Chapter 38
Mrs. Heartbreak and Clara Jane are in Clara Jane’s Winnebago, proceeding at a high rate of speed northward to Wall Eye, Missouri, and the very place Clara Jane passed through not sixty minutes ago. They are being followed by the radio personality Eddie Keever who, in overhearing the conversation between Mrs. Heartbreak and Clara Jane, has smelled a story he hopes to break tonight on his broadcast.
Young Keever—not so young really except by John’s accounting, which we can dismiss out of hand—was responsible for culture west of the Kings River; he found it, no doubt, a thankless and hard job of work.
Berryville’s various rodeos, swap meets, canning contests, high school basketball games, Electric Cooperative Soirees, tire sales, and Public Service Proctology Drives was thin gruel indeed when compared with Eureka Springs’ Art Walks, Diversity Weekends, Gay Pride Parades, City Council slash Performance Art meetings, UFO Conferences, and Angry Metaphysicist Support Groups. Easy it was for Richard Schoe, the Eureka Springs DJ, to make something of the news, but for Eddie Keever, it was not “something” he had to make, but miracles.
Thus, when he overheard Mrs. Heartbreak tell Clara Jane Smith Staley—the woman who had previously lived in the Keever’s house—that John was on a Mission from God that involved the scandalous Pastor Jay Cooker and his timeshare business Eveningside Ministries, Eddie’s ears perked up and his keen nose for news caused even more body parts to go on high alert. When Clara Jane had virtually wrestled Mrs. Heartbreak into the Winnebago, shouting loudly, “We’ve got to stop him!”,he hopped into his stylish forest green Ford Ranger pickup—okay, into his pickup truck—and began trailing them.
“This is Eddie Keever of CHIK News,” he said, speaking into his MP3 recording device, “hot on the trail of local resident and semi-famous folk artist the Fabulous Mrs. Heartbreak. She is, as we speak, proceeding at a high rate of speed to interrupt or foil, according to an unnamed source, a Mission from God.
“Mrs. Heartbreak, well known to Berryvillians as a frequent Advisor to God and by her husband, the dullard John Heartbreak, as the Voice of God, is not known for derailing Missions from God. What could be the cause of this new and unexpected Deus Interruptus? Is it possible that Mrs. Heartbreak has gone over to the Dark Side?
“Traveling with Mrs. Heartbreak is the former Clara Jane Smith, who most Berryvillians will recall is the founder of the Iowa Welcome Center located on the Town Square. Clara Jane, as you also may remember, was a member of Berryville’s First Methodist Church when Skip French was pastor there, and she lived on Pritchard Street before marrying former FBI Agent Orin Staley and moving to Forrest City Iowa where they opened a Winnebago dealership upon his retirement from the FBI.
“Incidentally, Mrs. Heartbreak and Clara Jane are traveling in a Winnebago. Not the Mini-Winnie, but the great big honking one.
“According to our unnamed source—that would be me overhearing their plans—they are traveling to Eveningside Ministries in Wall Eye to wreck some kind of plan that involves John Heartbreak and the Reverend Jay Cooker. Jay Cooker, as you know, served time in a Federal Big House for fraud, mail fraud, tax evasion, zipper trouble, and having the bad taste, or bad luck depending on your point of view, of having married Tomi Raye Cooker, now deceased.”
Eddie put the recorder down and focused on the road as the Winnebago slowed to accommodate a series of sharp curves, and inclines and hilly declines, each of them wet and steaming with slick oil. Yes, it is possible to see the prior sentence as containing significant sexual content but, honestly, we’re talking Ozark roadways so let’s just say that he put the recorder down, put both hands on the wheel, and slowed the green Ranger to avoid crashing and burning in a side gully. Safety first!
He hoped he wasn’t on a fool’s errand, yet something about the stricken look on Clara Jane’s face and the confusion on Mrs. Heartbreak’s, caused him to believe that he was on to a real story for once. What exactly was this “mission from God” and why had Clara Jane suddenly reappeared in Berryville? Inquiring minds would want to know. Wouldn’t they?
Eddie knew little about Clara Jane except that she had lived in his house just before he moved into it, and that she had opened the Iowa Welcome Center with John Heartbreak as a reluctant and unhappy partner.
Although the Iowa Welcome Center had been good for adjacent businesses like the Ozark Café, not everyone in Berryville liked having so many Iowans in town. They were so different from Arkansans and, frankly, were a rude people where the Native Arkansan is a friendly and helpful soul.
There were other differences as well: Iowans had money and Arkansans did not; they could read and Arkansans couldn’t; they were Lutherans or Catholics and belonged to churches named Immanuel or St. Chester’s, instead of one’s named Elmer’s Church of the Redeeming Unsullied and Perfectly Holy Underpants, or the First and Last Right Thought Revealed Primitive Anabaptist Ark of Latter Day True Believers. And then there was the whole corn subsidy business…but don’t get me started on that. (If you read the first book about John Heartbreak then you know how incredibly boring the topic of corn subsidies can be.)
Eddie could tell that the reunion between the two women had been sweet, but it had also been brief. He didn’t know that Clara Jane largely attributed her decision to be born again as a Christian to Mrs. Heartbreak’s good example, while Mrs. Heartbreak, in turn, felt that her own Christian faith was strengthened and validated by Clara Jane’s coming to Christ.
That grand, and sweet, mutuality was made possible and fostered by the two women’s shared commitment to Social Order Theory, an optimistic belief that operation of the Universe can be made orderly and predictable as long as others will allow them to lead and manage. Clara Jane had organized and improved the world by arranging serially and voluminously the timely deaths of bad apples and the chronically rude while Mrs. Heartbreak more prosaically organized and improved her husband John. That was all the evidence they needed that Social Order Theory was more, much more than mere theory.
