Earthly Powers (107 page)

       "Deliver us O Lord."

       "Lord Lord Lord save us from the fiend of hell."

       "Save us O Lord."

       "Lord Lord Lord cleanse our bodies from disease, cleanse our souls of every abomination cleanse the filthy world about us that it may be fit to be the golden throne of your coming."

       'Cleanse us O Lord."

       Much more of this. I longed for a stiff whisky and a cigarette drawn deep. The door at the back of me opened and one of the youngish women began to run down the aisle, clutching something black, dripping, shapeless, nameless in a napkin held high. I caught the smell of profound putrefaction as it flew past me. I wanted to pray, but to no God known here. The youngish woman cried: "Hallelujah, praise the Lord."

       "Your servant," countercried Manning, arms held aloft, "is by your grace healed of her affliction. Praise him praise him praise him." The congregation did its own arm-raising and praising. I had had enough. I got up and got out. Nobody hindered my going. Not even Manning, I think, saw. I met the poor old black woman at the back, weeping copiously in what might have been joy, clutched in the arms of the other youngish woman. Outside in the air I committed a foul sin. I lighted a cigarette and drank in its smoke like salvation. A black sexton or servitor came from round the corner of the Place of Prayer and, wordless, gentle, reproachful, took the cigarette from my mouth. He held it as though it were that black dripping horror within. I shrugged and smiled and waited. I was going to get Eve out of here. It was, after all, supposed to be a free country.

       Jim Swinney was out first. "You didn't stay till the end," he said. "You missed the healing of the halt and the lame."

       "I saw the healing of a cancer. Indeed, I saw the bloody cancer. That's enough for one day. Now I want to see my greatniece."

       "Your what?"

       "Great-niece or grandniece. I'm never sure of the right term. I saw her in there. A little girl called Eve Breslow. A girl who came here with an illegitimate baby. I have a message for her from her father. I want to see her alone."

       "Only God sees people alone." He took up a stance and put on a smirk signifying that he had seen through me. "That's why you came, is it? Not to do an article for this British paper."

       "Oh, that as well. But I see nothing wrong with delivering a message. A paternal one. Is there some rule against it?"

       "Christ said we must leave our fathers and mothers and follow him. What you're asking is irregular."

       The congregation, tranquillised by the Lord's body but elated by the works and words of God, started to come out. "There she is," I said. "Eve," I called. Jim Swinney also called. To him, not me, she came.

       She said, "I did nothing wrong, Jim. I swear."

       "I know you didn't, Eve. Do you know this gentleman?"

       She didn't know whether she ought to say she did or not. She squirmed. She tried to tighten her rope cord. "Yeah," she said at length. "He's my mother's uncle." And then, with a pathetic teenage salute of greeting, hand circling away from right temple, "Hi, Tunc."

       "Ah hi, Eve."

       "You got anything to say to him, Eve, anything to take back to your father and mother?"

       "Yeah, that I'm okay. That I'm happy. That I found salvation. That I love God."

       "How's the baby, Eve?" I asked.

       "He's okay, I guess."

       "That's about it," Jim Swinney said. "You have your message."

       "Could I talk to her alone?"

       He thought about that, chewing the inside of his lower lip. "It's irregular," he said. "But we might arrange something." He called a black sacristan or beadle. "Dick," he said, "take these two to the interview hut." Then he said something quietly to Eve.

       And so it was that we found ourselves, Eve and I, suspiciously alone, in a kind of wooden prison with a made up bed in it and two plain chairs. It had the smell of something long baked in radiant heat. The single high window would not open. "Kind of hot," I said. "Eve, your father wants you back."

       "My mother doesn't. Besides, I'm okay here. I found the way and the truth."

       "If you wanted the way and the truth your other grand-or great-uncle was better qualified to give it. The Catholic Church is at least civilised. This seems to me to be very suspect. I don't care much for this God Manning of yours."

       "He's wonderful. He's the living witness to the truth."

       "Love him, do you?" I said brutally.

       "With all my soul. He's the living witness. My days and nights are given up to the worship and praise of the Lord. Through him I found the way and the truth."

       "You're only a child," I said. "Christ, you've read nothing, learned nothing. You've been taken in by a ah phony."

