Gospel (126 page)

“Lovely house, isn't it?” asked Mrs. Bullins, proud of it.

“It's quite a lavish mansion you live in,” said Lucy pointedly.

“Yes,” she enthused, “it's antebellum—that means before the war. Of course when we Southerners talk about ‘the War' we mean the Civil War, not World War Two!” Mrs. Bullins laughed alone. “1836. Over 400 slaves at one time; the Pettigrew family who built it raised sugar cane and cotton—very hard work in those days.”

Not for the Pettigrews, thought Lucy.

“I'm happy to say that Augustus Pettigrew was a minister who had been to seminary in Scotland. Very influential in his day. I feel,” she breathed with sincerity, tears held back, “that God has been a long time in this house.”

“But the Reverend Pettigrew owned 400 slaves,” Lucy repeated.

As her Diet Coke was poured over the ice cubes in a tall glass, Mrs. Bullins nodded her head positively. “Slavery was a horrible thing but it was the way Our Lord chose for the black man to come to know Jesus Christ.”

The notion was so sealed and complete Lucy hardly knew where to begin to comment upon it.

“Black people in this country have been made a special revelation to go with their special suffrin',” continued Mrs. Bullins. “And it is through Jesus Christ that they will rise up in this country and be done with drugs and poverty and all that Satan has thrown in their path. Now you just help yourself to anything in our refrigerator—we have plenty of everything. Camilla sees to that, don't you, honey?”

Lucy turned to see a maternal black woman in a maid's uniform emerge from a pantry, a can of black-eyed peas in her hand: “Thaz right, Miz Lila.”

“Camilla's making her special Cajun meatloaf tonight. It's a
vayry
special occasion, having you and Dr. O'Hanrahan as our guests.”

“Don't you forget your meh'cine now, Miz Lila.”

Eagerly Mrs. Bullins took a bottle of prescribed medicine from atop the spice rack and emptied two pills into her hand, greedily swallowing them, remarkably, without the aid of water. “Cayn't forget my pills now can I, Camilla?” She flashed a guilty look in Lucy's direction. “My medicine. You see, I have to take, these … my medicine.”

Farley returned and led Lucy to a wood-paneled office with a large desk stacked with pamphlets and letters to sign by the window, and a large television screen and VCR opposite in a paneled cleft.

“I'm not like showin' off or nothin' but I thought at some point you might wanna see me in action,” he snorted, turning an embarrassed pink. “This is, uh, 19 … 1985, my first telecast. You gotta see my long hair to believe it, and that horrible ol' pink suit. And this tape, this one here, is this year. I led the prayers for young people in the Spring Revival. I'm gonna let you look at 'em while I go take a shower. I can't stand to see myself, I look like such a hick!”

Lucy let her arms be laden with video cassettes.

“And this is our Mardi Gras tape you were askin' about. This is where we stood outside this gay bar and, uh, the language gets a little blue but you can see the kind of sin we're up against.”

Lucy was left to play with the videotapes in this huge office by herself, presumably Reverend Bullins's home office. She played the Mardi Gras tape first and there was a younger, paler Farley stopping two men in Panama hats and Guatemalan ponchos with tall plastic cups of fruit-flavored drinks in their hands, telling them that
The party's thataway, but Heaven's thataway, my friend,
pointing upward. This received a predictable response. The video caught one lipsticked fellow in halfhearted drag who tried, as Lucy had tried, to argue with the group in vain.
You say Mardi Gras is pagan,
he said,
but you don't realize that Easter and Christmas are full of paganism too. Who am I? I'm a graduate assistant at Tulane and I study ancient history and … No, I'm not going to pray with you, I'm going in this bar and
 … And the debate went on, the Pentecostal Youth impervious. Farley looked sadly at the camera after the exchange was over and sighed:
Satan, you've got another one, but Devil, we're gonna getcha! We're gonna get you and kick you all the way back to Hell!

Lucy, bored soon enough, left the video running and got out of her chair to wander around the office. Here was the 1980 photo of Ron and Nancy looking benevolent beside a thinner Reverend Bullins and Lila; both ladies' face-lifts vacuously smiling to the breaking point, stretched to Kabuki. Here was a photo of Gavin McLeod, the guy on “The Love Boat” turned born-again booster. Here was a country & western singer whose name she thought she recognized.

