It had not changed.
It still read Adamiah Linklater.
I stuffed it down into the deepest part of my pocket.
YES.
To be sure.
An onlooker savvy to the details of my covert maneuvers that Sabbath might have been justified in questioning their integrity. There doubtless was, to the skeptically disposed, an ostensibly evasive quality in my reaction to this – the latest unfolding of my life’s irony-burdened plotline. Admittedly, my impulsive tactic might have appeared more fearful and knee-jerk than high-minded. But if a sanctimonious onlooker were to recall Mosiah’s reassurances leading up to the moment of the lottery, might it not then become arguable to said sanctimonious onlooker that my deed was not so much gutless, wicked, and self-serving as it was exceedingly generous? For had I not just transferred my own ticket to paradise to an underling brother? Had I not sacrificed my own enviable place at the very bosom of God? That Brother Ackley so flagrantly failed to appreciate my big-hearted gift was surely not my fault.
God had obviously puppeted me into position to make decisions for the overall good of the clan. Guiding my hand so that it selected my own name from the jar was only Her way, I quickly surmised, of granting me the opportunity to begin steering the church as I – Her Chosen One – saw fit.
She was giving me the go-ahead.
She was trusting me, Her Earthly Surrogate, with the prudent management of Her will.
Anyway, in the limited time afforded me, that is how I rather hastily came to justify my somewhat panicked and demi-divine action of swapping out my own fortunes with those of Clarence Ackley – one of the few men in the room whose name I could remember well enough to call out loud. I can see now that there might have been some errors in my judgment. I did not yet have all the details of the situation to work with, but it was becoming obvious that the Shining Redemption’s drawing was primitive in its nature, and a rite that solicited deep emotions from everyone involved.
Mosiah concluded his prayer. “Amen.”
The congregation echoed. “Amen.”
The old man gave me a nod and shambled back to his chair.
I moved to the pulpit, peering out at the polychromaticized multitude.
And then, of a sudden, there I found myself – a man poised on the tippy pivot point of his own perilous potentiality, coming to the end of one long journey and, with any luck, about to embark on a more fortunate other.
THE LADIES WAVED THEIR fans like a feminine drift of sharks holding steady to a current.
The men sat fixed in their seats, rigid and stoic as a clutch of clams.
I felt Mosiah and his boys breathing at my back; I felt Lamia.
The room grew evermore warm.
My heart started up knocking in my rib basket. The Ark took to swaying in a most nauseating manner, rocked – I recognized the sensation – by a rising tide of doubt. I gripped the pulpit rails, teetering at the front edge of a swoon, adjusting more squarely over my legs while waiting for this lubberly tremor to pass.
To buy myself a moment of re-composure, I bowed my head, feigning reverence.
I felt about to retch.
Get ahold of yourself, namby-pamby.
That old inspiring voice of reason piped up in the hollow between my ears. But this time that once caring panjandrum had seemingly lost all patience, abandoning any attempts at polite encouragement. Instead, I found myself rather mocked for my weakness.
Do you not see, poseur, that this is your final chance for redemption? Dust off your charm, reach into your bag of wordy tricks, grow some man nuts, and dazzle these folks with your so-called talent.
I juddered and swayed.
I swallowed and worked my jaw a few times, but naught came over my teeth but a dry and wordless wind.
I had never been so thirsty.
Oh God! I internally moaned, not so much in supplication, as in abject profanity.
For it appeared my cleverness and my voice – once such inseparable playmates – had someway grown estranged. I raised my face to the congregation, gazing out at their visibly escalating scrutiny. I well knew this horror. It was the same stage fright that had so besieged me in my doleful days as an impotent poet.
Someone coughed.
Someone whispered.
Someone snickered.
Zut and Vexation!
I nearly pissed myself with dread.
