Reverend America: A Journey of Redemption by Kris Saknussemm Read Free Book Online Page B

could rail about Cain and Abel, King Solomon and David. Where was Elijah when the chariot of fire came? Under a juniper tree. And he could sing. He had natural flare for music and that very rare ability in a voice to tell a story in time with music—to in fact never be out of time.
    Sister Rosalie put all her psychic skills to work and also made shrewd choices in the music played—classic hymns and Old Time spirituals that people could comfortably sing. They also had an ace up their sleeve. Poppy had picked up a very hard to find songbook of the Only Men in Baton Rouge, the lost breed of itinerant black Methodist singers who roamed the South in the years after the Civil War until the turn of the century. They were cross pollinators, who mingled primitive blues with Christian hymns, and little Mathias had been exposed to some of their compositions in Charleston. He could sing those as if he’d written them himself. 
He speaks to me when I call Him—He bathes my poor head down—and the river that lies before me—He promises I won’t drown.
    They were heroes to him. Buried in history like the black cowboys and the buffalo soldiers, they were ministers of a uniquely American gospel, equal parts preachers, traveling musicians and by necessity—gunslingers. Now the family had a rare extended collection of their vagrant body of work, which no other group they knew of could claim.
    With Rose’s mentalist skills and phenomenal musical ability—Poppy’s hucksterism and likeability—Casper would query down the years why they never went out to California or back to New York. They just didn’t seem the kind of people to do that. The Rockies were as far west as they could go, Virginia as far north on the east coast. They were children of the heartland and the South. Poppy could rhapsodize about the bright lights and bustle of Radio City Music Hall, but the idea of actually going to Manhattan and bathing in those lights and the swoon of traffic was unthinkable.
    The man was a dyed in the wool yarn spinner and prevaricator, but with only one grave exception that Casper ever knew, he had a ruthless acuity when it came to cutting to the chase of someone else’s patter. When it came to the Bible, “This is a father-son story,” he said sharply. He took the view that the key to the Christian message is the anguish in the garden of Gethsemane—Peter’s denial, the betrayal of Judas, the Trial, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection—
period
. “This is good drama and something everyone can understand,” he said. “Who hasn’t been done over and who doesn’t want to be reprieved—to not die?” To him, all the “flipjack” of miracles, archangels, cherubim and the many mansions in the sky was smoke and lights. “Of course someone who can walk on water’s goin’ to get burned,” he’d say. “Show business is tough. I’ve known folks who could turn sticks into snakes and water into wine and they got crucified too, 
believe
that. The strange deal here is that the guy doesn’t use his magic to get away—he lets himself be sacrificed. You can’t get past that. The father sets up the son, and the son wears it. It’s a blood debt for human rebellion, starting with Adam and Eve, and the son ends up being more the father than the father. That’s the hope for mankind—that the vicious jealous Father God will treat us more kindly because his Son has been down amongst us and knows the game from the inside. And the Son has leverage with the Old Man because it was him bleeding on that Cross.” (Poppy would’ve never accepted that this was a theological position, to him it was just getting the story straight.)
    He personally enjoyed all the apocalyptic thunder and blood, and saw great theatrical power in it if you had a big budget—but when it came to the question of actual religious 
belief
—almost everything else in the Bible—Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist even the Virgin Birth, was a lot of fluff that got in the