The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (26 page)

H
INES PRINTED VERBATIM
in the
Backhomer
his Sunday sermons and the keynote addresses he gave at meetings of associations like the Brooklyn Newfoundlanders Club, where Newfoundlanders met once a month to socialize. While composing his sermons, he walked around the newsroom, reading aloud from them.

“Mrs. Duggan,” Hines said to Maxine, “the text for this week’s sermon is ‘I have been a sojourner in a foreign land.’ Are you familiar with it?”

“I was just talking about it when you came in,” Maxine said.

“Oh my, oh my, oh my,” said Hines, shaking his head and smiling ironically. He invited her and Duggan to attend his Sunday service. He told them it would be well worth their time; it would be more fun than any party they could go to; they would not be hungover afterwards; and it would not cost them anything. But he seemed to be going through the motions, not really expecting any takers. He smiled with a kind of ironic sympathy when they declined, as if he had expected them to do so, as if he were looking down at them from heaven, one of the saved regarding two of
the damned whose paths in life had crossed with his, who might now be where he was if only they had listened.

“Oh my, oh my, oh my,” he said cheerfully, as if it was necessary that there be a preponderance of sinners against whom the saved could measure their good fortune.

Me, on the other hand, he saw as a convert-in-the-making. “Your conversion, Mr. Smallwood, is inevitable,” he said, standing by my desk, staring seer-like into space. “I see it as clearly as if it has already happened. You shall be immersed in the waters of the Hudson seven months from now and thus shall your eternal soul be saved. I will write your mother” — he had found out from Miss Garrigus that my mother was a member of the Ark — “and tell her that her oldest child will soon be saved. God be praised.”

I asked him not to write her and get her hopes up for no reason, since I had no intention of converting, but he went ahead and did it anyway. I had to write a disclaimer to my mother, who nevertheless took more heed of Hines’s letter than she took of mine and wrote back to me saying she had known all along, when she heard who I was working for, that I would be baptized in the Hudson, and she predicted it would happen at the very mission she had told me of before I left, the mission where Miss Garrigus was baptized.

When, for the umpteenth time — I had been working for him for nearly a year — he invited me to attend his Sunday service, I decided I would go, though I did not tell him so. Maxine had told me that I had to go just once. She had, just out of curiosity, and had witnessed a spectacle worth seeing.

I got up early one summer Sunday morning and walked the dozen or so blocks from the Coop to Hines’s church, which looked like a house to which a steeple had been attached. Out front, people were walking about the church, standing back from it to get a better look as if they had never seen it before, which reassured me.

When the service was about to start, I went inside. I was startled to see in the lobby a copy of the very portrait of Miss Garrigus that hung back home in the front room.

There was seating in the church for fifty or sixty and standing room for twenty more. Though there were a few seats still empty, most of them were near the front, so I decided I would stand. In fact, I stood behind the tallest man I could find so that Hines would not see me. Other than a large plain cross on the wall at the centre of the altar and a large wooden carving of Newfoundland on the front of the pulpit, the church was bare, the windows uniformly amber-coloured.

Hines came out onto the altar from a side door, with a Bible tucked under one arm. He was dressed no differently than he dressed for work, except that he wore around his neck, hanging halfway to his waist, a wooden cross. Hines climbed up into the pulpit and began to speak in his deep, quavering voice.

“One of my eyes,” he said, “is permanently bloodshot, the legacy of a stroke that, for a time, struck me blind and occasioned my conversion. God so marked me so that I would not forget.

“This happened many years ago in Newfoundland. I was struck stone blind, stone blind, can you imagine that? I was barely twenty-nine, younger than most of you, a bibulous fornicating gambler. I was crawling home one night on my knees after some debauch and everything went dark and I heard the voice of God cry out to me, saying, ‘Hines, if you wish to see the light of day again, if you wish to spare yourself the torment of eternity in hell, you must repent.’ I shouted out, ‘Lord, what must I do?’

