One of the telephones rang. Hodges picked it up, said, “Falconer Crusade. Oh. Hi there, Cammy, how are you…sure, just a minute.” He held the receiver out for Falconer. “J.J.? It’s Camille.”
“Tell her I’ll get back to her, George.”
“She sounds awfully excited about something.”
Falconer paused, then reached the phone with two long strides. “Hey hon. What can I do for you?” He watched as Forrest put the posters away and took the dripping pipe from the cup. “What’s that? Hon, the connection’s bad. Say that again now, I can hardly hear you.” His broad face slackened. “Toby? When? Hurt bad? Well, I told you that dog was goin’ to get hit chasin’ cars! All right now, don’t get all excited…just get Wayne to help you, and the both of you pick Toby up, put him in the station wagon, and drive to Dr. Considine’s. He’s the best vet in Fayette County, and he won’t charge you…” He stopped speaking and listened instead. His mouth slowly opened, closed, opened again like a fish gasping for breath. “What?” he whispered, in a voice so fragile the other three men in the room looked at each other with amazed expressions: they’d never heard J.J. Falconer when he wasn’t booming with good cheer.
“No,” he whispered. “No, Cammy, that can’t be. You’re wrong.” He listened, his face slowly going pale. “Cammy… I don’t…know what to do… Are you sure?” He glanced quickly up at the others, his beefy hand about to crunch the receiver in two. “Is Wayne there with you? All right, now listen to me carefully. I don’t care, just listen! Get that dog to the vet and have it checked over real good. Don’t talk to anybody but Dr. Considine, and tell him I asked that he keep this to himself until I speak to him. Got that? Calm down, now! I’ll be home in a couple of hours, I’m leavin’ as fast as I can. Are you sure about this?” He paused, exhaled a long sigh, and then said, “All right. Love you, hon. ’Bye.” And hung up the receiver.
“Anything wrong, J.J.?” Hodges asked.
“Toby,” Falconer said softly, staring out the window at the surrounding city, golden afternoon light splashed across his face. “My bird dog. Hit by a truck on the highway…”
“Sorry to hear about that,” Forrest offered. “Good dogs are hard to…”
Falconer turned to face them. He was grinning triumphantly, his face a bright beet-red. He clenched his fists and thrust them toward the ceiling. “Gentlemen,” he said in a voice choked with emotion. “God works in mighty mysterious ways!”
THREE
Tent Show
11
HEAT LAY PRESSED CLOSE to the earth as John Creekmore drove away from the house on a Saturday morning in late July. Already the sun was a red ball of misery perched atop the eastern hills. As he drove toward the highway, heading for his job at Lee Sayre’s hardware and feed store, a maelstrom of dust boiled up in the Olds’s wake, hanging in brown sheets and slowly drifting toward the field of dry brown cornstalks.
There had been no rain since the second week of June. It was a time, John knew, of making do or doing without. His credit was getting pretty thin at the grocery store, and last week Sayre had told him that if business didn’t pick up—which it wasn’t likely to, being so late in the summer and so stifling hot—he’d have to let John go until the autumn. He was digging into the emergency money to get his family by, as were most of the valley’s farmers. Perhaps the most contented creatures in the Hawthorne valley were the local hogs, who got to eat a great deal of the corn crop; happy also was the man from Birmingham who bought dry corncobs at dirt-cheap prices, turning them into pipes to be sold at drug stores.
There was the Crafts Fair, held in Fayette in August, to look forward to now. Ramona’s needlepoint pictures sold well. John remembered a woman buying one of Ramona’s pieces and saying it looked like something “Grandma Moses” might’ve done; he didn’t know who “Grandma Moses” was, but he figured that was a compliment because the woman had cheerfully parted with five dollars.