As would any animal in such a panic, I began wildly searching for a getaway. The center aisle stretched before me to the back of the church. I quick calculated the probability of escaping by this route. But no. I had seen what happened to Ackley. They would pounce before I made the doors. It appeared my lot was cast. This ship had already hoist anchor and I had no escape but by dropping dead or making of it what I could.
I tried another go at option two.
A mouse squeak issued from my lips.
“Louder!” someone heckled.
Others openly laughed.
Please help me, I silently implored to anyone – god, angel, or otherwise – who might be willing to lend me a hand. For I felt myself to be sinking down.
And that is when my eyes fell on Prudence.
She sat on the edge of her seat, hands folded in her lap, tipped forward so that the moistened top of her breasts bulged from her décolletage and glistened in the variegated light like a pair of rain-washed fruits.
That, as they say, was all it took.
In that instant, I had a revelation – this beauty before me was no longer just a face in a locket; she was no longer only a figurehead to inspire, a dream to be enjoyed abstractly, or a chaste damsel to be kept at arm’s length. The maiden was no longer only a high-branched peach to someday be procured when ripe. No. The hour of that plucking was at hand. She was the just reward for all my afore-endured sorrow and hardship.
Do not resist.
Prudence smiled anxiously up at me. She seemed to know what I was thinking. She arched her back. She appeared sure, and through her surety, made me sure too.
You are my Chosen One, she seemed to say. And I, in all my virginal comeliness, am your bounty.
I understood clearly then that I needed to give myself over to the tide. I needed to let myself be inundated by the waves of that same youthful passion by which I had once composed “Moon Night.” I needed to return to that Genesistic instant and let myself be tossed in that ancient sea of poesy if I were to ever let drown my loneliness, be reborn, and enter unto that long-sought bosom of rosy comfort and contentment.
My love gazed up at me with motherly reassurance.
Surrender.
I had to let go of all prudence, I realized, if I were to ever take hold of my Prudence.
I OPENED MY ARMS to the sanctuary.
The rainbow poured down on me like a fall of ethereal water.
The ladies all stopped their fans.
I smiled piously.
And then, with a soothful tone, I started in –
“My beloved spake, and said unto me, rise up, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone!”
I paused as my scriptural invocation soared out over the crowd.
The ladies tensed, and then shifted in their seats.
“Sisters!” I then thundered. “Brothers! We are the Fortunate Children. The Chosen Ones! For God – Our Mother – said, Let there be light…” I held up my finger and turned it in the bright air. “…and then She shined Her light on us!”
Slowly, one by one, the ladies recommenced to waving their fans.
Someone offered up a timorous “Amen.”
“And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters! That firmament, good people, is this home She has given us – our New Eden. Here is the birthplace of Her radiant love. From out of it flows the sparkling wealth of all the rivers of the world. For I say unto you today, this ovular oval of palm trees and sand is the most hallowed woman hole in all th
e seven seas; it is the gateway to and fro the blissful garden paradise of Her original womb!”
“Holy Mother!” someone offered.
I felt a force waking within me.
“Every fish and star and bird was born from the deep fountainhead of that mysterious garden. We, here in this room, are that original orchard’s first two-legged yield. And now, after all our hardship and hunger and wilderness wandering, yea, after enduring our souls’ long voyage through the winter of our discontent, we are privileged to be returned to this once lost paradise. Yea and yea, for this island ring is the Promised Land – the earthly equivalent of God’s very own feminine lap pillow of luxurious comfort and contentment.”
The men fidgeted beside their wives.
The fans beat slightly faster, stirring a tangible breeze.
The whole church creaked, and then listed somewhat to starboard.
“Ladies!” I swept my arm over the women scattered before me. “Sisters!” I pointed at individual members of the mammary-laden crew. “I say unto you – You each possess a garden within. A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters…”
“That’s right!” An enthusiastic fellow shouted from the back of the church. “Praise be to our ladyfolk!”
I felt a shudder of spiritual inebriation.
