Jerry Lee Lewis, now Stan Kenton, now Gene Vincent; he
was in a fever of jive Godhead testimony.
“Naw, you don’t have to fear! Ah, naw! You don’t have to fear that kid who wants to show you dirty-book pictures! You don’t have to fear that boy who says just one toke on just one joint won’t hurt you and you’ll be a sissy if you don’t take it!
Ah, naw! ’CAUSE WHEN YOU GOT THE LORD YOU
GONNA WALK WITH THE LORD, AM I RIGHT?”
“YEAH!!!”
“OH-YEAH! AND WHEN YOU GOT THE LORD YOU
GONNA TALK WITH THE LORD, AM I RIGHT?”
“YEAH!”
“I CAN’T HEAR YOU, AM I RIGHT?”
“YEAH!!!” They screamed it out, many of them rocking back and forth in a frenzy now.
“IF I’M RIGHT SAY HALLELUJAH!”
“HALLELUJAH!”
“IF I’M RIGHT SAY OH-YEAH!”
“OH-YEAH!”
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They rocked back and forth; Jack and Wolf were rocked
with them, helplessly. Jack saw that some of the boys were actually weeping.
“Now tell me this,” Gardener said, looking toward them
warmly and confidentially. “Is there any place for the evildoer here in the Sunlight Home? Huh? What do you think?”
“No sir! ” cried out the thin boy with the buck teeth.
“That’s right,” Sunlight Gardener said, approaching the
podium again. He gave the mike a quick, professional flick to clear the cord out from under his feet and then he slipped it back into the clamp again. “That’s the ticket. No room here for tattletale liars and workers of iniquity, say hallelujah.”
“Hallelujah,” the boys replied.
“Amen,” Sunlight Gardener agreed. “The Lord says—in
the Book of Isaiah he says it—that if you lean on the Lord, you’re gonna mount up—oh-yeah!—with wings as eagles,
and your strength shall be the strength of ten and I say to you, boys, THAT THE SUNLIGHT HOME IS A NEST FOR EAGLES, CAN YOU SAY OH-YEAH!”
“OH-YEAH!”
There was another caesura. Sunlight Gardener gripped the
sides of the podium, head down as if in prayer, gorgeous
white hair hanging in disciplined waves. When he spoke
again, his voice was low and brooding. He did not look up.
The boys listened breathlessly.
“But we have enemies,” Sunlight Gardener said at last.
This was little more than a whisper, but the mike picked it up and transmitted it perfectly.
The boys sighed—a rustle of wind through autumn leaves.
Heck Bast was looking around truculently, eyes rolling,
pimples glowing such a deep red that he looked like a boy in the grip of a tropical illness. Show me an enemy, Heck Bast’s face said. Yeah, you go on, show me an enemy and just see what happens to him!
Gardener looked up. Now his mad eyes appeared filled
with tears.
“Yes, we have enemies,” he repeated. “Twice now the State
of Indiana has tried to shut me down. Do you know what? The radical humanists can barely stand to think of me down here at the Sunlight Home, teaching my boys to love Jesus and
their country. It makes em mad, and do you want to know
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something, boys? Do you want to know a deep old dark se-
cret?”
They leaned forward, eyes on Sunlight Gardener.
“We don’t just make em mad,” Gardener said in a hoarse
conspirator’s whisper. “We make em scaaaaaared.”
“Hallelujah!”
“Oh-yeah!”
“Amen!”
In a flash, Sunlight Gardener grabbed the mike again, and
he was off! Up and down! back and forth! sometimes he
jigged a two-step neat as a minstrel in a 1910 cakewalk! He bopped the word to them, pumping one arm first at the boys, then up toward heaven, where God had presumably dragged
up His armchair to listen.
“We scare em, oh-yeah! Scare em so bad they got to have another cocktail, or another joint, or another sniff of cocaine!
We scare em, because even smart old God-denying, Jesus-
hating radical humanists like them can smell righteousness and the love of God, and when they smell that they can smell the brimstone coming out of their own pores, and they don’t like that smell, oh no!
