The Talisman

22

The Sermon

1

At five that afternoon, an electric bell went off in the hallway, a long, toneless blare of sound. Wolf leaped from his bunk, thudding the metal frame of the upper with the side of his head hard enough to wake up Jack, who had been dozing, with a jolt.

The bell stopped shrieking after fifteen seconds or so; Wolf went right on.

He staggered over into the corner of the room, his hands wrapped around his head.

“Bad place, Jack!” he screamed. “Bad place right here and now! Gotta get outta here! Gotta get outta here RIGHT HERE AND NOW!”

Pounding on the wall.

“Shut the dummy up!”

From the other side, a shrieking, whinnying, horsey laugh. “You gittin some sunlight in you souls now, boys! And from de way dat big fella soun, it sho feel fine!” The giggling, whinnying laugh, too much like a horrified scream, came again.

“Bad, Jack! Wolf! Jason! Bad! Bad, bad—”

Doors were opening all up and down the hall. Jack could hear the rumble of many feet dressed in blocky Sunlight Home shoes.

He got down from the top bunk, forcing himself to move. He felt cross-grained to reality—not awake, not really asleep, either. Moving across the mean little room to Wolf was like moving through Karo syrup instead of air.

He felt so tired now . . . so very tired.

“Wolf,” he said. “Wolf, stop it.”

“Can’t, Jacky!” Wolf sobbed. His arms were still wrapped around his head, as if to keep it from exploding.

“You got to, Wolf. We have to go out in the hall now.”

“Can’t, Jacky,” Wolf sobbed, “it’s a bad place, bad smells. . . .”

From the hallway, someone—Jack thought it was Heck Bast—yelled, “Out for confession!”

“Out for confession!” someone else yelled, and they all took up the chant: Out for confession! Out for confession! It was like some weird football cheer.

“If we’re going to get out of here with our skins on, we’ve got to stay cool.”

“Can’t, Jacky, can’t stay cool, bad. . . .”

Their door was going to open in a minute and Bast or Sonny Singer would be there . . . maybe both. They were not “out for confession,” whatever that was, and while newcomers to the Sunlight Home might be allowed a few screw-ups during their orientation period, Jack thought their chances for escape would be better if they blended in as completely as they could as soon as they could. With Wolf, that wasn’t going to be easy. Christ, I’m sorry I got you into this, big guy, Jack thought. But the situation is what the situation is. And if we can’t ride it, it’s gonna ride us down. So if I’m hard with you, it’s for your own good. He added miserably to himself, I hope.

“Wolf,” he whispered, “do you want Singer to start beating on me again?”

“No, Jack, no. . . .”

“Then you better come out in the hall with me,” Jack said. “You have to remember that what you do is going to have a lot to do with how Singer and that guy Bast treat me. Singer slapped me around because of your stones—”

“Someone might slap him around,” Wolf said. His voice was low and mild, but his eyes suddenly narrowed, flared orange. For a moment Jack saw the gleam of white teeth between Wolf’s lips—not as if Wolf had grinned, but as if his teeth had grown.

“Don’t even think of that,” Jack said grimly. “It’ll only makes things worse.”

Wolf’s arms fell away from his head. “Jack, I don’t know. . . .”

“Will you try?” Jack asked. He threw another urgent glance at the door.

“I’ll try,” Wolf whispered shakily. Tears shone in his eyes.

2

The upstairs corridor should have been bright with late-afternoon light, but it wasn’t. It was as if some sort of filtering device had been fitted over the windows at the end of the corridor so that the boys could see out—out to where the real sunlight was—but that the light itself wasn’t allowed to enter. It seemed to drop dead on the narrow inner sills of those high Victorian windows.

There were forty boys standing in front of twenty doors, ten on each side. Jack and Wolf were by far the last to appear, but their lateness was not noticed. Singer, Bast, and two other boys had found someone to rag and could not be bothered with taking attendance.

