Skinny Legs and All

IT WAS A BRIGHT,
defrosted, pussy-willow day at the onset of spring, and the newlyweds were driving cross-country in a large roast turkey.

The turkey lay upon its back, as roast turkeys will; submissive, agreeable, volunteering its breast to the carving blade, its roly-poly legs cocked in a stiff but jaunty position, as if it might summon the gumption to spring forward onto its feet, but, of course, it had no feet, which made the suggestion seem both empty and ridiculous, and only added to the turkey’s aura of goofy vulnerability.

Despite its feetlessness, however, its pathetic podalic privation, this roast turkey—or jumbo facsimile thereof—was moving down the highway at sixty-five miles an hour, traveling faster, farther on its back than many aspiring actresses.

The turkey, gleaming in the callow March sunlight, had been a wedding present from the groom to the bride, although the title remained in the groom’s name and he was never, in fact, to relinquish ownership. Actually, it was the fashioning of the turkey, the phenomenon of its existence, that was his gift to the bride. More important, it was the manifestation of the turkey, the squealy, swoony surprise of the creation of the turkey, that had precipitated the marriage: the groom, Boomer Petway, had used the turkey to trick the bride, Ellen Cherry Charles, into marrying him. At least, that was what Ellen Cherry was thinking at that moment, less than a week after the wedding, thinking, as she watched the turkey suck the thawing countryside into its windshield and blow it out its rearview mirror, that she’d been tricked. Less than a week after the wedding, that probably was not an excellent indicator of impending decades of marital bliss.

Some marriages are made in heaven,
Ellen Cherry thought.
Mine was made in Hong Kong. By the same people who make those little rubber pork chops they sell in the pet department at Kmart.

MOCKINGBIRDS ARE THE TRUE ARTISTS
of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they’re born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to
rearrange
reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.

And so it was that in the dogwood branches and lilac bushes on the grounds of the Third Baptist Church of Colonial Pines, mockingbirds were producing art, were “making a joyful noise unto the Lord,” while inside the building, a Georgian rectangle of powdery brick and prissy white trim, several hundred freshly scrubbed, well-fed human beings concerned themselves not with creation but destruction. Ultimate destruction.

In east-central Virginia, where Colonial Pines was located, spring was quicker on its feet than it was out in the Far West, through which Boomer and Ellen Cherry’s roast turkey was transporting them ever eastward. Pussy willows had already come and gone in Virginia, and sickly faced dogwood blossoms, like constipated elves, strained to take their places. From underground silos, jonquil bulbs fired round after round of butter-tipped stalks, all sorts of buds were swelling and popping, birds (not just mockingbirds) strung ropes of birdsong from treetop to fence post, bees and other insects were waking to the unfamiliar alarm of their own faint buzz; all around, the warning natural world was in the process of rebirth and renewal, almost as if to deliberately cast some doubt upon the accuracy of the sermon being concluded at that moment in the church.

“God gave us this sign,” said the preacher from his oak veneer podium. “The Lord gave us a
sign
! A
sign
! It was a warning, if you will. A word to the wise. He gave his children a big easy-to-read sign, words in tall black letters, maybe golden letters—maybe it was a
neon
sign. In any case, there’s no mistakin’ its message. The Lord shoved this sign before the countenance of his beloved disciple, John, and John, being a righteous man, John bein’ a
wise
man, John didn’t blink or scratch his head or ask for details, Saint John didn’t call up a lawyer on the phone and ask for a legal interpretation, no, John read this sign and copied it down and passed it on to mankind. To you and I.”

The preacher’s voice was reminiscent of a saxophone. Not the cool, laconic sax of Lester Young, but the full, lush, volatile sound of, say, Charlie Barnet. There was a marvelous, dark lyricism in his voice, the kind of defiance that is rooted in deep loneliness. His pockmarked face was lean and hungry looking, a beat face poisoned by boils and the runoff from rotting teeth. Yet the voice that rolled out from that face, from underneath the boyish shock of damp, black hair, the voice was fecund and round and gloomily romantic. Females in the congregation, especially, were touched by the preacher’s voice, never stopping to consider that it might have been hot pus that fueled its grand combustion.

“What the Almighty Father told John was this: that when the Jews return to their homeland—yea! when the Jew is once again at home in the land of Is-ra-el—the end of the world is at hand!”

