John D MacDonald - One More Sunday

by One More Sunday(Lit)

  We have a perfect right to retain our exemption on the Church, the assets of the Church and the University. And, of course, if any individual Church member is unable to prove to the IRS his total annual gift we are more than glad to provide him with documentation from our records."

  Robby Nathan spoke again.

  "Would this Henrietta Fund be as big and strong as it is were it not for the weight and prestige of the Church?"

  John Tinker's quick smile was charming. He spread his hands in a big shrug and said, "Probably not. But no tax exempt money goes into it. And it is expended on social matters and political matters. Are we to be totally muzzled by our government? Power equals responsibility and responsibility implies taking those actions deemed responsible. It's another good question, Robby. It helps clarify this whole area for all of us at this table. The Church is against crime, poverty, random dumping of toxic wastes, communism, sloth, indifference, police states, murder and littering the highways. In my sermons I touch on a whole list of social evils, from obscenity to adultery. In so doing, I am a political activist because politics is the art of devising ways for men to live together in peace and in relative comfort. And with, of course, minimal interference from the State in matters that are not the business of the State."

  "And as a matter of fact," Charley Winchester said, 'we have almost as many checks and balances and safeguards as you fellows up there in our nation's capital and by the way, we no longer believe that D.C. means Deliberately Confusing. We have a powerful advisory board formed of all the pastors of our affiliated churches. Over eighty of them now. We have an in-house steering committee, and we have the guidance of the Founders of the Society of Merit. We are supposed to keep their identities secret. There can never be more than twenty living members at any one time. But I thought you'd find it interesting, so I brought along a list you can look at, but not keep."

  After Lewis Train studied it, he said, "Every one from the Fortune Five Hundred?"

  "All but four," Charley said.

  "We get invaluable advice from it. It was old Doctor Meadows' idea to start that group. Those men have a financial and a spiritual investment in the Eternal Church."

  "Speaking of our eighty-eight affiliated churches," John Tinker said, "I want to make a point about the causes we endorse and some of the causes endorsed by other church groups. We did not establish a lot of those churches. We picked them off. Quite a few of them came from national church organizations affiliated with the National Council of Churches, which is a part of the World Council of Churches. They were weak churches, discontented with the national church bureaucracy, and ready to split."

  "Why," Senator Howlett asked, 'in this era which we could call a time of the resurgence of the Christian religion, have these churches become so weak?"

  John Tinker Meadows shrugged.

  "A lot of the church organizations have internal dissension. In the South we have the PCUS, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S." with over eight hundred thousand members. In the North they have the UPCUSA, the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A." with two and a half million members. They've been split apart since the Civil War. Back in 1969 they began to try to get together again, but a lot of the conservative members of both branches didn't like the sound of it. And we have been picking off some of their churches ever since. They did merge in June. But while they were fussing at each other, the Southern Church lost over a hundred and thirty thousand members, and the Northern Church lost three quarters of a million. Their dissension was our opportunity."

  "I thought they'd have more members than that, "Jim Ricardi said, frowning.

  "We tend to think too much about membership totals," John Tinker said.

  "Fourteen million Southern Baptists. Ten million United Methodists. Forty-one million Catholics. Five and a half million Baptists in the National Baptist Convention." He shrugged.

  "We're one of the little ones. Over half a million. But growing faster than most because we make a better effort. We keep in better touch. The affiliated churches that decided to come in with us were quite weak. Now they are strong, so strong that the National Council of Churches keeps pecking at us, trying to find some leverage to make us give them back.

  They won't go back, for the same reason that so many members of the National Council of Churches tried to resign from the World Council of Churches, but it was voted down. A piece of every dollar that goes into the collection plates goes to the World Council of Churches with their headquarters abroad, and that World Council sends seed money to every Marxist revolutionary group in Latin America and in Africa.

  The World Council defends it on the grounds that the money goes for food and medicines, to help the poor, as Jesus Christ ordered us as Christians to do. But a lot of people believe, and I am among them, that if you provide food and medicine, it leaves the revolutionaries with more money for arms and terror.

  "I bring this up only because you gentlemen might hear some strange things about the Eternal Church of the Believer from that big building they call the God Box. It might come directly or indirectly, but when it does, consider the source. The only revolution we sponsor is the return to Jesus Christ. And in this country that is long overdue."

  Conversation returned to aimless generalities until finally Charley said, glancing at his watch, "I happen to know that Doctor Meadows here has a morning meeting coming up, and what I would like to do is take you fellows on a little walking tour of the Tabernacle and the Garden of Mercy before we head back to the plane."

  They shook hands around, all smiling, all showing teeth.

  They would take their little tour, and when they were walking in the Garden of Mercy, a very pretty woman with a camera would recognize one of the Senators and would take their picture in the Garden with the Tabernacle as the background.

