In the Blood Read Free Page A

Alabama. Perhaps small congregations weren’t to his liking, for within two years he was building his television empire, his flamboyant style and personality perfect for the camera.
    Something in the intervening years had politicized him toward the hectoring style of right-wing politics launched from many Fundamentalist pulpits. The bible was thumped, the finger pointed, the warnings declaimed. Opposing views were mocked. Comedians needed only to crouch and scream to convey Scaler to the audience.
    Seeming almost desperate to succeed, he’d created his own religious broadcasting empire – the Kingdom Channel – and within a few years he’d amassed the funds to begin buying up large tracts of land and building Kingdom College.
    Alongside hyper-conservative religious views came a bent more toward the Old Testament than the New. Hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes were warnings from God, post-industrial plagues of locusts and famine. Though other prominent preachers had jumped on the bandwagon, Scalerhad been the first to proclaim Hurricane Katrina’s assault on New Orleans as the retribution of a miffed deity.
    “God hath sent his terrible wind and flood to wash away the filthy lifestyle of the Sodomites,” he had intoned to national cameras a day after Katrina had turned the nation’s longest ongoing party into a tragedy. “Praise the name of Jesus who smiteth all his enemies!”
    When a bothersome local reporter pointed out that the two major neighborhoods of the city to be mainly spared – the French Quarter and Garden District – were where most gay New Orleanians resided, while the mostly black Ninth Ward was the hardest hit, Scaler seemed lost for a split-second, then suggested God had used the Ninth Ward to demonstrate what might happen if the gays didn’t repent their sinful ways.
    “Are you saying, Reverend Scaler,” the reporter had asked, “that God drowned citizens in the Ninth Ward as a warning flare for the gay population?”
    Sensing a problem, Scaler had screwed himself to his full five-foot-eight height and launched a bombastic response, his standard solution to rhetorical difficulties. He jabbed a righteous finger at the reporter. “I’m saying God stirred up the sky and the sea and sent a warning. People should have been smart enough to see it as the hand of the Lord coming and moved from the swath of His cleansing.”
    Scaler’s clarification sparked howls, but heremained undeterred through the publicity furor, perhaps because applications for Kingdom College went up by forty per cent and donations to his ministry went up fifty. The increased donations added new acreage to the holdings and a new library and dormitory to the campus, creating, as one editorialist put it, “The only structures built by Hurricane Katrina.”
    Beside the distracted Scaler was his wife, a plain woman with an awkward nose, her major role in Scaler’s drama restricted to the utterance of amen s after his pronouncements and singing hymns in a reedy, nasal voice. There were pronounced spaces between her outsized upper incisors, giving her a rabbity look. With a fluffy paste-on tail and penciled-in whiskers, she would have made a convincing Halloween bunny.
    I saw the bunny shoot a couple of side-eyed glances Scaler’s way, as if surprised by his newfound taciturn demeanor. She aimed a perplexed glance at the senator, who looked back and shrugged. Despite the gesture, I thought I saw a split-second of fear cross his face.
    “Reverend Scaler,” a reporter asked, turning from Tutweiler, “you built this college and remain chairman of the board of regents and spiritual advisor. Will you not share a few words with us on what has to be one of the major accomplishments of your life?”
    Scaler blinked several times, then rubbed at his right eye. He held out his hand, fingers moving ina grabbing motion. An assistant quieted the hand by giving it a microphone. Scaler leaned toward the mic, his eye closed tight. “I