In the Blood Read Free

ceremony?”
    “The endless expansion of Kingdom College,” he grunted.
    The camera panned to the left of the guy at the lectern, showing a dozen dignitary types, including Senator Hampton Custis and three state representatives. The camera passed Custis to highlight a face familiar to everyone who used the television for devotional purposes, and nearly anyone in America who watched the news: the Reverend Richard Bloessing Scaler. Scaler’s round, plump face was without mirth and, actually, without much activity at all, save for the occasional pursing of lips as if figuring out a puzzle in his head. He was so focused on the solution as to seem oblivious toboth the hubbub a few dozen paces away and the political powers attending his ceremony.
    “It’s not a provocative question, Dean Tutweiler,” a reporter responded, “but a simple one. Your institute has been called racist because it didn’t accept black students until recently. And grudgingly, it seemed. Was Kingdom College founded on separatist principles?”
    The Dean shot a glance at the founder of Kingdom College, Richard Scaler. If Tutweiler was looking for help, he received nothing; Scaler stayed in his own head, miles away.
    “Reverend Scaler and I have explained the position of the college to the point of distraction. Students of African-American descent weren’t initially considered for admittance because of the many excellent institutions specifically geared for such students, a helping hand to folks who couldn’t afford college. Our original intent was to provide the same – equal – helping hand to less economically blessed students of Caucasian parentage and meant no insult to those of other –”
    His words were cut off by hoots and jeers. The news camera panned to a couple dozen people at the back of the crowd, held in check by steel barriers manned by cops. They were a mix of black and white, many holding signs equating Kingdom College to a racist institution, calling it Jim Crow College or Old South University. Scaler looked up and read the angry statements in turn, his face devoid of emotion. Senator Custis lookedirked. The lesser political types noted Custis’s irritation and quickly affected irritated looks of their own. Audience members turned in their seats and jeered back at the demonstrators.
    Scaler remained impassive.
    “What’s with Rev. Scaler?” I said to Harry. “Normally he’s racing back and forth, pounding his bible, promising hellfire and damnation to anyone who doesn’t agree with him.”
    “Maybe Scaler’s starting a new phase,” Harry said, taking a sip of the coffee, eyes widened by the bourbon blast. “He’s been through, what? – maybe a half-dozen phases, starting when he was hardly old enough to tie his shoes.”
    I returned my eyes to the television. Richard Bloessing Scaler, though only in his mid fifties, had been a fixture throughout my thirty-six-year life. What the Jackson and Osmond families were to under-age singing talent, the Deep South was to youthful preaching talent. Kids as young as five and six preached at tent revivals, bible in one hand, microphone in the other, exhorting the flock to come to Jesus in sing-songy voices normally associated with whining about being fed vegetables.
    Scaler had been a star on the circuit, a chubby little whirlwind who could preen and thump with the best of the bunch. I recall him from taped interviews, staring at the camera with a sincere face, his hair pomaded, dressed in a sky-blue suit, spouting verses of such precision and attributionthat interviewers were certain he’d been prompted by his parents. His answer was always the same: “Oh no, sir” – or ma’am, for the young Scaler had the mandatory impeccable Southern manners – “from the first time I opened the Good Book, His words jumped from the pages to my soul.”
    Scaler faded from the scene when an adolescent, re-emerging in his mid twenties as the pastor of a rural church in west-central