“He told me I had to go where no one knew me, get away from my partners in debauchery and the places of temptation to which I knew I would be drawn, which I knew I could not pass without frequenting, so established were my habits, so puny and cowardly was my resolve, so bent was my will to Satan’s ways. I had to leave that island, which once had been my paradise and which I and no one else had made my hell.

“ ‘Hines,’ God told me, ‘you must go, you must venture out across the gulf and, in some strange city where no one knows you, make amends, and with good deeds and unflagging worship of the
Lord, renew your soul.’ And so that is what I did. I did what you and yours have done. I came to this Sodom of a city because God told me it was here in this New York on this new island that I should build my church.

“Some of you who left that new found land were drawn here by prideful ambition. Some, like me, were driven here by shame. But most of you came here because you had to, and you believe yourselves to be as undeserving of your exile as Jonah was of being swallowed by the whale. But you are wrong, for because you are sinners, you deserve much worse than this.

“Homesickness. What is that compared with hell-fire and damnation? You were homesick before you left home. You were in exile when you lived in Newfoundland. Homesickness is but the yearning for salvation. Newfoundland is but the place your body came from. Your true home is the birthplace of your soul, the place where it began and to which, when you have breathed your last, it will return. Remember, man, thou art a Newfoundlander and unto Newfoundland thou shalt return.”

“Amen,” said the congregation all at once.

There was not the usual coughing and shifting about that greets the ending of a sermon, nor had Hines stepped down from the pulpit. If anything, the congregation seemed more attendant than before and some people even leaned forward in their seats while others gripped their prayer books tightly and bowed their heads as though in shame.

He looked around the little church as though enumerating his congregation, taking note of who was there and who was not.

“Gentlemen,” said Hines, “will you bar and block the door?”

I looked over my shoulder and saw two men wearing blue armbands heft a large wooden bar into place across the doors, then stand, one in front of each door, clasping their hands in front of them.

“I will speak this morning to someone who is here for the first time,” said Hines. There was a sagging of shoulders, a collective sigh of relief. Most of them were off the hook.

I told myself that there were, there must be, other first-timers in attendance. No one, I was somewhat relieved to see, was looking at me, though surely most of them must have known that I was new.

I stood more fully behind the large man who was shielding me from Hines and bowed my head. What was I doing there? Why, given how Hines had been talking about me these past few weeks, had I come and willingly put myself in peril? I cursed Maxine for recommending it to me.

“The name of the person I am addressing,” Hines said, “cannot be spoken in this church, as he has yet to be baptized in the Pentecostal faith.”

“Pray for him, oh Lord,” said the congregation. I felt faint, yet clung still to the hope that Hines’s target wasn’t me but someone else.

“Pride is your sin,” said Hines. “Pride, the sin for which Lucifer, once a chosen one of God, was hurled headlong from heaven and for which to this day he lies writhing in the lake of fire with his fellows-in-damnation, will not release you until you ask the Lord to strike him down. Not until you admit to your absolute worthlessness in comparison with God will you be free of pride. You must be convicted of the sin of pride, admit to it, abject yourself or be forever damned. The sins of the father are visited upon the son, and though your father’s sins are many, all of them proceed from pride as surely as you proceeded from his seed and from your mother’s womb. Your mother cannot sleep, such is her anguish that alone of all her brood, her first born will be damned.”

I felt the blood surge to my head. My forehead hit the back of the man in front of me, but he did not turn around.

“Look at yourself. Your clothing is shabby and filthy. There is barely room inside you for your soul, you are so puny, so pathetic. If a mere man were to clap you on the back with any force, the breath of life would leave you and you would fall down dead. Think how easy it would be for God to strike you down. Surely He is coming soon. You know not the day, nor the hour.

