by Cameron Judd
In illustration, he recounted his own experience, while in seminary, of seeing an anthropologist of world renown struck by a car as he raced across a busy street. The man had made the reckless run because he’d seen a man on the other side of a road fiercely beating a dog as it whimpered and tried to crawl away. That anthropologist was on the seminary campus only to briefly visit his brother, a seminary administrator. The anthropologist was a famous and articulate advocate of a thoroughly subjectivist view of morality. From the pulpit, Feely read from one of the man’s best-known essays: “We do not discover moral realities existent outside ourselves, as we believe we do, but rather we, individually and collectively, create our own moral notions and project them upon the canvas of our universe, then tell ourselves we have ‘discovered’ them. We project these, our own creations, just as a projector in a theatre projects upon a screen images that appear real, but are merely fleeting light, shadow, and color. The question has been posed: For what reason should I care about the welfare of any others but myself except to the extent that such caring benefits me personally? The honest answer to this question must be: ‘For no reason at all.’” These words, Feely said, were those of a man who spent months in a body cast from injuries received from sacrificing his own safety for the sake of a beaten animal. A man who proved “better and greater than his own philosophy,” as Feely put it.
Feely concluded his sermon with the reading of relevant scripture and a final, summary thought: “We are not what we think we are or say we are, not in the end. We are what we in fact are, through no choice of our own: beings made in the image of our creator, attuned to the unshakeable reality of a moral order that overreaches us all, and which will remain what it is regardless of our acknowledgement of it or lack thereof. Just as we ourselves will remain what, and who, we are: creations of God, who put some of himself into us.”
“Glad you made it,” Feely said to Eli and Melinda after the service. “I confess I was not persuaded I would actually see you here.”
“I, for one, will be back,” Melinda said. “How refreshing to hear a sermon that allows you to actually exercise your mind, not just religious emotions!”
“Thank you,” Feely said. “I’ve long believed that a quietly reasoned presentation, quietly given, speaks far more loudly than the most impassioned and stentorian bluster.” Feely looked at Eli. “And what did you think, my friend?”
“I think you may have just made a church-goer out of me, Reverend. I’ll be back.”
“I’m thrilled to hear it. God bless you both … and God bless my forgetful mind! I just realized I completely overlooked bringing that Harvestman manual with me. I’ll run it by your office during the week, if I may.”
“That will be fine,” Eli said. “Much appreciated.”
UNCLE JEFF PARVIN OWNED a big old house on the southern edge of Kincheloe County, and if there was a locale that might be considered the headquarters of the Parvin clan, it was Uncle Jeff’s place.
A house-builder by trade, Uncle Jeff, now in his upper seventies, had expanded his old dwelling, which dated to 1897, more than once over the years. The expansion included, most significantly, a big rectangular addition on the rear that functioned as a center for Parvin family gatherings. There was a kitchen worthy of a large restaurant on one end, commercial stoves and all, but most of the addition’s space was taken up by a room sufficient to hold several large tables and host an army of diners. That room had been used for Parvin weddings and receptions, family reunions, private family concerts by Parvins who fancied themselves talented country music performers, and even for wakes and funerals. A huge family Thanksgiving dinner was held in Uncle Jeff’s hall every year, with a similar gathering a month later for Christmas. The Parvin Super Bowl get-together was nearly as big an event as the holiday gatherings, though usually with even more beer and sometimes even a brawl or two, if football loyalties were divided.
Uncle Jeff Parvin had gotten the idea for building “Parvin Hall,” as he usually called it, after contracting to build the family clubhouse behind the home of Carl Brecht. The money Mr. Carl had paid him for that job had funded most of the Parvin Hall construction.