Their victim was a narrow-chested, bespectacled kid of maybe fifteen. He was standing at a sorry approximation of attention with his chinos puddled around his black shoes. He wore no underpants.

“Have you stopped it yet?” Singer asked.

“I—”

“Shut up!” One of the other boys with Singer and Bast yelled this last. The four of them wore blue jeans instead of chinos, and clean white turtleneck sweaters. Jack learned soon enough that the fellow who had just shouted was Warwick. The fat fourth was Casey.

“When we want you to talk, we’ll ask you!” Warwick shouted now. “You still whipping your weasel, Morton?”

Morton trembled and said nothing.

“ANSWER HIM!” Casey shrieked. He was a tubby boy who looked a little bit like a malevolent Tweedledum.

“No,” Morton whispered.

“WHAT? SPEAK UP!” Singer yelled.

“No!” Morton moaned.

“If you can stop for a whole week, you’ll get your underpants back,” Singer said with the air of one conferring a great favor on an undeserving subject. “Now pull up your pants, you little creep.”

Morton, sniffling, bent over and pulled up his trousers.

The boys went down to confession and supper.

3

Confession was held in a large bare-walled room across the way from the dining hall. The maddening smells of baked beans and hotdogs drifted across, and Jack could see Wolf’s nostrils flaring rhythmically. For the first time that day the dull expression left his eyes and he began to look interested.

Jack was more wary of “confession” than he had let on to Wolf. Lying in his upper bunk with his hands behind his head, he had seen a black something in the upper corner of the room. He had thought for a moment or two that it was some sort of a dead beetle, or the husk of its shell—he thought if he got closer he would perhaps see the spider’s web the thing was caught in. It had been a bug, all right, but not the organic kind. It was a small, old-fashioned-looking microphone gadget, screwed into the wall with an eyebolt. A cord snaked from the back of it and through a ragged hole in the plaster. There had been no real effort to conceal it. Just part of the service, boys. Sunlight Gardener Listens Better.

After seeing the bug, after the ugly little scene with Morton in the hall, he had expected confession to be an angry, perhaps scary, adversary situation. Someone, possibly Sunlight Gardener himself, more probably Sonny Singer or Hector Bast, would try to get him to admit that he had used drugs on the road, that he had broken into places in the middle of the night and robbed while on the road, that he had spit on every sidewalk he could find while on the road, and played with himself after a hard day on the road. If he hadn’t done any of those things, they would keep after him until he admitted them, anyway. They would try to break him. Jack thought he could hold up under such treatment, but he wasn’t sure Wolf could.

But what was most disturbing about confession was the eagerness with which the boys in the Home greeted it.

The inner cadre—the boys in the white turtlenecks—sat down near the front of the room. Jack looked around and saw the others looking toward the open door with a sort of witless anticipation. He thought it must be supper they were anticipating—it smelled very damn good, all right, especially after all those weeks of pick-up hamburgers interspersed with large helpings of nothing at all. Then Sunlight Gardener walked briskly in and Jack saw the expressions of anticipation change to looks of gratification. Apparently it hadn’t been dinner they had been looking forward to, after all. Morton, who had been cowering in the upper hallway with his pants puddled around his ankles only fifteen minutes ago, looked almost exalted.

The boys got to their feet. Wolf sat, nostrils flaring, looking puzzled and frightened, until Jack grabbed a fistful of shirt and pulled him up.

“Do what they do, Wolf,” he muttered.

“Sit down, boys,” Gardener said, smiling. “Sit down, please.”

They sat. Gardener was wearing faded blue jeans overtopped with an open-throated shirt of blinding white silk. He looked at them, smiling benignly. The boys looked back worshipfully, for the most part. Jack saw one boy—wavy brown hair that came to a deep widow’s peak on his brow, receding chin, delicate little hands as pale as Uncle Tommy’s Delftware—turn aside and cup his mouth to hide a sneer, and he, Jack, felt some encouragement. Apparently not everyone’s head had been blown by whatever was going on here . . . but a lot of heads had been. Wide-open they had been blown, from the way things looked. The fellow with the great buck teeth was looking at Sunlight Gardener adoringly.

