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‘Here is a stock for speculation. Buy at eight-and-one-eighth, and in the Promised Land you can sell at one hundred.’ No, he offers us present security , four-and-a-half per cent compounded every quarter! Now I realize I am speaking to hard-headed men, businessmen whose decisions are far-ranging in the unsentimental world beyond this sanctuary …”
    Piet wondered if the hair sprouting from the ears in front of him were trimmed. A cut-bush look: an electric razor, quickly. He fingered his own nostrils and the tickling itch spidered through him; he fought a sneeze. He studied the golden altar cross and wondered if Freddy Thorne were right in saying that Jesus was crucified on an X-shaped cross which the church had to falsify because of the immodesty of the position. Christ had a groin. Not much made of His virginity: mentioned in the Bible at all? Not likely, Arab boys by the age of twelve, a rural culture, sodomy, part of nature, easy access, Egyptian lotus. Coupling in Africa right in the fields as they work: a sip of water. Funny how fucking clears a woman’sgaze. Christ’s groin Arab but the lucent air vaulted by the ceiling of this church His gaze. Piet feared Freddy Thorne, his hyena appetite for dirty truths. Feared him yet had placed himself in bondage to him, had given him a hostage, spread X-shaped, red cleft wet. Freddy’s wise glint. The head with cross-etched wrinkles on the back of its barbered neck under Piet’s gaze rotated and the ear orifice became a round brown eye. In Pedrick’s sermon the palms spread across Jesus’s path had become greenbacks and the theft of the colt a troubled disquisition on property rights. Pedrick struggled and was not reconciled. How blithe was God, how carefree: this unexpected implication encouraged Piet to live. “And so, gentlemen, there is something above money, believe it or not: a power which treats wealth lightly, which accepts an expensive bottle of ointment and scorns the cost, which dares to overturn the counting tables of respectable bankers and businessmen like yourselves. May we be granted today the light to welcome this power with hosannahs into our hearts. Amen.”
    They sang “Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates” and sat for prayer. Prayer and masturbation had so long been mingled in Piet’s habits that in hearing the benediction he pictured his mistress naked, a reflected sun pooled between her breasts, her prim chin set, her slightly bulging green eyes gazing, cleared. Erotic warmth infused Piet’s greetings as he edged down the aisle, through a china-shop clutter of nodding old ladies, into the narthex redolent of damp paper, past Pedrick’s clinging horny handshake, into the open.
    At the door Piet was given a palm frond by a combed child in corduroy shorts.
    Waiting for his daughter to emerge, he leaned by a warm white pillar, the frond in his left hand, a Lark in the right. Outside the sanctuary, the day was surpassingly sentimental: athin scent of ashes and sap, lacy shadows, leafless trees, the clapboarded houses around the rocky green basking chalkily. The metal pavilion, painted green, sharpened the gay look of a stage set. The sky enamel-blue, layer on layer. Overhead, held motionless against the breeze, its feet tucked up like parallel staples, a gull hung outlined by a black that thickened at the wingtips. Each pebble, tuft, heelmark, and erosion gully in the mud by the church porch had been assigned its precise noon shadow. Piet had been raised to abhor hard soil but in a decade he had grown to love this land. Each acre was a vantage. Gallagher liked to say they didn’t sell houses, they sold views. As he gazed downhill toward the business district, whose apex was formed where Divinity Street met Charity Street at Cogswell’s Drug Store and made a right-angled turn up the hill, Piet’s vision was touched by a piece of white that by some unconscious chime compelled focus. Who? He knew he knew. The figure, moving with averted veiled