Fat Lightning (16 page)

Next day, which was yesterday, them folks from the historical society come by, still a-trying to get me to sell 'em my house and land. I just laughed at 'em, said they better get in line. They looked right puzzled, so I told them that my brother and sisters thought they were going to sell it all to some developer, and the fire chief thought he was going to come here and walk all over me because I won't put out a damn fire in a goddamn sawdust pile, but that they was all wrong, and so are you, I told them. Said, me and Sebara is going to stay right here and build us a chapel to honor the appearance of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And then I run 'em off.

Sebara was gone both times. She takes the money into town, puts it in an account me and her have now at the Virginia National Bank there. She showed me the bank book; we've got near-bout $25,000 already, just donations from folks that come to the barn. I went with her when she opened it, and the girl frowned and went and got her boss. He come over all smiles and slicked-back hair when he won't nothing but Arthur Dillon's boy that was too lazy to work. Reckon that girl hadn't never seen a white man and a colored woman open a bank account before.

But the sun is setting earlier and earlier. Sebara says that she figures we got three more weeks that it'll hit the barn enough to let 'em see Jesus, so we got to make hay while the sun shines, like she says.

She even got a man from Channel 6 and one from the
Times-Dispatch,
with a photographer, out here, and so now everybody knows we're coming up to what Sebara calls the grand finale. Then, we'll take the money and start building a shrine here, right on the other side of the barn. Sebara says they can lay the foundation this fall, and then we can raise enough money in the spring, when Jesus comes back, to build the rest next summer.

She's a smart woman. She's got hundreds and hundreds coming out here every night now. They got to line up and go by single-file so everybody can see it for a minute or two. Sometimes folks will just fall to their knees when they see it, and we have to pick them up and move them along. The Basset boy helps us do that.

Sometimes I wonder what Momma and Daddy must think about all of this. Yesterday, I went over to Egypt. The pines are all grown now and being pushed out by the white oaks, but there's still a place in the middle there, mine and Holly's place. I go there sometimes when it seems like things is moving too fast. Sometimes, it seems like I can hear Momma talking when the wind is blowing from the west.

Yesterday, it seemed like she said to me, “Don't never leave; Don't never leave.”

It gets hard for me to tell, sometimes, what's the wind and what's real. I'll have the fat lightning dream and wake up gnawing my pillow, Sebara telling me it's all right.

And then I wonder if Sebara ain't a dream, too.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Sebara picks up Billy between Jeter's house and the state highway, as they'd planned. He steps out of the cornfield, startling the black woman for a second. He throws down the cigarette he's been smoking among the bone-dry, waiting-to-be-tilled stalks and gets into the Lincoln.

At the state road, they turn left and head north. Billy can see the top of the courthouse and the water tower off to the right, seemingly suspended in air above the early October oaks, just now turning.

They're headed for Murro.

Billy eyes the brown deposit bag between them on the front seat.

Sebara eyes him.

“Makes the old fool think it's on the up-and-up if I leave with all the money in a O-fficial bank bag,” she says, laughing and speaking in the exaggerated black accent she uses to con white people. Billy's in on the joke, though, for now. “He sure is goin' to be surprised when he tries to draw out of that account.”

Sebara Tatum became minister of the Ebenezer Free Will Gospel Holiness Church because her father was the minister before her, and because she learned well.

Lucas Tatum founded the church and named it. He was a roofer whose men covered most of the houses and stores in the black communities of Moseby County. One hot July day, when the shingles on the roof didn't seem as if they could be much hotter than the tar in the buckets the men carried up with them, Lucas Tatum stepped off the roof of Bessie McAdams' two-story house and had a vision.

Lucas hadn't meant to step off the roof that day. He didn't usually go up on the roof himself except to see how the job was progressing, but he was helping out because his crew was a man short. He was working alongside an apprentice, a boy just 15 years old, all arms and legs and thumbs. When the boy stepped back near the highest point on the roof, forgetting where he was, he kicked the tar bucket over not five feet from where Lucas Tatum was half-sitting, half-squatting, looking the other way. The tar stuck to his right arm like napalm and burned through his right pants leg.