“Let us pray. Heck, will you lead us?”

Heck did. He prayed fast and mechanically. It was like listening to a Dial-a-Prayer recorded by a dyslexic. After asking God to favor them in the days and weeks ahead, to forgive them their trespasses and to help them become better people, Heck Bast rapped out, “For-Jesussakeamen,” and sat down.

“Thank you, Heck,” Gardener said. He had taken an armless chair, had turned it around backward, and was sitting on it like a range-ridin cowpoke in a John Ford Western. He was at his most charming tonight; the sterile, self-referring craziness Jack had seen that morning was almost gone. “Let us have a dozen confessions, please. No more than that. Will you lead us, Andy?”

Warwick, an expression of ludicrous piety on his face, took Heck’s place.

“Thank you, Reverend Gardener,” he said, and then looked at the boys. “Confession,” he said. “Who will start?”

There was a rustling stir . . . and then hands began to go up. Two . . . six . . . nine of them.

“Roy Owdersfelt,” Warwick said.

Roy Owdersfelt, a tall boy with a pimple the size of a tumor on the end of his nose, stood up, twisting his rawboned hands in front of him. “I stole ten bucks from my momma’s purse last year!” he announced in a high, screamy voice. One scabbed, grimy hand wandered up to his face, settled on the pimple, and gave it a fearful tweak. “I took it down to The Wizard of Odds and I turned it into quarters and I played all these different games like Pac-Man and Laser Strike until it was gone! That was money she had put away against the gas bill, and that’s how come for a while they turned off our heat!” He blinked around at them. “And my brother got sick and had to go in the hospital up in Indianapolis with pneumonia! Because I stole that money!

“That’s my confession.”

Roy Owdersfelt sat down.

Sunlight Gardener said, “Can Roy be forgiven?”

In unison the boys replied, “Roy can be forgiven.”

“Can anyone here forgive him, boys?”

“No one here.”

“Who can forgive him?”

“God through the power of His only begotten Son, Jesus.”

“Will you pray to Jesus to intercede for you?” Gardener asked Roy Owdersfelt.

“Sure am gonna!” Roy Owdersfelt cried in an unsteady voice, and tweaked the pimple again. Jack saw that Roy Owdersfelt was weeping.

“And the next time your momma comes here are you going to tell your momma that you know you sinned against her and your little brother and against the face of God and you’re just as sorry a boy as ever there was?”

“You bet!”

Sunlight Gardener nodded to Andy Warwick.

“Confession,” Warwick said.

Before confession was over at six o’clock, almost everyone except Jack and Wolf had his hand up, hoping to relate some sin to those gathered. Several confessed petty theft. Others told of stealing liquor and drinking until they threw up. There were, of course, many tales of drugs.

Warwick called on them, but it was Sunlight Gardener they looked to for approval as they told . . . and told . . . and told.

He’s got them liking their sins, Jack thought, troubled. They love him, they want his approval, and I guess they only get it if they confess. Some of these sad sacks probably even make their crimes up.

The smells from the dining hall had been getting stronger. Wolf’s stomach rumbled furiously and constantly next to Jack. Once, during one boy’s tearful confession of having hooked a Penthouse magazine so he could look at those filthy pictures of what he called “sexed-out women,” Wolf’s stomach rumbled so loudly that Jack elbowed him.

Following the last confession of the evening, Sunlight Gardener offered a short, melodious prayer. Then he stood in the doorway, informal and yet resplendent in his jeans and white silk shirt, as the boys filed out. As Jack and Wolf passed, he closed one of his hands around Jack’s wrist.

“I’ve met you before.” Confess, Sunlight Gardener’s eyes demanded.

And Jack felt an urge to do just that.

Oh yes, we know each other, yes. You whipped my back bloody.

“No,” he said.