When not in use for a family-wide gathering, one end of Parvin Hall generally functioned as a family tavern. Uncle Jeff’s beer was ice cold and he charged his kin no more than what it cost him, plus fifty cents. He saved the fifty-cents-per-beer profit and gave it all each year to the Christmas Children charitable program. “A man’s got to buy his ticket to heaven somehow, I figure,” he always said of that annual donation. It was usually sizable; Parvins drank a lot of beer in the course of a year, most of it at Uncle Jeff’s place, which featured a room-sized cooler stocked with the favored beverage.
Drinking alone and determinedly on this particular Sunday afternoon in Parvin Hall was Rawls Parvin, whose Parvin glare was now more a blank gaze, washed dull by alcohol. He generally had a good tolerance for the brew, but was almost to his limit. He had a lot on his mind … a lot of one thing: he was fuming bitterly over the fact that Melinda was running around with that wimp from the newspaper … was even spending time in private old places with him, doing one could only imagine what … and Rawls had a vivid imagination. He was sure she was doing all the things she denied to him, even though he was three times the man that runt was.
Rawls drained off another beer and decided to wait a bit before going for the next. He was quite near to flopping face-first onto the table and drifting away in a drunken stupor. If he tried to get up just now he wasn’t sure he’d even know which direction to walk to fetch another round.
He was nearly asleep when something thunked hard against the table about four inches from his face, hard enough to make his skull bounce on the tabletop. He jerked and opened his eyes to see a tall, frosty mug of fresh beer before him, some of it running down the sides from having been placed on the table so heavily. Mystified, he pushed himself upright and tried to make his eyes to focus sufficiently to see who had brought him the beer. He couldn’t quite do it.
A male face framed by graying hair, short in the front and past the collar in back, moved down to look into his own from close proximity. Rawls squinted and blinked and finally saw two glaring eyes looking back at him with the same glare Rawls saw when he looked in the mirror.
“Rawls, what’s wrong with you? Can’t you hold your beer no more, boy?” said Lukey Parvin, aka Bennie Neven, short-term resident of the Proud Cherokee Inn.
The face came better into focus, but he could have identified the man from his voice alone. “Lukey? Is that really you?”
“It’s me, nephew. In the flesh. I went to see you in the prison, but they told me you’d been turned loose. And I knew if you were free, you’d come back home. A man’s always drawn back to his home. Especially a Parvin man.”
“You came … to find me?”
“I sure did. But listen to me, son: it’s you and you alone I came back to see. Ain’t no other of our kin who knows I’m here at all, and it’s got to stay that way. I don’t want Uncle Jeff or Cale or nobody else knowing I’m back in Kincheloe. And I can’t lie to you, boy: I might have been followed. By people I surely don’t want to find me.”
“You in trouble, Lukey?”
“Always in trouble. But flying high, too, because I’m going to turn trouble into opportunity. I’m going to fix things with them who are after me. Get back into good graces, you know. I can do it, and I can bring you in with me.”
“You’re losing me here, Lukey. Tell me what you mean.”
“I’ve had the notion of finding my favorite nephew for a long time now, Rawls. I’ve got a problem or two to fix for myself, and once that’s done, I’ll be tapped into something that’s as big as this whole world. A money-making machine like you ain’t ever imagined.”
“That sounds good, Lukey. I ain’t got nothing going on, big or little.” Rawls paused and blinked firmly three or four times. “I’m drunk, Lukey. I don’t know I’ve ever been so drunk.”
It required exertion to talk. The beer had wrapped cotton around Rawls’s brain and tongue. “I do some night guard work down at … Spears-Hinkle and a couple … other plants out in the industrial park. I don’t make much but it’s something.”
“How’d you get hired for security with your prison record?”
“I know some people who pulled … strings for me.”
“Listen to me, Rawls: if you want to make good money and put this penny-ante stuff behind you, you know what you got to do.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to go back inside. When I walked out of that prison I swore to myself I’d not go back. So I can’t sell no more drugs, and I mean it.”
“Well, you better get ready to be a poor man the rest of your days, then, or win yourself a real big lottery. Or get yourself into something bigger and better than drugs. Reward requires risk, nephew. You’ll not get it any other way.”
