The Killing Room

FOURTEEN

Along the cornice of a hill overlooking a deep green valley, three miles south of Bruceton, West Virginia, sat a golden pavilion, a beacon of light in the sweltering summer evening. Mosquitoes and fireflies danced and swirled around the structure in a graceful ballet, making the large, luminous tent look as if it were itself moving to the rhythm of the joyous music coming from within.

But it wasn’t the music that drew the girl near.

It was the cross.

The back-lighted cross inside the tent painted a soft cruciform on the ceiling of canvas so that anyone seated inside could look above their heads and know that their souls were rising toward salvation.

For twelve-year-old Mary Elizabeth Longstreet it was magic. She knew that the revival — the Holy Thunder Caravan it was called — was going to be in town for only three more days. In that time she knew she had to work up the nerve to cross this field and enter the tent, or she would never forgive herself.

Although she had been baptized Mary — named for the Blessed Mother herself — everyone called her Ruby, due to her beautiful auburn hair, hair that would seem to catch fire in the late-summer months, turning a rich and vibrant red.

Ruby Longstreet was the middle child of five, a waif-like girl with inquisitive blue eyes and a shy smile. She had two brothers and two sisters. They lived in Jefferson County, West Virginia, not far from the Maryland line.

From the time she could talk Ruby could recite the Word. At two she said grace at her family table, a rough plank slab which rarely bore anything more than boiled potatoes or, on Sunday, a piece of boiled lamb shank.

For most of her childhood she kept a dog-eared copy of the King James Bible on a cloth on the floor next to the bed she shared with her sisters Esther and Ruth. In the night, when she could not sleep, she would read the Word by moonlight, and it would give her comfort, easing the hunger she had in her belly, the longing of her spirit.

As she and her sisters grew toward adolescence, their father would come into their room and sit at the edge of the bed, smelling of motor oil and sour mash, each night drawing closer. Elijah Longstreet was a coarse man, ill-mannered and quick to anger.

On the night he came for Esther, Ruby pretended to be asleep. She kept her eyes open, watching the shadows rise and fall on the wall, her ears filled with her sister’s muffled pleas, the smell of liquor and body odor filling her world.

A month later Esther went away. For days Ruby would walk to the end of their long, dusty driveway and watch for her sister. Esther did not return.

Has she gone to the Lord? Ruby wondered. She had no idea, and she dared not ask.

On the night her father came for Ruby he sat on the edge of the bed for the longest time. That previous winter Elijah Longstreet had lost half his weight, so much of it that by the time he came for Ruby he was skin and bones. But still he came. The need the devil had planted in his soul was powerful.

Before he could mount Ruby he began to cough so violently that not only the bed, but the entire room seemed to shake. Ruby had never forgotten that sound, that sodden animal grating.

By dawn, his daughter untaken, Elijah Longstreet was dead at the foot of the bed, Ruby’s Bible clutched in his hands, the index finger of his right hand stuck between the pages of Revelation, a pool of foul blood and bile around his head.

Everyone knew what Elijah Longstreet had been doing in Ruby’s room, but it was never spoken of. On the day he was buried, in the small family plot behind the outbuilding, Ruby’s mother watched from the parlor window, but did not set foot on the gravesite.

That day was six months before the caravan came to the valley, and in the intervening months Ruby Longstreet had sprung up, if not out. She was tall for her age, and had begun to bud, but she still had about her a little girl’s awkwardness, all elbows and knees and shoulder blades.

Finally, on the last night of the revival, Ruby crossed the field, toward the tent, the sound of ‘Give Me Oil in My Lamp’ — a song Ruby knew by heart — filling the summer night, echoing off the surrounding hills.

As she approached the tent she was noticed by two men leaning against an old, fender-wired pickup. One of them looked at Ruby the way she had seen her daddy look at her, all wet-lipped and fake smiley. The other one, the older man, just nodded toward the opening. Ruby could smell the roadhouse whiskey all the way across the road.

Ruby gathered her courage, her heart fit to burst with fear and excitement. The sound of joyous singing was thunderous. She parted the flaps, stepped inside, and saw the Preacher for the very first time.

