The Last Western (19 page)

Willie took the last note back to his room.

He opened up the Gospel of Mark and began reading the first passage his eyes fell upon.

The passage told of Jesus calling his apostles, choosing his first priests, Peter, James, John and the others.

When he came to the end of this passage, he felt the hair on the back of his head tingling and prickling as it used to do in the days when he pitched baseball.

That night at Eucharist, surrounded by his brothers, he thought about the Gospel text again.

As he watched Father Benjamin consecrate the bread and wine, he felt an urging and a longing he had never felt before, though when he thought about it later, it seemed to him that he had always had the longing in his heart in some way; he wept.

All that night he knelt by his cot in prayer, listening.

After the morning hour of silent praise he went to Father Benjamin’s room again.

He wrote a note and handed it to the old priest.

The note said,
I would like to be a priest and work among poor people
.

Father Benjamin’s face showed no feeling one way or the other.

He wrote his reply on the back of Willie’s note:
In the morning go to the chancery office in Houston. Tell Father Horgan what you have told me.

Willie nodded.

Then he knelt at Father Benjamin’s feet, but Father Benjamin lifted him up. Then he gave him the thrive sign.

That night Willie fell into a dreamless sleep and woke to a fine sunny day.

He got out of bed and knelt by his cot for a moment to thank God for the marvelous gift of life.

Then, intending to go to the common room for his last hour of silent praise, he reached around absently for his tunic, which he had dropped over his chair the night before.

It was gone. In its place he found a pair of slacks, a shirt, shoes and stockings.

As he stood wondering about this, he became aware that the building was silent.

It was always free of the human voice except at Mass, but at this hour there were usually the sounds of men rising from sleep, taps turning, footsteps in the corridors and so forth.

There was nothing this morning. Only silence.

He dressed quickly and went down to the common room. It was empty.

He glanced into the dining hall. Empty.

The kitchen was bare. Even the barn was deserted.

The Servants were gone.

He went back to his room a final time and as he opened the door, a scrap of paper fluttered off the desk by the window.

It was a message from Father Benjamin.

I told you yesterday that we had a mission for Houston and also a message. The mission, by the time you read this, will have begun. Speak of its beginnings to no one. Do not stand in its way or attempt to explain it to others. The message is another matter and it is much farther reaching and the key to it is a person and you are the person. This will become clear to you along the way. Peace, courage, love, joy, and all else that you may require.

Benjamin

Slowly Willie went down the lane to the open road and started the long walk to the city.

An hour later a truck farmer picked him up. “Hell in town today,” the farmer said. “And they goin’ to get it too!”

“Who is that, sir?”

“Them fellas that started the riots summer before last. They got the whole lot of them now and they going to pay.” Willie said apprehensively: “When did this happen?” “This morning. Don’t you listen to the news?” The farmer switched on the radio.

And so the riots of eighteen months ago, an announcer was saying, take on an entirely new look. Only yesterday the grand jury had returned guilty verdicts against twenty-eight members of Houston’s Apache Club, the militant black organization which in the words of the presidential investigator, General E. Sam Houston Dallas Johnson, “deliberately touched off the riots to make the city of Houston look bad. “At five o’clock this morning, an individual calling himself The Reverend Benjamin Victor and twenty-seven members of a religious group known as the Silent Servants of the Used, Abused and Utterly Screwed Up, appeared at the home of Magistrate Harlowe Judge claiming that they, not the Apaches, should serve the 15-to 35-year sentences handed down by the court yesterday.

Our reporter in the field Frank Yardley has an update on the story: Frank?

Yardley: 

Yes, George. We’re now in the office of Police Chief E. Barrington Davis, who reportedly took statements from Father Benjamin and the twenty-seven brothers. Chief Davis, would you call these signed statements confessions?

Davis: 

I wouldn’t call them poems.

Yardley: 

But we have a report that this group—the Brothers of the Screwed Up or whatever their name is—weren’t even in Houston at the time of the riots.

Davis: 

You don’t have to be somewhere to commit a crime. I mean anywhere will be fine if you’re going to tread the path of infamy. These foul balls say that they are to blame—that’s the main point.

Yardley: 

Does this mean that the Apaches will be released from your custody?

Davis: 

I’m not King Solomon. I’m a cop. The Apaches are still convicted for the riots, and until some court tells me different they are going to remain behind the vertical steel.

Yardley: 

Where are Father Benjamin and the brothers right at this moment?

Davis: 

They are behind the vertical steel also. Do you think we turn known criminals out on the street any more than a zookeeper would turn his wild beasts loose on the hopeless public?

Yardley: 

Have they asked for legal aid?

Davis: 

No they have not, sir. That is one reason they rank high up on the suspicion list because no citizen in his right gourd will deny hisself the opportunity of legal assistance when he gets caught with his pants down.

Yardley: 

But isn’t it true, chief, that one of the brothers said, “All the white people of Houston are guilty. We are simply here to acknowledge their guilt”?

Davis: 

Maybe one of them said that, I don’t know. They was saying many crazy and traitorous things. One of them said, “Not a stone will be left upon a stone,” too, and pointed right at the residence of Judge Harlowe Judge, which is one of the best old boys this state ever seen. They made many dangerous and radical statements which I do not wish to go into here on the air lest somebody thinks the Police Department passed judgment on traitors before they get a fair trial.

Yardley: 

Other than their signed confessions, did the brothers give any other evidence of their guilt?

Davis: 

They had some pictures which we have sent to the lab to make sure they are pictures. Yardley: What sort of pictures?

