Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“It may be more than a dollar. What I hear around here, he seems to have something. Anyway, he gets them. It seems he was a Marine sergeant on one of them landing barges out in the Pacific one day when a Jap dive bomber dove right at them and everybody tried to jump off into the water before the bomb hit, except one mama’s boy that got scared or tangled up in something so he couldn’t jump and the reverend (except he hadn’t turned reverend then, not for the next few minutes yet) went back to try and untangle him, when the whole barge blew up and took the reverend and the mama’s boy both right on down to the bottom with it before the reverend could get them both loose and up to the top again. Which is just the official version when they gave him the medal, since according to the reverend or leastways his congregation—What I hear, the rest of them are mostly ex-soldiers too or their wives or the other broads they just knocked up without marrying, mostly young, except for a few old ones that seem to got dragged in by the passing suction you might say; maybe the moms and pops of soldiers that got killed, or the ones like that Sister Holcomb one that caught you down the road, that probably never thawed enough to have a child of any kind and God help the husband either if she ever had one, that wasn’t even sucked in but flagged the bus herself because the ride looked like it was free—” He stopped. Then he said: “No, I know exactly why she come: to listen to some of the words he uses doing what he calls preaching. Where was I? Oh yes: that landing barge. According to the reverend, he was already safe and dead and peacefully out of it at last on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean when all of a sudden Jesus Himself was standing over him saying Fall in and he did it and Jesus said Ten-SHUN, about-FACE and assigned him to this new permanent hitch right down here on the edge of Memphis, Tennessee. He’s got something, enough of whatever it took to recruit this new-faith boot camp to need a church to hold it. And I be damned if I dont believe he’s even going to get a carpenter to nail it together. What did he say when he first saw you?”

“What?” Mink said.

“What were his first words when he looked at you?”

“He said, ‘Hell, you’re a preacher.’ ”

“You see what I mean? He’s mesmerised enough folks to scour the country for any edifice that somebody aint actually sitting on the front porch of, and knocking it down and hauling it over here to be broke up like we’re doing. But he aint got a master carpenter yet to nail it together into a church. Because master carpenters belong to unions, and deal in cash money per diem on the barrelhead, where his assignment come direct from Jesus Christ Who aint interested in money or at least from the putting-out angle. So him and his outpost foxholes up and down the road like that Sister Holcomb that snagged you are sifting for one.”

“Sifting?” he said.

“Siwing. Like flour. Straining folks through this back yard until somebody comes up that knows how to nail that church together when we get enough boards and planks and window frames ripped aloose and stacked up. Which maybe we better get at it. I aint actually caught him spying behind a window shade yet but likely an ex-Marine sergeant even reformed into the ministry is no man to monkey with too far.”

“You mean I cant leave?”

“Sure you can. All the outdoors is yours around here. You aint going to get any money until they take up that collection Sunday though. Not to mention a place to sleep tonight and what he calls cooking if you aint particular.”

In fact, this house had no shades nor curtains whatever to be spied from behind. Indeed, as he really looked about it for the first time, the whole place had an air of violent transience similar to the indiscriminate jumble of walls and windows and doors among which he and the other man worked: merely still nailed together and so standing upright; from time to time, as the stack of reclaimed planks and the pile of fire-lengths to which his saw was reducing the spoiled fragments slowly rose, Mink could hear the preacher moving about inside the intact one, so that he thought If he jest went back inside to compose up his sermon, it sounds like getting ready to preach takes as much activity and quickness as harnessing up a mide. Now it was almost sunset; he thought This will have to be at least a half a dollar. I got to have it. I got to get on. I cant wait till Sunday when the back door jerked, burst open and the preacher said, “All right. Supper’s ready. Come on.”