How true, Casper thought.
“Well, I went in one day and he had a position so one of her legs rubbed against his peter and he had wood. So, I called her out to have some juice and said to him, ‘It’ll have to go down now, won’t it?’ He was mad enough to piss blood.
“Then one night I seen him comin’ out of her room. Said she’d left her bedroom light on. I knew then that she’d had it on ‘cause she was scared of him. See, I’d taken to stayin’ up at night to watch him and tryin’ to sleep in the day, but sometimes I nodded out. I was on a lot of painkillers ‘cause he’d pushed me down the stairs at Mama’s place when he was drunk.
“Do you know he gave my Mama a poke when she was passed out one night? I swear to God—I hear this noise, thinkin’ he’s in the toilet bein’ sick? No way. He’s up in her room humpin’ her with her dress pulled up and she’s blacked out. I’m like what are you doin’? And he backhands me—pulls out and gives her one of those—abdominal snowmen. She woke up a bit then. You know what that son of a bitch said? Said she’d asked him up there. Said I was a cold fish and he could hide the sausage with her. She only passed out after he got on top. I tell you, when you don’t know normal—”
“Did he stop molesting your daughter?” Casper asked.
“Hell no! He told me I had two choices—either get out and just go away—or turn my back and let him have his fun with her—or start givin’ him service the way he wanted. You know—blow jobs and the back door.”
Casper didn’t think it wise to point out that that was actually three choices.
“So, I went to the priest,” she announced, taking a deep breath.
After all that was known about priests and child molesting, Casper wondered if that was such a good idea, but he had to admit that it seemed like a fair thing for a woman in her circumstances to do. Who else could she turn to? The police? She was trying to know normal.
“What did he say?” Casper inquired. As a former preacher, he had to say it was a tricky situation.
“That damn priest!” Sharee shouted, so loud that a couple of other people on the bus turned around. “He told me to go home and serve my husband! It was like, if he wants oral sex, suck him off. If he wants anal sex, let him. Better you do it than he goes to someone else. I said, ‘Father, I might take a dick in my mouth—I won’t let ‘em get me in the ass. That damn priest. I never asked him, but like how does he know he enjoys an asshole?”
Casper was confused. “The priest?” Maybe the story had taken a turn.
He was relieved when she cried, “No, hell no! My ex-faggot husband! But it was real nice he said—and I thought who else is he gettin’ it from? Is it Shania? Well, she wouldn’t fess. Then he told me it was Mama—she let him in the back door too. Jesus, so I’d have to be a whore in my own house to keep the man who was doin’ my mother off my daughter.”
“That’s tough,” Casper agreed. “What ended up happening to your daughter?”
“We went to the shelter and I told the police. Found out when he was doin’ her he put on women’s clothes. Had ‘em stashed in her closet. She hadn’t told me. Came out in the therapy. Counselor thought it made him feel less guilty if he was dressed up like a chick.”
Casper nodded. He’d heard that logic before. Such people always made him feel their lot had been sadder and harder than his. Didn’t matter either way. He knew all suffering had meaning. Any sorrow is sorrow enough.
The rest of Sharee’s story revolved around the suicide of her husband, who’d killed himself because in his further fall from grace and sanity, the street sex he’d had led to HIV and then he sickened with full blown AIDS. Sharee and Shania had moved from public house to little apartment as Sharee’s drug problems became shoplifting problems and then rubber check problems and jail time, then loss of custody—the child now being pregnant herself.
To Casper, it was like a passage of Scripture that could be recited from memory and it drove him to sneak his hand into the Medicine Bag.
SEX-STARVED FARMERS BUTCHER CELIBACY CULT
That captured the mood all right. The slips always held up a kind of mirror or made some comment.
How often had he heard stories like hers? Rancid fat, patchouli, insect spray, drain cleaner. Always third or fourth hand furniture from the Salvation Army or St. Vincent de Paul’s—dismal public housing units with dented front doors, tiny bedrooms with decals and stickers glued to the wall—Day Glo stars, unicorns, “Hang in There, Baby” cats—promissory notes, eviction notices, prescriptions, needles.
