If only he hadn’t been so darned sad, so alone. When she snuggled close, he had embraced her right there and then in the middle of the foster-home rec room, and caressed her lank hair, and looked into her round blue eyes. “Get me out of here,” she had murmured. “It’s such a dump.”
“I can’t, hon, I’m just a social worker.” She had raised her face to him, and he had thought perhaps she was an angel, despite the chewing gum, “Adopt me, Simon,” she had whispered.
“Oh, hon, I can’t, I haven’t got the money to raise a girl proper.”
“Simon, on the books I’d be your daughter, but I’d really be your wife.”
He remembered the smell of her breath, deep-sweet and juicy.
She had done things to him, things that felt so good he was as if tied in that chair. Never had he known the touch of such beauty. He had thought he was dying it was so good.
O Lord, I am Thy servant, and Thou art the kingdom and the power and the glory!
Afterward he just got so dam mad at her, she had damned his soul with those pretty white hands. She laughed at him and tossed her head like a little filly, and he took her by the neck and crushed the gristle of her windpipe, and all of a sudden her cream-perfect face was tight and blue.
Oh, God, he hadn’t been able to get her breathing. Her throat was purple where his hands had been and she grabbed at it and her eyes rolled and she died right there and then.
He had tried to blow air into her lungs, to give her artificial respiration, but she wouldn’t come back to life, so he was faced with this dead body.
“Lord, please, I’ve got to stop thinking about it!” If this kept up, he was sure to start hitting the bottle he kept in his trailer. It was less than half an hour before the congregation would start to arrive. Maybe one good drink would clear his head.
He went back to his trailer. Even though he usually didn’t drink much, over the years the back of the trailer had become crowded with bottles. He couldn’t very well throw them away.
Not that he pretended to be a teetotaler. But a preacher ought to be upright. So he kept his liquor to himself and followed even the smallest drink with a couple of peppermint Certs.
The opening of a fresh bottle was always a small festivity. He drank good whiskey. Twelve years old, smooth as a bunny’s ears. “Lord,” he said as always, “forgive me what I cannot help.” He took a fair pull.
Soon an echo of contentment was spreading through his body. “Thank you, O Lord, for this gift.” He knelt on the floor of his trailer. “Thank you for this kindness.”
Here he was, a preacher thanking Jesus for liquor. Now, there was something that would make a real man of God laugh out loud.
He lay back on his bed, reminding himself once again to change the sheets. He didn’t have a maid—he never allowed people in here.
He took out the hand. It lay on his palm, small and complex, a thing of clutching angles. A cut-off thing.
And yet, not cut off. In a way still alive.
Probably death was just nothing. The end. Sure there was a God, but God didn’t give much of a damn.
God was sq very far away. Heaven was the other side of the sky, and the sky was too damn big to ever cross.
He looked quickly at the hand. Hadn’t it moved just then, just when he thought how far away heaven was?
Sometimes he thought the hand could whisper to him.
He should have given her the knife and showed her how to cut a man’s neck so the blood spurted out in a pulsating stream, and she’d move his hair aside and turn his head a little and—zip. She would have done it. She would have done anything for him.
“I am destruction.”
He was going to give them one hell of a funeral. Let’s see, how many Turners were there? Betty and—what—two kids? Three of ‘em altogether. More than enough grief there for a fine show.
A change in the way the tight brown leather of the hand reflected the light startled him. He looked at it again. Was there subtle movement, or was that just the light flickering?
He put the hand down on the floor beside his cot and got the Bible from underneath. He’d do readings, the reference to death in Numbers, then the 116th Psalm, then the last and most important part, the Abadon passage from Revelation 9. The funeral would then wind its way down to the town graveyard just the other side of the Collier estate.
He was going to give fire to the faint of heart, he was going to burn wickedness in white heat.
He was going to burn the wickedness of the harlot in the hell of the flames, and at last destroy the abomination of the earth that infected this town and was tearing as a long-nailed claw tears at its God-fearing heart.
Another movement made him look again at the hand. What he saw shocked him. Always it had been closed. The thing was dry. And yet, as a flower of night, it had opened. He touched it in wonder, then picked it up. It was as stiff open as it had been closed.
He kissed the palm.
For a long time he lay inhaling its dry, faintly organic odor, remembering the salt-sweet smell of it in life, suffering an agony of helpless regret.
“Brother?”
He stuffed the hand in his pocket as he leaped off his cot. Had so much time passed? “I’m sorry, Sister Winifred. I was resting in preparation for the service. I must have dropped off.” He smoothed back his hair, splashed some water on his face, and ate his Certs while Sister Winifred waited at the door of the trailer.
She had a look of quiet happiness about her. “Brother,” she said as they went toward the Tabernacle, “is there any provision we can make for those standing in the parking lot?”
He stopped. “Wait a minute? Are you telling me I’ve got an overflow crowd?”
