The St. Michael Poker & Drinking Club

by Randle, Ned;

  When the crowd settled down, and after he introduced and thanked the musicians and singers, Billy launched into a long and earnest prayer of welcome and guidance, and if he ad-libbed, as Tom suspected he had, he had to credit the man with an enviable ability to fly by the seat of his pants, an ability Tom, who lately always stuck to the written script of his homily, no longer possessed.

  As the revival progressed, Tom decided he admired the format: the musicians played a good old-fashioned hymn, and Billy would urge the crowd to sing along. Each hymn had a signature theme, and when the singing ended, Billy would ignite a short, fiery sermon on the theme. He repeated the sequence several times with several different themes, keeping the listeners engaged and allowing Billy to tackle multiple sins and iniquities in a fresh way in a limited amount of time.

  The first gospel hymn was “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” and although he didn’t know all the words, Tom enjoyed the melody and sang, in a low, reserved voice, “Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms” when the refrain rolled around. What intrigued him most, however, was when Billy took to preaching, he segued “leaning on the everlasting arms” into the acceptance of Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and, by implication, informing his audience that Grand Hope Nondenominational Family Church had its arms out to them as an instrument of salvation, but one which couldn’t survive to save to their eternal souls without the generosity of sinners such as themselves.

  Billy’s backup band next played “Amazing Grace,” and after the final verse, he launched into an impassioned speech explaining how Jesus worked through grace, and his amazing grace saved a wretch like him. Tom’s ears perked up at the comment, thinking Billy might just reveal something salacious about himself, perhaps about his past, perhaps the basis for proclaiming he himself was a wretch. But Billy stopped short of any personal revelations, much to Tom’s disappointment. Nevertheless, Tom himself, having been a miserable wretch saved by grace through his mother’s intervention, found Billy’s words both applicable and inspiring. Moreover, he thought Billy’s format was well played. Crump used his words to prod and cajole and shame, but always in the end, to praise and uplift and announce the gift of grace.

  Tom also picked up on, and mildly admired, Crump’s tactic of using old gospel music to shoehorn in his teachings on hot topics of the day. They were awkward transitions, but they didn’t deter Billy who, with garbled phrasing and tortured syntax, made each uncomfortable subject fit into a lyric frame. Since most of the hymns were old Protestant standards, many originating in the Southern or Appalachian regions of the country, Tom had a lack of familiarity with the words, which only enhanced his acceptance of the allusions. Crump first preached that unrepentant homosexuality was a learned behavior that consigned the practitioner to a seat in hell. And he bolstered his pronouncements with at least a half dozen references to scripture, from verses in Leviticus to Romans, which Billy had marked in his old Bible with yellow Post-It notes, and which Tom recognized as authentic and literal. Billy ended the discussion on the subject by shouting out Paul’s condemnation of the homosexual act from Corinthians and saying the saint’s use of the original Greek word arsenokoitai could not be clearer or more graphic.

  Crump displayed, Tom thought, good insight into the hearts of the men and women in his audience. He played to the audience and plowed into a fertile field of proselytization. His next topic was lust, in general, and then lust specifically, citing First John, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. At the mention of lust of the flesh, Tom felt a little uncomfortable. But as he thought about Naomi, he felt nothing but joy in her healing and he let the discomfort pass. However, thinking about her caused him to miss most of Crump’s words of warning and condemnation regarding lust of the flesh.

  Billy next moved on to the evils of pornography, which he condemned as causing the Lord’s people to lust after flesh, but further added that pornography was undeniably lust of the eyes. Pornography is addictive, he warned, and destructive. Lusting after another in our minds is the essence of pornography, he explained, and is offensive to God. Tom again felt a pang of self-consciousness hearing Billy’s words. Billy then skillfully worked his way to a logical and practical conclusion: the proliferation of pornography and licentious behavior leads to the degeneration of the soul, resulting in the disintegration of the family in some cases and rape in others.

