Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 09 (2 page)

I ignored her question, which was distressingly earnest, and frowned at Ruby Bee and Estelle. “Do you know anything about this?”

Ruby Bee gave me an innocent smile. “I may have heard some rumors, but I didn’t want to bother you when you have all this laundry to do. You might even feel obliged to go run a speed trap out by the remains of Purtle’s Esso station so you can get your salary this month.”

“Just tell me—okay?”

“I’ll tell you, Arly,” said Dahlia. “Malachi Hope’s gonna have a revival out at the big pasture that belongs to Burdock Grapper. It starts on Sunday and will last for a whole week! He’s gonna heal everybody and save all the sinners in Stump County. Then he’s gonna build this humongous theme park, and thousands of people will—”

“Theme park?” I said, addressing Ruby Bee and Estelle. “On Bur’s property? What’s she talking about?”

Ruby Bee wiggled her eyebrows at Estelle, who snagged Dahlia’s arm and propelled her inside. She paused to collect her thoughts, and said, “What I heard is he aims to lease a thousand acres with an option to buy if he works out his financing.”

I stared at her. “Does Bur have that much property?”

“No, but next to the Grapper place is a two-hundred-acre tract that Jim Bob bought from Bimbo Buchanon’s widow when she had to go to the old folks’ home. Beyond that is the land that belongs to Lottie Estes’s second cousin Wharton. All together there’d be in the range of a thousand acres, give or take.”

“What’s he going to do with it?”

“Build something called ‘The City of Hope.’ It’ll be this amusement park, with a church, rides, water slides, restaurants, a campground, and I don’t know what all. It’s the most foolish thing I’ve heard since Perkin’s eldest took that correspondence course in tap dancing and made everybody in town come to a recital, but Estelle keeps insisting this preacher’s nigh onto a saint and we shouldn’t be questioning his motives.”

“Which are?” I said encouragingly.

“Did you ever see him on television?”

“I don’t watch televangelists.”

“Don’t go thinking I do, either, Miss Masterpiece Theatre,” she said, giving me an extensive view of her flared nostrils, “but a while back Estelle made me do it one night. This Malachi Hope was the smarmiest man I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot in my day. He was so oily I don’t know why he didn’t slip right off his stage and go flying into the laps of all those pitiful people in wheelchairs. After he got everybody all fired up, his wife floated down from the ceiling in a billow of smoke. She was dressed up like an angel and sang gospel songs. If she hasn’t been to Memphis so many times she has a key to the city, then my name isn’t Rubella Belinda Hanks!”

If you think I was getting all this, then you’re sorely overestimating me. “This televangelist is going to build a thousand-acre religious amusement park in Maggody?”

“I said no such thing.”

“Then what did you say?” I asked blankly.

“Burdock Grapper’s property starts on the far side of the lowwater bridge, and Jim Bob’s and Wharton’s are beyond that. It’s all within spittin’ distance, but not inside the town limits. I heard over at the launderette that Mr. Malachi Hope’s people made real sure about that.”

I wrinkled my nose as the last exhaust fumes wafted over us. “Did they?” I murmured under my breath.

“You want something to eat?” asked Ruby Bee.

“No, but I’ll see you long about supper time. I think I’m going to look into this Malachi Hope business. It beats doing laundry.”

“You never were much for doing laundry,” she said as she went inside.

I seldom fool my mother.

—==(O)==—

Mrs. Jim Bob and Brother Verber stood in front of the Assembly Hall, watching the last Hope Is Here truck turn the corner and roll down County 102 toward the low-water bridge.

“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” she said as she brushed the dust off her navy blue skirt, then straightened up to give him a beady look. “What do you think?”

He thought she was as fetching as a little sparrow, with her yellow-flecked eyes and thin lips pursed into what sort of resembled a beak and her undeniably shapely calves and trim ankles. He didn’t think that was what she wanted to hear, though. Sometimes—or even most of the time—it was hard to figure out what she did want to hear, but he always obliged her as best he could. “About this Malachi Hope fellow? Is that what you mean?”

“I wasn’t asking if it was hot enough for you, Brother Verber. Do you know anything about him and his plans?”

