"Wow," she whispered.
"That was what I said too," John Tinker told her.
She frowned.
"He's very crude but he's very, very strong.
That's because he's absolutely sincere. He really knows that it's going to work. And he makes it work. Fantastic! I know that my faith is just as strong as his, but I can't project it like that. He's acting but at the same time he isn't. He's fabulous, Johnny."
"And who does he remind you of ?"
"Of course! Poppa, when we were little. He wasn't as crude but he was just as strong. He could make them cry. He could make them flock up to be saved. He could make them believe.
Where has this man been? Why haven't we heard of him before?"
Finn had the facts memorized, as usual.
"He's forty-two, and within a month of John's age. He worked in a pulp mill in Florida. He was a brawler and a drunk. He was born again when he was twenty-two and he has never lost his faith. He says that he was converted by Matthew Meadows long ago.
There's no good reason to doubt him. At twenty-two he was sentenced to ten years in Raiford State Prison for manslaughter committed before he was saved. Actually, he turned himself in.
He did six of the ten years, came out on parole, worked for a few years and then began to preach. He worked out of a tent, moving along the Gulf Coast, saving souls. He arrived in the town where he now preaches about eight months ago. Their old preacher had died of a stroke. There was no strong affiliation. They call themselves the Central Church of the Living God. He isn't really interested in affiliating with us. He thinks he's doing just fine where he is. He seems to think we are too big and too rich and too important. The only reason he talked to us at all and let us tape is because your father was important in his life long ago."
"That's like Poppa too, John. Remember, all those people that were after him. But he wanted to be the head of his own church and build it himself."
"I remember, but I think we need this man," John Tinker said.
"And we need him right now. Agreed?"
"Certainly!" she said.
"He'll be coming for a visit in a couple of weeks. We'll send a jet for him and put him up in the Manse, and let him sit in on services in the Tabernacle. I want everyone on staff to be very, very nice to him. If we can persuade him to join with us, we're going to have some kind of a ball team here."
"I hate it when you use sports talk," she said.
Finn Efflander excused himself and left.
John Tinker Meadows turned a chair around and sat astride it, his arms folded, resting on the top of the back, chin on his forearm, staring at her.
"We don't have enough time for any kind of talk at all, sports talk or otherwise," he said.
"I know. I worry about you, Johnny."
"In what context, Mag?"
"When we do have a chance to talk, you get cross. Like now, you get that irritated look. Can't we talk like family anymore?"
"Maybe whenever we talk I can expect to be nagged."
"Isn't that what family members do to each other? Isn't it maybe what they are supposed to do?"
"Not exclusively."
"And if that is what you always expect from me, no wonder we never have any time to talk. If you expect to be nagged every time, I don't blame you for avoiding me."
"Okay, tell me why you worry about me."
"Your sermon today was very, very good. You seemed to pull everything together. You seemed to reach out to the people today, Johnny. You don't do that as often as you used to. You seem to be... spiritually distracted."
"I've got a great idea. Why don't you give all the sermons from now on, Mag?"
"Please. Please don't be ugly. I'm not your enemy. I want everything to be good for you. But you seem to be... going away from us lately, all of us. Like when you look out the back window of a car and there is somebody on the shoulder of the road, standing there, getting smaller and smaller and further away. You don't seem to have any fun anymore, any real joy or satisfaction. You don't realize how seldom you laugh."
"Maybe there's nothing funny going on lately."
"You push me away from you. You push away all the people who care the most for you. And there's another thing."
"I knew there would be. At least one. Or more."
"People are getting very wary of you. Nobody can guess how you are going to react to anything. I know you are really carrying the whole load of this place on your shoulders. We all know that. We all respect you for the job you're doing. Is there something wrong, something beyond all the weight of responsibility?"
"Maybe I'm just getting a little stale, Mag. Perhaps it has something to do with the old man. I don't know. Who is there to approve of the way I handle things? It made me feel good to please him, you know? Now he has no idea how well or badly I'm doing."
She looked down at her thumbnail, ugly, bitten down to the quick. Without looking up she said, "There's just the two of us, you know. I wonder about it a lot. What could have happened to us? Poppa wasn't demanding. He never leaned on us. You know that. Lately I've begun to realize that he was such a holy and dedicated man that he had absolute confidence in the three of us. He didn't really see us the way we are. Not ever." She looked up at him.
"And we weren't deserving? Is that what you're saying?"
"No, Johnny. I'm saying that the three of us, and maybe Momma too, we had to kind of... push ourselves upward to fill up the big image he had of us. To be better people than we ever were. And it was too much, maybe. It was too much for Paul, certainly. And maybe in ways we can't quite comprehend, it was too much for you and me too."