“As a child, you wrote your name at the bottom of lists of men you imagined to be great. Lists of Newfoundland’s prime ministers. Lists of Newfoundland historians. Lists of writers, thinking that to become one of these would somehow console you for the poverty you endured, the way the masters treated you at school and laughed at your ambition. You will never live down the mark they gave you for character. And how it galls you that the boys who at school were your inferiors have gone on to be successful. What a fool you are. God sets no store by how the masses of men regard you. What good will it do you in the next life that in this one you were held in high esteem by those God deemed unworthy of redemption? It will be no comfort to you, while you burn in hell, that a likeness of you commemorating your accomplishments stands forgotten here on earth except by pigeons. Vanity, all is vanity, saith the preacher, and a striving-after wind. I ask you to come forward now, to show yourself and for your soul’s sake stand beside me or be forever damned. If you do not come forward, you will burn like the little bits of kindling that you are. Your body will burn the way your boots burned the night he threw them in the fire. After death, your body cannot be consumed by fire but will burn forever and your pain will not decrease. Your insides will burn the way his are burned by the rum he drinks and by the guilt he harbours in his soul. God is extending to you an invitation that he will not extend again. He will not beg to any man, let alone the likes of you. He does not need you, but you need Him. God has instructed me to tell you that He will wait one minute more. We will wait and pray for you in silence.”

Hines made a show of taking out his pocket watch and placing it on the pulpit in front of him. He bowed his head. The congregation did likewise and many blessed themselves. One man in the nearest row of pews even took out his pocket watch, as though he were in the habit of timing this interval of contemplation with Hines when someone’s soul hung in the balance.

After a time, Hines closed his pocket watch, and in a lower tone of voice, as though no one could hear him but me, he said, “There is a dreadul secret that involves a book and a man you never knew.” My heart hammered inside my chest, a wave of dizziness washed over me. “Only through another book and another stranger will you find peace. These are the words of Almighty God Himself. Will you heed them now or be forever damned?”

I turned and ran towards the porch, shouldering my way through the men standing at the rear.

“Unbolt the doors,” Hines roared. The two men guarding them unbolted the doors and stepped aside as if terrified that I might touch them.

I ran from the church. I took the steps in two strides, ran across the churchyard and out into the street, looked over my shoulder, for I felt as though I were being pursued and my very life depended on not being caught. I kept running until, exhausted, I collapsed on a park bench.

“There is a dreadful secret that involves a book and a man you never knew.” Mr. Mercer. A man I never knew. A stranger. “Only through another book and another stranger will you find peace.” Through the Bible and through God, a stranger to me. “I’ve had my eye on you for quite some time,” he said that morning we first met in Bryant Park. For how long before we met, I wondered, and at whose request? My mother’s? Miss Garrigus’s? It wouldn’t have been difficult for him to keep track of me, knowing the newspapers and Newfoundlanders of New York the way he did. Obviously he had found out a lot about me from Miss Garrigus or my mother. But how did he know that my mother threw the book? Even if my mother had confessed to Miss Garrigus, which I very much doubted, it seemed inconceivable that Miss Garrigus would have broken her trust by repeating her confession to Hines. And even if she had, how did Hines know
I
knew about the book and Mr. Mercer, since even my mother did not
know I knew? Such was my state, I thought Hines might be capable of second sight.

I went back to the Coop and told them I would be checking out in the morning. I was determined never to set eyes on Hines again. But I could not stop thinking about his strange sermon. It seemed hard to believe that my mother had told Miss Garrigus about Mr. Mercer. The rest, about me and my father was one thing, but — And yet, she must have. That night, I lay awake for hours, then slept fitfully, and in the morning felt worse than if I had not slept at all.

I decided I would confront Hines. Immediately upon arriving at the
Backhomer
, I went to his office and closed the door. He was sitting behind his desk, the plaque bearing the coat of arms of Newfoundland behind him. He saw me glance at it. “
Quaerite Prime Regnum Dei
. ‘Seek Ye First the Kingdom of God,’ ” he said. “Do you remember the motto of Bishop Feild?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I said.

“The motto is ‘He is not dead whose good name lives.’ ”

“You had no right to do what you did yesterday,” I said. “Is that how you get your converts?”

“You went there of your own accord,” said Hines. “I wonder what Headmaster Reeves thought of the way you left?”