The St. Michael Poker & Drinking Club

by Randle, Ned;

  Chapter Eleven

  Father Tom was right. He was not the only player eyeing up the other men at the meetings of the St. Michael Poker & Drinking Club. Behind his hokey exterior, Billy Crump was quietly taking the measure of each man for his own purposes.

  Crump had found Belle City clergy to be naïve and complacent when he arrived to scope out the town as a possible site for a missionary church. Although the other clergymen around the card table had no reason to remember, Crump had attended services at each of their churches, several times. He’d also attended services at the Baptist and Presbyterian churches. He’d seen the other men at the card table do their jobs. With the exception of Father Tom, he was unimpressed. Still, he’d jumped at the chance to meet the men close up and divine what hold each might have over the members of his congregation.

  Crump was initiated into his brand of religion while still sucking at his mama’s teat, he liked to say in coarse company, listening to his Pap preach at tent meetings in villages and hamlets throughout the mid-South. He himself had been born in Kentucky during a stopover on his father’s circuit. Hence, he was born and bred in Kentucky and considered himself a Kentuckian and at one time referred to himself as Colonel Crump, Colonel of the Kentucky Christian Soldiers at camp meetings, until he got a cease and desist letter from the Commonwealth of Kentucky that demanded he stop implying he held a commission from the governor. In any event, he was a Kentuckian by birth but wasn’t from the Bluegrass regions of the state, with their verdant pastures, miles of white board fences, thoroughbred racehorses and columned homes populated by folks with refined manners and money. He was from the hard, rocky Pennyroyal Plateau, an area replete with poor prospects dictated by its karst topography, numerous caves and deadly sinkholes.

  His father’s revivals drew the mean and low, folks who subsisted as scab coal miners or hired hands or laborers to earn meager wages, or took welfare money and supplemented their fare with truck garden greens, fatty meats, fish, and game. And his father was a man of his people. As a youngster, Billy’s life was hard. His Pap made little money preaching, and although the visitors to the tent gave what they could, his father still had to run a floating card game and drag from the pot to make ends meet, a fact that bedeviled Billy when he was a younger man but served as a source of pride and inspiration in his middle years. His old man would send him down the road to the local tavern to get two pails of beer for the card players, with the cost of the beer chalked up to a tab at the bar, which the barkeeps always knew old Preacher Crump would pay in full before he left town. It was then Billy developed a fondness for the taste of cold beer in the summer sun, and up to the present, he still recalled no beer tasted as good as the swallows he stole as his wage for making the beer run for his old man.

  His Pap was always puzzling over ways to increase the draw to his tent rallies and thereby increase his take. So, Billy and his little brother were taught to dance, an exercise for which Billy seemed to have a natural affinity, and the boys would dance and sing at their father’s command, and when they were youngsters, they thought it good fun. Yet, despite his father’s shenanigans for making money, the Crumps were constantly living hand-to-mouth. But growing up poor where everyone around him was poor confirmed in Billy the lifelong belief God really did prefer the poor; there were so many.

  As Billy entered his teens, he balked at his father’s buffoonery and would catch a cuff or two on his ear or the back of his head for his stubbornness or for a cheeky response. Although he was small in stature, other than his head, and looked younger than his years, he found singing and dancing at tent revivals an affront to his burgeoning dignity. Moreover, as he approached manhood, his father assumed a different posture toward him, as if the older man sensed he had an adult son who displayed a winsome talent for showmanship and who may try to usurp his primacy in the shadowy, perfervid world of itinerant soul-saving. They would fight, sometimes physically, and when Billy reached eighteen years of age, he ran off and joined the Marines.

  Billy’s years in the Marine Corp were life-changing. In April 1970, South Vietnamese troops moved into Cambodia, pushing toward Vietcong bases. Later in April, a US force of thirty thousand troops, including three US divisions and a young Billy Crump, mounted a second attack. He remained in Cambodia for about sixty days, fighting for his life. During one intense battle, Billy, in complete disregard for his own safety, rescued two wounded members of his platoon, likely saving their lives. Under normal circumstances, Billy would have received a commendation, but in the haze of battle, his actions were overlooked. Moreover, the US wasn’t supposed to have troops in Cambodia, so the battle officially never happened. Later, Billy thought it was just fine that no one singled him out for saving his buddies; he likened it to Christ’s admonition to not let the right hand know what the left hand was doing.

