Pennies for the Ferryman - 01 by Jim Bernheimer

afternoon classes to find the Reverend Reginald Duncan waiting with my mother in my living room. For as long as I could remember, Pastor Duncan was the pastor of the Maple Street Methodist church. He was a bland fellow, and his reputation among the adults was that while he wasn’t much as a preacher, he was a good pastor, patching together a number of shaky marriages. Unfortunately for the Ross family, dear old Dad split before we realized there was even a problem. Pastor Duncan gave me the warm appraising look that he’d been giving me for the past twenty something years, shaking my hand with a firm, strong grip. He looked to the kitchen, where my Mom had retreated, and then smiled.
    “Want to go for a drive, Mike?” he asked.
    I nodded – if we were going to have a private conversation, it wasn’t going to happen while Mom was staking out the kitchen.
    As kids, we’d always admired Pastor Duncan’s car – every two years, year in, year out, he’d change to a new-model car – usually a Cadillac. I hadn’t given it a thought when I was a kid, but now that I knew how much they cost, I wondered how he could afford it. Maple Street Methodist didn’t pay him that much, and his wife was a teacher at the local elementary school.
    “So, Pastor,” I began, once we were belted in and backing out of the driveway. “How can a preacher pay for wheels like this?”
    Pastor Duncan smiled, reaching out to twiddle a knob on the air-conditioning. “When I was a newly minted Minister, back in the dark ages before cable TV and cell phones, I was an assistant minister out in Ohio. I learned then that if you were going to be worth spit in the job, the hours tended to be something other than nine-to-five.”
    He paused to turn off the radio, “So, one Saturday night at eight o’clock, when I was hoping to put the final, finishing touches on the next day’s sermon, I took a phone call on our church’s hot-line. The caller was a troubled young man who wanted to die and was looking for someone to talk him out of it. I spent the next eight hours talking to him on the phone. He decided that life might be worth living.   I delivered a pretty vanilla sermon the next day and I didn’t hear from the gentleman for a long time.”
    I got the sense that his good deed was rewarded. Pastor Duncan continued, “Three years later, I got a call back from that young man. In the intervening years, he made something of himself and felt that he owed me something, which was ridiculous, but that’s how he felt. He asked me what I was driving then, which was a beat-up old Chevy with too many miles on it. The next morning, he drove up with a new car and a stack of papers – an hour later, he drove away in my old beater, and I owned a new, top-of-the-line Caddy.”
    Pastor Duncan paused and then shook his head. “Every two years after that, he comes by my house, drops off a new car, and drives away with the one he’d delivered two years prior. I pay for tags, title, and insurance – which isn’t bad, given the cost of cars these days.”
    By this time we were on the beltway, heading towards the District.
    “So, Pastor, do you believe in ghosts?” I asked.
    It turned out that Pastor Duncan did believe in ghosts, which wasn’t all that unusual, given his firm belief in life-after-death, but it was refreshing to talk to a seemingly sane person who could take my story in, believe it, and not bat an eye. He stopped the car for a minute, parking carefully before dialing a number on his cell phone. “Mike, there’s someone you’ve got to meet.”
    Sixteenth Street in the District is a long, north-south street, and every few blocks there’s a different church: catholic, orthodox, protestant, even a mosque. As you drive further south, the neighborhoods become increasingly gritty and distressed, until you reach the hospital district, where it becomes downright scary. There’s a cluster of hospitals there, including an outstanding rehabilitation