Page 12 of Original Sins
PASTOR HARRISON COLE, the screens said, in letters ten feet high.And under it, the tagline, the brand, the empire in three words: SHEPHERD.STATESMAN.SERVANT.
He was the story.Harrison Cole was the one Hallie had sent me here to find—the power broker, kingmaker, the man holding the puppet strings of the entire machine I'd flown into this cornfield to dismantle.
“Shit,” I mumbled.
My stranger was the story.He was the national-feed, save-your-career, expose-the-well-documented-lie story.And he was gift-wrapped and walking out into a spotlight, and he had no idea—none—that the one real face in his grid of cowards last night belonged to the journalist in the press pen who could end him with a single photograph.
And I felt something for him.Something more than lust.It was heavy, and filled my chest with something I didn’t have words for.
That was the thing that closed around my throat like a fist, there at the back of that screaming arena with the fog in my eyes and his face filling my lens.Not the scoop, though the scoop was the size of a football stadium.It was that eight hours ago I’d decided, against every rule I'd ever made for myself, that I might be willing to feel something for this man.
Harrison Cole looked out over the crowd, smiling a smile that wasn't his—I knew it wasn't his, I'd seen the real one, and this wasn't it—and he raised both hands to quiet a room that did not want to be quieted.Then he leaned into the microphone with the ease of a man coming home.
“What a morning,” Harrison Cole said, in a voice I had last heard cracking apart against the back of my neck.“What a GLORIOUS morning the Lord has made.”
Ten thousand people thundered their love at him.I stood frozen in the press pen, one eye still pressed to the camera, my hands shaking and my heart slamming somewhere up in my throat.
I had everything I came for.The story of my life was standing forty yards away in a column of manufactured holy light.
So why did it feel like the only honest thing I'd ever touched had just been ripped out of my hands—and what the hell was I supposed to do now?
ChapterSix
Harrison
“What a glorious morning the Lord has made,” I said.Ten thousand people roared back their love, and not one of them knew they were applauding a dead man walking around in an expensive suit.
I let the noise build and then I lifted my hands to gentle it, the way my father taught me before I was old enough to shave—palms out, slow, benediction and command in the same gesture—and the arena quieted to a held breath.They always quieted.That was the terrible gift I'd been born into: a room would go silent for me the way water goes still when the wind drops.I had never once asked for it.
“Friends,” I said.“I want to talk to you this morning about power.”
My voice carried out over them, warm and certain, and underneath it, in the only room that was still mine, I was somewhere else entirely.I was twelve floors up in a wrecked bed, with a stranger's heartbeat slowing under my arm, his hair against my mouth, and I had not wanted the sun to come up.In thirty-five years I had never once not wanted the sun to come up.
“Now, the world will tell you that power is a dirty word,” I went on, the cadences worn smooth as river stone.“The world will tell you that people of faith ought to stay quiet.Stay small.Stay home.Keep your God in your church and your church on its block and don't you dare bring Him out into the daylight where He might inconvenience somebody.”A ripple of knowing laughter.“But I’m here to tell you that meekness is not the same thing as weakness, and that the good Lord did not give His people a nation this great so that they could hand it over to the people who hate Him.”
They came up off their seats with a roar.
And the whole time, I was thinking about his voice in the dark.Somebody tried to love me once.The way he'd said it—flat, almost bored, the way a man talks about a wound so old he's stopped feeling it on the surface and only knows it's there by the way he limps.And the whole time, I was just waiting for the catch, laying there with his confession in my hands like something warm and living and thought: I know you.God help us both, I know exactly who you are, because I am the same animal, and we’ve both been hiding in the dark for the same reason, and here we are, together.
“This,” I told the arena, sweeping a hand in front of me, “is not a church service.Make no mistake.There are churches enough in this country, and praise God for every one of them.No.What this is—what YOU are—is an army.”
The word landed like a struck bell.
“And an army has somewhere to march.We’re not here to feel good or to be comforted.We are here because there is a ballot box in every county of this nation, and that ballot box is an altar, friends—it is an altar—and on it we will lay down the future of this country and ask the Lord to make it godly again.A nation that honors the family.That protects the unborn and the unspoiled.A nation where a child is raised by a mother and a father under the eyes of a righteous God—”
The roar swallowed the rest.
A mother and a father.I heard the words come out of my own mouth, and somewhere far down inside myself a dry voice muttered: you don't have a wife, Harrison.You have a photograph of a dead wife that serves as a stand-in.You’re a faker.
I kept my face open and luminous.The screens threw it forty feet tall across the dark.I had learned a long time ago that the face and the man behind it were two separate beings, and only one of them was ever shown to the public.
And then—because the human animal cannot bear too much of itself at once—I turned my head.Just slightly.A speaker's instinct, throwing a line to the far side of the room so no one feels forgotten.
I saw my mother.
Floris Mae stood in the wings, stage left, just past the lip of the curtain where the house lights couldn't reach her but I could.She’d assembled her court around her—four, five of them, the convention wives, the donors' wives, the lacquered blonde helmets and the surgical sameness of those frozen faces, and the jewelry, my God, the jewelry, catching what little light reached them and throwing it back in hard cold points, diamonds at the throat, wrists, and ears, a small huddle of women wearing the tithes of the faithful around their necks.
Mother was watching me work, and she was not moved.My mother had heard me give some version of this speech four hundred times and she watched me give it the way a foreman watches a machine—checking for defects, calculating output, feeling nothing at all about the product it was making.