  In any event, the rescue of his buddies was transformational, not because he considered himself a hero, but because he learned his life calling was to save others. He understood he wasn’t bright enough or wealthy enough to go to school and embark on a career in medicine or the like, so he decided to enter the family business. He would do more important work—he would save souls. And in doing so, Billy would be a good Marine and charge ever forward, regardless of the odds or the intensity of the battle at his front.

  Hence, Billy Crump grated on traditional pastors when he went after members of their flocks, but he didn’t care. He figured the ends justified the means. Furthermore, his years in the Marines instilled in him a healthy abhorrence of monolithic, rule-bound institutions, such as old-line, traditional churches, and he took great delight in tweaking the noses of the Catholic priests, the Methodist ministers, the Lutheran pastors, and the Presbyterian clergy in the towns where he established his churches.

  Early in his career as a preacher, Crump didn’t stay in one place very long; he started out preaching in a tent, like his father. After a few years of traveling about, he sought a wife. And he had plenty of women to choose from, despite his physical shortcomings. Women, he learned, flocked around a man who exuded a sweet scent of illicitness. Still, he chose Maggie, a slip of a girl whose portentous full name was Mary Magdalene and whose approach to men was quite the opposite of that alleged of her namesake, at least by Pope Gregory the Great. She played hard to get, and he was forced to pursue her properly until she finally agreed to marry him. They were wed in a quiet service conducted by a pal from the tent revival circuit. The next day, the newlyweds hit the road.

  Naturally, children came along. His firstborn was a son whom they named Billy Junior Crump. On the night of the child’s birth, he sat on the edge of the stage in his empty tent and contemplated the future. He didn’t want to drag his wife and son around the countryside like his father had done him. Moreover, he recognized that canvas and poles and rope didn’t make for a lasting legacy. He decided he wanted a brick-and-mortar church where he could put down roots. To that end, he saved and borrowed and begged enough money to buy an abandoned storefront in Corbin, Kentucky and opened his first real church, the first Grand Hope Nondenominational Family Church. The first Grand Hope Nondenominational Family Church was successful. The rolls expanded to the point the congregation outgrew the old storefront, and Billy initiated a capital campaign until they had enough money through tithes and pledges to build a new church.

  His marriage was successful as well. He soon had three more children—two daughters and another son—all born one year apart. When the youngest girl, Hannah Mae, was old enough to learn the scales, he taught the kids to sing in four-part harmony, as well as dance, and employed them in his services. They were a huge draw and continued to be a huge draw until Billy Junior reached thirteen, and his father, wanting to spare him the humiliation he had felt as a teenaged sideshow geek, released his son from the group, leaving a disharmonic trio to carry on. The trio devolved into a duet, and finally his youngest daughter, Hannah Mae, sang as a sweet-voiced soloist into her twenties.<
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  Since he’d learned early on his particular gift was conversion of the unchurched and the disenchanted, he began to feel, after nearly fifteen years in one spot, like a miner who’d played out his claim. Also, he couldn’t completely rid himself of his inbred peripatetic habits. With Maggie and the kids well settled, and with a large church family in Corbin for their support, he struck out on his own, time and time again. And after twenty years of work, he’d founded at least five missionary churches—all called Grand Hope Nondenominational Family Church—throughout Tennessee and Kentucky. Belle City was his first foray north of Dixie, but not so far from Corbin that he couldn’t go back and visit his wife on occasion.

  Billy’s modus operandi was to find a promising town and live there for a while, getting the lay of the land, as he would say, and once he did, he became a fisher of men. In every town, there were the unchurched, the downtrodden, the homeless, the drunks, and the mentally ill to whom his special brand of salvation was appealing. They comprised his core of disciples around whom he’d build a new church. His greater gift, however, was to go after the disenchanted churched, those believers who’d grown tired of the impractical teachings of their hidebound churches, the stubborn and repetitive liturgies, the tired music, and the passionless preaching chock-full of esoteric interpretations of scripture that seemed to belie the plain meaning of the words on the page.