Morning heat waves shimmered across the highway, making Hawthorne float like a mirage about to vanish. He shifted uneasily in his seat as he passed the still-vacant, rapidly deteriorating Booker house; it had a reputation, John knew, and nobody in his right mind would want to live there. Only when he had passed the vine-and-weed-grown structure did he permit himself to think about that awful day in April when he’d seen Billy’s schoolbooks lying on the front steps. The boy still had occasional nightmares, but he never explained them and John didn’t want to know, anyway. Something in Billy’s face had changed since that day; his eyes were troubled, and locked behind them was a secret that John found himself afraid of. More than anything, John wished there was a real minister in town, someone who could fathom this change Billy was going through; the whole town was in dire need of a preacher. Saturday nights were getting wilder, bad words brewed into fights, and there’d even been a shooting over in Dusktown. Sheriff Bromley was a good, hard-working man, but Hawthorne was about to slip from his control; what the town needed now, John knew, was a strong man of God.
He had wanted to be a minister himself, a long time ago, but the farming heritage of his family had rooted him to the earth instead.
At a tent revival one hot August night, he’d watched his father spasm and roll in the sawdust as people screamed in strange tongues and others shouted hallelujahs; the unnerving sight of the lanky red-haired man with his face contorted, veins jutting out from the bullneck, had stayed with John all his life. John feared the blue evening twilight, when—his father had said—God’s Eye roamed the world like a burning sun, in search of the sinners who would die that night. It was understood that life was a gift from the Lord, but Death was Satan’s touch in this perfect world; when a man died spiritually and turned away from God, physical death was sure to follow, and the pit of Hell yawned for his soul.
His father had been a good family man, but privately John was told that all women, like Eve, were cunning and deceitful—except for his mother, who was the finest woman God had ever created—and he was to beware of them at all times. They had strange beliefs, could be swayed by money and pretty clothes, and they bled once a month to atone for the Original Sin.
But, at a barn dance when he was twenty, John Creekmore had looked across at the line of local girls waiting to be asked to dance, and his heart had grown wings. The tawny-skinned girl was wearing a white dress with white honeysuckle blossoms braided into her long, shining russet hair; their eyes had met and held for a few seconds before she’d looked away and trembled like a skittish colt. He’d watched her dance with a boy whose clodhoppers kept coming down on her feet like mules’ hooves, but she only smiled through the pain and lifted her white hem so it wouldn’t get dirty. Rosin leapt from the fiddlers’ bows, dusting the tobacco-stained air, as the dancers stomped and spun and bits of hay drifted down from the loft like confetti. When the girl and her partner had circled close enough, John Creekmore had stepped between them and taken her hands, spinning away with her so smoothly Old Mule Hoof grabbed for empty air, then scowled and kicked at a clump of hay since John was twice his size. She had smiled, shyly, but with true good humor in her sparkling hazel eyes, and after the dance was over John asked if he might come see her some evening.
At first, he’d never heard of Rebekah Fairmountain, Ramona’s mother. Later, he dismissed the tales he heard as idle gossip. He refused to listen to any more wild stories and married Ramona; then it was too late, and he turned alternately to moonshine and the Bible. He could never say, though, that he hadn’t been warned about how things were; he remembered several times even Ramona trying to tell him things he couldn’t stand to hear. He clung to the Bible, to the memory of his father once telling him no good man would ever turn tail and run from a woman, and to God. And life, like the seasons, went on. There’d been two blessings: the birth of Billy, and the fact that Rebekah Fairmountain, as tough as kudzu vine and alone since the death of Ramona’s father, had moved to a house fifty miles away, on land with a better consistency of clay for her pottery.
A man John had never seen before—city man, he guessed, from the looks of the clothes—was nailing up a poster on a telephone pole near Lee Sayre’s store. John slowed the Olds and gawked. The poster showed a righteous-looking man lifting his arms to Heaven, and read: the south’s greatest evangelist, jimmy jed FALCONER! ONE NIGHT ONLY! COME AND GET CLOSE TO GOD! Beneath that, in smaller letters, was: AND WITNESS THE GOD-GIVEN HEALING GIFTS OF LITTLE WAYNE FALCONER!
John’s heart thumped. Praise the Lord! he thought. His prayers had been answered. He’d heard of Jimmy Jed Falconer before, and the tent revivals that had saved hundreds of sinners; he’d always wanted to go, but they’d always been too far away before. “Hey, mister!” he called out. The man turned around, his sunburned face bright red against the whiteness of his sodden shirt. “When’s that preacher speakin’? And where’s he gonna be?”
