"Para-bell, para-bell," he said impatiently.

"Jesus Christ went around telling them to folks."

"Oh yes, of course," she said, realizing he meant parable.

"What kind of... what did you tell him?"

"That's between him and me. It's his now, like I give it to him to hold his life stitched together. He wants to tell anybody, he's free to do so. It don't belong to me no more."

That's a very... unusual concept, Reverend Birdy."

"Not to me, it ain't. Of course, I've been doing it for years.

And I maybe got one I can make up for you." As he spoke he turned to look directly at her, and she felt that he was seeing her for the first time. There was an extraordinary impact in that clear blue stare looking down at her.

"Well... that will be nice, I'm sure."

"Some are nice and some aren't nice. They has to fit the 3*4 person. Fit them the way I see them, which sometimes it isn't the way they think on themselves. So it comes to them as a shock. But it is kind of the word of the Lord, filtered down through me. When He tells me what to say, I say it."

"I was very impressed by the way you conducted that revival that was taped. It was very stirring."

"The camera and the lights kept me from getting all the way up where I wanted to be. It was too much like acting. I'm not an actor. What do you show me next?"

"I don't imagine you want to look at the motels and the restaurants."

"Sister, like I said back there when I got off the airplane, I want to see the whole thing because maybe I won't be back."

"We hope you'll be back to stay."

"I know."

And so he made long and careful visits to the motels and the restaurants, and to the University the classrooms and dormitories and gym and swimming pool. And the University theater. He accepted the fact he could not see Matthew Meadows, that he was too ill to see. He inspected two new houses in the Settlements that were not yet occupied, and he g talked to some of the workmen putting up more. They went back to Communications and he listened to the taping of a , radio talk show. He went up to the roof and looked at the big ' GTE dishes. He listened to Walker McGaw's set speech about the number of television stations they reached, and the number of hours they were on the air both in radio and television. He roamed through the noisy room where the women were composing the boilerplate letters on the word processors linked to the Diablos, and where the mechanical pens were making the facsimile signatures on those outgoing letters. He picked several up and read them carefully, his lips moving. It seemed to Mary Margaret he took a long time to read each letter.

They strolled the Garden of Mercy, and they went up and walked through the cemetery. Her tent dress was getting so damp with the perspiration of long effort in the sun, it was beginning to cling to her shoulders and flanks. When at last there was nothing more to see, he said, frowning at her, "Where's your brother? Wasn't he supposed to be here? Friday a busy day for him?"

"Something probably delayed him. He might be looking for us right now."

"Where can we talk, you and me? I'd like it if we'd talk in that place where you live. The Manse? In your place. I want you to be in a place where you feel most at home, and I'm the stranger."

She hesitated, wondering what he meant, then agreed. The limousine took them back to the Manse. They rode in silence in the automatic elevator to the third floor and walked diagonally across the wide foyer to her apartment. It was never locked.

With the intense security at the Manse there was no need. She phoned Security and Reception and told them that when John Tinker arrived, she was in her suite having a discussion with the Reverend Birdy. While she phoned, he roamed around, looking at the spines of the books on the shelves, looking at her small collection of primitive Balinese and Haitian paintings, curious amalgams of innocence and sophistication.

"What's this here one about, Sister?"

That's from Bali. Those are fruit bats."

"Ugly little devils, aren't they?"

The way they arranged them is very pleasing, I think. It is a nice pattern, a nice composition."

"Buy it yourself?"

"Yes. I bought that one and those two over on that wall of the fish and the butterflies when I went with Poppa to Denpasar years and years ago to a Christian Action Conference about the missions."

He continued to look at the bats, rocking back and forth, heel to toe, his huge brown hands clutching the wide brim of the planter hat he held behind him. He said, almost to himself, "Lots of people, I guess they can take the ugly in their lives and they can make a nice design out of it. Put it just so, a little dab here, a little dab there, and then it is a design instead of evil and they can have folks in to admire it."

It annoyed her slightly and she raised her voice and said, "Won't you please sit down, Reverend? I'm sure you have a great many questions to ask about Meadows Center now that you've seen it all."

He looked around and selected the big leather armchair she had acquired to make Poppa more comfortable when he came in to see her for one of their long talks. She was on the small 3z6

needlepoint settee nearby. He dropped his planter hat on the floor beside the chair.

"I got no questions."

"None at all? Oh, come now! You must have some. If you don't have any questions, do you have any comments?"

"Anything I want to say about it, I'll save until your brother gets here. I promised you a para-bell, didn't I?"

"I... I guess you did."

The way it is coming to me, it might sting you some, but it might also he'p you some."

"Help me what?" 2 "He'p you live your life. It's the one thing all of us got in common. How to live the life."

"Well, go ahead then."

"In a minute," he said.

"Got to arrange it into words." He closed his blue eyes for a long thirty seconds and then opened them and looked directly at her.

"A long time ago there was a little girl lived in a village by the sea." His voice was deeper and slower, and he was selecting his words with more care.

"This little girl had an important father, a chief in the village. And she had two brothers, one older than her and one younger, and they were both handsome and brave and smart and everybody knew they would grow up to be chiefs.

"The little girl did not know what she would grow up to be but she believed it was her fate to become a wife and bear children. But she was the middle child and people did not pay attention to her very much. She worried about herself. She didn't know if she was pretty or if she was ugly. It was on her mind all the time. She was scared of the young men of the village, scared about what they would think about her, scared of walking on the beach with them in the evening. Her fears got worse and worse. She did not know what to do.

"So one day she was down on the beach alone and she saw an ugly kind of seaweed that always washed up there. It had fat pods and wrinkled leaves. She wound two strands of it around her waist. She wore the strands all day long. They made her feel better. She did not know why. Every day she added more weed.

And she felt better toward herself. She became the seaweed girl, and no young man wanted her. It had solved her problem.

She would never have to find out if, under all the weed, she was pretty or she was ugly. It would never have to come up. She could stop being afraid of the young men because no young man would ever ask her to walk down the beach in the evening, and she would not need to worry about what might happen."

He seemed to be through. She stared at him.

"What happened? I don't know what you mean."

"Your seaweed is butter and cream and cheese and chocolate cake and ice cream and cookies."