Earthly Powers (106 page)

       "Yes indeed. Is that the sort of thing you live on? Record royalties, I mean, that sort of thing."

       "We're self-sufficient, that's a fact. We make our own bread, donations, book sales, record albums, they're the butter."

       "State taxes, federal taxes?"

       "We're a religious organisation. We pay no taxes."

       "Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?"

       "Give up that killing weed, brother. It rots the soul as well as the lungs. No smoking here, no liquor either. No toxic abominations may pollute God's good air, that's our rule. Now I'll show you what work we do."

       It was a long trudge to the farming area. There had been a serious effort to feed bad ground. Potato fields, acres of cabbages. Workers, black, white, of poor deprived stock all of them, except for the occasional crazed thin clerkly looking man, librarian-looking woman, unbent their backs from their tasks to greet and be greeted. Hi Jack Enoch Jethro Mabel. Hi Jim. At me they looked with suspicion. I could not see young Eve anywhere. I asked, "What do the children do?"

       Schoolhouse is down there in the Matthew area. We have four areas, named for the evangelists. School will be out in half an hour."

       "And the very young children? The infants?"

       "We have this, what do you call it—"

       "We British call it crche."

       "That's a French word, we don't like anything foreign. We call it a kiddy centre."

       "Is there a hospital?"

       That's not a foreign word, right, but it's kind of a dirty word with us. Healing is in the hands of God."

       "The deity or er Mr Mannning?"

       "One through the other. This here is the piggery. See that fine Jersey herd. Self-sufficient, like I said." Nowhere could I see little Eve. "With corn we're not self-sufficient. We buy that. Bakery's over there. Own generators. Sewerage system. That was put in for the chemical warfare unit that was here."

       "What's that building there without windows?"

       "That's the special meditation centre. The children are sent there for special meditation on their sins. Thank the Lord that's not too often. The devil bites them when they're not keeping a sharp lookout. The children of the Lord are good children."

       "Precisely what my sister's brother-in-law says."

       "Well, he's right." A jangle of jubilant hells rang through the camp. I looked for the source. Loudspeaker grilles flush with hut walls just under the eaves. "God's back. We'll meet him at the big house." This young man's background was hard to place, both socially and regionally. The voice should have been southern Baptist but was in fact halfeducated, say, Nebraska.

       I asked, "How long have you been with ah Mr Manning?"

       "Just call him God, to his face too. No ceremony with us. How long? Seven years, since he came out of the wilderness. I'll give you all the facts you want, we're not ashamed of the facts. Before that I managed a pool hall in Concordia, if you know where that is."

       "Northern Kansas, not too far from the Nebraska border."

       "You'll not believe me, since you're one of the unbelievers, but I heard the voice call one day in the click of the balls. The balls clicked and kept saying Come come come. So I came. God was in Concordia that night, preaching, selling his book. I bought the book, I knew about books, always a big reader of filth and frivolity before that. I was educated at Kansas State in Manhattan, if you know it"

       "I know it."

       "I fell on evil ways. I was rescued. Praise the Lord."

       "Amen." By this time we had arrived back at the big house, and Godfrey Manning was awaiting us on the verandah, arms outstretched. His voice was of the superfatted melodiousness you find only in America.

       He greeted: "Kenneth. Kenneth. Brother. In the name of the Lord many many welcomes."

       I did not wish to be embraced. I climbed the steps to the verandah but kept my distance. "It is good to be here," I said hypocritically. He was big and broad, a steak-fed man. The hair was too black to be other than dyed; I thought I detected a toupee. He was dressed in a very good clerical grey woolmixture suit. He wore a cream silk shirt with conservative collarpoints and a plain thin grey tie. No razzamatazz. The eyes were blue and remarkable. I had read of Napoleon's eyes, which were like cannon, cantharides, heaven's deeps or whirlpools. The eyes that had held together an empire. Manning's eyes were less, or more, ambitious. Such eyes were as much a free gift as any other physical beauty, and there was as little necessity for them to be an expression of a great intellectual or spiritual endowment. This man was neither holy nor intelligent, but he was very shrewd. He had not, being given my name by Kilduff in Washington, known who the hell I was, but he had found out. Do a rundown on this Toomey. Who's Who would tell him my achievements but not my weaknesses. See what Jack Javers at the San Francisco Chronicle can dig up about this guy.

