Crossed Signals
Joe Hazard donated the land for a cross that towered over Mayhaw, Mississippi. He never dreamed his generosity would spark a divine comedy.
I.
I was out on assignment when they chunked a brick through the newspaper’s office window. I have a general idea who “they” were, but “nobody” saw them so I can’t press charges. The Beacon’s secretary, Carmella, got so scared that I started carrying. The pen is mightier than the sword, but neither stands a chance against a hand cannon.
I’d hate to use it. Folks who turned against The Beacon once happily read about little league, engagement parties, and Garden Club in its pages. That’s still the bulk of what we run. When we published a piece about the Cross of Christ National Church bringing a cross to Mayhaw last year, I wouldn’t have described it as hard news. Just getting the cross here took finagling, but the story we ran polished every tension between interested parties into a gleaming account of how well people in Mayhaw worked together.
Pastor Tim Jones, the founder of the Cross of Christ National Church, said God wanted the CCNC to build the tallest cross in Mississippi in Mayhaw. But a local ordinance prohibited anything taller than the City Hall clock tower from being built. The cross’ height, 175 feet, would also require it to be at least a mile from the airfield used by crop dusters and emergency helicopters. And an ideal spot with highway access had been sold for construction of a SmallMart. Just when it looked like the CCNC would give up on Mayhaw, Joe Hazard, whose cattle pasture abutted the north side of town, donated five acres for it.
Construction commenced in May and in less than a month, the cross stood taller and prouder than any of the thirty-two others put up by the CCNC. There was no sanctuary. The CCNC called itself a church, but the crosses themselves were its cathedrals. It owned no other spaces for people to worship, though it had a corporate office outside Memphis.
You could see the cross from anywhere in Mayhaw, which prompted a story from The Beacon: an article with complaints from folks who were having difficulty sleeping with it looming over them so brightly at night, especially those who lived in the trailer park close to the cross. Most of them were Latino immigrants who worked at the golf course or the chicken processing plant. When I ran an editorial suggesting that it would be neighborly for the Cross of Christ National Church to offer residents blackout shades, the uproar was so loud you would have thought I published recipes for scrambled baby brains in kitten sauce.
One minute we’re seen generally as a community-minded institution. The next, we’re a liberal, anti-Christian rag. It was a head-scratcher.
The houses and trailers of those who complained got egged. People canceled subscriptions after sending letters to the editor reminding the community that most Mayhaw residents were Christians, and that we lived in a country founded on Christian principles. References to Matthew 10:34 abounded. It was as if the paper tried to cast a shadow on Jesus rather than shed light on how the Mayhaw cross might improve its relationship with the neighbors who lived nearest to it. I didn’t know where the bile came from. We hadn’t had such a strong, negative reaction to anything since we incorrectly identified the salutatorian in a cutline eight years ago. One minute we’re seen generally as a community-minded institution. The next, we’re a liberal, anti-Christian rag. It was a head-scratcher, and we ran every letter to the editor unabridged just to prove our commitment to being the town’s voice.
It didn’t work.
Now I know why.
II.
Crews from the Cross of Christ National Church cleared the five acres of Joe Hazard’s land before the ink dried on the lease. It was boilerplate stuff except for the duration of the lease: 600 years, the same age as Noah when the flood came. The lease absolved Joe from any issues caused by his tenant, and the property reverted to him if the rent went unpaid, an act of God destroyed the cross, the county condemned the cross for reasons relating to maintenance and upkeep, and some other legal mumbo jumbo. Joe’s friends tried to get him to pay for breakfast at Earlene’s the morning after the contract was signed.
“Nah,” he said after swallowing a cheekful of biscuit and gravy. “They prorated this year’s lease. It won’t even cover the tip. Boys, my estate and I are making dollar a year off that lease for the next 600 years.”
“Who negotiated that deal for the church?” Jerry Michaels asked. He was the oldest of the group—seventy-eight—but could still use a winch to yank a stubborn calf out of its mama better than a vet a third his age. His second wife made the best lemon meringue pie in northeastern Mississippi.
“Negotiated it myself,” Joe said. He put one more bite of biscuit and gravy in his mouth and swore to himself he’d stop there. It had been getting harder to get out of his chair.
