Bad Characters Page 16

  “Greetings, Christian soldier,” said the man, in a deep, rich Southern accent, and he offered me a large, warty hand. “Evangelist Gerlash is the name, and this is my girl, Opal.”

  Opal put her hand on my head and said, “Peace.”

  “Same to you,” I said awkwardly, and took my feet out of the water. “You can have this tree if you want. I was just leaving.”

  I started to get up, but Evangelist Gerlash motioned me to stay where I was, and he said, “It uplifts my heavy heart and it uplifts Opal’s to find a believer in our wanderings through this godless world. All too seldom do we find a person applying themself to the Book. Oh, sister, keep to this path your youthful feet have started on and shun the Sodoms and the Gomorrahs and the Babylons!”

  My youthful feet were so wet I was having a struggle to put on my socks, and I thought, Peace! That’s all he knows about it. There’s not an inch of peace or privacy in this whole town.

  “Seek truth and not the fleshpots!” said the man. “Know light, not license! ‘A little child shall lead them,’ says the Book you hold in your small hands, as yet unused to woman’s work. Perhaps you are that very child.”

  “Amen,” said Opal, and with this they both sat down, tailor-fashion, on the bank of the stream. For some time, nothing more was said. The Gerlashes complacently scrutinized me, as if I were the very thing they had been looking for, and then they looked at each other in a congratulatory way, while I, breaking out in an itching rash of embarrassment, tried to think of an urgent bit of business that would excuse me from their company without being impolite. I could think only of the dentist or of a dancing class, but I was dressed for neither; some weeks before, my Uncle Will M’Kerrow, who lived in Ridley, Missouri, had gone to a sale at the Army and Navy store in St. Joe and had bought presents for me and my brother and my two sisters, and today I was wearing mine—khaki knickers and a khaki shirt and a cavalry hat. I had perked up the hat by twining a multicolored shoelace around the band; the other shoelace I had cut in two to tie the ends of my pigtails; over my heart was sewn a red “C,” a school letter that I had got in the spring for collateral reading. The dentist, Dr. Skeen, a humorist, would have died laughing if he had seen me in these A.E.F. regimentals, and Miss Jorene Roy, the dancing teacher, would have had kittens. Although the Gerlashes had no way of knowing the personality of either of them, I was so unskillful at useful lies, and believed so firmly that my mind could be read, that I did not dare pretend I was going to have a cavity filled or to assume the five ballet positions. I said nothing and waited for an inspiration to set me free. People who talked Bible talk like this made me ashamed for them.

  Evangelist Gerlash was immensely tall, and his bones had only the barest wrapper of flesh; he made me think of a tree with the leaves off, he was so angular and gnarled, and even his skin was something like bark, rough and pitted and scarred. His wild beard was the color of a sorrel horse, but his long hair was black, and so were the whiskers on the backs of his hands that imperfectly concealed, on the right one, a tattoo of a peacock. His intense and watchful brown eyes were flecked with green, and so were Opal’s. Opal’s hair was the color of her father’s beard and it fell ropily to her shoulders; it needed a good brushing, and probably a fine comb wouldn’t have done it any harm.

  Presently, the evangelist took his beard between his hands and squeezed as if he were strangling it, and he said, “We have had a weary journey, sister.”

  “You said a mouthful,” said Opal, and hugely yawned,

  “We come all the way from Arkansas this trip,” said her father. “We been comin’ since May.”

  “I liked it better last summer,” said Opal, “up in Missouri and Iowa. I don’t like this dry. Mountains give me the fantods.” She looked over her shoulder up at the heat-hidden range and shuddered violently.

  “We been roving like gypsies of the Lord, warning the wicked and helping the sick,” her father went on. “We are pleased to meet up with a person who goes to the source of goodness and spiritual health. In other words, we are glad to make the acquaintance of a friend.” And, still wringing his beard, he gave me an alarming smile that showed a set of sharp, efficient teeth. “Yes, sir, it gladdens me right down to the marrowbone to see a little girl on a summer day reading the word of God instead of messing with the vanities of this world or robbing the honest farmer of his watermelon or sassing her Christian mother.”