Alternatively, the storytellers might live in ramshackle trailers in peckerwood country. Or maybe it would be one of those cheap cigar lobbied hotels near the barber colleges and the blood bank, with too many flights of stairs up to the little firetrap rooms. Hardened toenails. Flakes of crusted snot. And the faces behind the desk—if there is a desk. Pimply young white men wearing wifebeaters to accentuate their BO . . . repellent Slavs in hound’s-tooth sports coats . . . porcine Ukrainians with beads of sweat on their upper lips—darting eyed Indians—sometimes a jabbering older black man in an Atlantic City short sleeve and a Stetson Whippet.
Those gatekeepers have about them the bloodlessness of the pawnbroker—the stone-eyed Korean storeowner, packing heat under the register. El Paso, Sunset Boulevard, Trenton, the Tenderloin in San Francisco.
Casper’s sympathies lay with the Sharees. Whether he’d found them in Topeka or Texarkana . . . they always seemed a little too real for their own good. Dignified in their wretchedness. Always searching for that Emerald City somewhere where they could pay their rent, pass the application test, get custody—land that job. Hoping for Hope. For a Rinder to come.
The lean, wasted blonde who wanted to know normal got off in St. Louis and Casper tipped his cap when she rose. It was evening and he’d gotten a glimpse of the river lights and the Gateway Arch. Indiana and the Oldsmobile seemed like another life—although Cameron Blanchard remained luminous and large. Like some new form Berina Pinecoffin had taken.
He got off to uncramp his legs, but declined going further than the Burger King, which was alive with black teenagers shoveling fries. He’d always liked St. Louis when he’d passed through in the old days with Poppy and Rose. Pork steaks, toasted raviolis and gooey buttercake. Once, they stopped at Ted Drewes Frozen Custard for a “concrete” after a Cardinals game. Now the city seemed to be more famous for carjackings than baseball and beer.
A TV flashed images of tornado warnings in Oklahoma—and a story about old folks homes going broke, the staff wheeling the decrepit out to the curb to see if anyone would take them in. It depressed him, and reminded him of his own situation. When you pay for everything in cash, you’re already on the edge. He’d turned to head back toward the boarding gate when a white man about his age with cold blue Richard Widmark eyes addressed him. He seemed to be carrying a very heavy suitcase.
“I was born in Pittsburgh,” the man said.
That explains a lot, Casper thought. But the expression on the man’s face wasn’t funny.
“My father was a machinist for the Allegheny Tool Company. We lived with a bunch of Poles and Czechs—always going off to raise hell in Germantown. The old man never touched a drop. He was a metal spinner—needed steady hands. No one knows how to do that anymore.”
Casper could hear the rising inflection of inner urgency in the man’s voice.
“He worked on this machine he’d rigged himself—a soft shaped steel plate and a drop hammer—shaping metal just by feel—varying the speed with a pedal at his feet. He could do anything with metal. Anything.”
“Clever man,” Casper said.
“Clever?” the man repeated, his voice cracking.
Casper was about to say that he had a bus to catch, but the man seemed so quietly distraught in a way he’d seen many times before. He reached into his Medicine Bag for some assistance. The slip he got a look at said . . .
PRIEST PLAYS STUD POKER WITH SATAN FOR DYING MAN’S SOUL
“What happened to your father?” he asked.
“Yesterday was his birthday,” the man replied, almost whimpering. “He’d have been 90. And he’d still be alive. But my business went bust and I couldn’t afford to keep him in the home. He had to go to a State institution. Do you know what those places are like?”
“I do,” said Casper.
“The way they treated him doesn’t bear speaking,” the man said through gritted teeth. “He died in the humiliation of his own waste in a bed no one bothered to change—and no one called me. If I hadn’t gone belly up, he’d still be alive. Now I’m so broke I’ve had to come here to live on my cousin’s charity. I used to be the logistics manager for a trucking company in Independence. There’s a joke! Independence. My wife and daughter died in a head-on seven years ago. The old man was all I had—and I let him down.”
