Windshake was prospering, as some big-money tourists had settled in the area over the last few years. Windshake Baptist's take had picked up about eight percent a year over Armfield's reign at the pulpit. Well, make that three percent, after Armfield skimmed off his 'tribute.'
'So, are you coming, Daddy?' Sarah said, her voice echoing off the polished wood and plate glass and into his hairy ears.
'Depends on what's for dinner. If it's another one of those vegetarian omelets, then I'll be heading down to the steakhouse.' Armfield snickered.
'Oh, Daddy,' she said.
'Just picking, honey.'
Sarah's accent was fading, her open vowels getting flattened like a flower in an old diary. She was a sophomore down at Westridge University, and she had been picking up all kinds of figures of speech and mannerisms from those Yankee intellectuals. Armfield wondered what else she might be picking up.
'May the Lord watch over her,' he offered in silent prayer, and set his Bible gently on the pulpit, where it would be ready to provide inspiration on Sunday. He wondered if he should tell Nettie and Brother Bill that he was leaving. Naw, Nettie would lock up. Besides, he didn't want to walk in on the lovebirds.
Armfield was afraid he would suffer the sin of envy. He'd suffered enough sins for one day. It was going to take a good half hour heart-to-heart chat with the Lord to wash those wrongs away. But the Lord would forgive. He always had.
Armfield walked down the aisle, under the high wooden ribs of the church. The only noise was the creaking of his knee joints and the muted roar of the rain pounding on the roof. He joined his daughter in the foyer, where she held the umbrella poised and open outside the door, ready for the thirty-yard trot to the parsonage.
Armfield was so focused on his looming penance that he didn't resent the falling rain. As he looked at it slicing across the streetlight in fat needles, he thought he saw a faint green shimmering. He shook his head and hunched under the umbrella.
At least it’s not frogs.
“Race you,” Sarah said, and she was gone, along with the umbrella.
Armfield laughed, and then the sky split with a streak of thunder and lightning, the bolt touching ground near the church.
“Spare me, Jesus,” he whispered, then dashed against the rain to the house.
Don Oscar was tangled in a forsythia hedge, its sharp green buds scratching into his skin. He felt ready to bloom, ready to explode into velvety yellow orgasms. He felt alive, more than he had ever felt while human. He was chlorophyll and carotene, watery tissue and carbon, a metastasis of animal and vegetable. He burned in joyous rapture as his energy was drained by the parent.
He was food of the gods.
The parent’s slender white tongue-roots were stretching under the skin of Bear Claw, siphoning and converting the Appalachian fauna all across the stony slopes. Now it had sent out its disciples, fish and fowl and man and beast all marked by the touch of the cosmic reaper. And Don Oscar was one of the children, providing nourishment to the beloved space-seed so that its mission could continue.
He was dimly aware that his wife Genevieve was nearby, nosing in the dirt like an old sow snouting up succulent truffles. The wild lilies were sending green shoots into the sky along the banks of the creek, and Genevieve was among them, rolling in the rich swampy mud. Her torn calico dress was damp and black, sticking to her ample thighs as she wallowed without shame.
Don Oscar had never loved her as much, had never appreciated the glorious depths of her organic wealth as much as he had while converting her. Now they were bound in a far holier matrimony than they had ever achieved in their human relationship.
Now they served the parent, and it in turn served them, blessing them with the radiance of the sun, granting them the boon of moisture drawn through their epidermis, allowing them the pleasure of transpiration. Parting the clouds of their ignorance so that they might be aware, sloughing off their sinful skins so that they were made pure.
Don Oscar had lost his sense of time, but he thought maybe it was all science, only now there was a new science, with new natural laws. He regretted the wasted mortal effort of survival, the long struggle of the flesh. He was filled with self-loathing for the resources he had needlessly piddled away, for his avarice and selfishness. But then, his path had been worthwhile if it had ultimately led to this perfect day.
Was it only yesterday that he had been converted? Or did days matter anymore? Now there was only eternity, a blissful servitude that stretched forever ahead as the hot golden rays of the sun reached across the fingers of the galaxy.
He sprawled among the forsythia, leaning against the slender branches, leaking opal fluid from his wounds and scratches, absorbing carbon dioxide as he died and was reborn a million times over.
As he soaked and absorbed, as he swelled with verdant joy, he was overcome by a rapturous desire to share. He would pay a call on the neighbors.
CHAPTER SIX
Tamara looked out over the auditorium at the sea of young faces and the tops of a few heads that had drooped over their desks. She despised these meat market classes. But what did she expect?
After all, this was Psychology 101. It was designed so that even an athlete could make a solid “C” while saving the sweat for scholarship payback. All you had to know was that Jung wasn't spelled with a “Y” and you had it made.
Sure, there would be maybe five students out of the eighty who would put forth an effort, who would actually read the material and turn in four-page papers when she asked for a minimum of three.
Of those five, maybe two would go to graduate school and become psychologists.
But she knew that the line between an amateur and a professional psychologist was thin. That line was as wavy and elusive as the difference between sanity and madness. To teach or to be officially insane, all you had to do was get certified.
But that was part of the challenge, wasn't it? Being the one without becoming the other.
She flipped back her hair with one hand and gripped the lectern as if it were a dance partner. She drew in enough air to send her voice across the room.
'How does the mind work? Why does it work one way and not another?' she said firmly without shouting. 'Is it really only billions of nerve cells reacting chemically and electrically with each other? Are our thoughts and reactions only scientific processes over which we have no control?
'If so, what differentiates one person's emotions from another’s? Social influence and outside stimuli? At what point does spirituality and ego step over into rational, measurable brain activity?'
She could tell she was losing them. She was even losing herself. Time for an icebreaker. 'And what does it have to do with us, and why should we care?'
A few snickers rippled across the room. From somewhere in the back, a voice shouted, 'Who says we care?'
The class erupted in laughter. That was good. At least they were momentarily awake. She fixed on the area from which the remark had come and saw a crew-cut teenager with one thick eyebrow across his forehead, smiling smugly.
'So, Mister-' Tamara said, meeting his small eyes.
'Watkins.'
'Mister Watkins, since you know all about yourself already, why don't you tell us? Why are you the way you are? Why are you self-confident enough to blurt out in class what half a dozen others were thinking but didn't say?'
The lone eyebrow made a perplexed vee.
Tamara continued. 'What makes you different from the young lady beside you, who keeps checking her
