The Sins of Walker Railey
I had to know: Did the minister of the church I grew up in try to murder his wife? I told him I thought he was guilty. “I hear what you’re saying,” he said.
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“I’m surprised you haven’t asked about my suicide attempt,” he said, once again presuming on my role. He talked about it and began to cry. I found myself curiously removed. I began to tabulate the times he had cried so far. He had cried when he talked about the death of Bishop Goodrich. “What I was aware of”—here is the point that he cried—”was the death of tradition.” He came close to crying when he spoke about having to leave this office we were in, which was dear to him. He had cried when I asked him about his recent return to First Church for a memorial service for his baby-sitter, Janet Marshall, who had suddenly died of lupus in September. “When I walked back into the sanctuary,” he had said, “the first thing I saw was the pulpit, and I just kind of stood in the back, really, and at that point kind of lost consciousness of what was going on around me.” Later in the day, when we were at lunch, he would cry when he remembered his neglected childhood. I didn’t question the genuineness of those responses. These were real losses—of his tradition, his comfortable home, his profession, his childhood, and nearly his very life. But they seemed—what? Was it fair of me to compare his losses against Peggy’s? against his children’s? Why didn’t he cry for them?
What interested me about his suicide attempt was the note he left behind, in which he had spoken of demons. In First Church there had been much speculation about what Railey’s demons might have been—perhaps sex, certainly ambition. This is the usual Methodist metaphorical construction of biblical language. I asked Railey what demons meant to him.
“‘Demons,’” he said, “that’s just not, that’s just not a word I use a lot. I’ve talked to you about depression, that’s a demon. I’ve talked to you about a low self-esteem, that’s a demon. I’ve talked to you about a great fear over the uncertainty of the future, that’s a demon. And there may be a lot more demons, but my point is that several things I’ve struggled with would fall under the category of demons.”
“And yet your very fist sermon was ‘On Seeing Satan Fall,’” I reminded him. “I wonder what your opinion of Satan is. Is he a figurative creature or a real force?”
“Well, first of all, I preached ‘On Seeing Satan Fall’ because that was taken directly out of the text of the Scripture. It was a sermon on the church. I do not see Satan as some incarnated presence in life—who’s over against God and therefore the two are in a battle and we’re kind of little pawns in the game. That makes me less responsible for my own actions. I think there is evil in the world and I think there is goodness in the world and I think that both the inclinations of good, which would be godliness, and the inclination to evil, which would be satanic, are inside of us.”
“But you don’t think that at any point in your life you were controlled by forces that you couldn’t—”
“No, no, I don’t,” he said abruptly. “I think that’s a theological and a psychological cop-out.”
Railey turned the conversation back to the church, back to the moment when he had stood in the rear of the sanctuary at Janet Marshall’s service. Several years before, when Janet’s illness flared up, she had summoned her pastor to her hospital room and demanded to know what he was going to preach when she died. She had him actually write out a sermon and read it to her. “Her death became the first occasion that I was not able to do something in an ordained way that I would have done,” Railey remarked. Instead, he had slipped into the church at the last moment, hoping no one would see him but knowing that everyone expected him to be there. “There were some people who, I think—I can’t be sure of this—but there were some people who went out of their way because they didn’t know what to say. But there were a whole lot more people who did. They just squeezed, hugged, kissed, slapped me on the back. They could feel my pain,” he said, crying again. “I wasn’t able to conceal it; I wasn’t trying to. I think everybody knew that I was there under a great price, just emotionally, to walk into that sanctuary. So there was a great combination of pain also a sense of joy that the community was there, and I felt its love.”
“Did you feel a sense of shame?” I asked.
Railey looked at me sharply. He is, of course, alert to insinuation. “I felt, probably, every emotion you could feel.”
“But did you feel ashamed?”
“I felt a great need to be forgiven, if that’s what you’re talking about.”
