The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish (6 page)

HUNTERS
and
HUNTED

A
Night
of
Terror

T
he
next thing Mary Mabel knew, the porter had arrived to collect her. “You’re to be stowed in the trunk of the Packard and spirited past the newshounds at the gates.” The indignity was a relief. She was too upset to think, much less be swarmed by reporters. She tossed a few clothes in her bag, along with
The Collected Works of William Shakespeare
, said goodbye to the rest of her books, and left home forever.

The porter dropped her across town, at Highway 2, on the outskirts of London’s east end. “Hike your skirt, you’ll hitch a ride no problem.” He handed her five dollars.

“Thanks,” she said. Together with the spare change her papa had thrown at her, she’d have food for a couple of days.

The porter drove off. Mary Mabel planted her suitcase at the side of the road and stuck out her thumb. The fourth car stopped.

“Where to?” the man asked as she got in.

“Wherever you’re going.”

“Aren’t you the sly fox.” He put his arm around her shoulder. She slapped his face, hopped out, and raced back into town as fast as her legs would carry her.

The rest of the day she wandered the east end, incognito. Parishioners from St. James didn’t go near these dead-end streets, and her picture hadn’t appeared in the papers. Not that her mug on the front page would have changed anything; she went unrecognized by a pair of Pentecostals who’d been at the hospital. Out on a missionary patrol, they spotted her sitting on a bench, and ran over with their Bibles, eager to testify how they’d witnessed the Beeford resurrection with their very own eyes, and how Miss McTavish was one of their own.

“Well, I’m she, and I’m not one of anybody’s,” Mary Mabel said, “though if you could spare me a room for the night I’d be obliged.”

“You’re not Miss McTavish!” the elder huffed. “You’re a two-bit whore! A pox-ridden clap-breeder! How dare you pretend to be who you aren’t?” The pair turned on their heels and took off in search of likelier candidates for salvation.

At dusk, Mary Mabel found herself at the entrance to the Western Fairgrounds. The revival tent stood silhouetted against the sky, the centre collapsed, tears in the canvas brilliant with sunset. “So this was where Timmy Beeford was electrocuted,” she marvelled. She gaped at the shell, what was left of the generator, and the hulk of the trailer-truck. It was a wonder that only the boy had died.

Night fell. Shadows slipped under the tent flaps and into the trailer. Was it safe to fall asleep among strange and lonely men? She decided not to chance it. Luckily, the truck’s cab was empty. She crawled in, locked the doors, and fell asleep, a full moon shining through the windshield, God’s night light to the forsaken.

Next morning, she was up before the rounds of the London Parks Department. She freshened up in the Fairgrounds’ washroom, managing a sponge bath in one of the stalls with a pair of socks she wet in the sink. For food, she settled for a late afternoon bowl of pork and beans which, with a slice of buttered bread, rice pudding, and a Maxwell House, could be had for sixty cents at Minnie’s Good Eats across the road.

By sundown, she was back in her cab, curled up for bed, proud of herself for surviving her first full day on the streets. “It’s not so bad,” she thought. “At least it could be worse.”

M
ary Mabel was right. It
could
be worse. And it soon
was
.

She woke up in the middle of the night with the feeling she was being watched. Rolling over, she saw a man standing outside the passenger door, his nose squashed flat against the window. Her Peeping Tom was a vision from the crypt. His eyes gleamed wild from deep sockets, sunk in a head papered in gauze like Boris Karloff’s Mummy. Ears, unnaturally large, sprouted from the bandages, along with clumps of matted hair. Seeing her awake, the monster began to jabber. Saliva drooled from his mouth, a mouth with jaws that appeared to be wired shut with clothes hangers.

Dear God
, she thought,
it’s a lunatic escaped from the town asylum!

The creature began to claw at the window. Long, bony fingers rattled the door, fiddled the handle. Mary Mabel scrambled to the driver’s side and pressed the horn with all her might, praying the nearby tramps would save her. No such luck. They fled in all directions.

The lock popped up. The door swung open. The madman grabbed her by the calf. She flipped over, yanked up her free leg, and landed a boot to his chin. He reeled back, howling. She turned to escape out the driver’s side. A second stranger blocked the exit. He shone a flashlight in her eyes. She hoisted her bag from the cab’s floor and held it like a shield.

Flashlight chuckled. “We’ve got us a live one.”

“Godda beesh!” swore the madman.

Mary Mabel looked from one to the other. “Back off or I scream!”

“As if anyone would care. What’s your name?”

“None of your beeswax!” She cast a nervous eye at the maniac. To her relief, he’d shifted his attention to the glove compartment, rifling through a grab-all of maps, receipts, pencils, old toothbrushes, and crumpled sandwich bags.

