Killing the Buddha

by Peter Manseau

  By that time the congregation had dwindled almost to the point of extinction. The community had been engulfed by building, and what had once been a village on the outskirts of a small North Carolina city had become a bedroom community full of apartment complexes and strip malls and oil change shops, grocery stores, fast-food restaurants, movie theaters, and gas stations. When, at the ripe old age of ninety-three, the Reverend Bryant passed on to his reward, the board of trustees were faced with a sad fact. They had only seven members left. All of them sitting in the same room with a lone real estate agent with a bad hunger for land, the land under their church. Now, seven years later, where St. Thomas Baptist Church once stood loomed a vast car dealership shaped like a hog.

  For several years Velmajean wandered from church to church on Sunday mornings, looking for what people called a spiritual home. She preferred to call it a church. She had tried the high-tone, Sunday-Go-to-Meeting Baptists, the Speaking-in-Tongues Holy Rollers of the Pentecostals, the casserole-toting Methodists, the choir-besotted AME Zionists, the Hat-Happy Church of God in Christs—but none of them felt right to her, felt comfortable. Each was like a pair of shoes she admired until she tried them on.

  One fine Saturday morning there came a knock at Velmajean’s door. There before her stood that nice couple who lived five doors down, Philip and Amanda Witt. He was black, she was white, both so young and handsome, she thought, they should be ashamed of themselves. And they had a toddler too cute for words. Simply adorable. She had offered to look after the child if they ever needed a baby-sitter. She thought they had come to ask for her services. She looked forward to having a three-year-old around, even if it were only for a few hours.

  “How are you two today?”

  That was when she heard about the Atomic Church. In truth she had heard of it before. It had been all in the news when it first opened, and she remembered scoffing at the notion. A failed shopping center refurbished and rebuilt as a single mammoth church with just as mammoth a congregation. The New City of God their minister liked to call it.

  “We’d love it if you came with us on Sunday. We think you’d enjoy it.”

  They were oh so nice, so gentle. She couldn’t tell them that was not her sort of place.

  Nothing could have prepared her for that odd gathering. More like a nation under one roof. Never in her sixty years had she been among so many human souls at once. The rumblings alone sounded like thunder. The main auditorium held ten thousand people and was sandwiched between two vast wings containing, among other things, a nursery the size of a small school, a “worship gym” where one could work out while watching the sermon on jumbo monitors, four small theme chapels, several suites of administrative offices, a bookstore and record store, a gift shop, a café and a restaurant and a sandwich shop; an infirmary; and a children’s recreation room that resembled Disneyland. The Atomic Church of God and Worship Center boasted a credit union, an employment agency, a marriage counseling service, a culinary school (“learning to cook for Jesus!”). There were six choirs, four Christian rock bands—the Rolling Tongues of Fire, Loaves N Phishes, the Adam and Eve Project, Psalmsmack—and an inspirational rap group, Boyz 4 da Cross, which had a best-selling CD entitled Gangbanging 4 da Lord; there were four services on Sunday, and at least one major one every day, not to mention endless Bible studies and support groups, and a flotilla of outreach programs and lectures and encounter gatherings and forums that resembled activities aboard a luxury cruise ship. In fact, that was what the entire operation reminded her of: one vast ocean liner on land, afloat from the rest of the world. She would get through this service.

  After musical numbers and skits that made her think she was first at a rock concert and then a Broadway play, and then a stadium-size group therapy session, with the uproar and flash of a rock star cum head of state, on center stage rushed the Atomic Reverend himself, Reverend Spike. (“Are you ready to get nuclear for Jesus?”)

  Aside from the physique of a professional wrestler and the good looks of a movie star, and a platinum tongue, the Reverend Jamie Horowitz’s mystique was bound up in his past.

  His father had been a famous physicist and his mother, part Japanese, part Hawaiian, a concert pianist. He had gone to excellent schools and at a tender age made a fortune in computers, which he lost, and then another one with an Internet company, which was in turn wiped out like so much goofer dust. All before he was thirty. But did that stop Spike Horowitz? No, brothers and sisters. The Lord had an appointment for him stored in His great celestial PalmPilot. Hallelujah! The Lord told him to build him a city, a City of God, just as St. Augustine has written about. And the Atomic Church was that city.

