Feast for Thieves

by Marcus Brotherton

  Friday night I drove down to the tavern again, walked inside, plopped my half dollar on the counter to pay for the drink that never slid down my throat, and turned to square off against Deuce Gibbons.

  He was as bruised as I was from a month of fighting. All the fellas were. We all nodded our hellos to each other, caught up on small talk, then clenched our fists and prepared to wallop each other.

  “There’s one thing I’ll say about you, Reverend—” Deuce said. “And I respect this about a fella, no matter what he does for a living.” We were shuffling around each other, warming up before we charged. I noticed he looked a little flat-footed tonight.

  “What’s that?”

  “You got grit.” He popped me with a left jab, then another. I threw a lunging left and missed. I was running on adrenaline instead of using smart fighting skills. Right away I followed my miss with an uphill combination. Deuce deflected the blows and nailed me across the eyebrows. A scab split and blood spattered. It started running down into my eyes, making it hard to see. Quick, I wiped it away and hammered Deuce with a shot to the chest, then grabbed him and threw him backward. A chair sailed my direction and I ducked it. The other fellas were all fighting now too, not against me just yet, just among themselves for the fun of it. I pushed Deuce away and followed up quick with a hook to the shoulder to knock him off balance, then a right cross to the ribs.

  He was glancing around for his gang, I could tell, not wanting to call out to them to appear weak, but breathing heavy, looking for a quick way to finish me off. He threw a left uppercut, but I dodged it along with a bottle that came at me from behind, then smashed him across his nose, hearing the bone snap. The punch drove Deuce to his knees. I pivoted and pummeled another fella who attacked me from the side. He went down like a stack of bricks and I turned and faced Deuce again. He rose, panting, and I walloped him in the cheekbone. He went down again, this time to his knees and from his knees to his back. I spun again in time to duck another broken bottle heading straight for the back of my head. I ran three steps forward and caught the thrower with a crack to the jaw. Then ran back to where Deuce was. The big man was still on the floor.

  And this week—glory be—he wasn’t getting up.

  The next Sunday morning Deuce Gibbons sat in the front pew at church. Even though he didn’t like preachers, he was true to his word and, sure enough like I’d reckoned would happen, a whole gang of men followed him through the front door.

  Oh, I knew most of them by name now. There was Hoss and Cash and Slim and Stitch. There was Tick and Harry and Hank and Boone. At one time or another I’d punched most of them in the face. We breakfasted every morning together at the Pine Oak Café before we all went to work, and they’d all warmed up to me considerably since I started fighting with them. I was speaking a language they knew, I reckoned, meeting them on their home ground. Gummer came along to church too, although he and I had never fought. He was friends with all the fellas, so he figured wherever they went, he’d go along too. In all, about thirty new young men crowded into the sanctuary.

  Along with all the men came the barmaids from the tavern, the cleanup crew, and most of the working girls. There was Trixie and Dolly, Opal and Marlis, Zelda and Sal—they’d been watching me fight at the tavern too, and I’d always talk to them if I had a moment or two before each week’s fight started.

  Ava-Louise ran the show at the brothel. She was a handsome woman, maybe sixty years old, and she came to church to keep track of her gals she said as she walked in. I watched her while we were singing. She was looking to a faraway spot in the corner of the roof, her eyes misting over like she remembered a better place from long ago.

  Luna-Mae was in church, of course, and the rest of the gals who came along with Oris Floyd, but he wasn’t here for a spell. Word had it that he was in Oklahoma looking over a line of purchase on some new oil wells. He’d be away for at least three months, maybe four, and that suited me fine. With him out of my hair, I could get some real preaching done.

  “Today we’re talking about two fellas named Cain and Abel,” I said, grasping the pulpit with both hands. “Most folks when they read this story picture themselves in the shoes of Abel, the brother of righteousness. But I’ve been reading this text every day this past week, and I’m seeing things different.”

