A Slipping-Down Life

13

In February a revivalist named Brother Hope came to preach at the Pulqua Tabernacle of God. His anxious face appeared in every store window, above interchangeable numerals showing the number of souls he had saved. His sermon titles were posted on a signboard on the Tabernacle lawn: ‘One-Way Street,” “Do You Have a Moment?” and “For Heaven’s Sake.” Above the signboard were strings of pennants, triangular like the ones in Mr. Casey’s filling station.

“Someone is shouting your name in the Tabernacle of God,” a bass player told Evie. Evie felt a sort of inner jolt, a bunching together of the chest muscles. Then the bass player said, “You ought to go hear, they say it’s right comical.”

“Have you been?” Evie asked.

“Naw. I don’t go places like that.”

None of the Unicorn’s musicians did; yet still they sieved the news from unnamed sources and passed it on. False gods were multiplying on every corner of the earth, Brother Hope said, even in this green and pleasant town of Pulqua: drugs, liquor, and the mind-snatching rhythms of rock-and-roll. Right here in Pulqua some poor girl had ruined her face during an orgy over a roadhouse rock singer, it was in all the newspapers, and if that was not idolatry then what was? Evie Decker was her name, if no one believed him; the Unicorn was where the singer sang.

“At least it’s publicity,” Evie said.

“Publicity won’t do us no good in the Tabernacle of God,” David told her.

“Well, I don’t know why not.”

“Do you think that congregation is likely to show up at the Unicorn?”

But he was wrong. They did show up. Not the entire congregation but at least the younger members, probably slipping out on their straight-backed country parents. They came that Saturday in small clusters, pale and watchful, as if Brother Hope had been their trained guide on the paths to sin. The tables were lined with dressed-up boys and dowdy young girls who seemed hit in the face by every beat of the music. Drum slid his pelvis easily beneath the spangled guitar. Evie’s scars shone like snail tracks. Brother Hope’s congregation leaned forward to watch and then back to whisper, taking in the sights in small gulps. “Well, this is the place all right,” Evie heard one boy say. “There’s the girl. This is the music.” When she rose to meet Drum in back, she walked slowly and proudly, as if she were carrying something important.

That Saturday she was happy. She felt that things were going well again. But by Monday everything had changed. Zack Caraway drove out in person to say that Drum was no longer needed, even for Saturdays. He stood in the middle of the room looking around him unhappily, twisting his hat in his hands. “I was going to say it two nights ago,” he said, “but they was a rush toward the end and I put it off. Now, all I’ve had this winter is bad luck and I know you will argue, Drum, but what can I do? My money has went. If you want to come on Sundays to the free-for-all, I would be right happy to have you, but that’s the most I …”

Drum never said a word. She had expected another fight, but he just sat in the couch with his face toward the window, his long brown eyes reflecting the winter light, not even protesting as Zack cut the last inch from him. After Zack had left he drank two beers and listened to a record. Then David came by, and they played a game of darts. Drum seemed insulated; if Evie mentioned Zack, he looked away from her and all she saw was the smooth olive line of his cheek.

“Zack is slipping,” David told her. “If he had eyes he could see that what that Tabernacle crowd is after is you and Drum.”

“Well, tell him that.”

“I can’t tell him.”

“Somebody should. Brother Hope is giving the Unicorn free publicity and nobody even takes advantage of it.”

Publicity was everything. She felt that more and more. She thought of publicity as the small, neat click that set into motion machines that had previously been disengaged. Drum’s music, beating like a pulse, had started leaving her ears with a cotton-wool feeling, and his speaking out was harder to understand with every show; but if there were crowds of screaming fans, then everything would click into working order. “If we could only spread Brother Hope,” she said. “Get his sermons where they mattered more — not just to little old scared country people.”

“No way of doing that,” David said.

“Why not? We could go to the Tabernacle and make a big fuss, get a newspaper write-up.”

“Naw,” David said.

But she wore him down. Over a two-day period she filled his mind with pictures — Brother Hope looking startled, a reporter asking what all the trouble was about, a news item on Drum Casey’s protest at a church attack. David moved forward inch by inch, balking sometimes so that she wished she could just give up. There was too much expected of her, she thought. All this arguing, urging, encouraging. Alone, she heard the driving rhythm of her own voice echoing wordlessly through her mind. But there was Drum. She watched him when he wasn’t looking, and felt hollow with worry when she saw him slumped on the couch endlessly circling the rim of a beer can with his index finger. “Oh, why not, let’s go and give Brother Hope a try,” David said one evening. Drum didn’t even look up.