“I’ll find a way.”
Rawls was fighting hard to say no to the prospect his uncle was slowly unveiling to him. Lukey, though, could see the young man’s will starting to crumble.
“They castrate you when they locked you up, Rawls? I think they must have. You got to grow you a new pair if you’re going to find something better than guarding factories for nickels and dimes. Especially to do what I’ve got in mind for you. You got to be fearless, and hard as nails, to do this. And it ain’t drugs, so you don’t need to worry about that part.”
“I can be hard as I need to be, Lukey.”
Lukey Parvin looked around to make sure he and Rawls were alone. They were.
“Listen, Rawls: I’ve got myself connected to something big, I’m talking worldwide big.”
“Legal?”
“Ha! Nothing worth doing is legal, boy. You know that. Listen … let me get some beer in me, and then we can really talk.”
“Drink this here beer you just set down for me. I need to … to let my belly settle a little before I have more.”
Lukey walked around the table and sat facing Rawls. He slid over the big mug of beer and began to drink thirstily.
“You still filming them dirty movies in them back alley motels, Lukey?”
“Yeah, yeah. But it’s kind of a cover act now. For the thing I’m really focusing on.”
“I bet you’ve seen some stuff, huh, Lukey?”
“Rawls, I’ve looked through my camera and wondered why anybody would ever want to see what I was seeing. But I can tell you: anything you can think of, there’s somebody who wants to see it. Usually a lot of them. But there’s no real money in camera work. So why did I stick with it? I was making connections. The camera work was a doorway, a way of meeting people who could hook me up with something a lot bigger and better. A whole lot bigger and better.”
“You keep talking, but you ain’t said what it is you’re talking about.”
Lukey looked around, then leaned closer yet despite the emptiness of the room. “The Flower Garden, Rawls. It’s back and about to explode bigger than ever. You know what I’m talking about? It was all over the news a few years ago.”
“I never have watched no news, except for sports. I sure don’t watch nothing about flower gardens.”
Lukey laughed and rolled his eyes. “It ain’t that kind of flower garden, boy. That’s just what they call it.”
“I’m going to have to drink a lot more beer before this starts making sense, Lukey.”
“Uncle Jeff’s got enough beer to fill a swimming pool. So drink away. Drink up! Have I told you enough to make you want to hear more?”
“Yeah, Lukey. As long as what you’re wanting me to do don’t put me back in the pen.”
“Nephew, the only folks who go to the pen are them who get caught. I’ve done crimes that could put me away for life, and I’m still roaming free as a bird.”
“Yeah, but you’re always dodging.”
“I won’t deny that. Hell, I’m dodging somebody right now. I’m dodging somebody who I think was sent to follow me. I’m hoping I shook him off, though.”
“Law?”
“Not law. No.”
Rawls rose and headed off to the room-sized beer cooler, his ever-present limp exaggerated into a full stagger by drunkenness. He returned with a bottle of lager in each hand.
Lukey raised his beer mug while Rawls got one of the bottles open. “Here’s to all the money you’re going to make if you hook up to work the Flower Garden with your good old Uncle Lukey.”
“Here’s to the money,” Rawls said, lifting his bottle.
“Hear hear.” They drank, then talked more than an hour. Lukey spoke more about those connections made in California. Connections tied to even deeper ones tied in turn to a world-spanning network, ones through which a man willing to “do the work” could make a true fortune. But only if he had the skill and steely conscience required. “You got to be tough, and hard, and willing to do what has to be done without a flinch. And you got to be silent about it. Full, dead silent, because if the word gets out, one way or the other, your life is over.”
“That’s heavy stuff, Lukey.”
“Damn right. This is sell-your-soul-to-the-devil stuff, this is.”
“So just what is it we would be doing?”
