Rev. Hartley’s suspicions of Colson were amply justified in the course of time, but before then Colson fled, having harvested a goodly crop of cold cash and warm women instead of punkins and taters. And before then he put his lasting stamp on the town by changing its name for the final time.
His sermon on that hot August night began with the subject of the harvest as a symbol of God’s great reward, and then moved on to the subject of this very town. By this time, Colson had stripped off his frock coat. His sweatsoaked hair had tumbled in his eyes. The sisters had commenced getting down in the amen corner, although it would be yet a while before the speaking in tongues and the holy rolling got going.
“I consider this town sanctified,” Colson told his audience, gripping the sides of his pulpit with his big hands—he might have considered it sanctified for some reason other than the fact that his honored self had chosen it in which to spread his tent (not to mention his seed), but if so, he didn’t say so. “I consider it a haven. Yes! I have found a haven here that reminds me of my haven-home, a lovely land maybe not so different from the one Adam and Eve knew before they went picking fruit from that tree they should have left alone. Sanctified!” Preacher Colson bellowed. Years after, there were members of his congregation who still spoke admiringly of how that man could shout for Jesus, scoundrel or not.
“Amen!” the congregation cried back. The night, though warm, was perhaps not quite warm enough to completely explain the blushes on so many feminine cheeks and brows; such flushes had become common since Preacher Colson came to town.
“This town is nothing short of a glory to God!”
“Hallelujah!” the congregation yelled jubilantly. Breasts heaved. Eyes sparkled. Tongues slipped out and wetted lips.
“This town has got a promise!” Preacher Colson shouted, now striding rapidly back and forth, occasionally flicking his black locks back from his forehead with a quick snap that showed his cleanly corded neck to good advantage. “This town has got a promise and that promise is the fullness of the harvest, and that promise shall be fulfilled!”
“Praise Jesus!”
Colson came back to the pulpit, grasped it, and looked out at them forbiddingly. “So why you want to have a town which promises the harvest of God and the haven of God—why you want to have a town that speaks of those things named after some dago is more than I can figure out, brethern. Must have been the devil working somewhere in the last generation is all I can figure.”
Talk about changing the town’s name from Ilium to Haven began the very next day. The Rev. Mr. Crowell protested the change listlessly, the Rev. Mr. Hartley much more strongly. Ilium’s selectmen were neutral, except to point out that it would cost the town twenty dollars to change the Papers of Incorporation on file in Augusta, and probably another twenty to change the municipal road signs. Not to mention the letterheads on town documents and stationery.
Long before the March town meeting at which Article 14, “To see if the town will approve changing the name of Incorporated Maine Town #193 from ILIUM to HAVEN,” was discussed and voted on, Preacher Colson had literally folded his tent. and stolen into the night. Said folding and stealing took place on the night of September 7th, following what Colson had for weeks been calling the great Harvest Home Revival of 1900. He’d been making it clear for at least a month that he considered it the most important meeting he would hold in town this year; perhaps the most important meeting he ever held, even if he should settle here, something he felt more and more often that God was calling him to do—and didn’t that news just make the ladies’ hearts go pitty-pat! It was, he said, to be a great love-offering to the loving God who had provided the town with such a wonderful growing season and harvest.
Colson did some harvesting of his own. He began by cajoling the attendees to give the largest “love-offering” of his stay, and finished by plowing and planting not two, not four, but six young maidens in the field behind the tent after the meeting.
“Men love to talk big, but I guess most of em pack derringers in their pants no matter how big they talk,” old Duke Barfield said in the barbershop one evening. If there had been a Stinkiest Man in Town contest, old Duke would have won hands down. He smelled like a pickled egg that has spent a month in a mud puddle. He was listened to, but at a distance, and upwind, if there was a wind to make this possible. “I heerd o men with double-barrel shotguns in their pants, and I reckon it’s so every once n agin, and once’t I even heerd tell o some fella had him a three-shot pistol, but that fucker Colson’s the only man I ever heerd of who come packin a six-shooter.”
