What I Really Think of You Page 5

  Daddy was counting that morning’s offering from The Hand over on the card table, while Bobby John read the comics.

  Daddy, Bobby John, and I had finished watching Guy Pegler’s sermon, which he called “Chopsticks.”

  He told how these folks went to a Chinese banquet, and when they took up their chopsticks to get at their meal, they couldn’t reach the food in front of them because the chopsticks were too long.

  The reason for that was everyone was supposed to feed the person across from them. “Feed each other in life!” Guy Pegler shouted out. “Give and you shall receive!”

  It’s Up to You was offering little gold chopsticks for charms that week, too.

  Bobby John said he was waiting for the P.S., looking from the comics to the TV.

  Bobby John said, “Not many people I know can even handle chopsticks.”

  “I wouldn’t like to be waiting for any food you was going to be passing across the table to me on chopsticks,” Daddy told him.

  “You ever tried to pick up chop suey with them things?” said Bobby John.

  “Well, it’s a good sermon all the same,” said Daddy. “You can’t knock that sermon any.”

  “It’s a good sermon if you’re Chinese,” said Bobby John.

  “It’s a good sermon,” Daddy said.

  Bobby John said, “You want me to help count up the offering?”

  “This offering’s not going to take two of us to count,” said Daddy. “The cat could count this offering. … I think I’ll go in my room to pray.”

  “Wait for the P.S., Daddy,” said Bobby John. “Don’t turn off the TV yet.”

  Mum shouted in to count the offering after dinner. “You’re going to lose your appetite, Royal.”

  “Be better if we all lost our appetites with this slim an offering,” said Daddy.

  While The Challenge Choir sang “The World Needs a Melody,” the camera showed their faces, then the ocean waves, then a gull flying with silver wings into blue clouds, then Guy Pegler in his royal-blue robes with his hands up, then back to the choir, the ocean, et cetera.

  I was combing the cat when I heard Guy Pegler say “… a special guest in our P.S. segment from right here in Seaville.”

  The three of us looked up at that one, and that was when we saw Diane-Young Cheek standing there on the balcony with Guy Pegler’s arm around her shoulders.

  “You know your girl friend was going to be on?” Daddy asked Bobby John.

  “I know something went to her head ever since the healing,” Bobby John said.

  Next thing we knew, Diane-Young Cheek was telling how Jesus Christ took her pain away.

  “I’d gone to this place we have here called The Helping Hand Tabernacle,” she was saying, and Daddy snapped, “This church.”

  “Well, we’re getting a plug,” Bobby John said. “At least we’re getting that.”

  I called out to Mum that we was on national television. “Hurry and see!”

  Guy Pegler said, “And what happened at The Helping Hand Tabernacle?”

  “That’s twice,” Bobby John said.

  Mum was in the room by then, paring knife in one hand, carrot in the other. “Praise the Lord!”

  Diane-Young Cheek told how Reverend Keck and Reverend Ringer prayed over her.

  “She’s in the big time now,” said Bobby John.

  Guy Pegler said softly, “Diane-Young, I want to interrupt you long enough to tell our viewers you were in great pain because you’d tried to take your life.”

  Mum sucked in her breath and said, “Well, the dirty linen’s out on the line now, for all to see.”

  “Satan’s linen is never clean,” Daddy said.

  “… and then I heard about this healing,” Diane-Young said.

  “I tell you I was surprised when she showed up,” Mum said. “Wasn’t you surprised, Bobby John?”

  “Never know what she’s going to do,” said Bobby John.

  “I was surprised,” I said. “She said her folks said we were too emotional down at The Hand.”

  “I expect they’re singing themselves some other tune now,” Mum said.

  “Keep quiet and listen,” Daddy said.

  “… suddenly the pain was gone and I just fell over,” Diane-Young said.

  Mum said, “She was slain in the spirit. She fell in the spirit.”

  “Diane-Young, I want to thank you for appearing with me this morning, and helping others realize that Jesus wants you to win!” Closeup of Dr. Pegler. “So do I!”

