SIX
At the little Prairie, thirty miles lower down, [the steam-boatmen] were bro’t to by the cries of some of the people, who thought the earth was gradually sinking but declined to take refuge on board without their friends, whom they wished to collect. Some distance below the little Prairie the bank of the river had caved in to a considerable extent, and two islands had almost disappeared.
Natchez, January 2,1812
The Reverend Noble Frankland looked into his wife’s sitting room. “Time to go, sweetie pie,” he said.
Sheryl looked up from her work. “Just a second, teddy bear,” she said.
Sheryl used tweezers to pick up a tiny piece of paper, no larger than the head of a pin, dip it carefully in glue, and then place it carefully in the eye of an angel.
She was doing her art. Sheryl had been working at this project for longer than the twelve years of her marriage to Frankland.
Her chosen medium was postage stamps. Sheryl bought them by the thousands, the more colorful the better, and cut them up into tiny pieces each the size of a snowflake. These she glued onto bolts of black-dyed linen in designs representing scenes from the Book of Revelation. The pictures were amazingly intricate, like those miniature paintings drawn with three-hair brushes, but the scale of the work was enormous. The entire work was over fifty feet long, and Frankland had never been permitted to see all of it, though occasionally he’d caught glimpses of it over Sheryl’s shoulder as she worked. Just the bits he’d seen took his breath away. Horsemen and angels, the saved and the damned, the Whore of Babylon and the City of God, all blazing in the brightest of colors, all shown in the most exacting detail. When Sheryl depicted a demon, she showed it to the pockmarks on its skin and the gleam of wickedness in its eyes. You could practically smell the garlic on its breath.
No commercial artist could ever produce work like this. The labyrinthine detail combined with the huge scale would have defeated any attempt to profit from such a work. Only a person inspired to devote her life to the work could possibly assemble such a thing.
Frankland stood by and waited for Sheryl to finish. She had always wanted to be a pastor’s wife, and she hadn’t shrunk from any of her duties, but when they married she had demanded one promise from him. “I want you to let me have an hour a day to work on my Apocalypse,” she’d said. “And the rest of the time is for you and the Lord.”
He hadn’t minded. Frankland had projects of his own. They’d spent many hours in pleasant silence, Sheryl working on her art, Frankland working on his plans— perhaps equally detailed— for the End Times, the plans that he kept in fireproof safes in the guest bedroom closet.
Sheryl finished the angel’s eye— it glowed a beautiful aquamarine blue, with a little wink of postage-stamp light in a corner of the pupil— then blew on the glue to dry it and rolled up the linen scroll. “I’m ready, sugar bear,” she said.
The picket signs were thrown in the back of the pickup truck, and Sheryl climbed into the driver’s seat. Sheryl put the truck in gear and wrestled the wheel around to point it toward Rails Bluff.
The pickup was a full-size Ford, and Sheryl had to work hard to make the turn, but Frankland did not want power steering on his vehicles. Or air-conditioning, power brakes, power windows, or power anything.
It wasn’t that he objected to these conveniences as such. It was just that he figured that during the Tribulation, spare parts for power steering mechanisms and other conveniences might be hard to come by, and he didn’t want his ministry to be immobilized by the failure of something he didn’t actually need.
He wiped sweat from his brow with his handkerchief. Maybe, he thought, he should have relaxed his principles in regard to air-conditioning.
At least the sun was beginning to sink toward the west. The heat would soon begin to fade.
The truck jounced out of the driveway and onto the asphalt. Frankland rolled his window all the way down, and inclined his head toward the air that blasted into the cab as the truck picked up speed. He waved at Joe Johnson, one of his parishioners, who was pacing along the edge of one of his catfish ponds. Johnson looked up from beneath the brim of his Osgold feed cap and gave a wave.
The pickup drove on. Cotton fields broadened on either side of the road.
“Robitaille,” Sheryl said flatly. She slowed, swinging the big truck toward the shoulder. A large, elderly Lincoln zoomed past, heading in the opposite direction, its driver a dark silhouette behind its darkened windshield. Frankland looked over his shoulder at the Lincoln as it roared away. He could feel distaste tug at his features.