Three of Preacher Colson’s conquests were virgins before the invasion of the Pentecostal pecker.
The love-offering that night in the late summer of 1900 was indeed generous, although the barbershop gossips differed on just how generous the monetary part of it had been. All agreed that, even before the great Harvest Home Revival, where the preaching had gone on until ten, the gospel-singing until midnight, and the field-fucking until well past two, there had been a great outpouring of hard cash. Some also pointed out that Colson hadn’t had many expenses during his stay, either. The women damn near fought for the privilege of bringing him his meals, the fellow who now owned the hostelry made him the long-term loan of a buggy ... and, of course, no one at all charged him for his nightly entertainments.
On the morning of September 8th, tent and preacher were gone. He had harvested well ... and seeded with equal success. Between January 1st and town meeting in late March 1901, nine illegitimate children, three girls and six boys, were born in the area. All nine of these “love-children” bore a remarkable resemblance each to the other—six had blue eyes, and all were born with lusty crops of black hair. The barbershop gossips (and no group of men on earth can so successfully marry logic and prurience as these idlers farting into wicker chairs as they roll cigarettes or drive brown bullets of tobacco-juice into tin spittoons) also pointed out that it was hard telling just how many young girls had left “to visit relatives” downstate, in New Hampshire, or even all the way down to Massachusetts. It was also pointed out that quite a few married women in the area had given birth between January and March. About those women, who knew for sure? But the barbershop gossips of course knew what had happened on March 29th, after Faith Clarendon gave birth to a bouncing eight-pound baby boy. A wild wet norther was whooping around the eaves of the Clarendon house, dropping 1901’s last large budget of snow until November. Cora Simard, the midwife who had delivered the baby, was in a half-doze by the kitchen stove, waiting for her husband Irwin to finally make his way through the storm and take her home. She saw Paul Clarendon approach the crib where his new son lay—it was on the other side of the stove, in the corner which was warmest—and stand looking fixedly down at the new baby for over an hour. Cora made the dreadful error of mistaking Paul Clarendon’s fixed stare for wonder and love. Her eyes drifted closed. When she awoke from her doze, Paul Clarendon was standing over the crib with his straight-razor in his hand. He seized the baby by its thick crop of blue-black hair, and before Cora could unlock her throat to scream, he had cut its throat. He left the room without a word. A moment later she heard wet gargling sounds coming from the bedroom. When a terrified Irwin Simard finally found the courage to enter the Clarendon bedroom, he found man and wife on the bed, hands joined. Clarendon had cut his wife’s throat, laid down beside her, grasped her right hand with his left, and then cut his own. All this happened two days after the town had voted to change its name.
4
The Rev. Mr. Hartley was dead-set against changing the town’s name to one suggested by a man who had proved to be a thief, fornicator, false prophet, and all-around snake in the grass. He had said as much from his pulpit and had noted the agreeing nods from his parishioners with an almost vindictive pleasure that was really not much like him. He came to the town meeting held on March 27th, 1901, confident that Article 14 would be resoundingly voted down. He was not even troubled by the brevity of discussi
on between the Town Clerk’s reading of the article and Head Selectman Luther Ruvall’s laconic, “What’s y’pleasure, people?” If he had had the slightest inkling, Hartley would have spoken vehemently, even furiously, for the only time in his life. But he never had so much as an inkling.
“Those in favor signify by sayin aye,” Luther Ruvall said, and at the solid—if not very passionate—Aye! that shook the roof-beams, Hartley felt as if he had been punched in the gut. He stared around wildly, but it was too late. The strength of the Aye! had taken him so totally by surprise that he had no idea how many from his own congregation had turned on him and voted the other way.
“Wait—” he said aloud in a strangled voice that nobody heard.
“Those opposed?”
A scattered straggle of Nays. Hartley tried to scream his, but the only sound to escape his throat was a nonsense syllable—Nik!