“Just what I heard at the potluck,” he admitted as he pulled out a handkerchief to mop his forehead. “He’s looking into buying land out past the bridge so he can build some ridiculous park. I saw a flyer over at the barbershop about a tent revival next week. Do you reckon I should call off the Sunday evening service and the Wednesday evening prayer meeting so folks can go?”

“You are not thinking this through,” Mrs. Jim Bob said, her impatience increasingly hard to miss. “Canceling a couple of services for the revival is one thing, but consider what’ll happen if Malachi Hope goes through with this project. Where do you imagine most everybody in town will go on Sundays—to the Assembly Hall to hear Lottie Estes fumble through hymns on a piano, or to a big, glitzy church where they can wander around afterward, riding the Ferris wheel and eating cotton candy?”

Brother Verber sank down on the steps of the porch, his fat face all puckered up as he mulled over what she’d said. Lottie Estes got most of the notes right, but she was liable to loose her place in the refrain and they’d have to start all over. The Assembly Hall was hot in the summer, drafty in the fall, and colder than a witch’s tit long about January. In the spring, most folks brought umbrellas. He himself always looked forward to the potluck suppers after the Sunday evening services, but the same green bean casseroles and gelatin salads showed up just about every week, and he’d heard some tart remarks lately. There wasn’t near enough in the coffers for a cottoncandy machine, much less carnival rides.

Sighing, he looked up at Mrs. Jim Bob. “I reckon it’s gonna be the end of the Voice of the Almighty Lord Assembly Hall, Sister Barbara. There ain’t no way to compete.”

“Once he gets it built, you’ll be lucky to fill the front pew,” she said without sympathy, “but this Hope fellow doesn’t own so much as a square inch of land—yet. I don’t know about Bur Grapper and Wharton Estes, but Jim Bob got a long letter a while back. Jim Bob happened to be off in Hot Springs at one of those municipal league meetings, so I took it upon myself to open the letter just in case it was important and I needed to call him.”

“You are so saintly,” Brother Verber said, shaking his head in admiration. “I would never have thought of that.”

“Well, I did. The letter was from a man named Thomas Fratelleon, who claimed to be Malachi Hope’s business manager. It was all a lot of complicated jargon about the southeast quarter of the northwest quarter, but as far as I could make out, he was asking if Jim Bob would sell that parcel for a hundred dollars an acre.”

“Generous offer, I suppose. It’s nothing but scrub and rock out that way, and the only thing it’s good for is chickweed. After ol’ Mrs. Wockermann ran off to Mexico with Merle Hardcock, her nephew sold that pasture beside her house for more like fifty an acre.”

Sometimes Mrs. Jim Bob wondered if he was exactly the right person to be the spiritual leader of the congregation. However, it was a thought unworthy of a pious Christian, and everybody knew she was the most pious Christian in town and maybe the entire county.

Brother Verber shivered like a wet dog. “Like I said,” he continued in the sonorous voice he used for funerals and the till-death-us-do-part moment in wedding vows, “there’s no way to compete with a cottoncandy machine. If I lose my congregation, I won’t be able to take a modest percent of the offering to support myself. I might ought to write the seminary out in Las Vegas and see if they know of a vacant pulpit someplace else. It breaks my heart to think about having to leave my cozy little rectory over there under the sycamore trees.” He was so choked up he had to clear his throat like a bullfrog. “And you, Sister Barbara. You are such an inspiration to us all, what with your soul as pure as the Lord’s rain and—”

“Malachi Hope can be stopped,” she interrupted, since he wasn’t saying anything she didn’t already know. “If you’d been paying attention, you’d have realized the significance of what I just said. He doesn’t own any of the parcels as of now, and even if Bur and Wharton agree to sell theirs, Jim Bob’s two hundred acres are in the middle of them.”

“Jim Bob wouldn’t turn down a hundred dollars an acre, would he? That’d add up to …” He tried to do the computation in his head, then finally gave up and said, “A right tidy sum of money.”

“Twenty thousand dollars.”

Brother Verber whistled through his teeth. “Nothing to turn up your nose at.”

