The Last Western (23 page)

“Don’t think they wouldn’t if they could!” roared Mr. Goldenblade, and he took the name of the Lord in vain another sixteen times.

“Sir,” said Willie, “the only reason I called was to ask about a friend.”

“Is he somebody of mine?”

“Sir?”

“Does he work for me—W-O-R-K?” Mr. Goldenblade shouted.

“Oh no sir,” said Willie, “he’s a ball player. But I got a telegram from him today saying he had joined this Green Canary Army and—”

“
Wait
a minute, wait a minute, hold it right there,” Mr. Goldenblade said. “Let’s see if I have this straight or if maybe I have been taken drunk. I am talking on the phone right now, am I not?”

“Yes sir.”

“Would you mind telling me where you are?”

“No sir,” said Willie, “I’m at the—”

“Because I’m going to call the chief of police, the sheriff, the governor, the FBI and the Houston Old America Club and we’re going to come over there and we’re going to arrest you as a conspirator against the government of the United States of America and a lousy creep who has insulted my five daughters and a supporter and agitator who goes around spitting on the graves of innocent American mothers.”

“Sir!”

“Who are you?” Goldenblade said hoarsely.

“A priest.”

“I
am
drunk,” said Mr. Goldenblade, and mumbled something about God which Willie could not understand.

“Mr. Goldenblade? Mr. Goldenblade?”

There was a shuffling sound on the line, then the voice of the butler:

“I’m afraid Mr. Goldenblade must disconnect.”

“I’m sorry. I guess he got too excited.”

“He has many worries of late, being one of the most important men in the state of Texas, the United States and the world.”

“Well, good night,” said Willie.

“You’re welcome,” said the butler.

The next day Willie went down to the chancery office and Bishop McCool gave him a letter signed by the archbishop, which said he was being loaned to the diocese of Santa Fe, to serve Our Lady of Guadalupe parish in the town of Delphi, New Mexico, where many tragic conditions prevailed and the bishop certainly wished him Godspeed in carrying the many crosses that could be expected.

Out of the dim
memories of his boyhood, Willie knew Delphi as a poor border town where Mexican people and a few black people lived in a cluster of shacks around an adobe church and where nothing ever happened—people were only poor together under the vast, hot sky.

But in the years since Willie was a boy, Doveblade Communications had come to town and Delphi had changed. People had jobs now, money in their pockets, TV antennas on their rooftops. Doveblade Communications had tripled the population of Delphi in less than five years.

For many years Doveblade Communications had conducted its operations at two large factories—one in Philadelphia, the other in Chicago.

The Philadelphia operation, employing 40,000 workers, had been described as a model American industrial plant by
Midas
magazine. But the Chicago facility, almost from its beginning, had been plagued by strikes, shortages, theft, sabotage, delayed deliveries and overruns—all of which sins the chairman of the board, George Doveland Goldenblade, attributed to the “immoral greed and monist tendencies of the Chicago laboring force.”

When the workers struck the Chicago plant at the beginning of the unending war in the Middle East, causing a two-month shutdown, Goldenblade and the members of the board determined to move the operation to what Goldenblade called a “free enterprise climate.”

Whereupon the Doveblade management began a long and extensive survey of what Goldenblade described as “your free opportunity American town—that is, a town where there have never been any jobs and where any wage is better than no wage. This is what we are looking for.”

Many free opportunity towns were scrutinized—Macabre, Kentucky; Yush, Nevada; Hole, Georgia.

Delphi, New Mexico was the town the officers selected.

It seemed a splendid choice: few citizens here had ever had a job.

Here the citizens were happy and uncomplicated and religious. As one of the company officers wrote to Mr. George Doveland Goldenblade,
The people of Delphi are so religious, they see poverty as a cross to be carried through life. They fear riches and some of them think rich people will lose their eternal souls, or the equivalent. Even the minimum wage would be dangerous to these people—a temptation of the world, the flesh and the devil. Recommend we play up this angle by erecting religious statuary about the plant and maybe a cross at the factory gate.

When the company built its new plant in Delphi, the Doveblade authorities took out an ad in
The Wall Street Journal
which was as beautiful as a poem by the famous American poet of the unremembered days, James Whitcomb Riley. The theme of the poem was how Doveblade, the company that cares about people, was bringing prosperity to some colorful poor folk who lived in a tiny border town in New Mexico.

The message warmed the hearts of many citizens, and the company received numerous requests to have the ad made into Christmas cards.

The President of the United States said it just showed what could be done “within the system, when good sound businessmen put their heads together and get to work on the problem of poverty.”

For some years the Delphi Plan succeeded wonderfully.

Profits were higher than ever.

The poor Mexican and black people of Delphi had jobs for the first time in their lives.

Even the wives of the Doveblade management thought the town had charming possibilities. One of the more enterprising wives opened a mail-order store which sold the beautiful blankets made by the Indian women to families all over the United States. In a year’s time the Delphi Den Blanket became a wonderful gift for a birthday, confirmation, bar mitzvah, wedding or any happy occasion.

When the United States entered the period of the Six Wars—or pacifications, as they were called by Doveblade management—the Delphi Plan had to be modified. The plant could not hire people fast enough to keep up with the demand for weapons.

So the officers of the company took out help-wanted ads in the newspapers of the Southwest. The ads brought many white people to Delphi. These people, too, became workers in the busy plant and settled in the town.

These were the first white people who had ever lived in Delphi. No one could predict how the races would get along with one another.

As long as the Six Pacifications kept up, there was no problem of any kind. It was when the conflicts began to wear down, run out or, in other words, end in peace with honor, that the tranquillity of Delphi came unglued and the Doveblade Delphi Plan headed for trouble.