“Motion’s carried,” Luther Ruvall said. “Now, Article 15—”
The Rev. Mr. Hartley suddenly felt warm—much too warm. He felt, in fact, as though he might faint. He pushed his way through standing throngs of men in red-and-black-checked shirts and muddy flannel pants, through clouds of acrid smoke puffed from corncobs and cheap cigars. He still felt faint, but now he felt that he might also vomit before he fainted. A week later he would not be able to understand the depth of his shock, so deep it was really horror. A year later he would not even acknowledge that he had felt such an emotion.
He stood on the top town-hall step, snatching great swoops of forty-degree air, clutching the handrail in a death-grip, and looked out across fields of melting snow. In places it had now drawn back enough to show the muddy earth beneath, and he thought with vicious crudity that was also unlike him that the fields looked like splotches of shit on the tail of a nightshirt. For the first and only time, he felt a bitter envy for Bradley Colson—or Cooder, if that was his real name. Colson had run away from Ilium ... oh, beg your pardon, from Haven. He had run, and now Donald Hartley found himself wishing he could do the same. Why did they do it? Why? They knew what he was, they knew! So why did they—
A strong, warm hand fell on his back. He turned and saw his good friend Fred Perry. Fred’s long, homely face looked distressed and concerned, and Hartley felt an unwilling smile cross his face.
“Don, are you all right?” Fred Perry asked.
“Yes. I had a moment in there when I felt light-headed. It was the vote. I didn’t expect it.”
“Nor I,” Fred replied.
“My parishioners were part of it,” Hartley said. “They had to have been. It was so loud, they had to have been, don’t vou think?”
“Well ...”
The Rev. Mr. Hartley smiled a little. “I apparently do not know as much about human nature as I thought I did.”
“Come back in, Don. They’re going to take up paving Ridge Road.”
“I think I’ll stay out awhile longer,” Hartley said, “and think about human nature.” He paused, and just as Fred Perry was turning to go back, the Rev. Mr. Donald Hartley asked, almost appealed: “Do you understand, Fred? Do you understand why they did it? You’re almost ten years older than I. Do you understand it?”
And Fred Perry, who had shouted out his own Aye! from behind a curled fist, shook his head and said no; he didn’t understand at all. He did like the Rev. Mr. Hartley. He did respect the Rev. Mr. Hartley. But in spite of those things (or maybe—just maybe—because of them), he had taken a mean and spiteful pleasure in voting for a name suggested by Colson: Colson the false prophet, Colson the confidence man, Colson the thief, Colson the seducer.
No, Fred Perry did not understand human nature at all.
2.
’BECKA PAULSON
1
Rebecca Bouchard Paulson was married to Joe Paulson, one of Haven’s two mail carriers and one-third of Haven’s postal staff. Joe was cheating on his wife, something Bobbi Anderson knew already. Now ‘Becka Paulson knew it as well. She had known it for the last three days. Jesus told her. In the last three days or so, Jesus had told her the most amazing, terrible, distressing things imaginable. They sickened her, they destroyed her sleep, they were destroying her sanity ... but weren’t they also sort of wonderful? Boy howdy! And would she stop listening, maybe just tip Jesus over on His face, or scream at Him to shut up? Absolutely not. For one thing, there was a grisly sort of compulsion in knowing the things Jesus told her. For another, He was the Savior.
Jesus was on top of the Paulsons’ Sony TV. He had been there for just six years. Before that, He had rested atop two Zeniths. ‘Becka estimated that Jesus had been in roughly the same spot for about sixteen years. Jesus was represented in lifelike 3-D. This was a picture of Him that ‘Becka’s older sister, Corinne, who lived in Portsmouth, had given them as a wedding present. When Joe commented that ‘Becka’s sister was a little on the cheap side, wa’ant she, ’Becka told him to hush up. Not that she was terribly surprised; you couldn’t expect a man like Joe to understand the fact that you couldn’t put a price-tag on true Beauty.