“Wednesday night, seven o’clock,” the man replied; he motioned with his hammer in the direction of Kyle Field. “Right over there, fella.”
John grinned. “Thanks! Thanks a lot!”
“Sure thing. Be there, will you? And bring the family.”
“You can count on it!” John waved, his spirits buoyed by the idea of taking Billy to hear an evangelist who would really put the fear of the Lord back into Hawthorne, and drove on to work.
12
STANDING ON THE PORCH in the Wednesday evening twilight, Billy itched in a dark gray suit that was at least a size too small; his wrists jutted out from the coat, and the necktie his father had insisted he wear was about to choke the breath out of him. He’d accompanied his daddy to Peel’s barbershop just that afternoon for a severe haircut that had seemingly lowered his ears by two inches. The front was pomaded enough to withstand a windstorm, but a disobedient curly cowlick had already popped up in the back; he smelled strongly of Vitalis, an aroma he loved.
Though the suit made him feel as if bumblebees were crawling over him, he was excited and eager about the tent revival; he didn’t fully understand what went on at one, except that it was a lot like church, but people had been talking about it for several days, planning what to wear and who to sit with. As he and his father had passed Kyle Field that afternoon, Billy had seen the huge tent being staked down by the workmen, and a truck filled with sawdust to be used for covering the ground had rolled up into the grass like an enormous beetle. The tent, crisp-looking, brown and peaked at the center, took up almost the entire softball field, its folds stirring in the dusty breeze as another truck with a heavy-duty electric winch played out thick black cables. Billy had wanted to stay and watch, because he’d never seen such activity in Hawthorne before, but John had hurried him on; driving back home, they’d both glanced silently at the ruin of the Booker house, and Billy had squeezed his eyes shut.
A white full moon was rising in the darkening sky, and Billy watched with fascination as a long beam of light swept in a slow circle from the direction of Kyle Field. He heard his parents’ voices from within the house and almost flinched, but then he realized they weren’t arguing; everything had been fine today, since his mother had agreed to go to the tent revival with them. But when she’d at first refused to go, John had made the flimsy walls tremble with his shouts of indignation. The fighting had gone on for two days, usually with Ramona coldly silent and John circling her, trying to bait her into anger. But now, Billy thought, they were all going to the tent revival together, like a real family.
In another few minutes, John and Ramona came out on the porch. He was wearing an old brown suit and a black bow tie on a slightly yellowed dress shirt. His face and hair were freshly scrubbed. He carried his Bible pressed to his side.
She wore a dark blue dress and a white shawl around her shoulders; her hair had been brushed until it shone and was allowed to tumble freely down to the middle of her back. It was not for the evangelist, or to placate John, that she’d decided to go, but because she’d been in the house so long; she wanted to see people—not that people would be overjoyed, she knew, to see her.
Tonight, she decided, she would make herself be very strong. If she happened to see the black aura, she would quickly look away; but she probably wouldn’t see it, and everything would be just fine.
“Ready, bubber?” John asked his son. “Let’s go, then!”
They got into the car and drove away from the house. Won’t see it tonight, Ramona thought, her palms suddenly perspiring; no, probably won’t see it at all…
Cars and pickup trucks were parked in rows all around the huge peaked tent, and there was a line of cars waiting to turn in beneath a long banner that read REVIVAL TONIGHT! EVERYBODY WELCOME! Men with flashlights were waving the vehicles into parking places, and John saw that school buses had brought whole loads of people. A gleaming silver Airstream trailer sat just behind the tent, separated from the parking lot by sawhorses. The air was filled with dust and voices, and John heard the banner crackle above them as he pulled the car onto the field.
A man with a flashlight peered into the window and grinned. “Evenin’ folks. Just pull on over to the right and follow the man who directs you over there.” He held up a bucket that was filling up with change. “Quarter to park, please.”
“Quarter? But…this is a public field, ain’t it?”
The man shook his bucket so the coins jingled. “Not tonight, fella.”