  The folks all looked to be listening to me. Deuce Gibbons made sure all the boys kept shut up.

  “See, Cain was the ornery brother,” I continued. “He was a fighting man, a scrapping man, a man so bent on destruction he hated his own kin. Cain hated Abel so powerful that Cain ended up killing Abel. It’s harder to see ourselves in Cain’s shoes, I reckon, as a man who’s hardened around the edges, but I can tell you from reflection that it ain’t as hard to attack a man in anger as you might think.”

  Deputy Roy was chewing gum, his eyes fixed on my face. The sheriff was staring at me too, not knowing where I was going. Bobbie was taking notes, her brow furrowed intently. Emma Hackathorn was shushing her children.

  “That’s the funny thing about this passage,” I went on. “Frankly, when I read it for the first time, it stopped me cold. It was after all the destruction took place—not before—that God met with Cain. God asked the murderous Cain where his brother was, and Cain didn’t have a smart answer for that, claiming he wasn’t his brother’s keeper. But God knew the truth. As a punishment, God told Cain he’d need to leave the area, and Cain obeyed. The man was fearful of leaving a place of safety. He was scared others would attack him. But God said, ‘Not so,’ and put a mark on Cain so no one who found him would kill him, and God promised that his presence was still with Cain, even after he’d done all that evil.”

  I looked around the congregation, at that room full of rough-hewn folks. They was all becoming familiar to me now. I’d been visiting them at their homes and speaking with them on the streets of Cut Eye. I’d met them at a funeral and at the filling station and at the mercantile and at the café. I was getting to know who was related to each other by blood and lineage, what one person thought about another, what one person was struggling with, and what another needed to overcome. For the first time I looked at them not with eyes of duty, but with eyes of heart. I wasn’t fighting these folks no more, not pushing my way forward only to keep a job and stay out of jail. I was beginning to care. I plumb was.

  “So that was good news for all of us,” I added. “If God could care for a ruffian like Cain, even with everywhere he’d been and with all the wrong he’d done, then I reckon God could care for someone like me.”

  The congregation was nodding their heads, agreeing with what I was saying. I heard someone call out an “amen.” I cleared my throat. They was still with me, still on the same page.

  “It’s no secret I went to Sunday school as a child,” I said. “I was taught who Jesus was, and that he was a man worth following. It’s also no secret that I’ve strayed far from the path of right living since then. I believe that same spot of hardship is where a heap of folks are today. Some folks here are finding God for the first time. And some of us are finding our way back to God. I don’t know all that I believe yet, nor can I explain all that I hold true. But that’s where I’m going. I’m traveling this road with you. I’m discovering something that gives me a hope and a future. And I invite you along with me in this good and noble direction.”

  That’s all I said.

  I sat down. Bobbie got up, led a song in closing, and then we were done. I’d preached for a solid half hour, the rightful amount of time. But it didn’t seem like the amount of time I preached was all that important anymore. That morning after service was over the folks filed out the door and shook my hand genuinely, not out of pity or consternation. The old lady who’d once slapped me asked me to bend my face over so it was close to hers, and when I did she kissed my cheek. Deuce Gibbons muttered that he’d be back next Sunday, and so did most of the other rough fellas.

  Well, and Bobbie Barker plumb gave me a hug.

  Those next few
weeks in Cut Eye, Texas, were some of the happiest of my life. I reckoned they were happy days for all the townsfolk, mostly. Some talked about a new spirit in the air. Others called it “revival,” but I didn’t know nothing about that. I kept meeting with the deacon board and with Mert, kept learning things from Bobbie and eating her picnic snacks, kept preparing sermons and delivering them, kept visiting folks at their homes and in jail, kept chopping firewood every chance I got.

