Deacon King Kong(75)

“Where’s the picture?”

“The one in your mind?”

“No. The one in the church.”

“Oh, that old thing? It’s a big old circle with Jesus in the middle and them words over top of his head. Right out back behind the church.”

“How long has it been there?”

“Lord . . . it’s been there, oh, I don’t know how long. Don’t nobody quite know who drawed that thing. My Hettie said a man drawed it up there when they first built the church. She said, ‘I don’t know how those fools paid him, for our treasury ain’t never had more than fifty-four dollars in it. They didn’t use my Christmas Club money to pay him, that’s for sure!’” Sportcoat chuckled, then added, “My Hettie kept the Christmas Club money, too, see. Kept it in a box . . . someplace.”

“I see . . . you say the painting’s . . . along the back wall outside?”

“Why yes it is. Big ol’ pretty picture of Jesus in a circle with his hands just about touching the edge of that circle. Painted right on the cinder block. Folks used to come from miles to see that picture. It got covered over some, but if you stand back in the weeds you can still see the circle and the whole thing as it was. I heard tell once that there was something special about that picture.”

“Is it a picture or a painting? Covered over? Is the picture covered over?”

Elefante stared at him so thoughtfully, curiosity etched in his face, yet for some reason Sportcoat felt, at that moment, that the spiritual part of his message was slipping. “No, it’s not covered over. Well, the church kinda painted over it a little over the years, fixed it up. Colored it up some. But you can still see him, plain as day. It’s not the words so much that’s wrote there that’s important, though,” he added, going back to making his spiritual pitch. “It’s the spirit of what Jesus wants, see. To hold you in the palm of His hand.”

“Can you see his hands too?”

“Surely can.”

Sportcoat carefully neglected to mention, “He was once white till we made him colored.” Unbeknownst to Sportcoat, the church’s version was actually a local artist’s rendering of Jesus as depicted in the centerpiece of Italian artist Giotto di Bondone’s Last Judgment, the original of which lived in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, which portrayed Jesus as a white man in a beard. Someone in the congregation some years back had insisted that Jesus be colored black, and Pastor Gee, anxious to please the congregation as always, had cheerfully hired Sister Bibb’s son Zeke, a housepainter, to brown up Jesus some. With the help of Hot Sausage and Sportcoat, the three did just that, coloring Jesus’s face and hands with dark brown house paint. The result was horrible, of course, with the facial features, so carefully detailed by the original copyist, so badly distorted and the hands so badly mangled, the face and hands looked like near blobs. But Jesus, Pastor Gee noted cheerfully at the time, had emerged a Negro, and a great spirit as always, and that was the point.

Sportcoat wisely didn’t breathe a word of this, but Elefante stared at him with such an odd look that Sportcoat felt he was pattering on too much, which could, as usual, spell trouble with white folks. “Well alrighty then!” he said, and shuffled down the alley.

Elefante watched as Sportcoat walked down the alley and turned onto the sidewalk and out of sight. He felt slightly dazed, his heart still light with the thought of fresh, new love, the Governor’s mesmerizing daughter, and now this. A Negro from the colored church two hundred yards from his boxcar? Negroes? And his father? He’d never seen his father with a Negro, ever. Was he losing his mind?

He climbed the narrow stairs to the back door, opened it to the kitchen, and stepped inside, feeling dizzy, the words still in his head.

May God hold you in the palm of His hand.





17





HAROLD



Two hours later, with his pay from Miss Four Pie in his pocket and two bottles of booze standing atop a cinder block like crowns on a king’s head, Sportcoat and Hot Sausage considered Sportcoat’s encounter with the Elephant.

“Did the Elephant have a gun?” Sausage asked.

“Nar gun!” Sportcoat said triumphantly. The two were lounging in Sausage’s basement lair, seated on overturned crates, sipping from the first bottle Sportcoat cracked open, peppermint bourbon, saving the second, a bottle of King Kong, for dessert later.

“What’s he like?”

“He’s all right, partner! A good man. He was fighting to give me that smooth hundred dollars.”

“You shoulda taken it. But then, why would you do that? That would be the smart thing to do, which you is allergic to.”

“Sausage, his momma already paid me. Plus he helped my Hettie.”

“For all you know, he coulda been the one that throwed her in the harbor.”

“Sausage, if ignorance is bliss, you is happy. A big man like the Elephant wouldn’t bother my Hettie. He liked her. He said he seen her wave all the time as she come and go from church.”

“When you get tired of thinking, Sport, call me. Maybe she seen something he done. Maybe she knew something. Maybe he robbed her!”

“You watch too many movies,” Sportcoat said. “He wasn’t hauling not a bit of trouble at her, not one bit. She was following God’s light is all. And she found it.”