She nodded, at once pleased and solemn, remembering the nature of the occasion. Brother Pierce was careful to hide his own elation. One good thing about this witch business was that it was really an inspiration to the people. A man had lost his life, but the Lord willing, his sacrifice would not have been in vain.
“Tell you what you do. Sister. You stick that P.A from the movie projector out on the front stoop. And leave the doors open. They’ll hear us. They will hear the Word of the Lord.”
Shyly, and so quickly that he could hardly notice, she touched the bulge of the hand in his pocket. He was shocked, and drew back. There was on her face a knowing sort of a smile. “Praise the Lord,” she whispered. Did she think it was his member?
The light of the packed Tabernacle washed him with energy. He was glad to see how intense those faces were today, and the sincerity in the tears. It humbled him to fee! every stare upon himself when he mounted his pulpit.
He looked from face to face, nodding to the weeping Turner family. For the moment the coffin was closed. He would do the revelation after his first reading. “Now we are gathered here to seek in the Kingdom of God for succor, my beloved brothers and sisters, for He who cherishes us shall now comfort us in our loss.”
“Oh, yes,” from a few mouths.
“For a man is dead, and he was a good man! Yes, he was a good man!”
“Oh, yes!”
“And this man was killed by the spell of the mandrake, a spell woven by witches against us, and he was burned in the fire of their evil hearts!”
“Oh, yes!”
“I tell you this: we will avenge his death, for the people of the Lord will not let the evil of witchcraft fester among them, growing out of all proportion as cancer grows, for in this congregation we have the power of His holy name, we have the cure for the cancer of evil!”
“We have the cure!”
“I recall from the Good Book, from the chapter of the Numbers where God spoke out of the mouth of Balak, and said, ‘Who can count the dust of Jacob, and the number of the fourth part of Israel? Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his!’ And I say to you, I say to you, I would join him in a minute if I thought it would bring us peace from the torment of these witches! Oh, these spellbinders and these dev
ils are riding the horses of hell in our streets, and burning the fathers of our houses, for they are the very fire of evil!”
“Praise the Lord, praise His Name!”
“Now I am going to ask that you give one another the kiss of peace, and I am going to open this coffin, and I tell you this, Betty Turner, you are to come up here and embrace your husband, and each of your children will do it, too, for you must see and remember, all of you, the work of the dread hand of Satan, and bid good-bye to our lost brother.”
Something moved in his pocket. And in his mind he thought he heard whispered approval. The hand of the little girl, cut off for a lot of reasons. He told himself that he did it to prevent identification.
No, he remembered too well the work of the knife. It had been pleasure that animated him, a steaming pile of rotted pleasure, to take a part of her softness…
It was not soft now. It had become an instrument of the Lord’s work. Praise be the hand, may it bring him his punishment in its curled, brown fingers.
He went down to the catafalque. The lid of the coffin opened smoothly. He could sense people craning to see, could hear the gasps, the stifled screams. Brother Turner lay, a blackened hulk of a thing, his head scorched bald, his carbonized fists raised before his chest. His eyes were half closed, his lips parted. He had died of suffocation, from seared lungs.
“The beautiful naked witch will burn as he has burned, in the slow fire of purification!”
It was all in planning, too. Simon did not make idle threats. He would at once avenge the lost brother and cleanse for them the souls of the witches.
Tomorrow night he would burn their elegant red brick devil-house with its fine white columns, the kind of house exactly that the filthy scum rich lived in back in Houston. Then he would take that woman of theirs, the one with the soft white hands and the flowing hair, the one who had abominated the streets of Maywell with her naked ride, and he would tie her up in her nakedness and burn her before the witness of his people.
Then he would say to the witches, disband. Be gone. God does not want you here.
The hand touched him so intimately that it almost made him cry out again, as it had so long ago in Houston.
“Betty Turner, come forward and embrace your husband!”
“Oh, please, I—we just can’t!”
“You can and you must, for it is the will of God! I call on the rest of you, help her and her children to take courage! Come forward and embrace your brother, every one of you, embrace him and touch his agonized flesh and know what evil the witches do to the body of the Iamb!”
Sister Winifred was the first to go. That was a plucky lady. She jerked back when she laid her cheek against the dead face and the dried crackling pricked her. Moving up and down the aisle, Simon exhorted.
“Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus! Help them now, give them strength!”
The weeping of the Turner family filled the Tabernacle, that and the shuffling of the faithful up to the coffin.
“And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth:”
“Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them.”
Betty Turner clapped her hands to her face. “Close it,” she wailed, “please close it!”
“And I looked, and behold a white cloud, and upon the cloud one sat like unto the Son of man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle.”
Some of the men began to push the open coffin toward the rear of the church so that more could embrace (he dead saint.
“And another angel came out from the altar, which had power over fire; and cried with a loud cry to him that had the sharp sickle, saying. Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe.”
There began among the congregation soft clapping. Simon nodded to Winifred, who started the organ going, very low, “Gather at the River.” Best to stick to the simple, familiar songs, Brother Pierce always maintained. That was the way into the most hearts and souls.
