'I CAN'T HEAR YOU, AM I RIGHT?'
'YEAH!!!' They screamed it out, many of them rocking back and forth in a frenzy now.
'IF I'M RIGHT SAY HALLELUJAH!'
'HALLELUJAH!'
'IF I'M RIGHT SAY OH-YEAH!'
'OH-YEAH!'
They rocked back and forth; Jack and Wolf were rocked with them, helplessly. Jack saw that some of the boys were actually weeping.
'Now tell me this,' Gardener said, looking toward them warmly and confidentially. 'Is there any place for the evildoer here in the Sunlight Home? Huh? What do you think?'
'No sir!' cried out the thin boy with the buck teeth.
'That's right,' Sunlight Gardener said, approaching the podium again. He gave the mike a quick, professional flick to clear the cord out from under his feet and then he slipped it back into the clamp again. 'That's the ticket. No room here for tattletale liars and workers of iniquity, say hallelujah.'
'Hallelujah,' the boys replied.
'Amen,' Sunlight Gardener agreed. 'The Lord says - in the Book of Isaiah he says it - that if you lean on the Lord, you're gonna mount up - oh-yeah! - with wings as eagles, and your strength shall be the strength of ten and I say to you, boys, THAT THE SUNLIGHT HOME IS A NEST FOR EAGLES, CAN YOU SAY OH-YEAH!'
'OH-YEAH!'
There was another caesura. Sunlight Gardener gripped the sides of the podium, head down as if in prayer, gorgeous white hair hanging in disciplined waves. When he spoke again, his voice was low and brooding. He did not look up. The boys listened breathlessly.
'But we have enemies,' Sunlight Gardener said at last. This was little more than a whisper, but the mike picked it up and transmitted it perfectly.
The boys sighed - a rustle of wind through autumn leaves.
Heck Bast was looking around truculently, eyes rolling, pimples glowing such a deep red that he looked like a boy in the grip of a tropical illness. Show me an enemy, Heck Bast's face said. Yeah, you go on, show me an enemy and just see what happens to him!
Gardener looked up. Now his mad eyes appeared filled with tears.
'Yes, we have enemies,' he repeated. 'Twice now the State of Indiana has tried to shut me down. Do you know what? The radical humanists can barely stand to think of me down here at the Sunlight Home, teaching my boys to love Jesus and their country. It makes em mad, and do you want to know something, boys? Do you want to know a deep old dark secret?'
They leaned forward, eyes on Sunlight Gardener.
'We don't just make em mad,' Gardener said in a hoarse conspirator's whisper. 'We make em scaaaaaared.'
'Hallelujah!'
'Oh-yeah!'
'Amen!'
In a flash, Sunlight Gardener grabbed the mike again, and he was off! Up and down! back and forth! sometimes he jigged a two-step neat as a minstrel in a 1910 cakewalk! He bopped the word to them, pumping one arm first at the boys, then up toward heaven, where God had presumably dragged up His armchair to listen.
'We scare em, oh-yeah! Scare em so bad they got to have another cocktail, or another joint, or another sniff of coc**ne! We scare em, because even smart old God-denying, Jesus-hating radical humanists like them can smell righteousness and the love of God, and when they smell that they can smell the brimstone coming out of their own pores, and they don't like that smell, oh no!
'So they send down an extra inspector or two to plant garbage under the kitchen counters, or to let loose some cock-a-roaches in the flour! They start a lot of vile rumors about how my boys are beaten. Are you beaten?'
'NO!' they roared indignantly, and Jack was dumbfounded to see Morton roaring the negative out as enthusiastically as all the rest, even though a bruise was already beginning to form on Morton's cheek.
'Why, they sent down a bunch of smart news reporters from some smart radical humanist news show!' Sunlight Gardener cried in a kind of disgusted wonder. 'They came down here and they said, 'Okay, who are we supposed to do the hatchet-job on? We've done a hundred and fifty already, we're experts at smearing the righteous, don't worry about us, just give us a few joints and a few cocktails and point us in the right direction.'
'But we fooled em, didn't we, boys?'
Rumbling, almost vicious assent.
'They didn't find no one chained to a beam in the barn, did they? Didn't find no boys in strait-jackets, like they heard down in town from some of these hellbound School Board jackals, did they? Didn't find no boys getting their fingernails pulled, or all their hair shaved off, or nothing like that! Most they could find was some boys who said they got spanked, and they DID get spanked, oh-yeah, they was spanked and I'd testify on that matter myself before the Throne of Almighty God, with a lie-detector strapped to each arm, because the book says if you SPARE that rod, you gonna SPOIL that child, and if you believe that, boys, you gimme hallelujah!'