Congregations were disconcerted. In theory, they accepted that they were all sinners, but in practice it was generally understood that the preacher’s wrath was to be directed at sinners outside the tent. By the end, only Pentecostals had the stomach to attend. They could count on the Holy Spirit descending, transporting them with the gift of tongues, God’s proof-positive that they’d been saved by the blood of the Lamb and were bound for glory with Percy and the angels.
Floyd had known that life in the Lord’s vineyard was not for the upwardly mobile, but after expenses he barely had the scratch to pay for his French ticklers. He decided to pull the plug. He waited till they hit London, Ontario. Here Percy would be as happy as he’d be liable to get, haranguing one of the last crowds to consider him a somebody.
And so, the afternoon of that fateful revival, Brother Floyd moseyed his partner into the van of the trailer truck. “I’ve been doing some thinking.”
“Praise the Lord. The first step to repentance.”
Floyd bit his tongue. “The ministry’s had it,” he continued. “It’s time to call it quits.”
Percy staggered backwards. “Quits? Where would the world be today if Jesus had called it quits?”
“Our receipts don’t amount to a pinch of heifer dust,” Floyd persevered. “We’re a corpse begging to be buried.”
“And what if we are? Lazarus came back.”
“For heaven’s sake, Perce, you’re misery on a stick, you scare the kids.”
“God didn’t put us on this earth to be happy. We were put here to serve.”
“There’s other ways to serve.”
“Not for me! This ministry’s my calling. It’s where I belong. It’s my home.”
“It’s not your home, it’s a tent. Repeat after me: ‘This is a tent. A tent of horrors kept fresh with slaughterhouse guts and a paintbrush.’”
“Nooo!”
Floyd wasn’t good with tears, but he wasn’t about to let a wave of compassion sink his resolve. “Perce,” he stared in embarrassment over the poor man’s left shoulder, “I’ve been doing some calculations. There’s a way we can close up shop and go our separate ways with a little something to tide us over.”
Percy sniffled. The absence of other vocalizing encouraged Floyd to believe that reason had a prayer.
“We got ourselves seven thousand square feet of tent near as I can reckon. At four six-inch squares per square foot, that’s twenty-eight thousand squares. I propose we do one final farewell tour. Each night we’ll sell Redemption squares, to be cut from the tent and delivered at tour’s end: two bits a piece, or a buck for one with blood on it.”
Percy gaped like a gopher on a spit. “YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A GODDAMN STOOL UP THE DEVIL’S ANUS!” He hurled a folding chair at his partner and flew from the fairgrounds, tears of rage, horror, and helplessness flooding down his cheeks. “Dear God,” he beseeched, falling at the foot of a mighty oak, “steep me in Your wrath! Do such a Work through me tonight that it will tear the firmament!”
The next thing Percy knew, he was on stage screaming at Timmy Beeford, lightning shearing the main pole, ripping the wires, popping the light bulbs, exploding the generator — and his mother’s childhood caution ringing in his ears: “Percy, my pumpkin, be careful what you pray for. God may be listening.”
K.O. Doyle and Co.
Bright and early the following morning, Brother Floyd had surveyed the damage to ministry assets. It was calamitous. The generator and trailer were write-offs, ditto the lights and supports. As for the canvas, the cost of repair would be prohibitive.
“Hot diggity!” Floyd crowed. This would lay to rest any hopes his partner might have harboured for their ministry’s resurrection. Good thing he’d kept up the insurance payments. Brother Percy’d urged him to drop the policy and put their fate in God’s hands. “Trust in the Lord and He will provide.” However when dealing with God, Floyd had preferred to keep one hand on his wallet.
His caution vindicated, he savoured the wreckage, then skipped to a telephone where he placed a call to their underwriter. He was promised that an adjuster would be up from Toronto on next morning’s train. If God were as helpful as the United Dominion Insurance Company, Heaven would have a lot more takers.
Visions of Easy Street filling his head, Floyd made his way to London General Hospital to visit his partner. In the past evening’s upheaval, the poor man had broken his jaw. With the wires and swelling, he was in no condition to answer back. What better time to rub in the good news?
Floyd cataloged the carnage with glee. “The Almighty’s will is writ large,” he concluded. “He wants us shut down pronto.”
Percy was beside himself, his attempts at interjection digging metal into bone, tissue, and nerve ends. “Aaaa! Aaaa!” he howled in pain.
“Why, Perce, is that the glorious sound of rejoicing?”
“Aaaa! Aaaa!”
“Aaaa! Aaaa! Aaaa-men!” Floyd winked to the heavens. “Thank you, Jesus.”
Brother Percy grabbed the Gideon Bible on his nightstand. He was about to pitch it at his partner’s head, but Floyd cocked a fist. Percy cowered.
“Blessèd are the meek,” Floyd reminded with a grin.
Floyd stopped grinning with the arrival of the adjuster, Mr. Fischer. In the view of the United Dominion Insurance Company, the destruction of ministry property fell under the clause dealing with Acts of God. (“A subject about which you’re no doubt familiar.”) Floyd blanched. Dreams of a lucrative settlement were up in smoke, but so were plans to market tent squares. Without a final tour, how could they pitch the merchandise? And without the tent, truck, and generator, how could they have a tour?
Complicating matters, work on Percy’s jaw had taken a bite from their reserves. Released from hospital that afternoon, the evangelist stooped to a dingy room in the cheapest digs he could find, the C.P.R. Hotel, a.k.a. The Ceeps. Floyd likewise swallowed his pride, and had management squeeze in a cot at the foot of his partner’s bed.
After supper, while Percy prayed to the Almighty for deliverance, Floyd toddled downstairs to the hotel tavern to worship at the altar of Jack Daniels.
The kid at the end of the bar was one cocky bantam. Vest open, tie loose, slick hair parted in the middle, he left off talking to the bartender, and plunked himself down at Floyd’s table. “K.O. Doyle,” he stuck out his paw. “I hear you’re Floyd Cruickshank, brains behind the preacher man.”
“What’s it to you?”
“I’m looking for a Mary Mabel McTavish. You know her?”
“What if I do?”
“I’d like to jog your memory,” Doyle said. He was with King Features Syndicate, a Hearst operation, up from Buffalo for a peekaboo. “A tousle-haired all-American tyke, right out of a Norman Rockwell, dies and gets brought back to life. The story’s a four-star wank-yer-crank, ’specially