       "Now you're blaspheming. I don't want to hear any more."

       "You're coming with me, Eve. I'm taking you back to New York."

       "I'm not I'm not." And then she did a thing to me at that moment totally inexplicable. Standing as she was now, and just by the door, she tried to rip her sack garment. It was too tough for her small fingers. She untied the knot of the waistcord and threw the waistcord down. Then she lifted the garment over her head and stood there naked except for a pair of pants, her own I assumed from their flimsiness, not Godgiven. Then she screamed and screamed and banged at the door. I should have known it would be locked. It was very speedily unlocked. God Manning himself was there, along with Jim Swinney and the blotched former alcoholic. They were none of them shocked by the sight of the naked girl. Irma Mesolongion even had a bathrobe ready. Manning himself picked up the discarded sack from the floor. Then he started on me. Eve meanwhile sobbed in the arms of Irma the reformed. Manning told me of my filthy libidousness, my incestuous lust, my disgusting senile pervertedness. Various Children of God, perhaps kept hanging about for this purpose, closed in the better to hear. Manning made it clear that it was only by the holy strength of his presence that they did not tear me to pieces as dogs tore the defiled flesh of Jael.

       "This," I said, "is ridiculous. I have never touched the body of a woman in my life. To suggest that I would do it to a girl, to my own grand-or great-niece. My tastes," I said mildly, good old former comedywriter Toomey, "are quite otherwise."

       "Son of Sodom," Manning cried promptly, "spawn of Gomorrah. Out of the abode of the blessed with the curse of the living God upon you. Liar and cheat, without doubt the author of filth, though thank the Lord I have never read you. Out."

       It was a fair trudge back toward the gates and the guardroom. I saw, thank the Lord, the hired car waiting outside. Behind me marched the troop of the saved, murmuring, even barking (Filth fornicator dirty sinner perhaps even limey faggot). Manning had gone off somewhere, perhaps to deliver a tele. phonic commination to The Times bureau in Washington. Sobbing Eve and her escort had also disappeared. Jim Swinney was there till the end. The guard had changed. It was still, however, all black. A young man with tortured eyes swung open the gate. He had his automatic pistol at the ready. The driver waited courtly by the open doors of the saloon. He had, he had told me, once been a driver for Government House, South Australia. The young black accompanied me to that door.

       He said, "I'm coming with you, man. I'm getting outa here." He pointed his gun back at his former colleagues, who pointed in return. There was no question of anybody firing.

       "In quick," I said, pushing him. He dithered and his pants were wet. The driver, glad of excitement after the long dullness of his wait, rushed to his seat and switched on the ignition. We started off on the desolate road to Los Angeles.

       "Jesus," the young black said through his terrified sweat, "you don't know what it's like back there, man."

       "I have an idea," I said and offered him a cigarette.

CHAPTER 75

"What," I asked Melvin Withers of the Los Angeles Times, "did you get out of him?"

       "The usual. What you'd expect. Beatings-up called the Lord's punishment. A rotational harem. He says his brother died under queer circumstances, but he can't prove anything. Nobody can. There's no point in him going to the police. Manning is very generous to the Los Angeles police. Your little black friend is in some danger."

       I had known Withers for some time, off and on. I had once given him an exclusive story about the impending marriage between the sixty-yearold actorsinger Benny Grimaldi and a sixteen-year-old girl still at Hollywood High. He was a good journalist but he was going to die soon. At fifty he was on a bottle and a half of California brandy a day and four packs of Lucky Strikes. His clothes smelt as though they were steeped in tobacco juice. His white forelock was stained with it. He breathed a heavy reek of what the Irish call blind hash (spuds stewed with onions and a spoonful of Oxo), evidence of a strange metabolism. We sat in a dark bar. "Read this," he said. He meant the file he had put on the table before me. It was too dark to read with ease. "I can't lend it." He drained a neat brandy in one. "I'll be back in about an hour. Some copy to file."

       So I squinted at Godfrey Manning's dossier over three more vodkas on the rocks. Soothing music played from the ceiling, a whole spectrum of my time, from "Darktown Strutters" to "I Could Have Danced All Night." A heavy man at the bar counter kept saying, "Yeah I guess so. They could at that, I guess."

       Godfrey Manning's career began in the town of Pring, Indiana. His parents had died in a road accident near Decatur, Illinois, and he had gone to live with an uncle and aunt. The town of Pring was a Ku Klux Klan centre where custom defied law and said that no nigger had better have the sun setting on his head if he didn't want buckshot in his ass. The uncle belonged to this organisation and only went out of doors when it was time for putting a white sheet on and brandishing a fiery cross. He was not well enough to work. He received a monthly disability check from the government, something to do with his lungs and something that had gotten into them in the First World War. The aunt was reputed to have Cherokee blood. She worked in a tomato ketchup factory. Pring had seven churches, and young Godfrey, who was given to religion, attended them all, lie liked to play at being a preacher and would make boys lie on top of girls so that he could accuse them of sin. He won every biblical quiz that was going at all seven Sunday schools. He was dogmatic and fierce-tempered, but only about religion. His preferred church, after a long time of sampling, was the Pentecostal Church run by the Holy Rollers. Sick of the racism of Pring, he dropped out of its high school whose principal was a loud voice of intolerance and enrolled in a school in the bigger town of Richmond. He talked of becoming a minister of religion. He left with average grades but several Bible prizes and entered Indiana University in Bloomington. There he did badly in subjects with an exact discipline but grew famous for his gabgift. He ran a Bible study group with a hot enthusiasm that sometimes appalled, always fascinated. He married a Bloomington girl, daughter of the keeper of a cigar store, who was five years his senior, Claudine Rogers, given to religion like himself but reputedly passionate in bed. He took her to Indianapolis where, though unordained, he became a pastor at the Eastbank Church. This city, home of the national office of the Ku Klux Klan, was even less tolerant of the doctrine of racial equality than Pring, and Manning was courageously preaching this doctrine. He was jeered at during church services; dead cats were stuffed into the church toilets; NIGGERLOVER was chalked on the church wall. He became a parttime student at Butler University, took ten years to get a bachelor's degree and was finally ordained as a minister of the Disciples of the Lord Jesus. During those ten years he spent some time in the wilds, preaching to village layabouts bored with pool halls, also to college students in bars and under campus oaks, and he wrote and published at his own expense a book which I had heard of, God knew, but not seen. I could imagine its content and style.

       Sick of the dead cats on his returns to Easthank Church, he decided to start his own sect, the Children of God, in a district of Indianapolis which was changing from poor white to poorer black. On a trip to Philadelphia, he went to listen to Father Divine, dispenser of love and chicken dinners. He admired his style. He admired his total control over his flock. He admired most of all that clue to Father Divine's successfaith healing.

       He continued to suffer the enmity of racists. Talking to a black brother at a bus stop he was hit by a hurled beer bottle. His wife was spat upon in a supermarket. He saw his church as a garrison besieged by a mad and dangerous world. Like all garrisons, it had to be disciplined. He achieved loyalty not through eloquence and love alone but through punishments, some of them crassly physical. He formed a kind of ecclesiastic police force. None of his congregation loved him the less for his occasional, and unpredictable, shows of violence. The Mayor of Indianapolis gave him a seven-thousand-dollar-a-year job as director of a human rights commission. He spoke eloquently on behalf of love and tolerance but had rocks thrown at him. He received telephone calls which told him to get out of town. He stuck to his convictions. His congregation grew. Money began to come in. He served one thousand free meals a week to the destitute. He bought two old buses to carry singers, auxiliary preachers or warmers-up, and cheerleaders to spread the word in the Midwest on revival tent campaigns. He began to heal the sick, or those who thought they were sick. At his temple in Indianapolis hundreds crammed in to watch him cure arthritis, toothache, dyspepsia, calcified joints, cardiac disease, epilepsy, thrombosis. A cataleptic girl was brought in and he restored her to animation, crying, like his master, Talitha cumi. One evening he called out a name and a woman stood up to say she was suffering from cancer. Manning ordered her to go to the church toilet and pass the growth from her bowels. A cloth was brought in with a black odoriferous horror wobbling on it. Cries of hallelujah and praise the Lord. Manning's enemies alleged that this was a decayed chicken liver.