The Comfortable Coffin

by Richard S. Prather

  It was after this that lights came on so bright in the tent that you had to blink your eyes against them. That was for TV, sure enough. You could see the two big cameras, one aimed at the platform and one at us in the seats, with men waiting at them. And as soon as those lights came on, the lealer walked out on the platform, moving slow and easy, his hands out in greeting, a king among men, but a good, lain man himself for all that, you could tell.

  He didn’t waste any time; he exhorted us right from the beginning, and so hard that first he opened his necktie, then he pulled off his coat, and then you could see the honest sweat dripping off his face and coming out in big splotches on his shirt. It is good to see a man sweat like that; you know he means what he says, and he is working hard to get it across.

  Mostly it was about how faith had led him to his power, and how faith would lead us to our cure, and when he came to the part where he told how right in a little back room of the Rocky Heights First National Bank where he was clerking for miserable pay, and sick and ailing at that, he had dropped to his knees and felt the power seize him, it was enough to make a lot of the folks around me shout and groan and carry on in their joy for him.

  Then came the healing. The little weasel-like fellow who the Healer said to us was Charles M. Fish, his manager, stood on the platform and read off the names on the cards, while one by one we marched down to take our turn. When it came my turn, and I had to walk down that aisle with everyone craning to see, and that big glass eye of the TV camera staring at me, I felt my knees would buckle under me before I made it.

  But I did make it, and there I stood at the foot of the platform with the Healer on his knees just above me, a microphone in his hand.

  “Brother,” he said into it, and when I heard his voice booming out in the tent behind me I almost jumped, “what is your affliction?”

  He held the microphone at me, and I said, “Ulcers.”

  “Did you hear that?” the Healer yelled at the crowd. “This big, good-looking young man in the prime of his life is being eaten alive by a sickness that defies man’s medicine, cursed by a fiery torment licking at his vitals day and night—and yet he has faith to stand before me and seek deliverance! Do you think he can be healed?”

  “Yes!” everyone yelled back at him. “He can be healed!”

  The Healer mopped the sweat from his face and looked down at me. “Do you think you can be healed, brother?”

  I could feel the power crackling out of him like electricity now. I couldn’t wait for it to take hold of me and settle things once and for all.

  “I can be healed,” I said.

  ‘Then bend your head, brother. Bend your head, and make sure your faith is just as strong as my power. Because if it is, you’re going to walk out of here a new man!”

  He didn’t wait for me to bend my head. He shoved it down with his big hand, and called out, “Heal this man! Be merciful and heal him,” and then suddenly hit me on the back of my neck with his fist, so that the power in him ran right into me, clear down to the roots. There wasn’t a flicker in the old hot-spot. It was as if nothing had been wrong there in my whole life.

  “I’m healed!” I said, hardly daring to believe it. “I’m healed!”

  He shoved the microphone at me. “Say it again, brother. Cry it aloud in your jubilation!”

  I grabbed my belly to make sure. I didn’t feel a twinge. “It’s gone!” I said. “It’s a miracle!”

  I didn’t care what happened then. I jumped up and down. I waved at everyone in the crowd and shouted right along with them when they shouted hallelujah for me. Even with that TV camera aimed at me all the time I didn’t care. I was never happier in my life.

  When I came back to town to pack my bag and say goodbye, most folks just gave me a pat and a handshake and let it go at that. But Doc Buckles was terribly soured on me. Doc was short and fat, a good man in some ways, always willing to lend a hand where it was called for, and I had the kind of weakness for him that he had for strong drink and godless talk. He walked up and down his office, waving his arms the way he does, and talking to me on and on. Even though he knew my ears were dosed against him he didn’t stop. Once Doc gets started it takes a lot to stop him.

  “What kind of a life is that?” he said. “Being an auto mechanic for a traveling tent show? Working day and night for less money than Ab Nolan pays you at the gas station, making a holy show of yourself at those meetings, living with a bunch of swindling strangers! You’ll find out what it’s like, boy.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but I’ve been called. And I’m following the call.”

  “Called!” He threw up his hands. “You were called to get rid of lustful thoughts by rolling around naked in the snow one night, so that I had to pull you through pneumonia. You’ve been called to bust up Glenn Lyman’s rabbit traps every time he sets them, so you’ve been to jail twice already for that. Every time you’re called it means trouble for you, Aaron. Don’t you have sense enough to see that? It always means trouble when a man’s too good for his own good.”

  “My body was healed,” I said, “but there’s many another got to be helped now. I’m just adding my mite to the work.”

  “I don’t tell you how to fix my car,” Doc said, “so don’t you go telling me about healing. The way you’re acting you’re being just as crazy as your old Dad was. From the time you quit sucking your thumb he filled you up with so much of his hellfire, and talking in strange tongues, and fear of the devil that he clean addled your wits. For all I know, anybody smells sulphur and brimstone as much as you do is bound to get an ulcer from it.”

  It scared me to hear him talk like that, but I know it was no use trying to argue back. I just don’t have the gift of speech, and Doc, especially when he’s got a load of Old Reliable in him, has more than his fair share.

