"Now you listen to me!"

"You used a knife and fork to cover your own self up so you wouldn't have to worry about yourself so nobody would come and try to take you away from Poppa."

"That is ridiculous!"

"Look at you! There was something you didn't realize. You are a creature of God, Mary Margaret. God has told us to be fruitful and multiply. You turned your back on your own God-given body so you wouldn't have all that responsibility.

And by doing that you turned your back on God. You turned your back on your own life. Your way back to God would be to shed all that blubber. Shed one pound a week. That isn't hard to do. Fifty-two pounds in a year. My guess is there is maybe a handsome woman buried under all those chins and that big belly and those hips and thighs big as bushel baskets.

You got all winded just walking around with me. That's pitiful. You're a young woman. Tell you what I'll do for you and the Lord. I'll come back by here a year from now and look at you. And I'll pray for you to have the strength to do it. And if I come back here and you haven't done it, then you and me are going to go around and around, hear?"

"I have never heard such total nonsense in my life!"

He smiled at her.

"Never have, eh? Told you the para-bells tend to sting. That's because they get down to the roots."

Five minutes later when John Tinker Meadows tapped on the door and came in, the two large people were sitting side by side on the frail settee. She was bent over, sobbing like a child, and Tom Daniel Birdy was patting her on the back of her shoulder, making rumbling sounds of comfort.

"What happened? What's going on?"

The big man got up. John Tinker hadn't realized how big he was. He shrugged and said, "Your sister here, you could say I brought her a little personal message from the Lord."

3*8 "What happened, Mag?" John Tinker demanded.

She raised her stained and bloated face and glowered at him and said, "Oh, shut up, Johnny." She levered herself up onto her feet and plodded to her bathroom and banged the door.

John Tinker looked to the Reverend Birdy for an answer, and the man said, "Did her no harm. Maybe helped a little. It's her business and the Lord's, not yours, friend. Nice to meet I you. Nice to shake your hand, Reverend Meadows. Met your daddy long ago."

"May I take it that we can welcome you to the Church on a permanent basis?"

"She showed me just about everything. I had a good long look at all of it. She told me about the medical center you're planning on and all that. She did her job. She put a good face on everything. Let's just wait until she comes on out. You two are the family. From what I gather, the old man's out of it for keeps."

"That's right. Did you meet Walter Macy ?"

"No. He was under the weather, his wife said on the phone.

But there was no real need to meet with him. I met a lot of the others in charge of different things."

"Few people realize what a large operation it is."

"It turns out bigger than I thought."

When she came back out she had changed her dress and fixed her hair. She gave Birdy a small shy smile, and went back to the settee.

"You set there, friend," Birdy said, pointing to the leather chair, and John Tinker found himself obeying the voice of authority. It was the same knack the old man used to have, to give orders gently but with such confidence they would be obeyed, nobody questioned them.

Tom Daniel Birdy stood where he could face both of them.

He smiled and said, "I've been making this speech up in my head all day long. I thought of so many different ways of saying things I got no idea how it'll come out.

"I'm pleased you thought of me and had the idea I could handle the number two or three preaching job here, or whatever it is. Any man should be flattered to be given a chance to reach all them people with the Word of God. Ride all over the world in those big pretty airplanes. Stay in the best places.

Own fifty suits of clothes and twenty-five pair of shoes. Get onto first names with the heavy hitters. Senators and Ambassadors and all such. Buy land, build stuff. Wowee!"

He stepped closer to John Tinker and leveled a finger, aiming it at the middle of his face, a finger like a sausage.

"But I got into this line of work to tote souls to Jesus! To tote them my own personal self without million-dollar satellites and million dollar airplanes and five hundred pounds of computer forms.

What this whole place does is separate you from your people, and that separates you from God and Jesus Christ."

John Tinker, keeping his voice level, asked, "Isn't that an inverted form of vanity? Isn't it the product of ego?"

"You are one smart man to ask that, because that's what I've been worrying on. It's the one weak place where my thinking isn't clear to me. I prayed to the Lord to make it come clear, but nothing has happened yet. I got my little church down there, and the people come from quite a ways around. No radio broadcasts, nothing like that. They come because somebody told them. If I grow too big for that little old church we'll build us a bigger one with our bare hands, me and my deacons.

