The Stone Angel (26 page)

“I got the job by prayer,” he’s saying. “You wouldn’t think so to look at me, would you? But that’s what happened. I was convinced of it. I was a Redeemer’s Advocate in those days. I came by it honestly. My granddad on my father’s side was a circuit rider.”

“A circus rider?”

“Yeh, Nero’s circus. He was an early Christian. Circuit, I said, actually. He used to go around preaching the Word. He’d set up that big gray flapping canvas tent of his in the fairgrounds at the edge of town, and he’d put his sign outside.
Hear Tollemache Lees. Well-known Evangelist. Renowned throughout the Cariboo and the entire Peace River Country. Tonight’s Sermon—What Awaits the Damned? Don’t miss this timely topic
. Some such thing. The brand of salvation he sold was firewater, nothing meek about it, believe you me. It might be hard to swallow but you sure felt good once it was down. He’d started out as a shingle-binder but changed to being a spell-binder—that’s what Dad used to say about him, not meaning it as any compliment, either. My dad kept a shoe store in Blackfly, sawmill town up north. He was United Church and couldn’t stand the sight of the old guy. I grew up in Blackfly.”

“What an odd name for a town.”

“You wouldn’t think so,” he says, “if you’d ever been there in summer. The little bastards never gave you a
moment’s peace. Mother was even more death on the old guy than Dad was. After the Tabernacle was built, up in Blackfly, he used to come regularly. He liked it a whole lot better than his tent, which was wearing kind of thin by that time. The Tabernacle had a fumed oak pulpit with a white satin cover fringed all around with gilt tassels, and at the front, in nifty maroon script letters, it said
All Now Living Can Be Saved
. Mother forbade me to go but I went anyway. She even used to walk right past him if she met him in the street. He’d come around to the shoe store and Dad would give him the odd buck to get rid of him. Mother said she couldn’t hold her head up in Blackfly while he was there. I liked the meetings. He had a voice that carried like the spouting of a whale. He’d lead the gathering in song. I can hear him yet—

He sings gustily, in a voice breathless with laughter. I’m not much diverted. This seems in poor taste to me.

“What an unpleasant hymn.”

“Not at all,” he says. “It was better than Buck Rogers and Tom Mix rolled into one. Also, I believed it with all my might and main. When I was grown, and joined the Advocates, Mother said I was a throwback. Poor Mother. Poor little soul. She was a worrier. She was an Anglican and she worried about the possibility of any other Anglican seeing me sauntering into the Tabernacle. She worried about everything. In summer she worried in case she smelled, and she used to patter into the bedroom every half hour or so and sprinkle herself with
lavender talcum, but when deodorants came on the market, she wouldn’t use them in case they made a mark on her dress and people saw.”

“Well, the poor thing,” I say, clicking my tongue and holding out my plastic goblet again. “Fancy spending your life worrying what people were thinking. She must have had a rather weak character.”

“Ever noticed a morning glory?” he asks. “They look-so frail you’d think they’d wither if you spat at them. But try to weed them out and see how far you get. Weak, hell. She fussed so much about me being an Advocate that finally I left Blackfly for good. She was more determined even than Lou.”

“Lou—that’s your wife?”

He tilts the jug again and wipes his mouth with a hand.

“Yeh. I met her at a Bible Camp. She was a big strapping girl, a redhead. Like a feather mattress, that woman was, and that’s a fact. That Bible Camp was quite something, I can tell you.”

He’s rather a coarse man, I can see that. I sniff and he glances at me.

“I was fond of her,” he says defensively. “Did I say fond? I was crazy about her. In those days she could have prayed the angels themselves right down from heaven, if she’d been so inclined, and when she lay down on the moss and spread those great white thighs of hers, there wasn’t a sweeter place in this entire world.”

His plain words take me aback, and I’m embarrassed and can’t look at him.

“Well, that’s a mighty odd combination, I must say, prayer and
that.”

There’s thousands would agree with you,” he says
morosely. “God is Love, but please don’t mention the two in the same breath. I loved that woman, I tell you.”

“You call that love?”

“Lady,” he says, “if that wasn’t, what is?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know, I’m sure.”

I heave the breath in and out of my lungs. “Oh—I’m tired. I’m quite worn out these days. I never used to feel this tired. That fool of a doctor. A good tonic would be a lot more benefit to me than all his X rays.”

