That Saturday she was happy. She felt that things were going well again. But by Monday everything had changed. Zack Caraway drove out in person to say that Drum was no longer needed, even for Saturdays. He stood in the middle of the room looking around him unhappily, twisting his hat in his hands. “I was going to say it two nights ago,” he said, “but they was a rush toward the end and I put it off. Now, all I’ve had this winter is bad luck and I know you will argue, Drum, but what can I do? My money has went. If you want to come on Sundays to the free-for-all, I would be right happy to have you, but that’s the most I …”
Drum never said a word. She had expected another fight, but he just sat in the couch with his face toward the window, his long brown eyes reflecting the winter light, not even protesting as Zack cut the last inch from him. After Zack had left he drank two beers and listened to a record. Then David came by, and they played a game of darts. Drum seemed insulated; if Evie mentioned Zack, he looked away from her and all she saw was the smooth olive line of his cheek.
“Zack is slipping,” David told her. “If he had eyes he could see that what that Tabernacle crowd is after is you and Drum.”
“Well, tell him that.”
“I can’t tell him.”
“Somebody should. Brother Hope is giving the Unicorn free publicity and nobody even takes advantage of it.”
Publicity was everything. She felt that more and more. She thought of publicity as the small, neat click that set into motion machines that had previously been disengaged. Drum’s music, beating like a pulse, had started leaving her ears with a cotton-wool feeling, and his speaking out was harder to understand with every show; but if there were crowds of screaming fans, then everything would click into working order. “If we could only spread Brother Hope,” she said. “Get his sermons where they mattered more — not just to little old scared country people.”
“No way of doing that,” David said.
“Why not? We could go to the Tabernacle and make a big fuss, get a newspaper write-up.”
“Naw,” David said.
But she wore him down. Over a two-day period she filled his mind with pictures — Brother Hope looking startled, a reporter asking what all the trouble was about, a news item on Drum Casey’s protest at a church attack. David moved forward inch by inch, balking sometimes so that she wished she could just give up. There was too much expected of her, she thought. All this arguing, urging, encouraging. Alone, she heard the driving rhythm of her own voice echoing wordlessly through her mind. But there was Drum. She watched him when he wasn’t looking, and felt hollow with worry when she saw him slumped on the couch endlessly circling the rim of a beer can with his index finger. “Oh, why not, let’s go and give Brother Hope a try,” David said one evening. Drum didn’t even look up.
And when David came by Thursday night and said, “You ready?” Drum said, “Ready for what?”
“The Tabernacle of God, of course,” David said.
“You wouldn’t catch me dead in the Tabernacle of God.”
“Well, what the hell, Drum, where you been all this time? We been discussing the Tabernacle three days now and you never said a word against it.”
“Oh, never mind,” said Evie. “We’ll go alone. It’s only for a couple of hours.”
“Then what about me?” Drum asked.
“You said you didn’t want to come.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do, just sit here till you get back? Looks like everyone is leaving me all the time.”
“Lord,” said David.
So they all went. They rode in David’s Jeep. Wind whistled in under the canvas flaps, and Evie shivered inside her thin school coat and huddled closer to Drum’s side. Her hair was pulled straight off her forehead, held by a flaking gold barrette. When she looked into the rear-view mirror her scars glinted back at her, right side to, but dim as an old photograph. Her features were wavery and uncertain. “Now that we’re really going I feel like a fool,” she said. “I don’t even have a plan in mind.”
David said, “Well, I did call that photographer from the newspaper. Publicity’s no good without a photograph.”
“If I hear that word publicity again,” Drum said, “I’m going to puke.”
“Now, Drum.”
The Tabernacle was on Main Street, an old white clapboard house between a pizzeria and a shoe repair shop. A sign cross the porch said, “Pulqua Tabernacle of God. Everybody ‘Welcome.’ Come on in Folks,” with the sermon title tacked beneath it: “What Next?” Nailed to a pillar was another of Brother Hope’s posters, with his eyes unfocused and frightened, as if he could see straight to hell. Spinsters in high-heeled galoshes and old men in suit jackets and overalls filed past the poster toward a brightly lit door. Evie followed, holding tightly to Drum’s hand so that nothing would separate them. She had pictured something bigger and more anonymous, like a lecture hall; not this oversized front parlor lined with folding chairs and hung with dusty curtains. An old lady with lace laid across her shoulders like antimacassars pressed Evie’s hand in both of her own. “Good evening, children, you won’t regret this,” she said. When she saw Evie’s forehead she smiled harder and gazed far away, blinking several times, as if she had received an insult she wanted to overlook. Evie clutched Drum’s and David’s elbows and led them toward the chairs in the back of the room.
“I wish we hadn’t come,” she said.
“Told you so,” said Drum.
“Well, I forgot how creepy these places are. I don’t like the smell.”
David was the only one who stayed cheerful. “Smells all right to me,” he said, and he took a deep breath of the air — dry wood, hand-me-down hymnals, and dust. “Yonder is the photographer,” he told Evie.
“What’s he doing way up front?”
“He has to be far enough away to photograph us.”
“Us?” Evie said.
“Who else?”
“Well, yes, of course,” Evie said, but she wished she had thought this thing through before she came.
Brother Hope appeared on a small raised platform up front. He was red and knotty-faced, like a man swelling with anger but choking it down. His hair was plastered sleekly across his skull; and he wore a long black robe with a striped woolen scarf hanging from his shoulders. “All rise,” he said. His voice was thin and stifled.
Everybody rose. Forty chairs creaked and snapped.
“I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord. ‘In the Garden.’ ”
“In the Garden” sounded strange without a piano. The women sang in high, sliding voices, as if they were complaining, and the men made muttering sounds beneath the tune. Evie, who disliked hymns, stayed silent. When all the verses had been sung they sat down again, and Brother Hope gripped both sides of the pulpit.
“We are gathered here,” he said, “as lone survivors on a sinking ship. Only you and I know that ship is sinking. Only you and I seek to find the rotting planks. Art thou weary? Art thou languid? Then thou art smarter than thy neighbor, for thou hast seen the water rising beneath the planks. Last month, my friends, I was in Norville. A man buying a popular magazine was told that the price had gone up, and I heard him ask, ‘What next?’ ‘What next?’ he said. Well, that started me thinking, my friends. What next for us, in the life beyond, I thought, if things continue like they’re going now? Today there are women wearing the garb of men, men in stupors from the fumes of alcohol and the taste of foreign mushrooms, dancers dancing obscenities in public and everywhere, on every corner of the earth, sacrifices made to false gods and earthly idols. What next? What next?”