The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  Waking up was easier the second time.

  I was already half aware, drifting in and out of the world, when the telephone rang and I forced myself to stand up before answering it and thanking the operator. Half an hour of t’ai chi, followed by a quick shower—warm at first, then stinging cold to get the juices flowing—put the finishing touches on the long night. Most of my pains were gone, and my outlook was almost disgustingly cheerful by the time I was dressed and ready for public exhibition.

  I dialed Dana’s room, but wasn’t surprised when no one answered.

  Find her later.

  Find breakfast now.

  I locked the motel room door behind me and took a leisurely course to the coffee shop, stopping off to spend a quarter at one of the newspaper vending machines just outside. But I didn’t get past the headlines that told me someone with the unlikely name of Robert Donald Thieroux had been killed in a freak automobile accident.

  Inside the coffee shop, I spotted Dana at a booth next to the front windows; a chubby little man in a silk business suit was seated across from her. She waved enthusiastically as I entered.

  “Over here, dear,” she fluted, in a stage-fluttery voice I’d never heard before. “Over here!”

  The man with her didn’t seem happy to see me.

  “This dear little fat man,” she said, still twittering along the top of the scale, “has been entertaining me while I waited for you.”

  The man shuffled his feet, started to move out of the booth, and then realized I was standing in the way.

  “Look,” he said, “I just—”

  “He’s very inventive,” Dana went on, apparently paying no attention. “I mean, you absolutely wouldn’t believe some of the things he said he would like to do with me if we went back to his motel room. I told him my husband was a minister and would want to hear about it, too, but I don’t think he really believed me. Did you, dear little fat man?”

  She paused, still smiling sweetly, and the man didn’t seem to want to look in her direction. He pressed a shoulder experimentally against my left leg, but I pretended not to notice and favored him with a smile of my own.

  “A pleasure, brother,” I said. “Prime pleasure on this glorious morning to encounter a fellow laborer in the vineyard. Will you join us now in a moment of communion?”

  All lechery had vanished from the face he turned to me, replaced now by a pained admixture of misgiving and disbelief.

  “O Father of all goodness,” I said, shading my brow with one hand while the other held him firmly in place, “bless this day to the building of thy kingdom and the furtherance of thy work. Look kindly upon this servant newly made known to us, and grant that his heart be uplifted and his body cured of all its many disorders and afflictions…”

  The final words fell into silence. Every eye in the room seemed to be turned in our direction. You can weep, curse, or faint in a crowd with some fair hope of privacy, but public prayer never fails to shock and amaze.

  I relaxed the pressure that had pinned him to the cushions, and his reaction was both swift and gratifying. In an instant he had slipped past me to freedom, scuttling across the room without a backward glance. The silk suit that had fitted so well earlier now seemed half a size too large.

  “Prayer meeting at eight-thirty sharp,” I called as he reached the door. “We’ll be expecting you…”

  He wanted to reply.

  But he didn’t.

  When he was finally out of sight, I sank into the booth with a tiny rotten glow of satisfaction still warming the spot where remorse ought to have been hard at work by now.

  “Shame on us both,” I said, not believing a word of it. But Dana had stopped smiling and seemed to be having trouble looking directly at me. Something had changed. I picked up the menu to take her off the hook and let her pick her own time and words.

  No accounting for mood swings.

  “I had a long talk with Helen Spence yesterday,” she said at last, about the time I had decided to give breakfast a miss and settle for coffee.

  “Been meaning to do that myself,” I said. “Always worthwhile…”

  But Dana wasn’t having any.

  “Helen told me all about you,” she said. “Everything—how you and Jake were roommates at seminary and were ordained on the same day. And the war in Vietnam and how you served two tours and lost your eye, and resigned from the priesthood.”

  Helen always did talk a lot. I wondered how I had come off, seen through her eyes, and what she could possibly have said to make this woman uneasy in talking to me now.

  “And she told me about Sara…”

  Oh.

  Dana picked up a spoon and made a few unnecessary stirring motions in the half-empty coffee cup.

  “So,” she went on when we’d both had time for a paragraph or two of silent dialogue, “I guess I owe you an apology.”

  I started to protest, but she was already shaking her head.

  “The trouble is,” she said, “I don’t feel one damn bit apologetic. Not really. Not at all, in fact. What I do feel is mad enough to throw this coffee in your face, cup and all, and then go back and see what Helen Spence has to say about a good solid clout in the chops.”

  The grin I gave her was absolutely genuine.

  “If you really decide to do that,” I said, “please take me with you, or at least give a little notice. I’d pay good money to watch. And maybe handle the betting line. I’ve seen Helen in action, and my money’d be on her…but not by more than six to five.”

  That did it.

  “Bastard!”

  Right.

  Time is surely the best cure for embarrassment, but anger will do well enough in a pinch, and to carry out the plans I had for the day I needed a full partner, not a running apology. I watched her struggle through a series of emotions and come at last to a plateau where conversation—and even communication—might be possible.

  “Well, anyway,” she said, “I think it was a dirty trick not to warn you that I looked like…her.”

  No argument there.

