He gave his audience a minute to ponder that one, then slammed his fist down. "No!" he cried, now waving the fist in the air. "They didn't worry one whit-because she was a whore! Jehu finally got to feeling sorry about the mess outside and told his men to go bury her, but they came back and said they was right sorry but all they could find was her skull, her feet, and the palms of her hands! That was all that was left of the whore!" Verber stopped to mop his forehead. Several members of the congregation muttered amens, but they didn't sound as if they knew exactly why they were doing it.
Hammet rumbled under his breath. Farther down the row Bubba. made the same noise, and Sissie didn't look all that pleased with the sermon thus far. Sukie, on the other hand, looked dumbstruck by the theatrics. Baby was asleep. I crossed my fingers and wished myself to be elsewhere, but it didn't work. It never does.
Verber sucked in a lungful and let it rip. "Now I'm going to tell you what Jehu had to say about that whore, Jezebel. He said that the dogs ate the flesh and that the corpse was dung upon the face of the field. Those were his precise words, because he knew what ought should happen to whores." He sucked in another lungful and gripped the sides of the pulpit as he leaned forward. "And we know it, too. Even in this very day and age, there are whores who are willing to corrupt good Christian soldiers of the Lord. They tempt them something awful. They encourage otherwise moral men to indulge in the sins of the flesh. These whores are about as carnal as you can get! And there is such a whore right here in Maggody. She's smack-dab in the bosom of our little community."
While he stopped once again to mop his forehead, I realized the rumbling along the pew had intensified until I might as well have been sitting beside a hornet's nest. I don't know if Verber heard any of it, but he shot a hooded look at our merry band before continuing. "But why do we allow it? We're charitable Christians, yes. We're kind and forgiving. We're not the kind of folks to stone a sinner-at least not a penitent sinner who's willing to change her nasty ways. But this whore won't repent! She goes right along tempting men with her big breasts and her curvacious body and her perverted enjoyment of practices way too depraved to describe in the holy house. She encourages those practices-and takes five dollars for doing them!"
He mopped for a minute while the congregation tried to imagine what practices he was referring to, since they sounded interesting. Once he was tidied up, he sternly studied his flock. "What can we do, you ask me? Well, I'm going to tell you what we can do. We can tell this whore we don't want her in our community any longer. We can tell her that we're God-fearing soldiers of the Lord, and we'll no longer tolerate her depravities. We can tell her we're sick of her, that she is an outcast who'd best go somewhere else to engage in her whorin' and moonshinin' and perversions. We can tell her we don't want her kind because we're moral and pure. We are pillars of the Lord!"
I glanced at Hammet, who glanced at Bubba, who sucked in a breath of his own, stood up, and pointed his finger at the figure behind the pulpit. "Pappy!"
And one beat behind him, Sissle leaped up and aimed an equally accusatory finger at the very same person. "Pappy!"
That rather brought the situation to a halt. The silence was such that you could have heard two electrons collide. Maybe a whole sackful of electrons. The proverbial pin would have sounded like a nuclear explosion. Verber recoiled. His face was so frozen in panic that I decided this time we were going to be treated to the spectacle of a public heart attack. Personally, I was enchanted. It made the last threequarters of an hour worth every tedious second. Ruby Bee and Estelle nodded at each other, leading me to further questions regarding their sanity. David Allen was biting down on his lower lip so hard it was likely to bleed.
Finally there was a noise in the back, followed by footsteps down the aisle. Mrs. Jim Bob stomped right up to Bubba Buchanon and jabbed her finger at him. "You are a filthy little liar! How dare you and this wretched sister of yours make that kind of wild, lying accusation in the house of the Lord? You ought to be whipped until you can't sit down for a solid week. Maybe a year!"
Hammet now poked Sukie, who picked up Baby and turned around to stare at the back of the room. Every head in the congregation turned too. What we saw was Jim Bob Buchanon, Hizzoner the Moron, sneaking toward the exit. What we heard was Sukie loudly lisp, "Pappy!"
"Liar!" Mrs. Jim Bob howled.
"No, she ain't," Ruby Bee said, rising to the occasion. She held up the Bible so everyone could see it. "What I got in my hand is Robin Buchanon's family Bible. She couldn't read or write real well, but she had enough sense to record the names of her children's fathers. It seems like Brother Verber begat a couple, as did our fine, upstanding mayor. This is proof. The begats are written in the Bible."
And right there in the Voice of the Almighty Lord Assembly Hall, all hell broke loose. It was wonderful. It really was.
14
David Allen, Hammet, and I slipped outside. Even beside the highway we could hear the accusations flying inside the building, with Mrs. Jim Bob the most audible. By a long shot.
"Interesting timing," I said to Hammet.
He gave me a grin of great innocence and shrugged. "We was going to wait until afterward, but he was saying all them low-down things. It jest seemed like the time."
David Allen nodded. "I thought it was well staged, myself. But what about your father, pal? Wasn't he in there cowering behind a pew?"
"No, he used to live over in Emmet, but I think he moved away a few years back. He weren't all that bad. He gived me a dollar once, but of course Her found it and like to slap me silly."
"Do you know his name?" David Allen asked.
"It's in the goddamn Bible." Hammet sighed, then looked up at me with his puppy-dog expression. "Iffen we can't find him, can I live with you? You might get married sometime to a father what wants a sibling for his own little boy-iffen his little boy gets well."
I bent down and hugged him until he squirmed. "Listen," I said gently, "you know you can't live with me. But we'll find your father and let him know about you. You yourself said he wasn't all that bad. And you can come visit me whenever you want-if you don't complain about sleeping on the sofa or being left alone all day while I do police work."
Which I needed to do. I was in the middle of asking David Allen if he'd keep Hammet for an hour when a pickup truck drove past us and stopped in front of the Emporium across the road. My whiskery, dope-smoking friend got out of the truck and waved a half-eaten ice-cream cone at me. I told everybody to sit tight and went across the street.
"How are Poppy and the baby?" I asked.
"They're cool. How about you?"
A dark-haired man with the motions of a panther came out of the store, a gasoline can in one hand and a package of light bulbs in the other. Ignoring me, he glowered at Zachery. "I told you to be back an hour ago. What the hell kept you? Are you trying to fuck with me for some reason?"
"Hey, man, don't come down on me. Rainbow told me to wash the truck. It was so dusty she thought it might contaminate the bottled water or something screwy like that." He grinned at me. "Have you met Nate here?"
"You're the one who wasn't around last night to fetch the midwife," I said pleasantly, considering. "You'd gone off in the truck, so I ended up driving all over the county to find her."
"Yeah, tough luck," he muttered.