  Then The Challenge Choir began singing, “Run, climb, reach for a star!”

  Daddy said, “Well, we got something to give thanks for here, seems to me.”

  We bowed our heads while Daddy said a prayer of Thanksgiving.

  The prayer began, “O Lord, help us keep humble,” and no sooner ended when Bobby John began pacing around saying he supposed it was a good thing, he supposed a nationwide plug was a good thing.

  “You should praise Jesus, son,” Mum said. “You helped bring her to Him.”

  “Well, I was her mintor all right.

  “You was her mentor” said Daddy. “You wasn’t her mintor. Sounds like you was in charge of her breath. Mintor.”

  Later that day I got up from a nap, and the whole house was quiet except for Bobby John whispering into the phone. He’d pulled the cord into the living room, and was crouched over on the living-room couch.

  “You could have told me you was going to be on nationwide TV, D. Y. … Now, that ain’t the point. It isn’t the point. It isn’t that we want anything, honeybunch. I just miss you so.”

  He stopped talking when he saw me and said, “Opal’s in the room now.”

  I started to leave when he said, “Opal, wait.” Then into the phone, “I’ll ask her. But you remember what I said.”

  He put his hand across the mouthpiece and said, “Opal? The Cheeks are having a dinner party for Dr. Pegler and his wife and Jesse. They want you up there next Saturday night.”

  In those few seconds before I answered, I saw Jesse’s face, Bud’s, smelled the honeysuckle at St. Luke’s, crazy, jumbled pictures in my head, until I finally managed to say, “What they want me for?”

  “To help serve,” Bobby John said, as though I ought to know that as well as I knew my own name.

  Something else … When Daddy woke up from his nap, Bobby John announced the Cheeks were going to put in a whole new CheckCheek Security System at The Hand. He had this big grin on his face. “It’s free from them to us, Daddy.”

  “What for?” Daddy said.

  “In gratitude for D. Y.’s healing, Daddy.”

  “The Hand’s never been locked since it opened,” Daddy said.

  “There’s been some stealing going on in The Hollow, Daddy. People been taking things from houses.”

  “Taking things?” Daddy said. “The Lord commanded us if any man take your coat, give him your cloak besides, or don’t you remember your Bible?”

  “They just thought—”

  “They just didn’t think,” said Daddy. “We don’t need no CheckCheek Security in our Savior’s church, thank you all the same.”

  Six

  JESSE PEGLER

  THE NIGHT WE WERE going to dinner at the Cheeks’, my mother said the Cheeks were “very important.”

  I could just hear Bud’s voice saying, “Oooh, they must be filthy rich!”… Then my father answering him, “Rich as Croesus, right you are, and fund raising for the Lord happens to be every bit as important as anointing the sick or feeding the starved!” Bud would have piped up well, it was good my father felt that way because we did a lot more fund raising man we did anointing or feeding. … It was one of their old running arguments.

  Me—I just bitched a lot and ended up showering and changing into my best clothes.

  My father came by my room as I was finishing dressing.

  He was wearing a new dark-blue thin-pinstripe suit, a light-blue shirt, and an ACE tie. The tie was patterned after a clu
b tie, only instead of heraldic devices or sporting symbols, “ACE” was repeated across it in tiny gold letters against a blue background.

  “Jesse,” my father began, “one thing experience has taught me is—”

  I braced myself for some lesson in morality or philosophy, but he continued, “—that a narrow tie width is better on men our size. Bud can get away with a fatter tie with his height, but we’re not blessed with six-foot frames.”

  I remembered my father when he’d buy ties by the half dozen in a serve-yourself drugstore, only making sure they weren’t all the same color.

  “I don’t have anything narrower,” I said.

  “You may borrow one of mine,” he said. “One of my paisleys would look good with what you have on.”

  “Okay,” I said. I reached up and began undoing my tie. “How come you have on a blue shirt?” I asked. “We’re not being televised tonight, are we?”

  He always wore blue on the tube, to match his eyes.

