“Praise the Lord,”—Daddy.
I said, “Praise the Lord.”
“… doing it, doing it, done!” Brother Dudley said.
Brother Dudley got to his feet. “I think you’re going to feel a lot better, Bobby John, if not all better.”
Bobby John said, “I do feel a little better.” He was looking at his legs stretched out in front of him.
“Did it grow?” I asked him.
“I do think it did,” said Bobby John.
He got up and walked around. “I swear it might have.”
Then Brother Dudley gave a whoop and hollered, “Unspeakable joy!”
That was how leg growing came to be introduced at The Helping Hand Tabernacle.
Before Brother Dudley left, he said, “My usual cut is sixty percent of the collection plate, but because of the hard times, Royal, Arnelle, I’m going fifty-fifty with you.”
“You’re not lying, Bobby John?” Daddy asked him when Brother Dudley drove off!
“Daddy, I don’t like being called a liar!” Bobby John’s troubles were making him testy; he could flare up at anything.
“Grandfather Ringer grew legs,” Mum said.
“There’s no doubt legs can be grown,” Daddy said. “I just don’t like any faking.”
I could hear all this from downstairs while I sat up in my bedroom rocker.
“Daddy, if you’re calling me a fake, you’re causing a breach between us nothing’s going to mend,” Bobby John hollered. “I might know of fakes, but I never faked myself, no matter how Satan tempted me.”
“He’s not calling you a fake,” Mum said. “He’s just checking, honey, since we don’t know the man, just know he’s charismatic.”
“What fakes you know of, I’d like to know,” said Daddy.
“Oh, we all know of fakes. He’s just saying what we all know, Royal.”
Warm nights made me ache with longing for nothing I knew about, and I let the light breeze brush my face, held my arms with my fingers, the Bible in my lap. I had the little lamp on, atop my card table, and a pen in my lap because I felt like writing something down.
I could hear them going at it downstairs, tuned them out, tuned them in, enjoying the smell of the fresh coffee Mum was perking, thinking what would I write? Why would I want to write anything? What was getting into me?
“Well, maybe we could try him out, don’t hurt to try him out,” Daddy was saying.
“Daddy,” Bobby John answering him, “it’s what we need. The congregation’s dwindling down to nothing and we’re not fighting back!”
“Don’t talk to me about fighting back. Your own girl friend left us soon as she got healed, didn’t even witness to us, witnessed up to them!”
“She was from them, Royal,” Mum said. “She was never from us.”
I opened the Bible to the flyleaf where I wrote last time.
Baby, the Rain must Fall.
June 28, 7:15 P.M.
S. Mouth S. Shoppe.
The telephone rang and my heart gave a leap, but my alarm said eleven-thirty, and I doubted he’d dare call that late at night.
But I listened until I heard Daddy bellow, “Yes this is Reverend Ringer!”
I unscrewed the top of the pen and held it ready, then it wrote itself seemed like, right under S. Mouth S. Shoppe.
Wrote: Unspeakable joy!
I let the ink dry, waited, put my finger across the words, smiling, and the little wind coming in, blowing the curtains like something little and alive moving gently behind them, nudging so sweetly at them.
When I came away from wherever it was I drifted to, I heard Daddy saying Willard Peyton was dead.
I got up and went across to the door.
“We lost him,” Daddy said.
“God called him,” said Mum.
Daddy said, “Seems that he left some money, poor old Willard, but I’m told he left five thousand dollars.”
“Well, you can’t take it with you,” Mum said. “Who’d he leave it to?”
“That’s the killer,” Daddy said, “though the good Lord knows I wouldn’t count it any kind of a blessing to profit from Willard’s passing.”
“We got five thousand dollars, Daddy?” Bobby John said.
Daddy said, “We don’t. Guy Pegler does.”
Ten
JESSE PEGLER
DONALD DIVINE SAID SEAL was a dynamite-looking girl and a real sweetheart for taking in Yellow, but she wasn’t a Pegler, and Yellow’s story had to be told about a Pegler.
“The whole point we want to get across,” said Donald, “is that Guy Pegler is flesh and blood, not just an image coming on the tube Sunday mornings. He lives in a house, he’s got a wife and kids, he worries about the oil bill, he’s part of the family of man but he’s also a family man.”
So I found myself up on the white-and-gold balcony one Sunday morning, trying to keep my knees from knocking, and the gold tassels on my father’s blue robes from blowing in my eyes, while my father did his best to make us look like “just folks.”
Somehow we’d pulled Yellow up there with us before we got on camera, Donald supporting him from behind, steadying his old legs every time one slipped, and telling him, “You’re a good old boy.”
“What a face on this old mutt!” Donald said. “We ought to rename him Gold. I could sell Christmas trees to Scrooge with this guy for bait.”
It was the Sunday of the “Happiest Man” sermon, but we cut out the lead-in hymn from The Challenge Choir, and put my father and me and Yellow in the spot.
“… and that poor old man, dying, having already made his peace with that idea, was only worried about one thing now: his dog, a mutt he’d loved with all his heart for fourteen years, faithful companion, there every night on his hearth looking up at him, wagging his tail, how many of us haven’t known the simple, lovely feeling of having our dog at our feet on an evening for comfort?”
My father paused, and then asked softly: “Could any of us die in peace knowing our old, loyal, mutt dog was in some crowded animal shelter, thrust from his familiar surroundings to a filthy, cement-floored environment where no one would even know or care about his name,