“Oh yes,” Gardener said. “Oh yes. I’ve met you before. In California? In Maine? Oklahoma? Where?”

Confess.

“I don’t know you,” Jack said.

Gardener giggled. Inside his own head, Jack suddenly knew, Sunlight Gardener was jigging and dancing and snapping a bullwhip. “So Peter said when he was asked to identify Jesus Christ,” he said. “But Peter lied. So do you, I think. Was it in Texas, Jack? El Paso? Was it in Jerusalem in another life? On Golgotha, the place of the skull?”

“I tell you—”

“Yes, yes, I know, we’ve only just met.” Another giggle. Wolf, Jack saw, had shied as far away from Sunlight Gardener as the doorway would allow. It was the smell. The gagging, cloying smell of the man’s cologne. And under it, the smell of craziness.

“I never forget a face, Jack. I never forget a face or a place. I’ll remember where we met.”

His eyes flicked from Jack to Wolf—Wolf whined a little and pulled back—and then back to Jack again.

“Enjoy your dinner, Jack,” he said. “Enjoy your dinner, Wolf. Your real life at the Sunlight Home begins tomorrow.”

Halfway to the stairs, he turned and looked back.

“I never forget a place or a face, Jack. I’ll remember.”

Coldly, Jack thought, God, I hope not. Not until I’m about two thousand miles away from this fucking pris—

Something slammed into him hard. Jack flew out into the hall, pinwheeling his arms madly for balance. He hit his head on the bare concrete floor and saw a tangled shower of stars.

When he was able to sit up, he saw Singer and Bast standing together, grinning. Behind them was Casey, his gut pouching out his white turtleneck. Wolf was looking at Singer and Bast, and something in his tensed-down posture alarmed Jack.

“No, Wolf!” he said sharply.

Wolf slumped.

“No, go ahead, dummy,” Heck Bast said, laughing a little. “Don’t listen to him. Go on and try me, if you want. I always liked a little warmup before dinner.”

Singer glanced at Wolf and said, “Leave the dummy alone, Heck. He’s just the body.” He nodded at Jack. “There’s the head. There’s the head we got to change.” He looked down at Jack, hands on his knees, like an adult bending to pass a pleasant word or two with a very small child. “And we will change it, Mr. Jack Parker. You can believe it.”

Deliberately, Jack said, “Piss off, you bullying asshole.”

Singer recoiled as if slapped, a flush rising out of his collar, up his neck, and into his face. With a growl, Heck Bast stepped forward.

Singer grabbed Bast’s arm. Still looking at Jack, he said, “Not now. Later.”

Jack got to his feet. “You want to watch out for me,” he said quietly to them both, and although Hector Bast only glowered, Sonny Singer looked almost scared. For a moment he seemed to see something in Jack Sawyer’s face that was both strong and forbidding—something that had not been there almost two months ago, when a much younger boy had set the small seafront town of Arcadia Beach to his back and had begun walking west.

4

Jack thought that Uncle Tommy might have described dinner—not unkindly—as consisting of American Grange Hall Cuisine. The boys sat at long tables and were served by four of their number, who had changed into clean mess-whites following the confession period.

Following another prayer, chow was duly brought on. Big glass bowls full of home-baked beans were passed up and down the four tables, steaming platters of cheap red hotdogs, tureens of canned pineapple chunks, lots of milk in plain cartons marked DONATED COMMODITIES and INDIANA STATE DAIRY COMMISSION.

Wolf ate with grim concentration, his head down, a piece of bread always in one hand to serve as a combination pusher and mopper. As Jack watched, he gobbled five hotdogs and three helpings of the bullet-hard beans. Thinking of the small room with its closed window, Jack wondered if he were going to need a gas-mask tonight. He supposed so—not that he was likely to be issued one. He watched dismally as Wolf slopped a fourth helping of beans onto his plate.

