The Little Friend

With the Good Lord’s Help: Upholding and Spreading the Protestant Religion and enforcement of all our Civil Laws. Mister Bootlegger, Mr. Pusher, Mr. Gambler, Mr. Communist, Mr. Homewrecker and all Law Breakers: the Lord Jesus has yr Number, there are 1 thousand Eyes upon you. You had better change your ocupation before the Grand Jury of Christ. Romans 7:4 This Ministry stands strictly for Clean Living and the Sanctity of Our Homes.

Beneath this was a decal of an American flag, and the following:

The Jews and its municipalities, which are the Antichrist, have stolen our oil and our Properties. Revelations 18:3. Rev. 18:11–15. Jesus will Unite. Rev. 19:17

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Eugene’s visitor—a wiry, staring-eyed young man of twenty-two or -three, with a loose-limbed country manner and ears that stood out from his head—joined Eugene at the window. He’d done his best to slick back his short, cowlicked hair but it still stood up in unruly tufts all over his head.

“It’s the innocents such as him for who Christ shedded His blood,” he remarked. His smile was the frozen smile of the fanatical blessed, radiating either hope or idiocy, depending on how you looked at it.

“Praise God,” said Eugene, rather mechanically. Eugene found snakes unpleasant whether they were poisonous or not, but for some reason he had assumed these on the floor behind him had been milked of venom or otherwise rendered harmless—else how did hill preachers like his visitor kiss these rattlers on the lips and stuff them down their shirt fronts and pitch them back and forth across the length of their tin-roofed churches as they were said to do? Eugene himself had never seen snakes handled during a religious service (and, indeed, snake-handling was rare enough even high in the coal mining country of Kentucky, where the visitor hailed from). He had, however, seen plenty of churchgoers babbling in tongues, knocked flat on the floor and twitching in fits. He had seen devils cast out, with a smack of the palm to the sufferer’s forehead, unclean spirits coughed up in gobs of bloody spit. He had witnessed the laying on of hands, which made the lame to walk and the blind to see; and, one evening at a riverside Pentecostal service near Pickens, Mississippi, he had seen a black preacher named Cecil Dale McAllister raise a fat woman in a green pants suit from the dead.

Eugene accepted the legitimacy of such phenomena, much as he and his brothers accepted the pageantry and feuds of World Federation professional wrestling, not caring much if some of the matches were fixed. Certainly many of those who performed wonders in His name were fakes; legions of the shady and deceitful stood constantly on the look-out for new ways to rook their fellow man, and Jesus Himself had spoken against them—but even if only five percent of the purported miracles of Christ Eugene had witnessed were genuine, was not that five percent miracle enough? The devotion with which Eugene regarded his Maker was vocal, unwavering, and driven by terror. There was no question of Christ’s power to lift the burden of the imprisoned, the oppressed and oppressive, the drunk, the bitter, the sorry. But the loyalty He demanded was absolute, for His engines of retribution were swifter than His engines of mercy.

Eugene was a minister of the Word, though affiliated with no church in particular. He preached to all who had ears to hear him, just as the prophets and John the Baptist had done. Though Eugene was rich in faith the Lord had not seen fit to bless him with charisma or oratorical skill; and sometimes the obstacles he struggled against (even in the bosom of his family) seemed insurmountable. Being forced to preach the Word in abandoned warehouses and by the side of the highway was to labor without rest among the wicked of the earth.