John found lint and fifteen cents in his pockets. Ramona opened her change purse, took out a dime, and gave it to him. They drove on, following the impatient swing of flashlights. They had to park at the far edge of the field, between two school buses; by the time they’d walked the fifty yards to the tent’s entranceway their carefully prepared clothes were scaled with dust. John took Billy’s hand as they stepped across the threshold.
The interior held more people than John had ever seen gathered together in his life, and still the folks were coming in, rapidly filling up the wooden folding chairs that faced a large raised platform. Golden light streamed from shaded bulbs hanging in rows from the tent’s high ceiling. Over the excited but restrained murmur of voices, a church organ played “The Old Rugged Cross” through two mighty speakers, one on each side of the platform. An American flag and the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy were suspended above the platform, the Old Glory just slightly higher than its rival. A bow-tied usher in a white coat came back to help them find a seat, and John said they wanted to sit as close to the front as they could.
As they walked along the narrow aisle, John was uneasily aware of the stares that were directed toward Ramona. Whispers skittered back and forth, and a whole row of elderly matrons who comprised the Dorcas Society stopped their sewing to stare and gossip. John felt his face redden and wished he’d never insisted she come with them; he’d never expected her to give in, anyway. He glanced back at Ramona and saw she was walking with her spine stiff and straight. He found three chairs together—not nearly as close to the platform as he’d wanted to get, but he couldn’t take the gauntlet of stares and whispers any longer—and he said to the usher, “Right here’s fine.”
At five minutes before seven there wasn’t enough room in the tent for a thin stick. The air was heavy and humid, though the ushers had rolled up the tent’s sides so a breeze could circulate; paper fans rustled like hummingbirds’ wings. The organ played “In the Garden” and then, promptly at seven, a dark-haired man in a blue suit came out from behind a curtain at the right of the platform and climbed several steps up to it, where a podium and microphone had been set up. He tapped the mike to make sure it was working and then surveyed the crowd with a gleeful, toothy smile. “How do!” he said loudly. He introduced himself as Archie Kane, minister of the Freewill Baptist Church in Fayette, and talked about how glad he was to see such a good response, as a choir in yellow robes assembled on the platform behind him. Billy, who’d been growing a little restless in the stifling heat, was excited again because he liked music.
Kane led the choir and assembly in several hymns, then a long rambling prayer punctuated by peop
le calling out hallelujahs. Kane grinned, dabbed at his sweating face with a handkerchief, and said, “Brothers and sisters, I suppose those who know me have enough of me on Sunday mornin’s! So…there’s a gentleman I want to introduce to you right now!” Whoops and hollers spread over the crowd. “A fine gentleman and a man of God, born right here in Fayette County! I expect you already know his name and love him like I do, but I’m gonna say it anyway: the South’s greatest evangelist, Jimmy Jed FALCONER!”
There was an explosion of clapping and cheering, and people leaped to their feet. A fat man with a sweat-soaked plaid shirt rose up just in front of Billy, obscuring his view, but then John was rising to his feet with the rest of them and had swept Billy up high so he could see the man in the bright yellow suit who bounded to the platform.
Jimmy Jed Falconer grinned and raised his arms, and suddenly a huge poster began unrolling down the backdrop behind him, a black-and-white Jimmy Jed Falconer in almost the same pose the real one held. Across the poster’s top was the large red legend: THE FALCONER CRUSADE.
Falconer waited for the applause and whooping to die down, then stepped quickly to the microphone and said in a polished, booming voice, “Do you want to know how God speaks, neighbors?” Before anyone could answer, he’d pulled a pistol out of his coat, aimed it upward, and fired: crack! Women screamed, and men were startled. “That’s how He speaks!” Falconer thundered. “The Lord speaks like a gun, and you don’t know when you’re going to hear Him or what He’s going to say, but you’d sure better be on His right side when He does His talkin’!”
Billy watched the blue haze of gunsmoke waft upward, but he couldn’t see a bullethole. Blank he thought.
Falconer set the pistol atop the podium, then swept his intense blue-green gaze across the audience like the searchlight that still pierced the sky outside. Billy thought that the evangelist looked directly at him for a second, and a fearful thrill coursed through him. “Let’s pray,” Falconer whispered.