Lucy spotted the array of Bullins pamphlets on the bookshelf. He had no actual books, but on the shelf as if they were books was a video series. His photograph was always on the cassette, glasses down his nose, looking scholarly and authoritative. Lucy wondered if Bullins had ever heard of Augustine, read a word of Luther or Calvin, St. Teresa or Catherine of Siena, anything of the Church that had gone before. She saw Jimmy Swaggart's
Straight Answers to Tough Questions
and took it down from its place.

(Oh please.)

Lucy and Luke and Gabriel and Christopher would sit around the TV on dull Sunday nights and jeer this man who bashed every known denomination, put Jews and Catholics in Hell, bashed gays, bashed feminists, bashed intellectuals, sang paeans to President Reagan, the nonchurchgoing, divorced Hollywood has-been with the estranged family, racist cabinet, and West Coast morals who had persuaded every born-again in America of his deep personal holiness. On the inside cover there was a flourished signature and generic message from Swaggart to his Louisiana rival Farley Bullins. She thumbed through the book:

Is aerobic dancing sinful?
“For Christians to get their aerobic exercise to the beat of this same music is to expose themselves to the pollution of the world.”
What do you think about mixed swimming?
Swaggart's against it.
Movies?
“It is wrong for Christians to associate themselves with worldly entertainments such as movies.” Here's a goodie:
Is oral-genital sex scripturally permissible between husband and wife?
Of course not.
Homosexuality?
They're not born that way, according to Swaggart, but rather entered by Satan … “These individuals would like to be in a position where they could recruit young men and boys (or girls) into their life of debauchery and filth.”
Evolution?
“I think that it is clear that no true evolutionist can be a Christian or a believer in the Bible.” Lucy indulged herself, flipping through the book. Cremation is a sin, capital punishment, of course, is
not;
and as for women, “Any husband who is Christlike in conduct and attitude should be reverenced by his wife and she should submit to him as unto the Lord. She should submit in everything, knowing that everything he demands will be scriptural, godly and Christlike.”

Gee, Jimmy, I have a question, thought Lucy, replacing the book on the shelf:
what does God think about sneaking out on your wife in your $1.5-million mansion, going to a sleazy motel and renting a room with a prostitute whom you've paid to spread her legs and play with herself while you masturbate nearby?
She thought of the triumphal facts on the book jacket: a following of 2.2 million households on TV, a weekly worldwide television following of 500 million. The number-one preacher on the tube, until his little misadventure; a man worth
millions,
Farley Jr. had explained, to the local economy of Baton Rouge. How could even
one
million people want to hear
these
opinions? How could so many of her fellow Americans be moved to hand over their hard-earned money in support of these politics and sentiments?

What hope do we women have? she thought blackly. Where Christians are concerned, it just hasn't changed one little bit—

“Lucy?”

She turned to the door to see Farley.

“Dr. O'Hanrahan's here and supper's almost on the table.”

In the foyer, she was reunited with O'Hanrahan, who looked like a melted wax sculpture of himself. “I'll take the Sudan to this humidity any day,” he grumbled, wiping his red forehead.

She looked into his yellowed eyes, which he averted. “You don't look very well, sir.”

“I don't feel very well,” he admitted, for once.

Reverend Bullins was seen next sweeping through the front doors, waving his driver and the white Mercedes-Benz with the TPL logo to be parked in the garage, depositing his suitcoat into his servant's waiting hands. “Thanks, Camilla. Yes, I'm tellin' you, Patrick. You
ought
to see a doctor.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” he said, flashing her a signal he had something to tell her.

In one of the long stately rooms off the side of the central high-ceilinged hallway was an equally long old-fashioned oaken table. The room was a soft yellow with many wall-ridgings and plaster excrescences in antebellum style; a crowded chandelier sparkled above the table, and a portrait of Farley Bullins with an American flag imposed upon a dawn breaking beyond him hung over the room's unused fireplace.

They milled around the table and Camilla wheeled in a tray with her meatloaf steaming on a silver platter. She industriously prepared everyone's iced tea, squeezing the lemon and asking who took sugar and would Miss Lucy like Sweet-'n-Low.

