I doubted the prognosis was good.
Jimmy headed back to his office to set agencies and investigations in motion. I looked at Harry. He had picked up his rod and reel from the sand and was breaking it down.
“You’re done fishing for the day?” I asked.
He stared at me.
“We just landed a baby, Carson. How can we top that?”
We retreated to my place for long-awaited mugs of coffee. When I brought them to the living room, Harry had switched on the local morning news and was frowning at the tube. I saw a semi-familiar face on the idiot box: Jeffords Tutweiler, a tall, lean, middle-aged man with black hair gone gray at the temples, an almost-pretty face that reminded me of Roger Moore. He was at a lectern, thumbs atop, hands down the sides. He looked like he wanted to pick up the lectern and heave it at the reporters sitting in a row of folding chairs. Behind him, I saw a mound of dirt with a dozen shovels buried halfway up the blades.
“I don’t think this is the proper venue for deliberately provocative questions,” Tutweiler was saying through tight-pursed lips. “Today is for celebrating enhanced educational opportunities across the South.”
“What’s going on?” I asked Harry. “Some kind of groundbreaking ceremony?”
“The endless expansion of Kingdom College,” he grunted.
The camera panned to the left of the guy at the lectern, showing a dozen dignitary types, including Senator Hampton Custis and three state representatives. The camera passed Custis to highlight a face familiar to everyone who used the television for devotional purposes, and nearly anyone in America who watched the news: the Reverend Richard Bloessing Scaler. Scaler’s round, plump face was without mirth and, actually, without much activity at all, save for the occasional pursing of lips as if figuring out a puzzle in his head. He was so focused on the solution as to seem oblivious to both the hubbub a few dozen paces away and the political powers attending his ceremony.
“It’s not a provocative question, Dean Tutweiler,” a reporter responded, “but a simple one. Your institute has been called racist because it didn’t accept black students until recently. And grudgingly, it seemed. Was Kingdom College founded on separatist principles?”
The Dean shot a glance at the founder of Kingdom College, Richard Scaler. If Tutweiler was looking for help, he received nothing; Scaler stayed in his own head, miles away.
“Reverend Scaler and I have explained the position of the college to the point of distraction. Students of African-American descent weren’t initially considered for admittance because of the many excellent institutions specifically geared for such students, a helping hand to folks who couldn’t afford college. Our original intent was to provide the same – equal – helping hand to less economically blessed students of Caucasian parentage and meant no insult to those of other –”
His words were cut off by hoots and jeers. The news camera panned to a couple dozen people at the back of the crowd, held in check by steel barriers manned by cops. They were a mix of black and white, many holding signs equating Kingdom College to a racist institution, calling it Jim Crow College or Old South University. Scaler looked up and read the angry statements in turn, his face devoid of emotion. Senator Custis looked irked. The lesser political types noted Custis’s irritation and quickly affected irritated looks of their own. Audience members turned in their seats and jeered back at the demonstrators.
Scaler remained impassive.
“What’s with Rev. Scaler?” I said to Harry. “Normally he’s racing back and forth, pounding his bible, promising hellfire and damnation to anyone who doesn’t agree with him.”
“Maybe Scaler’s starting a new phase,” Harry said, taking a sip of the coffee, eyes widened by the bourbon blast. “He’s been through, what? – maybe a half-dozen phases, starting when he was hardly old enough to tie his shoes.”
I returned my eyes to the television. Richard Bloessing Scaler, though only in his mid fifties, had been a fixture throughout my thirty-six-year life. What the Jackson and Osmond families were to under-age singing talent, the Deep South was to youthful preaching talent. Kids as young as five and six preached at tent revivals, bible in one hand, microphone in the other, exhorting the flock to come to Jesus in sing-songy voices normally associated with whining about being fed vegetables.
Scaler had been a star on the circuit, a chubby little whirlwind who could preen and thump with the best of the bunch. I recall him from taped interviews, staring at the camera with a sincere face, his hair pomaded, dressed in a sky-blue suit, spouting verses of such precision and attribution that interviewers were certain he’d been prompted by his parents. His answer was always the same: “Oh no, sir” – or ma’am, for the young Scaler had the mandatory impeccable Southern manners – “from the first time I opened the Good Book, His words jumped from the pages to my soul.”
Scaler faded from the scene when an adolescent, re-emerging in his mid twenties as the pastor of a rural church in west-central Alabama. Perhaps small congregations weren’t to his liking, for within two years he was building his television empire, his flamboyant style and personality perfect for the camera.
Something in the intervening years had politicized him toward the hectoring style of right-wing politics launched from many Fundamentalist pulpits. The bible was thumped, the finger pointed, the warnings declaimed. Opposing views were mocked. Comedians needed only to crouch and scream to convey Scaler to the audience.
Seeming almost desperate to succeed, he’d created his own religious broadcasting empire – the Kingdom Channel – and within a few years he’d amassed the funds to begin buying up large tracts of land and building Kingdom College.
Alongside hyper-conservative religious views came a bent more toward the Old Testament than the New. Hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes were warnings from God, post-industrial plagues of locusts and famine. Though other prominent preachers had jumped on the bandwagon, Scaler had been the first to proclaim Hurricane Katrina’s assault on New Orleans as the retribution of a miffed deity.
“God hath sent his terrible wind and flood to wash away the filthy lifestyle of the Sodomites,” he had intoned to national cameras a day after Katrina had turned the nation’s longest ongoing party into a tragedy. “Praise the name of Jesus who smiteth all his enemies!”
When a bothersome local reporter pointed out that the two major neighborhoods of the city to be mainly spared – the French Quarter and Garden District – were where most gay New Orleanians resided, while the mostly black Ninth Ward was the hardest hit, Scaler seemed lost for a split-second, then suggested God had used the Ninth Ward to demonstrate what might happen if the gays didn’t repent their sinful ways.
“Are you saying, Reverend Scaler,” the reporter had asked, “that God drowned citizens in the Ninth Ward as a warning flare for the gay population?”
Sensing a problem, Scaler had screwed himself to his full five-foot-eight height and launched a bombastic response, his standard solution to rhetorical difficulties. He jabbed a righteous finger at the reporter. “I’m saying God stirred up the sky and the sea and sent a warning. People should have been smart enough to see it as the hand of the Lord coming and moved from the swath of His cleansing.”
Scaler’s clarification sparked howls, but he remained undeterred through the publicity furor, perhaps because applications for Kingdom College went up by forty per cent and donations to his ministry went up fifty. The increased donations added new acreage to the holdings and a new library and dormitory to the campus, creating, as one editorialist put it, “The only structures built by Hurricane Katrina.”