Following dinner, all the boys rose, formed lines, and cleared the tables. As Jack took his dishes, a Wolf-decimated loaf of bread, and two milk-pitchers out into the kitchen, he kept his eyes wide open. The stark labels on the milk cartons had given him an idea.

This place wasn’t a prison, and it wasn’t a workhouse. It was probably classed as a boarding school or something, and the law would demand that some sort of state inspectors must keep an eye on it. The kitchen would be a place where the State of Indiana’s eye would fall most often. Bars on the windows upstairs, okay. Bars on the kitchen windows? Jack didn’t think so. They would raise too many questions.

The kitchen might make a good jumping-off point for an escape attempt, so Jack studied it carefully.

It looked a lot like the cafeteria kitchen at his school in California. The floor and walls were tiled, the big sinks and counters stainless steel. The cupboards were nearly the size of vegetable bins. An old conveyor-belt dishwasher stood against one wall. Three boys were already operating this hoary antique under the supervision of a man in cook’s whites. The man was narrow, pallid, and possessed of a ratlike little face. An unfiltered cigarette was pasted to his upper lip, and that identified him in Jack’s mind as a possible ally. He doubted if Sunlight Gardener would let any of his own people smoke cigarettes.

On the wall, he saw a framed certificate which announced that this public kitchen had been rated acceptable under standards set by the State of Indiana and the U.S. Government.

And no, there were no bars on the frosted-glass windows.

The ratlike man looked over at Jack, peeled his cigarette off his lower lip, and tossed it into one of the sinks.

“New fish, you and your buddy, huh?” he asked. “Well, you’ll be old fish soon enough. The fish get old real quick here in the Sunlight Home, don’t they, Sonny?”

He grinned insolently at Sonny Singer. It was quite obvious that Singer did not know how to cope with such a smile; he looked confused and unsure, just a kid again.

“You know you’re not supposed to talk to the boys, Rudolph,” he said.

“You can just cram it up your ass anytime you can’t roll it down the alley or kick it in the air, buddy-roo,” Rudolph said, flicking his eyes lazily over Singer. “You know that, don’t you?”

Singer looked at him, lips first trembling, then writhing, then pushing together hard.

He suddenly turned around. “Night-chapel!” he shouted furiously. “Night-chapel, come on, let’s go, get those tables cleared and let’s get up the hall, we’re late! Night-chapel!”

5

The boys trooped down a narrow staircase lit by naked bulbs enclosed in wire mesh. The walls were dank plaster, and Jack didn’t like the way Wolf’s eyeballs were rolling.

After that, the cellar chapel was a surprise. Most of the downstairs area—which was considerable—had been converted into a spare, modern chapel. The air down here was good—not too warm, not too cold. And fresh. Jack could hear the whispering of convection units somewhere near. There were five pews split by a central aisle, leading up to a dais with a lectern and a simple wooden cross hung on a purple velvet backdrop.

Somewhere, an organ was playing.

The boys filed quietly into the pews. The microphone on the lectern had a large, professional-looking baffle on the end of it. Jack had been in plenty of studio sound-rooms with his mother, often sitting patiently by and reading a book or doing his homework assignments while she did TV overdubs or looped unclear dialogue, and he knew that sort of baffle was meant to keep the speaker from “popping” the mike. He thought it a strange thing to see in the chapel of a religious boarding home for wayward boys. Two video cameras stood at either side of the lectern, one to catch Sunlight Gardener’s right profile, the other to catch his left. Neither was turned on this evening. There were heavy purple drapes on the walls. On the right, they were unbroken. Set into the left wall, however, was a glass rectangle. Jack could see Casey crouched over an extremely professional-looking sound-board, reel-to-reel tape recorder close to his right hand. As Jack watched, Casey grabbed a pair of cans from the board and slipped them over his ears.

Jack looked up and saw hardwood beams rising in a series of six modest arches. Between them was drilled white composition board . . . soundproofing. The place looked like a chapel, but it was a very efficient combination TV-and-radio studio. Jack suddenly thought of Jimmy Swaggart, Rex Humbard, Jack Van Impe.