“I admire your spunk,” Flashlight continued, “but you’re in a heap of trouble. Break and enter. Tell us your name or we turn you in.”

“Clara Brimley,” she answered warily.

“Liar. Not to worry, I’ve other ways to find out.” He emptied her bag and searched it, opening the cover of her
Collected Work
s. He read the inscription: “‘From the Library of Miss Mary Mabel McTavish..” His jaw dropped. “You’re Mary Mabel McTavish?”

“What’s it to you?”

Flashlight whooped like he’d hit the bingo jackpot. “Criminey, crackers, and tangerines!”

His monster pal joined in: “Ass an ee sha ruhseef!”

“You can say that again,” Flashlight said. “Miss McTavish, God has answered our prayers.” He saw her confusion. “My apologies. The name’s Floyd Cruickshank. And this here’s my partner, Brother Percy Brubacher.”

Life
in the
Vineyard

B
rother
Percy Brubacher would live to regret finding Mary Mabel in the Holy Redemption trailer-truck, would live to curse her name and all her works, fulminating from soapbox pulpits on Los Angeles street corners to the cell of the prison where he would be held on charges of kidnapping and murder. Yet at the time, finding Mary Mabel made Percy feel as close to Heaven as he was ever likely to get.

Now forty, he’d been undergoing a spiritual crisis. The promise of his first years evangelizing had turned to dust and he’d found himself in a pitched battle with the Forces of Darkness. “Help me, Jesus!” he’d scream in the middle of the night; but the Lord was not to be found in those lonely small-town hotel rooms with their peeling flowered wallpaper, mouse droppings, and tick-infested sheets.

Percy would leap out of bed in a frenzy and ferret from his suitcase the little black books in which he’d written up the history of his ministry, a literary labour undertaken as an assist to future biographers. He’d seek inspiration from page one, volume one, “The Day I Got the Call,” a recounting of the morning he’d stood, age five, in the alley behind his family’s bakery in Hornets Ridge, and served a communion of day-old Chelsea buns to a congregation of squirrels and chipmunks. As the rodents munched, tiny claws pressed together as if in prayer, the clouds had parted and a halo of sun had shone down around him, the sign of God’s anointing.

Percy’s mother encouraged his call, taking him to local meetings of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. He was an immediate sensation in his little blue blazer, grey flannel shorts, and bow tie, leaping to his feet as the Spirit moved, to preach away on the evils of drink. His father, a backsliding Baptist with a taste for bathtub gin, was none too pleased at his son’s denunciations. But as Percy reported, “The old devil said little, being generally passed out.”

While Percy’s religious vocation was attractive to rural women of a certain age, it caused trouble with the village boys, especially at recess, after he’d trumpeted their sins in front of the teacher. Percy didn’t mind. He wore his shiners proudly. “The badge of the Lord,” he called them. “‘For so persecuted they the prophets who came before me.’”

He took comfort from a postcard he’d received from famed baseball player-turned-evangelist Billy Sunday. Sunday had been touched by the letter from the little boy from New Hampshire, who’d written for advice on how to handle an alcoholic father. His reply became Percy’s salvation, recognition from the next best thing to God Himself that he mattered in the world beyond Hornets Ridge. He waved the postcard under everyone’s nose, made it the frequent subject of school Show and Tells, and created a small shrine to it next to the Bible by his bed. At night, he’d kneel, clasp it in prayer, and, running his finger gently over the postage stamp, listen to the still voice of the Lord.

“Yea, God spake unto me through Reverend Billy’s postcard,”
— (volume one, page 126) —
“revealing a Great Plan, a Divine Destiny for His humble servant. In cause of my deep and abiding faith, He promised that the day would come when I would be summoned to preach His Gospel throughout the land, and would be known, now and for all eternity, as the greatest of His prophets in the New World.”

Like all prophets, Percy endured a time of testing. In his early twenties, he wandered off for a prayer retreat atop Mount Pawtuckaway. From its peak, he saw the fiery furnace of Shadrach, Meeshach, and Abednego brought unto Hornets Ridge. His father, in a drunken stupor, had pitched a tank of kerosene into the bakery oven; his family died instantly in the explosion.

Percy anguished.
“Why had I been saved, while my mother and siblings had perished? The Lord spake unto me in my agony. He had need to temper my faith, He said, the better for it to withstand the temptations of Hell.”

Percy retreated to a shack outside the village. Here he prayed without cease, readying himself for the promised day when God would summon him to mission. A few elderly women who remembered him from the W.C.T.U. left plates of food and spare coins outside his door, but this was the extent of his following. Even village clergy kept their distance; they resented being called to account by a hermit half their age. Children, emboldened by their parents’ mockery, threw stones as he passed. He paid them no mind, his eyes alight with glory. Let them call him “Beggar Loon” and “Scarecrow”; he’d have the last laugh.