  “You’ll see the reason for that later. It’s a surprise,” he said. He said that Donald Divine, the ACE public relations man, was waiting for him downstairs in his study.

  “When you’ve finished up here, stop in and say hello to Donald, okay, Jesse?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “We’re due at the Cheeks’ at seven-thirty. … And Jesse,” he said, “I don’t insist on this, but I was always touched when my boys would answer yes, sir, instead of yeah or okay.”

  “Yes, sir,” I managed.

  He slapped my back and said, “I love you, son!”

  “I love you, too, sir.”

  We both laughed at that. Then he went bounding out of the room and down the stairs—Bud liked to say he was born with his motor running. I think they both were.

  I went into my parents’ room and got one of my father’s ties. Then I just stood there looking around at all the photographs of our family. They were everywhere: on the wall, in little frames set out on top of the bureau, even some stuck into the mirror on my mother’s dressing table.

  We were a pretty seedy-looking bunch in the days when Bud and I were little. My dad always seemed to be wearing a vest with his shirt sleeves rolled up. My mom was usually in some flowered dress with a hat on, even in the hottest weather. Her hair wasn’t as blond in those days, more brown than the bright yellow she’d changed it to.

  In those days my mom couldn’t afford manicures or hairdressers, and her dresses came off the racks at shopping-center stores.

  Our tent, in the photographs, was usually somewhere in the background. Bud was always mugging for the camera, making faces or holding up two fingers behind my head, and my socks were always falling down. I was in clothes too big for me, Bud’s hand-me-downs.

  Seedy-looking as we were, we were all smiles, all of us.

  In the later snapshots, particularly after Bud’d split, my father didn’t smile. My mother smiled on cue from years of practice, but my father’s emotions always went right to his face, so sometimes my mother had to remind him to leave his burdens behind while he faced people who might have greater ones.

  My father’s face in one recent photograph, stuck into a corner of my mother’s mirror, looked like someone had socked him in the stomach. It was taken at the ground-breaking ceremony for The Summer House, just after Bud left. I was on one side and my mother was on the other. Donald Divine took the shot, and I remember my father’d just finished saying, “It’s just a shame one of our number is missing.”

  He’d said that about a dozen times that day.

  I wondered why he couldn’t remember his battles with Bud, times he’d tell Bud he was sick of the sound of Bud’s voice. One of their biggest battles was over the “prayer rugs” idea my father came up with in one of his brainstorming sessions with Donald Divine.

  Supposedly, strips of our old canvas tent were to be sold for $100 a piece as prayer rugs. Smaller, wallet-size pieces were to go for $10. My father was to get up and announce that the tent was saturated and impregnated with The Power. “The power of the Lord had to pass right through the canvas, and now you can have a share of it.”

  Bud didn’t like the whole idea to begin with, but when he found out the strips of canvas weren’t even to be strips of the tent, he blew up. He said it was the phoniest pitch he’d ever heard about, and he called my father a con artist.

  “Bud, Bud, Bud,” my father began crooning back at him, “there’s no way to get the canvas from our tent clean. Why, it’s filthy!”

  “Then don’t say it’s canvas from our tent! Don’t say it has The Power in it!”

  “But”—my father’s voice with a sharp little edge to it—“it’s symbolic, not literal. Why, if it was literal we wouldn’t have enough to go around. We couldn’t even make the offer.”

  “It’s dishonest!” Bud shouting. “It’s greasy!”

  “I love you, Bud, but you’re going too far now, young man!”

  “It’s a cheap trick!”

  “I wonder, Bud, if you know how sick I am of hearing you mouth off!”

  That was the only one of their fights that came to blows.

  I don’t know who hit who first, but Bud stumbled over a chair on his way out of the living room, cursing and holding his eye with one hand. My father’s face was scarlet. He was breathing as though he’d run the mile, and his eyeglasses had been knocked to the floor.

  Shortly after that, Bud took off.

  The strips of canvas went like cold drinks on a hot summer’s day. My father said they alone paid for a whole floor of The Summer House.