The Preacher stood before the crowd of a hundred, divine and young and handsome in his white linen suit and lemon yellow shirt. He was willow-slender and graceful, and moved minklike around the area at the front of the church, just below the cross. He projected a lightning force, an energy that came across even when he was just standing still. Ruby imagined it was the Holy Ghost that filled him, pure and simple. Behind the Preacher’s head the bright light over the makeshift pulpit created a golden aurora.

Ruby knew all about the Preacher, knew of his hardscrabble past, not that different from her own. She knew these things because the Preacher had written a book about his life — I Am the Spirit — and Ruby read it so many times that the words were now starting to fade from the page. She once dropped the book into a rain puddle and ran home, drying it before the fire, ironing each page flat with her aunt Hazel’s dry iron.

In his life, in the days before the light, even the Preacher knew darkness. A backwoods boy, a son of Appalachia born in Letcher County, Kentucky, he had survived the devil in two fathers, and a mother whose mind was taken by Satan himself.

When the Preacher was still a boy his stepsister Charlotte was murdered. Many believed it was this terrible tragedy that put him on the path to salvation.

The Holy Thunder Caravan traveled all over, passing through northern Kentucky, southern Ohio, southwestern Pennsylvania. The Preacher also appeared on the radio. When Ruby knew that his program was going to be on she would park herself at the table and listen, letting his beautiful voice fill her with the Spirit.

This night Ruby took a chair at the back of the gathering, and listened to the congregation raise their voice in praise, heard the music soar to the heavens. She did not have the courage to join in, but just being this close to the Preacher filled her with a happiness she had never known.

The next day the caravan moved on. Ruby cried for days. She walked six miles to the small library every Saturday looking for news in out-of-town papers. Once she was rewarded with a notice that the Preacher and his Holy Thunder Caravan would be stopping in nearby Brandonville.

Ruby went to work taking in washing, sweeping out stalls, anything she could to make money. In the end she saved eleven dollars, enough for a round trip on the Greyhound.

This time the Preacher spoke about the evils of the flesh. When he called those who had not been saved by the Word to come forward, Ruby found herself on her feet, hands raised in testimony.

When the Preacher finally came to her he touched her forehead. The feeling began in her toes, a sensation of warmth and serenity she had never before experienced. The world soon became a bright white light and there was no doubt — no doubt at all — that it was the Spirit rising within her.

The next thing Ruby knew she was lying on a cot behind the tent, a cold cloth on her forehead. The woman sitting next to her was big and jolly. She wore old grease-stained overalls and smelled of hand-rolled cigarettes and orange candy.

‘Am I in heaven?’ Ruby asked.

The woman laughed. ‘No, little darling, you’re still in West Virginia. It’s been called a lot of things, but heaven sure as hell ain’t one of them.’

Ruby knew that evangelists were travelers, just as she knew that there had always been wanderlust in her own shoes.

That night she went home, did her chores. At dawn she took her school dress and her good dress, her few other possessions, and left.

She never went home again.

When Ruby returned to the campgrounds, the tent was dark. She entered, saw a solitary figure standing at the pulpit. It was himself. Ruby would always remember how the Preacher looked — tall and regal and divinely sent — silhouetted against the cream-colored canvas of the tent in the moonlight.

The Preacher saw her and smiled. Ruby felt as if she might faint again, but she put her hand on the edge of a chair, and after a few moments she felt fine. The Preacher came around, pulled out a chair, and welcomed her.

And thus Mary Elizabeth Longstreet became a member of the Holy Thunder Caravan.

Ruby spent that summer traveling with the caravan, roaming across southern Ohio and northern West Virginia, to towns like Grand Run, Friendly, Sistersville, and Paden City. The Preacher liked to move along the banks of the Ohio River which, in the summer months, made it convenient to baptize folks.

At first there were just seven people in the entourage. You wouldn’t think by just looking at the tent and the hundred or so chairs that there was so much work involved in planning, moving, setting up, taking down, packing.

Ruby was not a big girl, but she was much stronger than she appeared. Many times she matched the two older boys who helped out.

