by Jeff Crook
“I didn’t know you cared.”
“You should have mentioned that during our little interview.”
“Why? Did you want to offer me a job?”
“No, but I might have gone a little easier on you, maybe.”
“Maybe?”
He stopped and considered me with comic gravity. “Sam Loftin was a friend of mine,” he said without a lick of sincerity. I almost laughed. “For a while there, I thought you had murdered him. Do you know the last time we had a murder in Malvern?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “Not once since I’ve been sheriff, and I’ve run unopposed the last two elections.” We had reached the edge of the stage, which the senator had not yet mounted, he was so busy kissing flesh and pressing babies. Luther and his family were already standing serenely near the microphone, like so many cardboard cutouts against the backdrop of drought-stricken trees.
“Your mother must be proud,” I said to Stegall. I think what most upset him about Sam Loftin’s death was the possible damage to his record. Having it ruled a suicide kept his sheets clean.
“She is very proud. There’s no crime to speak of in Malvern, not like in Memphis. The people here love me.”
Mickelson finally arrived. Stegall took up his position near the stairs and settled into his best Secret Service pose. Luther Vardry stepped up to the microphone and cleared his throat. The crowd quieted down while he reminded us why we were there—to see and hear their native son. And then he launched into a long biographical narrative while the senator stuck his thumbs in his button holes and beamed like a lighthouse.
Luther finally drew the curtains on his story. “Malvern loves Bill Mickelson. By golly, all of the Seventh Congressional district loves him, even if he is still a Democrat.” Mrs. Ruth rolled up beside me in her wheelchair, Deacon at the helm.
Someone in the crowd shouted, “Because he votes like a Republican!”
This earned the heckler a big laugh from the crowd. It also allowed the senator to muscle the microphone away from Luther.
Ruth said, “Listen now, preacher, and you will hear a real preacher.”
“It is true that I vote more often with my Republican colleagues than with the Democrats. This has earned me the ire of many in this state, who accuse me of betraying the Democratic party.” This was met with general applause and a good deal of cowboy whoops and catcalls.
“To them I say, it is not I who betrayed the party. I have not changed. If anything, it is the party who has changed and betrayed us all, by consorting with Socialists…”
Huzzah! said the crowd.
“And Marxists…” Huzzah!
“And tree-hugging liberals who would sell your jobs just to protect some little bitty fish in a stream nobody has ever heard of.” He had to raise his voice to be heard. “And flag-burning atheists who want to take God out of the pledge and the classroom!” It was a while before he could speak again. He didn’t seem to mind.
“The people of Tennessee are good, God-fearing people. I am your representative in Washington. I have served the people of this state in one capacity or other most of my adult life—first in the state legislatures, then the House, and for the last twenty-nine years in the United States Senate. I am a Democrat, yet my Republican constituents vote for me because I have always served the people of this state. Not just the Democrats. Each and every one of you, whether you vote for me or not. If you are willing to cross party lines to vote for me and return me to office, then I am willing to cross party lines to serve you.”
He launched into a recitation of his bacon list. It was obvious from the glow on the faces of those around me that many of them had directly benefited from the federal dollars Senator Mickelson shoveled into their Swiss bank accounts. Especially the man standing just behind him—Sheriff Stegall.
23
IT OCCURRED TO ME, not for the first time, that Sam Loftin had been the treasurer of this band of well-dressed thugs, and that he had died with a respectable amount of cash stowed in a suitcase behind his daughter’s closet. A suitcase that also contained barely licit photos of his underage daughter. I could see how somebody might have wanted to kill him if he were skimming money from whatever graft operation the senator had set up around here. I couldn’t see, as yet, how the photographs fit into it.
Senator Mickelson spoke just long enough for Mrs. Ruth to have a nice nap, but not so long as to put the rest of his audience to sleep. She woke up as the prayer meeting started to break up, and asked Deacon to take her back to Luther’s house.