“They’re the first ones to best you in a deal,” Jerry said. “Land that close to town goes for ten thousand an acre these days. You could put a grandkid through community college on that.”
Two colleges, one in California and one in Massachusetts, had already flown Ellie to their campuses just to show off. She captained the soccer team and sang a respectable soprano in the church choir.
“I didn’t do it for the money,” Joe said. “I did it for Jesus.”
“Well, throw the money changers out of the temple,” Jerry said.
Joe didn’t add that his grandkids were smarter than Jerry’s and would be going to college far away from Mayhaw. The oldest, Ellie, could not have been a more perfect child. She would be a senior next year, and her scores were so high that two colleges, one in California and one in Massachusetts, had already flown her to their campuses just to show off. She captained the soccer team and sang a respectable soprano in the church choir. Ellie sometimes steered to book smarts over common sense, and sometimes she moaned about not having a normal life because of her parents’ expectations, but Joe knew her brain would get her where she wanted to go.
Joe felt a felt of twinge of guilt for saying he leased the land for Jesus. He did, of course, love Jesus. But he also did it because he knew it would infuriate his son-in-law, a closet agnostic who just got elected mayor and refused to grant the CCNC an exception to the building height ordinance.
III.
When Pastor Tim Jones came to the city council meeting last year to make a case for allowing the cross to be erected despite the height ordinance, he wore a perfectly tailored black suit with a white shirt and a black tie and well-walked but immaculately shined shoes. He wasn’t much to look at—a hair under six foot, thin without being sallow, the same salt-and-pepper goatee sported by half the men in Mississippi over the age of forty—but when he talked, people listened like he was giving instructions before the rapture.
When he paused, those sitting behind him whipped themselves into a Pentecostal frenzy, shaking in their seats, mumbling jibberish, jumping up in the aisles. I covered it for The Beacon. I halfway expected Pastor Jones to pull a diamondback rattler out of his worn-out valise and pass it around. Instead, he pointed his right index finger at the table where the elected officials sat and stage-whispered just barely loud enough to be heard over all those rapturous souls, “I know what Jesus says. What say you?”
City council members said nothing for a full fifteen seconds after Pastor Jones spoke. You couldn’t say it was dead air because hallelujahs and amens echoed through the room. Finally, Joe Hazard’s son-in-law, Mike Ratcliff, edged his mic to his lips.
“Thank you, reverend, but city code prohibits the construction of anything taller than the clock tower. The council and I spoke before this meeting about the matter. There are two votes for it, two against it, and one abstention, which means I have the deciding vote. I heard nothing from you this evening that changed my mind about bending the law.”
After Mike hired a Mexican lady, Karla Barrios, to help around the house, Jill didn’t do much more than ferry kids to school and soccer matches. Her eyes had lost their sparkle.
Mike looked at the other council members. “Has anything changed with y’all?” he asked.
They all stared holes through the floor. Charlie Robinson, the one who abstained—who knows what Mike had on him?—opened his mouth like he wanted to speak, so Mike pressed forward to the next item on the agenda. Pastor Jones stayed at the podium. He looked at his pinky ring, a gold band with an inset ruby that had had a platinum cross across it, his one visible concession to the wealth born of beating Bibles, and whispered into the mic, which was still hot, “Thou shalt place no other gods above me.” Then he turned and walked out.
I wasn’t sure which version of the bible Pastor Jones quoted from—my King James version read “Thou shalt place no other gods before me”—but the allusion to the second commandment was clear. Most of the people who had come to City Hall filed out dejectedly with him, muttering things under their breath about godlessness and having a recall on the election.
Joe Hazard didn’t walk out with them. He watched the rest of the meeting because he hated the way his son-in-law ran it. Mike let people talk too long when it was obvious his mind was made up. He said things that highlighted his knowledge of the law and their ignorance of it—and then smiled and tilted his head. He used big words.
Mike Ratcliff was a brilliant man and a capable attorney, but he sapped all the verve and spontaneity out of his wife, Jill, Joe Hazard’s daughter, who had grown gray and morose and slightly overweight over the last ten years of being just a little wrong about everything. After Mike hired a Mexican lady, Karla Barrios, to help around the house, Jill didn’t do much more than ferry kids to school and soccer matches, and read whatever was next on the book club’s list. She went to church and the garden club and served on the Main Street committee, but her eyes had lost their sparkle.