  “We stopped in nineteen towns and preached up a storm,” said Opal. “You got any gum on you?”

  Fascinated by the Gerlashes, although the piety the evangelist assigned to me discomfited me, since I was no more reading the Bible than your cat, I took a package of Beech-Nut out of the pocket of my knickers, and along with it came my hand-me-down Ingersoll that hadn’t run for two years. Opal took a stick of gum, and her father, with his eye on my watch, said, “Don’t mind if I do,” and also took a stick. “That’s a dandy timepiece you got there. Remember that nice old gold turnip I used to have, Opie?”

  “Yeah,” said Opal scornfully. “I remember you hocked that nice old gold turnip.”

  “Possessions are a woe and a heavy load of sin,” said her father, and reached out for my watch. But after he had held it to his ear and fiddled with the stem for a while, he gave it back, saying, “Was a dandy timepiece. Ain’t nothing now but a piece of tin and isinglass.” Then he returned to his thesis. “I reckon this is the one and only time I or Opal has come across a person, let alone a child, drinking at the wellspring of enlightenment.” And he gave me his hand to shake again.

  “Amen,” said Opal.

  There followed a drawling antiphonal recitative that related the Gerlash situation. In the winter, they lived in a town called Hoxie, Arkansas, where Evangelist Gerlash clerked in the Buttorf drugstore and preached and baptized on the side. (“Hoxie may be only a wide space in the road,” said Opal, “but she don’t have any homely mountains.”) Mrs. Gerlash, whom Abraham had untimely gathered to his bosom the winter before, had been a hymn singer and an organ player and had done a little preaching herself. Opal, here, had got the word the day she was born, and by the time she was five and a half years old she could preach to a fare-thee-well against the Catholics and the Wets. She was also an A-1 dowser and was renowned throughout the Wonder State. In the summer, they took to the road as soon as Opal was out of school, and went camping and preaching and praying (and dowsing if there was a call for it) and spreading the truth all over the country. Last year, they had gone through the Middle West up as far as Chicago (here Opal, somewhat to her father’s impatience, digressed to tell me the story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow), and the year before they had gone through New England; on earlier trips they had covered Florida and Georgia. One of these days, they were going to set up shop in New York City, though they understood the tourist-camp situation there was poor. Sometimes they found hospitality and sometimes they didn’t, depending on the heathens per capita. Sometimes the Christian citizens lent them a hall, and they put up a sign on the front door saying, “The Bible Tabernacle.” Often, in such a receptive community, they were invited to supper and given groceries by the believers. But sometimes they had to do their saving of souls in a public park or in a tourist camp. (“Not much business in this one,” said Opal, gazing ruefully at their solitary tent.) Mr. Buttorf, the druggist in Hoxie, always said he wasn’t going to keep Gerlash one more day if he didn’t quit this traipsing around three months of the year, but the Lord saw to it that right after Labor Day Buttorf came to his senses and hired him again. They had arrived in Adams this morning, and if they found fertile ground, they meant to stay a week, sowing the seeds of righteousness. Evangelist Gerlash would be much obliged to learn from me what sort of town this was; he said he guessed nobody could give him the lay of the land—spiritually speaking—any better than a Bible-reading girl like me.

  “But first,” he said, “tell Opal and I a little something about yourself, sister.” He took a black notebook out of the pocket of his black coat
and took a stubby pencil out of his hatband, licked it, and began to ask me questions. All the time he was taking down my dossier, Opal rocked gently back and forth, hugging herself and humming “Holy, Holy, Holy.” I was much impressed by her, because her jaws, as she diligently chewed her gum, were moving in the opposite direction to her trunk; I was sure she would be able to pat her head and rub her stomach at the same time.

  * * *

  It never occurred to me that I didn’t have to answer questions put to me by adults (except for the old men in the Goldmoor, who were not serious)—even strange ones who had dropped out of nowhere. Besides, I was always as cooperative as possible with clergymen, not knowing when my number might come up. The evangelist’s questions were harmless enough, but some of them were exceedingly strange. In between asking my name and my age and my father’s occupation, he would say, “Which do you think is the Bible Sabbath—Saturday or Sunday?” and “Do you know if the Devil is a bachelor or is he a married man?” When to these hard, interesting questions I replied that I did not know, Opal left off her humming and said, “Amen.”