Sure enough, when he hit thirty, God smiled on His poor servant. Reggie Burns, praise Jesus, went and blew the heads off himself, wife Nellie, and Pittsburgh playboy Junior Bennett — and Percy Brubacher got his break.

Within four days of the murders, the Bennetts put their estate on the market, and sold its contents at auction. In “Sinner On My Doorstep” — little black book, volume three, pages 21 to 50 — Percy recalled the curious visit he’d received that evening from Floyd Cruickshank, a former classmate who minded the till at the general store where Percy bought soap, macaroni, and tacks. Floyd, ever the would-be dandy in his secondhand worsted windbreaker and matching plus-fours, rocked on the heels of his Oxfords and asked, “Could I have a word?”

Percy was wary. Since their school days, the most Floyd had ever said to him was, “That’ll be sixty-five cents.” But the Lord put a flea in Percy’s ear, so Perce said, “Fine.”

After a little this-and-that about the weather, Floyd got down to business. He’d been at the auction. “All day, folks ponied up to buy the Bennett’s effects. They claimed they wanted a piece of history. Bull. What they really wanted — you could see it in their eyes — was a piece of secondhand sin. They wanted to hang their hats on the rack where Nellie hung her cloth coat, or put their lips on Missy Bennett’s bone china, or — pardon my French — have a bounce in the sheets of a murdered adulterer.”

Percy nodded grimly. He imagined Satan’s flames licking the pillowcases.

“At the end of the day,” Floyd continued, “everything sold but the tent. No surprise. It’d take a pretty big backyard. Even repaired, the stains’d put a damper on get-togethers. Which is why I got it free for the hauling.”

Percy’s heart raced. “You got the tent?”

“Amen.” And now Floyd got serious. “Perce, we’ve known each other since we were kids. I’m ashamed to say I did you wrong.”

Percy could hardly breathe. He was suddenly back in the playground, swearing down God’s vengeance, as Floyd cleaned his clock. Again and again and again.

“I’m here to say I’m sorry,” Floyd said.

Percy’s eyes welled. “You’re sorry?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. Very sorry. Forgive me?”

The next thing Percy knew, he was hugging Floyd and sobbing on his shoulder. Floyd eased him onto the porch step and handed him a handkerchief.

“I’m no do-gooder,” Floyd said quietly, as Percy blew his nose. “I’m just a sinner who wants to get the hell out of Hornets Ridge. That bloody tent’s my main chance. All afternoon, I’ve thought, if folks find thrills in tea towels, what’ll they find in the tent of horrors itself? Only thing is — I can’t just sell tickets. Respectable folks’ll need an excuse to go inside.”

“Maybe a sermon?” Percy blurted. He shook his fist over his head. “That tent is the Lord’s living proof, The Wages of Sin Is Death.”

“My thought exactly,” Floyd enthused. “A God-fearing barn burner on that theme’ll pack ’em in. But heck, Perce, I’m no speaker. I can barely sell toothpicks, much less God.”

“So the Lord has sent you unto me!”

“More or less.” Floyd stuck a finger in his collar. “I remember school, Perce. You gave me nightmares for weeks. No kidding. You were one scary bugger. So here’s what I’m driving at. You’re a preacher without a pulpit. I have a pulpit without a preacher. Whadeja say?”

“I say the Lord has worked a wonder in your heart, Brother Floyd!” Percy wrung out the handkerchief and gave his eyes another wipe. “Yea, it be murder, suicide, adultery, and drink have brung this tent unto us, but through our ministry shall innocent souls be snatched from the Pit. Oh Brother Floyd, I say unto you, all things work together for good for those who love the Lord. Let us pray.”

By midnight, Brother Percy was packed; he had but his Bible, his postcard, a few old clothes; a second pair of shoes, the soles patched together with squares of birch bark, bicycle tires, and tacks; a toothbrush and a comb; and his emerging set of little black books. Unable to sleep, he lit his kerosene lamp, and wandered to the cemetery to spend his last night in Hornets Ridge beside his mother’s grave. As he later wrote:

I knelt beside the wooden cross that marked dear Mother’s resting place and traced the grooves of her name with my finger. “I won’t be able to come by so often, Mother,” I said, “for God has laid a mission on me. But you already know that, smiling down from Heaven. You’re the only one who believed in me, who never made fun, besides blessèd Billy Sunday. As he wrote in my postcard, ‘From a little acorn will grow a mighty oak.’ It’s true. For I’m growing, feet planted in the Word of God, arms branched open in the Light of the World. Before I’m through, I’ll be as famous as Brother Billy. More famous, even. They won’t laugh at me then. They’ll bend their knees and pray before me. I’ll make you proud, Mother. I’ll be crowned with glory and have money enough to buy you the biggest stone in the whole darn cemetery. Better than a stone: you’ll have the statue of an angel. For that’s what you are, it’s what you deserve, and it’s what you’ll have, so help me God.”

