The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish (7 page)

While Percy knew the Bible, he scarcely knew himself. Sex was no temptation to him whatsoever. An enthusiastic virgin, he held the entire process to be as distasteful as it was messy, a dirty chore necessary to propagate worshippers. Fortunately, being a preacher, he’d been given a more dignified means to populate the Kingdom, and a damn sight more sanitary to boot.

Floyd, on the other hand, laboured under no such misapprehensions. Frankly, the Widow Duffy’s nocturnal ramblings had aroused more than his curiosity. “Brother Percy,” he admonished, “we have a Christian duty to remain. If that dame sleepwalks unattended, she may fall down the stairs and break her neck.”

“Don’t think to pull the wool over my eyes,” Percy scolded. “You’ve a mind to spill your seed in that harlot! How shall you answer up to Jesus at the end time?”

“Nag, nag, nag. If I wanted a wife I’d have married one.”

“Repent or burn!”

“Go suck an egg.”

Percy stormed off, spending the rest of the night at the local fleabag. He didn’t sleep. Then again, neither did Floyd. Yet whereas Percy spent the morning’s drive to the next town muttering into his Bible, Floyd was frisky as a pup, pedal to the metal, whistling rags. They stopped for gas. Brother Percy closed the Good Book and held it to his breast. He cast a baleful gaze in the direction of his colleague.

Silence.

“What?” Floyd demanded.

God’s prophet flared his nostrils. “Apostate!”

Brothers Percy and Floyd never again shared accommodation. Percy confined himself to respectable S.R.O.s with sharp-eyed proprietors who snooped the halls to nix shenanigans amongst unmarried guests. Famous for shared baths with rust-stained sinks, the smell of mothballs, and the sound of lonely geriatrics weeping at all hours behind closed doors, these hotels were a perfect match for the evangelist. Once management realized he was alone, they paid no heed to his arguments with the dresser mirror.

Floyd, truth to tell, had always kept his pump primed. He’d simply held off till Percy’d fallen asleep, figuring it was better to sneak off like a kid out for a smoke than to set himself up for sermonizing in the truck. He’d had nightmares of being strapped to the wheel with Percy haranguing him from North Bay to Memphis. But discovery of Floyd’s appetites had put a cork in Brother Percy’s pipes; his censure registered instead by heavy sighs. This was a mite creepy on all-night drives, but a definite improvement over the yapping to which Floyd had hitherto been subjected.

As Percy’s private life grew progressively solitary, his nature became more bilious. “Billy Sunday wasn’t stuck in hicksvilles with a whoremonger! He was beloved! Adored! It isn’t fair!” His theology followed his mind into nightmare, his God transformed from disciplinarian to psychopath.

“The Lord thy God is a bloody god,” he’d rage across the stage, “His plan of redemption, a slaughterhouse dripping with the blood of the Lamb, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ! Who’s off to the lake of fire? You know yourselves, you hell-born, hog-jowled, whiskey-soaked assassins of righteousness! You cigarette-smoking, fudge-eating lechers in spats and green vests! You hags of uncleanness dolled up in fool hats for card parties, serving spiced meats on hand-painted china with nasty music on your pianos while your spawn run the streets like a rummage sale in a secondhand store, gadding about in the company of jackrabbits whose characters would make a black mark on a piece of tar paper! Well, you’re off to judgment, my friends. You, too, Granny, your white hairs won’t save you from a swim in the Devil’s chamber pot! You’re off to a judgment fierce as that of those damnable rum-soaked Bennetts, suffocating in the rank, fetid sweat of their fornication, drowning in the juices of their abomination! A judgment fierce as Sodom and Gomorrah, when the Lord God made Mount Vesuvius puke a hemorrhage of lava!”

Congregations were disconcerted. In theory, they accepted that they were all sinners, but in practice it was generally understood that the preacher’s wrath was to be directed at sinners
outside
the tent. By the end, only Pentecostals had the stomach to attend. They could count on the Holy Spirit descending, transporting them with the gift of tongues, God’s proof-positive that they’d been saved by the blood of the Lamb and were bound for glory with Percy and the angels.

Floyd had known that life in the Lord’s vineyard was not for the upwardly mobile, but after expenses he barely had the scratch to pay for his French ticklers. He decided to pull the plug. He waited till they hit London, Ontario. Here Percy would be as happy as he’d be liable to get, haranguing one of the last crowds to consider him a somebody.

A
nd so, the afternoon of that fateful revival, Brother Floyd moseyed his partner into the van of the trailer truck. “I’ve been doing some thinking.”

“Praise the Lord. The first step to repentance.”

Floyd bit his tongue. “The ministry’s had it,” he continued. “It’s time to call it quits.”

Percy staggered backwards. “
Quits
? Where would the world be today if Jesus had called it quits?”

“Our receipts don’t amount to a pinch of heifer dust,” Floyd persevered. “We’re a corpse begging to be buried.”