Let not your heart be weary, for tomorrow will come for you, Casper thought. It was an Only Men hymn Reverend America had often sung. “You didn’t let him down. Sounds like you did all you could.”
“That’s not good enough in this country anymore!” the man almost shouted. “But thank you for listening to me. You have the questionable honor of being the last person I’m going to speak to.”
“What do you mean?” Casper asked, feeling that twinge.
“I can’t go to my cousin’s with just the shirt on my back—because there’s not much more but this suitcase. I filled it with bricks in Kansas and I’m headed for the river. I just needed to talk to one person before I go. I chose you. Thanks.”
“Wait a minute,” Casper said, his voice hardening as he grabbed for the suitcase—feeling that it was indeed unusually heavy. “So you’re going to kill yourself?”
“I can’t keep going,” the man gasped.
“Well,” Casper shrugged. “That’s just piss dick poor. You heaving yourself into the Mississippi with that bag of bricks is the disgrace to your father—not how he died. I knew an old man—and a woman too—who’d beat you over the head with that suitcase. God isn’t the author of confusion, and you can’t blame it all on what’s wrong with the country either. But here’s the deal. Before you try to take your miserable life, you owe me one thing.”
This seemed to set the man off balance. He wasn’t expecting this.
“You go on and throw your life away,” Casper continued, pulling out one of the last of his precious $50 bills. But before you do, you pay your debt. I want you to drag that dead weight of yours into a cab and go to Ted Drewes and have a frozen custard. They’re still open. Chippewa and South Grand. Any cab driver will know how to get there. It’s famous.”
The man’s face washed over with disbelief.
“I’m serious,” Casper rasped, “Ted Drewes. You go and have a concrete there on me or you won’t find any cool dark peace down in the river—you’ll find the fires of Hell. Maybe you did betray your father. But you betray a stranger on your last night and you’ll regret it more than you can know. Get along now. Go to die, if you have to—but go have that frozen custard first. You owe me.”
The man took the money with a look of raw incredulity on his face. Casper didn’t wait to see or hear more. The last thing he wanted to watch was that man lugging his suicide out into 15th Street.
Remarkably, he got a seat to himself on the bus on to Joplin, when the boy with the bleeding mole beside him got off at the first stop. That fifty bucks? He liked to think of it as an investment. Hopefully not of a Boone Burgers kind. He’d learned long ago as Reverend America that not everyone can be cured. But that didn’t mean you gave up. You always hold out for sunrise, blood though there may be.
7
Sins and Wonders
Damnation and salvation came as easy as music to the young Reverend. He could do the Valley of Dry Bones and he knew the Mighty Clouds of Joy. Speaking in tongues had to be worked up to, but it could be pushed along by Poppy faking a fit (stammering out the words to an Albanian drinking song). He got so he could testify to beat the band—and the flame took off. Lumber City, Georgia, Pickens, South Carolina—Paducah, Bean Valley, Hurricane River Cave. People took him for an ordained minister, so, he performed baptisms on the shores of Bull Shoals Lake and a full immersion wedding in Lake Pontchartrain—after Poppy had given him a crash course in how to swim.
Hard times were performing to sparse attendance due to inclement weather or some competitive event, like a tractor pull. It was always much easier to get hyped up before a crowd, and Casper would often think of that in years to come—how difficult it is to sway an individual, but how smooth it can be to work a whole audience.
A couple of well-timed lunges and raised arm pleas, his patter, and his singing—that was what people came for. “An evil generation seeks a sign!” he’d cry out—and then hold up a copy of a newspaper from the nearest big city. He learned how to both shout and whisper into a microphone—and where there was no PA system, his little voice, which wasn’t little at all, could be used to great effect to draw the people closer. That gave Rose and Poppy a better chance of targeting individuals ripe for healing, and a subtle system of eye contact and code words could alert Reverend America. Soon they had their own PA and could’ve had their own road crew if Poppy hadn’t been stingy and suspicious of outsiders.
