But Armfield knew it was the devil working on him, softening him up, to coin a phrase. Just as the devil had laid out the shining cities before Jesus, sweeping his cloven hoof out like a real estate salesman, offering them to the Son of God free and clear and with a righteous right of way if Jesus would only forsake His Father. But Jesus had resisted, and so would Armfield.
But, damn it, we all fall short of the perfection and glory of God. And what would Jesus have done if the old devil had offered him a piece of Nettie's tail instead of some old Jew cities built of mud and stone?
Armfield gazed up at the mahogany crucifix hanging on the wall behind the pulpit. Jesus looked down in return, wooden and Indian colored and sad, peering from under His crown of briars.
Armfield had scored the crucifix at a foreclosure sale, from a Catholic church in a nearby rural county. The Catholics had suffered declining membership and the diocese decided to close the doors. Armfield saw the purchase as one more victory, one more proof of the rightness of the Baptist way. Some of his parishioners had grumbled when he’d placed the icon on the wall, but Armfield had persuaded his flock that the display was conservative, hearkening back to the old days of Christianity.
There was only one Old Time Religion, and that was the Baptist faith. Jesus didn’t belong to some bunch who worshipped Mary and ate wafers. The Son of God belonged to those who were willing to have their heads washed clean of sin. Armfield looked up at the darkly stained wooden face.
"Forgive me, Jesus," the preacher whispered. Then, hearing a door creak open at the rear of the church, he added loudly, "And thank thee, Oh Lord, for thy continued blessing, that it may shine on this, Your church. Amen."
"Amen," added Bill Lemly, his deep voice filling the narrow church hall. Armfield turned and saw Lemly's wide-shouldered frame filling the doorway against the backdrop of the dark, wet world outside. Lemly walked up the aisle, his shoes leaving prints on the red carpet, that tongue of sanctity that carried the sinners forward, nearer to God and close enough to smell the five-dollar-a-pint aftershave that Preacher Blevins wore on Sundays.
"Good evening, Preacher," Lemly said. "Looks like the Lord's brought us some more rain."
"Yes, Brother Lemly. We may need to build ourselves an ark before this one's over with."
"Now, God promised He'd never do that to us again. The next time He destroys the world, it will be with something different. Something good."
What would it be next time? Nuclear rain, man-made brimstone and fire from heaven? Cancer-causing chemicals in our sugar substitutes? Or another eight years of a Democrat-controlled Congress? The Lord worked in mysterious ways.
"So right, Brother,” Armfield said. “But the prophecies are coming together, just as the Bible promised."
"The Lord will be coming soon to take us home, and what a glorious day that will be."
That was one part of this deal that made Armfield uncomfortable. He wanted to go to heaven, wanted to waltz through the Pearly Gates and huddle at the feet of Jesus, plucking a harp and adding his thin voice to the choirs that would sing His praises, forever and ever without end. Armfield just didn't want to do it anytime soon.
One of his secret fears was that one day he'd be plugging along, minding his own business, maybe out checking the trim job on the graveyard hedges or working up the lead paragraph of a kick-ass sermon, and he'd feel a tap on his shoulder. He'd turn around and there would be the Lord Himself, tall and blond and blue-eyed and glowing.
Armfield didn't want to die. At least, not for a long time to come.
"Yes, Brother Lemly, a glorious day that will be," he said, licking his thin lips.
Armfield parted his Bible and tucked his purple nylon bookmark smack in the middle of the Gospel According to Saint Luke. Good a place as any to quote from come Sunday.
One of these days, he was going to get around to reading the Good Book, and from cover to cover, too, not with all this skipping around. He'd started it once when he was sixteen, sat down and zipped through Creation and Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, the greatest story on earth unfolding before his eyes. Then he'd hit the “begats,” and it had been like slamming face first into the wall of a Jewish synagogue: "Such-and-such begat thus-and-so, who in turn… "
Armfield wasn't the world's most educated man. He was a poor reader and the only original thoughts that popped into his head were when he was trying different poses on the fantasized flesh of Nettie Hartbarger. But he’d been the loudest in his class at Henneway. He had been the most outspoken critic of the liberals and the baby-killers and the Catholics and other lower forms of life.
He had prayed for strength and guidance so the Lord might sit on his shoulder and shine His Holy Reading Lamp so that Armfield could do the Lord's will. And finally he'd come to accept that the Lord's will was for Armfield to never finish the Bible. Armfield's dad couldn't even read, but he'd certainly gone to heaven, the way he'd tossed the family's cookie jar money into the collection plate every week. Money that Armfield could have used for orthodontia so his damned front teeth didn't stick out like a knot-sucking beaver's. Money that his mother could have spent on a mammogram, which might have detected the breast cancer that took her to the Lord while Armfield was at Henneway. Money that might have kept his malnourished sister from running away and becoming a hooker in Charlotte.
A flash of lightning blinked outside, once, then three times in succession, flickering across the colored plate glass windows as if they were movie frames. But the Jesus in the plate glass didn't change position, just knelt among those lambs like He was giving them the Sermon on the Mount translated into bleats and baas. Then the thunder rumbled, shaking the hand-hewed arches of the church.
"The Lord's pitching a fit tonight, Preacher," Lemly said, his laughter rumbling as deep as the thunder. “Must be somebody’s doing some serious sinning.”
Armfield nodded from the pulpit. Even though he was on the dais, with a solid oak rail between Lemly and himself, Lemly somehow towered over him, dark eyed and broad faced and muscular and tanned. Lemly had been a football star at State, then had moved back home after graduation and opened a building supply business. Now he owned four stores among the surrounding counties and had another in the works.
This man could sell dogwood timbers to Jesus.
But Brother Lemly was also a church deacon and generous benefactor and county commissioner and Leading Citizen. If Armfield wanted to get a grip on public opinion, to find out how a certain action or statement might play in Windshake, he asked Lemly. Hell, Lemly was public opinion, when you got right down to it.
The front door opened again, and the top of an umbrella poked its way into the church. It spun, sending a silver shower of water drops across the foyer, then lifted, and Armfield's lightbulb-shaped head lit up with a smile.
"Hey, darlin’," he said, forgetting his "preacher voice" for a moment.
"Hi, Dad. Hi, Mr. Lemly," Sarah said. She shook back her hair, her long red hair that was just like her mother's, only not scorched from too many hours under a dryer cone down at Rita Faye's Beauty Salon. Sarah smiled, white and perfect teeth showing between her lips. Armfield made damned sure his kid had gotten her braces, if for no other reason than that she'd never have to look in the mirror and be pissed off at her miserly old man.
"Hello, Sarah," Lemly said. He turned back to Armfield. "Say, Preacher-"
Armfield had insisted that the congregation call him "Preacher" instead of "Reverend." It was much more folksy. Put the parishioners at ease. Got him invited to dinner come Friday. Loosened the purse strings come Sunday.
Kept their guard down. No association in their minds with the Reverend Bakker or the Reverend Swaggart. Or even Falwell, who hadn't been convicted but seemed to leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth just the same. He turned his attention back to Lemly.