"And so you are saying that what is wrong with you and me, we have been role-playing to please Poppa, and now he's not there to be pleased anymore. What's there is a confused and troubled child. Mag, if we are not what we appear to be or what we think we are, what the hell are we? What are we supposed to do with our lives? Right now thousands and thousands of people depend on us for their faith and their happiness. Isn't that enough justification?"
"Have you thought about marriage?"
It startled him.
"I thought this was supposed to be a serious and friendly conversation. What in the world are you talking about? That's a ridiculous idea. I was married once. Remember?"
"And Chris was an absolutely fabulous woman. How could anyone forget her? Everybody loved her. You are forty-two years old, Johnny, and Chris has been buried up there on the hillside next to our mother for nine years now. Nine years!"
He stared at her.
"Got the bride picked out?"
"Tracy Bellwright."
He looked at her in total astonishment.
"You are really something else! Who the hell is she? Have I heard that name?"
"She's the oldest Angel I have, and she's getting selfconscious about being twenty-eight among all those young kids. She's assistant to Dorothy Getts, the dean of women."
"Tall pretty blonde woman? Long hair?"
"She's more than pretty. I think she's beautiful. She's intelligent, Johnny, and she has a sweet disposition, a lovely voice, and she's a very healthy person. And she adores you."
"She should save her adoration for the Lord."
"You know what I mean. Don't put me off that way. There could be a lovely wedding in the Tabernacle. You two would be a wonderful-looking couple. We'd get fantastic coverage from the media. And I think the members of the Church would really like to have it happen."
"Mag, I do not really think I want to get married."
"It could keep you out of trouble."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Why do you have to ask? You know the kind of trouble I mean. I don't think you want to force me to describe it to you.
The last time it happened it could have gotten out of hand and turned into really terrible trouble for you and the Church and all of us. You were lucky. We were all lucky. The Church was lucky. Sometimes, Johnny, people go looking for you and
they can't find you anywhere. And I am reminded of what was going on two years ago. There's a rumor you're seeing a married woman. Can it be true? After the way you promised the last time, never again?"
"Are you losing your wits, Mag? Are you losing touch with reality?"
"Do you want to answer me, or do you want to sidestep the question? Are you messing around with someone?"
"No. I am not messing around with anyone."
"When you are tempted, Johnny, you are not exactly a pillar of strength. You've proved that more than once."
"And you manage to rekindle the memories once a month at least, don't you? Everybody else who knew anything about it has forgotten, all except Mary Margaret Meadows. Maybe it's the way you get your kicks, living in my past."
"I'm not going to let you make me angry, John Tinker. I think there are quite a few people who remember it. But that's beside the point. Lately you've been so irritable and restless and remote, and it makes me wonder how vulnerable you might be to some sort of trouble. Why don't you take a good look at Tracy Bellwright? She would make a really lovely bride, Johnny. She'd make you happy. And then there'd be somebody to really approve of the good things you do, to be proud of you for them, like that sermon this morning."
He stood up slowly and looked down at her and smiled.
"Sis, how would you ever get to know anything about that kind of restlessness? Look at you! You've put all other kinds of temptation behind you with a knife and fork. Gluttony is one of the sins of the gratification of self. Until you can control your own hungers, sister, and your own insecurities, try to stay the hell out of my personal life. Okay?"
He strolled out of the small projection room, closing the door softly as he left. She sat quietly for a long time, and then remembered the trick she had learned in childhood. If you tried to catch the rolling tears with the tip of your tongue, they would stop.
He's going bad, she thought. Ever faster. Like something rotting away underneath the shiny outer skin. You'd have to cut into it to find the rot. For many now, he has become more and more a person playing a part. A person pretending to be the Reverend Doctor John Tinker Meadows. A polished performer with a saintly look who, on any Sunday, preaches to more people than ever listened to Jesus Christ in his whole lifetime. He wanted all this because it was Poppa's. He wanted it dreadfully. And each year that he took over more of it, he wanted it less. Now he has it all, and maybe he doesn't want it at all. So he's getting more reckless. What is the game with the loaded gun? Russian roulette. With Johnny it is woman roulette. The loaded situation, loaded with risk. Defying God and his own father. Maybe, in some warped way in his mind, they are one and the same. There are rumors. He knows I didn't make them up. And if they weren't true, he wouldn't have been so vile and nasty to me.
From memory she whispered aloud the second and third verses of the Thirty-sixth Psalm, the Jerusalem Bible translation used by all the faithful of the Eternal Church of the Believer.
"He sees himself with too flattering an eye to detect and detest his guilt; all he says tends to mischief and deceit, he has turned his back on wisdom."
