World Made by Hand

Fifty-three

Loren and I went over to the high school in the morning. We just walked in the front door. Nobody asked what we were doing. I hadn’t been inside the place since my boy Daniel was a student there. We had to shut it down after that. That was the year of the flu, which took so many young lives, and also there was no way to run the furnaces anymore. New Faith had done an impressive job of cleaning it up, though it was still recognizably institutional. The hallways were still lined with dreary sea-foamcolored ceramic tiles, but the lockers had been removed. The place was strikingly busy at that hour, men and women bustling around the corridors, here and there a few children scurrying along. They ignored us as if we were invisible, and it was only when Brother Elam happened by, and I hailed him, that anyone would pay attention to us.

Elam directed us to Brother Jobe’s headquarters which, if I remembered correctly, had been the principal’s office, a suite of several rooms, actually. He was working at a small round table in the outer office where the secretaries used to sit, scribbling furiously with a steel pen and an inkwell, blotting his lines with a rag as he scratched away on the paper. He sat in a pink upholstered chair under a slightly water-stained framed portrait of George Washington that must have been part of the original decor. But otherwise, he had transformed the rooms into something that resembled an Edwardian hotel suite. I could see that the inner office had been converted to a bedroom and that a woman was in there making the bed. When she went around to the far side of the bed, I saw that it was the same girl who had been sitting next to Brother Jobe the night we first met.

“What a surprise,” he said without looking up. “Mornin,’ Mr. Mayor, Parson Holder. Do you know what it means to be full of the Holy Ghost?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued. “How important is it for God’s ministers to be continually at prayer? To know the power and the nature of God you got to partake of his inbreathed word. Morning and night, at every meal, at work, at bathing, whatever chance you got. The Psalmist said that he hid God’s word in his heart, that he might not sin against him. And you will find that the more of God’s word you hide in your heart, the easier it is to live a righteous life.”

Brother Jobe looked up at us with an impressively toothy smile.

“Have you prepared your Sunday sermon yet, Parson?” he said to Loren.

“Not yet.”

“You going to get around to it or speak extempore.”

“I usually make some notes beforehand.”

“Do you? Well, listen up to this here.” He cleared his throat. “You people who are seeking the baptism are entering a realm of illumination by the power of the Holy Ghost. He reveals the preciousness and the power of the blood of Christ. I find by the revelation of the spirit that there is not one thing in me that the blood does not cleanse. I find that God sanctifies me by the blood and reveals his power in the work of the spirit. Oh, this life in the Holy Ghost! This life of grace growing and knowledge increasing in the power of the spirit, the life and the mind of Christ being renewed in you, and of constant revelations of the might of his power. It is the only kind of thing that lets folks stand.”

He glanced up again.

“Ain’t that some sermonizing?”

“It’s very musical,” Loren said.

“Well, if you don’t mind talking shop a moment here, Parson, don’t you find that to be effective-you got to connect with a different part of the congregation’s brain? You’re right, it is a kind of music. But is it an accident that the spirit finds our people most often in the act of singing?”

“No,” Loren said.

“And wouldn’t you say the singing region of the brain is different from the digging-a-ditch part?”

“Probably.”

“One of these days I’ll have to come by and listen to you hold forth,” Brother Jobe said. “Would you mind?”

“Not in the least.”

“And you can bring your whole dadblamed congregation to our Sunday service any old time-we got the whole goldurned auditorium and it must seat seven hundred.”

“Thank you.”

“Now what-all you boys come to see me about?”

“Actually, I’m here to place you under arrest,” Loren said.

Brother Jobe’s face registered shock at first, but slowly dissolved into a grin of even vaster amusement and satisfaction than the one he had shown at reading his own sermon.

“Ain’t this one for the books,” he said. “What’s the charge going to be?”

“Either disturbing the peace or criminal mischief or battery, third degree,” Loren said. “I haven’t quite decided. Maybe we’ll mix and match.”

“Hey, that’s good. Sounds like you been boning up. But what for exactly?”

“Cutting people’s beards off against their will.”

“I see. Okay, why don’t you boys pull up a seat, let’s powwow on this. First off: you got a jail?”

We did have a jail. It was on the second floor of the old town hall, and Loren and I had checked it out earlier that morning. I don’t think it had been used in thirty, forty years. It was cluttered with old file cabinets and other junk. We would have to spend a couple of hours mucking it out and mopping it up, and we had no idea where the keys to the locks of the two cells might be found.

“Yes, we have a jail,” I said. “Look, Brother Jobe, I’m not against you or your organization, and I appreciate what you’ve done for the town since you arrived. But you can’t snatch people off the street and have your way with them—”

“Have my way with ’em! Hooo-weee."”

“You know what I mean.”

“Looks to me like you all can’t take a joke,” he said, but he kept grinning as though his amusement knew no bounds.

“The people in town are pretty ticked off,” Loren said.

“Maybe so,” Brother Jobe said, “but at least now they look good being that way.”

“If we don’t make a public show of bringing you in,” I said, “I’m afraid things could get ugly around here.”

“Bottom line: you want me to work with you?”

“Yes. That’s pretty much it.”

“Heck, I’ll work with you.”

“Okay,” I said. “What do you say we come get you around seven o’clock this evening? You meet us at the front door. We walk you through town so everybody can see, and lock you up.”

“Fair enough. Then what happens.”

“Somehow we get Wayne Karp down there with you.”

“In the jail?”

“Yes.”

“That trailer trash? I hope you’ve got two separate cells.”

“We do,” Loren said.

“Well then, I’ll look forward to making his acquaintance. How do you propose to bring him in?”

“I don’t know,” Loren said.

“You can probably use these here,” Brother Jobe said. He stepped across the room, fetched a wad of papers on top a bookshelf, and handed them to me. “Writs and such,” he said. “Signed by Mr. Bullock, all properlike. I sent young Brother Minor over to fetch them. He helped remind Mr. Bullock of the service we rendered him. They come in late last night.”

The wad included a warrant to search Karptown for stolen goods, a warrant for the arrest of Wayne Karp, a summons for Bunny Willman and Wayne Karp to appear before a grand jury two weeks hence, two blank arrest warrants to be used as we saw fit to bring in whoever had been with Wayne burgling houses the night of the levee.

“That’s pretty comprehensive,” I said. “How’d you get Mr. Bullock off square one, finally.”

“We had a… a meeting of the minds, so to speak.”

I handed the papers to Loren.

“We’ll go up to Karptown later today,” he said.

“You’re a couple of brave boys.”

“The object is to inform them that the law is back in business here,” Loren said. “They got a lot to answer for.”

“You know, I’ve offered my men to the mayor here.”

“I’m aware of that,” Loren said. “Thanks. If necessary, we’ll take you up on that.”

“Some of’em have been to places and dealt with folks that even Mr. Wayne Karp wouldn’t want to know about. You don’t have to explain none of this to Mr. Karp, but we got your back. The welfare of this town is our business too. Maybe he’ll understand that he can come in now walking upright or come in later by some other means of locomotion.”

“We’ve got modest expectations,” Loren said.

“Reach for the stars, I always say.”

“We’ve got to start reaching for the lower branches before we get to the stars,” I said.

“Some day I’m going to teach you to think big, old son,” Brother Jobe said. “Tell you what, though: you bring the sumbitch in tonight, I’ll have him converted into a Jesus-loving lamb of God quicker’n you can say Deuteronomy 32:35.”