Folks, just lay yo hand on yo television set, and you gone be HEALED!!!

He suddenly felt like screaming with laughter.

A small door to the left of the podium opened, and Sunlight Gardener stepped out. He was dressed in white from head to toe, and Jack saw expressions varying from exaltation to outright adoration on the faces of many of the boys, but Jack again had to restrain himself from a wild laughing-spree. The vision in white approaching the lectern reminded him of a series of commercials he had seen as a very young child.

He thought Sunlight Gardener looked like the Man from Glad.

Wolf turned toward him and whispered hoarsely, “What’s the matter, Jack? You smell like something’s really funny.”

Jack snorted so hard into the hand cupped over his mouth that he blew colorless snot all over his fingers.

Sunlight Gardener, his face glowing with ruddy good health, turned the pages of the great Bible on the lectern, apparently lost in deepest meditation. Jack saw the glowering scorched-earth landscape of Heck Bast’s face, the narrow, suspicious face of Sonny Singer. He sobered up in a hurry.

In the glass booth, Casey was sitting up, watching Gardener alertly. And as Gardener raised his handsome face from his Bible and fastened his cloudy, dreaming, and utterly insane eyes upon his congregation, Casey flipped a switch. The reels of the big tape recorder began to turn.

6

“Fret not thyself because of evildoers,”

said Sunlight Gardener. His voice was low, musical, thoughtful.

“Neither be thou envious against

the workers of iniquity.

For they shall soon be cut down like the grass,

and wither as the green herb.

Trust in the Lord, and do good;

so shalt thou dwell in the Territories—”

(Jack Sawyer felt his heart take a nasty, leaping turn in his chest)

“—and verily thou shalt be fed.

Delight thyself also in the Lord;

and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.

Commit thy way unto the Lord;

trust also in him;

and he shall bring it to pass. . . .

Cease from anger, and forsake wrath;

fret not thyself in any wise to do evil.

For evildoers shall be cut off:

but those that wait upon the Lord,

they shall inherit his Territory.”

Sunlight Gardener closed the Book.

“May God,” he said, “add His Blessing to the reading of His Holy Word.”

He looked down at his hands for a long, long time. In Casey’s glass booth, the wheels of the tape recorder turned. Then he looked up again, and in his mind Jack suddenly heard this man scream: Not the Kingsland? You don’t mean to tell me you’ve overturned a full wagonload of Kingsland Ale, you stupid goat’s penis? You don’t mean to tell me that, do yoooooouuuuuuu?

Sunlight Gardener studied his young male congregation closely and earnestly. Their faces looked back at him—round faces, lean faces, bruised faces, faces flaring with acne, faces that were sly, and faces that were open and youthful and lovely.

“What does it mean, boys? Do you understand Psalm Thirty-seven? Do you understand this lovely, lovely song?”

No, their faces said—sly and open, clear and sweet, pitted and poxed. Not too much, only got as far as the fifth grade, been on the road, been on the bum, been in trouble . . . tell me . . . tell me. . . .

Suddenly, shockingly, Gardener shrieked into the mike, “It means DON’T SWEAT IT!”

Wolf recoiled, moaning a little.

“Now you know what that means, don’t you? You boys have heard that one, haven’t you?”

“Yeah!” someone shouted from behind Jack.

“OH-YEAH!” Sunlight Gardener echoed, beaming. “DON’T SWEAT IT! NEGATIVE PERSPIRATION! They are good words, aren’t they, boys? Those are some kind of gooooood words, OH-YEAH!”

“Yeah! . . . YEAH!”

“This Psalm says you don’t have to WORRY about the evildoers! NO SWEAT! OH-YEAH! It says you don’t have to WORRY about the workers of sin and iniquity! NEGATIVE PERSPIRATION! This Psalm here says that if you WALK the Lord and TALK the Lord, EVERYTHING’S GONNA BE SO COOL! Do you understand that, boys? Do you have an understanding ear for that?”