Joe called the CCNC pastoral hotline on the way home from the council meeting.
IV.
Three months after the Mayhaw cross’s grand opening, Pastor Jones came back to preach. The whole town was there. More people came to hear him than had shown up the night before for the home opener of the hapless high school football team, which seemed fated to endure yet another losing season.
“This cross is not merely a remembrance of Jesus’ life and example, not merely a place where lost souls unburden sin from their hearts,” he said, gesturing to all the people who surrounded the gazebo where he stood. He looked as serious as Solomon announcing he would soon split an infant in two. “It is not merely a reminder of the Christian principles on which this- great nation was founded. This cross is a beacon of love and selflessness, a highway to the hearts of everyone who can see it.”
Pastor Jones paused for effect. Then he beamed a smile that made everyone breathe deep, like they were on a rollercoaster about to plunge a hundred feet. “Of course, it ain’t just a beacon of Christ’s love. It’s a beacon to the internet. Starting tomorrow, if you can see this cross, you will have free access to the rest of Jesus’s world. The G in this 5G network stands for God.”
He pointed to the cross, and a hidden door swung open. The Mayhaw cross looked like steel and concrete, just like the CCNC’s other thirty-two crosses. But it had a wooden stairway inside that led to an office and battery backup station at the center of the cross, and from there to the parts of the cross that went up or out, the CCNC had essentially created a massive antenna.
Church staff shared QR codes linked to directions for using the CCNC as an internet service provider. There would be no charges—ever—and users would have access not only to the CCNC News Channel but also to CCNC religious services streamed from Cross of Christ locations.
People closed their eyes and opened their mouths to cheer—the local cable company had been gouging them for spotty internet access for years—and many of them had signed up on their cell phones before they got to the parking lot. There were some glitches at first. Streaming to old platforms like Facebook moved slowly, though CCNC had a parallel platform, CCNCSocial, that worked well and offered slick parental monitoring. Then there was the week that CCNC leaders “accidentally” shared a spreadsheet with the usernames of everyone who tried to access porn. There hadn’t been so many red faces in Mayhaw since the end of Prohibition. The next week they rolled out trivia apps that allowed people in different age groups to win prizes based on their knowledge of religion or American history.
“I love BibleQuest more than any sport I ever played,” Ellie said. “Those of us who feel God’s divine and supernatural light have a different way of seeing the world.”
Ellie Ratcliff, Joe Hazard’s granddaughter, ranked first in the state in all categories, and first nationally in bible trivia. When The Beacon ran a story on her achievement, she credited God and her grandfather for her love of competition and her knowledge of the Good Book. “I love BibleQuest more than any sport I ever played,” she said. “Those of us who feel God’s divine and supernatural light have a different way of seeing the world.”
Ellie’s celebrity status made Mike Ratcliff proud. He loved winning anything, and he changed his tune on the CCNC after they provided free internet services. Joe and Jill said nothing. Ellie was changing. To them, looking at her was like watching your child date somebody you detested: you don’t want to stoke the fires of oppositional defiance, but can’t stand watching the child get burned.
CCNC News had local stories on Sunday nights—that pinched The Beacon’s bottom line—followed by free movies with story arcs that had all the suspense of an Easter tableau. But for Halloween, they ran The Handmaiden’s Place, a truly scary if somewhat derivative movie in which the protagonists, members of the Offered family, discovered happiness by rejecting everything they saw on mainstream media. The CCNC News app pushed updates about the movie steadily the week before it aired, making it out to be the most important American film since Red Dawn. I turned it off when the father of the Offered family killed the man who raped his daughter, then told her she’d have to carry the child to term.
Mayhaw residents talked about The Handmaiden’s Place for weeks. Some girls started wearing the pleated white caps popular with the women in the Offered family. Men began putting Bowie knives in scabbards on their belts and wearing square-toed boots like the Offered patriarch.
The number of knife wounds treated in the Mayhaw ER quadrupled. One particularly zealous man began applying his knife to “harlots’ heels.” Whenever he saw a woman wearing high heels, he’d mutter lines from Deuteronomy and 1 Timothy, hold the women down, and saw off the heels from their shoes. He broke the ankle of a lady lawyer in a pantsuit, but she decided to leave town instead of pressing charges.
