I looked ahead to the opaque rear window of the senator’s vehicle and smelled something worse than ham. Senator Hampton Custis had become emblematic of a class of politicians using fear to fuel their drive to power. Though the Civil Rights movement was years past by the time Custis made the jump from a rural county prosecutor to a senate seat, he’d based his campaign on the greasy residue of Jim Crow, speaking of a ‘golden age’ that had disappeared, oddly enough, when blacks gained full voting stature.

Like many Southern politicians who had risen from humble beginnings to heights of power, he maintained a thick rural accent, although amused reporters often noted his speech became much less mush-mouth in the halls of Congress than on the stump.

Custis’s ascension had been fast and not unmarked by controversy. After college, he’d returned to his Alabama home town and practiced small-town law, advertising on billboards and park benches: Divorces, $100! While in his late twenties he ran for county prosecutor when both the incumbent and main competitor were affected by scandal. He won by a few votes and made his mark as a strict law-and-order type.

Seemingly able to smell news cameras, Custis learned to speak in sound bites provocative enough to gain face time on the national news. He called a group of conservative gays, “pansies that got in the wrong boat somehow”. Another was, “Any woman who’s considered abortion for any reason is a murderer in her heart.” In a renowned 1983 trial of three white men arrested for raping a black woman, Custis’s office lost or “misplaced” crucial evidence, the loss allowing the perpetrators to go free.

In the late eighties, Custis’s office was surreptitiously investigated by the SDLP, prompted by the discovery that, where blacks and whites were accused of the same crime, the blacks were 320 per cent more likely to be jailed. There were also accusations of pay-offs and bribes.

Snarling about “political assassination”, Custis had jumped from the embattled prosecutor’s office into a senate race. In the primary, he defeated a respected moderate senator by accusing him of insufficient patriotism and liberal sympathies because the man had once said that slavery had been a blight on the South. A concurrent rumor campaign held that the incumbent had either fathered one black child and one Hispanic child, or a single child of both persuasions. Though the stories were unfounded, the rumors were so well-seeded that the incumbent spent half his campaign refuting them.

After winning the primary, Custis drummed up wads of money, advertised constantly, refused one-on-one debates with a black opponent – “I want to talk direct to the people, not jabber with some lib’ral” – and won the general election by point-zero-two per cent on a viciously contested recount.

Canny enough to realize his victory had been secured not with ideas or personality but money, Custis had since devoted himself to amassing the kind of largesse to keep him in office and his contributors in tall cotton. He received much, and gave much to the campaigns of his fellow lawmakers. In Washington DC, honor withers in the face of money, and Custis was allowed great berth in biases and pronouncements.

After seemingly hours in the wake of Custis’s motorcade, we flashed our ID at the impromptu security point still a mile from the college. The general public had been channeled to a side road. Free of the need to wave, Custis’s motorcade picked up the beat to about eighty-five mph and rocketed away.

We flashed ID again when on the campus, were sent to a lot reserved for non-security cops, press, buses, and mid-range celebrities. Our IDs bought fast entry through a side door. The main floor was a melee of sweating bodies reeking of deodorant and cheap fragrances. We hiked to the balcony.

The stage of the chapel was about eighty feet wide and fifty feet deep, the depth necessary for the pulpit, the band, and the choir’s eight rows of risers. The area was lit from six stories above by a lighting system an arena-rock band would have admired. Two huge video monitors flanked the stage.

Taking front and center of the stage was Richard Bloessing Scaler, his suit white, his casket hammered brass, his hands laced over a black bible. Above the casket was the pulpit, looking like the helm of a sailing ship, if helms were white and gold and inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

The bereaved elite sat in velvet-upholstered chairs behind the pulpit. Closest to the casket was Patricia Scaler. She was in the requisite black with a veil so dense it seemed opaque, as if she had believed it would wall her off from the thousands of incoming mourners and reporters. I felt deep sadness for her.

I saw Fossie beside Mrs Scaler, his eyes drifting over the crowd. After a few minutes I saw her move from Fossie’s side to Senator Custis. She leaned low, spoke a few words, and sat beside him. He put his hand over her forearm, gave a squeeze of reassurance.

Sitting in the other chairs – many still arriving – was an assemblage of what I assumed were friends and people from the college and various Scaler media enterprises, though I could recognize only two: Dean Tutweiler, looking amply doleful, and the lawyer Carleton, sitting beside the Dean and whispering in his ear, probably putting the funeral on the clock. Looking down into the front rows of the congregation, I recognized several other notable right-wing televangelists, out to pay their respects to a colleague in the industry. Or maybe making sure he was dead.

We watched a half-dozen orations which, save for the vocalizations, sounded the same. Between speeches the choir sang hymns. When I’d shoot a glance at Mrs Scaler she remained in the same position, unmoved by so much as a breath, hiding in the fortress of her grief.

After nearly an hour of hagiography, Custis took his position at the podium, the main event. He tapped the mic and asked for more volume. The senator cleared his throat, then opened his hands toward the man in the casket below the podium.

“I’ve known this beautiful man since his days as a simple country pastor in a small church. It feels like a hundred years, such has been the Reverend Richard Scaler’s influence on my life and devotion to our Lord. Here lies a true man of God, a warrior for righteousness, a soldier of Heaven, the vanguard scout for the legions of Truth and the point man for Jesus Christ our Eternal Savior…”

Custis’s voice boomed from the walls. Amens arose from the crowd. I heard Harry mutter something. A sixtyish, blubber-necked white guy in the pew beside us turned to see a black guy talking to himself. Blubber-neck couldn’t hide his disgust.

Harry looked back. I couldn’t see the expression on my partner’s face, but the white guy turned even whiter and snapped his head back to Custis’s eulogy.

“…Richard and I were two sons of the South, scions of small towns close to one another. It was a simpler time then, a better time then…before the hippies and the nay-sayers and the America-haters took to the streets, before the Godless heathens stormed the gates of rectitude…”

More amens from the crowd, though I saw less-hardened faces looking uncomfortable at Custis’s opportunistic language. The raw politician in Custis sensed the same, backed it down.

“…Then the seventies came with what Richard later called his ‘finding’ period. Finding who he was, discovering his full potential as a preacher, though he had preached since the age of four. He could have given it all up, my friends. Or stayed in his small country church away from the great responsibility he later undertook. I knew him then just as I knew his beloved Patricia then, and I hope that my friendship was some inspiration to him…”

I took as much as I could stomach and left, Harry on my heels.