As the pacifications wound down, the orders for weapons began to decline. There were still four pacifications going on—enough to keep the demand for weapons very high—and one could count on many future conflicts waged in the interest of liberty, honor and self determination, but still the ending of just one pacification made it unprofitable to keep all the workers on the payroll.

And so, in the same June of Willie’s ordination, it became clear to the officers of Doveblade that it was absolutely necessary to let 800 workers go.

Which 800? That was the question.

Mr. George Doveland Goldenblade himself summarized the problem to his board of directors at a secret meeting in the executive lounge of the company headquarters, an elegant room called Bimini Lounge, which had a luxurious bar decorated with photos of historic atomic cloudbursts.

“If we fire the whites, there’s going to be talk we prefer the nigras and the wetbacks to the whites, and the whites are going to cause a tumult, even though the nigras and the wetbacks were here first and even though we can pay them low and they put up with it. On the other hand, there is the justice of the situation. With the pay they been gettin’, the nigras and the wetbacks have been getting fancy and high-hat, which is getting very offensive to Mrs. Goldenblade and my five lovely daughters, who frequently buy their lousy blankets, which are going up and up in price and which is a case of outright swindling and exploitation which ought to be reported to the Bureau of Indian Affairs or some other agency of the government that has got some shred of moral horse sense. If we do fire the blacks and the wetbacks, though, because of this new high-hat mentality they been acquiring, they too could touch off a tumult. Which brings us a twofold course of action… .”

At moments of great stress Goldenblade had a habit of humming the melody of a tune from the unremembered ages. The tune was an ancient hymn that bore the title
Tantum ergo Sacramentum.
Few knew the meaning of this title or even that the humming had a title until a former Catholic, who had once studied Latin and now worked in Doveblade public relations, related that the word tantum meant
only
and
ergo
meant
therefore
—an explanation that satisfied no one but at least gave the humming a name.

Throughout Doveblade Communications, every employee knew that when the
Only-Therefore
humming commenced, the anger of the chief executive had entered the most dangerous zone of all.

Now, in the executive lounge, the ominous sound took up.

Hum hum hum hummmm.

There was a stir around the great table.

Hum hummmmm.

The third vice-president nudged the second vice-president. The second vice-president nudged the first vice-president. Automatically the first vice-president nudged the man next to him—Goldenblade himself.

Goldenblade glowered at the first vice-president.

“Well?”

“What—what is the twofold course, chief?”

Slowly, quietly, calmly, smiling horribly, Goldenblade explained.

“Either we get ourselves a pacification somewhere in the next three weeks or else we find the communist-inspired, dope-addicted, grave-defiling, flag-burning fruit who talked the President out of Pakistan and nail him to the cross in front of the plant!”

The board members broke from the executive lounge like reporters from the unremembered times running to report a scoop.

The next day the board agreed that it would probably be easier to find a pacification than whoever it was who had encouraged the President to stop the fighting in Pakistan, so a special committee began studying the more promising conflicts around the world with a bonus to be awarded to the man who found the best new pacification in the shortest time.

*  *  *

The church of Our Lady of Guadalupe stood in the middle of the poorest and oldest section of Delphi and was a sign of desperate last chances.

It was a good-sized old mission church built in the adobe style, very dark inside, with many large sad-looking statues of forgotten saints who had made their way through the world in strange European lands before the United States had started operating.

Over the altar there hung a murky painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, very similar to the original at the shrine in Mexico.

The stations in the church were of the realistic kind—Jesus taking a beating every step of the way—and there was no reminder anywhere that he had made the trip to the end and had managed to come out the tunnel on the other side with the light shining through his wounds.

When he looked at the church the first time, Willie wanted to do something to make it happier, but maybe, he thought, the church was a reflection of how the people felt.

Many of the townspeople, after taking jobs at Doveblade, had moved away from the neighborhood of the church, and the pastor Willie was replacing had planned to build a new church among the spanking new houses growing up around the plant.

Still there were many people left behind in the old neighborhood: old people, sick people, people who could not get the hang of even the simplest job.

These poor lived in rows of drab adobe sheds, though a few of the more resourceful had taken over old houses abandoned by the suburbanites.

When Willie saw the well-made stucco house that was the parish rectory, he knew he could not live in it and be with the poor too.

So on his first Sunday, after reading the Gospel where Christ sends his disciples out to preach and warns them about staying too long in any one place, Willie told the people how happy he was to be with them, as indeed he was, and then spoke of the house.

“We must have a family in the parish who needs a house and since I have no need of one, the rectory is open to anyone who needs it.”

Not until that moment, as he stood looking at the brown and black and white faces that were turned up toward him, stood thinking how wonderfully fine they seemed, gathered together as they were in order to say some words that would help them be brother and sister to one another and say praise-words and thank-words to the Loving One—not until that moment had he given thought to where he might live.

Then it came to him what to do.

“If there would be no objection, I could live with you,” he said, looking for all the world like a clown, with his red-gray hair and red-brown-gold-black skin making a funny contrast with the Pentecostal green of the Sunday vestments.

“Would it be such a bad idea, brothers and sisters?

“It is true I cannot do many skilled things among you, around your houses I mean. But then I know how to do certain chores that would permit me to earn my keep.

“If I could stay with each family a night or so, running errands, watching the babies while you went away for a time, helping with something about the house, then we could get to know each other, true?”

He stopped with that because he saw the people were turning to talk to one another and his heart filled with love for them. They seemed so wonderful to him that first morning, exactly like a good family, all scrubbed and shiny as if turned out for a party.

“You certainly look fine,” he found himself saying.” And I know God loves us all. We ought to love each other more and more, because we are, all together, just one thing, true?

“How wonderful to be alive and to be here and to think that we can always be together!”