For a time, God’s Promise looked to be fulfilled. As recorded in Percy’s little black books, those were the glory days, a time of redemption with Satan on the run. The Bennett murders packed the tent that whole first summer; and come frost, Floyd had finagled invitations from the Deep South, where righteous brethren from the hills of Arkansas to the Florida orange groves were keen on hellfire sermons featuring Yankee sinners bobbing in brimstone.

The collections had been equally good: love-offering envelopes sufficiently stuffed to keep up payments on the truck, and on that marble angel for his mother, which he’d got at a discount on account of the left wing being chipped in transit, though not so’s you’d notice, praise the Lord. There was even enough to shell out for beds in private hotels; these inspired more uplifting prayers than those delivered from lumpy mattresses in the basements of local deacons. Nor did the evangelists stint on such accommodation. As Floyd pointed out, “Jesus may have preached to whores, but stay in some flophouse, you think there won’t be talk?”

The evangelists also agreed that the Almighty wanted His employees to look their best. “Rags and sandals are fine for Bible times, but holes in the socks make a lousy advertisement for the Kingdom of God.” So Percy got himself outfitted with two navy, off-the-rack suits from Tip Top Tailors, three starched white shirts, one pair of suspenders, and a snazzy charcoal-grey fedora.

Percy kept a careful tally of all such expenditures on the flesh in his little black books. Here, too, he recorded tallies of the tent’s nightly take, as well as the count of those who hit the sawdust trail, parading up the aisle to fill out decision cards for the Lord. Some of these converts made a habit of getting saved. If Percy knew, he didn’t let on. He was proud of his numbers, and prayed they’d be celebrated like those of his hero, Brother Billy, whose salvation stats had been touted in box scores on the front pages of dailies from L.A. to Washington, Albuquerque to New York.

Percy’s triumphs, however, went unheralded. Local reporters covering the arrival of the tent simply wrote a rehash of the murders. “Those degenerate fornicators get more ink than I do,” Percy groused. To add insult to injury, no one appeared to know how to spell “Brubacher,” an indignity that invariably set Percy to work on some variation of the following letter-to-the-editor.

Dear Buttonbrook Gleaner,

Buttonbrook should count itself good and lucky to have had the internationally renowned revivalist Brother Percy Brubacher preaching out at the bandstand last Saturday night. He has chased the Devil out of Arkansas, Rhode Island, and points between. So it is a crying shame that your editor is so ignorant as to spell his name with a “k.” This is an embarrassment to your paper, a black day for Buttonbrook, and an insult to the Reverend Brother Brubacher, who is more famous than the lot of you put together.

Yours sincerely,

Mr. Herb Potts

As time rolled on, attendance at the tent began to thin. The Bennett killings were stale, jostled out of the spotlight by Al Capone, the Lindbergh baby, and above all else the fallout of the Great Crash. It’s hard to raise a sweat over the death of some playboy when big city skies are raining bankers.

The Depression did more than upstage their act. While a few churches continued to play host, most cut off invitations lest dwindling tithes be siphoned to the competition: charity begins at home. Consequently, Brothers Percy and Floyd had to underwrite production costs, while fending off accusations that they were stealing bread from the mouths of local widows and orphans. It was a strain, especially as the offering envelopes they were accused of filching were increasingly stuffed with newspaper.

Costs up, revenues down, the evangelists scaled back. They lodged at modest bed and breakfasts, which had the attraction of landladies prepared to darn socks, or raise pant hems to disguise frayed cuffs. There was a price for this needlework: widows with a clutch of dead lace at their throats and habitations appointed with dusty bouquets of dried flowers. Such would insist on favouring them with recitals at the parlour piano. “Do you ever dream of domestic bliss?”

The Widow Duffy was a terror in this regard. Her attentions to Brother Percy caused the poor man much consternation, especially at night when she prowled the corridors, ultimately surprising him in the biffy. “Get thee behind me Satan,” he cried, scrambling to cover his privates. The Widow Duffy claimed herself an innocent sleepwalker, but Percy was no fool. “She meant to have her way with me,” he whispered to Brother Floyd. “We must quit this den by daybreak: ‘Flee from temptation, nor let the shadow of it come nigh!’”