A Red Death by Walter Mosley Page A

sky-blue satin band. The room was so quiet by then that you could hear the harsh rasp of Winona’s stockinged thighs.
    As I watched her progress I noticed a large young man watching me from across the aisle. He was wearing a decent brown suit that had widely spaced goldenrod stripes. His broad-rimmed fedora was in his lap. His stony dull eyes were on me.
    Jackie took his place as lead singer of the choir, and Melvin stood before the group with his hands upraised. Then he looked down behind him, and for the first time I saw a small woman sitting at a large organ just below the podium.
    Then there was music. The deep strains of the organ and Jackie’s high tenor voice. The choir sang in back of that.
    “Angels,” Etta muttered. “Just angels.”
    They sang “A Prayer to Sweet Baby Jesus.” After Melvin was sure he’d guided them into harmony he turned to add his bass to Jackie’s high voice.
    Melvin was Jackie’s height, but he was black and craggy. When he sang he grimaced as if in pain. Jackie seemed more like a suitor trying to talk his way into the bedroom.
    The song filled the church and I loved it even though I was there for something else. Even though I was going to go against a member, or at least a helper, of that flock, still the love of God filled me. And that was strange, because I had stopped believing in God on the day my father left me as a child in poverty and pain.
    “Brothers and sisters!” Reverend Towne shouted. I hadn’t been looking when he came to the dais. He was a very tall man with a big belly that bulged out from his deep blue robes. He was dark brown with strong African features and dense, straightened hair that was greased and combed back away from his forehead.
    He ran his left hand over his hair as the last members of the crowd went silent, then he looked out over the faces and grinned and shook his head slowly as if he had seen someone who had been missing for years.
    “I’m happy to see you all here this Sunday morning. Yes I am.”
    No one spoke but there was a kind of shudder in the room.
    He held his big open hands out toward us, relishing our human warmth as if he stood before a fire.
    “Was a time once when I saw a lotta empty chairs out there.”
    “Amen,” one of the elder deacons intoned.
    “Was a time,” the minister said, and then he paused. “Yes. Was a time that we didn’t have no peanut gallery in the back. Was a time ev’rybody could sit and listen to the word of the Lord. They could sit and meditate on his spirit.
    “But no more.”
    He looked around the room, and I did too. Everyone else had their eyes on him. The women had a kind of stunned look on the whole, their heads tilted upward in order to bask in the peculiar and cool light that flowed from the stained-glass windows. The men were serious, by and large. They were concentrating every fiber of their wills to understand the ways of righteousness and the Lord in their everyday lives. All except the man in the brown suit. His stony glare was still on my profile, and I was wondering about him.
    “No, no more,” the minister almost sang. “Because now He is marching.”
    “Yes, Lord!” an old woman shouted from down front.
    “That’s right,” the minister spoke. “We are going to have to go to the church council to expand the roof of the Lord. Because you know he wants all of you in his flock. He wants all of you to praise his name. Say it. Say, yes Je-sus.”
    We did, and the sermon started in earnest.
    Towne didn’t quote from the Bible or talk about salvation. The whole sermon was aimed at the dead and maimed boys coming back home from Korea. Reverend Towne worked in a special clinic that tended to the severely wounded. He spoke especially long and poignantly about Wendell Boggs, a young man who’d lost his legs, most of his fingers, one eye, the other eyelid, and his lips in the service of America. Bethesda Boggs, a member of the congregation, wailed as if to underscore his terrible