His voice stitched in and out of Evie’s thoughts, rising above them sometimes as a new topic jolted into view and then submerging while she decided whether to go to school tomorrow, planned a menu, wondered what Drum was thinking with his mouth so straight and set. At her left, David shifted his weight but kept his eyes pinned on Brother Hope. The congregation commented on the sermon during each pause. “It’s true. It’s true.” “Amen.” “Ain’t that so?” Like poor listeners in an ordinary conversation, they seemed likely to jump up at any moment and interrupt to tell experiences of their own. Only none of them did. Instead, Evie began to worry that it would be she herself who interrupted. Pauses between paragraphs grew longer and quieter, swelling until they might burst forth with her own voice saying something terrible. Ordinary ministers picked a single, narrow theme for each sermon; Brother Hope tried to cover the world in an hour. Faced with the leap from one topic to another, from the evils of pre-teen dating to the inevitability of death and from there to the unnaturalness of working mothers, he kept taking a breath and hesitating, as if he worried about the abyss he had to span; and every time it happened Evie drew in her breath too. She was not certain what would burst forth. She gripped the chair in front of her, and the man who sat in it turned to show her the expectant, circular eyes of a baby.
“Our children are no longer safe,” said Brother Hope. “Golden nets are cast to reel them into evil and we say, ‘It’s only music. We had music,’ we say, but we had the waltz and ‘Mairzy Doats.’ My friends, I say unto you, go into your parlors some night and watch your children dancing. Is that innocence? I can cite chapter and verse. A young man driving home from a jukebox joint crashed into a Good Humor truck and died; marijuana in his glove compartment. His name was Willie Hammond, if you care to check on that. A young girl living within your own town limits slashed her forehead with the name of a rock-and-roll singer; ruined her life for nothing. If you don’t believe me, her name was Eve Decker; the singer sang at the—”
“Wait,” Evie said. “That’s me.”
She stood up, still gripping the chair in front of her, and looked around at all the upturned faces. Hearing her name in public, even when she had expected it, gave her a ripped-open feeling. She couldn’t think why David was smiling at her and nodding. “You take that back,” she told Brother Hope.
“We are all friends here,” said Brother Hope.
“Well, I’m not. You’re speaking libel. Slander. I did not ruin my life, it was not for nothing. How can you say such a thing?”
Brother Hope was fiddling with the ends of his scarf and staring at her forehead. “Please, now, please,” he said. “Any burden you have—”
“I don’t have any burdens!” Evie shouted. “I didn’t ruin my life, I married him!”
A flashbulb snapped in her face, an explosion of light that faded to a squirmy green circle. It took her a moment to remember about the photographer. She watched the circle drift over to Brother Hope’s face, and then she let go of the chair.
“Well,” she said finally. “The place he was talking about is the Unicorn, out on the south highway. The singer is Drum Casey, who is my husband and just got fired for—”
“Sit down,” Drum said.
“—for the last day of the week he was working. Just got his working time cut day by day, raising his hopes and then lowering them again, and if anybody really cared about Christian love they would call up the Unicorn and say, ‘Where is Drum Casey? Why isn’t he there? We want—’ ”
Drum rose. “I don’t have to allow this,” he said.
“Why, Drum.”
“Shut up,” Drum told her. “Sit down.”
“Please, my friends. Please,” said Brother Hope, and he looked over either shoulder although there was nothing but a blank wall behind him.
“Drum, I am only trying—”
“She’s doing great, Drum,” David said.
“You shut up too,” said Drum. “I have had enough publicity tonight to put me six feet under. And you—” he said, turning suddenly on Brother Hope, who opened his mouth and took a breath, “you and your sacrifices to false gods, that’s a bunch of bull. It’d been a hell of a lot more sacrifice if she’d been prettier to begin with. Get going, Evie. We’re through here.”
He took hold of her arm just above the elbow. He pushed her out ahead of him and Evie went, boneless and watery, knocked sick by what he had said. David had her by the other hand. “Now, then,” he kept whispering. “Now, wait.…”
They rode home in a swelling, suspended silence, as if this were just another pause in Brother Hope’s sermon. David kept clearing his throat. Evie expected to cry but could not. Drum sat beside her with his face set straight ahead, his hands on his knees. Once he drew in his breath as if he meant to speak, but he said nothing.
14
That week’s newspaper carried a photograph of Evie hunched forward behind a seated man, as if she were pushing him in a wheelchair. Her face looked surprised. “Evangelist Ends Sojourn in Pulqua,” the caption read. “Brother Evan Hope left Pulqua yesterday after two weeks at the Tabernacle of God. He described his stay as ‘heartwarmingly successful.’ Above, a local teen-ager protests his attack on rock music.” Evie threw the newspaper aside, not bothering to show Drum. But the next day David drove all the way out to their house to tell them that Drum had been re-hired at the Unicorn. “You can thank Evie for this,” he said. “Word of mouth spread what she did all over town. People kept calling Zack and asking where Drum Casey was.”
“What do you know,” said Drum. He didn’t look up from the magazine he was leafing through. “Anything I hate, it’s indecision. I wish Zack would just fire me for good and get it over with.”
“When are you going to be satisfied? You got your Saturday nights back, didn’t you?”
“Sure. I guess so.” Then Drum turned another page of his magazine.
What he had said to Evie at the Tabernacle was buried now, not erased but buried beneath the new grave courtesy he showed toward her. He had never apologized. For several days he treated her very gently, helping her with the dishes and listening with extreme, watchful stillness whenever she spoke to him. It was the most he could do, Evie figured. She shoved down the Tabernacle memory every time it floated up in her mind; yet evenings, when they sat doing separate things in the lamplight, she sometimes wanted to leap up and ask, “What you said, did you mean it? You must have or you would never have thought it. But did you mean it for all time, or just for that moment? Are you sorry you married me? Why did you marry me?” None of the questions were ones Drum would answer. She kept quiet, and only watched him from across the room until he looked up and raised his eyebrows. Then the questions began to occur to her less frequently. Whole days passed without her remembering, and gradually she and Drum drifted back to the way they had been before.
Drum returned to his Saturdays at the Unicorn without a word, played his songs and came home as soon as his last set was over. He never went without Evie. She felt that her hold on her school work was slipping, and sometimes she suggested that he go alone while she studied, but Drum said, “Nah, you can study some other time. You’re so smart, one night won’t hurt you.” Yet while he played he stared over her head, never directly at her.
“We went two-ing on the one.
“We went circling on the square.
“We went adding on the divide.”