“You, ladies, are the wholesome gatekeepers of those gardens, verily, the tight-lipped twin sisters of God. A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. You ladies hold the petticoated profusions of the Milky Way. The living waters bubble forth from your glorified nippular wellsprings to slake our wretched parchedness. You hold the source of the succulent fruits and flowers that are born in your bloomered gardens. Oh, tend those gardens well, my ladies. Keep them tidy and well irrigated. Keep your gate hinges oiled, yea, for the salvation of Man depends upon the access to your garden’s fruity offering and – it goes without saying – your merciful willingness to share it up with him as the holy hunger doth periodically arise.”
I let that figuratively mixed notion go to work in their heads, paused to catch my breath, and then, turning to a slightly more portward tack, I continued to allow this wordy flow inspired from Solomon’s Song of Songs, as its chapters were etched on my heart and its verses now poured freely therefrom.
I increasingly quaked as I preached.
“Awake, O north wind; and come thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may blow out.”
Straightaway, as if on cue, the ladies blew up a corresponding wind with their fans.
The Ark gently rolled. I braced myself against the pulpit as the aforesaid spices wafted throughout the sanctuary – a heady mix of tropical flowers, sanctity, and perspiring women coming into the front edge of a collective heat.
Its effect was dizzying in the extreme. I felt myself becoming evermore spiritually opiated.
The congregation began to sway in a somewhat drunkenly fashion.
“Hallelujah!”
“Yea and yea and verily yea, oh, I now ask ye, brothers – how many a lad do a porty gal blow? For that same flower-spiced wind didst blow we men over the soft belly of the ocean, leading us, by way of our compass needles, beyond the rain, through the dark and coldened nights, to this garden world of warmth and sunshine and would-be stimulation!”
“Thank you, God!”
“Men – My Brothers – I say unto you, we are the luckiest stuff of dreams. We are the wealthy ones. The graced. The spiritually erect. For verily, we are the blessed bosom nuzzlers of God Herself as She is replicated in our comely sisters and wives. We are the implanters and the nuts and the happy reapers all at once. For our ladies conjure us in the moonlight. By night on my bed I sought him, they dream, whom my soul loveth.”
I glimpsed Prudence sidelong. Her up-tipped torso brought a quick vision to my mind of Cloud’s voluptuously carved figurehead. It was encouraging, to be sure, but I could not allow myself to wholly dwell on her gifts just yet. For my sermon was just turning wing on wing with the rising wind, and I had needs attend to its allegorical rigging.
“Yea, My Brothers, we are Her servants and Her sons and Her little friends. We are the wild beasts of Her garden – the gobblers-up of Her uteral offering, and the sucklers at her sweet udderal fount. Let my beloved come into his garden, pray our sisters, and eat his pleasant fruits.”
(Yes, admittedly, my metaphors were growing evermore divergent. But at this point in my oratory, it was becoming less and less me who was doing the preaching and more and more a latent force being reborn from my nether being. Said mystical force was speaking through me by way of some long-submerged primalism, some deep-down candor of fish babble built out of amniotic wind and water, offering up this once-forgotten gibberish lisping toward the Word of Words before words – a profound primordial poesy predicated on those leviathan tremors one feels in one’s most ineffable moments of awe at the magnificent mystery of Life.)
“Hoo-ya, Brothers! Come unto your wives as horny clove-hooved beasts that She might tame your pagan wildness with her angelicized wifery. Let Her coax and wheedle and draw forth from you your most rigid and profane attribute so that She might take hold of it and, by the baptismalisation of her wet angel kisses, make it sacred.
“Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices. Oh, and oh! Smell them now, My Good Fellows. For those pungent spicy mounds all around you are consecrated, and by way of their goodly spices will you find your upright hungers divinely seasoned and, likewise, well satiated.”
At that point, my soles began to lift ever so slightly from the deck. I gripped the pulpit to hold myself in place.
The ladies were fairly beating up a gale with their fans.
