The Life of Hope (9 page)

Joseph wondered at this logically, puzzled by it. He didn’t have the time to wait, stalling until his shaft withered away. Furthermore, he realized that his erection was driving him in some small but urgent way. “For verily,” Joseph Hope spoke—he’d spoken fast upon the heels of his last words, all of his cogitations done in a thrice—“He took not on Him the nature of angels, but He took on Him the seed of Abraham!” Joseph Benton Hope thrust his arms toward the skies, allowing the sheet to fall. Then, quickly, Hope spun to face George Quinton, who alone (and only for that short moment) had the physical power to stop him.

“Now see heah!” said George, and he advanced on Hope.

Joseph drove the gaze of his eyeball as a carpenter drives a nail. George Quinton stopped so suddenly that his momentum
threatened to topple him over. Joseph Benton Hope began to quote from Isaiah, rounding out the edges of his croaky voice. “Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? When thou seest the naked, that thou cover him, and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?” George Quinton, Hope saw, was motionless, pinned like a butterfly in a collection.

Hope had achieved chilling effects with his readings of the words “naked” and “flesh;” several of the old men were now propped up on aged elbows, one or two were even sitting upright. Hope began to turn, addressing them all. “Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily! And thy righteousness shall go before thee, and the glory of the Lord shall be thy reward!”

Something was bothering Hope, and he relegated some small portion of his sensibilities to find out what it was. Hope’s mind was operating on several different levels at once; searching through Scripture, selecting body movements, regulating inflections in his froglike voice. A very large part of his senses was taken up with keeping himself removed from Martha Quinton. So long as he kept a certain distance (vague, but very real) Hope was all right. As soon as he crossed that invisible line, Martha would beat him to a pulp. And at the highest level, Joseph Benton Hope was merely watching all this, aloof and removed like a general; and, like a general, he was relayed the following message—Mr. Opdycke was still blubbering beneath the bedsheets. This is what had been bothering him, of course; the effect was undermined by this man’s pitiful simpers. Hope lowered his voice until it was almost a whisper, only a notch or two louder than Opdycke’s sobs. “Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer! Thou shalt cry, and He shall say …” Hope moved to Opdycke’s cot and pulled the sheet away. “Here I am!”

Hope touched his fingers to Mr. Opdycke’s head, quickly finding and gingerly exciting the Site of Tranquility. Nothing happened. Opdycke’s brain had no doubt been so scrambled by alcohol and disease that nothing was where it should have been. Hope moved his fingertips elsewhere, trying to locate the Organ of Veneration. Still nothing happened. Desperately (although
without any visible sign of desperation) Hope simply massaged Mr. Opdycke’s lousy skull, hoping to achieve some change in the man’s behavior. After a moment, Opdycke stopped sobbing, and even dared to open his eyes. Once Mr. Opdycke’s eyes were open, Hope dropped to his knees, his own eye descending as a hawk descends on a rabbit. “And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul, then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noon day.”

“I couldn’t help killing her,” Mr. Opdycke said to him, almost conversationally.

“And the
Lord
,” Hope howled quietly, “shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in droughts.” Hope sprang to his feet, drawing the old men upward with him so that they were all sitting, withered and wrinkled. Hope looked at the most emaciated of them. “And make fat thy bones!” he cried. “And thou …” Hope spread his arms, including them all. “Thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.” Hope gestured lightly toward the skies, and all of the men stood up, even Mr. Opdycke, all of them naked as newborns. Now it was time for the dangerous part. Joseph Benton Hope turned around and began to advance on Martha Quinton. “And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places,” he hissed. Martha’s eyes were fastened on Hope’s staff, which he knew was huge; it throbbed and ached and longed to burst. “Thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations.” Joseph was crossing the threshold. Martha Quinton’s eyes leapt up to meet his, terrified but defiant. “And thou shalt be called,” Hope whispered, “the repairer of the breach, the restorer of paths to dwell in.”

Joseph Hope now stood a few inches from Martha, almost touching her with his root.

Martha dropped to her knees.

“Perfection,” Joseph Benton Hope said, “must be available for all men and women, and salvation must be a continuous process, not a fixed achievement.”

The faces were all flushed and smiling blissfully. Joseph let a silence hang in the air, then he gathered it up into his small hands and lowered his head in prayer.

They did likewise.

It was a small assembly, but they more than made up for it in enthusiasm, proudly labeling themselves Perfectionists and extolling the thoughts and virtues of their spiritual leader, Joseph Benton Hope.

The most loyal were the Quinton twins.

George took care of the more practical things, replacing the cots in the windowless room with rows of chairs, building for Hope a lectern, and outfitting the exterior of the edifice with a new sign. George took down the one reading:

and put up a sign that announced:

Martha had done the actual recruiting, first persuading friends and acquaintances to attend, then starting to work on the general populace. Martha had many and varied recruiting techniques, ranging from thoughtful arguing to insistent badgering to physical overpowering. Hope himself had seen Martha literally drag a gentleman in off the street, his ear locked and twisted between her mighty fingers.

Mr. Opdycke, poxy and consumptive, had remained with them since the “Meeting in the Mission,” as they all referred to it. Mr. Opdycke had proven himself a valuable asset. For one thing, Opdycke was very demonstrative in his faith, forever dropping to his knees with great, gleeful cries of “Hallelujah!” For another, his love for Hope was boundless. Mr. Opdycke’s open sores had started to vanish the instant Hope had touched him, or so it seemed, and his heart had been filled with a wonderful warmth.

