French Silk(133)

"Yeah," Alice seconded. "We'll watch. Go on."

"No!"

"Chicken."

The preacher was extending an invitation for anyone within the sound of his voice to take his hand. It would be the same as accepting the Lord Jesus by the hand, he told his listeners.

"Dear brothers and sisters, you don't want to go to hell, do you?"

"You don't want to go to hell, Mary Catherine," Alice said seriously. "Go on. He's looking straight at you."

"No, he's not. He's looking at all of us."

"He's looking at you. Maybe he sees that you're truly a sinner. Go get saved." Lisbet gave her friend a firm push.

Mary Catherine demurred, but in ways she couldn't understand or explain, she was drawn to the young preacher's compelling voice. Years before, a young, good-looking priest had trained at their parish. She and all her friends had developed passionately sinful crushes on him. They attended nearly every mass that he conducted. Yet Mary Catherine hadn't felt moved by that young priest as she did by this shabbily dressed, marginally articulate, but positively dynamic sidewalk evangelist.

Urged on by her friends, she walked toward him, sending pigeons scuttling aside, drawn as though by a power beyond herself. When she was within several feet of him, he stepped forward and extended his hand. "Hello, sister."

"Hello."

"Do you want Jesus to come into your heart?"

"I … I think so. Yes. I do."

"Hallelujah! Take my hand."

She hesitated. His hand was perfectly formed, strong-looking, the smooth palm turned up invitingly. She stretched her hand forward and laid it in his. She thought she heard Alice and Lisbet gasp in disbelief of her courage, but all her senses were shocked by the sudden fist the preacher closed around her hand.

"Kneel now, sister." She did. The pavement was hard beneath her bare knees, but when he laid his hands on her head and invoked God's forgiveness and blessings, she didn't feel anything except the heat emanating from his fingers and palms. After a long prayer, he placed a hand beneath her elbow and assisted her to her feet.

"Just like Jesus told the woman taken in adultery, go and sin no more." Then he took a wooden offering plate out of a battered suitcase that was lying open at his feet and thrust it at her.

The gesture took her by surprise. "Oh." For a moment she was too flustered to think, then she hastily opened her purse, clumsily removed a five-dollar bill, and dropped it into the plate.

"Thank you kindly, sister. God's gonna reward you for your generosity."

He quickly replaced the offering plate with her five-dollar bill, along with his Bible, inside the suitcase and snapped it shut. Picking it up, he jauntily walked away.

"Uh, wait!" Mary Catherine couldn't believe her audacity, but to let him casually walk out of her life was unthinkable. "What's your name?"

"Reverend Jack Collins. But everybody calls me Wild Jack."

* * *

He'd been reared in a poverty-stricken rural town in Mississippi. About the only thing the town had going for it was the railroad. A section crew was headquartered there. For the most part, the men were single and lived in boardinghouses.

His mama provided evening entertainment for them.

Being the only whore in town, she did a lively business. She'd conceived and given birth to little Jack without ever knowing which of her customers had sired him. Jack's first memory was of toddling around their cramped room to fetch his mama her Lucky Strikes. By the time he was eight, they were fighting over the packs her gentlemen friends sometimes left behind.

He went to school only because the truant officer gave his mama hell if she neglected to get him up and send him off. She in turn gave him hell if he didn't go. Out of sheer stubbornness, he learned as little as possible, although he was a natural leader. Because he didn't give a damn about anything or anyone, because he never even whimpered when he got licks but looked at the principal eyeball to eyeball with open contempt, he earned the fear and admiration of his classmates. He used that to his advantage and wielded more authority on campus than did the faculty.

When he was thirteen, he called his mama a fat, stinking whore one time too many. She coaxed one of her johns to ambush and beat the hell out of him. The next day, he regained consciousness near the railroad tracks with a freight train barreling down it. Holding his broken ribs with one hand, he jumped the freight. He never went back and never saw his mama again. He hoped she died and rotted in hell.

He hoboed through the South for several years, taking odd jobs until he had enough money to get drunk, get laid, and get in a fight, and then he moved on.

One night the freight he was on stopped somewhere in Arkansas. It looked like a happening town, the kind that appealed to a wild young buck like him. But to his irritation the "happening" turned out to be a tent revival. The next freight wasn't due till morning, and that evening it came a downpour. He reasoned that the tent would at least provide shelter, so he attended the revival with everyone else in town.

He scorned everything about the service and everyone who listened with misplaced hope to the preacher who admonished his congregation to seek treasures in heaven, not on earth. What a dope, Jack thought.

He changed his mind when he saw how full the offering plate was when it was passed to him. Pretending to put a bill in, he took out a ten. But he looked upon the smug preacher standing on the podium with new respect.