“Yeah!”

“Hallelujah!” Heck Bast cried, grinning divinely.

“Amen!” a boy with a great lazy eye behind his magnifying spectacles returned.

Sunlight Gardener took the mike with practiced ease, and Jack was again reminded of a Las Vegas lounge performer. Gardener began to walk back and forth with nervous, mincing rapidity. He sometimes did a jigging little half-step in his clean white leather shoes; now he was Dizzy Gillespie, now Jerry Lee Lewis, now Stan Kenton, now Gene Vincent; he was in a fever of jive Godhead testimony.

“Naw, you don’t have to fear! Ah, naw! You don’t have to fear that kid who wants to show you dirty-book pictures! You don’t have to fear that boy who says just one toke on just one joint won’t hurt you and you’ll be a sissy if you don’t take it! Ah, naw! ’CAUSE WHEN YOU GOT THE LORD YOU GONNA WALK WITH THE LORD, AM I RIGHT?”

“YEAH!!!”

“OH-YEAH! AND WHEN YOU GOT THE LORD YOU GONNA TALK WITH THE LORD, AM I RIGHT?”

“YEAH!”

“I CAN’T HEAR YOU, AM I RIGHT?”

“YEAH!!!” They screamed it out, many of them rocking back and forth in a frenzy now.

“IF I’M RIGHT SAY HALLELUJAH!”

“HALLELUJAH!”

“IF I’M RIGHT SAY OH-YEAH!”

“OH-YEAH!”

They rocked back and forth; Jack and Wolf were rocked with them, helplessly. Jack saw that some of the boys were actually weeping.

“Now tell me this,” Gardener said, looking toward them warmly and confidentially. “Is there any place for the evildoer here in the Sunlight Home? Huh? What do you think?”

“No sir!” cried out the thin boy with the buck teeth.

“That’s right,” Sunlight Gardener said, approaching the podium again. He gave the mike a quick, professional flick to clear the cord out from under his feet and then he slipped it back into the clamp again. “That’s the ticket. No room here for tattletale liars and workers of iniquity, say hallelujah.”

“Hallelujah,” the boys replied.

“Amen,” Sunlight Gardener agreed. “The Lord says—in the Book of Isaiah he says it—that if you lean on the Lord, you’re gonna mount up—oh-yeah!—with wings as eagles, and your strength shall be the strength of ten and I say to you, boys, THAT THE SUNLIGHT HOME IS A NEST FOR EAGLES, CAN YOU SAY OH-YEAH!”

“OH-YEAH!”

There was another caesura. Sunlight Gardener gripped the sides of the podium, head down as if in prayer, gorgeous white hair hanging in disciplined waves. When he spoke again, his voice was low and brooding. He did not look up. The boys listened breathlessly.

“But we have enemies,” Sunlight Gardener said at last. This was little more than a whisper, but the mike picked it up and transmitted it perfectly.

The boys sighed—a rustle of wind through autumn leaves.

Heck Bast was looking around truculently, eyes rolling, pimples glowing such a deep red that he looked like a boy in the grip of a tropical illness. Show me an enemy, Heck Bast’s face said. Yeah, you go on, show me an enemy and just see what happens to him!

Gardener looked up. Now his mad eyes appeared filled with tears.

“Yes, we have enemies,” he repeated. “Twice now the State of Indiana has tried to shut me down. Do you know what? The radical humanists can barely stand to think of me down here at the Sunlight Home, teaching my boys to love Jesus and their country. It makes em mad, and do you want to know something, boys? Do you want to know a deep old dark secret?”

They leaned forward, eyes on Sunlight Gardener.

“We don’t just make em mad,” Gardener said in a hoarse conspirator’s whisper. “We make em scaaaaaared.”

“Hallelujah!”

“Oh-yeah!”

“Amen!”