At each stop the Preacher would set them up at a small motel or a campsite, then go into the town to spread the word. When possible he would get himself interviewed on the local radio station. He could always get the Holy Thunder Caravan mentioned on the religious pages of the local newspapers for free, but it wasn’t until he took a small ad in the entertainment section that the bigger crowds began to show up.

Some nights the Preacher would summon Ruby to his room. There he would sit in front of the mirror while Ruby brushed his beautiful golden hair. One of the few things Ruby carried that was of any value was her grandmother’s hairbrush. The brush had a gold-tone stamped metal handle, along with a base inset bearing a hand-embroidered floral petit point sample. Night after night Ruby would brush the Preacher’s hair — never fewer than one hundred strokes — while he regaled her with stories from the Good Book.

Over the next few months, while she toured with the caravan, Ruby spent much of her time with the twins, Abigail and Peter. The twins, who had been taken in by the Preacher when their parents were killed in an automobile accident near Elkins, were just toddlers at the time, and had been touched by the Lord in a way that made them special.

On many nights, when the tent had been struck and packed away, when the chairs and booths had been loaded into the truck, and the caravan was ready to depart at dawn light, Ruby would read to Abigail and Peter.

Their favorite story was from 1 Samuel, 17, the story of David and Goliath.

When Ruby was thirteen, her womanhood bursting, everything changed.

One evening, on a hot July night, just outside Moundsville, the Preacher took her hand and said, ‘Come with me, child.’

They went to his RV, a grand place where Ruby had never been. Inside were soft golden sofas, a television, and the ceiling was painted with a bright blue sky.

At the back of the main part of the RV, hanging from a hook, was a pink dress, store-bought and beautiful. The preacher told her it was hers, and that she should put it on.

They had supper, just the two of them, at a fold-down dining table. Ruby was so nervous she had to remind herself to chew her food. She had wine for the first time in her life.

When they were finished, and Ruby had cleared the plates, they sat across from each other on the sofas.

‘You know, the Lord has very big plans for you, Mary Elizabeth.’

‘He does?’

The Preacher waited a few moments, as was his way, then rose. This night he wore black, right down to his tie. He moved like a cat across the small space. He sat on the sofa next to her, took her hand in his. This close, she could see the small flecks of gold in his eyes. She felt light-headed at his nearness.

‘There will come a time — not for many years, God willing — when I will no longer be able to bring the Word to the people,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ Ruby managed. She fidgeted on her cushion, the store-bought dress a little too tight.

The Preacher smiled, and Ruby felt her knees begin to knock. She did her best to stop them.

‘Although I am young now, it will not always be so.’

She knew what he meant, but she could not imagine him any other way than he was at that moment. ‘Let us drink the Lord’s bounty,’ he said, handing her a crystal goblet. He took his own, and they touched the rims together, making a sound not unlike the pealing of a bell on a great, shining chapel on a hill.

She lifted the glass to her lips and drank. At first she found this new wine to be bitter, but the more she had, the less bitter it became.

The Preacher read to her from the Scriptures well into the night, and as he did they continued to drink the bitter wine.

*

In the dream that was not a dream, the Preacher stood at the foot of the bed. He was now dressed in red, and wore a Roman collar.

‘Mary,’ he said softly.

In the dream that was not a dream Ruby was naked. She felt the humid night breeze through the window. She could smell the honeysuckle and summer hyacinth.

In the dream that was not a dream the Preacher entered her. The pain was terrible, and in the dimness of the bedroom she saw his eyes, felt the heat of his breath, and for a moment she looked inside him, and there saw deep and terrible chasms of fire.

Ruby awoke in her own sleeping bag, inside one of the trucks. She sat up, her head hurting and spinning, her body aching, a wicked thirst inside her. She frantically tried to find her new dress.

It was gone.

The next stop was near a small town in southwestern Ohio called Hannibal. They set up the tent in a field overlooking a lake. It was late summer and the mosquitoes were out in full force. The Preacher sent two boys into town to tack up the flyers.

By six o’clock the people began to arrive. It wasn’t a large crowd, but this was only the first night. The Preacher always stayed three days in a new town in order for the word to spread, and it always did.

There were a total of nine people in the caravan in those days.

