of Eastern Cape, was a place like many other small towns. It was the kind of place where humidity rose so high in the summer that walking out to get the mail made a person feel as if he'd just taken a shower. Kids walked around barefoot from August to February beneath oak trees draped in Spanish moss and the air smelled of pine, salt and sea, a scent unique to Port Elizabeth.

For many of the people there, fishing in the PE Harbor or crabbing in the Swartkops River was a way of life, and boats we moored whenever you saw the intercoastal waterway.Only four channels came in on the television, though television was never important to those of us who grew up there. Instead, our lives were centered around the churches, of which there were about eighteen within the town limits alone. They went by names like Hoogland PE NG Kerk,Impetus Gemeente, Pharos Gemeente, St Francesco Catholic Church and St John's Methodist Church,St Nicholas Anglican Church,Oasis Family Church,Oasis Family Church. And then, of course,there were the Baptist churches. When I was growing up, it was far the most popular church denomination around, and there were Baptist churches on practically every corner of town. There were Freewill Baptists, Northern Baptists, Congregational Baptists, Missionary Baptist, Independent Baptists — well, you get the picture.

Back then the big event of the year was sponsored by the Baptist church Downtown — Missionary, if you really want to know — in conjunction with the local high school. Every year at the Opera House they put on their Christmas Pageant, which was actually a play that had been written by Brixton Kruger, a pastor who'd been with the church since Moses parted the red sea. OK, maybe he wasn't that old, but he was old enough that you could almost see the guy's skin.

it was sort of clammy and translucent, and his hair was as white as those bunnies you see in pet stores around Easter. Anyway, he wrote this play called "The Christmas Angel" because he didn't want to keep on performing that old Charles Dickens classic, " A Christmas Carol". In Brixton Kruger's mind Scrooge was a heathen who came to his redemption only because he saw ghosts, not angels — and who was to say  whether they'd been sent by father God anyway? And who was to say he wouldn't revert to his sinful ways if they been sent directly from heaven? The play didn't exactly tell in the end and Brixton didn't trust ghosts if they weren't actually sent by Father God. This was his big problem with Dicken's story.

So Brixton decided to try his hand at writing his own play. He'd written his own sermons his whole life, and some of them, we had to admit, were actually interesting, especially when he talked about  'The wrath of God coming down on the fornicators' and all that good stuff. That really got his blood boiling, I'll tell you, when he talked about the fornicators. When we were younger, my friends and I would hind behind trees and shout "Brixton is a fornicator!" when we saw him walking down the street, and we'd giggle like idiots, like we were the wittiest creatures ever to inhabit the planet.

Old Brixton, he'd stop dead in his tracks, and he'd turn this bright shade of red, like he'd just drank petrol. He'd peer from side to side, his eyes narrowing as he  searched for us , and then just as suddenly he'd start to go pale again, back to that fishy skin. Boy, was it something to watch.

So we'd be hiding behind a tree, and Brixton (what kind of parents name their kid Brixton, anyway?) would stand there waiting for us to give ourselves up, as if he thought we'd be that stupid. We'd put our hands over our mouths to keep from laughing out loud, but somehow he'd zero in on us. He'd be turning from side to side, and then he'd stop, those beady eyes coming right at us, right through the tree.

'I know who you are, Ryan Newfeldt,' he'd say 'and the Lord knows too.' He'd let that sink in for a minute or so, and then he'd finally head off again, and during the sermon that weekend he'd stare right at us and say something like  'Father God is merciful to children, but children must be worthy as well.' And we'd sort of lower ourselves in the seats, not from embarrassment, but to hide a new round of giggles. Brixton didn't understand us at all, which was sort of strange, being that he had a kid and all. But then again, she was a girl. More on that,though, later. Anyway, like I said,Brixton wrote the Christmas Angel one year and decided to put on that play instead. The play itself wasn't bad, which surprised everyone. It's a story of a man who lost his wife a few years back. This guy, Anthony Andrews, used to be real religious, but had a crisis of faith after his wife died during childbirth. He's raising this little girl all on his own, but he hasn't been the greatest father, and what the little girl really wants for Christmas is a special music box with  an angel engraved on top, a picture of which she'd cut out from an old catalog. The guy searches long and hard to find the gift but can't find it anywhere. So it's Christmas Eve, and he's still searching, and while he's looking out through the stores, he comes across a strange woman he's never seen before, and she promises to help him find the gift he's searching for. First,though,they help this homeless person (back then they were called vagrants, by the way); then they stop at an orphanage to see some kids, then visit a lonely lady who wanted some company on Christmas Eve.