  The standing applause took a while to die down as the great tree trunk of a man stalked back and forth across the immense stage, white teeth flashing, eyes manic with glee.

  “Praise be to God, saints,” he said as the crowd finally took their seats, though the mass of worshipers never quieted, always there was the hum and the occasional ejaculation of agreement, communication back and forth from the high-tech high priest and the pulsing Army of the Lord. The spectacle made Velmajean smile despite herself. This wasn’t church, this was a movement.

  “I’m happy this morning, saints. I’ve been talking to the CEO, the Chairman of the Board, the President of the Universe—hallelujah! And do you know what He told me?”

  The response was akin to a thunderclap.

  “That’s right, children. Hallelujah! Our annual report’s good. Our soul-stock is up! Our major asset—our Atomic Faith in Christ Jesus our Lord—is through the roof! Hallelujah!” With that, balloons and confetti fell from the air like manna, and the response was seismic. The band struck up a disco version of “Soldiers of the Lord,” and people not only leapt to their feet but danced, and for a time there was rejoicing in the aisles. Velmajean spied the frenzy the way a rabbit watches foxes frolic.

  “Hug your brothers and sisters. Amen. Amen. Amen!” The Reverend led the worship pep rally for a good twenty minutes or more before the lights dimmed, the stadium hushed, and the hulk from Honolulu settled down to his sermon, “God’s 401(k) for You!” (which would be available at the next service on audiotape, videotape, CD, and DVD).

  By and by, somewhere in the midst of his message, long after the cute catchphrases had subsided and the laser lights took a break, Velmajean found the Reverend downright moving. It was not his ocean-deep, river-smooth voice—the sort of voice that made you want to believe, to follow; after a spell it was hard to conceive that this voice did not know what it was talking about, did not come from another place; or the fact that he was simply riveting, difficult not to watch. But his words, tender, healing, inspiring, touched her. (“God’s retirement plan is a Welcome Table of love, dearly beloved. The meek, the weak, the halt, the lame, the peacemakers and the sinners—hallelujah—will all be fed. Cleansed. Wrapped up in his bosom…”) This, Velmajean thought, is how a sermon should make you feel.

  At the end of the sermon, Velmajean was on her feet along with the crowd crying Hosea.

  Make no mistake, Velmajean Swearington Hoyt was as levelheaded and as sensible as they come, not easily swayed by a good-looking man, no matter how well he filled out a pair of jeans. Yes, she liked the Reverend, could listen to him all day, could watch him for the rest of her natural life. But it was not the Reverend’s good looks and sermon that convinced her in the end, that swept her along—it was the people. The overwhelming sense of fellowship, of belonging, of congregation in the truest sense: She felt as if she were becoming a member of a new nation, something fresh and wonderful, and she wanted to be a part of that new happening.

  In fact, she had been a member of the church for close to two years before she personally met the Reverend Spike. That occurred the day after the turkey barbecue incident.

  He had actually been scheduled to be there that day—the Annual Thanksgiving-in-May Celebration to feed the homeless at a strip mall in Durham—but on paper the Reverend Spike was alw
ays overbooked, double-booked, as if, one fine day, the Lord would see fit to actually split him into eight men to accomplish all the works necessary in his ministry.

  Velmajean arrived at the parking lot early that day. There were to be fifteen other workers from the church to dispense the food. A poultry processing plant had donated turkeys galore, and the women and men in the Reach Out Program had spent days roasting turkeys, frying turkeys, making turkey casseroles and turkey salads and turkey soup—gallons of turkey soup, as the chairperson reasoned, depending upon the turnout, the soup could be stretched (and ultimately frozen) yet remain filling and nutritious. Four fat gobblers had been left over. Velmajean had volunteered to take them home to barbecue. She’d spent hours that night and the next morning slowly grilling the butterflied birds, deboning and hacking the meat into two large plastic tubs of delicious chopped barbecue with a strong vinegar-based sauce sure to please a crowd. Her wrists and forearms were still sore from the work. She had also stopped by on her way to pick up a gross of bread loaves donated by a local upscale French bistro. Her car smelled of toasted sesame seeds and new barbecue.

