Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

“I am very sure that was so,” Adam told the woman, gazing at her with a puzzled expression. “He did as other children do, and his soul was what he did. Later, his doings—and thus his soul—fell under sway of older, more twisted souls, and so began to deform its youngling beauty toward these unhappy shapes. In children, my many friends from Beulah Fork, the soul is very plastic.”

“The soul ain’t plastic, Mister Adam!” shouted a black man next to Livia George. Several people, including two devout fundamentalist whites, seconded this objection.

“Never do I mean to imply the soul is what you would call, well, a synthetic polymer,” Adam said. “Please understand. The soul is immaterial. It has no location. But because it is what the body does and knows, it can be shaped. Metaphorically, I say. Likewise literally. All this, I have learned painfully in your great but strange country.”

“The soul don’t have nothing to do with the body!” shouted Ruben Decker, my neighbor one farm to the south. “It’s spiritual and everlasting!” Adam, somewhat sadly, was shaking his head. Other people in the crowd, primarily men, loudly proclaimed both a rigorous body-soul dichotomy and the immortality of the soul in that transtemporal realm known as heaven. Their phraseology was country allegory—“The body die, but the soul rise up!” “Gonna live forever with Jesus!”—but the message, a kind of received Protestant consensus, set Adam back on his heels.

My hands had begun to sweat. To Caroline, I whispered, “Can you believe this? A theological donnybrook in my own back yard.”

Adam took off his top hat and peered into it as if searching for the proper reply to those whose ire he had aroused. As he readied to speak, the sounds of the rotary blades of a helicopter— thwup! thwup! thwup! —became audible over the treetops to the northeast. Then the copter’s wasplike body tilted into view. It swept over the highway, dropped toward my front lawn, and settled noisily to rest on the other side of the house. Three or four security guards went running that way with their pistols drawn, and many of the people facing the sundeck began pushing and side-stepping one another as if to follow the guards.

Raising his hands, Adam called, “Please, everyone! Let the security persons do their work! No pretext here for rushings about and shovings!” These admonitions calmed many in the crowd, but the hubbub prompted by the helicopter’s arrival kept Adam from continuing the funeral rites. For reassurance, I took Caroline’s hand.

Presently, an entourage of three men in expensive suits, flanked by guards, strode around my house’s corner. The leading figure in this procession was the Right Reverend Dwight “Happy” McElroy. With film-star winks, victorious-politico smiles, and aw-shucks-country-boy nods, he acknowledged the disbelieving delight of many of the mourners on hand. His son Duncan marched two or three steps behind him, while his other meticulously dressed lieutenant—a man with a blond flattop and a suspicious eye, the civilian equivalent of a Secret Service agent—stayed at McElroy’s elbow.

McElroy escaped only by mounting the sundeck and walking toward Adam with his right hand extended. To cheers and applause, he and the habiline shook. My small friend appeared as perplexed as the tall evangelist looked amused and confident: Mutt and Jeff. The men were such physical contrasts that many people laughed.

“What’s ‘Happy’ McElroy doing here?” the evangelist suddenly asked, as if about to launch his own homily. “Well, my son Duncan and I are just in from Louisiana, via Atlanta, to share the grief of two bereaved families; also, to honor Adam Montaraz for a saintly gesture worthy of Our Lord Himself. We could not stay away. Where the sorrow of others calls out for assuaging, there the ministry of Dwight McElroy, God’s consoling servant, must also be. Adam didn’t expressly invite us, no, but that’s because in his humility he feared to impose upon a man as busy about God’s undone work as I. His thoughtfulness is a light unto the nations.”

“Amen!”

“Tell it!”

“But I come for another important reason, too, dear friends—to bring back to this noble man the bread that he and his equally noble wife cast upon the waters of faith, hoping thereby to save the life of the unbaptized infant whose ashes occupy this jar.” McElroy nodded at the urn. He withdrew from an inside jacket pocket (peacock-patterned silk) an official-looking envelope. “Duncan and I, not to mention my wife and Christ-proclaiming partner, Eugenia Lisbeth, are proud to return to the Montarazes the five thousand dollars that their son’s murderer extorted from them as an illicit ‘donation’ to the Greater Christian Constituency. Let no one say that ‘Happy’ McElroy accepted blood money—other than that consecrated in the blood of the Lamb—for God’s work. Let no one say that a life devoted to love chose to profit from the wages of bigotry and hate. Here, Adam, take this check, to put it to more fruitful work than it has thus far done.”

A hush gripped the crowd. Even the mockingbirds had stopped calling and flitting about. McElroy’s offering—his refusal to profit by another’s misfortune—had paralyzed his sweating onlookers with holy wonder.

Adam put his hands behind his back. “Thank you, but I cannot accept it.”

McElroy beamed. “The saintliness of this man is going to be legendary ,” he said, beginning to return the envelope to his jacket. “His very generosity cleanses this money of its taint. Cleansed, it can go to work for God. We’re blessed, my friends, to have among us in these evil days such a one.”

Before the crowd could start amen -ing and hallelujah -ing, the mother of Craig Puddicombe spoke up: “That money ought to be guv to us. But for Craig, it wouldn’t’ve been made a donation at all.” She went to the front of the paddock and stuck her hand up at McElroy. “It’s ours by right. It ain’t any of the Greater Christian Constipuancy’s.”

Everyone gawked, me with all the others, the evangelist and the habiline likewise visibly taken aback. The other Puddicombes, the woman’s in-laws and children, stumbled forward to uphold her demand.

“Yes,” Adam finally managed. “Give it to her.”

“But it’s made out to you,” McElroy said. “Not to this improvident person—who whelped the animal that killed your son and the frail woman that helped kidnap him.”

Said Craig Puddicombe’s mother, “He had his bad pints, Craig did, but he never let no one stick his pitcher on a magazine ’thout his pants on. He never held up the poor for pennies on a TV church service.”

Bilker Moody, slouching against a railing behind young Puddicombe’s casket, snickered.

“Mrs. Puddicombe—” McElroy said, uncharacteristically at a loss for words.

Said Adam, “I will, what do you call it, endorse ? Yes, I will endorse for her the check you’ve brought.” He held out his hand to McElroy, who, as if drugged, passed the check over. Adam endorsed it with a borrowed pen and handed it to Mrs. Puddicombe, who folded it and slid it down the neck of her faded sun dress.

“We’re awful hot,” she said. “You put Craig down decent, now. We’re gonna trust you to do it. Daddy’s too sick to stan’ and watch it. We’re goin’ on home.” With no more fuss, she led her family out of the roped paddock and around the house toward the distant front gate—five thousand dollars richer, beneficiary of a habiline saint.

Caroline and I were now the only two people in the area set aside for Tiny Paul’s and Craig’s immediate families. I looked back to see if my neighbors were staring at us, only to catch a glimpse of Rudy Starnes, cameraman, and Brad Barrington, anchor-flake par excellence, sneaking through the crowd to record another event that was none of their business. They soon reached Livia George and her friends.