“Right!” said Harry. “Which is what people do, now that the Reverend Lester Gull has come to town.”
“He tells them it’s the will of God that they should walk around the tree?”
“Don’t joke, this is not a funny situation.”
“I apologize,” I grinned. “Please continue.”
“Lester Gull,” Harry said with great dignity, “doesn’t even come to the tree himself. Except to stand in the crowd. It’s his students who make my customers walk around the tree.”
“Harry—”
“Harry, please, you’re giving the man heartburn. You eat, I’ll talk.” Pearl turned to face me. “Reverend Gull is training, what do you call them, they preach on TV.”
“Televangelists.”
“That’s right, such a silly word. Maybe they believe what they say, maybe they don’t. But religion isn’t what they learn from Reverend Gull anyway. From him they learn how to ask for money.”
“Specifically?”
“You bet specifically,” Harry broke in. “How to stand under my tree on Sunday afternoon and harangue my customers. They preach and preach and they ask and ask, and the customers get so upset they don’t come on Sundays any more, which is my biggest day because all the weekend people like you when else are they going to come? But now they don’t come, they shouldn’t have to know from the Reverend Lester Gull’s students doing their homework.”
“That’s what it is, their homework?”
“Homework,” Harry asserted. “Their assignment, should they choose to accept it, is to make people feel bad until they give money. Last summer they started this, this practice for picking your pocket. Over the winter they don’t come, but last month they’re back like the birds flying north. My customers are too smart to give money to a fake—” he said this proudly “—but they’re too good not to feel bad when someone asks and they don’t give. So what happens? My customers, they need a left-handed wall stretcher, they come to Hershkowitz’s. While they’re there, it shouldn’t be a total loss, they buy paint, they buy brushes, they buy hammers, they buy nails. But now the preachers yell at them, fire and brimstone and give us money. The customers say, ‘Paint and brushes and hammers and nails we can get at the Agway, those guys won’t bother us.’ So to Hershkowitz’s they don’t come any more, unless for a left-handed wall stretcher. And you can’t make a living, my friend, selling those.”
Harry finished his tale, looked at me mournfully.
“You’ve talked to the sheriff?” I asked.
“Don Brown, I voted for him four times already. ‘Harry,’ he tells me, ‘I’m sorry, but they got a right. The old oak’s in front of your store, but it’s public property. People got a right to give any kind of speech they want there. Nothing I can do.’ ”
“And you talked to the Reverend Gull?”
“The Reverend Gull,” Harry was affronted, “suggested I consider joining his flock. He said I had the makings of a first-class TV preacher. Can you believe this? I told him—”
“What you told him,” said Pearl, “you will not repeat in this house, in front of our friend. It was not nice,” she added to me.
“I’ll bet,” I said. “So. What do you want me to do?”
“Something smart,” Harry said. “You’re a big-city private eye, a very smart man. I want you to think of something very smart, to make the Reverend Lester Gull and his phony preachers go away.”
Harry and I walked through Hanover to the center of town. Kids rode bikes, and dogs chased after them through the bright sun and sharp shadows. Tulips and daffodils glowed in front gardens, and curtains billowed out from open windows.
As we turned onto Main Street a block from Hershkowitz’s, I saw the oak tree and the crowd. The tree was huge, the crowd was small, but the preacher under a drooping branch was giving them his alclass="underline" the arm-waving, the shouts that dropped suddenly to whispers, the finger-pointing, and the burning eyes.
Harry scowled, looked meaningfully at me; then he turned the lock on Hershkowitz’s door and disappeared inside.
I listened for awhile and watched the crowd. The text was from Matthew, the preacher reassuring the onlookers that they were of more value than many sparrows. From that came the pitch: as you have value to the Lord, you must demonstrate the value of the word of the Lord to you; as the Lord sees each sparrow fall, He will see the strength of your faith in the size of your offering. It was a good tie-in, though I didn’t see many takers. What I did see was what Harry was complaining about: people crossing the street, or cutting behind the back of the tree, to avoid the preacher altogether.
I followed Harry inside the store, between shelves jammed with hinges and hacksaw blades, knobs and chains and gardening gloves.
“So?” he said as I reached the counter where he was leaning. “Did you save your soul?”
“I haven’t even seen my soul in years,” I said. “Are all the preachers that good?”
“That’s good?”
“Terrific,” I told him. “Is Lester Gull out there?”
Harry craned his neck to peer through the window. “No. The chicken, he probably knows you’re in town.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “Did you tell him about me?”
“I told him I was going to get someone to fix his wagon. How, I didn’t tell him.”
“Good, because I don’t have a clue how. Listen, Harry, I’m going over to my place, and back to the city tomorrow. I’ll give you a call.”
“I can’t wait,” Harry said.
Harry did wait, until the next Sunday afternoon, when I came back up to Hanover with the results of my week’s work. I checked out the preacher under the oak on my way into the store. He wasn’t as good as the other one, but what he lacked in eloquence he made up in heat. People hurried by, avoiding his accusing eyes.
Inside the store, everything was quiet. Harry leaned disconsolately on the counter. “I called some people I know in Albany,” I told him, “to discuss Heaven’s Messenger. It’s interesting stuff, but it doesn’t do us much good.”
“What good were you looking for it to do us?”
“I don’t know. An outstanding bunco warrant on the Reverend Gull would have been nice.”
“But no?”
“But no. The school is a legal setup, a tax-exempt nonprofit religious institution.”
“But religion he doesn’t teach! He teaches how to make a profit. This makes him a nonprofit?”
“Well, maybe there’s something you could do with that, but it would take time to dig around and then go through channels. You’d have to complain to the attorney general, things like that.”
“Time, my friend, I don’t think I have. A whole season like this, I’m out of business. Where are you going?”
“To the lion’s den,” I said, heading for the door. “The belly of the beast. To the cedars of Lebanon, where the birds make their nests. I’m going to see the Reverend Gull.”
The golden sun was getting ready to sink comfortably behind the hazy hills when I reached Heaven’s Messenger. On a newly painted sign by the side of the road a dove flew out of an open Bible. The old restaurant building and the cabins wore fresh coats of green-trimmed white paint, and the front door had a shiny brass doorknob. I wondered, admiring its glow in the low sun, if it had come from Hershkowitz’s.
My ring was answered by a thin, beak-nosed man whose smile sprang to life a half second late, as though he hadn’t decided whether to activate it until he saw who I was. “Welcome, my friend, welcome!” His bony hands grabbed mine, pressed and pumped. “Heaven’s Messenger welcomes you. You’ve come for the month’s session? Or perhaps the two week intensive study course? Please come in. You’re the first of your class to arrive. I’m Lester, Reverend Lester Gull. You’re...?”