  Tom noticed Crump had begun to wander off topic when he started in on a mishmash of hot-button issues, and he wondered if fatigue was setting in and old Billy was wearing down, causing a lapse in discretion. The little evangelical exhorted the young women in the audience to remain chaste and then reminded them abortion, which often followed poor choices, was murder in God’s eyes, pure and simple. He then stridently argued that the role of the man is as absolute head of the family, his word being inviolate and final. Correspondingly, he pronounced the proper role of women in the family and in the church was to serve. Yet, as Billy delivered his hard sermonettes, his words never seemed to hit a sour note with the crowd. It occurred to Tom, as he watched the people around him lap up Billy’s words of eternal life, that the preacher’s views on these moral and religious issues were not that far afield from the official positions of the Roman Catholic Church, but he found them unsettling when he heard them declaimed in such stark and hokey terms.

  The sermonettes were invariably interrupted by shouts of “Amen!” and “Praise Jesus!” Tom had expected as much. On his drive to the revival, he’d succumbed to the stereotype of tent revivals being peopled by marginally intelligent rabble led by a strutting Bible thumper. Yet, even if Billy was a stereotypical Bible-thumper, in spades, the people under the tent looked normal enough and could have been his own earnest parishioners at Sunday morning Mass, as indeed one family was. The old lady next to him, prim and polite, was having a rollicking good time clapping her hands and stomping her foot, albeit out of time, during the last tune of the night, a rousing rendition of “I Saw the Light.” Tom clapped his hands and belted out the refrain, “I saw the light, I saw the light; no more darkness, no more night” as it rolled around. The words of Psalm 98, “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” came to mind, and he enjoyed the music even more and had to admit that listening to the motley group of musicians, the singing, and the little evangelical’s homespun liturgies made him feel better than he’d felt in weeks. All in all, he found the revival to be grand theater and enjoyed it immensely.

  When Tom checked his watch, he realized Billy had been on stage for over two hours, non-stop, singing and preaching, and it was natural his energy appeared to be flagging. Tom, recalling Billy’s thoughtful and discreet response to the news of Naomi’s illness, along with now seeing him demonstrate his considerable skills on stage, felt a newfound admiration for the little man, and he decided to wait around after the revival and let him know how much he enjoyed the spectacle.

  Billy was not ready to quit, however. The music ended, and the stage was quiet, and the only thing heard under the canopy were random coughs and clearing of throats, the shifts and shuffles of aching backsides in uncomfortable chairs, and sporadic, unprovoked shouts of “Amen!” or “Praise the Lord!” Crump allowed for the dramatic pause. He then began to walk slowly back and forth along the front edge of the stage, again recognizing regular congregants and thanking strangers and inviting them to regular Sunday meeting. He stopped to wipe the sweat from his face and neck with his handkerchief. There was a quiet but pervasive anticipation moving among the folks in the chairs, and Tom could sense they were wondering what Pastor Billy had planned for a finale. At last, Crump moved to dead center, stood tall in his boots, set his jaw and stared over the heads in the audience and shouted, “Now, looky here, folks, I have something to testify to before you and the Lord, and it is as true a testimony as ever been made! This lowly servant of Jesus Christ has been a witness to a miracle. A miracle, I tell you, right here in this town, and the miracle was pe
rformed by a man I know personally.”

  “Testify, Pastor Billy!” a man shouted.

  Another hollered, “Testify! Testify!”

  “I’ve prayed a lot over this, friends. I prayed to the Lord to instruct me in the right way, here. To set my path straight; you know, for Jesus to show me what I should do with this knowledge. I thought the right thing was to keep it to myself. But the Lord whispered in my ear last night, he says ‘Son, you ain’t the type to hide your light under a bushel.’”

  “Amens!” rang out under the canopy as Billy stood waiting for confirmation from the crowd that he should proceed in the way he’d already decided to proceed. He paused. More “Amens!” arose from various parts of the tent. Crump stood silently to let shouts and murmurs, which seemed to arise on cue, move about under the canopy until they ceased in expectation of a revelation. Father Tom, however, began to feel a vague discomfort, a prickly hot sensation along his spine, an insidious creeping discomfort rooted in the recognition that Billy’s purported “miracle” might well be related to him.