Mayhaw had changed. People stopped going to bars. Parents pulled their kids out of school and began homeschooling them—especially after the female circuit judge struck down a new school board policy that allowed prayers to be read on the high school intercom. After the CCNC announced its “Bright White Star” Christmas initiative for needy members of its congregation, there weren’t enough bell-ringers to keep the Salvation Army afloat.
One of the first kids who stopped going to high school was Ellie Ratcliff. She quit the soccer team and went on a hunger strike until her parents agreed to use the CCNC homeschool curriculum. “I’m tired of looking for meaning everywhere,” she said with a melodramatic sigh that would have made a TikTok influencer jealous. “All the meaning I really need is here, in my heart. And in BibleQuest.”
Mike wanted to treat it like a phase. But not Jill, who had more fire in her belly than she had for the last decade. When Ellie missed the early application deadline to the colleges that had flown her in for visits last year, Jill threatened to send her to a boarding school in Maine so she could relearn how to think for herself.
She would convince her dad to get rid of the trailer park—Americans needed to return to self-sufficiency, as her mother’s dependence on Señora Barrios proved—which started with women running Christian homes again.
“Stop trying to gaslight me, Mom,” Ellie said. “The fact I’m starting to see things differently than you suggests I am thinking for myself. I’m not crazy.”
Jill seethed. “I don’t think you’re crazy,” she said. She would have punctuated her sentence with a loud swallow of wine, but the Mayhaw Package Store had gone out of business. “Why do you think we went to the trouble of teaching you French, or paying for AP tests, or putting you in select soccer clubs? If you don’t get away from here for college, you’ll regret it. You’re too smart to stay around here.”
“What makes you think I’m going to college?” Ellie said.
Her parents’ outrage tied their tongues in the moment, but Jill did tell Joe Hazard that night. When Ellie announced at a family dinner later that week that she had met the man she wanted to marry on the BibleQuest chat app, Joe summoned her parents to the front foyer, which soon echoed with strident whispers. Ellie made out very little of their conversation. Her mind had turned to making Mayhaw our nation’s newest city on a hill. She would convince her dad to get rid of the trailer park—Americans needed to return to self-sufficiency, as her mother’s dependence on Señora Barrios proved—which started with women running Christian homes again. There would be blue laws to enact, and more crosses to erect.
Ellie did the dishes and dreamed of wedding gowns and helping with a cross in the next town. Her virtual fiancé was a little older and had the capital to evangelize. At about the same time she put the last pot in the drying rack, Joe drove his tractor over the gates that separated his property from the CCNC’s. He ran the hay needle through the door to the cross, then Jill poured diesel on the stairs and dropped a match. It took a few minutes for the cross to catch fire, but when it did, it burned higher and brighter than any cross in Mississippi history.
And that’s saying something.
V.
I wouldn’t say things went back to normal immediately after they burned down the Cross of Christ. Joe took all the blame and got arrested, of course, but maintains the mayor told him shortly before the conflagration that the cross had been condemned. It provided legal grounds—very shaky legal grounds—for the dissolution of the contract, but Joe had a talented attorney and planned to file continuances until he died or people stopped caring. He tried to return to his old church after he was released on bond, but found the doors closed. He’s now a devout worshipper of the NFL and TCM. The interview he gave me after he posted bond went into the best-selling issue The Beacon had had in eighteen months. Better than the special edition with letters to Santa.
It took a while, but people stopped checking their phones eighty times a day after they had to pay for data again. Ellie snapped out of her religious phase in time to apply to colleges. She didn’t get as far away as her parents and grandfather thought she would—just far enough away for people not to know that her grandfather had burned down the cross—but the whole Hazard family seemed happier than they’d ever been.
A few months after the brick came through The Beacon’s front window, “somebody” taped a message to the back door accusing the paper of planting the seeds of the cross’s destruction. I put my pistol back in the safe. I knew things had returned to normal. “People” have always blamed the media for whatever goes wrong.
About the author
Thomas Easterling worked at The Oxford American in the mid-1990s, when it was owned by John Grisham, and has been a public high school teacher in Mississippi since.