“And what if we are? Lazarus came back.”

“For heaven’s sake, Perce, you’re misery on a stick, you scare the kids.”

“God didn’t put us on this earth to be happy. We were put here to serve.”

“There’s other ways to serve.”

“Not for me! This ministry’s my calling. It’s where I belong. It’s my home.”

“It’s not your home, it’s a tent. Repeat after me: ‘This is a tent. A tent of horrors kept fresh with slaughterhouse guts and a paintbrush.’”

“Nooo!”

Floyd wasn’t good with tears, but he wasn’t about to let a wave of compassion sink his resolve. “Perce,” he stared in embarrassment over the poor man’s left shoulder, “I’ve been doing some calculations. There’s a way we can close up shop and go our separate ways with a little something to tide us over.”

Percy sniffled. The absence of other vocalizing encouraged Floyd to believe that reason had a prayer.

“We got ourselves seven thousand square feet of tent near as I can reckon. At four six-inch squares per square foot, that’s twenty-eight thousand squares. I propose we do one final farewell tour. Each night we’ll sell Redemption squares, to be cut from the tent and delivered at tour’s end: two bits a piece, or a buck for one with blood on it.”

Percy gaped like a gopher on a spit. “YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A GODDAMN STOOL UP THE DEVIL’S ANUS!” He hurled a folding chair at his partner and flew from the fairgrounds, tears of rage, horror, and helplessness flooding down his cheeks. “Dear God,” he beseeched, falling at the foot of a mighty oak, “steep me in Your wrath! Do such a Work through me tonight that it will tear the firmament!”

The next thing Percy knew, he was on stage screaming at Timmy Beeford, lightning shearing the main pole, ripping the wires, popping the light bulbs, exploding the generator — and his mother’s childhood caution ringing in his ears: “Percy, my pumpkin, be careful what you pray for. God may be listening.”

K.O. Doyle
and
Co.

B
right
and early the following morning, Brother Floyd had surveyed the damage to ministry assets. It was calamitous. The generator and trailer were write-offs, ditto the lights and supports. As for the canvas, the cost of repair would be prohibitive.

“Hot diggity!” Floyd crowed. This would lay to rest any hopes his partner might have harboured for their ministry’s resurrection. Good thing he’d kept up the insurance payments. Brother Percy’d urged him to drop the policy and put their fate in God’s hands. “Trust in the Lord and He will provide.” However when dealing with God, Floyd had preferred to keep one hand on his wallet.

His caution vindicated, he savoured the wreckage, then skipped to a telephone where he placed a call to their underwriter. He was promised that an adjuster would be up from Toronto on next morning’s train. If God were as helpful as the United Dominion Insurance Company, Heaven would have a lot more takers.

Visions of Easy Street filling his head, Floyd made his way to London General Hospital to visit his partner. In the past evening’s upheaval, the poor man had broken his jaw. With the wires and swelling, he was in no condition to answer back. What better time to rub in the good news?

Floyd cataloged the carnage with glee. “The Almighty’s will is writ large,” he concluded. “He wants us shut down pronto.”

Percy was beside himself, his attempts at interjection digging metal into bone, tissue, and nerve ends. “Aaaa! Aaaa!” he howled in pain.

“Why, Perce, is that the glorious sound of rejoicing?”

“Aaaa! Aaaa!”

“Aaaa! Aaaa! Aaaa-men!” Floyd winked to the heavens. “Thank you, Jesus.”

Brother Percy grabbed the Gideon Bible on his nightstand. He was about to pitch it at his partner’s head, but Floyd cocked a fist. Percy cowered.

“Blessèd are the meek,” Floyd reminded with a grin.

F
loyd stopped grinning with the arrival of the adjuster, Mr. Fischer. In the view of the United Dominion Insurance Company, the destruction of ministry property fell under the clause dealing with Acts of God. (“A subject about which you’re no doubt familiar.”) Floyd blanched. Dreams of a lucrative settlement were up in smoke, but so were plans to market tent squares. Without a final tour, how could they pitch the merchandise? And without the tent, truck, and generator, how could they have a tour?

Complicating matters, work on Percy’s jaw had taken a bite from their reserves. Released from hospital that afternoon, the evangelist stooped to a dingy room in the cheapest digs he could find, the C.P.R. Hotel, a.k.a. The Ceeps. Floyd likewise swallowed his pride, and had management squeeze in a cot at the foot of his partner’s bed.

After supper, while Percy prayed to the Almighty for deliverance, Floyd toddled downstairs to the hotel tavern to worship at the altar of Jack Daniels.

T
he kid at the end of the bar was one cocky bantam. Vest open, tie loose, slick hair parted in the middle, he left off talking to the bartender, and plunked himself down at Floyd’s table. “K.O. Doyle,” he stuck out his paw. “I hear you’re Floyd Cruickshank, brains behind the preacher man.”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m looking for a Mary Mabel McTavish. You know her?”

“What if I do?”