  When he had got from me all the data he wanted, he said, “I bet you this here town is a candidate for brimstone. I bet you it’s every bit as bad as that one out on the plains we were at for two weeks in a hall. Heathens they were, but scared, so they give us a hall. That Mangol.”

  “Mudhole is what I call it,” said Opal.

  Her father chuckled. “Opal makes jokes,” he explained. Then he said, “That was the worst town we come across in all our travels, sister, and somewheres on me I’ve got a clipping from the Mangol daily showing what I told the folks down there. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same situation was here in Adams, being in the same state with Mangol and not any too far away from Mangol and having that college that is bound to sow free-thinking. Forewarned is forearmed is what I always say. I may have a good deal of hard work to do here.” He began to fish things out of his pockets, and you never saw such a mess—a knife, a plug of chewing tobacco, a thin bar of soap, envelopes with arithmetic on them, a handkerchief I am not going to describe, any number of small pamphlets and folded-up handbills. Finally, he handed me a clipping. It said,

  ANOTHER SOUR, GASSY STOMACH VICTIM SAYS GASTRO-PEP GAVE RELIEF

  There was a picture of an indignant-looking man with a pointed head and beetling brows and a clenched jaw, who testified:

  “For 3 years I had been a Great Victim of stomach gas and indigestion,” said Mr. Homer Wagman, prominent Oklahoma citizen of 238 Taos Street, Muskogee. “My liver was sluggish, I would get bloated up and painful and had that tired dragged out feeling all the time. Recently a friend told me about Gastro-Pep so I decided to give it a trial. After taking 3 bottles of this medicine my WHOLE SYSTEM has gone through such a change that I can hardly believe it! Now my gas and stomach discomfort are relieved and I can eat my meals without suffering. I sleep like a schoolboy.” Advt.

  I did not know what I was reading, but I didn’t like it anyway, since it had so nasty a sound; I didn’t mind hearing about broken legs or diphtheria, but I hated any mention of anyone’s insides. I started to read it for the second time, trying to think of something intelligent or complimentary to say to Evangelist Gerlash, and I must have made a face, because he leaned over me, adjusting his glasses, and said, “Oops! Hold on! Wrong write-up,” and snatched the clipping out of my hand. I’m not abolutely sure, but I think Opal winked at me. Her father shuffled through his trash again and finally handed me another clipping, which, this time, was not an advertisement. The headline was

  GERLASH LOCATES HELL IN HEART OF CITY OF MANGOL

  and the story beneath it ran:

  “Hell is located right in the heart of the city of Mangol but will not be in operation until God sets up His Kingdom here in the earth,” declared Evangelist Gerlash last night to another capacity crowd in the Bible Tabernacle.

  “There are some very bad trouble spots in the city of Mangol that no doubt would be subjects of Hell right now,” continued the evangelist and said, “but there are so many good people and places in this city that overshadow the bad that God has decided to postpone Hell in Mangol until the time of the harvest and the harvest, God says, ‘is the end of the world’ (Matthew 13:39).

  “Hell, when started by God with eternal fire that comes from God out of Heaven and ignites the entire world, including this city, will be an interesting place. It will be a real play of fireworks, so hot that all the elements of earth will melt; too hot all over to find a place for any human creature to live. God is not arranging this fireworks for any human creature and therefore, if you or I ever land in this place, it is because we choose to go there.”

  Evangelist Gerlash and his daughter, Opal Gerlash, 12, of Hoxie, Arkansas, have been preaching on alternate nights for the last week at the Bible Tabernacle, formerly the Alvarez Feed and Grain store, at 1919 Prospect Street. Tonight Opal Gerlash will lecture on the subject, “Are You Born Again by Jumping, Rolling, Shouting, or Dancing?”