So he's pretending to be something he isn't and so am I. Paul couldn't handle that kind of strain, and maybe he was the best of the three of us. I am handling it better than Johnny. Does that make me the worst of the three of us, or the strongest?
She got up and rewound the tape and settled back and watched the Reverend Tom Daniel Birdy again. And again he touched her heart.
Six By nine-thirty on that Sunday evening, the Reverend Joseph Deets was reclining in familiar and delicious comfort in the small living room of his bachelor house in the Meadows Settlements at 11 Zedekiah Lane. The tract houses in that area of the Settlements were based upon the smallest and simplest floor plans, and were occupied for the most part by single people or childless couples who worked at the Center and rented rather than owned the small houses.
An old tape by the Modern Jazz Quartet was playing, and the intricate music was just within the range of audibility. All the draperies were closed. A floor lamp with a blue shade was the only light in the room, over by the couch. He was stretched out on his most expensive piece of furniture, a television chair with toggle controls which worked much like those on a hospital bed, raising and lowering the back and the knees to the most comfortable position. Within reach of his right hand was a small table with two glasses and a decent bottle of California Cabernet Sauvignon.
His old blue robe was open, and Doreen's head was tucked beneath the edge of his jaw, and her forearms were under his back, her fingers hooked back around the top of his shoulders.
Her firm breasts were pressed flat against his wiry chest. She lay frog like her body slack and deeply penetrated, utterly relaxed. Across her back and shoulders and rear was a featherweight mohair throw, shielding her from the faint chilly breath of the air-conditioning vent in the wall nearby.
He slid his two hands up under the throw, and with his workman clasp and closely trimmed fingernails, he traced slow patterns from the small of her back down around the solid gluteal cheeks and back up again, now and again detouring to trace the inner and outer lines of her velvet thighs, altering now and again the force of his touch, from a questing firmness to the lightest brushing stroke, but never changing the pattern or 72the rhythm. At last, as anticipated, she made a murky sound, almost a sound of complaint, and ground her head against his jaw, pulling at his shoulders with her hooked fingers. Her personal history, retrieved by him from the detailed data bank when he had first become curious about her, had not prepared him for her shyness, reluctance and fear. As he continued to caress her without haste, gently, he felt deep within her a tiny clenching, like the fist of a small sleepy child.
It had taken him a long, patient time to release her from the conditioning inflicted on her by her hearty motorcycle sweetheart, a fellow rough, selfish and hasty in his lovemaking.
Now that she was over the effects of him, she was, Joe Deets thought, like a tidy little cauldron of some wonderfully fragrant sauce which sits there on the back of the stove with the blue flame turned very low under it, a few wisps of steam rising. At any time, day or night, one needed only to turn the blue flame up a half whisker and the cauldron would simmer, then bubble at the edges and soon lift into a rolling boil.
He smiled to himself, tilted her head up and found her lips, then began a more strategic stroking. She sighed, shifted, and then breathed more quickly and shallowly as her hips began small movements. He felt her approaching climax from a long way off, and he helped her over the edge and into it, relishing her soft mewing sounds.
Once again he had been able to wait her out, willing himself back from the very edge of his own release, so that when she was still, he remained within her just as he had been before, deep, hard as a hickory post, pulsing almost imperceptibly with each strong thud of his heart.
He felt the hot wax of her tears on the side of his throat.
"No need for crying, sweetness," he told her.
"I'd just plain kill myself if she sends me home."
"I told you how many times? She won't send you home."
"How can you be real sure, Joe? This is black, dirty, evil sin and she knows it and you know it. You are older, she said, than my own dad and that makes it worse even."
"In one sense it's sin, Doreen. Every night of my life I pray for forgiveness for what we're doing. I tell Him we're weak creatures and we just can't seem to help ourselves."
"That's what I told her. We're in love and we can't help it.
She said you could help it if you wanted to. She said you've always been like this. She said you were always making it with young girls like me, and you don't really give a damn about me.
All you care about, she said, is getting sex from young girls.
And it is always the same for you."
"Not like this. Not really like this. Never before like this, believe me, love."
"She says it means your sin is worse than mine."<
br />
"It probably is."
"Because you're so old?"
With an inward wince he said, "That isn't what I meant. I'm a preacher, Doreen. That's what makes it worse. But sometimes providence moves in strange ways. I have enormous responsibilities to the Church. Crushing responsibilities. Until you came into my life I was sleeping badly, I had constant indigestion. Worry about my duties to the Church was slowly killing me. And if I can't carry on, there's nobody else who can do my work. It would be a terrible setback for the Church. Do you see what I'm driving at?"
"Maybe. I don't really know..."
John D MacDonald - One More Sunday Page 8