In many respects Mrs. Heartbreak has had the more difficult job; one that Clara Jane herself would agree was far less rewarding and far more complex than her own human resource management obligations. What, after all, is the defenestration, shooting, knifing, bombing, garroting, fricasseeing, strangling, smothering, clubbing, gutting, or beheading of another compared to spending an entire evening listening to John describe why Louisa May Alcott is America’s most under-rated writer—particularly when John believes that Louisa May is taking part in the conversation?
But as the poet Winfield Townley Scott had written, “They loved each other because their ailments are the same,” so it was with Mrs. Heartbreak and Clara Jane. Though their reunion had been brief, so attuned were they to each other’s psyches that Mrs. Heartbreak knew instantly that Clara Jane’s marriage to ex-FBI Agent Orin Staley was in trouble, and Clara Jane knew that Mrs. Heartbreak was vexed (again!) by whatever fool’s errand John was momentarily about.
It was only when Mrs. Heartbreak began to relate the somewhat abbreviated and admittedly confused story that John “was on a mission from God” to “fandango” the Reverend Jay Cooker, that Clara Jane became concerned and, frankly anxious that now, now of all times, a time when she needed rest and comfort from her good friend Mrs. Heartbreak, she might in fact be at cross purposes with Mrs. Heartbreak’s husband; cross purposes so deeply etched if one can imagine a purpose and a cross being etched at all, that she, Clara Jane, might have to kill John Heartbreak. Such circumstance might well dull the sheen of friendship between the two women, an outcome that Clara Jane would regret.
And why should, would—we know that she could—Clara Jane kill poor John, a man she had previously worked with and for, under odd surely but ultimately (for her) satisfying purposes?
Because, minutes before leaving Forrest City, Iowa and on toward her destination in Berryville, Sincerely Dewayne Wayne Darby, her pastor at the Church of God with Signs Following had said to her:
“Trust no one, Clara Jane. The world may end while you wind your way to Arkansas—“we know not the hour!”—and the path you follow between me and that sin infested hellhole named Berryville is strewn with the Handmaidens of Balaam, the Henchmen of Lucifer, and Satan’s own spawn. Beware, I say to you!”
Clara Jane had shaken her head. “Pastor Dewayne Wayne, John is a harmless old duffer. And it was really Mrs. Heartbreak who brought me to Christ. I think I can trust them.”
“If they are not among the elect, Clara Jane, they cannot be trusted. Not ultimately, not totally. And what you’ve told me about this Heartbreak character is troubling. You say he speaks to the Holy Spirit, but that he also speaks to dead writers, some of them atheists! That is hardly the description of someone who you call harmless.”
“I have heard him speak to Sinclair Lewis and Jack London,” she said, nodding dubiously. “I guess they were not believers.”
“But worse, Clara Jane, much worse,” he thundered, “he not only speaks to dead writers, he reads them too! He’s one of them book reading, foreign language spouting intellectuals! No, I wouldn’t trust him for a minute.”
“Are you telling me to forget about going back to Berryville? I really feel like I need a break.”
“No, Clara Jane,” Pastor Sincerely DeWayne Wayne Darby replied. “It is possible that this Mrs. Heartbreak you speak of is trustworthy—although I have my doubts. Otherwise, why would she have spent years with that sin laden vessel of decrepitude she calls husband?
“Just be careful, is all I’m saying. Trust no one, except the Lord. And possibly, now that I think of him, Pastor Jay Cooker.”
“Pastor Cooker?”
“Yes. An old friend who has a ministry called Eveningside, in Wall Eye, Missouri. Just north of Berryville, so he’ll be close at hand if you need a spiritual confidant.
“Jay and I met while we were—well, while we were between ministries, so to speak,” Pastor Darby continued. “Jay has started over in Wall Eye and has a perfect understanding of Revelations and its meaning for you, for me, and for the few elected souls who are to meet our Savior.”
Before leaving Forrest City, Clara Jane had promised Pastor Sincerely Dewayne Wayne Darby that she would look Jay Cooker up when she got to Arkansas, and to seek guidance from Pastor Cooker should she need it.
Thus, when Mrs. Heartbreak had informed her that John was on his way to fandango Jay Cooker, and was traveling with a woman to whom she referred to as “the Warrior Queen Sloan”, Clara Jane’s well-developed sense of impending chaos had begun ticking like a Geiger counter. After all, John had, all alone among 4,000 Berryvillians, instantly known her to be a serial killer; if he could pick her out of such a crowd, on what basis had he picked Sloan?
Mrs. Heartbreak was not used to being hustled about—if anyone hustled anyone it was usually she—but Clara Jane’s look of consternation and panic had moved Mrs. Heartbreak to, for once, set aside her usual mode of operation and to hop to. In this case, to hop into, Clara Jane’s Winnebago. Neither she, nor Clara Jane, had observed the ace reporter Keever’s surveillance of their conversation.
And so it came to pass, as readers of the Book of Mormon will recognize as a transitional and habitual phrase, that she, Clara Jane, and Eddie Keever sped headlong through the rolling Ozark hills toward Wall Eye, Missouri.
Eddie picked up the MP3 recorder as the Winnebago hit a short flat stretch of flat in the road. “We are nearing the entrance of Eveningside Ministries,” he said in a hushed tone. “What will we discover here? Will Mrs. Heartbreak prevail in upsetting Jay Cooker’s Ecclesiastical Applecart? What role does the dullard John Heartbreak have to play here? What, pray tell is this Mission from God? And who, friends, is “the Warrior Queen Sloan?
“Don’t touch that dial!”
