Jezebel

He was a man of the Revealed Word; so Elijah Crimmins put his face to the world. At forty-one, imposing of stature, with a thick mane of prematurely silver hair and a compelling presence, he had built his reputation righteously toiling in the Lord’s vineyards. Now, as evening drew down, with the day’s heat lingering, he made preparations for the final night of his Salvation Hallelujah! crusade.

“Sonny,” he called out to one of the two hired roustabouts lolling and smoking just outside the tent entrance, his voice burred from the strain of preaching, “you and Beau see to the guy ropes all around. I want them snugged up real good and tight.”

“You got it, Reverend,” the young man drawled, flicking his cigarette butt to arc like an orange firefly into the gloaming.

The preacher let his eyes roam over the interior of the capacious tent. On the hard, bare ground were dozens of folding chairs that soon would groan and sway with the exclamations of the faithful. The chairs were arrayed in rows and ranks before the stage, rough-planked, where his wife sat rehearsing a hymn on a small organ, its maple finish dulled and marred with age.

“That C-sharp, Constance…,” he said, his voice edged with annoyance.

“Your ear doesn’t lie, husband. It is flat, and I will be sure not to steer near it come the service,” she answered without looking his way. He watched her play for a moment. Five years his junior, she was a plain-looking country woman, bordering on homely—lusterless dishwater hair gathered like a nervous bird’s nest at the back of her head, angular face devoid of makeup, sallow beneath the bare light bulbs strung above the stage, lips pallid. She rocked her thin frame slowly to the music in a formless cotton dress of pale pink, a tired sateen bow drooping at the center of her flat chest. Elijah Crimmins regarded her with neither love nor even fondness. Rather, she was in his eyes a prop, suited to her role.

Outside, the crickets and katydids had begun raising their voices, a chorused accompaniment to the sultriness of the hour. Late-July nights were ever thus where Brother Crimmins had pitched his canvas, a campground enwrapped in the serpentine bight of the Mississippi a handful of miles north of Cairo. The sprawling field with its withered grass trampled flat in the powdery dust by the crowds of seekers, was familiar territory to the preacher. For each of the previous eleven summers he had made it a regular stop crusading through the tip of Indiana, far southern Illinois, into Missouri and back around to Tennessee before winding up at home in Kentucky by the time of the first leaves turning.

It was the Lord’s work, but the Lord’s work was not easy, taxing the body, mind, and spirit. Yet, there was bounty in return—souls saved, collection buckets brimming, and…diversion.

Through the years Elijah Crimmins had become a practiced hand at the business of salvation, though he had no notion of such a future as a young boy in western Kentucky. His consciousness was demarcated by the environs of the family farm—a meager patch of sorghum and a few head of weary livestock that managed to sustain him, his parents, and two younger sisters. What learning he had came with a dozen other children in the single room of a red brick schoolhouse down a winding dirt road a half-mile away. The Sabbath was given over mornings and afternoons to the Gospel Tabernacle which sat on the edge of the nearby village, small and defiant, a bulwark against those who flouted the Commandments. And while his mother saw to it that she and the children attended faithfully—“Daddy wasn’t much for the pews”—Elijah averred that the impression all the churching had on him was minimal.

He would come to say that the moment his life changed, or as he would have it, “the Savior took a-hold of my soul,” was the August night in 1926 when, at sixteen, at the insistence of his mother, he was packed up with his sisters in the back of the family’s rusting pickup and driven twenty miles to Cadiz. There, at the Trigg County fairgrounds, they joined with a throng of other country folk at the tent revival of Brother Harlan Westover.

“He come from way yonder in West Virginia,” Elijah’s mother had said. “A right powerful preacher, they say. Heals them that’s sickly, too.”

The night was brutally hot. The men bore it stoically while their womenfolk strove for relief with the cheap paper fans Brother Harlan’s female assistants distributed with a smile and a “may the good Lord bless ye.”

The big tent filled quickly, and it took but a short time for the proceedings to unfold. With a rousing crescendo of chords pounded out on an ancient upright piano and a flourish of tambourines, the evangelist bounded onto the stage. In his upraised right hand he clutched a Bible as if brandishing a torch and launched into a raucous preachment, praising Jesus and lashing out at sinners.

Elijah, who had evinced little enthusiasm for the trip, found himself immediately transfixed, marveling at Brother Harlan as he paced the stage like a caged lion, his sweat-streaked face replete with makeup beneath a shoe polish-black pompadour. The black suit coat he wore he soon enough tore off in a spasm of haranguing those who were unwashed in the blood, warning of everlasting hellfire.

For the better part of an hour, Brother Harlan whipped up the crowd as children squirmed, the women fanned themselves with increasing urgency, and the men loosened their shirt collars to ease the stifling discomfort.

Then, with the assembled raised to a proper frenzy as he moved into his peroration, the preacher exhorted those with infirmities to come forward for healing and salvation. And this a few did, some lame of limb, others with tear-stained faces.

With a swift round of laying on of the hands and a final supplication to the Almighty, the piano struck a brisk, thunderous finale as the evangelist’s youthful assistants moved among the crowd with wicker baskets to gather in donations.

Afterward, Elijah’s mother spoke excitedly of feeling the hand of the Holy Ghost upon her, while his daddy declared himself more revived by the jug of corn liquor tucked beneath the front seat of the truck. On the way home, as his sisters slept, Elijah jostled along in the bed of the old Chevrolet, eyeing the rind of ivory crescent moon that hung in the northwest firmament. His mind was suffused with what he had been a part of. He was gripped, not by Brother Harlan’s message, his apocalyptic admonitions, but rather the spectacle of it all, how the theatrics played out beneath the overspreading canvas, simmering in the summer heat, with the childlike yearning of those who sought a balm for their souls. Elijah marveled at the effect it had, most especially on the young women, who seemed in ecstatic thrall to the middle-aged preacher. It was a temptation of the flesh that thrilled the boy, though beyond his articulation.

Then and there the course of his life was set.