Forever Never Ends (9 page)

There was only one Old Time Religion, and that was the Baptist faith. Jesus didn’t belong to some bunch who worshipped Mary and ate wafers. The Son of God belonged to those who were willing to have their heads washed clean of sin. Armfield looked up at the darkly stained wooden face.

"Forgive me, Jesus," the preacher whispered. Then, hearing a door creak open at the rear of the church, he added loudly, "And thank thee, Oh Lord, for thy continued blessing, that it may shine on this, Your church. Amen."

"Amen," added Bill Lemly, his deep voice filling the narrow church hall. Armfield turned and saw Lemly's wide-shouldered frame filling the doorway against the backdrop of the dark, wet world outside. Lemly walked up the aisle, his shoes leaving prints on the red carpet, that tongue of sanctity that carried the sinners forward, nearer to God and close enough to smell the five-dollar-a-pint aftershave that Preacher Blevins wore on Sundays.

"Good evening, Preacher," Lemly said. "Looks like the Lord's brought us some more rain."

"Yes, Brother Lemly. We may need to build ourselves an ark before this one's over with."

"Now, God promised He'd never do that to us again. The next time He destroys the world, it will be with something different. Something good."

What would it be next time? Nuclear rain, man-made brimstone and fire from heaven? Cancer-causing chemicals in our sugar substitutes? Or another eight years of a Democrat-controlled Congress? The Lord worked in mysterious ways.

"So right, Brother,” Armfield said. “But the prophecies are coming together, just as the Bible promised."

"The Lord will be coming soon to take us home, and what a glorious day that will be."

That was one part of this deal that made Armfield uncomfortable. He wanted to go to heaven, wanted to waltz through the Pearly Gates and huddle at the feet of Jesus, plucking a harp and adding his thin voice to the choirs that would sing His praises, forever and ever without end. Armfield just didn't want to do it anytime soon.

One of his secret fears was that one day he'd be plugging along, minding his own business, maybe out checking the trim job on the graveyard hedges or working up the lead paragraph of a kick-ass sermon, and he'd feel a tap on his shoulder. He'd turn around and there would be the Lord Himself, tall and blond and blue-eyed and glowing.

Armfield didn't want to die. At least, not for a long time to come.

"Yes, Brother Lemly, a glorious day that will be," he said, licking his thin lips.

Armfield parted his Bible and tucked his purple nylon bookmark smack in the middle of the Gospel According to Saint Luke.
Good a place as any to quote from come Sunday
.

One of these days, he was going to get around to reading the Good Book, and from cover to cover, too, not with all this skipping around. He'd started it once when he was sixteen, sat down and zipped through Creation and Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, the greatest story on earth unfolding before his eyes. Then he'd hit the “begats,” and it had been like slamming face first into the wall of a Jewish synagogue: "Such-and-such begat thus-and-so, who in turn . . . "

Armfield wasn't the world's most educated man. He was a poor reader and the only original thoughts that popped into his head were when he was trying different poses on the fantasized flesh of Nettie Hartbarger. But he’d been the loudest in his class at Henneway. He had been the most outspoken critic of the liberals and the baby-killers and the Catholics and other lower forms of life.

He had prayed for strength and guidance so the Lord might sit on his shoulder and shine His Holy Reading Lamp so that Armfield could do the Lord's will. And finally he'd come to accept that the Lord's will was for Armfield to
never
finish the Bible. Armfield's dad couldn't even read, but he'd certainly gone to heaven, the way he'd tossed the family's cookie jar money into the collection plate every week. Money that Armfield could have used for orthodontia so his damned front teeth didn't stick out like a knot-sucking beaver's. Money that his mother could have spent on a mammogram, which might have detected the breast cancer that took her to the Lord while Armfield was at Henneway. Money that might have kept his malnourished sister from running away and becoming a hooker in Charlotte.

A flash of lightning blinked outside, once, then three times in succession, flickering across the colored plate glass windows as if they were movie frames. But the Jesus in the plate glass didn't change position, just knelt among those lambs like He was giving them the Sermon on the Mount translated into bleats and baas. Then the thunder rumbled, shaking the hand-hewed arches of the church.

"The Lord's pitching a fit tonight, Preacher," Lemly said, his laughter rumbling as deep as the thunder. “Must be somebody’s doing some serious sinning.”