  Proselytizing the disenchanted churched took time and patience and a good understanding of the disenchantments. To gather the information he needed, Crump attended services at each of the traditional churches in Belle City. He didn’t need to study the liturgies; he’d heard them all many times before. He studied the pastor and his flock. If the pastor was personable and engaging and offered a hopeful and useful message, Crump figured there would be slim pickings from that congregation. He found it particularly useful to see how the pastor interacted with the church members as they passed through the post-service receiving line.

  It was rare to find unassailable relationships in traditional churches, although he’d decided that Father Tom Abernathy’s at St. Michael Catholic Church were about as good as he’d seen. His parishioners seemed engaged, attentive, and genuinely receptive to his homilies. Father Abernathy, he noticed, was personable and friendly after Mass, fun-loving to the point of playfulness, particularly with the children. The priest was, it seemed, well-liked by his flock, and Crump later saw nothing in Father Tom during their poker games to disabuse him of the notion that St. Michael would be a hard nut to crack. And since he genuinely liked the man, he’d settle for the normal offal and not actively seek any of the priest’s parishioners.

  Pastor Swindberg was a horse of a different color. Crump had attended St. Paul’s several times trying to get a feel for the man. He sat in the back of St. Paul’s and studied the pastor and the congregation. He found Swindberg’s conduct of the liturgy uninspired. He seemed to sleepwalk through the formalities. His sermons were pedestrian and boring, and Crump made a mental note of the restlessness of some congregants and the slumberous faces of others, mannerisms which were obvious to Crump’s trained eye. After church, the pastor was stiff and formal in his receiving line, reticent to engage, lacking in warmth and charm. In fact, Crump noted the only item of interest about St. Paul’s, its pastor or its congregation, other than possible vulnerability to his methods, was the pastor’s comely wife who stood next to him in the line and offered the only relief from the morose atmosphere indigenous to Lutheran church services.

  Meetings of the poker and drinking club confirmed Crump’s opinion that Swindberg’s congregation was accessible, primarily because the principal pastor was so unlikable. He showed himself to be punctilious and shy, averting eye contact at all costs. Yet, Crump knew it would be difficult to dislodge any lifelong Lutherans, with their old-fashioned Teutonic stubbornness and resistance to change but figured it worth his while to try, and he made a mental note to do so.

  In Crump’s estimation, first formed after visiting the Methodist church, Reverend Brian Metzger was, despite his imposing physique, a lightweight. His estimation was confirmed by observations during the card games. But he had a preformed prejudice against the Methodists. He found their services insipid and noncommittal, lacking the doctrinal and dogmatic convictions and constancy of the Catholics or the Lutherans. After only one visit to the Methodist church, he was convinced he could seed his new church in Belle City with more than a few disenchanted Methodists, and it didn’t take him long thereafter to strike a major coup.

  When he arrived in town, he’d familiarized himself with Belle City’s movers and shakers, and he was delighted to see the Chief of Police at the Methodist Church service. Within a week, he’d found a reason to visit the chief in his office. Crump proposed holding a tent revival, and, as he explained to the chief obsequiously, he wanted to make sure the city was okay with the idea, to find out if overflow street parking would be a problem for the police, and to see if there were any permits or licenses he needed to obtain. He wanted to do everything according to the book, he explained. He was charming and solicitous, and by the end of their conversation, Crump had garnered the chief’s support for the project and his commitment to attend the revival. Crump knew at that point he had the man hooked and only needed to reel him in, which he later did. In Billy’s world, no matter what the undertaking, the ends always justified the means.

  Chapter Twelve

  Because Theo and Naomi were never far from his thoughts, Father Tom was abashed when he answered his telephone and heard Theo’s voice. The pastor wanted to meet in the morning for coffee at a coffee shop in a small town about fifteen miles from Belle City. Tom thought his choice of meeting place overly cautious, but due to the nervous tension he detected in Theo’s voice, he told Theo he’d meet him there.

