They had to use guile and misdirection to keep him from contacting any of the pilgrims who came to visit the Tabernacle. He tried to run things as he always had, but he gave contradictory orders and orders that often made no sense, referring to problems solved and decisions made long ago.
John Tinker took over, carefully and quietly so as not to make the old man angry. The old man wanted to preach and they had him do some sermons on tape in the studio. They were disasters. His voice was beginning to go. He forgot his train of thought and could not find his place in his notes. But he was so important to the national congregation, the Church administration was afraid that if his condition became known they would lose membership. He had become a symbol of the Church. There were over fifteen hundred splendid hours of Matthew Meadows on tape. John Tinker and Mary Margaret sat in on long and exhausting editing sessions. The final selections, over seven hundred hours, were adjusted for color, and then dupes were made on archival-quality tape and stored in the air-conditioned vaults. The old radio tapes were far more numerous, and almost as useful.
And so he was still there, smiling out at his congregation from their living-room television sets, hearty and inspiring, giving his Bible lessons, reading from the Gospel, bringing new converts to the Eternal Church of the Believer. Whenever Mary Margaret saw one of the old broadcasts, it twisted her heart.
They had taken him to three medical centers where diseases of aging were being studied. They said he had had some small strokes, and there was some minor damage from that. But the significant problem was detectable by brain scan, that pattern and configuration which indicated Alzheimer's disease, the most disabling form of senility, progressive and irreversible.
Only a minor percentage of persons in their late sixties became senile, perhaps six to eight percent. And even in the nineties the percentage remained relatively small, peaking at perhaps twenty percent of those at very advanced age. Matthew Meadows, they said, was otherwise in remarkable physical condition for a man of sixty-nine. They could expect an increasing problem of communication, irrational behavior, confusion, more memory loss and, finally, a total impairment of memory and all mental processes, at which time it might be wise to institutionalize him.
After they had accepted the diagnosis, she and John Tinker had agreed that he could be cared for indefinitely at the Manse, in his own suite, surrounded by the great complex he had created. There was money enough. Equipment could be purchased and nurses employed who would keep his condition a secret known only to the family and their closest associates.
Now it seemed they might have to stop including him as a silent member of the trio at the altar. There was no problem about editing out any visible aberration from the tape while organizing it for broadcast, but it would be visible to the thousands at the Tabernacle and in the University auditorium, and they would speak about it in hushed tones to other thousands.
Watching his empty, sleeping face she thought about this new program John Tinker had devised, with the help of the Japanese computer specialist, Oshiro. They would rebuild the famous resonant voice of Matthew Meadows so that it could talk on the telephone to individual Church members. She had tried to talk John Tinker out of it. He said the apparent presence of the old man was essential to the health of the Church. She said it was an abomination, akin to having him stuffed and rigged with wires like a large puppet so that he could preach as well as speak. John Tinker had laughed at her.
Her father stirred and opened his eyes and looked without comprehension at the television screen. The Sunday-afternoon motorcycles were gone, replaced by a shapely young woman who stood poised against a pale sky, at the edge of a high platform. She jumped and, in slow motion, made an incredible series of spins and twists before she sliced neatly into the blue pool water.
He looked at her, and she saw the puzzled look in his eyes, and knew he was searching memory for her name.
"Ernie?" he said in his thin, uncertain voice.
The doctors had told them to be patient with him. Lately he had begun to think she was Ernestine, his elder sister, who had died of pneumonia several years before Mary Margaret had been born. She was surprised at how angry it made her to have him call her that. Ernestine was a few pictures in an old album, a fat young woman who frowned at the camera and who wore odd hats.
"It's Mary Margaret, Poppa."
"Of course. Mag. I'm sorry. Wasn't Ernie here yesterday? I remember she was telling me something about how a mouse got into Momma's sewing basket."
"Ernie hasn't been here in a long time."
"I messed my pants this morning," he said, making his voice small, looking down at the floor.
"I know."
"Willa told you! I told her not to tell."
"She had to tell us, Poppa. We had to ask her why you left the service the way you did."
"I left the service? Before it was over? Oh... I guess I did, because I had to go something terrible, Ernie."
"Mag."
"I'm sorry. I keep calling you Ernie. And... I guess she's dead. She's been dead a long, long time."
"Yes."
"They told me she went right to heaven to wait for the rest of us. I tried to imagine what it was like, where people could wait.
Momma said it was probably like a big golden bus station with gold benches and a door where people come through into heaven. I used to wonder if there would be so many waiting she wouldn't see us when we came through the gate. Ernie would never wear her glasses. She said that being fat was enough. I didn't eat any lunch today. Willa ordered up milk toast but it was too mushy. I couldn't eat it. It made me feel sick to look at it even. I had a milk shake."
"Was it good, dear?"
"It was very good. They have very good milk shakes here.