  Thirty minutes before the appointed hour, a small group of men had gathered, smoking and milling about, talking loudly. There was no sign of her fellow church members. Velmajean sat in the car, her mouth watering from the smells of piquant barbecue sauce and the loaves of bread, pungent even from the trunk. She listened to the all-news radio station.

  She didn’t get worried until fifteen minutes before the meal was to be served. The two vans with the Atomic Church of God and Worship Center logos were nowhere to be seen. A crowd of men and a smattering of women had gathered now. For the first time in many months, Velmajean regretted that she had not knuckled under and gotten a cell phone.

  Then came a knock at her window. There stood a youngish man, chestnut brown, in a frayed-collar shirt and green fatigues. He had a several-day growth of beard, and his teeth were Ivory Snow white. He smiled at Velmajean as she rolled the window down.

  “Miss, some of the guys were wondering if we got the wrong day for the Thanksgiving thing.”

  “No, no,” Velmajean said. “It’s supposed to be happening right now. I don’t know where everybody is.”

  The man licked his lips. “Mmm, that smells good. Barbecue?”

  “Yeah, turkey barbecue. Made it myself.”

  The man paused and stared at Velmajean. Of all the things that occurred that day, the look on that young man’s face abided with her. Not a look so much of hunger, or of longing, or of weariness, though to be sure these powerful ingredients stewed there; but there was also an admixture of sadness and shame, the desire to request, yet a deeper need to be understood, not pitied. Most powerfully there was a sense of a man clinging to his dignity, not to be melted for barbecue.

  Later, when asked what had moved her to get out of her car, take out the two tubs of barbecue, retrieve the 144 loaves of bread from the trunk, and begin, one by one, to serve the throng, she could only shrug and sigh. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  She knew the real reason but felt she could never find a way to properly articulate it, to make anyone understand: She did not want that young man to have to ask.

  Ninety minutes later the two vans from the church arrived, heavy laden with their cornucopia of turkey cuisine and condiments and Kool-Aid. They saw Velmajean Swearington Hoyt, alone and armed only with a spoon and a knife, cutting open loaf after loaf of bread, scooping up a decent amount of turkey barbecue, patiently feeding an entire tribe of men.

  Perhaps that would have been the end of the matter, people might have spoken of the incident with warm hearts and glowing tones in that way one speaks of dedicated teachers, but she kept on and on and on. Despite the brothers and sisters hurriedly arranging the tables and fare, and now-tepid soup, for some odd reason the crowd gravitated around Velmajean, wanted to taste and be fed by the woman who had been serving them singularly from the beginning. The loaves did not run out; the tub of barbecue never went empty. Each and every person in the crowd was filled.

  Later accounts put the number of people at over a thousand, which was not merely unrealistic since the program had never served more than five hundred people at one time. Mrs. Frederica Stanforth and Mrs. Nellie Mae Washington both reckoned the crowd at more like one hundred fifty to two hundred. But how the flesh of four turkeys and a big bag of bread could feed such a number escaped even their eagle eyes. Moreover: Velmajean never opened the second tub.

  Velmajean understood that something had occurred but tried not to name it. She went home, tired, and fell into a cotton candy sleep, gauzy, sweet, luscious, buoyed, and serene.

  At first the rumors and talk percolated only among the Atomic saints, but given the number of witnesses and the sheer size of the congregation, soon a new urban legend arose: This woman—her name, fortunately, had been lost in the translations—had fed an entire crowd of men with a tub of barbecue and a basket of bread at the Quail Dale Square at Broad and Hollywood in Durham, North Carolina, a legend now being repeated all over the state. It was at Bingo Night that Velmajean first heard the word miracle applied to the incident. That was the first time Velmajean Swearington Hoyt began to feel, instead of blessed, afraid.