Working people. I baptize them, and I he'p them through sickness, and I comfort them in grief and I bury them, knowing they are safe with the Lord forever. Man, that's what this fool business is all about. It ain't quantity, Johnny. And it ain't money and power and airplanes and all. It is you beside a sickbed holding the hand of a dying boy and making sure he goes to heaven, and then it is you crying along with his folks when you comfort them. This whole place is too big. Way too big. All your members are little numbers somewhere down inside machines. Sure, you go into their living rooms and there you are on the screen, Johnny, your face big as the whole screen and you are looking at them and talking personal, and you want them to send in their money, and you ask them nice, and tell them their money is a prayer to God. Maybe it's a prayer to you and your father. I want my people to give what they can. And they do. You want them to give more than they can, and you never look them right in the face and see them.

You don't know them. What good is that? How can you send a soul up to Jesus when you don't know the face it is hiding behind?"

"I don't think you understand," John Tinker said.

"Maybe neither of us understands the mystery of the Lord, my friend. Maybe it passe th all understanding, and what we got to have then is pure belief. And my way of living gives me a.

more belief in one hour than you'll have in a whole year. I feel it in my gut that the way you people are doing it is wrong! You think you can haul in a great big pile of money and do a lot of good with it, along with doing yourself some good. I had a boy down there been dying of that AIDS thing. Picked it up, he 3 thinks, living the low life in New Orleans, and he come on home with it. I'm not telling him it is the Lord God punishing % him for doing abominations with other fellows. I'm not telling J!

him he's wicked and dirty. What I'm doing, I'm setting there g beside his bed at home they got him home after the last o pneumonia and I'm holding his hand and kneeling beside the bed and praying for his immortal soul. And I am telling him there is room in heaven for anybody who goes out of this life sincere, repenting for any mean cruel things they done to anyone."

"Have you taken a vow of poverty?" John asked politely.

"It's pretty obvious we never have," Mary Margaret said.

"Shut up, Mag. I'm asking him."

"I live as well as I need to live, Johnny. We take up the collections and I take out living expenses, and what is left, half goes to the poor in the parish, the poor and the unemployed and the sick, and the rest goes into the bank waiting on the time we need to fix up the church or build something else. I couldn't have afforded to come here if you hadn't sent the airplane to fetch me. You know something?"

"Like what?"

"These days it's all like a big shooting gallery."

"I don't know what you mean, Tom."

The Reverend Birdy sat on a hassock with his big fists resting on his knees and looked across the room at them.

"People are confused. Life has got all mixed up these days. Nuke-ular freezes that won't happen, and jobs scarce as buttons on a goose, Latins flooding in by the hundred thousand, drug busts, and politicians all the time raising their own pay, and them sheiks wanting to cut off the oil again, and Reagan saying one thing and doing something else, and the Supreme Court fogging everything up ever' chance it gets, with one law for the rich man and another for the poor. They got junk and garbage running out of their TVs and their cable onto the rug in the front room. They got a world around them being poisoned by companies so dang big they don't ever have to answer a letter unless it comes from a bunch of lawyers. People want to understand what their life is about and what is the meaning of it, and everything they see in the real world, why, it tells them that their life is no-account and meaningless. So they have this great need to turn to something that will give life meaning.

That's why it is a big shooting gallery. It is shooting fish in a barrel. It is having so many rabbits in a field you can't walk without kicking them. It makes open season on hopeless folk for every freak religion and medication and diet that comes down the pike promising them everything. Used to be all the medicine men used to peddle their ointment out in California, but it has spread to the whole country. Your daddy worked in times when people were confident of their lives and the future, and it was a lot harder then to bring people to Jesus than it is now. You stand up there and promise them heaven, and they will send you money because they don't dare take the chance they might miss out by not sending it. You lock them into your big group of supporters and tell them they are better than any other group in the whole world. And that, forgive the expression, Sister Mary Margaret, is stable dressing."

"And what are you doing that's so great? "John Tinker asked.