You like milk shakes. What you should do is move in here."
She sighed as she realized how many times they had gone through this same conversation. If she said she already lived there, he would become more confused and then he would become angry and frightened.
"I think that's a good idea, Poppa. Maybe I will move in here, if they have those good milk shakes."
That would be nice, Ernie. Then I could see you oftener.
Days go by when I don't see you at all, or see anybody except Willa."
"Well, until I can make arrangements to move in, I'll try to come and visit you oftener."
"Maybe I could come and see you. No, that isn't such a good idea. I'm safer in here. They can't get in here, but they keep trying."
"Who's trying to get in here, Poppa?"
"You know. I told you about them. The Antichrist. I don't want to talk about it. I told you that, too. How are the others?"
"The other who?"
"The other members of our family, Mag! What did you think I meant? Where's Paul? And where's your mother?"
"Paul is away. At school."
"He doesn't ever write me."
"He was never much for letter writing."
"I guess you're right."
She was afraid he was going to ask about her mother again, and there was no good way to handle it. She knew that if she lied, she merely added to his confusion. And the last time, when she had told him she was dead and how she died and how long she had been dead, he was overwhelmed by great waves of grief and loss, and he remembered how her dear face and body had dwindled to gray-yellow skin stretched over bone, how the radiology treatments had taken away her hair, her teeth, and any remaining will to live.
Poppa had always been opposed to doctors and hospitals, unable even to discuss them in any reasonable way. He said always that regular habits, a simple diet, a happy spirit and regular prayers to the Lord God would keep the body in fine fettle. Perhaps that would have worked with Momma too, but she could not cling to her happy spirit after Paul mutilated himself. It was as if all the family's luck and some of their shared love had rushed out with the blood from the severed arteries and veins. When he was put away, Momma mourned her last-born as if he had died, whi
ch in one sense he had. They had all planned to be so proud of him.
And it did not take long before she began to be tired, to lose weight, to lose the flesh tones of health. By the time Poppa relented and agreed to let her see the doctors, the things growing inside her had eaten away too much of her and she could not be saved, not by radiology, not by chemotherapy and not by earnest prayer.
But he did not ask about her mother, about Claire, his long-dead wife. He would probably ask about her the next time. She wondered how John Tinker handled it. They never visited him at the same time. It seemed to make him more confused to have them both there.
"Willa says there's going to be lamb stew for supper. That's really good news, Mag. I love lamb stew. With boiled onions in it. The real small kind. Are you going to come eat with us?"
"I wish I could. I'm sorry, Poppa. Not this evening, but soon.
Okay?"
"That will be nice," he said.
"And we won't have to talk about Claire at all, will we?"
It startled her. Sometimes he seemed to be aware of what had happened to him, and to remember all the past. She had spent the Sundays of her life listening to the sweet thunder of his voice. For most of her life he had known everything worth knowing.
She went to him, bent and kissed his lined forehead, patted his silk-clad shoulder. She glanced at the television screen. A man on a horse had a rope around the horns of an immature bull and he yanked it off its feet and ran to where it lay fallen.
"Don't you want the sound on?"
"No. They talk so fast I don't know what they're saying. I just like to watch them. I like to watch them do things."
She had to hurry to keep her date with John Tinker over in the projection room in Communications. He and Finn Efflander were there, waiting for her.
"Why am I in on this particular viewing, gentlemen ?" she asked.
"We need another opinion on this one. We think he's a new tiger. And we need one to hold the show together," John Tinker said.
"You do nicely, Mag. And I am getting a little bit better as time goes by. But Doctor Macy just does not have the spark, and neither do our visiting clergymen. We've got to try to fill the hole the old man left. We've got to get the people crying and carrying on."
6 "Who is this so-called tiger?"
"The Reverend Tom Daniel Birdy from down near Pensacola. Don't laugh at the name, sis. I sent a crew down there with the best portable equipment we could find."
Finn Efflander started the professional tape and stood by to adjust the volume before coming back and sitting on Mary Margaret's right. The picture was good. But the Reverend Birdy was picked up in the middle of a thoroughly pedestrian sermon. He read hesitantly from the Bible. He was a big brown rawboned man with coarse black hair, a broad face and features that made her wonder if there was some American Indian in his lineage.
"But he isn't at all"..."
"Just sit quiet, Mag. Please. Trust us."
Within a few minutes, Tom Daniel Birdy got down to the primary business at hand, the business of saving souls.
"I know what you've been doing in your dumb, sorry lives," he roared, glaring at his congregation. The sudden loudness made Mary Margaret jump.
"Ever' one of you. No exceptions. You and you way over there in the pink necktie. You've been having sick, rotten little thoughts." He was down from the pulpit, pacing back and forth behind the rail.