“It is if what’s at stake is the salvation of the community. Jim Bob is the mayor of Maggody, and his first concern should be the spiritual well-being of his constituents. I watched some of Malachi Hope’s television shows. He preached about how Jesus wants everybody to have themselves a good time in the here and now. From the way he carried on, you’d think Jesus was a camp counselor. I don’t recollect him saying one word about eternal damnation. He had celebrities on his ‘Hour of Hope’ who talked about how they used to be miserable sinners, but as soon as they dedicated their lives to the Lord, they got rich and famous. He even had Matt Montana on his show one time. He sang ‘You’re a Detour on the Highway to Heaven,’ and half the folks in the audience were bawling by the time it was over.”

“I’ll bet they emptied their pockets when the plates were passed,” Brother Verber said, getting misty as he imagined the scene. “I wonder if I could get—”

“Jim Bob has a duty to this community, and he is not going to stand aside and allow this charlatan and his hussy to lure everybody away from the Missionary Society after all I did to win a third term as president. I’ll have a word with him this evening. If I can’t persuade him, you may have to throw in some words about Satan and the root of all evil.”

“You think it’ll work?”

Her expression was so fierce he cringed. “It will work, Brother Verber.”

—==(O)==—

Burdock Grapper watched the trucks and buses rolling up the dirt road next to his house, then took a beer out of the refrigerator and sat back down on the recliner. He was sixty-three, which made him nearly twenty years older than his wife, Norma Kay. He was also two inches shorter than she was. His narrow nose was more crooked than his teeth, which had been aching so much he was thinking about having ‘em yanked. He had a full head of brown hair tinged with gray; he dropped by the barbershop every six weeks or so for a trim, but mostly to hear the latest gossip. Not that he’d hear what gnawed at him night and day—the identity of the sumbitch Norma Kay was having an affair with. If and when he found out, the sumbitch and Norma Kay would both be real sorry.

“You’re late,” he said as she came into the living room. “It’s almost supper time. Where were you?”

“At school. Where else would I be—over at Raz Buchanon’s house gossiping with his hog?” Norma Kay went into the kitchen and took a pound of hamburger meat from the freezer. “I asked you this morning to defrost this, Bur. Is it too much trouble to get off your butt for one minute and help out? All you’ve done since the day you retired is watch those stupid soap operas and drink beer. One of these days you’re going have a heart attack and die, and I won’t even notice until you start to stink worse than you do already.”

“Watch your mouth,” he said, finishing the beer. He crumpled the can and tossed it onto the floor with the others. “Why were you at school so late?”

“The schedule’s a real mess. We were supposed to play Hasty the week after Thanksgiving, but the coach canceled because her best players have to go to a choir competition down in Clarksville. She knows we’ll whip their asses if they don’t have that six-foot-tall center.” She stuck the meat in the refrigerator and pulled out the remains of the previous evening’s casserole. She did so with a smug smile, since Bur hated leftovers more than he did soap and water. “I was on the phone all day trying to line up another team. We might be able to play Emmet, but then I have to figure out how to get us there, since the boys are still playing Hasty. Cory’s not about to let us take the bus.”

“Talking to Cory, huh?”

She came to the doorway and glared at him. “Cory and I have to talk to each other because we have to transport both of our teams to the out-of-town games and we only have the one bus. For pity’s sake, Bur, you were the basketball coach for thirty-three years. Did you ever tell your players to take a cab?”

Bur shrugged. “So you needed to talk about the bus. How’s he doing as head coach while Amos is laid up over at the nursing home in Farberville?”

“I don’t know. He just started off-season training today. Some of the first string are on vacation, but there’s a new junior with promise, and the MacNamara boy must have grown two inches over the summer. He’s going to make a good point guard.”

Bur aimed the clicker at the television set, having lost interest in basketball right after the buzzer went off to end the final game of his career. He’d never liked his players; the only pleasure he’d derived from coaching was being able to make their lives hell during practices and games.

Norma Kay returned to the kitchen to stick the casserole into the oven and fix herself a glass of iced tea. She never touched beer on account of her figure, which was holding up pretty good except for a broadening of her rump. She used a variety of expensive creams on her face and took pains to color her hair at the first sign of a dark root. Estelle Oppers was always giving her snooty looks, but Norma Kay was proud of its bright yellow color and the perky little flip like she wore when she was a starter on the Coffeyville varsity team twenty-five years ago. Nobody except parents had ever come to the games, girls’ athletics being a joke back then, but the team always played as if the bleachers were packed and a championship was at stake.