What we didn’t mistake was what then happened to Reverend John Muldaur. At the same time the little girl was screaming and holding her hands out for her mommy, Muldaur went into the kind of convulsions Jerry Lewis goes into for laughs.
But you could tell by the abrupt mask-like stiffening of his face, which was an expression of shock and horror, that whatever was wrong with him was for real.
His body went into spasms, an arm kicking out, a leg collapsing, the other arm flailing away from his body as if it wanted to tear free.
While one of the male members of the church collected the rattlesnake and put it back in its cage, the other members of the church formed a circle around the minister, who was now flat on his back on the platform, arching up every few seconds to allow his entire body to jerk and twist and convulse. We were part of the circle.
Prayers went up like flares; sobs exploded. A lone woman hurried-pushed-paddled the children out the door.
An older man in a T-shirt with a Dixie flag on it knelt next to Muldaur saying the same thing over and over, “You’re receiving the spirit of the Lord, Reverend, and you shouldn’t be afraid.”
Some spirit. Some Lord.
“Is there a phone in here?” Kylie asked.
“A phone in the house of the Lord?” a woman snapped back.
“There’s a pay phone down the road,” one of the more sensible women said.
“He’s receiving the Lord,” said the man in the Dixie flag T-shirt, calmly.
“He’ll be fine in a minute.”
But Muldaur wouldn’t be fine in a minute.
His attempts at breathing were loud and frightening.
I’d visited my granddad, a “lunger,” on a Va ward one time. He’d never recovered from the various lung ailments he’d picked up from various poison gases in Ww I. He was like a sea creature writhing on a beach beneath a pitiless sun. My mom always cried for days after seeing him like that.
Muldaur’s death-I had no doubt he was passing over-was far noisier and gaudier.
He was bug-eyed, flailing tongue, wriggling eyebrows. He was spit, snot, urine, feces. He was crying, cursing, keening. He was dancing, heaving, pounding.
“The Lord comes to us in many strange ways,” said the Dixie T-shirt man. He was as beatific as ever.
“Marv, you’ve got a motorcycle,” the man who’d recovered the baby rattler said. “Run down and call for an ambulance.”
Marv trotted out the door.
There are significant moments that you can’t quite deal with completely-they’d explode your mind if you gave yourself to them completely-s a portion of your brain observes you observing the moment. It was like that the first time I ever had sex. I was enjoying it all so much I was afraid I’d start acting real immature and yell stuff or act unlike the sophisticated, jaded sixteen-year-old I was. So a sliver of my mind detached and took an overview of everything. While my body was completely given over to trying to last at least three minutes, my mind was congratulating my body. You’re a man now, young McCain. A worldly gadabout-philosopher stuck in a town where the new co-op grain silo is still a newsworthy event. You, McCain, are a Hemingway sort of guy.
I was hoping a portion of my mind would detach now and watch me watch Muldaur die. But it didn’t. And so all I could do was stand there and hope that there was a life afterward because if this kind of suffering had no meaning-six million Jews in the concentration camps; millions who could be snuffed out with a brief exchange of atomic bombs-then none of the words our religions spoke were anything more than ways of hiding the meaninglessness of everything. And frankly, cosmic meaninglessness scares the shit out of me the way nothing else comes close to. I should never have taken those philosophy courses as an undergrad.
And then I realized something.
The only thing more terrifying than watching Muldaur throwing himself voodoo-crazed all over the floor of the platform was watching him lie there absolutely still.
Which is what he was doing now.
And it didn’t take me long, worldly gadabout-philosopher and Hemingway sort of guy that I am, to realize what this meant.
Muldaur was dead.
“What’d he do? Crap his pants? God, that smell is awful. I knew those damn snakes would kill somebody eventually.” We were still inside the church. Sykes’d shooed a lot of the worshipers outside.
With his usual dignity and professionalism, Cliffie Sykes, Jr., hitched up his holstered Colt. 45, hitched up the Bowie knife he carries in a belt scabbard, touched a tip of his black Western boot to the corpse, and screwed up his fat face into a parody of Porky Pig, no personal offense meant to you, Porky.
Cliffie, Jr., is the chief of police.
At one time Black River Falls was owned and operated by the Whitney family, a branch of Eastern millionaires who came out here when one of the men got involved in some kind of legal trouble involving stock swindles. They tried to create a small version of a New England town out here on the prairie. They were imperious, of course, and snobs, of course, and contemptuous of the rest of the town, of course. But they brought sound town government, good and fair law, and an eagerness to keep the town clean and modern, all the virtues of New England Yankees.
World War Ii changed all this, as it changed so many things, good and bad. Cliff Sykes, Sr., owned a small construction company at the start of the war. Then he entered into various federal contracts with the government. He built airplane runways, roads, training camps. And his brothers and sisters practiced every kind of black-marketing there was. One of his sisters was even an Allotment Annie, a woman so-called because she married soldiers just about to ship overseas and collected their monthly allotment checks. One New York woman was indicted for having forty-six husbands. I doubt that Helga Sykes had had that many husbands, only because there weren’t that many blind soldiers.
Anyway, the long run of the Whitney family, begun in the previous century, came to an end. The Sykes clan were not only wealthier, they were more powerful. They took over this part of the state, including our town. And thus it was that Cliffie Sykes, Jr., who had failed to pass the police entrance tests given by six other towns, started his law enforcement career as our chief of police.
“You smell that, McCain?”
“Yeah, I smell it.”
“He crapped his pants.”
“Yeah, you said that, Sykes.” I only called him Cliffie when I was so mad I didn’t care anymore.
He pointed to the snake cage. “I should go get my shotgun and kill every one of those bastards.” He pawed his stubby hands on the front of his khaki uniform, the kind Glenn Ford always wears when he’s playing a lawman.
Secretly, Cliffie thinks he’s Glenn Ford. Secretly, I think I’m Robert
Ryan. Which I am, pretty much, except for the height, the good looks, the deep voice, the masculinity, and the charm.
“Or you could always just take them to the woods and set them free,” Kylie said.
He seemed to see her for the first time. She’d be pretty hard to miss. She was the only pretty one of the three of us. Everybody else he’d run outside.
“Say, what’re you doing here?”
“I’m with McCain.”
“And what’s McCain doing here, while I’m at it?” he said.
“McCain is doing here what Muldaur asked him to do,” I said.
“And that would be what exactly?”
“Exactly, that would be trying to ascertain if somebody was trying to kill him.”
“He told you that?”
“He told me that.”
“Why’d he think somebody was trying to kill him?”
“He thought it was because of all those pamphlets he was handing out.”
“What was wrong with those pamphlets? I read a couple of ‘em and they seemed all right to me.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” I said.
“And anyway, the snakes killed him.”