“Driving like a maniac, as usual,” he said.
“Driving like a drunk,” said Sheryl.
The Roman Enemy, Frankland thought, and turned to face the foe.
The Rails Bluff area had so few Catholics that there was no full-time priest in the community. The little clapboard Catholic church shared its priest with a number of other small churches in the area, and Father Robitaille drove from one to the other on a regular circuit. In Rails Bluff he heard confession and said mass on Monday nights, then roared off in his rattletrap Lincoln to be in another town by Tuesday morning.
Robitaille did not show the Church of Rome to very good advantage. He was from Louisiana originally, but alcoholism had exiled him to rural Arkansas. And he drove like a crazy man even when sober, so sensible people slowed down and gave him plenty of room when they saw him coming.
“I don’t know how he’s avoided killing himself,” Sheryl said.
“The Devil protects his own,” said Frankland.
A cotton gin shambled up on the right, corrugated metal rusting behind chain link. 750 friendly people welcome you, a road sign said.
The population estimate was an optimistic overestimate. Both in terms of number, and perhaps even in friendliness.
The Arkansas Delta, below the bluff, featured some of the richest agricultural soil in the world combined with the nation’s poorest people. The mechanization of the cotton industry had taken the field workers off the land without providing them any other occupation. The owners had money— plenty of it— but everyone else was dirt-poor.
Rails Bluff, however, envied even the folks in the Delta, and sat on its ridge above the Delta like a jealous stepsister gazing down at a favored natural child. The county line ran just below the town on its bluff, and all the tax revenue from the rich bottom land went elsewhere. It was as if God, while showering riches on everyone in the Delta, had waved a hand at everyone above the bluff and said, “Thou shalt want.”
In the Delta, many people were poor, and a few were rich. In Rails Bluff, nobody was rich.
Now that a Wal-Mart superstore had opened in the next county, things in Rails Bluff had grown worse. The hardware store had just gone under, and the clothing store was hanging on by its fingernails.
If the world did not end soon, Frankfand thought, Rails Bluff might well anticipate the Apocalypse and vanish all on its own.
The truck drove past an old drive-in theater, grass growing thick between the speaker stanchions, and then passed into town. Sheryl pulled into the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly, and Frankland saw that Reverend Garb was already waiting, standing with one of his deacons, a man named Harvey, and a smiling, excited crowd of young people, members of his youth association.
Garb was a vigorous man in gold-rimmed spectacles, pastor of Jesus Word True Gospel, the largest local black church. The kids— all boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen— were all neatly dressed in dark slacks and crisp white shirts. Garb and Harvey added ties to the uniform. All wore white armbands.
Frankland hopped out of the pickup and shook Garb’s hand. “Glad you could make it, Brother Garb.” He looked at Garb’s youth brigade. “I hope my parishioners give us such a good turnout.”
“I’m sure they will, Brother Frankland. Some are here already.”
Frankland looked at the rows of cars and trucks parked at the Piggly Wiggly, saw familiar faces emerging. He greeted his parishioners as they approached, heartened by their numbers.
As he was talking to one of his deacons, a battered old 1957 Chevy pickup, rust red and primer gray, rolled off Main Street into the parking lot, a big man at the wheel. There was a gun rack in the truck’s rear window with an old lever-action Winchester resting in it. Frankland walked toward the pickup truck to greet its driver. Pasted on the back window was a sticker that read TRUST IN GOD AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT.
“Hey, Hilkiah,” said Frankland.
“Hey, pastor,” Hilkiah said cheerfully.
Hilkiah Evans stepped out of the truck. He was a tall man with broad shoulders, powerful arms, and a pendulous gut. His prominent nose had been broken over most of his face, and his arms were covered with tattoos. The old ones, the skulls and daggers and the Zig-Zag man that dated from his time in prison, were getting blurry with age as the ink began to run— a contrast to the later tattoos, the face of Jesus and the words “Jesus is Lord,” which were sharp and clear. A naked woman, prominent on his left bicep, had been transformed into an angel through the addition of a pair of wings and a halo.