  “It would have saved a little wear and tear on the cardiovascular system,” I agreed. “But I guess Helen thought we’d be grown up enough to survive.”

  “All the same”—Dana’s eyes were curious now—“is it…I mean, am I really that much like her? Like Sara?”

  I thought about it, looking at her.

  “On first impact,” I said, “yes. Remarkably. Same size and build, same face. Even the same vocal range—when you’re not chastising lecherous wimps. Hair and eyes a bit different, but all in all, close enough to use her driver’s license.”

  “And on second look?”

  “On second look, too. But maybe not on third. A lot of time has passed, remember. Impressions fade. Sometimes now I can’t be sure if the face I remember is really Sara or an old photograph of her.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “I know,” she said. “It’s that way for me sometimes, too. With Harry. Somebody told me once that no one is really dead while you remember him, so I guess that means poor old Harry is really gone. Take me a while even to describe him.”

  I wondered if that was really true.

  None of my business.

  “Anyway,” I said, “when I look at you now, it’s Dana Lansing I see. Not Sara. I’m not much for building monuments, in graveyards or anywhere else, so whatever Helen may have had in mind doesn’t seem to have made much difference. At least not to me. How about you?”

  That got a smile, the first real one she’d offered. And it was worth the effort.

  “Fair enough,” she said. “Now—whose parade do we rain on first?”

  In point of fact, the first order of business seemed to be a breakfast that would have buried a brace of lumberjacks.

  Nothing like sudden human contact to sharpen the appetite.

  Conversation languished while sausage, eggs, biscuits, and gravy—a country touch not to be sneered at; everyone has weaknesses and that’s one of mine—m
et their destiny and were tamped down with more of the worst coffee I had ever tasted.

  “Dear sweet Lord,” I said, taking a final bite of biscuit to banish the acrid taste, “what do they make this stuff with, floor sweepings?”

  Dana’s nose wrinkled.

  “Nothing wrong with the coffee itself,” she said. “It’s the water. Lots of alkali. People around here don’t even notice. Been drinking it all their lives, so they think that’s just the way it is. But if you go somewhere else for a while, you forget, and drinking it again can be a real shock.”

  “That would account for it.” I nodded solemnly. “All the same, judging from the way you were able to rescue me from the clutches of the law yesterday, I’d say you were still pretty well plugged in to the local scene.”

  “I’m from here,” she said. “Born and raised in Farewell, and that means I’m homefolks. Scenery. I could go away for twenty years—fifty—and come back and still be homefolks in a way that someone who’d moved in and lived here all those years never would. Damned if I know whether it’s a good thing or a bad one. But that’s sure how it is.”

  I nodded. “That,” I said, “is more or less what I’d expected. And hoped.”

  She looked a question.

  “Jake Spence gave me a bird’s-eye view,” I said. “He’s been here awhile, and he’s got the kind of job that gets him pretty well acquainted. Still, there are things about the town and the people in it that need the kind of gut knowledge you’d have and he wouldn’t.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as, I played cards for a night with an attorney called Deke Pemberton. Jake tells me he is both smart and honest. A rare combination, if true. Especially for a lawyer. But I can only vouch for the smart part. Honest takes local on-the-ground information.”

  Dana fumbled a cigarette from her purse and lighted it, considering honesty.

  “If he’s not honest,” she said after a moment or two, “then he must have changed a lot since I left. And I still wouldn’t believe it.”

  Her expression said there was something more, and I waited to hear that, too. “Except?” I prompted.

  “Except…well, Deke Pemberton just always scared the living hell right out of me. And I’m not the only one, either. Those eyes of his. You must’ve noticed them, playing poker with him. They look right through you and see everything and tell you nothing at all.”

  She inhaled deeply and blew the smoke away. “Honest, though. Yes, he’s that for sure. Maybe it’s just being born rich like he was and never needing to steal, but I always thought it was something more than that. Some people—and not stupid people, either—are just naturally that way. And I think he’s one of them. Why? Are you thinking of changing your will?”

  I grinned. “Might be a good idea,” I said. “Second question, more personal: Your sister, Marilyn, has she given a definite answer, signed anything, on that offer she had to sell the helicopter business?”

  “No way.” Dana shook her head. “Before you went to sleep yesterday you mumbled something about how she wasn’t to do that, and I’ve been stalling them anyway. Was that right?”

  “Perfect. Now, one more question and we’ll be ready to get out of here and start the day’s work: I’ve already made a call that ought to get me part of the information I need, but to nail everything down and draw a diagram for the skeptical, I’m going to have to talk to someone with an insider’s knowledge of Farewell real estate and financing. Particularly the financing. Any names in particular come to mind?”

  Her response was immediate, but stopped just short of the voice box. Instead of answering at once, she tilted her head a fraction of an inch—and for a moment I was paralyzed.

  Sara.

  It was her mannerism, a memory I thought I’d buried and forgotten a long time ago—the slightly stagey way she had of picking her way around a question she could have answered but thought she shouldn’t. I wondered if Dana had noticed anything in my face. Probably not. She was busy with thoughts of her own.

  “You’re not talking about J. J. Barlow,” she said.

  “Someone else, maybe.”

