John D MacDonald - One More Sunday

by One More Sunday(Lit)

  "Of course!" she kept saying. But he kept asking. His black hair was coarse and touched with gray, his eyes a vivid and memorable blue.

  There is not much you can say about an airstrip and a small control tower, five aircraft including the helicopter. Those are all the airplanes, and those are the men who fly them and maintain them. The tower has reception from the weather satellite that covers this whole part of the East from Washington to Jacksonville."

  He climbed up into the tower with the heavy agility of a big polar bear. He stayed up there talking to one of the employees for ten minutes while she waited in the shade of a hangar. After that he went into the larger hangar and talked to the boss 3*3 mechanic. He did not volunteer any information as to what he had talked to them about, and she felt a reluctance to ask him.

  He seemed fascinated by the Mall. He covered all of it, strolling slowly, stopping to look into every store and walking through the larger ones, up and down the aisles. He stood for a long time without comment, his back against a wall, watching the traffic flow of people. Many turned and stared at him, then asked each other low-voiced questions.

  Rolf Wintergarten had come back to work that morning.

  She took Tom Daniel Birdy up and introduced him. For once he did not stay and talk, but went back out into the corridor and said, "What's wrong with that there man?"

  "His wife died very recently. We buried her here Wednesday at midday. She was in an automobile accident and never regained consciousness. They hadn't been married very long.

  She was much younger than Rolf. She was his second wife."

  "You wait right here," he told her, and he turned and went back in. Before the outer door closed she saw him taking big strides toward the door to the inner office and saw one of the women trotting after him saying, "Sir? Sir!"

  It was twelve minutes by her watch before he came back out.

  He took out a big white handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes, then blew his nose.

  "Might be to be'p him a little maybe."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "I made him up a para-bell."

  She frowned at him, puzzled.

  "Para-bell, para-bell," he said impatiently.

  "Jesus Christ went around telling them to folks."

  "Oh yes, of course," she said, realizing he meant parable.

  "What kind of... what did you tell him?"

  "That's between him and me. It's his now, like I give it to him to hold his life stitched together. He wants to tell anybody, he's free to do so. It don't belong to me no more."

  That's a very... unusual concept, Reverend Birdy."

  "Not to me, it ain't. Of course, I've been doing it for years.

  And I maybe got one I can make up for you." As he spoke he turned to look directly at her, and she felt that he was seeing her for the first time. There was an extraordinary impact in that clear blue stare looking down at her.

  "Well... that will be nice, I'm sure."

  "Some are nice and some aren't nice. They has to fit the 3*4 person. Fit them the way I see them, which sometimes it isn't the way they think on themselves. So it comes to them as a shock. But it is kind of the word of the Lord, filtered down through me. When He tells me what to say, I say it."

  "I was very impressed by the way you conducted that revival that was taped. It was very stirring."

  "The camera and the lights kept me from getting all the way up where I wanted to be. It was too much like acting. I'm not an actor. What do you show me next?"

  "I don't imagine you want to look at the motels and the restaurants."

  "Sister, like I said back there when I got off the airplane, I want to see the whole thing because maybe I won't be back."

  "We hope you'll be back to stay."

  "I know."

  And so he made long and careful visits to the motels and the restaurants, and to the University the classrooms and dormitories and gym and swimming pool. And the University theater. He accepted the fact he could not see Matthew Meadows, that he was too ill to see. He inspected two new houses in the Settlements that were not yet occupied, and he g talked to some of the workmen putting up more. They went || back to Communications and he listened to the taping of a , radio talk show. He went up to the roof and looked at the big ' GTE dishes. He listened to Walker McGaw's set speech about the number of television stations they reached, and the number of hours they were on the air both in radio and television. He roamed through the noisy room where the women were composing the boilerplate letters on the word processors linked to the Diablos, and where the mechanical pens were making the facsimile signatures on those outgoing letters. He picked several up and read them carefully, his lips moving. It seemed to Mary Margaret he took a long time to read each letter.

  They strolled the Garden of Mercy, and they went up and walked through the cemetery. Her tent dress was getting so damp with the perspiration of long effort in the sun, it was beginning to cling to her shoulders and flanks. When at last there was nothing more to see, he said, frowning at her, "Where's your brother? Wasn't he supposed to be here? Friday a busy day for him?"

  "Something probably delayed him. He might be looking for us right now."

  "Where can we talk, you and me? I'd like it if we'd talk in that place where you live. The Manse? In your place. I want you to be in a place where you feel most at home, and I'm the stranger."

  She hesitated, wondering what he meant, then agreed. The limousine took them back to the Manse. They rode in silence in the automatic elevator to the third floor and walked diagonally across the wide foyer to her apartment. It was never locked.

