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By Root 12354 0

into a bizarre religious convulsion, brief in duration but intense. The Holy Bible—which I carried in a bundle along with Time magazine and the Washington Post—had been part of my itinerancy for years. It had also, of course, served as an appendage to my costume as the Reverend Entwistle. I had not been in any sense a godly-minded creature, and the Scriptures were always largely a literary convenience, supplying me with allusions and tag lines for the characters in my novel, one or two of whom had evolved into pious turds. I considered myself an agnostic, emancipated enough from the shackles of belief and also brave enough to resist calling on any such questionable gaseous vertebrate as the Deity, even in times of travail and suffering. But sitting there—desolate, weak beyond description, terrified, utterly lost—I knew that I had let slip all my underpinnings, and Time and the Post seemed to offer no prescription for my torment. A fudge-colored lady of majestic heft and girth squeezed into the seat beside me, filling the ambient space with the aroma of heliotrope. We were speeding north now, moving out of the District of Columbia. I turned to glance at her, for I was aware of her gaze on me. She was scrutinizing me with round, moist, friendly brown eyes the size of sycamore balls. She smiled, gave a wheeze, and her expression embraced me with all the motherly concern my heart at that hopeless moment longed for. “Sonny,” said she, with an incredible amplitude of faith and good cheer, “dey is only one Good Book. And you got it right in yo’ hand.” Credentials established, my fellow pilgrim pulled out of a shopping bag her own Bible and settled back to read with an aspirated sigh of pleasure and a wet smacking of lips. “Believe in His word,” she reminded me, “an’ ye shall be redeemed—dat’s de holy Gospel an’ de Lawd’s truth. Amen.”

I replied, “Amen,” opening my Bible to the exact middle of its pages where, I remembered from idiot Sunday School lessons, I would discover the Psalms of David. “Amen,” I said again. As the hart panteth after the water brooks so panteth my soul after thee, O God... Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me. Suddenly I felt I had to be secreted from all human eyes. Lurching to the washroom, I locked myself in and sat on the can, scrawling in my notebook apocalyptic messages to myself whose content I barely understood even as they streamed out from my scrambled consciousness: last bulletins of a condemned man, or the ravings of one who, perishing on the earth’s most remote and rotted strand, floats crazed jottings in bottles out upon the black indifferent bosom of eternity. “Why you cryin’, sonny?” said the woman later when I slumped down beside her. “Somebody done hurt you bad?” I could say nothing in reply, but then she made a suggestion, and after a bit I mustered enough possession to read in unison with her, so that our voices rose in a harmonious and urgent threnody above the clatter of the train. “Psalm Eighty-eight,” I would suggest. To which she would reply, “Dat is some fine psalm.” O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee: Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry; For my soul is full of troubles... We read aloud through Wilmington, Chester and past Trenton, turning from time to time to Ecclesiastes and Isaiah. After a while we tried the Sermon on the Mount, but somehow it didn’t work for me; the grand old Hebrew woe seemed more cathartic, so we went back to Job. When at last I raised my eyes and looked outside, it had grown dark and lightning in green sheets heaved up over the western horizon. The dark priestess, whom I had grown attached to, if not to love, got off in Newark. “Ev’ything gone be all right,” she predicted.

That night the Pink Palace from the outside looked like the set of one of those glossy, brutal detective movies I had seen a hundred times. To this day I remember so plainly my feeling of acceptance when I made my way up the sidewalk—my willingness not to be surprised.