  I got paid in cash and paid off my bill at the mercantile. Emma Hackathorn decided to buy the place from the estate of Woburn Jones. She wasn’t bringing in any money since her husband died in the traffic accident, so times were tough for the family, and she reckoned she’d go forward even grieving as she was. Her youngest child was able to play in the store while the three oldest children were at school. Emma looked genuinely happy most days, and even happier once Gummer Lopez from the filling station started courting her. I didn’t see them right off as a couple, but he had a gentle way with her. In time, I could see him becoming a husband to her, a father to her fatherless children. The sheriff spoke to me about it once, asked what I thought of the matter, and all I said was, “Well, it’s worth a wait and see.”

  Four times over the next two months I traveled up the highway in the DUKW to visit Sunny at the Chicorys’ house of evil. I still hadn’t told anyone in Cut Eye about my daughter, nor did I plan to unless necessary. She still wasn’t talking yet, which concerned me plenty, but she began to warm to me, to understand I had a substance of history with her, and that I was at least one trusted grown-up in her life. I paid Rance seventy-five dollars I made from cutting wood, and he seemed both surprised and pleased to see that amount of cash. I promised Rance I’d return as soon as I could with more. Sunny looked to be at peace for the time being, although it was still mighty risky every moment of her living with the Chicorys.

  With Mert’s help, the church began a building program, and the fella from the lumber store drew up plans telling us how to proceed. Each Saturday I gathered a group of fellas—most of the same who’d fought me at the tavern—and we hiked into the tree stand to work. We chopped and sawed all morning, broke off for lunch and a short men’s Bible study, then got back to work for the rest of the afternoon. Just like the sheriff said, the fellas seemed to enjoy a sense of purpose to what they was doing. They understood that a church was only a building, but it was a building worth having in a thriving community.

  We began to discuss how what we were doing at the church involved more than creating a new building, which sounded funny at first to many folks. Bobbie pointed this out to me first. A man’s faith could spring forth at church, but a man’s faith wasn’t the same thing as the church. The building was related to the faith, but the faith was separate. It could exist outside the church building too.

  What mattered most was that a man understood his position before a holy God, Bobbie explained. There was redemption to be had, provided a man asked God for it. This redemption could be gleaned in a manner of receiving, much the same way Cain received from God even after Cain had done all his wrong. Bobbie called this grand idea grace—it was all about giving a man a favor he didn’t deserve. That sounded strange to me, although I liked how it sounded too. Grace meant a man could truly change with God’s help, no matter what the fella had done. He might need to suffer some consequences for the wrong he’d done as a matter of the natural course of things, but grace meant that his overall debt was paid and the slate was clean. With grace, there was nothing that came between him and God. It didn’t matter if the fella had a rough background. It didn’t matter, even, if he’d once committed a crime.

  It was the first week in September 1946, I reckoned, because Sunny just turned five and her birthday’s on the first. It was stifling hot on a Friday morning, and I showed up as always for breakfast at the Pine Oak Café. Cisco had agreed to come on the deacon board, I forgot to mention, although he still had a lot of grieving to do, he insisted. He wasn’t there this morning, but Augusta was. She served me up a grilled T-bone steak with a side of scrambled eggs, a platter of flapjacks with salted butter and hot maple syrup, and I sat back with a big smile on my face and ate until I was stuffed. For the first time I was feeling hopeful about surviving my year as the preacher of the Cut Eye Community Church. I rightly was. In seven more months, after that year was over, well, no saying what I might do then. It wouldn’t be preaching, but with some solid job history behind me, there’s no saying what I couldn’t do.

  That’s when a memory flashed at me. It was a returning voice, one I’d heard before. I swear I did. It sounded like the voice was coming from outside the Pine Oak Café, and I couldn’t rightly say the voice was speaking to me out loud, but the voice was clear in my ears.

  “Hey fella!” said the voice. “You want to live?”

  How that man’s voice was reaching me so far through those walls, I couldn’t rightly fathom. But there, eating until my stomach was bursting with Augusta Wayman’s good breakfast cooking, I nodded my head.

