We returned to the department, flipped a coin. I lost and had to write up the events of the day. I was feeling worn and bleary-eyed and it took an hour to document the case thus far. I made copies of the full materials and dropped them in the box outside Lieutenant Mason’s office, then wandered to the meeting room. The door was closed and I saw Richard Scaler sermonizing on the screen of the computer. The video was jittery. Though I couldn’t hear the audio, my mind heard his angry rants, the crowd amening Scaler’s every screeching condemnation of those not fitting the straitjacket confines of his theology.
When I entered the meeting room Harry sat forward and paused the action.
“A Richard Scaler film retrospective?” I asked.
“Tutweiler got me wondering who Richard Scaler really was. How the reality jived with my images of him. It’s pretty sad what I found so far. Wanna look?”
Though weary, curiosity pulled my chair closer to the screen. Harry tapped a key and the action re-started.
“This one I pulled off YouTube. Scaler preaching at a tent revival in Louisiana in the early sixties. The kiddie-preacher stage.”
The uploaded video was black and white, grainy, probably shot on what was called a super-8 camera, the film negative about as wide as your average lady’s pinky nail. Richard Bloessing Scaler was about seven years old, a little dab of pudge on a big broad stage. He danced, twirled, cajoled, all the while amening and hallelujahing in a comedic, high-piping voice. The crowd ate it up, some fainting, others speaking in tongues, others shaking as if standing in water while holding a shorted toaster. And always, moving through the crowd, the hat asking for money.
The film floated out of focus, re-entered on a scene that appeared to be backstage at the just-completed revival, billows of white cloth backdrop as Scaler’s parents sat in folding chairs, the young Richard between them.
“He’s got the spirit all the way through,” Daddy Scaler drawled. “They come from fitty miles to hear my boy preachin’ the Lord’s word.”
Richard Scaler Senior looked like a refugee from a Depression-era dust storm, a bone-skinny scarecrow with a nasal Oklahoma drawl. He wore overalls and a plain shirt, and I figured it was more costume than clothes, telling the dirt-poor audience he was one of them.
Mama Scaler was grossly obese; no way to gloss it, a lump. Her eyes seemed lost in her fleshy face. I felt sorrow at her condition until she looked into the camera. Her eyes were as cold and glittering as the eyes of a rattlesnake, and projected a force I could not explain, even through the bad lighting and grainy film. She stared at the camera as if determining whether to ignore it or kill it.
“How often do you preach, Richard?” the interviewer asked the chubby little kid.
“Every ni—”
“Two–three times a week,” Daddy Scaler interrupted, shooting a wide grin at the kid and patting him like an obedient retriever. “He’d preach day’n’night if we let him, but uh course, he’s got school an’ things.”
I’ll bet, I thought.
I saw Richard yawn and begin to slump, dead tired after hours of preaching and altar calls. His mother’s hand shot in from behind and grabbed the kid’s jacket at the shoulder blades, yanked him erect like a sack of meal. It was meant to be hidden, but Mama Scaler was unfamiliar with camera angles.
“Stand up straight, boy,” Mama Scaler side-mouthed. “An’ smile. These people are takin’ pictures.”
I looked at the seven-year-old and saw a wooden marionette. The camera scanned the departing crowd. The camera had lights and the faces looked back at the lights with confusion or fear or anger.
“I notice the crowd is all white,” the interviewer said. “Do you ever let Richard preach to colored audiences?”
Mama Scaler backhanded the question away like it was a fly. “Negras is made by Satan an’ doan have the men’l powers to unnerstand the word a God Ahmighy. All they wanna do is stir up trouble ennyways.”
“What kind of trouble do they stir up, ma’am?”
“What kinda question is that? I’m not sittin’ here to be talkin’ ’bout no filthy negras.”
“It was just a question, ma’am,” the interviewer said. “Could you tell us how much the typical revival pulls in, and what percentage of the proceeds are yours?”
A look of disgust quivered through the flesh of Mama Scaler’s face. She looked at her husband and said, “Get ’em the fuck outta here.”
Daddy Scaler rocketed from his chair with his finger pointing.
“This goddamn interview is over right now –”
“They’re simple questions, Mr Scaler. Mrs Scaler? Might you know what percentage of the –”
Scaler pushed his hat at the camera lens. “Doan you be talking to mah wife out my permission. Git outta here right now. ZEB! ETHAN!” he called to someone off-screen. “Come kick these goddamn nigger-lovin’ Communists outta here!”
The camera shifted sideways. A flurry of grunts and curses and the camera fell to the floor, showing a two-second scuffle of shoes and boots. The screen went black.