Armfield nodded from the pulpit. Even though he was on the dais, with a solid oak rail between Lemly and himself, Lemly somehow towered over him, dark eyed and broad faced and muscular and tanned. Lemly had been a football star at State, then had moved back home after graduation and opened a building supply business. Now he owned four stores among the surrounding counties and had another in the works.

This man could sell dogwood timbers to Jesus
.

But Brother Lemly was also a church deacon and generous benefactor and county commissioner and Leading Citizen. If Armfield wanted to get a grip on public opinion, to find out how a certain action or statement might play in Windshake, he asked Lemly. Hell, Lemly
was
public opinion, when you got right down to it.

The front door opened again, and the top of an umbrella poked its way into the church. It spun, sending a silver shower of water drops across the foyer, then lifted, and Armfield's lightbulb-shaped head lit up with a smile.

"Hey, darlin’," he said, forgetting his "preacher voice" for a moment.

"Hi, Dad. Hi, Mr. Lemly," Sarah said. She shook back her hair, her long red hair that was just like her mother's, only not scorched from too many hours under a dryer cone down at Rita Faye's Beauty Salon. Sarah smiled, white and perfect teeth showing between her lips. Armfield made damned sure his kid had gotten her braces, if for no other reason than that she'd never have to look in the mirror and be pissed off at her miserly old man.

"Hello, Sarah," Lemly said. He turned back to Armfield. "Say, Preacher—"

Armfield had insisted that the congregation call him "Preacher" instead of "Reverend." It was much more folksy. Put the parishioners at ease. Got him invited to dinner come Friday. Loosened the purse strings come Sunday.

Kept their guard down. No association in their minds with the Reverend Bakker or the Reverend Swaggart. Or even Falwell, who hadn't been convicted but seemed to leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth just the same. He turned his attention back to Lemly.

"I was wondering if Nettie was here,” Lemly said. “Said for me to pick her up at six o'clock sharp, and it's nigh on."

"She's in the vestry, Brother. Probably didn't hear us because of the rain."

"Mind if I go on back?"

"Help yourself, Brother. Just don't take Nettie away before she's got the Lord's bank account balanced."

Lemly's laughter thundered again, and he left the room, his wet shoe soles squeaking across the oak floor of the dais.

Damn
. Armfield had been hoping Lemly might have some new angle to work, a tent revival or gospel singing to fill up the old coffers of Windshake Baptist. And maybe a few dollars could trickle their way into Armfield's pockets. But Lemly was here after Nettie.

Hmm. Might not be too seemly. Both of them single and dedicated to the church. Still, fairly young and prone to the call of lust, weak against the devil's whispers. And local tongues might wag.

He'd have to keep an eye on them. That wouldn't be much of a problem, especially in Nettie's case.

"Now, what are you doing here, young lady?" he said to his daughter.

"Mom sent me over to tell you supper's ready," she said.

Her face practically shone with innocence and youth, like the Virgin Mary's did in those Renaissance paintings. She had her mother's fair skin, with some delicate freckles on her smooth cheeks. Of course, he didn't really know what her mother's skin looked like these days, because she wore more makeup than a white-trash trailer queen.

Armfield looked down at the open Bible, then cupped it in his hands as if it were an infant. He held it lovingly to his chest. The weight of the book comforted him. Its gilt-edged pages gave him strength. And it made a damned fine prop when he went into one of his "whopped upside the head by the staff of Jesus" routines, when he twitched and gibbered across the dais on those Sundays when the congregation needed a little extra stimulation.

The routines were the reason why Windshake Baptist Church had recruited him. While a lot of the Southern Baptist churches were letting divorced ministers and liberals and even a few converted Episcopalians do their preaching, Windshake was going to hold the line. At last year's Baptist Convention, some formerly conservative pastors were arguing for what they called "continued accessibility in the face of modernity." Whatever that translated to in common English, it sounded like selling out to the devil to Armfield.

So a touch of fire and brimstone was welcomed in Windshake. Most of the congregation felt that if it was good enough for their grandparents, then, by God, it was good enough for
them
.

Except some rivals had popped up along the outskirts of Armfield's territory. First Baptist over at Piney Ford was starting to pack them in. There was a Methodist church around the back side of Sugarfoot and a little Lutheran church in a converted vegetable stand out in the Stony Creek community. He'd even heard a Unitarian group was meeting in the basement of a used bookstore.

But Armfield wasn't worried. A little competition just made you work harder. It was also a sign that 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.