“Yes, sir,” I said. “Is that what you wanted to tell me?”
He didn’t answer my question. He said, “I’m arranging to have a place for you on the program. You’ll make a short speech of gratitude.”
“Yes, sir.”
Then he took a deep breath and let it out. “You’ll never be Bud,” he said finally. “Bud did things with love. But you, Jesse.”
“Me what?”
“Don’t try to imitate your brother, that’s my advice. Don’t try to take your brother’s place. Find your own place.”
I looked up at the brightly colored kites flying in the sky above the beach, squinting at the sun, beginning to feel the edge of anger move in closer to my gut. I said, “Seal and I were just horsing around … sir. … Did you ever just horse around?”
“Sometimes I think I horsed around all the time, where you’re concerned,” he said. “I’m not talking about the scene I just happened upon. I’m not dense enough to think Seal would change her loyalty from Bud to you.”
“Thanks for that one,” I said.
“You can attack, but I can’t,” he said. “And I don’t. Not the way you do.”
“What are you so damn mad at?” I said. “Sir?”
“I’m damned mad because you’re damned vicious. Bud criticized my work because he thought he knew better ways to do it. You just go for the jugular. You just scribble something across my notes because you’re a smart ass, not because you give a damn about me or ACE. Bud gave a damn!”
“If Bud had written that on your sermon pad, you would have laughed it off. Sir.”
“Probably. Because it would have come from love, or it would have come from hate. But it wouldn’t have come from indifference. It was just an indifferent, smart-aleck wisecrack!”
He stopped walking in the middle of the path and looked down at me.
“When did you change your mind about me?” he said. “Or did you always think I was just a money-grabbing crook?”
I suppose he had every right to be steamed, but I wished just once he’d give it to me, without a testimony to my brother first.
“You called it right,” I said with a mild shrug, determined not to let it build into the kind of brawl he and Bud went in for. “It was just a smart-aleck wisecrack.”
But I’d thought about saying: When did you change your mind about being a preacher, or did you always think you ought to be a TV star?
He looked down at the ground. “Maybe I’m touchy, son, because I don’t like certain things I have to do myself.” Then he looked up and gave me one of those little smiles he pulled on camera, right before he made some kind of confession about how hard it was to ask for money, how much it was against his nature. (A week didn’t go by they didn’t flash the 800 numbers, and the “Call in your contribution” sign following them.)
He said, “This TV business is like a bottomless pit, Jesse. It was a lot simpler in the old days. We just passed the plate.”
I could have said a lot back before he trotted down to the house to mix his martini before dinner, but I decided to shove it. I said, “It’s not your fault, Dad.”
He said that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, really, and I raised my hand and let it drop in a gesture of helplessness, because it wasn’t what I wanted to say, really.
Then he clapped one hand around my shoulder, hugged me, and got even in his own way, calling me Bud by accident, as he gave his usual end-of-conversation benediction. “I love you, son. I love you, Bud.”
Then he corrected himself. “Jesse.”
He feinted an embarrassed little punch near my chin, and I tried to let him off the hook by laughing hard with him.
Eleven
OPAL RINGER
“HERE’S A TWENTY-SEVEN-year-old sweeper in an industrial plant whose impossible dream is going into business for himself! May the dream come true! It’s up to you!”
“God Bless America” was playing softly in the background while Jesse’s father reached out from the balcony to take another ribbon off The Good Turn Tree.
“He’s a good showman, I’ll give him that,” Brother Dudley said, running his palm across his bald head, a glass of Flavor-Aid in his other hand, as he lay back in Daddy’s Barcalounger, with his feet up in the air. “He’s right up there with P. T. Barnum or the Ringling Brothers.”
“If you like circuses,” Daddy said. “They were circus people. … Oh, I admit, I admit, Guy Pegler’s got more tricks up his sleeve than a hound dog’s got fleas in August.”
“Well, we got some tricks up our sleeves, too, Royal. We just got to learn to let people know about them.”
“We got no tricks. We got The Power, that’s what we got to let people know. I’m going to get in my van and go up and down the streets of this town, and the next town, and the next one after that. I’m aiming for five hundred people on our Saturday Soaking.” He shot me a look. “Including you, Opal.”
“I know including me,” I said.
Daddy was still sitting at the card table, where they’d finished dividing up the offering from the morning service at The Hand. Brother Dudley’d grown six legs and they’d split three hundred dollars, but Daddy said there’d likely be more coming in next Wednesday night, once word got out Brother Dudley’d be back then. Daddy said pray God there’d be more on the way, because we were in debt up to our necks now. It was the reason for the Saturday-night Soaking, a twenty-four hour prayer/healing session to “help The Hand help the Lord help you.”… Bobby John had his own idea to drag Guy Pegler to a memorial service for Willard Peyton, said Dr. Pegler owed Willard that much,