They claimed they didn’t believe in what they were spouting—but each time they “soaked the wood ducks” they said a prayer. (Soaking became an important image for young Mathias, as one of the principal family activities beyond performing was doing laundry together in a steel drum—and while doing that, they always sang.)
Outside of their music together, there was little tenderness, which isn’t to say there wasn’t teamwork. No hugs and kisses—but there were pats on the back—and he was never struck. They didn’t celebrate his birthday—but they didn’t acknowledge their own either. Instead, they’d lash out with mashed potatoes and chicken fried steak when there was a “good haul.” And he was given occasional “boosters” when he’d performed especially well. Christmas and Easter became important, but only for professional reasons. The one hint at a traditional family occasion was Thanksgiving, which they commemorated by getting invited to another family’s dinner—Poppy and Rose were skillful at that. Once they were treated to a banquet of bush turkey and home cured country ham in red-eye gravy by a mountain family in Tennessee with fourteen children. People living in a split log and tarpaper house, with excelsior for insulation. Mathias True gave the blessing.
Together they’d end up traveling as far north as Southern Ohio, east to Newport News, south into the palmetto groves of Florida, and back into southern Colorado. They mainly worked the fundamentalist evangelical churches—Oneness, Wesleyan Holiness, Higher Life—the Assemblies of God. Baptists were good with the money and there were some charismatic pockets of Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists—even a few Catholics (rare, but monied).
They could draw a crowd with Seventh Day Adventists and some Brethren—but their biggest successes always came with the more extreme audiences like Church of God and the snake handlers of the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus’ Name. About the only religious group Poppy and Rose had any genuine scorn for was the Mormons. (“Never trust a Moron,” Poppy said, although, along with the Grand Ole Opry, they all enjoyed listening to broadcasts of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.) They did well in the Delta and the Smoky Mountains. Often the smaller and poorer the hamlet, the more money they made. Healing became what they were known for.
Now, you may be of the mind that faith healing is just an out and out con—but as Poppy would say, “That’s because you’re looking at the game from the wrong end of the table. Healing isn’t the con—faith is the con—and people fool themselves in that. We’re not fooling people. We’re freeing them to believe fully in what they already do—or what they say they believe in. Healing? Who doesn’t want to be healed? There’s always something wrong. Complaining is what people love to do the most. Gratitude is the shortest-lived sentiment there’ll ever be.”
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In his view, “The trick is to make folks believe the real cause of their problem is a secret that they’re hiding from themselves—and that’s so often what the case really is if you think about it. All we do is convince them that they need to let that secret out. They need to demonstrate their own healing to prove the trueness of their faith. If they don’t, they show weakness before others—and short of death, that’s what everyone fears the most.”
Understood this way, you can see why faith healing works—or rather, how they so astutely made it work—from Alpine, Texas to Jacksonville. The healer identifies or creates doubt concerning the real infirmity. It’s not someone’s palsy or a torn retina that needs to be healed. The infection, the warts, the neuralgia—these are just symptoms of anemic faith. Once the afflicted person has been cast in this light, publicly, they naturally buck up. People who have been using disability as a means of gaining sympathy are suddenly caught out. People with genuine, serious maladies, who have garnered sympathy, are equally caught out. Instead of the spotlight being on the healer to work some miracle, the scrutiny turns upon the invalid to demonstrate the strength of their faith. It’s their weakness of belief that underlies their disability or illness. What’s more, their weakness means the healing energy in the room is diminished so that others may not find their cure.
Done skillfully, most people in the heightened atmosphere of a worship service, and especially in a larger camp meeting, never perceive this subtle shift in the dynamic.
Since most human ailments have some crucial psychological aspect to them (even the most obvious and dramatic physical injuries or conditions)—when primed with the right psychological message, the problem lessens—inner resources are galvanized. Should the relief wear off later (as it inevitably will), the sufferer now has a new suspicion about the reason why and is more inclined to keep quiet or exaggerate the earlier benefits they received. “Yeah, the knee’s gone crook a little bit, but it’s so much better than it was before. I can’t tell you how much less ache there is. Gettin’ a good night’s sleep again.”
Reverend America: A Journey of Redemption Page 6