The preacher paused. He gazed at the congregation with his starving eyes. Verlin Charles was later to say, “Sometimes when he looks down at us like that, I feel like he wants to eat the flower right outen my buttonhole.” “Uh-huh,” his wife, Patsy, replied. “Makes me feel like he wants to chew the elastic outta my underpants.” Verlin Charles did not appreciate Patsy Charles’s interpretation of the preacher’s voracious stare, and he told her so.

Off to the left of the altar, a radio engineer raised three fingers. The Reverend Buddy Winkler caught the gesture out of the corner of his eye, immediately thereupon aborting the penetrating scrutiny of his flock and returning to the microphone.

“When the Jew has returned to his homeland, the
end of the world
is at hand! That is the sign God gave unto us. Why? I want to ask you somethin’. Do you think God just threw out that crumb of information offhand like it was gossip, like it was an interestin’ item outen the
Reader’s Digest
? Or did God have a
purpose
in the showing of this sign to John? Did God have a
reason
in ordering John to write down this prophecy in his Book of Revelation? Are we intended to act somehow upon this message?”

The engineer raised two fingers. Buddy Winkler nodded and quickened the tempo. Blowing Charlie Parker style, blowing a swift freight of harmonic rhetoric, blowing his sax-voice at about fifty-eight bars per minute, blowing alto now—his usual tenor abandoned at the gates of syncopation—the preacher swung into a dazzling diatribe against Semite and anti-Semite alike: instructed his brethren (with a sputter of grace notes) to turn their attention to Jerusalem, the city of their eternal fate; bade them prepare themselves for physical entry into Jerusalem, where they that were righteous among them were to accept their promised rewards, reminded them that on the following Sunday he would describe to them what conditions they might expect to encounter in the New Jerusalem; and further reminded them that next week’s sermon, as each of the sermons in this series concerning the Rapidly Approaching End, would be broadcast over the Southern Baptist Voice of the Sparrow Network, of which WCPV was the local affiliate. He then stitched on a reedy coda of prayer, timing an “amen” to perfectly coincide with the wag of the engineer’s single digit.

Sequins of spittle were scattered along his smile as he accepted compliments at the door.

“Powerful sermon, Reverend Winkler.”

“God bless you, Roy.”

“Reverend Winkler, you are just eloquence itself. You move me, you stir me up inside, you—”

“It’s the Lord that speaks through me, Miz Packett.” He squeezed her hand. “The Lord does the movin’.”

“Right nice, Bud. Frogs are out.”

“Don’t know if I’ll have time for any jiggin’ this spring, Verlin.”

“You got other frogs to jig, right, Bud?”

His boils waxed a deeper red. “Patsy now.”

“As in ’other fish to fry.’”

“Patsy.” He said her name laboriously, as if he were coaxing a lone low note from his saxophone bell. It was both censure and plea. Patsy grinned and left him to his flock.

Verlin and Patsy Charles walked to their Buick Regal in the parking lot.

“You hadn’t ought to mess with him here, Patsy. In God’s house . . .”

“He was out on the steps.”

“. . . on the Sabbath.”

“Bud’s Bud, on Sunday or the Fourth of July.”

“How about on Judgment Day?”

“We’ll see soon enough, I reckon,” said Patsy, and Verlin, safely behind the lilac hedge, smiled.

“You know,” Verlin said, as he stopped to admire a new Ford pickup that he knew to belong to an acquaintance, “the end of the world is not gonna be coming right away. You know why? Because the fact is, there’re more Jews in New York City than in the entire country of Is-ra-el.” He tried to pronounce it the way his cousin Buddy did, but Verlin’s voice was more kazoo than saxophone.

“So, you wanna deport ’em?”

“No skin off my pecker if New York’s more Jewish than Jerusalem. I’m not ready for Armageddon. I got bills to pay.”

“You got a daughter fixin’ to live in New York City.”

A tremendous frown wadded up Verlin’s face. It was a pink face, occupied neither on its west bank nor its east by a single whisker. Verlin was one of those men who seemed to shave internally. His build was rangy, as was his kin’s, the preacher’s, but his face was round, smooth, satiated (which is not quite the same as “content"), and it smelled perpetually of mildewed washrag, no matter what quantities of Old Spice aftershave were tossed at it. “You would have to remind me,” he said.