Deleted Scene: Pastor Bob

Here’s another deleted scene! As anyone who’s read All the Birds in the Sky knows, Patricia goes to a special school for witches called Eltisley Maze. It’s actually two different magical schools stuck together – and if you want to know more about how that happened, read this. But originally, there was another teacher at Eltisley Maze, and he was even more unusual than the other teachers in the book. Read for yourself!

So this is a flashback to Patricia’s high school years, in which she spends time with a teacher named Pastor Bob, who teaches Trickster Magic. Pastor Bob’s title isn’t just a funny nickname – he’s an actual Baptist minister who teaches at The Maze part time, and works at a church in Memphis the rest of the time. In the final version of the book, Pastor Bob got absorbed into the character of Kanot, the head teacher at The Maze.

The usual warnings need to be repeated here – this isn’t as polished as the final version of the book, and I cut this stuff out for a reason. (Mostly, just to make the book shorter and flow better, but also just because it worked better otherwise.) Don’t read this deleted scene until you’ve read the actual book! It’s not really representative of the book in its finished form, and I’m just posting it as an interesting extra.

With that out of the way…

There was one weekend when Patricia was supposed to spend
the entire weekend at The Maze untangling the electrical wiring in a cranky old
man’s bungalow. But instead, Pastor Bob invited her to come spend the weekend
in Memphis. “It’s just a few hours away by airship.” They left campus
late Friday afternoon, and touched down in the church parking lot around 7 PM.
The First Baptist Church of North Memphis was a big stucco prow, sailing up out
of the ground, lit by floodlights from below. At first, Patricia thought the
place was deserted, but then Pastor Bob led her down a tiny side staircase to a
basement, where the Friday night soup kitchen was still in full swing.

Pastor Bob walked around the long space, which looked just
like any cruddy basement you’d ever seen except that someone had installed
really nice track lighting. Pastor Bob stopped and talked to maybe a dozen
people, one by one, touching them on the shoulder or hand and listening as much
as talking.

That night, Patricia slept in the spare room in Pastor Bob’s
one-storey house, in the middle of what felt like suburbia but was in the
middle of the city. The next day, they got up early and drove around town in
Pastor Bob’s Lincoln Town Car, visiting his parishoners who were in trouble.
Everybody was in trouble, it seemed like. Most of them in cunning traps, just
as fiendish as anything The Maze had put Patricia through. Patricia spent the
whole time watching to see how Pastor Bob worked his magic – and most of the
time he either didn’t, or it was so subtle you’d swear it hadn’t happened. He
didn’t cure anybody’s COPD or make anybody so they’d never touch alcohol again.
He didn’t magically keep the bank from taking anybody’s house. He offered
little nudges, here and there. Just watching this made Patricia squirm, because
she’d seen this man turn ice into fire into flowers. Mostly, he prayed with
people, to no visible help.

“Why do you just pray with people? Jesus isn’t going to
fix Mrs. Martin’s broken hip, but you could, just like that,” Patricia
said to Pastor Bob in his car after they’d just had the most delicious barbecue
she’d ever tasted, with lots of corn bread and sweet ice tea. Pastor Bob didn’t
answer her, just shrugged, like she wasn’t paying attention.

Later, a couple hours later, Pastor Bob was driving them
down the big wide street where the center lanes randomly changed direction and
you had to watch the big arrow lights overhead to keep track. And he randomly
turned to Patricia at a stop light and said, “The Bible doesn’t talk about
quarks and pulsars, and it doesn’t tell you how to do a shrinking spell. But I
believe it tells us the important things. You ought to respect that.”

Patricia had pretty much gotten it through her head, they
weren’t going to be doing any fancy magic this weekend – this lesson was all
about restraint, or trusting in religion rather than mysticism, or something.
And then around five PM, right when Patricia was ready to slit her wrists, they
visited a house that was being eaten by black mold, on the outskirts of the
North Side. It had probably been a nice house once, but now it looked like an
episode of Hoarders. Only one person lived there, a man named Rodney Mander, even
though there were two and a half bedrooms and signs that a family had been
there. Patricia wanted to stay standing, because there was no surface that
didn’t look toxic. But Pastor Bob made her sit herself down.

Pastor Bob talked to Rodney for an hour or so – about his
constant drinking and occasional meth and crack jags, about his long-gone
family, and the engineering degree from MIT that he was wasting since the
petrochemical plant gone under. Rodney’s face looked hollowed, like a crypt
keeper, in the light from the one teetering lamp in the corner. Patricia was
waiting for Pastor Bob offer Rodney a Band Aid, like everyone else. And then
Pastor Bob said it, right around the time the tears were slickest on Rodney’s
face: “Rodney, what would you give me if I helped you change your
life?”

“Anything,” Rodney sobbed. “Everything.”

“Think carefully now,” said Pastor Bob. “Do
you mean that?”

“Yes,” Rodney cried. “Yes, yes.”

Patricia almost fell out of her chair. This was a classic
Trickster move, the False Bargain. Pastor Bob had just gotten Rodney to agree
to give Pastor Bob everything, in exchange for Pastor Bob helping him to
change. In other words, Rodney would give up all his power, in exchange for
giving up all his power. With that kind of buy-in, Pastor Bob could do almost
anything. He could turn Rodney into a giant reptile, or give himself the power
to fly. Whatever. Instead, of course, Pastor Bob called some volunteers from
the church to come over and clean this place up, and magic made the whole thing
go way faster and easier than it really ought to have. The black mold came
right off the walls. Some of that clutter was worth a small fortune on eBay,
and the church had its own eBay store, taking a cut for itself. Rodney would
never touch drink or drugs again. And Rodney would do whatever Pastor Bob told
him, from this day forward.

“Whoa,” Patricia said when they finally climbed
into the Lincoln Town Car, around three in the morning. “You own that guy
now. You, like, own his soul. Sorry, poor choice of words.”

“I don’t own his soul,” Pastor Bob said, steering
his big boat of a car with his eyes shut. “I just own his life. There’s a
big difference.”

In the morning, a seemingly well-rested Pastor Bob gave a
sermon about miracles, and how the true miracle was the persistence of faith in
the face of wickedness and despair. Twice.

Top image: Baptist Church, photo by Bert Knottenbeld