  With the intense security at the Manse there was no need. She phoned Security and Reception and told them that when John Tinker arrived, she was in her suite having a discussion with the Reverend Birdy. While she phoned, he roamed around, looking at the spines of the books on the shelves, looking at her small collection of primitive Balinese and Haitian paintings, curious amalgams of innocence and sophistication.

  "What's this here one about, Sister?"

  That's from Bali. Those are fruit bats."

  "Ugly little devils, aren't they?"

  The way they arranged them is very pleasing, I think. It is a nice pattern, a nice composition."

  "Buy it yourself?"

  "Yes. I bought that one and those two over on that wall of the fish and the butterflies when I went with Poppa to Denpasar years and years ago to a Christian Action Conference about the missions."

  He continued to look at the bats, rocking back and forth, heel to toe, his huge brown hands clutching the wide brim of the planter hat he held behind him. He said, almost to himself, "Lots of people, I guess they can take the ugly in their lives and they can make a nice design out of it. Put it just so, a little dab here, a little dab there, and then it is a design instead of evil and they can have folks in to admire it."

  It annoyed her slightly and she raised her voice and said, "Won't you please sit down, Reverend? I'm sure you have a great many questions to ask about Meadows Center now that you've seen it all."

  He looked around and selected the big leather armchair she had acquired to make Poppa more comfortable when he came in to see her for one of their long talks. She was on the small 3z6

  needlepoint settee nearby. He dropped his planter hat on the floor beside the chair.

  "I got no questions."

  "None at all? Oh, come now! You must have some. If you don't have any questions, do you have any comments?"

  "Anything I want to say about it, I'll save until your brother gets here. I promised you a para-bell, didn't I?"

  "I... I guess you did."

  The way it is coming to me, it might sting you some, but it might also he'p you some."

  "Help me what?" 2 "He'p you live your life. It's the one thing all of us got in common. How to live the life."

  "Well, go ahead then."

  "In a minute," he said.

  "Got to arrange it into words." He closed his blue eyes for a
long thirty seconds and then opened them and looked directly at her.

  "A long time ago there was a little girl lived in a village by the sea." His voice was deeper and slower, and he was selecting his words with more care.

  "This little girl had an important father, a chief in the village. And she had two brothers, one older than her and one younger, and they were both handsome and brave and smart and everybody knew they would grow up to be chiefs.

  "The little girl did not know what she would grow up to be but she believed it was her fate to become a wife and bear children. But she was the middle child and people did not pay attention to her very much. She worried about herself. She didn't know if she was pretty or if she was ugly. It was on her mind all the time. She was scared of the young men of the village, scared about what they would think about her, scared of walking on the beach with them in the evening. Her fears got worse and worse. She did not know what to do.

  "So one day she was down on the beach alone and she saw an ugly kind of seaweed that always washed up there. It had fat pods and wrinkled leaves. She wound two strands of it around her waist. She wore the strands all day long. They made her feel better. She did not know why. Every day she added more weed.

  And she felt better toward herself. She became the seaweed girl, and no young man wanted her. It had solved her problem.

  She would never have to find out if, under all the weed, she was pretty or she was ugly. It would never have to come up. She could stop being afraid of the young men because no young man would ever ask her to walk down the beach in the evening, and she would not need to worry about what might happen."

  He seemed to be through. She stared at him.

  "What happened? I don't know what you mean."

  "Your seaweed is butter and cream and cheese and chocolate cake and ice cream and cookies."

  "Now you listen to me!"

  "You used a knife and fork to cover your own self up so you wouldn't have to worry about yourself so nobody would come and try to take you away from Poppa."

  "That is ridiculous!"

  "Look at you! There was something you didn't realize. You are a creature of God, Mary Margaret. God has told us to be fruitful and multiply. You turned your back on your own God-given body so you wouldn't have all that responsibility.

  And by doing that you turned your back on God. You turned your back on your own life. Your way back to God would be to shed all that blubber. Shed one pound a week. That isn't hard to do. Fifty-two pounds in a year. My guess is there is maybe a handsome woman buried under all those chins and that big belly and those hips and thighs big as bushel baskets.

  You got all winded just walking around with me. That's pitiful. You're a young woman. Tell you what I'll do for you and the Lord. I'll come back by here a year from now and look at you. And I'll pray for you to have the strength to do it. And if I come back here and you haven't done it, then you and me are going to go around and around, hear?"

  "I have never heard such total nonsense in my life!"

  He smiled at her.

  "Never have, eh? Told you the para-bells tend to sting. That's because they get down to the roots."