‘You okay?” my companion asks. “You want me to quit gabbing?”

I smile at that. He couldn’t stop talking to save his life.

“No—go on. I like to hear you.”

“Well, okay, if you’re sure. Where’s your glass got to?”

“No, really, I mustn’t take any more. You’ll want it.”

“Don’t give it a thought,” he says. “I’m glad of the company. As I was saying, Lou and I got married sooner than we’d meant to, but that didn’t bother me any. It bothered her, though. All of a sudden she’s a worrier, too. She planned to tell everybody the baby was premature. She hardly ate a thing except tomatoes, very low calorie, you know, But when Donnie was born he was nine pounds twelve—what a disaster.”

He hands me the glass and I drink again. His vintage is stronger than it tastes. But I’m light-limbed, comfortable, and the pain has quite vanished. He lifts his shoulders in a shrug.

“I hugged her hard and told her it didn’t matter a damn,” he says. “But it was no use. God was punishing her, that’s what she thought. Some punishment, I said, a whopping kid like this, healthy, all there. He doesn’t
have two heads, does he, or an eye missing? She never saw it that way at all. You won’t believe it, but she was never the same.”

“You don’t say? How?”

“She held herself back. Her heart wasn’t in it. She was twice as keen at the Tabernacle though. She still is. But not me.”

He leans over and looks me straight in the eye.

“I lost my faith,” he says confidingly. “I kind of mislaid it and when I went to look for it, it wasn’t there.”

“Maybe you never had it, then,” I offer, thinking how impertinent of him to be telling me this. As if I were interested.

“I thought I did,” he says doubtfully. “But maybe I never, at that. I took it more easy than some, it’s true, but when I got up to testify I talked like Corinthians says with the tongues of men and of angels. I was fed up when Lou said that about Donnie. But it was really the end of the world that finished me on it once and for all.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We had a lay preacher in our Tabernacle at that time,” he explains. “He’d started out as a boulder painter. You know, one of those guys who go around with a bucket of whitewash, painting slogans on boulders along the road, to cheer up passing drivers.
Doom is Night—
stuff like that. Well, he ran out of whitewash, I guess, so he came to the Larkspur Street Tabernacle and started informing us the hour was at hand. I bet you thought that sort of thing went out of style years ago. But uh-uh. It never did.”

“I never had anything to do with those sects,” I say. “I wouldn’t know one way or another.”

“You never mixed in the right company,” Murray Ferney Lees says. “This guy, Pulsifer was his name, he was pretty convincing, I have to hand it to him. You know the sort of guy. Big, not actually handsome, but with that reassuring look. You listen to him and you think—boy, he sure sounds certain; how could he be wrong? Lou lapped it up. He wasn’t taking any chances, though. He never said the world—
as we know it
—they always put in that bit as a precaution—is going to terminate on September fourth at two-thirty in the afternoon. No, sir. He just said it would be soon, and he could prove it with chapter and verse, and we should post watches and hold these vigils and pray to have the exact time revealed to us, so we could be prepared, see? Listen, I said to Lou, so what if the exact time is revealed? You’re going to stop it, maybe, ask God to kindly wait until you’re an old lady? That’s just simply not the point, Murray, she said, the point is could you not keep watch one hour? Personally, she said, she certainly could and if I couldn’t that was my tough luck.”

I’m growing sleepy, listening to him, but something in his voice keeps me awake. He drinks again, then pushes the jug across to me. I try to tip it and pour, but the wine slops on the floor. Appalled, he seizes it from me. He’s drunk as a lord, but he pours my glass without wasting a drop. He’s an experienced hand. But I’m not mocking him, even inwardly. There’s a plausibility about this man. I like him now, despite his rabbity face, his nervous gnawing at his mustache. His strangeness interests me and I wonder how I could have thought him a bore. I’ve heard vaguely of the Redeemer’s Advocates, but never at firsthand before. I’d never have dreamed of having anything to do with such people.

“Did you go, then, Mr. Lees, to the vigils at the Tabernacle?”