  * * *

  I read this with a good deal more interest than I had read of Mr. Wagman’s renascence, although as Evangelist Gerlash’s qualifications multiplied, my emotion waned. I had assumed from the headline, which made the back of my neck prickle, that he had some hot tips on the iniquities of that flat, dull little prairie town of Mangol that now and again we drove through when we were taking a trip to the southwest; the only thing I had ever noticed about it was that I had to hold my nose as we went through it, because the smell of sugar beets was so powerfully putrid. The city of Mangol had a population of about six hundred.

  Nevertheless, though the evangelist did not scare or awe me, I had to be polite, and so, handing back the clipping, I said, “When do you think the end of the world is apt to be?” Opal had stopped her humming and swaying, and both she and her father were staring at me with those fierce brown eyes.

  “In the autumn of the world,” said Evangelist Gerlash sepulchrally, and Opal said, as she could be counted on to do, “Amen.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “But what autumn? What year?” He and Opal simultaneously bowed their heads in silent prayer. Both of them thoughtfully chewed gum.

  Then Opal made a speech. “The answer to this and many other questions will be found in Evangelist Gerlash’s inspirational hundred-and-twelve-page book entitled Gerlash on the Bible. Each and every one of you will want to read about the seven great plagues to smite the people of the world just before the end. Upon who will they fall? Have they begun? What will it mean to the world? In this book, on sale for the nominal sum of fifty cents or a half dollar, Evangelist Gerlash lets the people in on the ground floor regarding the law of God.” From one of the deep sleeves of her kimono—for that was what that grimy garment was—Opal withdrew a paper-bound book with a picture of her father on the front of it, pointing his finger at me.

  “Fifty cents, a half dollar,” said the author, “which is to say virtually free, gratis, and for nothing.”

  Up the creek a way, a bullfrog made a noise that sounded distinctly like “Ger-lash.”

  “What makes Mangol so much worse than anyplace else?” I asked, growing more and more suspicious now that the conversation had taken so mercantile a turn.

  But the Gerlashes were not giving out information free. “You will find the answer to this and many other questions in the book,” said Opal. “Such as ‘Can Wall Street run God’s Business?’”

  “Why does the Devil go on a sit-down strike for a thousand years?” said her father.

  “What?” said I.

  “Who will receive the mark of the beast?” said Opal.

  “Repent!” commanded Evangelist Gerlash. “Watch! Hearken!”

  “Ger-lash,” went the bullfrog.

  “Will Hell burn forever?” cried Opal. “Be saved from the boiling pits! Take out insurance against spending eternity on a griddle!”

  “Thy days are numbered,” declared her father.

  Opal said, “Major Haged
orn, editor of the Markston Standard, in his editorial said, ‘This man Gerlash is as smart as chain lightning and seems to know his Bible forwards and backwards.’” All this time, she was holding up the book, and her father, on the cover of it, was threatening to impale me on his accusing finger.

  “Perhaps our sister doesn’t have the wherewithal to purchase this valuable book, or in other words the means to her salvation,” he said, at last, and gave me a look of profound sadness, as if he had never been so sorry for anyone in his life. I said it was true I didn’t have fifty cents (who ever heard of anyone ten years old going around with that kind of money?), and I offered to trade my Bible for Gerlash on the Bible, since I was interested in finding out whether the Devil was a bachelor or had a wife. But he shook his head. He began to throttle his beard again, and he said, “Does a dove need a kite? Does a giraffe need a neck? Does an Eskimo need a fur coat? Does Gerlash need a Bible?”

  “Gerlash is a regular walking encyclopedia on the Bible,” said Opal.

  “One of the biggest trouble spots in the world is Mangol, Colorado,” said Evangelist Gerlash. “No reason to think for a minute the contamination won’t spread up here like a plague of locusts. Don’t you think you had ought to be armed, Christian soldier?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said, for I had grown more and more curious. “But I don’t have fifty cents.”

  “Considering that you are a Christian girl and a Bible reader,” said the man, “I think we could make a special price for you. I reckon we could let you have it for twenty-five cents. O.K., Opal?”

  Opal said rapidly, “Gastro-Pep contains over thirty ingredients. So it is like taking several medicines at once. And due to the immense volume in which it sells, the price of Gastro-Pep is reasonable, so get it now. Tonight!”