In a flash, Sunlight Gardener grabbed the mike again, and he was off! Up and down! back and forth! sometimes he jigged a two-step neat as a minstrel in a 1910 cakewalk! He bopped the word to them, pumping one arm first at the boys, then up toward heaven, where God had presumably dragged up His armchair to listen.

“We scare em, oh-yeah! Scare em so bad they got to have another cocktail, or another joint, or another sniff of cocaine! We scare em, because even smart old God-denying, Jesus-hating radical humanists like them can smell righteousness and the love of God, and when they smell that they can smell the brimstone coming out of their own pores, and they don’t like that smell, oh no!

“So they send down an extra inspector or two to plant garbage under the kitchen counters, or to let loose some cock-a-roaches in the flour! They start a lot of vile rumors about how my boys are beaten. Are you beaten?”

“NO!” they roared indignantly, and Jack was dumbfounded to see Morton roaring the negative out as enthusiastically as all the rest, even though a bruise was already beginning to form on Morton’s cheek.

“Why, they sent down a bunch of smart news reporters from some smart radical humanist news show!” Sunlight Gardener cried in a kind of disgusted wonder. “They came down here and they said, ’Okay, who are we supposed to do the hatchet-job on? We’ve done a hundred and fifty already, we’re experts at smearing the righteous, don’t worry about us, just give us a few joints and a few cocktails and point us in the right direction.’

“But we fooled em, didn’t we, boys?”

Rumbling, almost vicious assent.

“They didn’t find no one chained to a beam in the barn, did they? Didn’t find no boys in strait-jackets, like they heard down in town from some of these hellbound School Board jackals, did they? Didn’t find no boys getting their fingernails pulled, or all their hair shaved off, or nothing like that! Most they could find was some boys who said they got spanked, and they DID get spanked, oh-yeah, they was spanked and I’d testify on that matter myself before the Throne of Almighty God, with a lie-detector strapped to each arm, because the book says if you SPARE that rod, you gonna SPOIL that child, and if you believe that, boys, you gimme hallelujah!”

“HALLELUJAH!”

“Even the Indiana Board of Education, much as they’d like to get rid of me and leave a clear field for the devil, even they had to admit that when it comes to spanking, God’s law and the State of Indiana’s law runs just about the same: that if you SPARE that rod, you gonna SPOIL that child!

“They found HAPPY boys! They found HEALTHY boys! They found boys who were willing to WALK the Lord and TALK the Lord, oh can you say hallelujah?”

They could.

“Can you say oh-yeah?”

They could do that, too.

Sunlight Gardener came back to the podium.

“The Lord protects those that love Him, and the Lord is not gonna see a bunch of dope-smoking, communist-loving radical humanists take away this resting place for tired, confused boys.

“There were a few boys who told tattletale lies to those so-called news-people,” Gardener said. “I heard the lies repeated on that TV news show, and although the boys slinging that mud were too cowardly to show their own faces on the screen, I knew—oh-yeah!—I knew those voices. When you’ve fed a boy, when you’ve held his head tenderly against your breast when he cries for his momma in the night, why, I guess then you know his voice.

“Those boys are gone now. God may forgive them—I hope He does, oh-yeah—but Sunlight Gardener is just a man.”

He hung his head to show what a shameful admission this was. But when he raised it again, his eyes were still hot, sparkling with fury.

“Sunlight Gardener cannot forgive them. So Sunlight Gardener set them out on the road again. They have been sent out into the Territories, but there they shall not be fed; there even the trees may eat them up, like beasts which walk in the night.”

Terrified silence in the room. Behind the glass panel, even Casey looked pallid and strange.

“The Book says that God sent Cain out to the East of Eden, into the land of Nod. Being cast out onto the road is like that, my boys. You have a safe haven here.”

He surveyed them.

“But if you weaken . . . if you lie . . . then woe unto you! Hell awaits the backslider just as it awaits the boy or man who dives into it on purpose.

“Remember, boys.

“Remember.

“Let us pray.”