And when David came by Thursday night and said, “You ready?” Drum said, “Ready for what?”

“The Tabernacle of God, of course,” David said.

“You wouldn’t catch me dead in the Tabernacle of God.”

“Well, what the hell, Drum, where you been all this time? We been discussing the Tabernacle three days now and you never said a word against it.”

“Oh, never mind,” said Evie. “We’ll go alone. It’s only for a couple of hours.”

“Then what about me?” Drum asked.

“You said you didn’t want to come.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do, just sit here till you get back? Looks like everyone is leaving me all the time.”

“Lord,” said David.

So they all went. They rode in David’s Jeep. Wind whistled in under the canvas flaps, and Evie shivered inside her thin school coat and huddled closer to Drum’s side. Her hair was pulled straight off her forehead, held by a flaking gold barrette. When she looked into the rear-view mirror her scars glinted back at her, right side to, but dim as an old photograph. Her features were wavery and uncertain. “Now that we’re really going I feel like a fool,” she said. “I don’t even have a plan in mind.”

David said, “Well, I did call that photographer from the newspaper. Publicity’s no good without a photograph.”

“If I hear that word publicity again,” Drum said, “I’m going to puke.”

“Now, Drum.”

The Tabernacle was on Main Street, an old white clapboard house between a pizzeria and a shoe repair shop. A sign cross the porch said, “Pulqua Tabernacle of God. Everybody ‘Welcome.’ Come on in Folks,” with the sermon title tacked beneath it: “What Next?” Nailed to a pillar was another of Brother Hope’s posters, with his eyes unfocused and frightened, as if he could see straight to hell. Spinsters in high-heeled galoshes and old men in suit jackets and overalls filed past the poster toward a brightly lit door. Evie followed, holding tightly to Drum’s hand so that nothing would separate them. She had pictured something bigger and more anonymous, like a lecture hall; not this oversized front parlor lined with folding chairs and hung with dusty curtains. An old lady with lace laid across her shoulders like antimacassars pressed Evie’s hand in both of her own. “Good evening, children, you won’t regret this,” she said. When she saw Evie’s forehead she smiled harder and gazed far away, blinking several times, as if she had received an insult she wanted to overlook. Evie clutched Drum’s and David’s elbows and led them toward the chairs in the back of the room.

“I wish we hadn’t come,” she said.

“Told you so,” said Drum.

“Well, I forgot how creepy these places are. I don’t like the smell.”

David was the only one who stayed cheerful. “Smells all right to me,” he said, and he took a deep breath of the air — dry wood, hand-me-down hymnals, and dust. “Yonder is the photographer,” he told Evie.

“What’s he doing way up front?”

“He has to be far enough away to photograph us.”

“Us?” Evie said.

“Who else?”

“Well, yes, of course,” Evie said, but she wished she had thought this thing through before she came.

Brother Hope appeared on a small raised platform up front. He was red and knotty-faced, like a man swelling with anger but choking it down. His hair was plastered sleekly across his skull; and he wore a long black robe with a striped woolen scarf hanging from his shoulders. “All rise,” he said. His voice was thin and stifled.

Everybody rose. Forty chairs creaked and snapped.

“I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord. ‘In the Garden.’ ”

“In the Garden” sounded strange without a piano. The women sang in high, sliding voices, as if they were complaining, and the men made muttering sounds beneath the tune. Evie, who disliked hymns, stayed silent. When all the verses had been sung they sat down again, and Brother Hope gripped both sides of the pulpit.

“We are gathered here,” he said, “as lone survivors on a sinking ship. Only you and I know that ship is sinking. Only you and I seek to find the rotting planks. Art thou weary? Art thou languid? Then thou art smarter than thy neighbor, for thou hast seen the water rising beneath the planks. Last month, my friends, I was in Norville. A man buying a popular magazine was told that the price had gone up, and I heard him ask, ‘What next?’ ‘What next?’ he said. Well, that started me thinking, my friends. What next for us, in the life beyond, I thought, if things continue like they’re going now? Today there are women wearing the garb of men, men in stupors from the fumes of alcohol and the taste of foreign mushrooms, dancers dancing obscenities in public and everywhere, on every corner of the earth, sacrifices made to false gods and earthly idols. What next? What next?”