We hadn’t gone five steps before a bookish older gentleman greeted her boisterously. He seemed about Luther’s age, maybe a little younger, though considerably wider in the middle and babyishly flabby in his white guayabera shirt and Panama hat. He wore it tilted at what he probably thought a rakish angle.
“Hello Eugene,” Ruth whispered tiredly. “Deacon, I believe you’ve met Eugene Kitchen, vice president of Luther’s little community chest.”
Without breaking his smile, Eugene turned his head and spat a skeet of dark brown tobacco juice through the gap in his front teeth. It arched like a meteor past me and cratered the dust. “You can’t build that church, preacher. I’ve seen the plans you filed with the county. The entrance is on the highway.”
Deacon pushed Mrs. Ruth’s chair through the uneven grass. “Everything has already been approved by the county engineer.”
“But that entrance will allow unregulated access to Stirling Estates,” Eugene said. “That’s against the covenant.”
“The entrance only allows access to the church and the parsonage.” He nodded to Luther Vardry and his family as they joined us. Holly tried to climb into Deacon’s hip pocket, while Nathan slid his arm around my waist and nuzzled my ear. Mrs. Ruth’s head nodded forward in sleep again. Deacon put a hand on her shoulder to steady her.
Eugene continued, “I’ve also heard you plan to use the parsonage as a halfway house or something. You can’t do that without approval.” He seemed to know everything people weren’t allowed to do at Stirling Plantation.
“It’s not a halfway house,” Deacon said. “We provide counseling and employment placement for drug addicts and indigents.”
“Sounds like a front for farming out illegals,” Eugene snipped.
“The parsonage belongs to the church, not to me, and its uses are decided by church committee, not by me. I live there as long as my church will have me. I am a poor man. But who among us truly owns anything? Look to your own house. Do you own the bricks, the wood, the wires and pipes?”
“The bank owns more than I do.” Eugene laughed until no one joined him.
Deacon’s Bible had appeared in his hand, almost by magic, and as he spoke he waved it about, like a conductor’s baton, while still pushing Mrs. Ruth’s chair with the other hand. “Everything belongs to God. It came from God and it returns to God. Even our souls. We are but renters of our own flesh, abiding for a few years upon this earth.”
“Amen,” Luther said.
“But while you abide here,” Eugene sneered, “you have to live by the covenant.”
Ruth stirred in her chair and tugged at her oxygen tube. “God dammit Eugene, can’t you give a body peace for one day?”
Eugene stepped in front of her chair, forcing Deacon to stop. “Mrs. Vardry, this church proposal violates numerous provisions in the covenant. I intend to file a stop action with the court tomorrow morning.”
This lit the fire in her cold furnace. She jerked the oxygen hose from her face and nearly came up out of her chair. “I’d like to see you try. While you’re at it, call your son-of-a-bitching lawyer and ask him about article thirty-six of the covenant. He will find there a clause that states my house and property exist outside the statutes of the covenant.”
Ruth motioned for Deacon to steer a course around Eugene, then continued, “I insisted on article thirty-six when I deeded the remainder of my father’s farm to Luther so he could develop it. If not for me, he’d still be pumping
gas and handing out religious pamphlets on Highway 70.”
“People pump their own gas these days, Meemaw,” Holly said.
“Holly, dear girl, your mouth is good for one thing and it isn’t talking,” Ruth said.
Luther finally decided to come to Eugene’s rescue. “But Mama, the agreement also states that if you sell…”
“Or if I die and Nathan inherits it.”
“… the property will fall under the homeowners’ covenant,” Eugene finished with his thumbs stuck proudly in his trouser pockets.
“I haven’t sold the property, Eugene. I have given it to the Hope Church of the Gospel Revealed. It’s a charitable donation, transfer of title, severed and subdivided, in perpetuity, from Stirling Estates.”
“Meemaw!” Nathan wailed.
“Which means, dear boy, that you’re never going to see a clod of that dirt. So you’d better start looking for a real job, unless you plan on selling popsicles the rest of your life.”
“I make good money, Meemaw. I bought my own house right here.”
“Because your daddy drove those people into bankruptcy and foreclosed on their home.”
