The Last Western (24 page)

And suddenly he walked down the aisle towards them, passing into their midst.

He went up and down the center aisle and then the left aisle and then the right aisle shaking hands and listening to names until he had met every person in the parish, surprising them all and surprising even himself, for he had not planned to do this.

This meeting took twenty minutes and was his first sermon as a priest.

After the Mass, Jose and Isabel Delgado and their eight children came to the sacristy and asked if Willie was serious about the rectory, and he said yes, of course, he was serious. And so the Delgado family moved into the parish house that day, and Willie went to live with the people.

At first the Catholic people of Delphi did not know what to make of their funny priest, and there was awkwardness in the first few homes where he stayed.

Always in the past experience of the people, the priest was a different, isolated man’—a stranger by mutual consent, agent of a huge and sacred affair that went alongside life without ever touching it.

Priests were to be treated with respect but always kept at a safe remove, their natural business, so people thought, having nothing to do with the grind of living.

Now came this gangling grinning black-red-brown-gold man with the eyes of an Oriental, who seemed never to be serious and who loved nothing so much as rolling on the floor with three-year-old children and who shrieked even more loudly than they as he held them in the air with his long arms.

And it was really those children—Manolo and Sam and Juanita and Carla and Senera and May and Fidel—who paved the way for Willie, imploring parents to ask the priest to stay at their house.

So through the five-year-olds and the seven-year-olds and through a legion of toddlers, Willie came to know the parents, and through the eyes of their children, the parents came to love Willie.

After one night, sometimes after only one hour, people found themselves saying things to Willie they had never said to a priest before, or for that matter to anyone else.

There were no distancing things with this priest, the people found to their surprise.

He looked like them, he talked like them, he dressed like them.

Some of the better-paid workers at the Doveblade plant felt he did not dress well enough, and in the new homes in the suburbs he was not often invited to stay the night.

A thing that bothered many people was that Willie did not want to be called Father.

One night Juan Velez asked him why he did not like the title of Father.

“You are a father, Juan.”

“But are you not the father of the parish? We have always called the priest Father.”

“That makes me the papa and everybody else the children. How can we be brothers and sisters if one of us is always papa?

“My brother Carlos—he is a priest,” said Juan. “We of the family call him Father Carlos, even our mama.”

Willie laughed. “Each to his own way. But I prefer to be Willie. In the church the only titles I like are brother and sister. ‘Father’ throws everything out of focus.”

“Willie,” said Juan Velez’s eight-year-old son, “can we make the kite now?”

Willie said that that was the perfect time to make the great eighteen-foot kite that he had promised to build with the children of the neighborhood.

He had already told them stories of great kites men had built in the past, and he had made up a story about a kite that had once taken a man nearly to the moon in the days before space travel.

He loved to talk of flying things and flying men.

*  *  *

The more he came to know the people, the more he loved them.

He saw their deep, unconscious kindness to one another, their good humor, their quickness to forgive, the love they had for their children, their sympathy for those whom life had crushed.

The poor people of that parish had the usual quirks of selfishness and aggression and pettiness and the rest, those things in man which, Willie imagined, dated from ten million years ago when men were not yet men.

But among these poor workers, the quirks were not considered virtues. Civilization had not yet made them prized qualities of the spirit. The people were not yet in the cage.

But the cage was coming. Willie saw it in the factory that sat at the edge of town.

Willie did not know what was made in the factory because he was not interested in a man’s job or position, but in the man and in what men and women truly loved outside of their jobs.

But one day, walking past the factory, he saw the company sign, DOVEBLADE COMMUNICATIONS, and the company symbol, a dove that had been designed to look like a jet plane carrying a missile in its beak.

As he stood studying this strange ensign, Willie recognized a black man named Sureness Jack standing at the front gate, dressed in a red, white and blue uniform.

“Sureness? Is this where you work?”

“I am the guard here, Brother Willie.”

“What is made inside?”

“Bombs, grenades, mortars, guns.”