Davis: 

Of these scum taking part in the rioting and burning.

“That’s impossible!” cried Willie, startling the farmer so much the car swerved on the road.

“What the Jesus Christ do you know about it?” he demanded.

Then Willie remembered Father Benjamin’s words about the mission.

“Nothing,” he said.

“They just some crackpot bunch of niggerlovers, who ought to be hanged,” the farmer said and pushed his foot down harder on the gas feed.

When Willie reached the chancery office an hour later, he found the place mobbed with reporters.

The reporters wanted a statement from the bishop or another official concerning the church’s attitude toward the brothers.

As Willie went up a winding stairway that led to the main entrance to the chancery, powerful lights off to one side caught his eye.

Below him, standing in a little porch or breezeway that led from the chancery to the bishop’s private office, was a tall, handsome monsignor with wavy hair and a splendid smile.

A television reporter was interviewing him. Because the monsignor was smiling so heartily, the interviewer too was smiling, though his smile, breaking once in a while, looked like more work.

Willie thought that the handsome monsignor standing there in the strong lights looked like a movie actor. His face and his body and his purple silk robes seemed to say that everything was okay, that everything had always been okay and that from now on things were going to be even more okay than ever.

The interviewer asked his first question.

“Monsignor McCool, as chancellor of the diocese, do you have any comment at all on the activities this morning at the home of Magistrate Harlowe Judge?”

“Gol-lee Tommy,” the monsignor said, smiling even more handsomely than before, “I’m afraid we know little more about this matter than you fellows.”

“This order or congregation or whatever it is called in the church—the Servants—is this an official order of the church?”

“Not that we know of, Tommy,” said the monsignor, turning his handsome face directly into the eye of the camera. “They’re not in the official directory that we have here in the office. Of course, these are strange days for our church,” chuckled the monsignor, “and you run into some, heh-heh-heh, strange situations once in a while. Still I doubt that any good practicing Catholic who is in good standing with Holy Mother Church would have anything to do with an organization of this kind, getting mixed up in riots and so forth.”

“Most Catholics would disapprove?”

“Gee whiz, I would think so. Tommy, we have wonderful people in Holy Mother Church and ninety-nine percent of them are law-abiding citizens who love their country and respect their flag. They obey the commandments of God and they live by the rules of the country. Above all, they have this wonderful levelheadedness about their religion which keeps them from, you know, going over the edge.”

“Thank you, Monsignor McCool.”

“Thank you, Tommy.”

Willie turned away.

He went up to the great door of the chancery office and rang the bell.

A harried-looking priest appeared at the door.

“If it’s about the crazies,” he began, but Willie handed him the note on which Father Benjamin had written Father Horgan’s name.

“You want to see Father Horgan?”

“Yes.”

“This way.”

The priest led Willie down a dark, cool corridor, past many offices where electric typewriters clicked out the answers to many complicated questions.

At the end of the corridor the priest knocked on a door.

“Father Horgan?”

A feeble voice answered “Yes.”

“Someone to see you.”

The priest swung the door open.

Willie saw a shriveled old man sitting at a desk piled high with books and papers. The old man had hurriedly put something aside. Willie saw that it was a crucifix. The young priest left.

“Is it me you really want?” the old man asked in a thin, raspy voice. “No one has come to see me for eight and a half years.”

“I want to be a priest,” said Willie.

The old man squinted at Willie. Then he said, “Tell me why?”

“To serve the poor.”

The old man squinted at Willie an even longer time, his face relaxing little by little, until finally there was a smile there, all wrinkled and cracked.

He struggled from his chair slowly, limped around the desk and then, to Willie’s astonishment, he embraced him.

“God be praised!” he said. “The Spirit sends us a lover of the poor.”

He held Willie back a bit and looked into his face.

“Poor lad!” he cried suddenly. “Poor lad!”

Willie
was sent to Albert Einstein Seminary in the center of what was called the New Houston. The seminary, a tall cylinder of glass and steel that resembled a space rocket, was attached to Morganfeller University, considered the most advanced university in the Southwest.

Albert Einstein Seminary was considered to be even more advanced than the rest of the university. Its catalog was an advertisement not only for the most recent theories of religion but also for theories that had not yet been theorized.

To Willie, sitting in the classroom, the theories were all a haze of words that were unpronounceable and unspellable—existentialist, monophysite, demythologize—a foreign language.

The course work, much of it, was programmed by computer. There were fifty or more computers in use throughout the Einstein-Morganfeller complex, but the central computer for the seminary was a unit called Chi-Mon, which, according to the seminary prospectus, “served as a model for the stylization of the future ministry of the church.”

Once a week each student at Einstein was required to pose and solve a problem using the facilities of Chi-Mon under the supervision of Father Pomeroy, the leading theological physicist in the United States.

In his first visit to the Chi-Mon room, Willie approached the computer cautiously. He sat down at the console and thought a moment. Then he said, “What is the thirst of God?”

Chi-Mon, which had been whirring and buzzing for four years without interruption, stopped suddenly. The entire faculty and student body heard it stop. It was as if the power to the building had been shut off. There was a moment of suspenseful silence, then a sizzling sound that was like bacon frying. Chi-Mon began popping its red warning lights until, in two minutes’ time, all its 106 lights were blazing, indicating that vital electronic parts had been ruined.

Father Pomeroy, in a rage, said that Willie had tampered with Chi-Mon and forbade him to go near it again. It took six weeks to get the computer back into operating order, and Father Catwall, the rector, told Willie that his recklessness with the equipment had cost Einstein $40,000.