Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

“Did you give them the substitutes they wanted?”

Livia George sat spraddle-legged at a table near the cash register. “Don’ I always, Mistah Paul?”

“Everybody was taken care of?”

She gave me a disgusted look. “We turned you a pretty profit, and we done been doin’ that the whole live-long week. You jes’ like a man runs up to put out a fire when it’s awreddy burnt down his house.”

“Livvy, you say the sweetest things.”

“How’s Mistah Adam?” she asked, sitting up straight to wipe her brow. “How’s Miss RuthClaire?”

“Fine,” I lied. “Fine.”

I made some noises about the apparent success of Adam’s operation, but beyond that partial truth I could not comfortably go. To prevent any further discussion of the matter, I helped clean up the restaurant and stayed on for the five-o’clock dinner crowd. Our receipts for the day were encouraging, and I drove Livia George home without once mentioning that I had a guest in my house.

Next morning, closer to noon than to sunup, the TV set downstairs awakened me.

I knotted my terrycloth robe at my waist and stumbled barefoot down the steps to find Adam cross-legged on the floor with a section of the Sunday Journal-Constitution strewn around him and my RCA XL-100’s screen flickering with ill-defined violet and magenta images of Dwight “Happy” McElroy’s Great Gospel Giveaway broadcast.

“ ‘This is my story, this is my song,’” sang the hundred-member choir behind McElroy. “ ‘Praising my Savior all the day long!’”

Shots of the choir alternated with wide-angle pans of the congregation in McElroy’s huge Televangelism Center in Rehoboth, Louisiana. This soaring, baroquely buttressed structure had been paid for by the four-bit to five-dollar donations of hundreds of thousands of low-income subscribers to the doctrinal guidelines of the Greater Christian Constituency of America, Inc. Despite the raddled colors on my picture tube, I could see that attending the service were more enraptured souls than you could usually find at the Omni during an Atlanta Hawks basketball game. Seven thousand people? Ten? However many there were, they must have converged on Rehoboth from every city and hamlet on the Gulf Coast, not excluding Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile. The blessed place rocked.

“Ah,” I said. “Your favorite show.”

Adam had already dressed: a pair of light brown bush shorts and an orange T-shirt celebrating the pleasures of River Street in Savannah. He handed me a section of the paper called “The Arts.”

“Turn first page,” he growled, but, overnight, his speech had become more fluid.

I obeyed. What greeted my eye on the inside page was this headline:

Beside the brief story was a file photograph of Adam and RuthClaire in “happier times,” namely, at the opening of his Abraxas show in February. My face was a smudge of dots among other ill-defined faces in the background.

“That was quick, wasn’t it?”

I read the story. It quoted RuthClaire to the effect that Adam’s pursuit of spiritual fulfillment had left him little time for either Tiny Paul or her. She still loved him, but that very love insisted that she give him what he most wanted, a chance to study at Candler without family encumbrances. She wanted to support him in his quest for a theological degree, but all he wanted was complete freedom. No one alive fully understood the habiline mind, but in some ways Adam’s outlook was that of a medieval ascetic with a calling for the priesthood. Had she not intercepted him on his northward trek through Georgia two years ago, almost certainly he would have discovered his spiritual bent without first marrying.

Adam grunted. “She does not add. That ‘almost certainly.’ I would have. Stayed a naked animal.”

“Never mind. You still end up looking like a horse’s butt, Adam.”

“‘ A horse’s butt?’”

“What kind of man leaves his wife and son to study religion? Jesus.”

“I do not care. How I end up. Looking. To people who do not know me.”

“You just want Paulie back?”

“Yes.”

On Gospel Giveaway , the words of McElroy’s sermon rolled from him like Gulf Coast combers in hurricane season, powerful, dangerous, unrelenting. (Of course, there was also the ever-present inset of the woman interpreting the sermon for deaf viewers, her hands flashing like hungry seagulls.) Suddenly, though, McElroy held up a copy of the same section of the Atlanta paper now in my own hands.

“…a continuing assault on the American family,” he thundered, waving the newspaper at his auditors. “I’d planned to apologize today for my overzealousness last summer in castigatin’ the former RuthClaire Loyd for livin’ in sin with a male creature not her husband. Well, it’s long since become evident to everybody that this so-called creature is a man. He and Miss RuthClaire were in fact husband and wife at the time of their apparent illicit cohabitation. That bein’ so, they deserved an apology. Why, this past week I visited Adam Montaraz at a hospital in Atlanta, laid my hands square on his head, and baptized him into the everlastin’ glory and the ever-glorious communion of the Body of Christ. Say Amen !”

The people in the Televangelism Center roared, “ Amen! ”

“At the same time, I unburdened my spirit of its load of guilt and sorrow to both Montarazes, callin’ upon them to forgive me in the great and gracious name of Jesus Christ. And did they forgive me? I believe they did, and I went away fully convicted that here were two righteous human bein’s saved from sin and despair by faith in God and their humble devotion to each other.”

“To God give the glory!” a member of the audience cried.

“But this morning I read that this same couple, so concerned and carin’ only five days ago, has fallen to the epidemic of sundered relationships ravagin’ our country the way the plague once ravaged Europe! This story wounds me so bad because RuthClaire Montaraz has broken her marriage for one incredible reason—nothing more terrible than her husband’s desire to… to study for the ministry !”

The congregation groaned collectively.

Adam sprang up from the floor and punched the button turning the set off. “That. Son. Of. Bitch,” he enunciated.

“RuthClaire didn’t let him baptize T. P. He resents her for that, Adam. He’s trying to get back at her.”

“He has. Misread the story. I am the one. Who has deserted my family.”

“Adam, it’s all a fabrication. Everything in that story.”

Adam struggled to explain himself: “But he has misread, even, the fabrication. A person working for a Master of Theological Studies… is not preparing for the ministry. That is the degree of a lay person. Mr. McElroy should know that.”

“RuthClaire balked him. That’s all he knows.”

“So he blackens her name from his pulpit? For oh-so-many viewers? Is that what he does?” Adam stopped pacing, rubbed his lower jaw, and pointed a bony finger at the blank screen. “Dwight ‘Happy’ McElroy, you are a… very unpleasant… son of bitch.”

I calmed Adam down and got him into the kitchen where, remembering the orders of Dr. Ruggiero, I prepared him a plate of soft scrambled eggs and a bowl of oatmeal. Adam ate ravenously, polishing off his eggs before turning his spoon to the still steaming, cinnamon-sprinkled oatmeal.

The West Bank was closed on Sundays, not so much to honor the sabbath as to acknowledge the mores of the townspeople who honored it. And, like God, I myself was not opposed to twenty-four hours of uninterrupted rest every seven days. At any rate, that afternoon Adam and I entertained ourselves preparing a makeshift gallery display of RuthClaire’s paintings Souls in her old studio. We organized them by dividing them into five groups of seven canvases each, scrupulously assigning different background colors and frame sizes to each group—after which we either hung them or propped them on shelves or tables where they would show off to best advantage.