  Charley would get them to the jet in time to put them back in 1x4 Washington a little after eleven-fifteen as promised. The color picture and the negative would go into the vault, properly labeled.

  And just how did it go this time? John Tinker wondered.

  Pretty well. A few moments of tension. Not any more than usual. To his dismay he had almost lost his train of thought a couple of times while speaking to them. The same lines had been said perhaps too many times. He remembered his father saying to him long ago, "So far only four Senators and ten Members of the House have seen fit to answer our invitation to come see us. But we'll keep on asking. We'll always make it nice. No pressure. They'll tell the others. You'll see."

  And now the grand total of Senators was over sixty, and he could not remember how many from the House of Representatives, some out of curiosity, some out of suspicion, some out of awe and a certain spiritual hunger. And many, of course, who had the natural politician's instinct to move in close to any kind of visible power.

  Charley had said these two were on 'useful' committees. The ones who didn't bring along any staff were almost always easier to handle, and would usually accept a touch of Charley's Wild Turkey or Finlandia vodka. His lines were getting a little tired and more difficult to say. He decided to put Spencer McKay to work on the problem and see if he could freshen it up a little. It went well, of course, but he was getting weary of it. It was the same kind of listlessness which seemed to have settled over everything. The Senators would go back to Washington and, in time, at the right time, they would have something to say about certain practices of the IRS as regards religious institutions.

  Employees of the Manse were cleaning up the breakfast debris. He took a final cup of coffee back into his suite. A few minutes later his private line rang just once. He glanced at his watch. When it rang again, just once, five minutes later, he knew who it was and what she expected. He was tempted to ignore it. Yet she had promised to use that particular code only in emergency situations.

  The affair was beginning to make him irritable. It was sliding slowly downhill a familiar feeling. It had been one of his more idiotic risks. And she had been a little too obvious from t
he very beginning. His taste ran more to the shy and quiet ones, game difficult to stalk, especially for a public person. Maybe he had gotten into it this time not only out of boredom, or the sexual challenge of it, but also because Rolf Wintergarten was so openly adoring of his new, second wife, and Rolf was such a hardworking stuffed shirt, it seemed more like a bad script than a genuine, heartfelt affair. In fact it was so much like a bad soap opera that it had never seemed quite real to him, even when Molly lay under him, pumping and huffing.

  It seemed like some strange rehearsal, in which everything they said had already been written down and studied, and the camera crew, director, executive producer, script girl and the sound and lighting technicians stood by in readiness for the clap boards and the real take that somehow never happened.

  So, with a deep sigh, and a leaden resignation, he went down and took one of the blue Ford vans from the motor pool and drove down to the Mall. He parked around in back, near the Sears service garage, and walked to the bank of telephones just inside that entrance to the Mall. As he looked for a coin in his pockets, three middle-aged women stopped and stood staring at him, jaws sagging, eyes wide.

  "It is! It is! I told you!" the heaviest one said.

  "Oh, Doctor Meadows!" the thin one said.

  "We're all members of the Church from Dayton, Ohio, and we all love you so much. If we run to the bookstore and buy copies of one of your books, will you sign them for us? Please?"

  He smiled and nodded, nodded and smiled, shook their hands, found the coin for the phone, and then leaned against the wall by the plastic telephone shells, wishing he could, by an effort of will, disappear forever from the face of the earth without a trace, without a memory, with no knowledge of ever having lived. And with no slightest memory of his face, voice or existence remaining in the conscious mind of anyone on the planet, and no reference to him in any file or book or photograph. Death before birth.

  Nine Mrs. Holroyd told Roy Owen that Moses was doing some culvert work for a farmer a couple of miles up north of Lakemore, but she could see no objection to his going back to the barn and waiting for Moses by the school bus where he lived.

  The converted bus showed considerable ingenuity. Homemade steps led down from a door cut into the back of the bus to a screened platform with a canvas roof peaked like a Chinese hat. On the platform was a small noisy refrigerator, a deck chair, two large floor fans, a table with a table lamp. A water pipe led down from the Holroyd house, and there was a hand pump to pump the water up to a big drum on a sturdy platform fastened to the side of the barn, about ten feet above ground level. A pipe led from the bottom of the drum to a shower head above a concrete slab, with a turnoff just above the shower head. A second pipe led into the curtained interior of the bus.

  The uncurtained windows had been spray-painted white on the inside.

  Mrs. Holroyd had told him that Moses was a gem. He did any and all heavy work she asked of him, free of charge. He was very quiet, kept himself clean, did not drink and had no visitors. His red truck was, of course, a disgrace, but he kept it around behind the barn out of sight of the house and the road.

  "People say he's real strange, you know, kind of a religious nut, and don't I worry about him living on the property with me, but I tell them I feel a lot safer with Moses nearby than I would if he picked up and left."

  Roy found a two-foot section of log in the tall grass nearby and rolled it over to the barn, upended it, and sat in the shade and the light August breeze, leaning back against the weathered gray wood of the barn, flecked with bits of color from the coats of paint which had long since bleached away. He thought he would tell Lindy about this, realizing at once that she was gone and there was nobody left to whom he could tell this sort of thing. During the three months she had been gone, it had happened often. He would be planning how he would tell Lindy: "Guess who I saw yesterday."

  "I heard that Red and Ellie are getting a divorce."

  "Let me tell you how Moses fixed up that old school bus." But there was no one to tell the small things to. And maybe that was the very best definition of loneliness, that those bits of trivia worth recounting set up the resonances of lives shared over the years so that the two of you looked at the incident from the same angle of reference, with no explanations needed.

  Something tugged at memory and he recalled a New England summer long ago when he had caught mononucleosis the kissing disease in May of his last year in high school. He had been in bed during the graduation ceremonies, and the doctor had advised him against taking the summer job he had lined up before becoming ill and against any kind of strenuous exercise.

  "Be a slob," the doctor said.

  "Work at it until you get it right."

  That summer had seemed endless, but from the first day of college until now, he had never been without constant obligations, overlapping and interwoven like the leaves of an artichoke, so that, in time, the obligations became the identity, and the self was hidden down in there somewhere, unexamined. He remembered reading long ago that some wise man had said the life unexamined is the life unlived. But what if you did not want to examine yourself ? There was a certain comfort in being wrapped so tightly in obligation you were busy every minute, spending your free time in trying to organize your day and evening so that you could finish everything you were supposed to do.

  Back on the motel bed, contemplating the idea of a life without Lindy at the center of it, he had felt himself drifting away, with no identity left beyond the extensive analyses of stock and bond issues filed on disks, and some old photographs in Lindy's albums, and something of himself in the way Janie looked around the eyes.

  A rabbit came by and stopped close to him, in the grass where he had found the section of tree trunk. The rabbit did not look well. The dun brown fur looked lifeless, and it appeared to move more slowly than a rabbit should. He tried to remember the last time he had seen an animal in the wild. A raccoon face at the kitchen window of the rented cabin the summer before Janie was born?

  The rabbit hunched its back and chewed at the wet grass where the log had been. It straightened and lifted its chin high and scratched the side of its throat with a hind foot. In the stillness he could hear the busy sc ruffing noise of that scratching. It was somehow reassuring, a homely gesture. It seemed to him that a sick or rabid animal would not chew grass and scratch its neck.

  He sat and watched it crop and munch. Suddenly it sat straight up, forelegs against its chest, and seemed to aim its big ears down the slope beyond the barn. A dog was barking in the distance. The rabbit had a new awareness of Roy. No matter which way it turned, one wet brown eye watched him. It looked annoyed. It turned and hopped away, long hops, changing the angle of flight slightly at the end of each hop, an evasive maneuver practiced in such a halfhearted way it seemed to indicate the rabbit had come to believe the maneuver ineffective. Life was a crock, the rabbit said. Find some decent grass and there is some ugly giant sitting there staring at you.

  "Sorry," Roy said.

  "Sorry about the whole thing. Hope you feel better soon."

  And why am I sitting here on a log talking to a goddamn listless rabbit? Because the rabbit is helpless in its own way, as Lindy was helpless in her way. I am not very well either, but if I want to prove I am not mortally ill, I have to learn how to scratch the side of my neck with my hind foot.

  Twenty minutes later the red truck came rattling and groaning along the drive. One front fender was gone. It looked as if it had been rolled down a rocky slope. It stopped behind the barn and Moses appeared a moment later. Roy Owen, as he got to his feet, found himself unprepared for the sheer size of this fellow. He was tall and broad and when he stood still, looking at Roy Owen, he seemed as immobile as any tree. He had the most total beard Roy had ever seen. It grew so high on his cheeks that all you saw were the dark un winking eyes behind delicate little gold-rimmed glasses, a blunt brown tip of a nose and red lips. His black hair grew down across his forehead and was gathered into a rubb
er-band ponytail in back. Hair and beard were a kinky luxurious gleaming black, flecked with bits of gray. He wore a sweaty white T-shirt, overalls and black rubber boots caked with pale yellow mud. No small wonder, he thought, that Peggy Moon had prepared Lindy in advance for this apparition.

  "You want work done?" the talking tree asked. The voice came from deep in the big chest, and the lips barely moved.

  "Peggy Moon told me where I could find you."

  It took many questions and answers before he accepted Roy's word that he was not from the police, not selling anything, just seeking a chance to talk to one of the people who had been among the last to see his wife before she disappeared.

  "Little woman with light hair," Moses said.

  "Months ago."

  "I'm trying to find out what happened to her."