He was pleased with the strength of feeling in the congregation.
This funeral was going to give the men the courage they needed tomorrow night. It would take more than his pitiful sermonizing to inspire those men to face the witches again.
Harris signaled from the door. He was waiting with his hearse; the town graveyard closed at dusk.
“We will recite Psalm 116, brothers and sisters, as we go into the outer darkness, to return the flesh to the dust of the earth.”
He began the psalm.
“I love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications.”
They put the coffin in the hearse. Simon rode in the funeral car with the Turners. Betty, a handsome woman, was flushed with her grief, her breasts heaving rhythmically beneath her black dress, her eye shadow running down her face. She had a golden harlot of a daughter, and a son of freckles and sandy hair, whose face shone with faith despite his grief. Simon read as the car moved off toward the graveyard.
“The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell got hold upon me: I found trouble and sorrow.”
Betty Turner leaned her head against Simon’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I couldn’t hug him. But I just couldn’t, and now I’ll never see him again.”
Simon covered her hand with his.
“The Lord preserveth the simple: I was brought low, and he helped me.
“Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.”
Betty Turner drew a ragged breath. Her daughter’s eyes filmed. “Now, don’t start in again, honey,” Betty said. “You’ll start me, too.”
“Take comfort in the Word of the Lord,” Simon said. “This is His Word also. ‘Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.’ Your husband was a saint, my dear sister. A saint”
The son’s face clouded. Simon assumed he was remembering the truth of their private misery. That life with Turner had been miserable Simon had no doubt. Turner was a drunken, red-faced roach of a man with his hair full of grease, mean as a hog and twice as fat.
“Let Israel now say that his mercy endureth forever.”
“Brother Pierce,” the daughter asked, “do you know the whole Bible?”
Simon smiled. It was such a simple, pure question, from that darling, soft child. How could lips be so red, or eyes so blue, or hands so very smooth? He fought the ravening that he felt, and forced his face to gentleness.
The hand stirred.
He twisted and squirmed, but it remained close against him. He forced himself to answer the girl’s question, know about half. Every day I learn a new verse.
“Is there anything,” the boy asked, “that can make us proud of Dad?”
“Willy.”
“Sorry, Mom.”
“There is a verse, son, from the 119th Psalm. It goes like this. ‘This is my comfort in my affliction: for thy word hath quickened me. The proud have held me greatly in dension: yet I have not declined from thy law. I remembered thy judgments of old, O Lord, and have comforted myself.’ So we must all do the same, son.”
The boy thought about this. “Can I watch,” he asked at last, “when you burn the witch?”
“Oh, hush, now! Whoever said he was going to do such a thing?”
Simon felt himself grow cold. He had said little of his ideas, yet here they were coming out of the mouth of a child. There must be a lot of whispering going through the congregation. Sometimes he wondered who the leader was—himself or the intangible spirit of the group. “Do not admonish your son, Sister Turner, for a child might speak in the tongue of the Lord.”
When the car stopped, dusk was already far advanced. Betty Turner sank back into her seat. “I just don’t know how I’m going to get through this! I dread the burial.” She looked at Simon with stricken eyes. “There?
??s no way you could call him a good man. He drank. He beat us up. He was lazy and he two-timed me. He left us poor. But he was a person.” She glanced out the rear window, toward the sunlight that still clung to the cliffs of Stone Mountain. “Those witches killed him just when he was trying hardest to get himself saved. You see, that man wanted to live in the Lord. But the flesh is weak!”
She and her son and daughter, tears in their eyes, left the funeral car and walked toward the gravesite behind the coffin of the dead father.
Easily a hundred cars had come. Brother Pierce went to the grave, which had been lined with green artificial turf by Harris’s people, and provided with a sling for the coffin. Simon saw that he had the biggest graveside turnout in the history of the Tabernacle. That was wonderful, but it meant that there might be spies in among the crowd, witches and people sent by the sheriff and such.
Very well. He would not threaten anybody, nor even mention the vision he was having, of that young naked-rider witch lying in the midst of a fire, and she can’t get away, and she is burning and her screams are pealing through the night. And for just a few minutes, Simon is happy. He doesn’t even need the hand.
And it is because for these few minutes he is vanquishing the sin of that poor misguided girl.
He could only be at peace, he decided, when he was sending a soul to heaven. She had shone in the night like a goddess, had Amanda of the long flowing hair Of course it was her. He had noticed that hair when she visited the Tabernacle with her insane uncle. Oh, yes. The uncle was dead now, dead in that coffin they had taken from his house.
The deputy sheriff had said it was her in the coffin, but he was misled. She was young and perfect. No, it was him. If anybody were to dig up that coffin, they would find the old whoremaster of a scientist in it.
Simon stood in the thickening dark, among the dense crowd. The coffin was behind him, ready to be lowered into me grave. Betty Turner stood on his right, her daughter on his left, the son beside the daughter. Simon began reciting the familiar lines of Genesis 3:
“In the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”