Hilkiah was one of Frankland’s success stories. After his second stretch for armed robbery, Arthur Evans had been introduced to Frankland by a member of his church, Eliza Tomkins, who was also his parole officer. Though Arthur had at first resisted Frankland’s efforts to get his mind straight, it was clear that Eliza had detected a void in the man, a void that needed to be filled with belief and with the Light.
And, by and by, Arthur had listened, and as a mark of his conversion had changed his name to Hilkiah. Now he was one of Frankland’s stalwarts, a deacon and a tireless organizer. He had joined the Apocalypse Club and purchased a two years’ supply of food, although he’d had to do it on credit. Though he always had to scrape to make ends meet and was always working at least two jobs in the community, Hilkiah nevertheless donated much of his time to work at the radio station, to helping with church projects, with the youth and outreach programs.
And of course with the Christian Gun Club. He had given a great many young parishioners their first lessons in the use of a firearm.
His involvement with the Gun Club was, technically, illegal and a violation of his parole. But since his parole officer was also a member of Frankland’s congregation, she had decided to ignore the technicalities.
Besides, it was ridiculous to tell someone in a place like Rails Bluff that he couldn’t own a gun, even if he was a convicted armed robber. Sometimes the law was just silly.
“Hope I’m not late,” Hilkiah said.
“Not at all. I’ve barely got here myself.”
Hilkiah reached into the bed of his truck and lifted up a large Coleman cooler. “I brought some Gatorade. Thought people might get thirsty in this heat.”
“Bless you, Brother Hilkiah,” Frankland said. He should have thought of that himself.
Hilkiah set up the cooler on the tailgate of his truck along with some plastic cups. Reverend Garb came over to shake hands with Hilkiah, and then he turned to Frankland.
“Shall we get started?“ he asked. “Or are we waiting for someone?”
Frankland glanced along the road. “I was expecting Dr. Calhoun,” he said. “Maybe we should wait a few more minutes.”
Garb glanced toward Bear State Videoramics. “There’s Magnusson standing in the door,” he said. “He doesn’t look so happy to see us.”
“He that seeketh mischief,” Hilkiah said, “it shall come unto him.”
“The way of transgressors is hard,” said Garb, skipping a little further in the Book of Proverbs.
There was a silence while the others waited for Frankland to produce a quote, but Frankland’s mind spun its gears while it groped through its limited stock of citations, and it was Hilkiah who finally filled the silence with “A wicked man is loathsome, and committed to shame.”
“’Scuse me, teddy bear,” said Sheryl. “You forgot something.”
Sheryl approached and tied a white band around his arm. “Thanks, honey love,” said Frankland.
“I’m going to go back to the studio and check up on Roger,” Sheryl said. “I’ll be back at ten o’clock to pick you up, okay?”
“Okay,” Frankland said. They kissed, and she walked to the truck. Roger was the boy volunteer they had minding the radio station— not a big job, because all he had to do was load prerecorded programs— but Roger was fourteen, and Sheryl didn’t want to leave him alone with complicated equipment for too long a stretch of time.
“The Lord gave you a good woman, there,” Garb said with a smile.
“Don’t I know it,” said Frankland.
The rear wheels of the Ford spat gravel as it wheeled out of the parking lot, horn tooting. Another auto horn answered, and Frankland saw Dr. Lucius Calhoun boom into the parking lot in his Oldsmobile, waving from the window with his left arm as he spun the wheel with his right. He was followed by a regular convoy of vehicles, and as they drove into the parking lot they all began to sound their horns, a joyous noise unto the Lord.
“Sorry to be late,” Calhoun said as he popped out of his car. He was a young man, short and vigorous, barely thirty though already bald on top, with a ginger mustache and a broad grin. He shook Frankland’s hand and Garb’s.
