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Authors: Allan Stratton
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famed baseball player-turned-evangelist Billy Sunday. Sunday had been touched by the letter from the little boy from New Hampshire, who’d written for advice on how to handle an alcoholic father. His reply became Percy’s salvation, recognition from the next best thing to God Himself that he mattered in the world beyond Hornets Ridge. He waved the postcard under everyone’s nose, made it the frequent subject of school Show and Tells, and created a small shrine to it next to the Bible by his bed. At night, he’d kneel, clasp it in prayer, and, running his finger gently over the postage stamp, listen to the still voice of the Lord.
“Yea, God spake unto me through Reverend Billy’s postcard,” — (volume one, page 126) — “revealing a Great Plan, a Divine Destiny for His humble servant. In cause of my deep and abiding faith, He promised that the day would come when I would be summoned to preach His Gospel throughout the land, and would be known, now and for all eternity, as the greatest of His prophets in the New World.”
Like all prophets, Percy endured a time of testing. In his early twenties, he wandered off for a prayer retreat atop Mount Pawtuckaway. From its peak, he saw the fiery furnace of Shadrach, Meeshach, and Abednego brought unto Hornets Ridge. His father, in a drunken stupor, had pitched a tank of kerosene into the bakery oven; his family died instantly in the explosion.
Percy anguished. “Why had I been saved, while my mother and siblings had perished? The Lord spake unto me in my agony. He had need to temper my faith, He said, the better for it to withstand the temptations of Hell.”
Percy retreated to a shack outside the village. Here he prayed without cease, readying himself for the promised day when God would summon him to mission. A few elderly women who remembered him from the W.C.T.U. left plates of food and spare coins outside his door, but this was the extent of his following. Even village clergy kept their distance; they resented being called to account by a hermit half their age. Children, emboldened by their parents’ mockery, threw stones as he passed. He paid them no mind, his eyes alight with glory. Let them call him “Beggar Loon” and “Scarecrow”; he’d have the last laugh.
Sure enough, when he hit thirty, God smiled on His poor servant. Reggie Burns, praise Jesus, went and blew the heads off himself, wife Nellie, and Pittsburgh playboy Junior Bennett — and Percy Brubacher got his break.
Within four days of the murders, the Bennetts put their estate on the market, and sold its contents at auction. In “Sinner On My Doorstep” — little black book, volume three, pages 21 to 50 — Percy recalled the curious visit he’d received that evening from Floyd Cruickshank, a former classmate who minded the till at the general store where Percy bought soap, macaroni, and tacks. Floyd, ever the would-be dandy in his secondhand worsted windbreaker and matching plus-fours, rocked on the heels of his Oxfords and asked, “Could I have a word?”
Percy was wary. Since their school days, the most Floyd had ever said to him was, “That’ll be sixty-five cents.” But the Lord put a flea in Percy’s ear, so Perce said, “Fine.”
After a little this-and-that about the weather, Floyd got down to business. He’d been at the auction. “All day, folks ponied up to buy the Bennett’s effects. They claimed they wanted a piece of history. Bull. What they really wanted — you could see it in their eyes — was a piece of secondhand sin. They wanted to hang their hats on the rack where Nellie hung her cloth coat, or put their lips on Missy Bennett’s bone china, or — pardon my French — have a bounce in the sheets of a murdered adulterer.”
Percy nodded grimly. He imagined Satan’s flames licking the pillowcases.
“At the end of the day,” Floyd continued, “everything sold but the tent. No surprise. It’d take a pretty big backyard. Even repaired, the stains’d put a
“Yea, God spake unto me through Reverend Billy’s postcard,” — (volume one, page 126) — “revealing a Great Plan, a Divine Destiny for His humble servant. In cause of my deep and abiding faith, He promised that the day would come when I would be summoned to preach His Gospel throughout the land, and would be known, now and for all eternity, as the greatest of His prophets in the New World.”
Like all prophets, Percy endured a time of testing. In his early twenties, he wandered off for a prayer retreat atop Mount Pawtuckaway. From its peak, he saw the fiery furnace of Shadrach, Meeshach, and Abednego brought unto Hornets Ridge. His father, in a drunken stupor, had pitched a tank of kerosene into the bakery oven; his family died instantly in the explosion.
Percy anguished. “Why had I been saved, while my mother and siblings had perished? The Lord spake unto me in my agony. He had need to temper my faith, He said, the better for it to withstand the temptations of Hell.”
Percy retreated to a shack outside the village. Here he prayed without cease, readying himself for the promised day when God would summon him to mission. A few elderly women who remembered him from the W.C.T.U. left plates of food and spare coins outside his door, but this was the extent of his following. Even village clergy kept their distance; they resented being called to account by a hermit half their age. Children, emboldened by their parents’ mockery, threw stones as he passed. He paid them no mind, his eyes alight with glory. Let them call him “Beggar Loon” and “Scarecrow”; he’d have the last laugh.
Sure enough, when he hit thirty, God smiled on His poor servant. Reggie Burns, praise Jesus, went and blew the heads off himself, wife Nellie, and Pittsburgh playboy Junior Bennett — and Percy Brubacher got his break.
Within four days of the murders, the Bennetts put their estate on the market, and sold its contents at auction. In “Sinner On My Doorstep” — little black book, volume three, pages 21 to 50 — Percy recalled the curious visit he’d received that evening from Floyd Cruickshank, a former classmate who minded the till at the general store where Percy bought soap, macaroni, and tacks. Floyd, ever the would-be dandy in his secondhand worsted windbreaker and matching plus-fours, rocked on the heels of his Oxfords and asked, “Could I have a word?”
Percy was wary. Since their school days, the most Floyd had ever said to him was, “That’ll be sixty-five cents.” But the Lord put a flea in Percy’s ear, so Perce said, “Fine.”
After a little this-and-that about the weather, Floyd got down to business. He’d been at the auction. “All day, folks ponied up to buy the Bennett’s effects. They claimed they wanted a piece of history. Bull. What they really wanted — you could see it in their eyes — was a piece of secondhand sin. They wanted to hang their hats on the rack where Nellie hung her cloth coat, or put their lips on Missy Bennett’s bone china, or — pardon my French — have a bounce in the sheets of a murdered adulterer.”
Percy nodded grimly. He imagined Satan’s flames licking the pillowcases.
“At the end of the day,” Floyd continued, “everything sold but the tent. No surprise. It’d take a pretty big backyard. Even repaired, the stains’d put a
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