it makes My feet tingle.'
'Becka approached the Sony and turned it off.
'My Lord,' she whispered.
3
The following Sunday afternoon, Joe Paulson was lying fast asleep in the back-yard hammock with Ozzie the cat zonked out on Joe's ample stomach. 'Becka stood in the living room, holding the curtain back and looking out at Joe. Sleeping in the hammock. Dreaming of his Hussy, no doubt - dreaming of throwing her down in a great big pile of catalogues and Woolco circulars and then - how would Joe and his piggy poker buddies put it? -'putting the shoes to her.'
She was holding the curtain with her left hand because she had a handful of square nine-volt batteries in her right. She took the batteries into the kitchen, where she was assembling something on the kitchen table. Jesus had told her to make it. She told Jesus she couldn't make things. She was clumsy. Her daddy had always told her so. She thought of adding how he sometimes told her he was surprised she could wipe her own butt without an instruction manual, and then decided that wasn't the sort of thing you told the Savior.
Jesus told her not to be a fool; if she could follow a recipe, she could build this little thing. She was delighted to find that He was absolutely right. It was not only easy, it was fun! More fun than cooking, certainly; she had never really had the knack for that, either. Her cakes fell and her breads never rose. She had begun this little thing yesterday, working with the toaster, the motor from her old Hamilton Beach blender, and a funny board full of electronics things which had come from the back of an old radio in the shed. She thought she would be done long before Joe woke up and came in to watch the Red Sox game on TV at two o'clock.
She picked up his little blowtorch and lit it deftly with a kitchen match. She would have laughed a week ago if you'd told her she would be working with a propane torch now. But it was easy. Jesus told her exactly how and where to solder the wires to the electronics board from the old radio.
That wasn't all Jesus had told her during the last three days. He had told her things that murdered her sleep, things that made her afraid to go into the village and do her shopping Friday evening, lest her guilty knowledge show on her face (I'll always know when you done something wrong, 'Becka, her father had told her, because you ain't got the kind of face can keep a secret); that had, for the first time in her life, made her lose her appetite. Joe, totally bound up in his work, the Red Sox, and his Hussy, noticed hardly anything amiss ... although he had seen 'Becka gnawing her fingernails the other night as they watched Hill Street Blues, and nail-biting was something she had never done before - was, in fact, one of the things she nagged him about. Joe Paulson considered this for all of twelve seconds before looking back at the Sony TV and losing himself in dreams of Nancy Voss's heaving white breasts.
Among others, these were a few of the things Jesus told her, causing 'Becka to sleep poorly and to begin biting her fingernails at the advanced age of forty-five:
In 1973, Moss Harlingen, one of Joe's poker buddies, had murdered his father. They had been hunting deer up in Greenville and it had supposedly been one of those tragic accidents, but the shooting of Abel Harlingen had been no accident. Moss simply laid up behind a fallen tree with his rifle and waited until his father splashed across a small stream about fifty yards down the hill from where Moss was. Moss potted his father as easily as a clay duck in a shooting gallery. He thought he had killed his father for money. Moss's business, Big Ditch Construction, had two notes falling due with two different banks within six weeks' time, and neither would extend because of the other. Moss went to Abel, but his dad refused to help, although he could afford to. So Moss shot his father and inherited a pot of money after the county coroner handed down a verdict of death by misadventure. The notes were paid and Moss Harlingen really believed (except perhaps in his deepest dreams) that he had committed murder for gain. The real