  Five minutes later when John Tinker Meadows tapped on the door and came in, the two large people were sitting side by side on the frail settee. She was bent over, sobbing like a child, and Tom Daniel Birdy was patting her on the back of her shoulder, making rumbling sounds of comfort.

  "What happened? What's going on?"

  The big man got up. John Tinker hadn't realized how big he was. He shrugged and said, "Your sister here, you could say I brought her a little personal message from the Lord."

  3*8 "What happened, Mag?" John Tinker demanded.

  She raised her stained and bloated face and glowered at him and said, "Oh, shut up, Johnny." She levered herself up onto her feet and plodded to her bathroom and banged the door.

  John Tinker looked to the Reverend Birdy for an answer, and the man said, "Did her no harm. Maybe helped a little. It's her business and the Lord's, not yours, friend. Nice to meet I you. Nice to shake your hand, Reverend Meadows. Met your daddy long ago."

  "May I take it that we can welcome you to the Church on a permanent basis?"

  "She showed me just about everything. I had a good long look at all of it. She told me about the medical center you're planning on and all that. She did her job. She put a good face on everything. Let's just wait until she comes on out. You two are the family. From what I gather, the old man's out of it for keeps."

  "That's right. Did you meet Walter Macy ?"

  "No. He was under the weather, his wife said on the phone.

  But there was no real need to meet with him. I met a lot of the others in charge of different things."

  "Few people realize what a large operation it is."

  "It turns out bigger than I thought."

  When she came back out she had changed her dress and fixed her hair. She gave Birdy a small shy smile, and went back to the settee.

  "You set there, friend," Birdy said, pointing to the leather chair, and John Tinker found himself obeying the voice of authority. It was the same knack the old man used to have, to give orders gently but with such confidence they would be obeyed, nobody questioned them.

  Tom Daniel Birdy stood where he could face both of them.

  He smiled and said, "I've been making this speech up in my head all day long. I thought of so many different ways of saying things I got no idea how it'll come out.

  "I'm pleased you thought of me and had the idea I could handle the number two or three preaching job here, or whatever it is. Any man should be flattered to be given a chance to reach all them people with the Word of God. Ride all over the world in those big pretty airplanes. Stay in the best places.

  Own fifty suits of clothes and twenty-five pair of shoes. Get onto first names with the heavy hitters. Senators and Ambassadors and all such. Buy land, build stuff. Wowee!"

  He stepped closer to John Tinker and leveled a finger, aiming it at the middle of his face, a finger like a sausage.

  "But I got into this line of work to tote souls to Jesus! To tote them my own personal self without million-dollar satellites and million dollar airplanes and five hundred pounds of computer forms.

  What this whole place does is separate you from your people, and that separates you from God and Jesus Christ."

  John Tinker, keeping his voice level, asked, "Isn't that an inverted form of vanity? Isn't it the product of ego?"

  "You are one smart man to ask that, because that's what I've been worrying on. It's the one weak place where my thinking isn't clear to me. I prayed to the Lord to make it come clear, but nothing has happened yet. I got my little church down there, and the people come from quite a ways around. No radio broadcasts, nothing like that. They come because somebody told them. If I grow too big for that little old church we'll build us a bigger one with our bare hands, me and my deacons.

  Working people. I baptize them, and I he'p them through sickness, and I comfort them in grief and I bury them, knowing they are safe with the Lord forever. Man, that's what this fool business is all about. It ain't quantity, Johnny. And it ain't money and power and airplanes and all. It is you beside a sickbed holding the hand of a dying boy and making sure he goes to heaven, and then it is you crying along with his folks when you comfort them. This whole place is too big. Way too big. All your members are little numbers somewhere down inside machines. Sure, you go into their living rooms and there you are on the screen, Johnny, your face big as the whole screen and you are looking at them and talking personal, and you want them to send in their money, and you ask them nice, and tell them their money is a prayer to God. Maybe it's a prayer to you and your father. I want my people to give what they can. And they do. You want them to give more than they can, and you never look them right in the face and see them.

  You don't know them. What good is that? How can you send a soul up to Jesus when you don't know the face it is hiding behind?"
r />   "I don't think you understand," John Tinker said.

  "Maybe neither of us understands the mystery of the Lord, my friend. Maybe it passe th all understanding, and what we got to have then is pure belief. And my way of living gives me a.

  more belief in one hour than you'll have in a whole year. I feel it in my gut that the way you people are doing it is wrong! You think you can haul in a great big pile of money and do a lot of good with it, along with doing yourself some good. I had a boy down there been dying of that AIDS thing. Picked it up, he 3 thinks, living the low life in New Orleans, and he come on home with it. I'm not telling him it is the Lord God punishing % him for doing abominations with other fellows. I'm not telling J!