Dead Rights Party, XIIIf

Orville III, or “Papa,” as he was called by his adoring son, was more fortunate, undoubtedly because of his firm commitment to the Protestant work ethic, which he had heard about at a revival meeting presided over by a Baptist preacher who doubled as his (the preacher’s) mother’s secret lover. On one of his infrequent trips to Waco’s dens of iniquity, Orville the Third met and married Sarah Cohen, the candidate’s mother who, it was later learned by reading her correspondence with a former yeshiva-attending husband, was of Jewish ancestry. Ms. Cohen-Slack gave birth to Orville the Fourth on Christmas Day, prompting the mother to predict that her newborn boy would “make something of himself,” adding, after giving the matter a moment’s thought, “and I mean in a big way.” Some considered these words a prophecy of the self-fulfilling genre, citing the fact that she had come to the marriage with a small dowry, allowing Papa Slack to work himself up to a shack. It was at this point that the Slack family developed a substantial following. While still at the tin can stage of his life, Slack IV told Talia la Musa that he distinctly remembered that many of his neighbors would miss church of a Sunday morning and come over to Papa’s paint-thirsty shack to ask for his advice on how to deal with medicine pushers and other types of confidence tricksters. They would all sit around the stove and discuss the problem of evil and how to fight it. Papa’s quick mind was always “running like sixty,” as they used to say in those days. His best pieces of advice would invariably cause the advisee to flip a quarter into the ten-gallon hat that abutted the tips of his (Papa’s) five-gallon shoes.