       He said, "This is a double honour, Kenneth my brother. You come from the greatest newspaper in the world. You are one of the world's greatest writers."

       "That goes a little too far perhaps, Mr Manning. I'm merely—"

       "You must call me God. Away with the constricting clothes of surnames." Where the hell had he got that from? "I'm conscious of the pretentiousness of the nomenclature. But it's merely short for Godfrey. I was named for Godefroy de Bouillon, leader of the First Crusade and first ruler of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem." He pronounced Bouillon as bullion. "Bouillon," he said, "survives as the name of a soup. Let's go and eat, I'm hungry. I trust Jim here has been looking after you adequately."

       "I could not have had," I said, "a more conscientious or amiable guide."

       "Take all the compliments you can get, Jim. In we go, Kenneth my brother." We entered the house by way of french windows leading into a chintzy drawing room with well-polished parquet. Then on to a corridor smelling deliciously of lavender and beeswax. Then into a dining room with an oak refectory table and what looked like a genuine Florentine credenza. The pictures on the walls seemed to be family portraits. There was a painting, not badly done, of a blond woman seemingly asking the painter a question. Manning saw me looking at it. "My dear wife," he said. "Passed on. Still my morning and evening star, the light of my inspiration." Another man came into the dining room, big-nosed bespectacled, hair a mess, in a kind of tracksuit. Also a woman like a wardress. "Tom Bottomley," Manning introduced. "Irma Mesolongion. Kenneth, our brother, great writer from a great paper. Let's say grace." He cried to the ceiling: "Your gifts, Lord, your gifts. May we consume them with gratitude. May they nourish body and soul to your greater glory." We sat. I half expected Eve to come in with the bouillon or whatever it was to be, her to drop the bowl in shock at seeing me, Manning to say deceit deceit my homosexual enemy and friend 0f blasphemers drag him to the dark shed 0f penitence, but a boy from the Philippines entered with a shrimp salad and Manning said, "What delicious treat has Jessica prepared for us?"

       The boy said, "Yes."

       Manning said to me, "Toomey is an Irish name. Your father is Irish?"

       "My father is dead, of course. Yes, my grandfather came from Ireland. He was what was known as a potato Protestant. My mother, a Frenchwoman, brought back the faith to our family."

       "The Romish faith, of course." I had never heard the expression though I had read it in John Milton. "But we are past the days of division and hate. Your Pope has done," he said ungrudgingly, "good work." Water was poured for us all. "You will have expected," Manning said, "some rare vintage wine with your European tastes. But all stimulants are an abomination. Including tea and coffee. Our drink is water bright from the crystal stream." From the mains, chlorinated, tasting a little of my father's surgery.

       Unwisely I said, "Prohibition brought much harm to America. It killed—" But soon, under that steady blue luminosity, I would be blurting out the whole joint chronicle of the Toomeys and Campanati. "I mean, Christ turned water into wine and wine into his own blood."

       "Pure grape juice," Tom Bottomley said tonelessly. The shrimp salad was removed and a dish of hamburger steaks in deep brown gravy replaced it. Manning served them out, the Filipino helping.

       Manning said, "To think of a saviour of mankind high-flown with wine is a blasphemy. Irma here knows all about the horrors of the fermented grape."

       "I," Irma said, as tonelessly as Bottomley, "was an alcoholic till God rescued me." She was dim, blotchy and shapeless and looked as though a drink might do her good.

       "We have all sinned," Manning said cheerfully. "If we do not sin how can we be redeemed? You, my brother Kenneth, have sinned." Ah, he knew. "But the divine mercy is without end."

       "Amen," I said. "Here, though," I then said, "is an end of sin. There are, I should imagine, few opportunities for sin in this ah holy community."

       Don't you believe it," Jim Swinney said. "The devil's a real tough customer."

       "Sex," I said, "is probably the perennial problem."

       "Sex," Manning cried, "abases itself in the presence of the Lord. We make sure it abases itself."

       "How?"

       "Work, prayer, meditation, medicaments."

       "Ah. Something in the water?"