  When Tom arrived, Theo was sitting in a booth by a front window chewing his thumbnail, a cup of coffee and small plate sitting in front of him. Tom could see by the coffee slopped down the side of the mug and the flakes of sugar glaze on the plate, Theo had been there awhile, although he was punctual in arriving. Tom slid into the booth and asked the server, who startled him by appearing silently next to his shoulder, for a cup of black coffee.

  “You want something to eat, Tom? A donut or something? My treat.”

  Tom thanked him but declined, admitting he’d eaten a hefty bowl of raisin bran earlier. “Good for the bowels,” he added, patting his stomach with a smile.

  The remark about the bran seemed to pass through Theo without effect. Tom had sensed when he walked up to the table that Theo was in a glum mood, glummer than usual, and thought he’d test his disposition with the silly comment on the salutary effect of dietary fiber. Theo didn’t even smile. He appeared to be deep in thought to the point of nervous distraction, perhaps reconsidering his invitation to meet, perhaps considering the words he wanted to say. So Tom took his coffee from the waitress, added a splat of cream and stirred slowly and deliberately and said nothing, waiting for Theo to get to the point of the meeting in his own good time. After an awkward silence broken only by the by the rat-a-tat-tat of the spoon in the coffee mug, Theo blurted out, “I didn’t want to join your group for obvious reasons, but other than Naomi, I have no friends.”

  Theo stared down at his plate, gathering his thoughts and continued, “We never socialize, Naomi and me. Other than church functions, we’re never invited anywhere.”

  Once the words were out of his mouth, Theo returned to his thumb, which Tom could see was red and inflamed around the cuticle. As Tom considered Theo’s brief but powerful unburdening and observed his anxious manner, he felt a profound sense of sorrow, although in his mind any sorrow he felt for Theo was tempered by the fact that Theo had Naomi, and in Tom’s view, there was little more a man should want or need to be happy.

  “I see the looks on the other guys’ faces when we play cards. I’m not obtuse; I’m actually self-aware, if you can believe that.” He
looked up and dried his thumb with his napkin. “I know I’m a difficult man to like. I know people think I’m a self-righteous prig, and perhaps I am. I’m not proud of it. I’m not sure what to do about it. But I’m human; I’d like a friend or two like anyone else.”

  Tom recognized how difficult it had to be for Theo to call him and ask to meet and then to say the self-abasing things he’d just said. It was a soul-baring Tom never would have expected from the seemingly stoic pastor. He searched for a proper response, something meaningful but not maudlin, but all he could say was, “We’re like engineers, Theo; we’ve made ourselves necessary to society, but who the hell wants to spend social time with us?”

  Theo remained long-faced and responded only with a resigned shrug of his shoulder. Then he offered a wan smile at Tom’s insight. “I know what you mean,” he offered. “I have several engineers in my congregation. Insufferable know-it-alls, they are,” which drew a chuckle of agreement from Father Tom. But before Tom could offer a confirmatory anecdote on the maddening habits of engineers, Theo blurted out, “It’s always been that way with me. When I was young, the other boys teased me about being the parson’s perfect little boy. And I was. I was well behaved, mannerly, never gave my folks a minute’s worry growing up. I was so aloof and strait-laced in college, my acquaintances called me Iceberg. But my moderation in life cost me, Tom. I’m bland. I lack a certain seasoning others seem to like in a man.”

  Tom appreciated Theo’s metaphor. Seasoning. Yes, seasoning. He himself had been so well-seasoned, he was nearly eaten alive by the world when he was young and tender. But he’d survived. For what? To be sitting in a coffee shop listening to a dispirited Lutheran pastor lament his lack of seasoning, and all he wanted to think about was the man’s wife? And himself. Always himself. The sin of self-centeredness. Think about others, he told himself, and not about her. Or yourself. Others are seasoned, as well. He couldn’t control the coarse thoughts that cascaded through his head. Seasoning. Season to taste. Yes, taste. The taste of Theo’s wife. He closed his eyes and silently recited a prayer to St. Augustine, perhaps the only saint who could understand his feelings, asking him to intervene on behalf of his damaged soul.