Chapter 16 Hypocrisy’s Sermon to the Damned
The Leasing family, minus Prevarica, was now in the windowless truck and the doors were closed on them and locked. It was just the four of them. Aunt Arctica had died the previous year and her second husband Mockery had drifted off. Then their only servant Miss Pinch had left them for not paying her, and finally the nanny Miss Confusion had done the same for the same reason. So Guiles and his wife Oblivia now sat on the metal floor with just their boys Rage and Plausible. There were no chairs, and in fact the interior was utterly bare. One light glowed from the ceiling. The truck’s engine roared as if the driver were eager to take them away. But the police had not yet located Prevarica, so they could not go.
Guiles was thankful that there were no windows, because, if the demolition were to begin before the truck departed, he did not want to see it. The closest they had to a window was a square aperture between the truck and the cab that seemed to have been put there for communication with the driver, but it was covered by a sheet of metal that might or might not be movable. Guiles did not try to move it.
To his surprise one of the back doors reopened and a policeman leaned his dreary face in. “Leasing, you want to see a minister before you go?” Guiles only looked at him. What did it matter? “OK, don’t answer, smart ass. Here he is, whether you want him or not.”
Pastor Hypocrisy climbed over the rear bumper and joined them. As the doors were relocked behind him, he remained standing, looking down at the family. He wore a long black topcoat over his dark gray suit. His wingtip shoes were flat and brown and his tie was a rich burgundy. His presence carried the weight of authority and also of familiarity, because he was the Leasings’ pastor. They had seldom gone to church, but when they had, it had always been his bland face that had looked down at them from the pulpit.
Guiles almost managed a smile. It was damned decent of the Reverend to come around at a time like this.
“Thanks, pastor. I guess we could use some consolation. We’ve had some bad, bad luck.”
“I wouldn’t call it luck,” said Hypocrisy with a scowl. “It was your own doing.”
“Huh? No, it was just one rotten false friend after another, that’s what it was, if you want to know the truth.” Hypocrisy’s stern face warned him that something was wrong, that is, even more wrong on this, a day of ultimate wrongness. “I guess you want to pray with us, pastor? No? Oh yeah, you want to talk about the Bon Voyage ceremony that will take place after we’re gone and ask if we have any special requests for it.”
“Of course, he does,” said Oblivia. “That’s important.”
“You’ll have a Bon Voyage, all right,” the pastor said coldly, “and I’ll tell about what wonderful people you were, and everyone there will know it’s lies.”
“Now see here!” Guiles said with a trace of heat. “I thought you came here to console us.”
“What consolation can there be,” Hypocrisy said, taking out his Bible from a breast pocket, “for the guilty? Well, they haven’t rounded up your oldest girl yet, but I just can’t wait to say this, so we’ll start without her. You better believe I haven’t come here to remind you about your good qualities, because you don’t have any. My sermon today is just three short texts.” He flipped from one passage to another in the Bible, reading from it: “‘Your sin will find you out.’ ‘The wages of sin is death.’ And ‘How will you escape the sentence of hell?’” He slammed the Bible shut and put it away in his pocket again. “End of sermon, Guiles. That’s the sermon I always preach to Relocatees, and since no one will ever know what I said to you, I don’t mind telling you that I enjoy it. Actually, it’s practically the only thing I do enjoy.”
Oblivia blinked back tears. “But you always told us that people are good on the inside and that there isn’t really any such thing as sin.”
“You’re vile,” he said with a laugh. “Look at what you’ve done to your house, just as a for instance. When the roof was gone and the rear of the house was falling down, that’s when you spent a fortune on the front façade. All for your vanity! And when the place was so far gone that it was almost too late to save it, that’s when you invited in Neglect and Folly! It cost you quite a sum to put them up, didn’t it? But you didn’t care because you were making their son Dignity miserable; oh yeah, you really twisted the knife in his guts. But you also threw away your last chance to concentrate on saving the house. Now it’s too late, and too late is forever.”
“The house is still fixable!” Guiles said, half rising.
Hypocrisy firmly shoved him down. “And your lies! Lies, lies, lies. And your frauds and your thefts! I could go on and on, but oh dear, you don’t have time.”