Harry said, “The copyright on the full documentary the clip came from – titled God’s Country – is 1959. It tracks several revivals across the South. That’s where the film ends for the Scaler journey.”
“Little Richy would have been…”
“Seven,” Harry said. “And already a two-year veteran of the circuit.”
“It’s obvious Mama Scaler’s got spiders in her wiring,” I said. “Probably psychotic. Stuff like that can mess a kid up bad.”
“Your mom…” Harry said. “She was the opposite, right?”
“Scared of everything. It was righteous fear – my old man would explode if the temperature was a half-degree different than what he wanted. She made church mice look bold by comparison.”
A half-beat pause. “How do you think that affected you? Not just your mom, the whole childhood-fear thing?”
“Not as much as it affected Jeremy,” I said.
Jeremy was my brother. At age sixteen he’d killed our father and later he’d been imprisoned for killing five women, the crimes starting soon after my father had been torn apart in a woods. After years of living in an institution for the criminally insane, he’d escaped last year. I had nearly been killed trying to safely return him to the institution. The chase had ended in the revelation that Jeremy had not killed the women. Or at least that’s what I wanted to believe.
Jeremy was still out there, free, and I heard from him every three or four months, a brief phone call, a cryptic postcard. He never said where he was, I never asked. He was smart enough to stay outside forever, I figured. He was a genius at camouflage, exterior and interior.
“I guess I’d have to agree there,” Harry said. “At least, from what I know about your bro—”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Harry. I’m done.”
He nodded. “Sure. Let’s get back to the Reverend Dick, preaching in 1995.”
Harry resumed his control of the keyboard, pulling up another video. The gestures were pure Scaler, dramatic and exaggerated, from his popped-wide eyes to his ten-league-boot steps. He’d yowl out a statement, cross the stage, yowl out another. His suit was white, his shoes were white, his belt was white, his shirt and ties were white. The only dark was hair and eyes. His body was about two decades older than the boy we’d just seen on stage, almost three decades younger than the body we’d seen cut down from a staircase last week. The body was also about thirty pounds lighter. I was surprised at how lithe and youthful Scaler was, and how good looking.
“Who built this country?” he railed at what appeared to be an audience of several hundred. “The Europeans who arrived on these shores? The people who were sent by God to build the greatest nation ever seen on the face of the earth, a shining star of freedom? Yes, the nay-tives were here, it’s true, can’t be denied. In-di-ans.” Scaler did a woo-woo-woo motion at his mouth to the delight of the crowd. He arm-flapped across the stage in a parody of pow-wow dancing, twenty feet of insult to the sacred rituals of others. “Were terrible things done to the In-di-ans in the name of Nation? Of destiny? Again, it can’t be denied. It also cannot be denied that the native tribes worshipped plants and animals and the heads of idols carved on poles outside of teeeeee-peeeees…” Scaler paused and glared into the crowds to let his words sink in.
“Totem poles were northwestern tribes,” I said. “They didn’t live in tipis.”
“Shhh,” Harry said, pointing back to the computer. Scaler shook his disgust at plant and animal and idol worship from his face, lifted his bible and pointed to it with a stern finger.
“When you worship false gods and idols, you anger the true God. He sends an army to smite you in the name of justice and redemption. Could that army be the soldiers of Columbus? The armies of Cortés? The God-blessed American cavalry rescuing women and children trying to pioneer the plains of this great land?”
“Yes,” the crowd roared. “Yes.” I could see the front rows of the audience. Several turned to one another, patting backs and shaking hands, transported in the bliss of Scaler telling them that what they’d wanted to believe all along was true.
“The same God who saved the children of Israel at the expense of the blaspheming Egyptians now comes to save the Christian children of the plains at the expense of the marauding infidel In-deee-ans?”
Yesses and amens and hallelujahs. Scaler raised a palm for silence. It took two seconds for the place to turn as still as a windless desert. He appeared in the throes of decision, then spoke in a stage whisper:
“I can’t he’p but think that this leads to an overwhelming fact: God lifts the righteous, drops the unholy. It’s how he makes his work known…So despair not for those fallen to the Lord’s swift sword…those of Sodom and Gomorra – they did not heed the lessons. Do not despair for those charred by God’s truthful lightning – they did not listen to His clear words. Do not despair for those who constantly beseech, ‘Help me, help me. Give me this, give me that…’ They have not heard the words of God, to lift thyself by thine own bootstraps…”
“Adidas 3:19,” I whispered. “Pull thyself up as you would thine laces.”
“For they have set themselves at odds with God and His works and His servants and messengers. For they have set themselves at odds with us!”
“Them and Us,” Harry said, turning off the computer with a sigh. “Can’t beat the old favorites.”