“I’d like to jog your memory,” Doyle said. He was with
King Features Syndicate
, a Hearst operation, up from Buffalo for a peekaboo. “A tousle-haired all-American tyke, right out of a Norman Rockwell, dies and gets brought back to life. The story’s a four-star wank-yer-crank, ’specially if the dame’s got stems.”

“News travels fast.”

“I got sources.”

Doyle’s source, courtesy of
King Features
, was the telegraph operator in Wichita, Kansas, who took the cable Uncle Albert sent his sister.

TIMMY HAD A DUST UP WITH MOTHER NATURE. THE FREE PRESS SAYS HE DIED AND GOT HISSELF RESURRECTED. HORSE FEATHERS. GRACE SENDS HER REGARDS. SHE IS HAVING A SPELL. ALBERT.

A call from
King Features
to the
Free Press
confirmed the article. The paper offered to sell its copy, but the skeptical syndicate opted to send up a staffer for an independent fact check. After all, “Canadian news” was a contradiction in terms.

Doyle had hit town that morning. Like travelling salesmen and other ne’er-do-wells, he’d checked into The Ceeps because it was cheap, next to the station, and came with a bar. After dropping off his bag — a change of underwear and a toothbrush — he went in search of the gal of the hour. According to the
Free Press
, Miss McTavish worked at the local private school. Doyle traipsed over, only to be confronted by the headmistress. “That damn Gorgon tore a strip off me,” he sputtered to Floyd. “Her butt’s so puckered, I’ll bet when she farts, she hits high C.”

From there to the hospital. Doctor Hammond refused comment, but his broken nose told a tale, as did the shaken demeanour of a certain Nurse Judd.

Doyle had better luck at Bethel Gospel Hall. The pastor was a hayseed with breath that would strip linoleum, but he was four-square behind the miracle; he also tipped Doyle to Tom and Betty Wertz. The couple made shy, but Doyle got past the front door when he said he was a lawyer come to offer his services cheap, on account of he’d heard the good doctor planned to charge Tom with assault.

Last port of call: Timmy Beeford’s. Aunt Grace had the house sealed up tighter than a nun’s panties. But she’d overlooked Timmy’s upstairs bedroom window. Doyle lured the little nipper onto the verandah roof and got what he wanted with a couple of lemon sours.

With enough for a column, Doyle skedaddled back to the hotel bar, phoned in what he had to
King Features
, and tucked into supper: a pickled egg washed down with a pail of suds.

“You Canucks brew it strong,” Doyle told Floyd. “Then again, you gotta be pissed to live here.” He excused himself for a leak.

“I couldn’t help but overhear.”

Floyd looked up into the florid face of the drunk from the far corner. A big guy with a lumpy nose, the drunk slapped Floyd on the back. “Scoop Jones from
Scripps-Howard
. I got a quart of Four Roses in my room. Ditch the kid, come up for a nightcap. Give Scoop the scoop, get double for your trouble.”

“Sorry, pal, I gotta hit the hay,” said Floyd, rising unsteadily from his chair.

“A rain check then. Scoop Jones. Room 202.”

As Floyd lurched to the elevator by the front desk, he heard the clerk say to the new arrival in the rumpled fedora, “Scratch Micallef,
Associated Press
? I must say, we’ve been getting a lot of newsmen lately. The bar is that way.”

Wobbling down the hall to his room, Floyd felt a spot of envy. Some young missy’d grabbed the spotlight he and Perce had dreamed of. She’d be rich. Damn. There was nothing so cruel as the good fortune of others.

However, Floyd was a visionary, not long for regret. By the time he fumbled his key into the lock, he’d had a flash. By the time the door swung open, it was a full-blown inspiration. And by the time he switched on the overhead light, he saw his career resurrected in glory. He was going to hitch a ride on Mary Mabel’s star, be her manager, be a millionaire.

“Perce,” he cried, “get your ass in gear. If you want to save that damn ministry of yours, get on your knees and pray for God to bring us Miss McTavish. Tell Him to make it snappy. Given the shit He’s flushed our way, it’s the least He can do.”

Percy tumbled out of his sheets. If this could save his pulpit, he’d get cracking like eggs at a diner.

A few hours later, Percy prayed out and Floyd passed out, Herschel MacIntosh of the London Parks Department came pounding on their door, fresh from chasing lovers out of the fairground. “There’s bums in your tent. Any trouble, there’ll be hell to pay.”

The evangelists got to the site in no time. In the cab of their truck, they found a tramp in a dress. Percy was outraged when Floyd took up flirting.
No way is that whoremonger going to fornicate at the foot of my bed with some hoboess
, he fumed, as he checked the glove compartment for theft. That’s when he heard Floyd say the magic words: “You’re Mary Mabel McTavish?”

Mary Mabel McTavish! Lo, the Lord had delivered her unto them, just as Percy’d prayed! The reverend’s eyes filled with tears. He had a direct line to the Almighty after all.