Warren Murphy: Holy Terror

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* Title : #019 : HOLY TERROR *

* Series : The Destroyer *

* Author(s) : Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir *

* Location : Gillian Archives *

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CHAPTER ONE

Many things are holy, but few of them holy men. —HOUSE OF SINANJU.

When the Reverend Titus Powell saw the bodies being loaded on ox carts in the outskirts of Calcutta, he asked himself if he were willing to die.

More specifically, was he willing to give up his life for a white girl?

Even more specifically, was he willing to give up his life for a rich white girl whose father, just two decades ago, had made Reverend Powell ask himself the identical question over the value of a cup of coffee. He remembered it clearly. You don't forget facing death.

"Ain't no one stopping y'all from drinking that cup of coffee, Reverend. But they ain't gonna be no one stopping them from hanging y'all from the big elm at Withers Creek neither."

Those had been the words of Elton Snowy, owner of Snowy's Pharmacy, Snowy's Mill, Snowy's Drive-in, and Snowy's Farm, in Jason, Georgia. Mr. Snowy, who was a Jason on his mother's side, had stood with the Silex still bubbling at the lunch counter in his pharmacy, with the young Reverend Mr. Powell sitting in front of an empty coffee cup and a crowd of jeering white youths behind him.

"I'll take cream and sugar," Reverend Powell had said, and he saw the two dark barrels of a shotgun stuck in his face. On the triggers down the barrels was one fat pink finger. The nail was grimy. The nail, the finger, the hand, and the gun belonged to the saw mill foreman who, everyone in Jason knew, was the leader of the local Ku Klux Klan.

"One barrel or two with your coffee, nigger?" asked the foreman.

Reverend Powell heard the laughter behind him, saw Snowy hold the pot over the cup, smelled the aroma of fresh-ground coffee, and knew if he lived he would never drink coffee again.

"I said one barrel or two, nigger?" repeated the saw mill foreman.

"Get that outa here," yelled Snowy. "There'll be no shooting in this pharmacy."

"You gonna serve a nigger?"

"You ain't messing up this place with that double barrel."

"And you ain't gonna serve no nigger."

"Hey, Mr. Snowy," came an out-of-breath voice from the door of the drugstore. "It's a girl."

"If you think I'm gonna allow bloodshed in here the day my wife gives me a daughter, you're out of your cotton-pickin' head there," said Snowy. "Put that double barrel away, and let's all go to my place for a little real refreshment. I'm closing the pharmacy."

"All" of course did not include Reverend Powell. But in the general joy, he did get his cup of coffee, with no barrels.

"Just for this occasion," said the saw mill foreman, pointing the shotgun at the cup. "It ain't gonna be no regular thing."

But the South was changing all over, and it did become a regular thing for the blacks in Jason to eat at the same counters and to go to the same movie theaters and to drink from the same fountains, and twenty years later, if anyone asked whether a black, least of all the Reverend Mr. Powell of Mt. Hope Baptist Church, could get a cup of coffee at Snowy's, a resident of Jason would have looked at the questioner as if he should be committed to an insane asylum.

Now, as the ox cart creaked by him on a foreign road in India, Reverend Powell remembered that long-ago day in Jason. He could see bodies dangling limbs from the cart in a looseness no living person could duplicate. Bellies swelled forward but ribs protruded, cheeks sunk beneath vacant eyes staring out into eternity, never to blink again.

The road smelled of human excrement, and the morning had no coolness to it, just a smothering heat that would become unbearable when the sun rose to its full powers. Reverend Powell felt his seersucker suit sticking to him as it had even yesterday, but so filthy had been the hotel the night before that he had not dared change it. He leaned against the gray 1947 Packard with the new coat of paint, a car that would have been junked back in Jason, and looked at the driver, a brown-skinned man with Caucasian features. The driver had stopped for a large gray cow with a dangling, fleshy throat. Just minutes before he had refused to stop for a baby crying in the street, because it was what he called "an untouchable." Cows were sacred in India. Bugs were sacred in India. Everything was sacred in India, thought Reverend Powell—everything but human life.

Instead of waiting in the car's greasy back seat for the cow to pass, Reverend Powell had gotten out, and when he saw the ox cart of bodies go by, he knew he had to make a decision: go on, to what he felt now would be his death, or go back to Jason.

He still had several hundred miles along roads like these to reach Patna at the foot of the Vindhya Mountain Range, Patna on the Ganges up from Calcutta. Famine was upon the land despite gifts of American grain that rotted in warehouses of Calcutta and Bombay and Sholapur, despite even more grain that reached the people. Despite the most aid America ever gave any country it had not been at war with, India was still collecting its starved dead in ox carts while its sanctimonious ministers in New, Delhi, who presumed to preach morality to the world, lavished money on atomic bombs.

Reverend Powell said a little prayer and steadied himself. The cow had to move soon, and he must decide whether to go on up the road to Patna or go back to the airport and return to where he could breathe the fresh air of the piny woods or share a mess of catfish with his family or cry out his love of God before his congregation in the neat white church set off on the grassy slope by the old Snowy Mill.

He felt that his life hinged on the decision he made, but just last week, it had not seemed all that terminal. Difficult, yes; terminal, no. He had regarded it all as an exercise in turning the other cheek.

"Reverend," Elton Snowy had said back in Jason exactly seven days before, "you gotta help me. I think maybe you're the only one who can. I got a letter here from Joleen. I think she's been, well, sort of kidnapped. Sort of."

"Joleen. Little Joleen. Why, she's such a lovely girl. A real Christian, if I may say so, Mr. Snowy."

"Yes sirree, a lovely girl, a lovely girl," said Snowy. Reverend Powell could see red rings around Snowy's eyes, as if the richest man in Jason had been crying.

"I need your help, Reverend. I know Joleen used to sneak down to your section of town and do social work and all. And I know you and your people liked her."

"She is a lovely girl, Mr. Snowy. Can I offer you a cup of coffee? Myself, I haven't drunk any for twenty years."

"No, thank you kindly," said Snowy and pushed a worn letter at Reverend Powell. "Read this please. It's from Joleen to her ma."

Reverend Powell read the letter, and he was confused. It seemed like a pleasant enough message from a girl who had found happiness and communion with a divine force. What confused Powell was the reference to her father's good civil rights work, but that it was nothing compared to the work of the Blissful Master she had found there in Patna, India.

"If only your very close friend, Reverend Powell, could see the complete happiness of the Divine Bliss Mission here in Patna," the letter read, "I would be eternally grateful. For the sake of Jason, he should see it right away."

The printing on the letter said, "The Divine Bliss Mission," and according to its letterhead, it had offices in Paris, Los Angeles, New York, and London. Its home was Patna, India. A picture of a fat-faced teenage boy was engraved at the top of the letter. A fuchsia halo surrounded his head.

"I see your daughter has done what the Lord hath failed to wrought," said Mr. Powell pleasantly. "She has made me your close friend."