In the picture, Jesus was dressed in a simple white robe and holding a shepherd’s staff. The Christ on ‘Becka’s TV combed His hair a little bit like Elvis after Elvis got out of the Army. Yes; he looked quite a bit like Elvis in G.I. Blues. His eyes were brown and mild. Behind Him, in perfect perspective, sheep as white as the linens in TV soap commercials trailed off and over the horizon. ’Becka and Corinne had grown up on a sheep farm in New Gloucester, and ’Becka knew from personal experience that sheep were never that white and uniformly woolly, like little fair-weather clouds fallen to earth. But, she reasoned, if Jesus could turn water into wine and bring the dead back to life, there was no reason at all why He couldn’t make the shit caked around a bunch of lambs’ rumps disappear if He wanted to.
A couple of times Joe had tried to move that picture off the TV, and she supposed that now she knew why, oh yessirree! Boy howdy! Joe, of course, had his trumped-up tales. “It doesn’t seem right to have Jesus on top of the television while we’re watching Magnum or Miami Vice,” he’d say. “Why not put it up on your bureau, ’Becka? Or ... I’ll tell you what! Why not put it up on your bureau until Sunday, then you can bring it down and put it back while you watch Jimmy Swaggart and Jack van Impe? I’ll bet Jesus likes Jimmy Swaggart a helluva lot better than He likes Miami Vice.”
She refused.
Another time he said, “When it’s my turn to have the Thursday-night poker game, the guys don’t like it. No one wants to have Jesus Christ looking at him while he tries to draw to an inside straight.”
“Maybe they feel uncomfortable because they know gambling’s the devil’s work,” ’Becka said.
Joe, a good poker player, bridled. “Then it was the devil’s work bought you your blow-dryer and that garnet ring you like s‘well,” he said. “Better take ’em back for refunds and give the money to the Salvation Army. I think I got the receipts in my den.”
So she allowed Joe to turn the 3-D picture of Jesus around on the one Thursday night a month that he had his dirty-talking, beer-swilling friends in to play poker ... but that was all.
And now she knew the real reason he had wanted to get rid of that picture. He must have had the idea all along that that picture might be a magic picture. Oh, she supposed “sacred” was a better word, magic was for pagans, headhunters and cannibals and Catholics and people like that, but they almost came to the same thing, didn’t they? Anyway, Joe must have sensed that picture was special, that it would be the means by which his sin would be found out.
Oh, she supposed she had known something was going on. He was never after her at night anymore, and while that was something of a relief (sex was just as her mother had told her it would be, nasty, brutish, sometimes painful, always humiliating), she had also smelled perfume on his collar from time to time, and that was not a relief at all. She supposed she could have ignored the connection—the fact that the pawings had stopped at the same time that occasional smell of perfume start
ed showing up in his collars—indefinitely if the picture of Jesus on top of the Sony hadn’t begun to speak on July 7th. She could even have ignored a third factor: at about the same time the pawings had stopped and the perfume smells had begun, old Charlie Estabrooke had retired from the post office and a woman named Nancy Voss had come up from the Augusta post office to take his place. She guessed that the Voss woman (whom ‘Becka now thought of simply as The Hussy) was perhaps five years older than she and Joe, which would make her around fifty, but she was a trim, well-kept fifty. ’Becka would admit she herself had put on a little weight, going from one hundred and twenty-six to two hundred and three, most of that since Byron, their only chick, had left home.
She could have ignored it, would have ignored it, perhaps even have come to tolerate it with relief; if The Hussy enjoyed the animalism of sexual congress, with its gruntings and thrustings and that final squirt of sticky stuff that smelled faintly like codfish and looked like cheap dish detergent, then it only proved The Hussy was little more than an animal herself. Also, it freed ’Becka of a tiresome, if ever-more-occasional, obligation. She could have ignored it, that was, if the picture of Jesus hadn’t spoken up.
It happened for the first time at just past three in the afternoon on Thursday. ’Becka was coming back into the living room from the kitchen with a little snack (half a coffee cake and a beer stein filled with cherry Za-Rex) to watch General Hospital. She could no longer really believe that Luke and Laura would ever come back, but she was not able to completely give up hope.
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