The Preacher learned that, when they were in small towns, poor towns, by the second night he had gotten what money he could get from the people. It was then that the Preacher instituted his From Thy Bounty nights, encouraging the people to bring food as offering, instead of money. He would hold an abbreviated service, and donations of money would of course be accepted, but mostly people would come with home-baked breads, smoked meats, jams and preserves, and homemade pies.

They always ate well after that.

When the caravan reached New Martinsville they were joined by a man named Carson Tatum. Carson was in his mid-fifties, a kindly widower with more money than faith. Carson Tatum had sold his small chain of hardware stores at a tidy profit, it was said, and dedicated his life to the Word as revealed by the Preacher.

The Preacher needed a driver to haul the ever-increasing amount of gear, and a bargain was struck. The gatherings had grown from an average of fifty or so people to well over two hundred, expanding as word of the Preacher’s healing powers spread.

Carson, who had never had children of his own, took immediately to Ruby, and they became fast friends. Many times she would ride in the front seat of his F-150, and he would delight her with stories of his time as a merchant marine, making stops in faraway places like Singapore, Shanghai, and Karachi.

A few months later they stayed at a rundown motel outside Youngstown, Ohio. The entourage had grown to eleven people by then.

Ruby had not been feeling well, and another girl, a year or so younger, had taken over the care of Abigail and Peter.

The new girl was blond and pretty, but withdrawn, and had about her many of the ways Ruby had had when she first joined the caravan. She revered the Preacher, could barely look his way when he spoke to her.

Ruby’s illness began with a sour stomach every morning, which many times led to her vomiting. More than once she could not make it to the Porto Sans that were always set up near the tent for the people who attended the meetings.

In her third month Ruby began to show, and despite her efforts to hide the presence inside her, she knew what was happening. She came to the Preacher’s RV one night to tell him the wondrous news, but she was turned away.

Before she went back to bed she saw the new girl, Bethany, playing with Abigail. They were playing a game of hide and seek among the tangle of rusted Fords and pickups.

Bethany was wearing Ruby’s pink dress.

On the way back to the tent, tears streaming down her face, Ruby thought she heard a growling sound nearby, a low keening coming from just beyond the edge of the forest. As she approached the wood, she saw two black dogs, big males by the cast of their shadows.

As she stepped into the tent Ruby saw the dogs lope forward, heads lowered, then lay down on either side, their heedful black eyes like shiny marbles in the growing dusk.

Two weeks later, outside Coshocton, Ruby helped set up chairs. When she was finished, she stepped outside the tent for a cup of water, and caught sight of something moving at the edge of the field. When she stopped and looked closely, the sight made her heart jump. It was the two black dogs she had seen in Youngstown, nearly seventy miles away. They had followed the caravan.

When the dogs approached, tails between their legs, Ruby felt something stir inside her.

Five months later, in early spring, on the evening of Holy Saturday, the Preacher put them all up at a motel in Morristown, Pennsylvania. Ruby had her own room.

In the middle of that restless, sleepless night, the baby said it was time to be born. Ruby barely made it to the door of her room before her water broke. She opened the door, hoping she could make it to the next room where Carson Tatum was sleeping.

What she saw in the parking lot stole her breath.

The caravan, and everyone in it, was gone.

Ruby awakened in a clean room. She would soon learn it was a family clinic in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. When the doctor came to speak to her, she found she had no voice. They brought the baby boy to her. He was beautiful.

After a week, she bundled the boy, took his medicines, and lit out. The first three nights they slept on the side of the road.

The dogs were never far away. Sometimes they would bring food to them, food they had found in the Dumpsters and back lots of diners.

It was warm enough so that Ruby did not yet have to worry about the boy catching his death of cold. In those next months they moved at night, taking refuge in daylight.

Before long they would come to know the darkness.

By the time the boy was three, Ruby had flowered. They had been taken in by people they met along the roads. For nearly two years she and the boy were the boarders of a man and woman who ran a general store in southwestern Pennsylvania. One of her employers along the way was a small community college in Ohio, and Ruby, sleeping only a few hours a night, would wander the stacks of books in the library. She spent a good deal of time gathering food scraps from the cafeteria, but most of her free time she would spend in the library, reading everything she could. She discovered early that she had a facility for memory. She read to the boy from the time he was six months old.