“Now, Mama,” Luther began.
“I know all about it, Luther. I know a good many things. I still have deep connections in this community. You’d be surprised how much I know about what happens around here.” She looked at me when she said this. I couldn’t read her expression, whether she was trying to tell me something or if her gaze just happened to rest on me for the moment. She looked tired, but her wellspring of piss and venom had not yet exhausted itself. She grasped the wheels of her chair and jerked it around with surprising strength, until she was facing her son and grandson.
“It’s long past time you found this boy a wife, Luther. He needs settling down. If you can’t find somebody his own age, maybe you can buy him some stupid little second cousin from Virginia’s family. But you’d better hurry. You’re not getting any younger, Nathan.”
“Neither are you, you old vampire!” Nathan howled. Holly ducked behind Deacon to hide her giggles. “I wish you would just go on and die.”
“I’m tired, Luther,” she sighed as she tugged the oxygen hose back to her nose. “Take me back to the house so I can rest before dinner.”
Luther nodded and started to push her away. Eugene moved aside to let them pass, but then stepped in front of Deacon, his flabby chest puffed out. Even standing on his toes, he barely came up to Deacon’s chin. “This ain’t over, preacher. I know you tricked Mrs. Ruth into giving you that property. Luther will have her declared mentally incompetent and the title transfer voided. Luther Vardry owns this county.”
Deacon smiled beatifically. “But God owns the land, and He is with the righteous.”
24
LUTHER LEFT US AT THE PARK gate to take his mother home, while Holly took to the mound to pitch for the North Lakers against the South Lakers—apparently there was a whole other lake in the neighborhood that I hadn’t seen yet. Though friendly, both teams sported enough former college and high school baseball and softball stars to give it a vicious edge. Holly had been a high school All-American and led the Malvern High School Mustangs to the state championships two years in a row. She wore her old high school uniform. It was tight enough to make my eyes water.
I sat with Deacon in the stands and tried to tease a little information out of him about the people around us, but he seemed more interested in the outcome of the game than examining the players. To me, they all looked like potential murderers, from the pitcher who beaned a runner trying to steal second, to the catcher who spiked a woman sliding into home and sent her to the hospital in Mrs. Ruth’s ambulance. Deacon answered with grunts and shrugs, so I turned the conversation to a topic nearer to his heart. “How did you get Ruth to deed you that property? It’s worth millions.”
“I gave Ruth something more valuable than all the land and all the riches in it,” he answered. “I gave her the true, revealed Gospel, the forgotten Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
I wondered if it was the kind of Gospel that involved the handling of venomous serpents to the accompaniment of dueling banjos. “How did you get to be a preacher, anyway? You don’t seem the type.”
“How did you get to be a photographer?”
“It’s a long story.”
“So’s mine.”
“I asked first.”
He adjusted his sunglasses and settled in on the bleachers. “After Iraq, I decided I had had enough war and went AWOL for a while, until they caught me. I spent a few years as a guest at the federal hotel. When I got out, I didn’t have any skills other than driving a tank, for which there are fewer opportunities than I was led to believe when I enlisted. I had a good speaking voice. I tried to get into radio but I never could make it past the first interview. Even though I wasn’t a religious man, I’d been raised in the Church. I knew my Bible verses and I could do a good imitation of the old fire-and-brimstone preacher back home, good enough to make my grandmother cry.
“So I started preaching on the streets of New Orleans. At first, I shared a corner with a man who sold what he claimed was Jordan River water. I’d preach for a while and then I’d pass around a Community Coffee can, but I never did much good, barely enough to keep from starving. So I tried working corners in the wealthier parts of town, but they’d just call the cops and run me off. I ended up ministering to the lowest of the low—alcoholics, drug addicts, gamblers, ex-cons—because they seemed to be the only people who wanted or needed to hear my message. That’s where I should have stayed, but I’m a hardheaded man. I wanted to be the next Jimmy Swaggart, but I wasn’t preaching the gospel of wealth. Mine was a different kind of gospel.”
