drinking long and heartily.
Everyone who looked on the scene was convinced the water had been imbued with healing powers.
Suddenly Alberta began to leap and dance in a frenzy of exultation. Her big-boned body shook like a nautch dancer. Her face shone with religious fervor.
'I got Him inside of me!' she cried. 'I got God inside of me. I can feel Him inside of my stomach.'
The spectators were caught between amusement and awe.
'I can feel Him in my bones!' Alberta screamed. 'He's in my blood.'
She was shaking in a very delirium of passion.
'Oh, where is my Sugar?' she cried. 'Sugar Stonewall!' she called. 'Where are you, Sugar?'
Suddenly the faces blurred in her vision. The sky took on the colors of the spectrum, as though the world had turned into a rainbow. Her eyes protruded from her head, and sweat beaded all over her face. She began to moan and whimper, as though the ecstasy was more than she could bear; then she staggered and reeled, fell to the street and lay twitching on the wet pavement, from which steam had begun to rise.
'She's having a fit,' someone cried.
The crowd surged forward. Faces were distorted with excitement. People struggled frantically to get a look.
Sweet Prophet realized something unusual was happening. With quick presence of mind, he signaled his band to begin playing When The Saints Come Marching In, then beckoned to his top elder, Reverend Jones.
Elder Jones was on the alert, as always. Dressed in a goldbraided white uniform with colored tassels sprouting from the shoulders, like a rear admiral in the Cuban navy, he ascended the dais and bent toward the throne, cupping a hand to his ear.
'See what is happening to that woman down there,' Sweet Prophet directed.
Elder Jones descended to the street and knelt beside Alberta. His expression became grave. The spectators hemmed him in, leaning over his shoulders, and bombarded him with questions.
'Get back,' he ordered sharply. 'Give the sister air. She's had a trance. She's gone to talk with God.'
The spectators backed away with awed expressions. But still he had to conduct his examination with the utmost circumspection. He held Alberta's hand while furtively seeking her pulse-he didn't find any. He looked at her nostrils, and there was no movement. Her eyes had rolled back into her head so that only the whites showed. He stroked her face, feeling for the vein in the temple, but her skin was like cooling wax. He would have liked to put a mirror over her mouth, but couldn't risk alarming the spectators. He was so terrified he coulti hardly breathe, but he kept repeating, 'Glory be to Jesus,' to camouflage his fears. He requested the police to keep back the crowd, then climbed slowly to the throne dais.
Sweet Prophet gave one look at Elder Jones' black face, which had dried to the texture of wood ashes, and expected the Worst. 'Well?' he asked fearfully.
'She looks dead to me,' Elder Jones reported.
Sweet Prophet's already protruding eyes bulged perilously from their sockets. 'Great God Almighty!' he whispered in a tone of consternation. 'How in God's name could that happen?'
Elder Jones' mouth felt cotton-dry, and the hot air burned inside of his nostrils. 'The only way I figure it could have happened is the water you blessed was poisoned,' he said.
'Lord in Heaven help us,' Sweet Prophet moaned. 'How could it be poisoned?'
'Only God knows,' Elder Jones said.
Sweet Prophet drew a bottle of smelling salts from somewhere beneath his robe and held it to his nose. He couldn't afford to faint in this emergency, but his head whirled in a blind panic.
He pulled a yellow silk handkerchief from his pocket and patted his forehead.
'Are you certain she's dead, Elder?' he asked with a faint remnant of hope.
'I couldn't find any pulse, and she sure looks dead,' the elder affirmed.
As luck would have it, one of the little angels encircling the prophet's throne overheard the elder. Her eyes stretched, and her mouth dropped open.
'Daid? Is she really and truly daid?'
'Hush, child,' Sweet Prophet said anxiously, but it was too late.
A spectator had heard her-a big bull-voiced man wearing purple suspenders over a yellow shirt.
'Great jumping Jehoshaphat, she ain't in no trance!' he shouted in a voice that carried above the marching brass of the band. 'She is plumb dead!'
'Shut up, fool!' Elder Jones shouted. 'Do you want to panic everybody?'
But the damage was done. Word ran through the crowd like quicksilver that the converted woman who had drunk of the holy water had dropped dead.
Pandemonium broke loose. Emotions already ignited by religious fervor skyrocketed in terror. The excitable people began milling and screaming and fighting one another in animal panic.
Sweet Prophet knew he had to do something quick to avert catastrophe. It was the most desperate situation he had ever faced in his long and checkered career as a revivalist. It was worse even than the time he had been accused of raping three twelve-year-old girls.
His whole career hung in the balance. The next twenty minutes would determine the fate of his cult, which had taken him twenty years to build up. Not only his career as an evangelist, but his personal fortune was at stake. He didn't know what he was worth, but his followers, along with the press, insisted on calling him a multimillionaire. And it had been to his advantage to nurture this legend. His followers referred to his millions with personal pride. They boasted that he was richer than Father Divine, richer than Daddy Grace. Religious people love a winner, he had learned. By that they knew that God had blessed him. He rode around in a royal purple Rolls Royce with a gold plated radiator; in the winter he wore an overcoat made of ranch mink; he wore a diamond ring on each finger and diamonds in his shoes; he maintained a French-type wine cellar stocked with vintage wines and champagnes that he paraded for effect, although he never drank himself. All this might go by the board if it was discovered that the water he had blessed had poisoned one of his converts.
But he had not gotten where he was by means of a chicken heart. He had the nimble wits of a confidence man and the nerve of a bank robber. His brain worked best under pressure. 'Get the bottle, Elder, get the bottle for God's sake and hide it,' he said, then silenced the brass band with a gesture and spoke fervently into the microphone:
'Be calm! Be happy! Rejoice! Praise be to God! Let us all kneel in prayer. God is calling the holy ones.'
The face of a big black man turned ashy gray. 'I is getting the hell out of here,' he muttered.
He pushed through the crowd and started running. Others followed. Terror spread through the assemblage.
'Stay and pray!' Sweet Prophet warned. 'You can't run away from God.'
He signaled for the band to begin playing again and raised his big bass voice in song: 'Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home… All sing,' he commanded. 'I looked over Jordan and what did I see, coming for to carry me home…'
Hundreds of people broke in wild flight, knocking down women and children and trampling them in the street. But the converts and the religious remained. With their drenched white dresses clinging to oversized bodies, they turned their entranced black faces toward the sky, and began to sing their own individual songs.
'Oh, Jesus, I is coming…'
'I hear you calling me…'
'Call me, Jesus, I is ready…'
A big powerful woman clung to her husband, who was trying desperately to get away. 'What's the matter with you? Don't you want to go to heaven?' she was screaming.
Tears streamed down a toothless old woman's stoic face. 'Hurry, God, and take me while I is pure,' she prayed.
' Let us all kneel in prayer,' the voice of Sweet Prophet boomed.
Automatically, as though under the influence of mass hypnotism, the multitude knelt in the street.
Sweet Prophet began praying over the loud-speakers with a steady, moving fervor:
' The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust; if God doesn't get you the devil must…'
No one noticed Sugar Stonewall turn the corner into Seventh Avenue and begin to run. He was a long-limbed,