A year later she saw the man at a diner in Romansville, Pennsylvania. Ruby and the boy were staying at a bed and breakfast where Ruby was performing housekeeping chores in exchange for room and board.

He had gotten heavier, the flesh of his neck grown flabby. His shoulders had acquired a weight that only time and sadness could build. But there was no mistaking him. When Ruby and the boy approached the booth, Carson Tatum looked up. For a moment he looked as if he had seen ghosts. Then his face softened, and he was Carson again.

They got their pleasantries out of the way.

‘Let me look at you,’ he said. ‘You are a sight, Ruby Longstreet.’ He reached out and touched the boy’s shoulder. ‘And your boy is quite the man.’

‘He is my joy,’ Ruby said. ‘Is the caravan nearby?’

Carson nodded. ‘Just over in Parkesburg,’ he said. ‘It’s just down to the Preacher and three others now.’

Three others, Ruby thought. She said nothing.

Carson stirred his coffee for the longest time, even though there wasn’t but an inch in the cup, and probably cold at that. ‘It was wrong what he done,’ Carson finally said. ‘Just wrong.’

Ruby had no reply to this. None that she would say.

Carson looked over his shoulder, then back at Ruby. ‘The Preacher has thrown in with a traveling midway. It’s the only way he can draw people anymore. I want you and the boy to come this afternoon.’ He reached into his pocket, took out a pair of billets, along with a tight spool of red ride tickets. ‘You come about three o’clock. I’m going to have something for you.’

‘Something from the Preacher?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Ruby chose her words with care. ‘There’s something else I need you to get from him,’ she said. ‘If he’s still got it. Can you do that for me?’

Carson Tatum just smiled.

The carnival was small, worn out. It smelled of axle grease and spun sugar and despair. Whatever it had once been, it was no longer. In fact, it was not much of a midway at all. There was a small Ferris wheel, a carousel with painted horses, a track with only four little cars, along with the usual games of chance. There were a half-dozen food stands offering elephant ears, funnel cakes, caramel apples. Fireworks were promised.

Ruby had been here before. She knew this the moment she stepped onto the field, and the knowledge electrified her senses.

She had been here in her dreams.

Ruby took the boy by the hand, gave the man at the front booth their tickets. She looked to the edge of the field and, as expected, saw the black dogs. She had long ago stopped trying to tell which dogs were which. Ruby figured they were probably on their fourth or fifth litter. But there were always two. And they were always near.

At three o’clock she saw Carson standing by the carousel. Ruby and the boy walked over. Carson took them behind one of the stands.

‘Big news. He’s about to pack it in,’ Carson said of the Preacher. ‘I just heard that he is going to go to — ’

Philadelphia, Ruby thought.

‘- Philadelphia,’ Carson said. ‘He lived there at one time, you know.’

Ruby knew. She had read the Preacher’s book. When the Preacher’s mama left Jubal Hannah, and moved to North Philadelphia, the Preacher was only four.

Ruby knew the past, just as she could see the future in her dreams. She saw her son grown tall and strong and wise. She saw him silhouetted against the waters of the Delaware River, at long last free from the devil within him.

‘Preacher said he’s gonna start a mission up to Philadelphia,’ Carson continued. ‘A storefront church of sorts. Maybe a second-hand store.’

This was in her dreams, too.

‘Did you get what I asked?’ Ruby asked.

‘Yes, missy. I sure did.’

Carson looked around, reached into his coat, took out a thick paper bag. He handed it to Ruby.

‘Let him think it was me,’ Carson said.

Ruby hefted the sack. It was much heavier than she thought it was going to be. ‘What else is in here?’

When Ruby peeked inside she almost fainted. In addition to what she asked Carson to get for her there was a fat wad of money.

‘There should be forty thousand there,’ Carson said. ‘You take it and go make a life.’

Ruby forced down her sense of shock, hugged Carson long and hard and tearfully, watched him walk away. He had developed a limp on the right side. An affliction, she imagined, from all the heavy lifting he had done for the Preacher.