“Yeh,” he says. “I thought—what the hell, it’s not worth making a scene about. I hate scenes. They give me migraine. Lou can shout the place down when she gets going. Being in insurance, though, it put me in an awkward spot, as you can appreciate. What am I supposed to do, I said to Lou, go on selling annuities just the same? Which, if I believe my clients will none of them see sixty, is hypocritical, you got to admit it. Or tell them they’re wasting their money? In which case, I said to her, the New Kingdom better come pretty damn quick or we won’t be able to keep up the payments on the house. All the more reason, she said, for praying to know the date.”

“You didn’t believe it would happen, though, did you?”

He spreads his hands as though inviting me to examine them. The nails are bitten down to the quick.

“I believed when I was right there in the Tabernacle, along with all the rest. You think—my God, they all believe it—I can’t be the only one not to. But what you don’t know is maybe they’re thinking the exact same thing. Or maybe not. How can you tell? That’s what made me nervous sometimes.”

“But you—yourself—when you weren’t with them?”

“I’d heard the same malarkey since I was a kid. It was old stuff. I was used to it. I couldn’t get worked up about it the way Lou could. Or—yeh, maybe I could, at that, but not so easily. I needed a boost, see? Anyway, I went that night to the vigil.”

He breaks off and gazes around the room, up at the high rafters hidden by darkness, over to the derelict
boat, its prow only dimly discernible, the grubby glass windows of its wheelhouse catching our one taper’s worth of light and glinting as though a mirror were set into the night. I lean forward, attentive, ease a cramped limb with a hand, and look at this man, whose name I have suddenly forgotten but whose face, now turned to mine, says in plain and urgent silence—
Listen. You must listen
. He’s sitting cross-legged, and he wavers a little and sways as he speaks in a deep loud voice.

“Reveal, oh Lord, to these few faithful ones. Thy mysterious purpose, that they may prepare to partake of the heavenly feast in Thy Tabernacle on high and drink the grapes anew in Thine Own Kingdom—”

He stops. He peers at me to see what I make of it. I look at him and at the shadows streaking now around him. His face recedes, then rushes closer, but only his face, as though the rest of him had ceased to exist. Now I’m afraid, and wish he’d stop. I don’t want to hear any more.

“What they really meant,” he says, “was—if we’re for it, God, for pity’s sake tell us when. It’s this suspense we can’t stand.”

“Not an unusual plight,” I say dryly.

“Yeh? Well, that’s as may be, but I knelt there—the floor was like iron, I may say, and the crease in my pants was ruined—and all at once I lifted my head and looked around and saw old Pulsifer throbbing like a heart, his eyes closed, and it struck me then that if the tribulation didn’t come he wouldn’t be relieved—he’d be disappointed. I thought two things then. One was that if God had any sense of humor, He’d be laughing His head off that very minute. The other was that when the hour did strike, it would likely come as more of a surprise to
Him than to us. No future here, Murray, I said to myself. You can do as you please, I said to Lou, but I’m getting the hell out of here and going home. We shouldn’t have left Donnie so long anyhow. She didn’t hear me. I took the housekey out of her purse. She never noticed. She was too busy begging for the keys of heaven.”

He lifts the jug and when he swallows I can see his Adam’s apple moving up and down. It gives him a clownish and caricatured look, and out of regret for this, rather than any desire to hear more, I bend forward and touch his hand.

“Then?”

“It’s a funny thing,” he says. “She thought it would come from so far away. The Almighty voice and the rain of locusts and blood. The moon turned dark and the stars gone wild. And all the time it was close by.”

He pauses and then with some effort goes on.

“I got home a quarter of an hour after the fire trucks,” he says. “It started in the basement, and spread. The house was old—about twenty-five years, I’d say—and all the timber inside was very dry. The house was a total loss. We had insurance on that, of course.”

“But the—”

He nods. There is something bemused about his look, an inarticulate bewilderment.

“They say it’s quick,” he says. “They’re not actually burned, you know, not until afterward. It’s the smoke.”

He turns to me. “That’s what I was told. But how do I know it’s quick? It might not be. I’d only know for sure if it happened to me.”

He jerks his head away. “I wish to Christ it had,” he says.

He thinks he’s discovered pain, like a new drug. I
could tell him a thing or two. But when I try to think what it is I’d impart, it’s gone, it’s only been wind that swelled me for an instant with my accumulated wisdom and burst like a belch. I can tell him nothing. I can think of only one thing to say with any meaning.