“How can you talk to us this way?” Oblivia said. “You’ve always been so warm and friendly.”
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to suck up to people like you, day after day, year after year? I can only show my real self to goners. Now I can tell you how it really is. And believe you me, it feels good. You’re damned, you’re going to burn in hell for all eternity!”
“When you preached, you always said God wouldn’t send anyone to hell,” she sobbed. “You can’t change that now, not when it’s too late.”
“Can’t change now! Can’t change now!” he shrieked in high pitched mimicry, waving his hands around in a parody of hysteria. “God, I love this. You had a Bible in your hands every time you came to church, and the laugh, Oblivia, is you never read it. I stood up front and told you what it didn’t say, and you never checked, not even when it was open in front of you. Now you’re…hey, what? What is this?”
In the midst of his sport, someone had entered the truck, but it was not Prevarica and this person did not come through the door. Having passed like a wraith through the solid wall, the woman stood looking around at them, her dark face tired and troubled.
“Get out of here,” Hypocrisy said. “I mean now. Get out!”
She said nothing, did not even look at him. Instead she reached down to the youngest boy Plausible where he sat on the floor and stroked his head.
“What’s she doing here? Do you know her?”
“Never saw her before,” said Guiles.
“She hangs around the house,” said Rage sullenly. “We’re not supposed to see her.”
“Lady, I’m their pastor and I have work to do here,” Hypocrisy said in booming tones.
She sat down on the floor between Oblivia and Rage, each of her hands gripping one of theirs. Finally she looked up at him, and he could see by her expression that she had no intention of leaving. She was actually trying to follow them to Relocation!
The door opened behind him.
“Hey, pastor! We need you to get out of there. We’ve got a situation.”
“Just a minute,” he said without turning. Then he reached over the heads of the Leasings and savagely slid the square piece of metal to the side with a clang, revealing a glass filled opening communicating with the cab.
He looked down at Prayer. “You want to go with them? Look through that, babbler, if you think you can stand to share their future!”
With a last glare of hatred toward her, he turned away, stepped out the door, and climbed down from the bumper.
He found a changed scene in the Leasing House front yard. Old Coronary had pulled closer to the place, ready to begin its work. But standing in a line in front of the house, hand in hand, defying the bulldozer, were seven people. One of them was the missing Leasing girl Prevarica. The others he did not recognize, but they appeared to be a family. The kids looked scared, and their parents looked more scared.
“How did they get here?” he demanded of the cop who had called him out of the truck. “Weren’t you manning the barriers?”
The policeman finished relocking the truck and turned to him respectfully. “We were, sir, at the ends of the block, but they came out their front door just across the street and
made a dash over here before we knew what was happening. Damnedest thing I ever saw. The man and his wife showed us their ID when we asked for it. They’re Conformity and Chamelea Hope. You know them?”
“No, I don’t know them. Get them out of here. What do they think they’re doing? Being loyal to a friend? Nonsense, Guiles doesn’t have any friends left.”
“No one but Hope, sir.”
Hypocrisy noticed something in the eastern sky that he definitely did not want to be a first hint of dawn. “Listen, officer, under no circumstances allow the Leasings back out of that truck. Just put their girl in with them, arrest these trespassers, and get on with the demolition.”
“Yes, sir. We’re radioing for instructions.”
“Instructions!” the pastor shouted, thinking of what it would be like if the Leasings came back out of the truck, even for one minute, and started repeating the things he had just said to them. What if word of it reached his congregation! “Don’t you know it’s getting toward dawn? The truck has to leave now. Relocations are always done at night.”
“We know that, Pastor Hypocrisy. We’re calling the Mayor and Mr. Power, because we have firm orders not to bother the Hopes. That’s straight from the top.”
Hypocrisy had heard more than a little about the shelling that had taken place on this street years before, and thought that what the police were really concerned about was a repeat of that debacle. But then so was the Mayor: that was why the order had been issued.
An officer approached them, a man he recognized as Capt. Brutality.
“Hey, Cuffs,” the captain said, addressing the other policeman, “get the Leasing girl in the truck. We just got the operational go ahead from Chief Sordid.”
“What about the Hopes, sir?” said Cuffs.
“We arrest them, detain them for an hour or two, and then let them go.”