       "Something," Tom Bottomley said, "in the body of the Lord." A canned fruit salad was brought in, embedded in a kind of frogspawn. "The devil has to be fought." I wanted to get out of here. I had no further desire to contact Eve and persuade her to go home to her sorrowing father. I could always say I had done my best. While we were finishing oft our medicated water that great peal of joyous bells clanged through the house and, I presumed, the camp.

       Manning said, "Jim, be sure our brother Kenneth is well seated." And then he cried a grace after meat over the bells. "Your gifts, Lord, your gifts. We have consumed them with gratitude. Nourished, we resume with vigour your holy work."

       Outside, I saw platoons being marched to the Place of Prayer. The recorded bells slammed away spilling overtones. The Californian blue swallowed them like a pig swallowing peanuts. We went. We kept our distance from the worshipers filing in. Each one, I noticed, was given by a black or white or brown sexton or servitor or sidesman in a grey gown what looked like a communion host in a square plastic wrapping. "The body of the Lord?" I said.

       "Yeah, quicker this way. They take them in, then at the signal they consume. No waiting at altar rails. All in together, one body."

       "After the act of consecration, I presume."

       "Oh yes, they get consecrated."

       I still had not seen Eve. But now I saw her. She was going in with a group of females of all ages. All were clothed in what seemed to be drab floursacks corded at the waist. Eve's hair was lifeless, her face set, like the others, in puddingy holiness or resignation to the hard word of the Lord. She was not the girl I had previously seen, scoffing her Sara Lee, eager for the atomic end of the world at the Symphony Cinema. I doubted if I should be permitted to have a word with her.

       I was given a seat right at the back of the Place of Prayer. The light was, as before, dimly religious. The organ, played by a kind of reformed schoolmistress, gave out quiet generic Moody and Sankey. The congregation, fifteen hundred strong, sat quiet. Some faces turned suspiciously or curiously to look at me, the stranger and infidel. One of these faces was Eve's. She recognised me all right. Her eyebrows rose nearly to her hairline. Her mouth became an O. She shook and shook and shook her head. I frowned at her and made a shushing gesture. The organplayer footed the swell, the music rose, the curtain opened, the spots crescendoed from dim rose to the bright rose of revelation. God Manning was on the stage, a doctor's gown about his natty clerical grey. He raised his arms. The music stopped. Without preamble he shouted: "Do this in remembrance of me and my long and bitter suffering. For herein am I present and shall be with you so till the end of the world. Take and eat." The congregation broke open, some with difficulty, the plastic case on the communion wafer. "This is the body and blood of the living Lord." So the Council of Trent operated here: it was a kind of ecumeflicalism. The congregation reverently took the body on its collective tongue. "Purge us, bless us, glorify us," Manning cried, taking no wafer himself.

       After this act, in the Catholic Church the climax of the sacrificial drama, here a therapeutic preliminary, God Manning relaxed and smiled. "We welcome today to our midst fifteen new brothers and sisters." A side door in the auditorium opened, down near the stage, opposite to the organ, a flood shone, a group of the clearly dispossessed, mostly old black women, shambled in, blinking bewildered in the lime glow that warmed them. "You will learn their names in God's good time," Manning cried. "Now they come to us merely as God's abandoned children in sore need. But one name I utter—Rebecca or Becky Fawldon." An old black woman tried to hide her face in her hands. "Be not afraid, Becky. The Lord will work on you. Sorely diseased of a cancer of the bowel, she comes to us in the direst agony." How she could stand there nursing a cancer of the bowel only God knew. "Take her," Manning said to a couple of youngish women who now got up from the front row, "to the Room of Healing." The women grabbed the poor black sufferer somewhat roughly. They led her sobbing, probably more with embarrassment than pain, up the centre aisle. She passed me, her elephant skin wet with sweat and tears, giving off an odour of sickness and poverty. Then a door opened and closed behind me. Manning said, "Stand. Sing to the Lord our God." The organ started up again. They stood. They sang "Let Us Gather at the River." The tempo quickened for each fresh verse. There was concerted handclapping led by Manning. This was the true southern revivalist condiment. The hymn ended. Manning caught his congregation on the cusp of exaltation. He shouted: "Lord Lord Lord deliver us from iniquity."