The other men on the crew said that Lucas didn't scream, just got up and took the three steps it took to reach the side of the house, 25 feet off the ground. Then he took a fourth step.

He fell into the forsythia bushes next to Bessie McAdams' oil tank. The first man who got to him said that Lucas kept saying the same thing over and over: “Praise Jesus, I'm alive. Praise Jesus, I'm alive.”

Lucas Tatum became convinced that he was the beneficiary of a miracle. He had suffered burns over large areas of the right side of his body, and he would always walk with a limp afterward, but Lucas was sure that, if he hadn't heeded the voice that told him to jump off the side of the house, he would have died.

“I was going to jump somewhere,” he explained to his wife later. “What most people would've done would be just slide down the roof like a bag of shingles and fall off, and then where would I have been? I'd of busted myself wide open on Bessie McAdams' concrete driveway.

“But that voice, it told me, ‘Walk off the side of the roof.' And I must of hit the only place I could of jumped where I'd be saved by a nice, soft forsythia bush. Plus, the fall shook some of the tar off. I'd of been kilt if I hadn't minded that voice.”

No one else in Lucas' family felt he or they were especially lucky. While he was in the hospital, his business went broke without him to run it, and that plus the hospital bills cost the Tatums their house. Lucas and his wife and five children had to go live with his parents.

But Lucas Tatum never wavered in his plans for the rest of his life. As soon as he was able to get around with a cane, he paid a visit to an elder in the Murro Baptist Church, the white church that had just, a year before, moved into its new building and abandoned the wood structure that had served as its sanctuary since the Civil War.

The Baptists had planned to sell the old building for scrap lumber, but Lucas persuaded them to rent it to him for his as-yet-invisible congregation.

Within a year, Lucas Tatum's church, which he named the Ebenezer Free Will Gospel Holiness Church and which was part of no denomination, had grown to 50 members and was challenging the AME Zion church five miles away for black souls. Its main attraction, other than Lucas' zeal, was that it always had a good roof.

The Tatums themselves moved into the back of a store that Lucas' wife ran to help pay the bills. As soon as their children got old enough to get jobs, they left, disenchanted by church services five nights a week plus Sundays, unhappy over the beatings their father administered when they failed to memorize a Bible verse every day.

Sebara was the exception. She was only a year old when Lucas walked off Bessie McAdams' roof. She was eight years younger than her nearest sibling, and the challenging life of her father's church was all she'd ever known.

She was a beautiful child, all the church's members agreed. They'd seen her at six as the Virgin Mary in the Christmas pageant, at nine singing gospel solos, at 12 preaching her first youth sermon, at 15 taking over occasionally for her ailing father, who was dead of a heart attack before Sebara graduated from high school. Sebara's mother had already been dead five years, and the fourth of her siblings had left their store-house four years before that.

Sebara felt she had no choice. At 17, she took over her father's church. She lived by herself in the now-defunct store and persuaded the board of deacons to pay her meager rent.

For 12 years, she preached to the congregation of her father's former church. Some of the older members didn't like her flashy ways, preferring the earnest poverty Lucas Tatum had exhibited. They didn't like the way she traded cars every other year, always trading up.

But Sebara Tatum made the church grow. People would come from miles around to hear her preach, and they were entranced by the way she would half-preach, half-sing at them.

But what nobody knew, because Sebara kept her own counsel, was that she was tired, tired deep in her bones, of the Ebenezer Free Will Gospel Holiness Church and all its members.

Ever since she was a small child, Sebara had been amazed by the gullibility of the church-goers. She saw that anyone who was willing to scream and chant and allege to speak in tongues was heeded. She realized that the mere claim that one had received divine instruction was enough to convince most of the church's members. Sebara learned well and put it all to use when it came her turn to be its minister.