  “I’ve been called,” I said. “If I pass this way again I’ll drop in and say hello.”

  And that’s how we left it.

  Most of what Doc had said was wicked nonsense, of course, but after a few months I found out that he was right about one thing: there could be plenty of swindling strangers even in the camp of righteousness. I worked with the crew of mechanics tending the Healer’s limousine, and the trailers for sleeping in, and the twelve big trucks that carried the Faith Meetings from one town to another. And what I found among those mechanics was enough to curl your hair. Smoking and drinking. Gambling and loose talk. And loose women.

  They gave me a rough time of it when they found out that I stood foursquare against the devil, and they made it even rougher when they saw I wouldn’t play along and fake expenses for repairs, so that they could pocket the money. Many a time I was tempted to speak right up about it to the Healer, or to Charles M. Fish, or even to Miss Emily Jones, the Healer’s daughter, who I got to know pretty well along the way. But I never did, because it seemed wrong to turn in my fellow man to be fired when maybe he could learn salvation a better way. In the long run, I was glad I hadn’t carried tales, because things took care of themselves without that.

  What happened was that I finally had a run-in with Everett Kane himself, the foreman of the crew, and the chief cook of the sinful brew that was always boiling around me. He was a nag and a torment, always giving me more jobs than two men could handle and always complaining about them, even though he knew I was the best man he had, better than he was, for that matter. But I kept clear of him, because he was the one who had done that poor job on the carburetor of the Healer’s car which led the Healer right to me that day. I figured that if it had all been meant, maybe Everett Kane was meant, too, and so I spared him as long as possible.

  But one day I caught him signing my name on a requisition for parts I had never asked for, and I put it to him straight out. He was a strong man, vain about his strength, and he chose to let his fists talk for him. He knocked me down, and while I was praying for courage not to answer violence with violence, he knocked me down again. So having turned the other cheek, you might say, I
got up with a clear conscience and went to work on Everett until he was quite messy and had to be carried off for doctoring.

  When word of this got to the Healer, he called me in and talked to me like an angry father. So I finally explained matters to him, and then everything changed for the better. Everett and the sinners close to him were let out, and I was given his job with power to run things the way they should be run.

  That was the beginning of a better time for me. I made the men under me do an honest job and render an honest accounting, and while there was a little grumbling now and then among the backsliders, there was never anything said or done that could mean real trouble. As for myself, I was so grateful for the way things turned out that I made sure to put the biggest part of my pay every week into the hand of the dealer himself, as a Faith Offering.

  That was how the Healer was rewarded—by Faith Offerings. He would never charge a red cent for using his power; le would just remind folks that all Faith Offerings were welcome and would go to carrying on the good work. And as we moved along, town by town, staying a week at each town, the offerings came pouring in like the waters of Stony Brook when the spring freshets are running.

  It was wonderful to see how many people there were who wanted to carry on the good work. Even those stuck at home where they had to follow the meetings on radio or TV joined in. Charles M. Fish once told me that so many offerings came in every day to the post office near Paradise Point where the Healer’s Faith Temple was being built, the post office set up a special department there to handle them. There was nothing surprising in that, he said. Many a poor sufferer had been practically brought back from the grave by just touching a hand to the Healer’s picture on TV. He carried letters from them in his pocket to show scoffers and jeerers along the way, mostly men from newspapers that had nothing better to do than try and make a mockery of the Healer.

  So we moved across the north part of the United States that summer, and then swung down and around through the south that winter. And it was on the southward swing that I knew there was trouble brewing in me because of Miss Emily Jones, the Healer’s daughter.

  She wasn’t what you’d call a real pretty girl like some—she was usually too pale and peaked for that—but she had a nice trim figure, and big dark eyes, and the longest, blackest hair you ever did see. At first I didn’t take much notice of her, but then she seemed to be around me a good deal wherever I was, so that I started looking at her, and then I started liking what I saw. That was the trouble, because along with it the devil would pop the most terrible thoughts into my head. It was enough to make me break into a sweat every time I saw them for what they were and had to put up a battle against them.

  And I did battle them with all my might. I changed my diet from red meat to greenery; I immersed my body in ice- cold water until I was blue from neck to heels; I prayed with my arms held wide until it felt as if knives were sticking into them; but nothing helped. Worst of all was the way Miss Emily liked to take long walks with me at night after the meeting was over, without any idea of what those walks were doing to me. I figured that if I could get up courage to tell her my plight it would settle things, but I just couldn’t bring myself to it.

  I finally did, though, one night in a grove of trees right outside Tulsa, Oklahoma. We walked for a while, and then we sat down on a log to talk in the darkness with the insects chirping away around us and the breeze sighing in the leaves overhead like a lost soul.

  I told her everything then, but it didn’t work out as I expected. Because when I was done she sat quiet for a long time, and then she said, as if she were thinking it out loud: “The Good Book says Be fruitful and multiply. And there’s a legal and holy way of doing it, Aaron Menefee.”

  It took me a second to see what she meant, and when I did it was quite a shocker. “You mean, get married, Miss Emily?”

  “I don’t see why not. You don’t have any objections to matrimony, do you, Aaron?”

  I had trouble finding my tongue. “I don’t guess I have. But I never thought of it. I didn’t figure I was ready for it yet.”

  She leaned up against me, and when her shoulder rubbed against mine it was as if her father’s power was in it. “Don’t you ever again call me Miss Emily,’’ she said. “From now on my name is Emily to you, Aaron Menefee. And as for being ready for marriage, you’re twenty-five years old and long overdue. If you had as much sense as you had good looks you’d know that’s what those thoughts in your head were trying to tell you.”

  I had never seen the matter like that, and when she spoke those words it was like a stone being lifted off my back. Suddenly it seemed that her shoulder being tight against mine was meant, and that my arm going around her waist was the most natural thing in the world. But in the midst of the rejoicing I had a worrisome thought.

  “What’s the matter, Aaron?” said Miss Emily. “You were doing fine.”

  “Maybe so,” I said, “but what’s the Healer going to think about all this? Everything I am right now I owe to him. I can’t see going one step further along with this without his knowledge and blessing.”

  Miss Emily sighed like the night wind in the trees. “I’m my pa’s only child, Aaron,” she said, “and he’s inclined to keep me on a mighty short tether. Don’t you think it would be better to slip off somewhere to get married, and then tell him about it afterward?”

  “No,” I said, “that would be sharper than a serpent’s tooth. We can’t do it that way.”

  “We can’t?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s got to be done right, or not at all.”

  So we went to the Healer then and there, where he was sitting at a table in the back of the big tent along with Charles M. Fish and a couple of others, counting the Offerings and fixing them up to be banked the next day. When everyone else was gone I made a clean breast of everything to the Healer, Miss Emily sitting pale and quiet alongside of me, and I put the matter squarely into his hands.

  “It’s not for any man to judge himself,” I said, “so I leave it up to you as to whether I’m worthy or not. Although I have hopes that you’ll see it the way Miss Emily and I do.”

  He wasn’t happy about it, I could tell right away. He sat there a while, working his fingers together, and when he spoke it was with a sad voice.

  “Believe me, Brother Menefee,” he said, “it isn’t a question of being worthy, because you are among the worthiest souls I know. There’s more to it than that. Emily here is my only begotten child, and heir to all that has come my way. And I can tell you, Brother Menefee, that a lot of good has been coming my way these last few years.”

  “Well,” said Miss Emily, “if you’re saying that Aaron wants to marry me for my money, you can take my word for it he doesn’t.”

  “I’m not saying that,” the Healer told her. “What I’m trying to say is that I’ve got a big proposition on my hands here. A mighty big proposition. What with Offerings coming in from the meetings, and the national hook-ups, and the book sales, and pretty soon from the Temple when we get it going, I’ve got a job on my hands. It’s going to take a big man to step into my shoes, and I mean it to be someone who can do it right.”

  “If you’re talking about Charlie Fish,” said Miss Emily, “I told you a hundred times over I wouldn’t marry him if he was the last man on earth. He makes my skin crawl.”

  The Healer reached out and patted her hand. “All right,” he said, “if not Charlie Fish somebody else with his talents, but maybe more to your taste. When the power was sent down to me it enabled me to reap a mighty harvest, most of it tax-free. Someday you’re going to be trustee for all that, Emily, and your wedded mate has to be a fit partner. Worthy as Brother Menefee is, I don’t see him as the right one. I can’t give my blessing to any such unlikely marriage, and, from this day thenceforth, I don’t want to hear any more about it from either of you.”

  My heart sank in me, heavy as a stone going down in deep waters. “I’ve got faith in you, Healer,” I told him, “but
it’s a hard row you’ve given me to hoe. No woman has ever made me feel like Miss Emily does, and I don’t expect any ever will.”

  “It is faith, after all, which can move mountains,” said the Healer, “so you trust to it and let Miss Emily be. As long as I’m on earth I reign over her. When I’m gone to glory she’ll be free to walk her own path, but that won’t be for a long time, Brother Menefee, not with the way my health is and with the power in me. If I were you I’d hoe that long row and keep my eyes peeled for a woman more suitable.”

  I went away from there feeling as low as I ever had, and in the time that passed nothing could seem to brighten up the days and weeks, although Miss Emily gave it a good try.

  “I’ll never marry anyone else, Aaron,” she said to me. “I’ll wait all my life for you, if I have to. Any time you just turn around and hold out your arms I’ll be there.”

  Knowing that only made it hurt the more, because somehow it seemed to pile the whole thing on my back alone. It was like being speared at the end of the devil’s pitchfork. As long as you fought to hang on, you couldn’t be dumped into the blazing fires below, but you still couldn’t ever wriggle off and be free.

  It went along that way when we started moving up north with the coming of spring, and it was as bad as ever when we came to Cincinnati right near the old hometown. It was that feeling in me which led me to see Doc Buckles, I guess—that and the way I had promised him I’d drop in if I was nearby. Doc couldn’t give me the kind of consolation I needed, of course, but he was always full of fizz and ginger, and a good man to brighten you up, if you kept him steered away from foul talk and quarrelsome arguments.