“So they send down an extra inspector or two to plant
garbage under the kitchen counters, or to let loose some cocka-roaches in the flour! They start a lot of vile rumors about how my boys are beaten. Are you beaten? ”
“NO!” they roared indignantly, and Jack was dumb-
founded to see Morton roaring the negative out as enthusiastically as all the rest, even though a bruise was already
beginning to form on Morton’s cheek.
“Why, they sent down a bunch of smart news reporters
from some smart radical humanist news show!” Sunlight Gar-
dener cried in a kind of disgusted wonder. “They came down
here and they said, ‘Okay, who are we supposed to do the
hatchet-job on? We’ve done a hundred and fifty already, we’re experts at smearing the righteous, don’t worry about us, just give us a few joints and a few cocktails and point us in the right direction.’
“But we fooled em, didn’t we, boys?”
Rumbling, almost vicious assent.
“They didn’t find no one chained to a beam in the barn, did they? Didn’t find no boys in strait-jackets, like they heard
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down in town from some of these hellbound School Board
jackals, did they? Didn’t find no boys getting their fingernails pulled, or all their hair shaved off, or nothing like that! Most they could find was some boys who said they got spanked,
and they DID get spanked, oh-yeah, they was spanked and I’d testify on that matter myself before the Throne of Almighty God, with a lie-detector strapped to each arm, because the
book says if you SPARE that rod, you gonna SPOIL that
child, and if you believe that, boys, you gimme hallelujah!”
“HALLELUJAH!”
“Even the Indiana Board of Education, much as they’d like
to get rid of me and leave a clear field for the devil, even they had to admit that when it comes to spanking, God’s law and
the State of Indiana’s law runs just about the same: that if you SPARE that rod, you gonna SPOIL that child!
“They found HAPPY boys! They found HEALTHY boys!
They found boys who were willing to WALK the Lord and
TALK the Lord, oh can you say hallelujah?”
They could.
“Can you say oh-yeah?”
They could do that, too.
Sunlight Gardener came back to the podium.
“The Lord protects those that love Him, and the Lord is
not gonna see a bunch of dope-smoking, communist-loving
radical humanists take away this resting place for tired, confused boys.
“There were a few boys who told tattletale lies to those so-called news-people,” Gardener said. “I heard the lies repeated on that TV news show, and although the boys slinging that
mud were too cowardly to show their own faces on the screen, I knew—oh-yeah!—I knew those voices. When you’ve fed a
boy, when you’ve held his head tenderly against your breast when he cries for his momma in the night, why, I guess then you know his voice.
“Those boys are gone now. God may forgive them—I hope
He does, oh-yeah—but Sunlight Gardener is just a man.”
He hung his head to show what a shameful admission this
was. But when he raised it again, his eyes were still hot,
sparkling with fury.
“Sunlight Gardener cannot forgive them. So Sunlight Gar-
dener set them out on the road again. They have been sent out
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into the Territories, but there they shall not be fed; there even the trees may eat them up, like beasts which walk in the
night.”
Terrified silence in the room. Behind the glass panel, even Casey looked pallid and strange.
“The Book says that God sent Cain out to the East of
Eden, into the land of Nod. Being cast out onto the road is like that, my boys. You have a safe haven here.”
He surveyed them.
“But if you weaken . . . if you lie . . . then woe unto you!
Hell awaits the backslider just as it awaits the boy or man who dives into it on purpose.
“Remember, boys.
“Remember.
“Let us pray.”
23
Ferd Janklow
1
It took Jack less than a week to decide that a detour into the Territories was the only way they could possibly escape the Sunlight Home. He was willing to try that, but he found he
would do almost anything, run any risk, if only he could avoid flipping from the Sunlight Home itself.
There was no concrete reason for this, only the voice of his undermind whispering that what was bad here would be
worse over there. This was, perhaps, a bad place in all
worlds . . . like a bad spot in an apple which goes all the way to the core. Anyway, the Sunlight Home was bad enough; he