Free The Black Mass of Brother Springer by Charles Willeford Page A

fifty Sundays and fifty sermons the late Reverend Wannop, my predecessor, started all over again in the notebook, not in the Holy Bible. Evidently these numbered sermons were all tried and true, but they didn't help me any. How could I talk for an hour, perhaps two, on "I wait for the Lord...and in his words I do hope" when this great black Bible was as mysterious to me as the original hieroglyphics of the Dead Sea Scrolls?
           Oh, it was all very interesting, but this was Friday, and in two days I had four hours to preach—two in the morning and two more in the evening. My confidence in the simple-ness of being a preacher was waning fast.
           The back screen door slammed, and I turned my head toward the kitchen. An ancient black crone in a shapeless, dirty red dress reaching to her ankles, was framed in the doorway. Bent nearly double, she had to raise her head to look at me, and her gummy smile revealed a single, yellow upper tooth in the near-center of an obscenely pink mouth. She cackled thinly, removed a soiled bandana from her head. Her head was almost bald, but here and there a tuft of white, kinky hair stood up crazily.
           "Put the bandana back on your head, woman," I said, closing my eyes.
           "I'm Ralphine, Captain," she stated in an impossibly high voice, "and I wondered if you was ready for your breakfast or if you's had it yet."
           "Did Dr. Jensen send you?" I asked.
           "Yes, sir. And it sure is wonderful to have a man of God in the house again."
           "Okay. Fix me something, if there is anything to fix, and if there isn't get something at the grocery store and charge it to me."
           Again the cackle, but the bandana was back in place, and my eyes followed her thin pointing arm to the paper sack on the kitchen table.
           "I has done stopped at the store," she said, and then after another meaningless cackle, she backed into the kitchen and began to busy herself with pots, pans and other assorted noises.
           I lighted a cigarette and sat back in the swivel chair. Although Ralphine was only being paid five dollars a week by the trustees, I thought they could do better for me than that, but on the other hand, I was a single man in a small house, and a younger, more capable woman might cause talk. I must remember I was a minister at all times!
           I returned to my contemplation of the preparation of my sermon and ignored Ralphine and the noises from the kitchen. The more I thought about the sermon the more complicated my thinking got. How far could I go? The basis of any and all kinds of religion, as I knew them, had as a premise; blind and unquestioning belief! First of all, you have to believe, whether you were a Christian, a Shintoist, or worshipped a runty tree in the middle of a vast forest. But I was mixed up because I didn't believe in anything, not even in the figures I had added, subtracted, and multiplied so many years as an accountant in Columbus. I knew that figures could be made to lie, and only a clever man could detect the falsehood in the way figures were presented.
           But theology, religion, was so complicated and obscure; where could I start? Where could I begin my sermon, where could I lead my parishioners, and how much would they believe of what I told them? Except for a few halfhearted appearances at Unitarian Fellowship meetings I had never been to church in my life. I believed in nothing, and without believing I had to deliver two two-hour long sermons within two days. That is a lot of talk. As the holy Abbott at Orangeville had said, "It is all in the Bible," but I could hardly read from the Bible for four hours straight.
           I tried to remember the gist of the few Unitarian sermons I had heard, and what the minister had said, but I could not remember any one thought with any clarity. There was a sermon concerning art in our lives that I recalled, all about the