He removed his black jacket and leaned back with his elbows on the bleachers behind him. His glasses slipped down his sweaty nose. I didn’t see how he wasn’t dying under that sun. I had been following the shadow of a light pole for ten minutes, trying to catch a little relief.
He continued, “You see, working with those people, I had come to a realization. You could even call it a revelation, of the true Gospel, not the Gospel taught by the church, but the true Gospel, the true word that swept the world and transformed it in a generation. The Gospel of the modern church carries no such message, it has no transformational power. It is no different than the pagan religions it replaced. In many ways, it is the pagan religions it replaced, with only the names changed.
“I began to preach the new Gospel, and my preaching brought people hope who had no hope, joy where there was only sadness. People came to hear me, and once they heard me, they stayed. I was doing three services a day on Sundays and packing them to the rafters—black, white, you name it, they were there.
“Then Katrina hit and our little Ninth Ward church was washed away. The Lord took my church and scattered my saints. Me and my mama ended up living in a FEMA trailer for about nine months before the Lord tested me again by taking Mama. I never did find out what killed her—she started coughing up blood one morning and she was dead by dinnertime. Them FEMA bastards put her body in a plastic coffin and flew her to Atlanta and next thing I know they had burned her up and scattered her ashes, they wouldn’t tell me where. They kicked me out of that trailer so I was living on the streets. But I found out Mama had a life insurance policy, so I cashed it in and moved here, rented a space for my church in an empty strip mall in North Memphis.”
At the beginning of the fourth inning, Holly took the mound. Deacon paused his narrative to shout “Hey batter batter!” His voice drowned out the others in the crowd and seemed to carry to the farthest reaches of the park.
“Let’s see if you still got the old pepper, sweetheart,” Eugene shouted as he squatted behind the plate. He popped a flabby fist in his glove and people started to cheer. “Come on Holly! Let’s see what you got, babe!” She kicked the dirt around with her cleats while she loosened up her throwing arm, adjusted her ball cap to shade the sun lowering behind the plate, unbuttoned the top butt
on on her jersey to give everyone the best possible view of her tits.
While Eugene was still popping his glove and shouting, “Throw the damn ball!,” she whipped an underhanded scorcher across the plate. It bounced off the top of his mitt and his nose exploded in a mist of blood. He went over backward, screaming like a peacock. The game ground to a stop while they stretchered him off the field. Her next toss was a strike that the batter never saw.
Before I could swing the conversation back to the topic of the residents of Stirling Estates, Deacon picked up the narrative of his Pilgrim’s Progress. He wasn’t kidding about it being a long story. I should have gone first. “You can’t have a church without a congregation and my saints were scattered I knew not where, but the True Gospel was revealed in my heart and I had to minister to somebody. So I opened up my Bible and found Matthew 25: 35–36. ‘I was hungry and you fed me; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you took me in. Naked, and you clothed me; I was sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me.’ I thought, Where can I find those who are hungry and thirsty, strangers naked and alone, sick and in prison? I thought about it for a long time and I prayed on it, until one night I had a dream about my grandmother in her nursing home.
“So that’s where my ministry took me—to the nursing homes, to minister to those in their last and in many cases worst days upon this earth, to bring them such comfort as I could and the Gospel that could set their souls free. At one home, I met a woman named Ruth Vardry. Her son had forced her out of her house so he could sell it. To spite him, she gave the house and what remained of her land to me to build my church. She gave me the money to restore her house to its former glory, so that, in her words, it can finally do some good in the world instead of causing only pain and misery.
“I didn’t start ministering in the nursing homes for the money, but the money is good because of the message I bring. It is the Good News, the lost Gospel that was buried and hidden by the bishops of the early Church. I bring people hope when they have no hope, when they are staring down their last days upon this earth and wondering what will become of them and all their works and all their sins. I bring hope and peace, and in return, they fill my cup to overflowing. Naturally, some are like Ruth—I have no illusions about her. She has bestowed such bounty upon me to keep her children and grandchildren from inheriting it.”