A Stranger in the Kingdom by Howard Frank Mosher Read Free Book Online Page B

all, I liked Production Night, when I got to feed the nine-ton Whitlock.
    The Whitlock could print four pages of our eight-page paper at the rapid clip of twelve hundred takes an hour. Then the run was turned over and printed on the opposite side. To print the entire twenty-four-hundred-issue paper required four separate runs of two hours each. I generally took the first shift, then my father took over for a two-hour stint, and Elijah completed the last two runs, usually finishing up well after midnight.
    Stashing my autographed birthday baseball on a shelf above the machine, I sat on a high stool and fed one pristine white sheet after another into the inked rollers. Although I could see Elijah jawing from time to time at my father, I couldn’t hear him over the clash and nimble of the press. Until quite recently I had liked to pretend that the gigantic Whitlock was the pirate ship of my great-great-great-grandfather, a Scottish freebooter, with me at the helm like a latter-day Jim Hawkins. Now, with the increased self-awareness of adolescence, I was happy just to glance out at the street from time to time and to be seen and (I supposed) admired, not without strong sentiments of envy, by any town boys who happened to look in at me.
    Two hours later, as I reached for my red hunting jacket, Elijah was haranguing Dad about a grievance that had been eating at him for the past few weeks. “As I was saying, Cousin, you never, I repeat never, hire a minister until you’ve interviewed him in person and heard him preach at least one sermon.”
    My father stopped typing. “Elijah, we have been over this terrain forty-eleven times. How often do I have to tell you that George Quinn and Bill Simpson and I each spoke with the man on the phone for at least fifteen minutes. We checked his credentials and references, and the guy seems to be exactly what we want and have wanted for the past ten years or so.”
    â€œDid you hear him preach a sermon over the phone?”
    â€œWhat the hell sort of question is that? Of course not.”
    â€œThen how do you know he can?”
    Now my father was really exasperated. “Because, damn it, he has been preaching sermons to Canadian enlisted men and officers for the past sixteen years.”
    Elijah just shook his head and continued to type. As I tried to sidle past his machine unnoticed he said, “Boy, remember this. You never fill a pulpit until you’ve interviewed your candidate in person and heard him preach at least one sermon.”
    It did not seem very likely to me at thirteen that I would soon be in a position to fill a pulpit. I detested church and always had. Now that the trustees had finally landed themselves a full-time minister, Sunday school, which was nearly as bad, would no doubt start back up again too. A night or two ago I’d overheard Dad telling Mom that Elijah’s real grievance was that any minister at all had been hired because now my cousin the lay preacher would have to relinquish the pulpit from which he had bored the pants off every last member of the dwindling congregation since the departure of the last resident minister, Reverend Twofoot—who had left Kingdom County nearly two years ago, after suffering a total nervous collapse.
    Some members of the congregation felt from the start that Sanford Twofoot was not cut out for the rough-and-tumble demands of a remote border-town pulpit to begin with. He was a high-strung little man in his early sixties, yet it turned out that years ago he’d done a couple of tough missionary stints in the Congo; and though you never would have guessed it to look at him, he had guts and plenty of them In fact, poor Reverend Twofoot had more guts than common sense. When somebody told him about Resolvèd Kinneson’s cockfights, and the gambling and drinking that accompanied them, he marched right up to my outlaw cousin’s toting his trusty King James Revised Bible to put a stop to the