  Depending on the scholar one asks, the Christ performed somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-five miracles. By the time the Reverend had contacted Velmajean, inadvertently four more incidents had befallen her: dancing with her nephew on the pond at Abendigo Park; delivering a nonagenarian woman from Alzheimer’s with a hug; touching the cheek of a young man who suffered from acute paranoid schizophrenia and watching him walk away smiling and whole of mind. She shook hands with a woman who suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome and the shooting pains vanished.

  By and by her name had been divulged, and crowds appeared along Piney View Lane. The doorbell rang constantly. After six people—a blind man, a woman with kidney failure, a deaf boy, a quadriplegic man, a woman with breast cancer, and another with multiple sclerosis—her neighbors declared they had had enough and put a stop to the steady stream with a barrage of calls to the police department and the sheriff. By that point Velmajean had already become more and more disturbed. People turned up asking her to pay their Visa bills, to be cured of sexual addictions, for winning lotto numbers, and to palliate penile dysfunction. When she heard the sirens and the official barking on electrified megaphones, she felt two things: relief and shame, more than she would care to admit. To be sure there was a great joy, a deep, exhilarating sense of awe at the works being performed through her—not once did she take responsibility for the changes—but with each new face, with each new begment, she had experienced a creeping sadness and confusion.

  “I’m looking for a miracle,” the song went. For as long as she could remember, Velmajean had believed in miracles. Small and large. Mysterious and homegrown. She believed angels walked among us. She believed that folks were inexplicably healed of dread ills. That prayers were answered. Only now the purpose of miracles among men was less clear to her. Were they to demonstrate God’s love, the power of faith? Or to do good? Was one better than the other? Was it more important to have faith than to be made whole? She had not reckoned on the differing views—if indeed there was a difference. And frankly, the contemplation made her head hurt.

  The police and state troopers set up barricades and stood guard, and Velmajean was left to worry and fret. Part of her, roaming about the empty house, vacuuming, dusting, defrosting the freezer, was secretly terrified, though she did her best to hide it from herself. Theretofore she had been successful in not asking questions about what was happening to her. But no longer: Why me? What have I been chosen to do? What have I done to deserve this? That night she did not sleep well at all. Her dreams were beyond baffling: She dreamt of being in a choir of gorgeous, multicolored, naked angels, singing hip-hop songs in a language she did not understand; she dreamt of frantically trying to finish a supper for Jesus and a party of twelve, who we
re going to arrive at any minute and the damn turkey was raw; she dreamt she was watching television with a roomful of long-dead people—her mother, her father, her cousin Agnes among them—but everyone ignored her and left her to watch 60 Minutes by herself. She missed her husband as if he had died the day before.

  Demonstrating that he was well brought up, the Reverend Spike had the good manners to call first. Overwhelmed by calls, Velmajean had broken down and purchased an answering machine. It was lucky she had picked up the phone.

  She served him tea on her sunporch and was bemused and delighted by her pastor, the pastor, curiously enough, who had paid her no attention in twenty-four months after her joining his behemoth church.

  “You aren’t getting bored in this big house all by yourself, are you?”

  “No more than usual, Reverend. And I have all these nice men to play pinochle with at night. Not for money, of course.”

  They chitted and chatted. Velmajean found it difficult to put her finger on what made this gigantic figure so attractive. (“More tea, Reverend?”) Not merely the composition of his face, the symmetry, the rich salmon complexion, the intimidatingly white and well-formed teeth, the ink black eyes. (“Thank you, sister.”) No, it was the way he insinuated himself upon the individual you (“Did I ever show you pictures of the new baby?”), the self-possession, the self-power, the self-projection of self into yourself. (“Isn’t he a little cherub? Look at that.”) Your self was locked into his self when he spoke with you—it was a presence that told you: Don’t worry. You’re with me.

  “I was wondering, Sister Velma, if you would feel more…well, secure, more comfortable, in a hotel. You know, we have nice guest suites down at the church. You might—”