“All six of them?” Cuffs said, looking at the younger children.
“Sure, you got any objection?”
“No, it’s just that—”
“What?”
“Nothing. Hey, that’s a lot of Hopes.”
“And we’ve got four squad cars here, plenty to put them in. So get moving. We’ve got to clear them out fast so the demolition can proceed.”
A policeman was already dragging Prevarica out of the little line of fanatics. She writhed loose from him, stood up straight, and walked to the paddy wagon without being touched, as if free from compulsion. Hypocrisy was delighted to see Cuffs usher her inside. The Hopes, except for the youngest children, were being handcuffed and were taking it very quietly; almost, Hypocrisy thought, taking it with relief. Right. They must have been afraid they would be shot down where they stood, so this was not so bad.
Inside the truck, Prevarica turned around and tried the door, finding of course that it had been locked behind her. Then she looked down at her family, huddled on the floor with the black woman in their midst. This woman had been hanging around Leasing House for years, but the family had never discussed her presence, except that Guiles had insisted that they were never to converse with her or admit her existence. He despised her too much for that. Prevarica decided to continue this neglect now.
“Daddy, we need to do something,” she said.
“Where have you been?” her brother Rage said accusingly.
Prevarica ignored him. “Daddy, we need to have a talk with the police captain, that’s what. Do you have your cell phone?”
He shook his head. She could see its case on his belt, but felt sure he had failed to pay for service, had been cut off, and was now wearing it just for show.
“Do something, daddy.”
“I’ll speak to the driver,” he said softly and made some move to rise toward the window that communicated with the cab.
“No, daddy, don’t!” she screamed and, practically treading on her mother, got between him and the window. She had just a glimpse of the things, two of them, in the cab, before she slammed the sliding metal cover back in place over the window.
Then she looked down at her father, he looked up at her, and she knew he understood. He must remember what she had claimed to have seen when the Sluggard family had been taken away for Relocation. She had changed her story later at his own insistence, had changed it twice, but he could not have forgotten her original account, and now he must know it was true. As for Prevarica, she had not required her glimpse of the scalies. She had known what was in the cab without seeing them. But in the moment of closing the cover, one of them had shot out a foot long tongue and blinked at her with a lizard’s eye.
She was not the sort to ever admit that she had run out of options. Probably, she thought, as she sank to the floor among the others, she would try not to admit it even there, even at their destination. But she had seen this coming for years and, against her will, had formed some preconceptions. One was that admitting or not admitting defeat would have nothing to do with it. She would be in a place where she could tell lies up to the limit of her cleverness and audacity and achieve nothing, nothing at all. It was like what she preferred to call her skin disease: it just clung to you and cared nothing for what you said.
The driver revved the engine again. No one said a word. As each second that passed crushed down on her with iron weight, she sat on the hard metal floor and looked straight ahead. Then the strange black woman, whom she had never heard speak, whom she had doubted to have the power of speech, began to sing in a low, sweet voice.
I went down… Lord, I was invisible.
The folk in church called me the devil’s daughter.
I went down… God didn’t even recognize his daughter.
And I was drowned, drowned even to the soul.
My head got caught in weeds below the water.
I went down… Lord, I was invisible.
Prevarica wanted to tell her to shut up but would not give her the satisfaction of being noticed. She wanted to yell at her, ‘Shut up! Shut up! And don’t tell Wisdom! Don’t you, or the Hopes, or anyone ever tell him what’s happened, so he can say I should have listened to him.’
For she was sure that Prayer would not accompany them very far in the truck. She was free to step out through the wall and go report to her Heavenite bosses. Whether from her or others, Wisdom and everyone else would soon know all about it, for there was no stopping such news from spreading. Prevarica sat thinking of this, staring at the bolted seam of a metal wall, feeling a little like vomiting, and involuntarily listening.
I went down… Lord, down underneath the hills,
Below the lowest valleys, in the caves,
Below the deepest tree roots in the caves.
But even so, my Jesus said He will
Bring back my life and raise me from the grave.
I went down… Lord, down underneath the hills.
I went down… O Jehovah my God.
I went down… O Jehovah my God.
Part 3 A Highly Improbable Mission