“For the Flower Garden to function, it’s got to have its flowers, got to have its product. That’s where you and me come into it, Rawls. We’ll be what the Flower Garden calls ‘Procurers.’ I already am one. We gather the flowers for the garden, us and others like us all around the world. It’s a select group, the Procurers. But the rewards, Rawls, the rewards … oh, they can be high. Somebody able to bring in the right flowers can get rich. But he’s got to have what it takes. He’s got to have the brass and the grit and the stones and a soul as hard as iron. Have you got them things, boy? ’Cause what I’m talking about is bad-ass. Have you got what it takes?”
“I got it,” Rawls said, though he was far to drunk to half comprehend what either he or Lukey was saying. “I want in, Lukey. But you still ain’t spelled out … what you’re talking about. You’re talking code and riddles.”
“You’ll understand it at the right time, when you ain’t so drunk. I’m bringing you in slow, to let you get settled about what you’ll have to do. I’ll explain it all plain enough when the time is right.”
“Okay.”
“And not a word to nobody, Rawls. Not a soul. No mention of me being back home, of the Flower Garden, or nothing. You got that? Not to your daddy, not to any of our kin, not to nobody.”
“I’ll keep quiet.”
“Good. Because the folks who run the Garden, they got ears and eyes you never know are there. You betray them by so much as a blink or a whisper, and before you know it, folks are looking around and saying, ‘What happened to old Rawls Parvin? He just kind of vanished all at once.’ you know what I’m saying to you, son? You get it?”
“I get it.”
They clinked and gulped through another toast, then Rawls had a question. “Lukey, you really have done this already? This Flower Garden thing?”
Lukey stared a few moments across the big empty room, and drew in a slow breath. “Yeah, I’ve done it. I sure have.”
“You made money?”
“Good money. Then I hooked up with a woman, married her, even, and she got her claws on every penny I had, and disappeared. That was about the same time the law began to catch on to the Flower Garden and things got so hot everything went underground and dead for a time. But it never really died. The roots run way too deep for that. It’s growing again, and it’s going to be bigger than ever. Too big for anybody to shut down.” He looked Rawls in the face and got back on his subject. “Damn that thieving woman … if I ever find her, I’ll swear I’ll turn her into something you’d not recognize as a human being, boy. Roadkill. Hamburger. I’ll do it. Because some of the things
she done left me in dutch with the Gardeners. That’s what they call the ones who really run the ring, the Gardeners. I think they’ve got somebody following me, and not to invite me to Sunday School, no sir.”
“Yeah. You said something about that.”
Lukey drank a little more in brooding silence, then said, “Yeah, that woman took my money, and she might have took my life, too. She’ll pay high for that, Rawls. I’ll make sure of it. A man can’t let a woman wrong him and not pay her back for it.”
“Yeah.”
“That reminds me: that pretty little princess you was hooked up with back in the day, the one who cut you loose and whose daddy ruined your football career with that bullet in the leg … did you ever settle the score with her and him?”
“Not yet.”
Lukey looked disgusted. “You got to man up, boy! She spit in your face and made a fool of you, then left you sidelined for good, thanks to her dear old daddy and his gun, and you’ve let her go for years without you spitting back?”
“I know … I know. But I’ll overlook a lot when it comes to Melinda. She’s a special kind of girl.”
“That’s the very kind of soft talk I can’t hear from you, Rawls. Not with what we got ahead. You want on the Flower Garden money train, you kill all your sentiment and softness. Otherwise you become a problem. And the Gardeners don’t solve problems. They just make them disappear. For good.”
“Why do they call it the ‘Flower Garden’?”
“You’ll understand that soon enough, that, and a lot of other stuff.”
“It’s just that I don’t know that I get what you’re talking about. I think I do, but I ain’t sure. Your talk is all code and riddles.”
“Exactly.”
“So why should I say yes to something without even knowing what it is?”
“Because it’s me who’s telling you, and you ought to trust your old uncle. But Rawls, boy, you’re making me wonder if I’m wrong about you being tough enough.”
“Hey, Lukey, I’m tough enough. I am! Honest to God!”