“So, how do you find our little library?” asked Mrs. Bullins, as her husband was seating himself at the head of the table.

“Inadequate and philistine,” said Dr. O'Hanrahan.

Lucy hid a smile. She had encountered O'Hanrahan frequently in this mood when nothing could please him and there was nothing nice to say about anything.

Lila Mae: “Well, I'm sorry you—”

“You've got a fair collection of patristics but of course not one scientific work of textual analysis. Since you people fear truth and science.”

Lucy noticed O'Hanrahan swayed unsteadily taking his chair. He was drunk perhaps … But where would he get booze around here?

“… that library is a pile of stupefying ignorance on biblical interpretation and scriptural infallibility. Of course, you believe each word is divinely dictated by the Holy Spirit, which attributes the many mistakes in the biblical text to God instead of Man. I'm sure God appreciates that.”

Farley Jr. and Mrs. Bullins turned their eyes back on Reverend Bullins, their patriarch, their savior from the crummy little three-room shack under the levee in Catfishtown, their miracle worker. Reverend Bullins cleared his throat, “You are right to suggest I have no truck with secular humanism, Dr. O'Hanrahan. Or modernism or science-ism or whatever-you-want-ism you so-called scholars want to call it—”

“Stupidity-ism?”

Reverend Bullins buttered his cornbread. “I can understand some resentment, Patrick, on your part. But we Pentecostals merely intend to return here to the sanctity of the Early Church.”

“I'm sure that's true,” Lucy spoke up, ready to tangle as well, “where the place of women is concerned.”

O'Hanrahan laughed. “Early Church? In this million-dollar mansion you've got for yourself? And the tax-free salary? And the two Mercedes-Benzes and the private airplane—”

“God will provide for His servants.” The subject of servants reminded him to ask Camilla to go to the kitchen and fetch him another slice of lemon for his iced tea.

Mrs. Bullins set her drawn, face-lifted countenance to O'Hanrahan and displayed empathy, shaking her head so slightly. “This anger inside you, Patrick … Come to Jesus. Put your burdens on Him.”

Reverend Bullins: “Lila, if you'd allow
me
to continue.”

“Come to Jesus,” she got in one more time.

“Do you know what your pious husband is up to here?” O'Hanrahan asked Mrs. Bullins. “One of my greatest friends and one of the world's greatest Hebrew scholars had a hypodermic needle full of sedative stabbed into him so he'd stay out of your husband's plan.”

“Of course it's not like that, Lila—”

“Your husband is aligned with fanatics and kooks and dangerous men who are bringing a war upon this world!”

Reverend Bullins had nothing to fear from Lila Mae, who had been lobotomized long ago to a “Come to Jesus” and “Jesus is love” and “God is good” frequency that kept her close to tears … although a doctor could recognize that was more to do with her regular and increasing doses of depression medication.

Reverend Bullins: “No bad will come to those who preach Jesus as he is in the gospels, Patrick. I was ordained at the age of thirteen…”

O'Hanrahan pinched the bridge of his nose. Lucy noticed the red color of his face had not blanched to its usual healthy pink. Perhaps he was sunburned, but it looked more fevered.

“… which is why,” Reverend Bullins concluded some moments later, “I'm proud to call myself a fundamentalist.”

“
Mentus
means ‘mind.'
Fundus
to the Romans meant ‘anus.' Fundamentalist: a mind like an anus. I'm surprised anyone prefers the sobriquet.”

“Well, I am proud,” Bullins said imperturbably, as Camilla returned with his slice of lemon. “Heh-heh, as a Roman Catholic you must be tired of finding yourself on the losing team. You see, what your anger is really directed to is our success. Look about you. We were in 1.8 million American homes last year.”

Farley Jr. interrupting: “We're beaming our program into all the Eastern Europe countries. We're gonna bring Russia to Jesus.” Farley and his father pronounced Russia
rusher.

“Jeeeezus,” his mother repeated, by increments leaving her present world.

“We were mobbed,” said Reverend Bullins, “on our last trip to Russia. In Africa our ministry is growing—and they're not going to be Catholic or Lutheran, they're going to be Pentecostal. We're growing by leaps and bounds!”