His voice stitched in and out of Evie’s thoughts, rising above them sometimes as a new topic jolted into view and then submerging while she decided whether to go to school tomorrow, planned a menu, wondered what Drum was thinking with his mouth so straight and set. At her left, David shifted his weight but kept his eyes pinned on Brother Hope. The congregation commented on the sermon during each pause. “It’s true. It’s true.” “Amen.” “Ain’t that so?” Like poor listeners in an ordinary conversation, they seemed likely to jump up at any moment and interrupt to tell experiences of their own. Only none of them did. Instead, Evie began to worry that it would be she herself who interrupted. Pauses between paragraphs grew longer and quieter, swelling until they might burst forth with her own voice saying something terrible. Ordinary ministers picked a single, narrow theme for each sermon; Brother Hope tried to cover the world in an hour. Faced with the leap from one topic to another, from the evils of pre-teen dating to the inevitability of death and from there to the unnaturalness of working mothers, he kept taking a breath and hesitating, as if he worried about the abyss he had to span; and every time it happened Evie drew in her breath too. She was not certain what would burst forth. She gripped the chair in front of her, and the man who sat in it turned to show her the expectant, circular eyes of a baby.

“Our children are no longer safe,” said Brother Hope. “Golden nets are cast to reel them into evil and we say, ‘It’s only music. We had music,’ we say, but we had the waltz and ‘Mairzy Doats.’ My friends, I say unto you, go into your parlors some night and watch your children dancing. Is that innocence? I can cite chapter and verse. A young man driving home from a jukebox joint crashed into a Good Humor truck and died; marijuana in his glove compartment. His name was Willie Hammond, if you care to check on that. A young girl living within your own town limits slashed her forehead with the name of a rock-and-roll singer; ruined her life for nothing. If you don’t believe me, her name was Eve Decker; the singer sang at the—”

“Wait,” Evie said. “That’s me.”

She stood up, still gripping the chair in front of her, and looked around at all the upturned faces. Hearing her name in public, even when she had expected it, gave her a ripped-open feeling. She couldn’t think why David was smiling at her and nodding. “You take that back,” she told Brother Hope.

“We are all friends here,” said Brother Hope.

“Well, I’m not. You’re speaking libel. Slander. I did not ruin my life, it was not for nothing. How can you say such a thing?”

Brother Hope was fiddling with the ends of his scarf and staring at her forehead. “Please, now, please,” he said. “Any burden you have—”

“I don’t have any burdens!” Evie shouted. “I didn’t ruin my life, I married him!”

A flashbulb snapped in her face, an explosion of light that faded to a squirmy green circle. It took her a moment to remember about the photographer. She watched the circle drift over to Brother Hope’s face, and then she let go of the chair.

“Well,” she said finally. “The place he was talking about is the Unicorn, out on the south highway. The singer is Drum Casey, who is my husband and just got fired for—”

“Sit down,” Drum said.

“—for the last day of the week he was working. Just got his working time cut day by day, raising his hopes and then lowering them again, and if anybody really cared about Christian love they would call up the Unicorn and say, ‘Where is Drum Casey? Why isn’t he there? We want—’ ”

Drum rose. “I don’t have to allow this,” he said.

“Why, Drum.”

“Shut up,” Drum told her. “Sit down.”

“Please, my friends. Please,” said Brother Hope, and he looked over either shoulder although there was nothing but a blank wall behind him.

“Drum, I am only trying—”

“She’s doing great, Drum,” David said.

“You shut up too,” said Drum. “I have had enough publicity tonight to put me six feet under. And you—” he said, turning suddenly on Brother Hope, who opened his mouth and took a breath, “you and your sacrifices to false gods, that’s a bunch of bull. It’d been a hell of a lot more sacrifice if she’d been prettier to begin with. Get going, Evie. We’re through here.”

He took hold of her arm just above the elbow. He pushed her out ahead of him and Evie went, boneless and watery, knocked sick by what he had said. David had her by the other hand. “Now, then,” he kept whispering. “Now, wait.…”

They rode home in a swelling, suspended silence, as if this were just another pause in Brother Hope’s sermon. David kept clearing his throat. Evie expected to cry but could not. Drum sat beside her with his face set straight ahead, his hands on his knees. Once he drew in his breath as if he meant to speak, but he said nothing.