“O Sureness! Poor Sureness!” Willie cried.

The sun blazed down on them.

“Are you all right?” said Sureness, for Willie had begun to tremble in the hot light.

“All right, all right,” said Willie, his voice working wrong. “But the people—what of them, Sureness? Do they work here, our people?”

“All, Willie. It is our work now. It has brought us many good things—colored television, dishwashing machines—good things.”

Willie began to weep. He could not help it, even though he knew it was embarrassing to Sureness.

“Sit here with me, Willie,” said Sureness trying to comfort him.

“No,” said Willie backing away, “I—I have an errand.”

“It would be wise to rest.”

“I am all right,” said Willie, still crying. “You take care of yourself and have—have a safe afternoon.”

“I will do that, Willie Brother,” said Sureness, looking at Willie with concern.

Willie turned then and walked quickly down the road.

Along the way he met a sleek black limousine driven by a chauffeur.

In the limousine were Mr. George Doveland Goldenblade and his brotherin-law, General Maxwell Harrison.

Goldenblade, his eyes flashing restlessly about the Delphi landscape, had been listening to a cassette report on the ruinous peace that had come to Pakistan.

It seemed clear now that there was little possibility of reopening the pacification there for at least another two years.

Goldenblade was thinking of the 800 Delphi workers who would have to be discharged. He turned to speak to General Harrison when the red-black-brown-gold figure of Willie flashed at the edge of the road.

“What was that?” he cried.

“That?” the chauffeur said. “That was a person.”

“Is he one of ours? Stop the car, idiot!”

The chauffeur, whose name was Fred Sprocker, stopped the car.

“Sir,” he said, “that is Willie, the new priest.”

“Willie what?”

“Willie Brother,” said Sprocker.

“He’s a
priest
?” Goldenblade exclaimed. “Where’s his clothes?”

“Yes, and I don’t know,” said Fred Sprocker.

“Drive back and don’t get smart,” Goldenblade said. “I’ve got to talk to that man.”

Sprocker reversed the car, bringing it alongside Willie, who, lost in his thoughts, did not even see the car drifting back.

Goldenblade pressed a button and the window descended.

“Ah, Father Brother,” he purred. “Taking a little constitutional, I see.”

“Sir?”

“I’m G. Doveland Goldenblade, K.S.G., publisher of
The Houston Clarion
and beloved founder and president of Doveblade Communications. Perhaps you have heard of my brother, Earl, the Cardinal Archbishop of New Orleans? Uncle Eminence Earl, as we call him in the family?”

Goldenblade handed Willie a card which displayed an embossed version of the bird-jet carrying a golden missile in its beak.

“Uncle Eminence Earl’s internals been bothering him lately, Father Brother.”

“We have got to do something,” said Willie.

“He’s
been
to the best doctors in the world,” said Goldenblade.

“I mean about the weapons, the guns, the awful things they make there in your factory,” said Willie, tears streaking his face. He pointed back to the plant. “It’s all got to stop.”

G. Doveland Goldenblade thought of the many ways he wanted to take the name of the Lord in vain. Instead of doing that, he said, “I pray daily to the Lady of Fatima that communism and monism will be destroyed along with all their adherents.”

He handed Willie a thousand-dollar bill.

“For the soul of my dear mother,” he said. “Five hundred low Masses, please. Oh, and here’s another hundred: Uncle Eminence Earl’s internals.”

The limousine swooshed forward, covering Willie with dust and making him look like a sad statue of a saint holding in his hand the instruments of his martyrdom.

*  *  *

That night on the porch of the family of Hank and Morla Gotted, Willie listened carefully.

He needed a way to tell the people to stop making weapons.

Even more than that he needed a way to convince them to stop
liking
making weapons.

He knew what he was up against there: color television, automatic dishwashers, cassette stereo.

The Gotted house stood across the street from the Delphi bus station, and the 1:02 bus from Houston was discharging passengers into a pool of green light reflected by a sign that said, REGENT WINE AND THE WORLD IS FINE.