  “Uh-huh.” She thought about it and her posture changed, and Sara was gone. My breathing resumed, and an almost painful relaxation spread across my shoulders and upper arms while I sorted out the residual shock. Fine way for a grown man to act.

  Ridiculous.

  “Okay, then,” she said finally. “I guess I know who’d be the right one to ask. But I sure don’t know how you’d feel about seeing him. Or how he’d feel about you.”

  I waited for her to explain.

  “The one I’m thinking of,” she said, “is richer than God himself. Owns half of this county and has a mortgage on the rest, and if there is anything he doesn’t know about property and money hereabouts, he’ll sure be after someone’s hide for holding out on him.”

  “Sounds just right.”

  “Maybe. But he lives on a spread outside town, and you want to give him a telephone call before you go—he keeps a pack of dogs and they’re blood mean—and even if he tells you to come ahead, you’ll want to think it over for a while.”

  “Why would that be, now?”

  “Because his name is Mose Thieroux, and he is the grandfather of the damn fool who got killed yesterday morning, driving the car he stole from you.”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  But there is more to man than consumption; more to his life than a mere striving for sustenance.

  Here is where he differs from all other life forms of which we have knowledge.

  Here is the peculiar burden assigned him by the Almighty…

  THIRTEEN

  Looking at the world from the passenger seat of Dana’s car on the way to the Thieroux ranch, I was force-fed another, more leisurely, jolt of east New Mexico landscape, and found no good reason to revise my original perceptions.

  It was still big and raw and lonesome.

  Yet the day offered a few compensations. Winter sun had dried the highway, and even the unmarked dirt and gravel track that cut away toward the horizon seemed tolerable. Metal signs attached to the fence wire warned us that we were on Private Property, and there were two gates. But they were unlocked, and the dogs Dana had mentioned didn’t seem to have been set free with orders to kill.

  Dana was silent throughout the trip. She hadn’t wanted to listen while I used a pay phone to make the advance call to the ranch, and had expressed real astonishment when I told her that someone there had checked with the boss-man, and we were now invited guests. But she flatly refused my offer to rent another car and make the drive by myself.

  “You’d find too much trouble to get into,” she said. “I’ll come along to scrape up the remains and give them a decent burial. Besides, that old man likes his privacy, and his place isn’t all that easy to find.”

  Which was true, and not true.

  Making the drive alone, I might very well have missed the gravel turnoff. But once on that road, there was no way to go wrong, because there seemed to be no side branchings, and its destination was not the kind of place that could be missed. Or forgotten.

  One of the few folds in the steppe-like countryside concealed the main house and ranch buildings from casual highway observation, but this only intensified the effect when they came in sight on topping the first rise.

  Mose Thieroux’s tastes had evidently been formed in the early years of the century, and he had expressed them here without reference to local convention or aesthetics. The main house was of Victorian design complete with turrets, third-story dormers, and a forest of lightning rods surrounding the widow’s walk at the very top. Its materials were a combination of red-brick and weather-napped wood, though on closer inspection I noted that the apparent weathering had been carefully arrested and preserved at a stage of silvering that must have been satisfactory to the owner.

  Outbuildings—bunkhouses, machinery sheds, silos, stable, and a handsome horse-training ring—were of
the same meticulous design and construction, the whole ranch unit surrounded by and interspersed with a stand of elm, oak, maple, and walnut trees arranged to create an impression of randomness and natural occurrence not really possible anywhere on earth, least of all here.

  The workday had evidently begun, and an apostrophe of smoke from what appeared to be a blacksmith shop near the stable was the only visible evidence of life as we neared the house, but one of the double doors at the front of the house opened as we approached, and a rail-thin man in faded denim ambled out to watch us park at the edge of the driveway.

  “That’s him,” Dana said in a stage whisper as we got out of the car. “Old Mose.”

  Viewed fleetingly and from a distance, Mose Thieroux gave the impression of easy vigor and assurance. His movements and erect stance were those of an active man of middle years, dried sharp and taut by sun and wind, and closer inspection changed only a part of this.

  Roll-brimmed stockman’s hat and unshined boots completed a picture of the quintessential southwestern cowboy.

  But the belt buckle was a diamond-studded presentation model that had to have cost a good deal more than the car we were driving, and the eyes below the hat brim were those of a twenty-one-year-old gunfighter waiting in ambush behind a face that had seen at least ninety seasons.

  All this, however, paled to insignificance when he spoke.

  “Ayuh,” he said with a flat nasality that summoned a clear and immediate image of clams and lobsters. “Ayuh! Shouldn’t wondah you be the one they call Preacher…?”

  The accent was pure Down East, and the violent contrast with its surroundings was not eased as Mose Thieroux ushered us through the front hallway, past parlor and formal study, to a kitchen where he used a pot holder to remove a steaming coffeepot from the stove.

  “Like it black?” he inquired, pouring.

  I nodded, accepted an oversize mug, and was about to take a sip when I hesitated, remembering the battery-acid brew at the motel coffee shop. But he noticed the hesitation, and the edge of his mouth twitched in what might have been a smile. The rictus changed his face and made it fleetingly younger.