“We were planning on coming in the bus,” he said. “We had bus-sized banners and everything. But that ol’ fuel pump started kicking up again, so we had to convoy down.”
Dr. Calhoun seemed to spend as much time waging war with his church bus as he did fighting the Devil. Frankland had always enjoyed the stories of Calhoun’s travails.
On the other hand, the Pentecostal Church could at least afford a bus. At Frankland’s outfit, all the money went into the radio station and the bunkers of survival supplies.
“Shall we get started?” Frankland said.
Each pastor organized his own flock, handing out signs that said PORNOGRAPHY ATTACKS THE FAMILY or RAILS BLUFF FAMILY VALUES CAMPAIGN or FIRST AMENDMENT DOES NOT PROTECT FILTH.
Some of the children had signs that said PROTECT ME FROM SMUT.
Bear State Videoramics, to its disgrace, had been renting pornographic videos out of its back room. And, to the disgrace of the community, this had apparently been going on for some time.
Action was clearly required. The world would end soon, and Frankland did not wish Rails Bluff to acquire more than its necessary share of the divine wrath.
Frankland had an idea about how to deal with these sorts of situations. He could, of course, gather signatures on a petition, and lobby and persuade the county council to pass an ordinance against pornography, but then the ordinance would immediately become the subject of legal contention— the Civil Liberties Union, or other secular satanist busybodies, might intervene, and lawyers would cost the county money, and the thing could drag on for years without resolution, and in the meantime Eric Magnusson would still be peddling porn.
So quicker action was called for. A stern warning from the guardians of the community. A picket line, a public protest, and a call for a boycott.
Hit him where it hurts, Frankland thought. Right in the pocketbook. Magnusson couldn’t be making that much money as it was— nobody in Rails Bluff was making money. Magnusson couldn’t afford to lose much business.
And the best part was, even the Civil Liberties Union agreed that picket lines and civil protest were just fine. Just citizens exercising their rights to state their opinion.
“Don’t reckon you’re going to give up this foolishness anytime soon, huh?” said Magnusson.
Frankland looked up from tying a white band on the arm of one of his Sunday School class. The owner of Bear State Videoramics stood above him, red-gold hair gleaming in the setting sun, a scowl on his long Swedish face.
“I reckon not,” Frankland said.
“What’s the problem?” Magnusson said. “I’ve got a right to earn a living.”
“You’re not allowed to earn a living by poisoning the community,” Frankland said. “Somebody might pay you to put cyanide in the water, but that doesn’t mean you should take the money.”
Magnusson scowled. “I don’t sell to no kids,” he said, “so I don’t know why you got kids here. They’ll find out more about porn from you than from me.”
“They’ll know to avoid it,” Garb said. He had walked over from where he had been organizing his youth association members.
“I won’t stay in business without the back room,” Magnusson insisted. “You want another business to close in this town? What about my family?”
“The righteous,” said Garb, “eat to the satisfaction of their soul; but the belly of the wicked shall want.”
“Vileness shall meet with requital, and loud shall be the lamentations thereof,” Frankland said, his mind spitting out the quote before his tongue could put a stop to it. He had to admit he had no idea whether the verse was actually in the Bible or not, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Garb’s eyes flicker as he tried to identify the quote.
Magnusson only looked grim. He glanced over the assembling parishioners and nodded to himself. “I see some of my best customers here,” he said. “People who rent from the back room a lot. You want their names?” He looked at Frankland. “What’s that quote, from the Bible? About the beam in the eye messing up your view, or something?”
Garb seemed troubled by this revelation, but Frankland knew the answer. “They would not have sinned,” he said, “if you had not provided the means.”
“Oh yeah. It’s all my fault. Blame the lusts of the world on me.” He waved his arms. “If they don’t get the stuff from me, they’ll get it on mail order.”
He stalked back to his store. Frankland watched him go in satisfaction.
“It’s working,” he said, and smiled.
Calhoun approached, a broad grin on his face. “Shall we start with a prayer?” he said.