When J. B. Hope had first declared that all people could be perfect, Mr. Opdycke was sure that he alone would be the exception. He was so far from perfect it was almost humorous. His horrendous conduct aside, Mr. Opdycke’s physical being was imperfect to the extent that his stomach refused to hold down food, his pecnoster pissed red and at all other times discharged a smelly yellow stuff, his eyes colored everything various hues, and his brain jumbled memory and delirium until they formed a nightmare that Opdycke suffered through every minute of the day. But, miraculously, Hope had then pointed at Mr. Opdycke, there at the “Meeting in the Mission,” selecting him as an example. “This man
can
,” Hope intoned, “
must
be, and
shall
be perfect!” This was when the warmth came, a flood in his ravaged body. Mr. Opdycke sank to his knees, and suddenly he had a memory from his boyhood, and he with clarity recalled the words to a hymn. Mr. Opdycke began to sing. “I was heavy laden once with guilty sin, but it’s all gone now …”

“Stop!” commanded Joseph Hope, and Opdycke did so, instantly. “Singing,” said Hope slowly, “serves no earthly purpose. It is a crude imitation of our angelic life-to-be. As such, by its nature, singing is imperfect. Therefore, refrain from song.”

This was considered by some to be the oddest thing about
the Free Church, the fact that no singing was allowed there. The local clergy had other concerns. It was an odd and unsettled time for established religion, perhaps because the nation had only recently been born out of revolution, and a sense of idealism and adventure still hung about the countryside like fog.

In the church’s view, Joseph Benton Hope was a small, but nagging, problem. His Perfectionist doctrine flew in the face of prevailing theological thought: that thought being, “If all of you lowly debased sinners don’t pull up your socks, God is going to fry you eternally.” The popular religion those days was terrifying, even demonic, its ministers blackclad and given to pitching fits. Joseph Hope was idiosyncratic in his thinking, certainly, but he was cut from the same cloth. He preached in the orthodox sense, he quoted from Scripture and taught the life of Christ, and he was charismatic, that is, fired up with the Spirit. There were others far worse; lunatics who claimed that nakedness was man’s natural state and therefore preached in the nude to an assemblage of nudists.

There was a sect that had concluded that the faculty of speech was an aberration not intended by our Creator, and these people never spoke words, never even wrote words down, living a life of total silence and, presumably, extreme poverty and hunger. One man had counted up all the letters in the Bible and found that the astronomical total was divisible by thirteen, from which he concluded that the Good Book was in truth some cunning forgery of the Devil’s. Fortunately, some other man had totaled the letters himself and discovered that the original tally was off by 1, but the clergy still had to wonder at all the energy being poured into these peculiar pursuits.

The most troublesome of all was Theophilius Drinkwater. At least the others found their individual peculiarity and held on to it fervently; Drinkwater’s mind was a fertile garden of weirdness, and it seemed as if his theories and beliefs changed daily, attacking the church from different angles and positions so that it was impossible to find a suitable defense. Theophilius put out a weekly periodical called
The Battle-Axe & Weapons of War
(Drinkwater was well aware of the violent aspects of his struggle with the church) and in that small tabloid he made his very odd ideas known.

His specific heresies changed all the time, but Drinkwater harped on certain themes. For instance, Theophilius was no great lover of clothing, although, being a Bostonian, he acknowledged its occasional convenience. It was another of his beliefs that too much was made of the idea of “Hell,” that it was a threat sneaked into the Bible by purposefully mistranslating the Hebrew for “grave.” Where Theophilius acquired his linguistic erudition was something of a mystery; what was most alarming about this last theory was that the man presented a very strong case.

Drinkwater’s other constant theme had to do with marriage. Although seemingly happily espoused, Theophilius didn’t care for the institution, writing and publishing in
The Battle-Axe & Weapons of War:

Compared to this, J. B. Hope’s occasional writings (likewise published in
The Battle-Axe
: those interested should read “Malevolent Benefactor: the Influence of Theophilius Drinkwater on Joseph Benton Hope,”
The Journal of American Antebellum History
, vol. 4, no. 15) seemed to the church almost sweet in their innocence. Hope wrote, in a calm, eloquent way, of the “perfection” possible to mankind. The notion was laughable, certainly, but contained no virulent threat. If Hope and his people chose to ignore their very natures (for we are all sinners in the hands of an angry God) and wake up one morning to find Mephistopheles stoking the furnace, so be it. In fact, the church would have been perfectly willing to ignore J. Benton Hope, except for one small, worrisome thing. His congregation included an inordinate number of girls. Fully half of his followers were young, marriageable women. Something, the clergy felt in their bones, was amiss.

Most of the young women were there because Polly Drinkwater had told them about Hope and his preachings with such
passion and excitement that it would have been impossible to stay away. Having seen J. B. Hope once, the girls kept coming back.

It was not his teachings that drew them, for although Perfectionism was a sweet song, it was the only one Hope sang, and it soon became tiresome. What drew them was Joseph himself. He was a boyish-looking man, even angelic, his head topped with long flaxen curls. The eyepatch sat on his face deeply black, an exhilarating discord, speaking great mysteries. (It would be two years before kind-hearted George Quinton would make a gift to Joseph of an oversized, pale blue glass eyeball.) Hope’s mouth was perpetually fashioned into a crooked sneer, even when he talked gently of paradise. Hope’s voice was in itself arresting, a queer croaking thing, jagged as broken glass. His stint of debauchery had done little to change his lithe, muscular body.

The only thing demonstrative about Hope was this small body, a fact of which Joseph was ignorant. While he preached, Hope moved constantly, prowling about the room, making large circles, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, shaking his fists in the air as if offering to do battle with invisible demons. And finally, although not one of the girls would admit it even to herself, it was often readily apparent that Hope’s manly endowment was incongruous with his small frame.