  “Then find the good meal and eat your fill,” it said. “Swear you’ll do that?”

  I nodded again, and that’s when I understood what that voice was getting at.

  Once I was so hungry, so scared, and so desperate, and a tree broke loose like a strong hand moved it. A tangle of branches passed over my head, and I shot to the surface from the river of destruction. A moment later my knees scraped gravel on a shallow section of riverbed, and I stumbled forward out of the river, that river that seemed so far away now.

  Well, I walked three steps onto dry ground, and started searching for that good meal. After much searching I found that meal. Or perhaps it found me.

  ’Twas what I was eating today.

  I wish that feeling of near pure bliss would’ve lasted longer than it did. But if there’s one thing I’ve ever found in this life, it’s that the ups and downs have a way of evening things out. As soon as something powerfully good happens, something’s prone to be right around the corner, something mighty wicked. And sure enough, my hunch wasn’t wrong, although time would show it would happen in stages. A twinge of sorrow would arrive first. And then a bit of dread. And then would come an avalanche of pure terror.

  But all that would come only after I finished eating.

  SIXTEEN

  It was a still a glad day that late September Sunday when we took a special offering for our building campaign, and Mert, who’d been keeping track of the cash, informed me that folks dug deep.

  We’d gathered money for weeks before. The fellas and I had chopped a heap of wood and raised a pile of loot on our own. Plus, some of those single fellas had money tucked away in their mattresses and were hot to the idea of giving to a worthy cause, so that added to the mix. Plus, with attendance at an all-time high of nearly a hundred and ten folks on Sunday mornings, the special offering had been powerful generous.

  That glorious total was written carefully in a lined ledger. Mert held out the page to me that showed the amount: well over ten thousand dollars, plus change. The church folks had all gone home by the time the offering was counted, and Mert wore a mysterious smile as she showed me the books, the strangest smile I ever saw in that woman. Maybe it was strange only because she wasn’t prone to smiling, but she looked to be reaching a decision in her own mind. I didn’t know what the decision might be, so I opted not to press the matter further and chose to be happy in the moment. We’d reached our goal, and that was worth much.

  In fact—Mert pointed to another line underneath the sub-total—we’d actually raised close to twelve thousand dollars, enough to send Bobbie out to the mission field, thus fulfilling the girl’s dream of helping folks live well in other countries. We raised all that cash three months ahead of schedule, and right away from the church telephone I called the sheriff at his house and told him the good news. He said, “All right then.” And just like that we were set to begin work repairing and making new the building and grounds the following Saturday.


  I drove to the café and ate lunch—it was braised beef shanks in butter sauce—then drove back to the church in the DUKW. Later that same Sunday afternoon, Bobbie Barker drove her jeep over to the parsonage where I was studying for the evening service and knocked on my front door.

  I’d mentioned to the sheriff that we had some good news for her. I was thinking of the extra two thousand dollars, of course. But after I opened the door and before I could get a word in edgewise she said her daddy already told her about the cash and she had something else to tell me. She looked happy about the news. Mostly, anyway. The girl was wearing a T-shirt with a men’s oxford shirt layered over it, its tail hanging baggy and the arms rolled at the sleeves, a pair of tan shorts, and sneakers. She’d been shooting baskets outside her house when I’d phoned her daddy about the building campaign and extra money. She sat down on the parsonage steps and patted the seat next to her, the way we often sat together outside when she helped me study for my sermons.

  “Rowdy—” she rolled one of her sleeves down to her wrist then rolled it back up to her elbow, as if she was killing time. “Before I say what I need to tell you, can I ask you a personal question?”

  I sat on the steps and stared across the roadway at her jeep, at its black seats, green army paint, and familiar grill with the bars running up and down. “Sure,” I said.

  “It’s … um … do you have a philosophy of love?”

  “Hmm.” I pondered the girl’s question. “Not sure what you’re getting at.”