Willie was listening and watching the sleepy passengers, too.

But one passenger, not sleepy, broke the listening.

The one passenger was a tall limber shape, nothing more, but something in the way that shadow moved made Willie stand up.

He leaned forward on the railing of the porch, straining to see, not yet trusting what his heart had guessed.

Then the shape bent over quickly, an arm swung low to pick up a handbag, and Willie knew it was Clio.

He bounded off the porch, raced across the street and lunged at Clio like a linebacker.

“Clio! Clio!”

Clio’s mouth fell open—as if he had seen a dead man.

They babbled incoherently for two minutes, pounding each other on the shoulders and poking one another in the ribs in the old manner of their boyhood, too excited to speak.

“What—when—how did you get here?” said Willie finally.

“That bus,” said Clio. “You still are stupid.
That
bus.” Clio slapped the bus on its side.

“But why? How did you know I was here?”

“I didn’t. I’m here on business. I knew you were in some town somewhere, but man, this is a big state.”

Clio looked magnificent, tall and black and strong.

“You look like a—president, a great leader,” said Willie.

He asked about Martha and the baby.

In the green glow of the Regent sign, Clio showed Willie pictures.

“We’re in Brazil more or less always now,” said Clio. “Maybe it’s home for good.”

Willie kept marveling at him, the fact of his being there.

“Let’s go in here and have a beer. I’m staying with a family across the street, and they’re all asleep.”

So they sat down at the counter of the bus depot and talked the night away, catching up on all that had happened to them both.

“So you have joined this army, the Green Canary Army?”

“Yes,” said Clio quietly.

“But you’re not fighting surely?”

Seventy-two hours ago Clio had led an assault on the town of Sao Pietro, where forty-three of his own men and sixty-five of the government soldiers had been killed.

He did not have to close his eyes to bring it back again, the way the government men finally had run to the church and how they had rung the bell of the church and how they had blown the bell tower off the church and what had happened later to the soldiers as they tried to reach the foothills running fast from the church.

He looked at his oldest friend and he knew then, as he had known always, there would never be a way to make him understand.

“It is a small army of the people,” Clio said at length. “It is the people trying to get power.”

“What is power?”

“Arms, might, control.”

“You believe in those things?”

“I have to believe in them,” said Clio. “And if you saw the way things are with people down there, you’d understand why we do what we do. The people have never had the power, never the control of their lives. We’re the symbol of the power they can have.”

“Do you fight, yourself?”

The men had come running out of the back sacristy of the church, trying to reach a grove of trees one hundred yards distant but they did not see how Clio and his company had nested their machine guns between the church and the trees.

“Very little.”

“A little would be too much, Clio.”

“Don’t preach, man. Not if you don’t know what it’s all about.”

“But, Clio, who wins in war, in killing?”

“The people, if we win. It’s better than the way things are now.”

“There is a better way,” said Willie.

“Willie, if the rich men—the plantation owners and the others who have the power and the bread—would share, would
give
just a little, we wouldn’t fight. We hate the fighting. But the people are beaten down, understand? They don’t have any kind of life. There is a war that has been going on for centuries against them, the day-in, day-out war of being used and thrown away.”

“So you kill them and that is the solution?”

“It is the beginning of the solution,” said Clio. “Don’t you think they’re killing us? Starvation is killing. In the village where we live, three out of five kids die before they’re eight years old. And what does the government do? It sends doctors into the villages to show the women how not to have babies and how the men can become sterile. It’s called the program for life.”

“Still, to kill a man ..,.,” said Willie.

Clio had become a hero of the army that day, and who was it, he wondered, who had made him a hero? Was it the fat one who fell and rolled as the bullets popping along after his slow run finally caught up with him and spun him crazy to the ground or was it the lean major who had come from Germany and who had command of the troop and who had come out with two guns drawn at his side like an old-time cowboy from the movies or was it one of the young ones who had just reached the trees only to find that a wall of metal hung there unseen in the air?