LITMIR.BIZ

       FOUR

      

      THE REVEREND ELIAL STARBUCK leaned forward in his pulpit and gripped his lectern so hard that his knuckles whitened. Some of his congregation, sitting close to the great man, thought the lectern must surely break. The Reverend’s eyes were closed and his long, bony, white-bearded face contorted with passion as he sought the exact word that would inflame his listeners and fill the church with a vengeful righteousness.

      The tall building was silent. Every pew was taken and every bench in the gallery full. The church was foursquare, undecorated, plain, as simple and functional a building as the gospel that was preached from its white-painted pulpit. There was a black-robed choir, a new-fangled harmonium, and high clear-glass windows. Gas lamps provided lighting, and a big black pot-bellied stove offered a grudging warmth in winter, though that small comfort would not be needed for many months now. It was hot inside the church; not so hot as it would be in high summer when the atmosphere would be stifling, but this spring Sunday was warm enough for the worshipers to be fanning their faces, but as the Reverend Elial’s dramatic silence stretched so, one by one, the paper fans were stilled until it seemed as if every person inside the church’s high bare interior was as motionless as a statue.

      They waited, hardly daring to breathe. The Reverend Elial, white-haired, white-bearded, fierce-eyed, gaunt, held his silence as he savored the word in his mind. He had found the right word, he decided, a good word, a word in due season, a word from his text, and so he drew in a long breath and raised a slow hand until it seemed as though every heart in the whole high building had paused in its beating.

      ‘Vomit!’ the Reverend Elial screamed, and a child in the gallery cried aloud with fear of the word’s explosive power. Some women gasped.

      The Reverend Elial Starbuck smashed his right fist onto the pulpit’s rail, struck it so hard that the sound echoed through the church like a gunshot. At the end of a sermon the edges of his hands were often dark with bruises, while the power of his preaching broke the spines of at least a half-dozen Bibles each year. ‘The slavocracy has no more right to call itself Christian than a dog can call itself a horse! Or an ape a man! Or a man an angel! Sin and perdition! Sin and perdition! The slavocracy is diseased with sin, polluted with perdition!’ The sermon had reached the point where it no longer needed to make sense, because now the logic of its exposition could give way to a series of emotional reminders that would hammer the message deep into the listeners’ hearts and fortify them against one more week of worldly temptations. The Reverend Elial had been preaching for one and a quarter hours, and he would preach for at least another half hour more, but for the next ten minutes he wanted to lash the congregation into a frenzy of indignation.

      The slavocracy, he told them, was doomed for the deepest pits of hell, to be cast down into the lake of burning sulfur where they would suffer the torments of indescribable pain for the length of all eternity. The Reverend Elial Starbuck had cut his preaching teeth on descriptions of hell and he offered a five-minute reprise of that place’s horrors, so filling his church with revulsion that some of the weaker brethren in the congregation seemed near to fainting. There was a section in the gallery where freed Southern slaves sat, all of them sponsored in some way by the church, and the freedmen echoed the reverend’s words, counterpointing and embroidering them so that the church seemed charged and filled with the Spirit.

      And still the Reverend Elial racked the emotion higher and yet higher. He told his listeners how the slavocracy had been offered the hand of Northern friendship, and he flung out his own bruised hand as if to illustrate the sheer goodness of the offer. ‘It was offered freely! It was offered justly! It was offered righteously! It was offered lovingly!’ His hand stretched farther and farther out toward the congregation as he detailed the generosity of the Northern states. ‘And what did they do with our offer? What did they do? What did they do?’ The last repetition of the question had come in a high scream that locked the congregation into immobility. The Reverend Elial glared round the church, from the rich pews at the front to the poor benches at the back of the galleries, then down to his own family’s pew, where his eldest son, James, sat in his new stiff blue uniform. ‘What did they do?’ The Reverend Elial sawed the air as he answered his question. ‘They returned to their folly! “For as a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.”’ That had been the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s text, taken from the eleventh verse of the twenty-sixth chapter of the Book of Proverbs. He shook his head sadly, drew his hand back, and repeated the awful word in a tone of resignation and puzzlement. ‘Vomit, vomit, vomit.’

      The slavocracy, he said, was mired in its own vomit. They wallowed in it. They reveled in it. A Christian, the Reverend Elial Starbuck declared, had only one choice in these sad days. A Christian must armor himself with the shield of faith, weapon himself with the weapons of righteousness, and then march south to scour the land free of the Southern dogs that supped of their own vomit. And the members of the slavocracy are dogs, he emphasized to his listeners, and they must be whipped like dogs, scourged like dogs and made to whimper like dogs.

      ‘Hallelujah!’ a voice called from the gallery, while in the Starbuck pew, hard beneath the pulpit, James Starbuck felt a pulse of pious satisfaction that he would be going forth to do the Lord’s work in his country’s army, then he felt a balancing spurt of fear that perhaps the slavocracy would not take its whipping quite as meekly as a frightened dog. James Elial MacPhail Starbuck was twenty-five, yet his thinning black hair and perpetual expression of pained worry made him look ten years older. He was able to console himself for his balding scalp by the bushy thickness of his fine deep beard that well matched his corpulent, tall frame. In looks he took more after his mother’s side of the family than his father’s, though in his assiduity to business he was every bit Elial’s son for, even though he was only four years out of Harvard’s Dane Law School, James was already spoken of as a coming man in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and that fine reputation, added to his famous father’s entreaties, had earned him a place on the staff of General Irvin McDowell. This sermon would thus be the last James would hear from his father for many a week for, in the morning, he would take the cars for Washington to assume those new duties.

      ‘The South must be made to whimper like dogs supping their own vomit!’ The Reverend Elial began the summation which, in turn, would lead to the sermon’s fiery and emotive conclusion, but one worshiper did not wait for those closing pyrotechnics. Beneath the gallery at the very back of the church a box pew door clicked open and a young man slipped out. He tiptoed the few paces to the rear door, then edged through into the vestibule. The few people who noticed his going assumed he was feeling unwell, though in truth Adam Faulconer was not feeling physically sick, but heartsick. He paused on the street steps of the church and took a deep breath while behind him the voice of the preacher rose and fell, muffled now by the granite walls of the tall church.

      Adam looked astonishingly like his father. He had the same broad shoulders, stocky build and resolute face, with the same fair hair, blue eyes, and square-cut beard. It was a dependable, trustworthy face, though at this moment it was also a very troubled face.

      Adam had come to Boston after receiving a letter from his father that had described Starbuck’s arrival in Richmond.

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