  “Brothers and sisters,” Crump began, “I personally know a man who is an instrument of God. He healed a woman so filled with cancer she wasn’t gonna git better. No, sir. She only had days to live, maybe just hours. I know the woman, and I know her husband. Although they are good folks, both of them, she was sure to be dead by tonight. But about a week ago, this man I know, this instrument of God, filled with the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, prayed over that woman for days, unceasingly, and healed her!”

  “Amen!”

  “Praise the Lord!”

  “Tell us more,” an old voice implored.

  “No more to say about that, friends. She’s as right as rain, that woman. And I was a witness to the miracle, same as Lazarus’s sister.”

  Father Tom’s heart pounded erratically as the heat of anger rose to his face. He began to sweat profusely. This revelation about the healing was a breach, he thought, over the top, even for Billy Crump. How did he find out? Who could have told him? Surely not Theo. But who? And why was he shooting off his mouth about it now, in front of all these people? He was confounded and angry and clenched his fists and pounded them silently against his knees.

  “You crazy little bastard,” he muttered under his breath. “You crazy little bastard.”

  “Now here’s the kicker,” Crump continued. “There are Pharisees and Sadducees among us, right here in Belle City, and these sinners want to run this man of God out of town!”

  There were shouts of derision and disgust and anger; there were catcalls bestowing the name of Satan on these Pharisees and Sadducees, along with rabid incantations of Jesus’s name, seeking His mercy for this man, this instrument of God who had effected the miracle.

  “Hold on, folks,” Crump interrupted. “Be assured I’m not going to take this lying down. No siree. I’m gonna fight this. As long as God grants me breath. So I’m asking you to pray for me, and for this man, though I can’t tell you his name. You just have to trust me on this for now.”

  “We will, Pastor Billy!” someone in the back near Father Tom hollered toward the stage. “We put our trust in you and the Lord!”

  The charm of the event rapidly dissolved for Father Tom. What he’d considered, up to that point, to be harmless theatre had taken an abrupt turn toward the personal, the uncomfortable. He wanted to bolt for the exit, but he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. He sat in his chair and seethed.

  “And there’s other help I need, folks. It costs money to fight the devil. I’m asking for a freewill offering to support me and this mission. Just donate whatever your heart tells you to donate. We’ll take nickels or dimes, a dollar or five, ten or twenty. Just drop your money in one of the buckets on your way out.”

  Tom heard all he was going to hear. That Billy Crump wanted to take credit for being witness to a miracle to boost his standing with these rubes was bad enough, he thought. But to use Naomi’s healing as a money-maker for his goddamned church was beyond the pale. He got up and stomped toward the exit. He was so angry he could barely see his way out of the tent. He brushed by a five-gallon bucket near the exit, turned and gave it a hard kick, scattering the handful of seed money across the ground.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  As he walked into the cathedral carrying his plastic Walmart bag, the heels of Billy Crump’s boots made echoing thuds on the bare tile of the center aisle. He looked around and shook his head at the ostentation. There was an abundance of ornate marble statues, a multiplicity of gold crucifixes, and a polished marble holy water font. He walked through the cavernous nave toward the apse and craned his neck to study the ceiling, which was vaulted in a quadripartite design throughout the building. He stopped at the chancel where there was an ornately carved wooden ambo, a massive cathedra which was overstuffed and covered in a regal, if worn, deep red. He turned around to look at the other architectural features: rows of triforium windows below the ceiling, great marble columns resting on marble plinths, and various works of art on the walls in between the columns representing the Stations of the Cross. He admired them as art but considered them embodiments of vanity and conceit and a waste of money.

  As he stood before the altar, he heard someone shuffling about in the sacristy. Out walked an older man, gray and stooped, dressed in a loose black dress shirt and gray trousers.

  “Are you the bishop?” Crump asked.

  “Oh, my no. I’m Father Gregory. Just an old priest who assists the bishop.”

