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ut a Cause. These kids who hate each other are about to drive stolen cars to the edge of a cliff to see who’ll jump out first. But James Dean and this guy named Buzz become friends, and so it doesn’t make any sense for them to try and kill each other anymore. So James Dean says something like ‘Why are we doing this?’ Buzz says, ‘You got to do something for kicks, man.’”
While she told her story, her eyes were fixed steadily on mine. They were brown with a tinge of red in them, or maybe that was the distortion of the light under the tent. But she was pretty in an unusual way, innocent in the way that people at the very bottom of our society can be innocent when they have nothing more to lose and hence are not driven by ambition and the guile that often attends it.
“But you are,” she said.
“I’m what?”
“What you said.”
“I’m a cop?”
“I can always tell. But you look like a nice guy just the same.” She turned her attention back to the stage. “That’s Jamie Sue Wellstone? If my boobs would stand up like that, I wouldn’t be singing in a backwoods shithole under a piece of canvas in a rainstorm. I had mine tattooed, you know, chains of flowers, that kind of crap? They never recovered. They just flounce around now. What a drag.”
The people in front of us turned and stared as though the crew from a spaceship had just entered the tent.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Candace Sweeney. When I was a roller-derby skater, I got called Candy. But my name is Candace. What’s yours?”
“Dave Robicheaux.”
“A cop, right?”
“There’re worse things.”
“See, I can always tell,” she said.
Jamie Sue Wellstone began to sing “Amazing Grace.” Her rendition of it was probably the most beautiful I had ever heard. I believe its author, John Newton, would have wept along with the congregants in that unlikely setting of a rain-darkened tent in western Montana, far from an eighteenth-century slave ship midstream in the Atlantic Passage. I believe even the wretched souls in Newton’s cargo hold would have forgiven Newton his sins against them if they had known how their suffering would translate into the song Jamie Sue was singing. Or at least that was the emotion that she seemed able to create in her listeners.
The crowd loved her. Their love was not necessarily spiritual, either. To deny her erotic appeal would be foolish. Her evening gown looked like pink sherbet running down her body. Her hands and pale arms seemed small in contrast to the big Martin guitar that hung from her neck; it somehow made her diminutive figure and the loveliness of her voice even more mysterious and admirable. In an act of collective faith, the congregants both elevated her and reclaimed her as one of their own. Her wealth was not only irrelevant; that she had turned her back on it to join with her own people in prayer made her even more deserving of their esteem. Her songs were of droughts, dust storms, mine blowouts, skies peppered with locusts, shut-down sawmills, and crowning forest fires whose heat could vacuum the oxygen from a person’s lungs. How could she know these things unless she or her family had lived through them?
When the congregants saw Jesus’ broken body on the cross, they saw their own suffering rather than his. When they said he died for them, they meant it literally. In choosing to die as he did, rejected and excoriated by the world, he deliberately left behind an emblematic story of their ordeal as well as his.
When the audience looked up at the sequins glittering on Jamie Sue’s pink gown, when they saw the beauty of her face in the stage lights and heard the quiver in her voice, they experienced a rush of gratitude and affirmation and love that was akin to the love they felt for the founder of their faith. Idolatry was the word for it. But to them it was little different from the canonization of saints.
Their tragedy lay in the fact that most of them were good people who possessed far greater virtue and courage than those who manipulated and controlled their lives.
At intermission, the ushers poked broomsticks up into the canvas to dump the pooled rainwater over the sides of the tent. The air was damp and cold, the Mission Mountains strung with clouds. In the distance I could see a waterfall frozen inside a long crevasse that disappeared into timber atop a dark cliff. The people around us were eating sandwiches they had brought from home, and drinking coffee from thermos jugs. I told Candace Sweeney I was surprised no basket had been passed.
“They don’t ask money from folks here. If you don’t like it here, go somewhere else,” said a man in strap overalls sitting behind us.
Candace turned in her chair. “Why don’t you learn some manners, you old fart?” she said.
But I wasn’t listening to the exchange between Candace and the belligerent farmer. Instead, a big Indian girl sitting next to him had captured my attention. She wore a purple-and-gold football jersey embossed with a silver grizzly bear. She realized I was staring at her.
“I was admiring your cross,” I said.
“This?” she said, clutching the small cross with her fingers. It was made of dark wood and hung from her neck on a leather cord.
“Yes, do you know where I could get one?”
“I don’t know which store they come from. I got mine at Campus Ministries.”
“Pardon?”
“At the Campus Ministries summer training session. Everybody in Sister Jamie’s campus outreach program gets one.”
“Did you know Seymour Bell?”
