As for the vest, Brother Rowbottom had put that on in all innocence.
He did not understand why it had been left in his shack, although the preacher found it folded far too carefully to suggest inadvertence; in fact it lay atop the very corner of the mattress beneath which he himself had deposited the recently acquired single-action Colt. And the revolver was what he had returned for, of course, after concluding his brief chore. Actually his inquiry had been superfluous; he knew full well that the model would pawn in any saloon for just the figure its previous owner had named.
But then he almost did not go out again after all. Instead, musing absently, he stood for a period as if expecting something, his eyes fast to nothing in particular and yet quite bright, quite alert. What the preacher hoped for was a call, a beckoning, an invocation from elsewhere than in this world. He had been anticipating one for some time now.
Because he had heard such pronouncements before, if not recently. The earliest had come at sixteen, when his family was migrating westward from Tennessee. Indians had attacked their wagon string, killing everyone except Row-bottom himself, although leaving him with his left arm so severely mutilated they obviously believed him dead, and failing to lift his scalp only because, inexplicably, he had already been completely bald for years. Rowbottom wandered in a delirium for days before stumbling into a mining camp where someone was able to complete the necessary amputation.
That was when he first heard the voice, during his convalescence. “Brother, you been chose,” was all it said, but he was confident he knew generally what was implied, if not in the particulars. His father had been a sometime preacher before him, as were several uncles. There were perhaps forty miners in the camp, and his exhortations amused them for a time. But when it occurred to him one bright morning to fire the shed in which the communal whiskey was stored, rather than any appreciation of his zeal it was only his height, and his correspondingly exceptional stride, that got him out of the territory alive.
But he was to change his mind about drink as a vice anyway, or have it changed. This happened after he made his way to Oklahoma to live with a relative, one of the preaching uncles. The man accepted Rowbottom as an acolyte of sorts, restricting him to such ministrations as driving tent pegs and hawking Bibles initially, but finally letting him try his hand in the pulpit also. He made no comment afterward, offered no criticism, or not until some weeks later when he suggested that the boy try again. “But this time you might interpolate a bit more hot pee and vinegar amid the words,” he said then. This was about three o’clock, with a camp meeting scheduled at five, and he handed the boy a jug. Rowbottom almost fell from the improvised dais half a dozen times. He made twice that many conversions.
So if it wasn’t drink, he began to wonder if his special vocation might have to do with women. There was only one in the uncle’s home town, or one of the sort he had in mind, and Rowbottom set out with a characteristic vengeance to redeem what he took to be her unwittingly strayed soul. Surprisingly, the whore proved interested in the notion herself, or so it appeared when she cooperated to the extent of letting the boy talk himself hoarse for three consecutive hours, and even supplied him with whiskey of her own when it became evident that this was what primed him. But then when he was barely able to keep his feet she locked the door and proceeded to teach him a thing or two about what he thought he had been talking about. “So I got to marry you,” he said, “as a penance. It’s the sole way to salvation, fer the both of us.”
The woman threw him out then, but he persisted, if limited to remonstrance from beneath her window now. And when even a bucket of slops over the head failed to deter him, she at last seemed to capitulate. “All right,” she told him, “since it looks like I either got to be saved from ordinary everyday sinning or else have murder on my conscience to boot. Tomorrow then. You come back tomorrow night and we’ll get fixed up.”
She had six or eight of her better clients in on it by then, one of whom happened to be the local justice of the peace, the rest ostensibly serving as witnesses. Rowbottom himself failed to discern how any of them were expected to fulfill the latter function in a room where all the lamps had been extinguished, but the woman insisted. “It’s more romantic in the dark,” she assured him, even squeezing his hand, although the ceremony did not take long anyway. But then when a lamp finally did go on the whore lay doubled up on the floor laughing and the hand he now found himself clutching belonged to a squat, dumpy, incredibly square-headed Indian girl, a Kiowa apparently and obviously as befuddled as Rowbottom himself, if also too drunk to stand.
He was in Sweetwater, Texas, a month after vaulting the whore’s window ledge, when he glanced up from a pulpit one evening to find her gazing at him blissfully from the rear of his newest congregation, unpresuming actually, and with the expression on her quadrangular face very much like wonderment at her own temerity, but at the same time waving a small, folded, and already long filthy paper that he understood from the length of the room away would be the certificate, the Oklahoma license. It was only chance that the first horse he spied belonged to a federal marshal. And even then Rowbottom was another full week’s ride removed in less than four days, but they had telegraphed ahead.
So he was on the rockpile when the voice came again. This time it said only, “Wait, now,” but he might have anticipated that. He had been given ten years.
Two years after he got out he was still waiting. But then when he happened upon Yerkey’s Hole, finally, at long last, he began to sense a certain urgency again, a renewed purpose, although he could never fully grasp it. But even the town’s name was a hint. “Yerkey’s Hole,” he asked someone. “You mean it were a famous water well?”
“It were a whore,” he was told, “name of Yerkey.” So when he started to preach at the brothel, it was in the realization that he had best keep his hand in. Because it could not be long now.
Then something horrendous happened to him. He had been in the town perhaps a week and was strolling aimlessly one evening, passing an abandoned suder’s wagon, when she loomed up from the shadows behind it. “You want bim-bam, mister?” she asked him. It was dark, and it had been exactly twelve years. But there was no mistaking that blunt, flat head, that squat form. Rowbottom almost collapsed on the spot.
But a miracle occurred. She was peering directly at him, seeming almost to study him even, yet no recognition crossed her face at all, and when she persisted in hailing him it was only in regard to her original proposition, her modest semiprofessional offering. Rowbottom ran into her several more times in the next weeks, once at last deliberately approaching her wagon in daylight, but by then he was positive she had forgotten. “So that’s a sign by itself,” he decided. “Because she must of been brung here special, jest for me to understand I’m truly released of that one trivial burden now. Which doubly indicates there’s got to be a momentous new Call acomin’, and pronto.”
So he had been waiting more anxiously than ever tonight, listening with palpable concentration, after he found the vest. And then when he gave up again temporarily, he put on the vest itself only because wearing something, for a man minus one arm, had always struck him as more practical than carrying it. He thought he might sell the garment at the same time he pawned the pistol. That he tucked into his waistband.
So at first, approaching the wagon, he thought it no more than the usual solicitation, although it did strike him as curious that she carried a shotgun.
Then Rowbottom halted, still some distance away beneath a rapidly diminishing moon, remotely curious yet not hearing her too well either, and wondering what had happened to her usual wares, since what she attempted to merchandise now seemed limited to a “mean goose.” But something turned him wary also. “You run pretty damn fast,” she went on incomprehensibly, and still from quite far off, “for a feller squish out seventeen bim-bam in twenty damn hours, oh yeah. But I think I damn catch you this time, you betcha.”