  “Is the bishop here?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “When is he here?”

  “He says Mass once a week, at ten o’clock on Sunday mornings.”

  “I ain’t coming back on Sunday. I work Sundays. Where is he now?”

  “Well, son, I’m not sure. Did you check next door at the bishop’s house?”

  “Thanks,” Crump replied, and he turned around and clomped down the aisle through the nave.

  The bishop’s house was a large, Federalist style brick building. Crump stood outside and sized it up. He went up the front steps and tried the door, but it was locked. He rang the doorbell. No one answered the door. He rang the doorbell a second time, getting no response. Finally he pushed the button incessantly until a man answered the door. He was dressed like a priest, so Billy figured him to be a priest.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “Are you the bishop?”

  “No, I’m not the bishop. And what’s all the commotion about?”

  Crump knew his type from the days he went door-to-door peddling tracts and pamphlets. A hard sell, this guy. He stuck his leg in the open door so the priest couldn’t pull it closed.

  “I want to see the bishop.”

  “That’s not possible,” the priest replied.

  “‘But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, with men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.’ That’s from Matthew, Chapter 19,” Crump countered.

  “I’m aware.”

  “Well, then, I guess you’re aware I’m gonna see the bishop.”

  Crump pushed his way past the priest. He stood in the vestibule and looked about. Directly across from him was a desk and behind the desk an office door with a frosted glass window. He could hear a single voice coming from the office, as if someone was having a telephone conversation. He pointed to the desk and said, “Who sits here?”

  “That’s my desk. I’m the bishop’s secretary.”

  “Good, good. Well, you just go on in there and tell the bishop Pastor Billy Crump is here to see him.” With that he plopped down in a side chair and held his bag on his lap.

  “This is not the proper way to seek an audience with the bishop, Mr. Crump.”

  “It’s Pastor Crump, Grand Hope Nondenominational Family Church. And I don’t care a whit about your proprieties. I need to see th
e bishop.”

  Exasperated, the secretary let himself into the inner office. After a few minutes, he came back out and informed Crump the bishop had no time to see him.

  “I can wait.”

  “I don’t think you understand, Mr. Crump—”

  “Pastor Crump. And I don’t think you understand. I can wait here all day and all night if I have to. Forty days and forty nights, if I have to. He has to come out of there sometime, and when he does, I’ll be right here.”

  The secretary sat down behind his desk and busied himself moving papers among stacks, occasionally glancing over at Crump, who sat rigidly in his chair, hands on his Wal-Mart bag, staring straight ahead. Finally, he said, “You may as well just leave. You’ll not see the bishop today. Or any other day, for that matter.”

  “You may as well tell the bishop I ain’t leaving till he sees me.”

  The secretary stood up, shaking his head and went back into the bishop’s office. He returned quickly, saying, “The bishop cannot see you. And if you don’t leave, he’s instructed me to call the authorities.”

  “Hah! Call the authorities? Go ahead and call ‘em. The chief of police is one of mine, not one of his. And the chief knows how stubborn I can be when I’m facing down the devil.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You just march back in there and tell the bishop what I said. Or call the police. One or the other; I don’t give a damn.”

  The secretary returned from the bishop’s office and offered to escort him in. When he entered, Crump found the bishop sitting behind a massive desk, ornately carved with seraphim and cherubim, hovering angels and assorted crucifixes of various widths and depths. The bishop was a portly man with a jowly face, thick, wet lips, and large hands resting on the center of the desk. He was nattily dressed in a tailored shirt and linen trousers, not in his bishop’s regalia, not even in priest’s clothes. The bishop, in turn, took time to warily eye up Crump. The secretary stood to the left of the bishop’s desk looking Billy over, as well. The scrutiny didn’t bother Crump. As always, he was comfortable with himself. He knew that he sometimes emitted an aura of instability or irrationality; it had been that way since his time in Cambodia. And he also knew there were times when his air of unpredictability served to unnerve others, to his benefit, and he reckoned it would serve him well in this interview.