When he said this, it seemed to me as much of a concession as I was likely to get. We were still talking in generalities and metaphors—Methodistically, as it were—but I had the feeling that we were nearing the truth, as much as I was likely to see of it. On the other hand, perhaps I was merely twisting his words, finding more meaning than was really there.
“I felt a great need to…to…to be reaccepted,” Railey offered.
“As who you really are?” This was a leap on my part.
“As who I really am,” he agreed. “As someone who never wants to lose being part of the community that the church represents.”
“And having had that experience, do you feel now that if you”—here I searched for another word, but none would come—”I’m going to use the word ‘confess’ to whatever you are not talking about now, that they would forgive you?”
“That’s a pretty leading question.”
“It’s a hard question to ask.”
“That…that really…you—that I wish you would ask it another way,” Railey said, “because I’m not going to answer it like that. It’s just too…it’s too much of a setup.”
I tried to think of another way to ask, but he cut me off. “Let me just make a statement,” he said. “I was aware that night of the love that permeated the sanctuary—God’s love—in their lives. God’s love is both a judging love and a forgiving love; it’s both a healing and a haunting love. And I experienced God’s love in all four ways that night. Okay? And I think that’s about the way I would say it.”
Before I left, Railey wanted to know what I thought of him. “I don’t know what your impression is, and you don’t have to give it to me, but I’ve been real honest with you today,” he said.
I admitted that I found myself relating to him, but I also said that I could not construct an innocent man out of his behavior. I recounted his misleading testimony to the police, his avoidance of the grand jury, his inexplicable actions on the night of Peggy’s attack, and so on. “I think you’re a guilty person,” I said.
“I hear what you’re saying,” he said.
Here he was, reflecting my feelings, while I was accusing him of trying to murder his wife. I didn’t know what to think.
“I appreciate your even responding to that,” Railey continued. “I’m aware that nobody can sit down with all the facts that are supposedly known…and just make it all fit. That’s a frustration that everyone has felt, including me.”
“Confess,” I urged him. “It will haunt you forever, it will drive you crazy.”
“I don’t know if that’s a word of advice, a backhanded comfort, or what,” Railey said. “I am not guilty. I didn’t do it. I don’t feel tormented by the guilt of what I didn’t do.”
It would be the next day before I understood some of what disturbed me about my conversation with Walker Railey. There was, of course, the possibility of his innocence. If he was guilty of no more than infidelity, then what an awful fate for him to bear. How cruel of me to disbelieve him. But if he strangled Peggy and was going free, then what kind of person was he? I still didn’t know.
I had been struck, in a literary way, by the metaphorical parallels between Peggy’s condition and that of her children, who were in a custody limbo, and that of the congregation, which was still stunned and bewildered, and that of the crime, which continued to be unsolved, and that of Walker, who was, as I pointed out to him, suspended between one life and another. “Yes, yes!” he said with an eager intensity that surprised me. “Somebody asked me three or four months ago, ‘How’ve you been?’ And I said I kind of feel like I’m in an emotional coma. In that I’m breathing, existing, and living, but at that point—this is while I was still in the hospital—like anybody in a coma, like Peggy and others, I hear people around me talking and making decisions that affect my life, and at this point I don’t seem to have any control over those decisions. So I’m kind of in a fixed state. I guess you could say the same thing now.”
Perhaps it was the very eagerness with which he accepted this observation that chilled me, because of course there was no real equivalence between Walker Railey’s tragedy and Peggy’s. Soon after out interview he left to start a new life in California, but Peggy’s life would never start again.
And what will become of the congregation he leaves behind? It is in many respects his congregation, much of it comprising people like me, who had felt left down by the churches of their youth and who had been drawn back to faith by Railey’s radiant ministry. They shared a common belief in the goodness of Walker Railey. Now they were having to consider whether what they had taken as good was actually evil—or worse, far worse, that they would never really know the truth, and for the rest of their lives they would be bewildered, the truth would never be known, charges would never be filed, Peggy would neither die nor live again, and Walker Railey would never be revealed as either hero or villain but instead would haunt them forever, asking “Who am I?”
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