  Still, on ground-breaking day, it was Bud causing my father’s long face, and Bud my father was missing and mooning over.

  I tried to make him feel better by telling him I missed Bud, too.

  “You don’t even know how it pains me, Jesse,” he said, as though he had a knife in him and I’d scratched my elbow.

  “Guy.” My mother spoke up softly, almost a whisper, which meant she was about to deliver a necessary but not necessarily welcome truth. “We all miss Bud.”

  “Bud and I had a very special relationship,” he said.

  “We’re sympathetic to that, Guy,” said my mother, “but you have to share your missing him with others who miss him, too. When you can’t do that, we’ve got two people to miss, Bud and you.”

  My mother could always nail it right to the wall, with one blow.

  “Hello, Jesse.” Donald Divine stuck out his hand and caught mine in a crushing blow. “Your dad has come up with another real winner.”

  He pointed to a poster leaning against my father’s desk.

  My father was finishing a martini.

  While we stood there admiring the latest Challenge poster, I remembered back when my father was Brother Pegler, and he used to drop worms into tumblers of gin to show how lethal liquor was, that it killed worms instantly. (It was an old trick he’d copied from a famous evangelist named Billy Sunday.)

  Bud used to tease him about it, say that it only showed people how to get rid of worms. “You’ll have people all over the country saying they’re only drinking to kill worms.”

  Dad was a teetotaler in those days.

  The change came around the time Dad hooked up with Donald Divine. Most changes in our life came around that time.

  The new Challenge poster was enormous. Printed across it was a giant-sized charge plate.

  “Your dad’s going to kick off our early summer shows with a little gold charge plate charm,” Donald said.

  “How about another Martin?” my father asked him and, not needing to wait for an answer, scooped up Donald’s glass along with his own.

  I flinched at “Martin” for martini. My dad’d got that one from Igor Sonnebend, this rich Born-Again Christian, along with several thousand dollars for our Summer House building campaign.

  Dad got along with Igor real well, but my mother said Igor Sonnebend made her uncomfortable, because there never seemed to be enough of anything for him in this world. He
wanted more homes, more cars, more fine furniture … more more more. She said she’d rather see Dad back preaching under a tent than dependent on Igor for anything. They had a few arguments over Igor, because my mother said when a man like that kept getting so much, wasn’t someone somewhere having to do with less?

  My father insisted that Igor kept the wheels turning, that his needs kept people producing, kept people employed, but I don’t think he ever convinced my mother of it. She said there ought to be an “enough” for everyone.

  While my father was off in the kitchen getting more martinis, I stood with Donald and studied the poster.

  CHARGE IT TO THE LORD!

  “If he hath wronged thee, or oweth thee ought, put that on mine account.”

  Philemon 18

  It was times like that when I missed Bud most. I could see us up in our room, doubling over, holding our stomachs laughing. “A charge plate! … I—don’t—be—lieve—it!”

  Donald Divine always gave my father credit for every idea, but some of them were pure Donald. There was no way my father could have come up with some of them.

  Bud and I called Donald “Divine Donald,” and an idea like the charge plate, in the good old days, would have left Bud and me breathless from laughing, tears running down our cheeks. I sometimes think it was Seal who changed Bud, fired up his conscience so he got mad more than he laughed.

  Donald Divine said, “Jesse, next Sunday is going to be a bang-up show.”

  Donald always called our services “shows.”

  He looked younger than his thirty-five years. He was the type who wore expensive tweed jackets with suede elbow patches, silk scarves, and tinted glasses. He blow-dried his hair and had it cut regularly by a New York City stylist.

  “It’s your father’s idea to do our show at sunrise from now on,” said Donald.

  My father was back in the room with martinis and a slab of Brie on a silver tray, surrounded by Carr’s Table Water Crackers. (“Don’t buy any crackers but Carr’s,” my father’d told my mother a while ago. “That seems to be the ‘in’ cracker.”)

  “Jesse,” my father said, “can you figure out why we’re switching to sunrise? I bet Bud could.”