"Sick, dirty little pictures in your lonely mind. You're ashamed of yourself and you're so glad nobody can see into your head. How do you know nobody can? God can! You've got the anxieties, ever' one of you out there. Money worries eat on you. Job worries. Husband and wife worries. In every black heart there's a little voice asking questions. They gone catch me? They gone find out? Some of you are saddled with old folks, mean as snakes, and you are trying not to hate them because they're your folks, but you hate them anyway and you feel the guilts for hating your own kin. Some of you got kids worthless as crabgrass, prowling the streets, stealing and fighting and fornicatin' in parked cars with other kids worthless as they are. What's gone become of my kids? you ask.
What's gone happen to my job? What's gone become of me anyways? I got more than I can carry. I'm all bent over double and stupid from the load of sweat and worry and hate and guilt and all the anxieties I got to carry around every living minute of every day, giving me the bad dreams and the bad sweats at night. The years are crowding on by and I'm running in place.
Running my heart out and not gaining one simple inch. Is this all there is? Is this what it's all about?"
He stopped pacing and leaned back and smirked at them. It was a knowing and evil grin on his big rough dark face. A wheedling smirk. He lowered his voice to a husky, secretive rasp.
"And you been doin things! You been grunting away at it in dark places, sweatin' and gaspin'. Pleasuring yourself, taking what isn't yours to take. Grabbing flesh and grabbing money while your soul leaks out of you like spit down a drain. In the back of your mind there is this oily slippery little thought that keeps saying to you, now maybe those preachers were right.
Maybe there's a devil and a hell and eternal fire and all that.
But nobody has ever proved it, have they? Nobody has ever come back to tell us all about the weird wild crazy sound of ten billion souls in an agony that never ends, all of them sizzling and screaming at once, screaming for all the rest of eternity, their throats wide open, the eyes starting out of their heads.
"I'M HERE TO TELL YOU ABOUT IT! BECAUSE I
CAN HEAR THE SCREAMIN'll"
He dropped his voice again.
"Now how can it be possible that you black-hearted sinners and you are ALL sinners just as I am, because the thought is the same as the deed how can you shed all that daily anguish and pain and guilt and worry and fear, and sidestep that deep red pit of hell you've earned for yourself ?"
He made use of silence. He shook his head slowly.
"The answer is SO simple. The answer is SO easy. It's laid right out for you, right here in this Book. Want to know how it works?
You have to walk all the way up here to me, carrying that big sick stinking load on your back. You got to come up here and give one big terrible heave of your shoulders and you turn that big load that's killing you... you turn that load over to the good Lord. AND HE WILL TAKE IT ONTO HIS SHOULDERS. He always has and He always will. You take all your burdens and you take your immortal soul and you put them right into His hands and you say, LORD, I'VE HAD
ENOUGH OF THIS! I PURE GIVE UP! I CAIN'T
HANDLE IT NO MORE BY MYSELF! I'M YOURS FROM
HERE ON IN AND FOR THE REST OF ETERNITY!"
He smiled fondly at them all, and said in a soft voice, "Know what's going to happen? He's going to TAKE that load of fear and guilt and dirt and sickness off you. And all He is ever going to ask you in return is you got to live by HIS BOOK, by HIS RULES. The rules are easy. Any fool can follow the Ten Commandments if he puts his mind to it. His mind and his heart and his soul. BELIEVE every God-given word in this sacred Book. LIVE every day in His way, for His glory and for your own eternal joy in heaven. You will stand free, my friends. You will be born again, with no more guilt in you than a newborn child. You will be SAVED, and there isn't never going to be another thing that can happen to you on this side of the grave that can make you afraid, or unhappy, or guilty, or miserable, or sick at heart. NOTHING!
"I'm God's agent standing right here before you. He give me the right to tell you how to drop those burdens and help you drop them. So get yourself on up here, those of you new here today, those of you who got too scared and shy to try it last time you were here. TRY IT! IT WORKS! Those of you who've already been saved, you look around you now for the ones that want to come up and can't quite make up their mind, and you take them by the hand and bring them up to the Lord and you will be doubly blessed. Come on along! That's the way. That's it. One after the other. You been walking all your life, but you never took a walk that's going to me
an so much, now and in the hereafter. Come scrub your soul. Scrub your life clean. Find the way life should be, and never has been for you. Gather in close, all of you. Bless you. Don't try to hold the tears back. They come natural, out of gratitude to the Lord.
They're a true part of being reborn. Thank you, God. This is more souls than I had any right to expect. You've answered my prayers again. Now let's all bow our heads in a prayer of thanks for being able to heap all our burdens on the Lord God."
John Tinker stepped up and shut the tape off and turned to face her, arms folded. "Well?"
Mary Margaret realized she was sitting bolt upright on the edge of her chair, hands knotted in her lap, teeth biting into her underlip. She made herself relax and lean back.
John D MacDonald - One More Sunday Page 7