When Ruby paid her two spool tickets for the carousel, and she and the boy stepped on the platform, she saw Abigail and Peter for the first time in years. How big they had grown. Her heart ached with their nearness. She wanted to throw her arms around them like she had when they were small. She couldn’t.

A few minutes later she saw the Preacher. Despite his troubles and the intervening years he still looked beautiful. Ruby reckoned she would have seen him this way no matter what he did to her.

He did not see her.

The Preacher put Abigail and Peter on horses. It all seemed to happen in slow motion, as Ruby imagined it had for St John.

The Preacher chose a white horse for Peter, a red one for Abigail. The two children were fraternal twins, but now they looked a great deal alike, as if they were identical.

Ruby then saw the Preacher put a small boy on a black horse. Ruby did not have to wonder whose child this was. The boy looked just like the teenaged girl standing by the cotton candy stand, the thin, nerve-jangled girl named Bethany, the girl who had come after Ruby. Ruby wondered how many girls there had been since.

Ruby helped her boy onto the horse directly across from where the Preacher stood. This horse was old, unpainted. Its eyes were a faded gray, but most surely had one time been a coal black, as black as the dogs that were always near.

The carousel began to turn; the throaty old calliope played its song. Ruby looked at her boy, imagined him years from then, saw in her mind’s eye a time when he would be powerful, unstoppable.

The Preacher, just a few feet away, had no premonition, even though the signs were clear and unambiguous.

Weren’t they?

Or maybe the signs would have been clear if the Preacher had truly been anointed. For Ruby, the moment was preordained, and spoken of in the Word.

And I saw, and behold, a white horse.

Peter began to laugh as the carousel picked up speed, his white horse moving up and down to the rhythm.

I heard the second living creature say, ‘Come!’ And out came another horse, bright red.

Little Abigail, so much like her brother, began to laugh, too. She held tight to her red horse.

I heard the third living creature say, ‘Come!’ And I saw, and behold, a black horse.

The boy on the black horse was scared. The Preacher held him with his free hand.

Faster and faster they went, the sound of the pipe organ filling Ruby’s mind like a sermon. She looked at her boy. He seemed to know where he was, what it all meant. Ruby clutched the money close to her, and knew they would leave this night, never to return, just as she knew they would all meet again, in the city of two rivers. In Philadelphia.

And there would be a reckoning.

As Ruby held tight to the pole, she ran her hands over the smooth, unpainted surface of the carousel horse. She imagined, as she always had, that this horse had at one time been a lustrous roan. Now it seemed to be translucent. She could almost hear its heartbeat within.

I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, ‘Come!’ And I saw a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him.

In the months following that day the boy became very ill with tuberculosis, almost unknown in the modern world, but all too common among Ruby’s kind. She sat with him, night after night, a cloth over her mouth, the boy’s terrible rasping filling her nights.

One night, just outside the clinic in Doylestown, in the third month of the boy’s affliction, the two black dogs came and sat next to her. All night she patted their heads. In that night she had terrible dreams, dreams of men wrapped in barb wire, old men filled with stones. When she awoke to a white, healing light, the dogs were gone.

She went rushing into the clinic, mad with worry. They told her that, somehow, her boy had been healed.

They said it was a miracle.

*

Ruby grew to become a slender, beautiful young woman, and her charms were not lost on any man. She learned to use her wiles, borrowing many of the techniques of persuasion she had learned from the Preacher himself. She invested the money Carson Tatum had given her wisely, saving every penny she could, reading every book she could borrow.

One day she read in the newspapers of how the Preacher had proven himself to be the devil’s minion, how he had become a man who took souls unto himself, a man who did murder to avenge the loss of his stepsister Charlotte.

When Ruby learned of these dark deeds she knew the end days had begun.

On the day of the third church, Ruby — who had long since been known by another name, who had long ago forsaken her red hair — went to a street in North Philadelphia.

And Hades followed him.

They stood on the corner, across from the cathedral, watching. The people of the city milled around them, each parson to his tabernacle, each sinner to his deeds.

Mother and child, Ruby thought.

There are seven churches in all.