Darconville's Cat (43 page)

  The interlocutor, meanwhile, asking for everyone’s
undivided attention, went straight into the preliminary segment of
the program. Darconville looked around him to see people knuckling
into their pews, snorting for excitement, ready to be entertained.
Revival fires, burning, somehow recapitulated the klieg-lights of
the Grand Ole Opry. It was a land of
revue
!

  Miss Gelda Lou Glikes, a girl of excessive
beribbonment, blew out on her trumpet the old winner, “He Touched
Me,” blushed, and skipped into the wings. An ex-football star from
the Cincinnati Bengals (30” neck, 5½” hat) mesomorphically loped to
the podium and said that it may sound corny but he was lonesome for
Jesus, a remarkable heresy, thought Darconville, contravening the
orthodox argument that He is everywhere, but there was little time
to reflect on this, what with the swift entrance of The Marvy
Twins, male regulars, who swayed and harmonized to the favorite,
“The Flame on My Wick Is Bright Tonight,” the last chorus of which
one hummed while the other narrated a poem about motherhood from an
anniversary greeting card. Then a former dipsomaniac second-grade
schoolteacher, choking back the tears—”witnessing”—told her story,
God help her, about a spinfit she once threw after drinking only
one
highball, God forgive her, when she forced an unruly
seven-year-old to eat a whole jar of mucilage and two pink erasers.
And then a high-school boy in a wheelchair, waving the Confederate
Battle Flag, was pushed out on stage to recite a snatchet from “The
Conquered Banner”:

        ”. . . Keep it,
widowed, sonless mothers,

        Keep it,
sisters, mourning brothers,

        Furl it with an
iron will,

        Furl it now,
but—keep it still;

        Think not that
its work is done . . .”

  The showcase opened even wider. An octogenarian,
garbed out in an American Legion uniform, was led out to wave just
before what was clearly imminent cardiac arrest, one that would
nevertheless proudly enroll him among the Army of Heaven. A dwarf
named Larry appeared and spoke in tongues, the supernatural aspect
of his delivery not untransvalued for strangeness by his harelip.
And the last act belonged to one Roy LeRoy, billed as, and
generally recognized to be, W. C. Cloogy’s “best friend,” for the
evangelist, like the King of the Cowboys, always keeps such a foil:
it implies a disposition to gregariousness, Roman
amicitia
, and cuts down for the ensainted preacher on the
inevitable speculation the presence of wives causes. A kind of
swagman, stooge, and jovial boy-friday, he sang in one of those
parodically classical, out-of-fashion voices a medley of laxatives
touching on the Jordan; chariots swinging low; Rolls Being Called
Up Yonder; Loving Mysterious Strangers (age 33!); golden slippers;
and Columbia, the Gem—as the famous mixed metaphor has it—of the
Ocean, these being interspersed, narratively, with a didactic mess
of “Why, Daddy?” stories; criminal-sons-and-saintiy-moms stories;
the Worm Turns stories; instant conversion stories;
money-can-never-make-you-happy stories (always a signal for the
collection), and,
testantibus actis
, a whole rosary of
patriotic yarns.

  The Americanistic pitch, of course, was old hat on
the Bible circuit, as were subterranean virility fears common, the
latter always animating the former in the extra-defensive and
recurrent dream of the evangelist in which he sees himself, in full
color and cinemascope, a lantern-jawed begrenaded U. S. Marine
leaping out of a trench to beat the living shit out of the Devil
who, widespread was the assumption, wore perfume, spoke Russian,
and carried a purse.

  “I must have your attention now, Lies and German”—it
was the mannerbereft in the string-tie again, raising his eyes like
Enoch Translated—”for to welcome the shepherd of you sheep, God’s
chosen minister and,” he winked cutely, “the best li’l oP buddy
around—Dr. W. C. Cloogy!”

  The star appeared in the east wing. And then he
rumbled out, threw out his arms, and drew a bead directly on the
ceiling overhead.

  “The text for today, brothers and sisters, is:
‘
Why do you boast of your valleys, O faithless daughter
?’
Jeremiah 49:4.”

  Everyone crouched.

  “Sex! I’m puttin’ in here today to talk to you about
sex! Utter that blackest of words, neighbors, speak its two little
syllables compared to which, dear, dear brethren, nothin’ll give
you the fantods quicker, hear? It’s been the world’s favorite word
since tune began, from Lot’s wife to Pharaoh to the Queen of
Sheeby, and yet as I speak I know full certain that half of you
sorry pieces of plunder ain’t in no more mood to give it up than to
cross the Rivanna River in a hollow tooth! The Lord axin’ you to be
pure of flesh was axin’ back small change on the dollar, see, but
what? You smug as barncats, huh? Actin’ like Nebuckadunsaw, right?
Givin’ in to your cravin’s? Don’t look around! I talkin’ to you,
not
someotherbody
! I talkin’ to you out there, all
stinking feathers and no hat, who say ‘I’m mone live forever!’ who
say ‘Not me!’ who say ‘Bull!’ until you wake up one day to find the
Devil hoppin’ on you like a duck on a June bug, OK? Eyes closed,
ears deef, lips silent, fanny stopped up, yes, yes, yes! O God,
help! O God, rescue! O God, I seen it all before!”

  The Rev. W. C. Cloogy,
Doctor Fundatus
,
took his mumping cant right to the lip of the stage. There was
about his face a more than passing resemblance to Ulrich Zwingli: a
nose like a doorknob, round and brassy, poked out of an odd
rutabaga-shaped head, while under his hooded eyelids two
distrustful eyes constantly shifted back and forth black and
snapping like a jackdaw’s. Farcically he jigged in his smoldering
clothes, flaring his nose, thrashing the language in accents
penacute and rude, and, with deep and ominous wefts of breath,
sidling up toward the congregation in jits. The Abbot of Unreason
was loose.

  “Mo-tels! Pa’back books! Sippin’-liquor! Goosedown
pillows!
Supposed
hayrides! Men in bulgin’ pants from
magazines! Girlies with eyelashes like dang rakes! Profanity,
that’s how I pronounce it! But shall I put you in the picture,
friend? Ain’t never been a soul tumblin’ through them Gates of
Eternity but wadn’t first a li’l heap of trash, born in shame, and
set on magnetic north to grab at every pair of glands in sight,
pawin’ flesh and
doin’ like hawgs
! You proud of it? You
aim to be just another one of these crapmouses? That what I get for
confabulatin’ with y’all up here every Sunday of a morning? No?
Well, you best
get saved
, boy,
Ephesians 2:2
, or
don’t come runnin’ to me, ‘cause ain’t nobody nohow better plan on
eatin’ fish muddle n’ shoe-fly pie forever, clear? You vaporin’
with the Lord, you and you? And plannin’ on gettin’ away with it?
Why, you gonna get jerked up, every last one of you! The wages of
sin is death! The wages of sin, don’t bet your chewing gum
otherwise, is that you gonna die, die, die, die, you with me?
Everything from figpecker to philosopher gonna
dah
!
Hosea
9:7. Why, on the Day of the Great Dividin’, Jack,
you’ll be pawnin’ your crisping pins, big-city suits, mantles,
fancy duded-up hats, and you name what-all from the Montgomery
Ward,
Habakkuk 3:7
, and why, you ask? Go no farther’n
here, I’ll tell you, why just to buy your greedy profane little
self one minute from Hell’s black flames which can burn, sear,
blister, spit, bubble, and boil, but too late, you dracs and
sorcerers and fornicators, because by then the fahrenheit will have
shot through the nipple of the thermometer like you wouldn’t
believe and be scorchin’ out your spatchcock and gizzards, which’ll
be a thousand times worse if you took liquor ‘cause that
catches
! And do you think the Lord is gonna care two
diddlies if you fry—
frah
!—wipin’ hellsmoke out of your
eyes and dobbin’ your body with ashes to dink the heat? Not if you
ain’t willin’ to walk down Redemption Avenue! Not if you
sloppy-kissin’ the foot of Pharaoh! Not if you ain’t right with
Him
—but that’s either here or there, ain’t it, ‘cause if
you was right with Him, you things of Gomorrah, you’d-a not been
there in the first damn place!”

  Darconville couldn’t believe it. He looked about
him. It was a
limbus fatuus
of devotees: old horsefaced
ladies in absurd hats; various paralytici; hominids and monorhines;
dishlicking Hutterites; tobacco farmers, their necks cracked and
veneered by sun and wind; goosecaps with bowl haircuts; crofters
and their wives, both with toothless Punch-and-Judy profiles; and,
of course, the little foxes who spoil the vines, little teratogenic
kids with wide mouths, round simpleton faces, and water-parted
hair. And naturally there were those two bedizened women-in-orchids
(there always are) sitting together and complaining they couldn’t
hear a thing. Most of the people, stiff as pipes, sat
non-introspectively upright with the orthodox stares of faces on
church windows, but others, perhaps reaffirming the idea that the
human mind is more easily unhinged in matters of divinity than
anything else, began jerking back and forth like woodpeckers. A few
wept. And one or two tremebundi were knotted up in prayer, like
frogs poised for a jump. There was the sprawler, the huncher, the
croucher, the percher, the squatter, and one lady, either daft or
in the “rapture” —the boundaries touch—was coiled around herself in
a side-aisle and flapping in an
arc de cercle
, the
characteristic posture of the hysteric.

  Cloogy the concionator, meanwhile, saw he had them
where he wanted them, mustn’t lose them, and so wanned to the task,
a hot scaldabanco now cuffing his assailant’s shadow on the wall,
wringing his fingers, and verjuicing his sermon with every fright
he could, he spit his wrath and spanked the vices of his age
without a break or breath.

  “I seen the end and the beginning! I seen fallen
women, painted up like baboons, who could sweet-talk a cat into a
doghouse and, hopin’ to God never to see more, sportin’ men in zoot
suits shagging them at the dance hall. But what really cracks my
acorns is to see young folks leavin’ their little truck patches
nowadays just to go mousin’ around the city with cigarettes like
the ten-horned fiends of Revelations, and for what?—
sexual
monkeyshines
! Misfits, that’s all! Misfits and
compost-sniffin’ neathogs who don’t give a pin’s fee or a penny for
the Lord Jesus, born in the winter of the year i, died in the
spring of 33! Joshua ben Joseph they called Him back then, bein’
Jews of course and too blamebusted ee-literate to ascertain He was
callin’ Hisself by the name of Jesus, El Shaddai if you want to be
fancy, which I don’t! ‘Course, I know nothin’, you know it all,
huh? So go ahead, smoke yourself into fidgets! Coat your belly with
the devil’s drink! Fashion yourself out as friends of
pope-worshippers and
fai
-ries! Pinch up your waist in
calico, half nekkid, and take your love to town under them bright
city lights and honky-tonks,
Sirach 34:4
! But put you in
mind, you nasty little trapes, come the last trump of thunder—O
mercy, mercy on your souls!—you’ll have no wheel to spin, no loom
on which to weave, no sickle to harvest with, no well-sweep to draw
up precious water! And then what a scouring! What an upturnin’!
Lordy, what a dee-molition!”

  The brimstone rained down, but it didn’t matter.
Evangelism is to Southerners what valerian is to a cat. The
congregation whuffed appreciatively, their Demosthenes, they felt,
being as brilliant an orator as ever the Pnyx had cheered. Not for
them, if for Darconville—Isabel was only bewildered—was it the
trashiest piffle and most intolerable bit of fustian since the days
of thundering Whitfield, circulating Summerfield, and weeping
Payson. No, this for them was the Word, and its speaker—with hewing
arms, a face pot-liquor green, and a mouthful of indicavits—might
just as well have been preaching from a fishing-smack dead center
in the Sea of Galilee or sending the Divine Message through the
penal bars of the Mamertine dungeon. Cloogy banked on that as he
pointed a finger straight into their faces.

  “I be takin’ up a collection momentarily and will be
axin’ you to reach down deep in your pockets to pull out some
faith
which in this part of the Holy Land, for outreach
work and general upkeep, is colored green and crackles, ‘cause on
your deathbed or, well, pallet, which is the same as a bed only
narrower, you subscribers of sex and malfeasance, you ain’t gonna
own nothin’, you ain’t gonna take nothin’, you ain’t gonna
hear
nothin’, not the thrum of a harp, not the carol of a
bird, not the howl of a coon, not the whoooole doxology of
congregations—doxology a big-city word for praise and glory,
nothin’ else—so be warned, you fleshpeddlin’ spackies and
shut-wallets and tithin’ nigglers! ‘You conceive chaff, you bring
forth stubble!’
Isaiah 33:11
. But listen to me! Did I just
say you gonna prance into heaven ‘cause you e-void honky houses?
Did I just say you gonna prance into heaven ‘cause you ain’t
backslidin’ but twicet a week? Did I just say you gonna prance into
heaven, you rinsepitchin’, fist-clinching, pennypinching
dah-warves, ‘cause you blow the horn in Gibeah and sound the
trumpet in Ramah? I didn’t say any such of a
thang
! No!
No, no, no! You got to have
faith
, which means only
trust—in God— a mot-to found on every dollar in the American mint!
‘Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe!’
Joel 3:13
.
Here now, do I hear you reachin’ down now or is wickedness sweet in
your mouth? O wheelbarrows, full of hates and hisses! O hard as
stwones! I hear no jingle! I hear no jangle!”