The Ark was all out rolling on the proverbial sea, up and down and up and down.
The congregation came to its feet and began offering up ululations – a jubilant mixture of laughter and moans and arbitrary throat sounds of a euphorical nature.
All atremble now, I penetrated their nonsensical din with my booming voice.
“Oh, My Brothers and Sisters! It is your holy duty to reimagine that original Love of God, for through that re-imagination do we move ourselves closer to Her. Yea and yea! Each time a wife couples…or, er, as the case may be here in Eden… triples with her husbandry, she is moving all souls involved beyond their otherwise stifled purgatorial torment to a hygienic realization of salvation. She is beaming a welcomed light on the world, My Good Shiners. She is instigating – if only for the space of a convulsive instant – the most sublime deliverance available to us here on our earthly walk!”
A lady then jumped into the center aisle and called out, “Ayawooooooh!”
She began pulling at her clothes and twirling in ecstasy. “Ayooooooolalala!”
Other women joined her in this frenzied fan dance.
The men all raised up their arms, clawing at the rainbow light, praying and swaying like tribal lunatics.
Most entertaining.
“Awndolayooolooohoopoooey!” I bellowed. “Oh, my Brothers and Sisters! Oh, Children of God! Hear me when I say unto you, Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it! Oh la la! … for thy love is strong as death!”
The ladies were twirling and twisting and waving their arms and taking hold of one another, some of them kissing and petting and fairly groping one another’s soft corners with otherworldly animation and Sapphic friendliness.
“Awe – Ooooh – Laaaaa!”
The Ark felt to have entered the Trade Winds, beating gleefully over those frenzied feminine swells of oceanic ecstasy.
“Oh, I say unto you, Blessed are the Aroused! For through their arousal shall they rise up and catch a glimpse of God!”
“Awoooowaaah!”
I sped now toward my sermon’s climax.
“Children of Eden! Fortunate Sons and Shiny Sisters of God! For this day – the day of your prophecy’s fulfillment – is indeed a special day, deserving of a spe
cial celebration in the form of sacrosanct marital merriment.” I punched the air and thrust my arm before me, pointing to the back doors of the church. “Go now and go! I say unto you as your Chosen One, mark this day with thankful celebration! Go ye now and tend those gardens, partake of that holiest of all holey communions!”
They were quick to react to my command.
Those Edenites fairly evacuated the Ark like a stampede of cattle fleeing a burning barn.
I hovered momentarily, somewhat dazed, watching the last of them gallop out the doors.
All in a pant, I peered out at the big rainbow-washed room.
Prudence sat alone on the front pew, beaming up at me – her soon-to-be-husband and deliverer. She appeared unambiguously poised for the fervid tossing off of her outworn chastity.
I summarily considered the logistics of taking her right there on the altar. As we were about to become the Shining Redemption’s supreme twosome, such an act would surely be deemed only marginally sacrilegious, feasibly forgivable, if not somewhat suitable. Anyway, right then it seemed worth the gamble.
Prudence stood and floated into a beam of liquid blue light.
Oh, her fecundity!
I stepped from behind the pulpit, fairly tingling with amatorial anticipation. Naught was left but for me to swoop down and take her up in my arms. I tensed, preparing to do just that.
But then to my mortification, someone behind me cleared his throat and said, “Good enough.”
I whirled around to find Mosiah still planted in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, bobbing his head and thoughtfully scratching at something in his beard.
“A bit unorthodox in its delivery,” he said, “but all in all, an inspirational sermon.”
I SUPPOSE I SHOULD have been pleased as Punch that my pastorial debut had earned Mosiah’s venerated endorsement, but that was not my overriding emotion in that particular moment.
Not at all.
Truth be told, I could not have cared any less what that old cup crust felt one way or another. My worked-up mind was busy with other matters, the number one of these being the impediment posed by the string of pearl buttons running down the front of Prudence’s well-stuffed dress.
Fortuna and the Scapegrace Page 25