There was a meeting, attended by most of the church's members, on a Tuesday night two weeks after her father's death. The subject was Lucas Tatum's successor. While some of the members, including two of her father's former deacons, felt that Sebara should take over the church's leadership, many in attendance wanted to bring in an experienced, older minister from outside.

Sebara arrived at the last minute, dressed in a long red dress, and walked to the front of the church, ascended to the pulpit and looked over to her best friend, Marva Coleman, the organist. The first and only order of business was supposed to be a discussion of the church's choice for its new minister. But Sebara soon made it known that she had her own agenda.

“The LOOORRRD be with you,” she said, and Marva Coleman hit a note on the organ. The crowd stirred.

“I have COME with the word,

“God's HOOOLLY word,

“That He SEEENNNT to old Abraham,

“And He PASSED to the prophets,

“That He gave the LOOORRD Jesus,

“That's still LIVING today,

“The SAAAME holy word,

“That LED Lucas Tatum,

“To FORESAKE his earthly goods,

“And FOUND this church,

“With the LOOORD Jesus as its cornerstone,

“Didn't need NO OTHER cornerstone.”

Sebara, alternately singing and preaching, would pause every few words and Marva Coleman would punctuate the words with a blast from the organ. The audience swayed and moaned, under the spell of her chant. None of the deacons was brave enough to tell a 17-year-old girl she was out of order.

“The LOOORD came to me,” she continued,

“And He TOOOK me by the hand,

“And He SAAIIID to me, ‘Child,

“You must FORESAKE your youth

“And TAKE UP the yoke,

“For your FAAATHER'S work

“Is not yet DOOONE.'”

Sebara went on for 45 minutes, and at the end of the 45 minutes, there was no vote and no discussion. Two old women and a child fainted, and many fell into the aisles and spoke in tongues. The church was hers.

Sebara Tatum is 29 years old now. For the last eight years, she's been slipping enough money out of the collection plate to save a few thousand dollars. When she first heard about Lot Chastain's barn and the vision on it, she didn't think of it beyond its possibilities as an interesting change of venue for the Wednesday night prayer group.

But once she saw what the pilgrims believed was the outline of Jesus on the old wall, she knew that there was a plan. Not necessarily Jesus' plan, but a plan nonetheless.

She's included Billy in her scheme because Billy is everywhere, and he is, she can see, a natural criminal, one who would always smell out the larceny in neighboring hearts. Better, she thinks, to be up-front about it from the beginning. Or at least make Billy think she's up-front. Better to have him inside pissing out than outside pissing in.

They go along without speaking. Sebara turns left again beyond the river and passes the Ebenezer church. Sebara has handed over the church duties, other than the Sunday services, to Marva Coleman while she attends to matters at Lot's barn.

She turns in at her converted home, parking the big car parallel to the side of the cinder-block building. She and Billy go inside and Sebara puts the money in the safe that sits in her bedroom, along with the rest.

“Must be almost $40,000 by now,” Billy says, not taking his eyes off the stacks of green.

“Be a lot more than that by Saturday night,” she tells the boy. “Folks will be taking out second mortgages to put old Jesus-on-the-barn over the top.”

She's put out the word, through the TV and newspaper interviews, that she and Lot hope to have $75,000 after the Friday and Saturday sessions. They've brought in several hundred folding chairs, and Sebara has enlisted four Ebenezer church members to go around taking up the collection. The last hay crop of the year has been gathered by the man who rents what's left of the Chastain farmland, leaving the pilgrims with an almost unlimited parking lot. The weather report is for no rain through the weekend.

“Then,” she tells Billy as she relocks the safe, “late Saturday night, when old Lot is asleep, you and me will meet outside at midnight, you'll dig up the strongbox and I'll come by here and unlock the safe, and we'll be in Florida by morning.”

She's careful to keep the combination from Billy.

“Come on now, sweet boy,” she tells him, grabbing him by a belt loop. “Time to give Momma some sugar.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO