The Last Western (31 page)

Going up the steps, Willie opened the note.

The Servants of the Used, Abused and Utterly

Screwed Up are with you. Your larger mission begins.

We will be with you when it becomes impossible.

Benjamin

Willie whirled about, trying to catch sight of the man who had brought him the note, but he was gone.

A week later he stood on another stone stairway, the great steps of the cathedral of Houston, with a jubilant crowd spread before him.

It was like a crowd from the baseball days, pressing and swaying like something with a life of its own, a beast, but not a mad beast—a happy circus beast.

“They respond to you,” said Bishop McCool. “Gol-lee, how they respond.”

“They have come back to see me,” said old Archbishop Tooler, “all my pagan babies.”

He was pointing to the crowd from Delphi, the people who had come up for the celebration from Willie’s old parish.

“Bless them, bless them,” McCool kept saying. “That is what they want.”

So Willie blessed them, moving slowly and awkwardly in his glittering, heavy attire.

With the miter on his head and the crosier in his hand, he looked like a gawky, unhappy child dressed up to look like a bishop.

He blessed them again and again with the amethyst ring they had put on his finger weighing down his hand.

He felt burdened as never before and distanced from the people, and the sad, aching pains began in his heart.

At the reception hall, his splendid clothes made him feel stiff and he found it hard to reach people, to take their hands.

“Your Excellency,” they said.

“Please, no.”

“Let me kiss your ring.”

“Please, dear brother, stand up and let us tell each other our names.”

At the dinner he sat dazed as the speeches went on—the old archbishop welcoming home his many children from far-off pagan lands, the mayor observing that a local, poor black boy had risen to the top, Bishop McCool telling amusing anecdotes about Willie’s school days, which seemed like only yesterday and, as he thought of it,
were
only yesterday.

Willie could not speak—there were so many things hanging about him, weighing him down. He could hardly breathe.

So he blessed everyone and everything in sight.

Then someone handed him a telegram from Thatcher Grayson.

MORE AND MORE THE SPIRIT RAISES YOU UP UNTIL FINALLY YOU WILL BE OUT OF THE SINFUL WORLD ENTIRELY. SEE YOU IN BALTIMORE.

Mr. Grayson must have seen the shape of the trouble in the neighborhood where Edgar Allan Poe had written a story called “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” because the very next day the archbishop of Baltimore summoned Willie to come immediately, since one of America’s most venerable and beautiful cities was about to burn to the ground.

In Baltimore
the fire had already consumed a thousand 150-year-old row houses and was advancing steadily on the most elegant new motel in the United States.

The row houses, the town officials said, were expendable, but the Edgar Allan Poe Motor Lodge, Condominium and Adventure in Living, which had been erected to encourage confidence in the downtown of Baltimore, had to be saved.

“You can’t expect people to live in slums like this and not riot,” Willie told the governor of Maryland, Wilson Lee Beauregard VII, descendant of four Presidents of the United States and the nation’s leading connoisseur of the African violet.

Governor Beauregard and Willie were watching the riots from the top of the Civic Center four blocks from the Poe motel.

“Ah don’t care where they live, or how, suh,” said Governor Beauregard, “Ah don’t see what that has to do with tearin’ and smashin’ and burnin’. That motel is the most beautiful example of modern livin’ in the world, and they surely goin’ to try and destroy it, like that.” The governor clapped his hands together, making a small thunder burst.

“They don’t plan to destroy the motel,” said Willie, who had talked to the leader of the black rebels early that morning. “But the fires may get out of hand.”

“They
started
the fires, reverend suh,” said Beauregard. “Aren’t they responsible for what they started or am ah a lunatic?”

“What do you want me to do?” said Willie.

“Go on television and tell them the militia is goin’ in with orders to shoot to kill anybody interferin’ with the fahr-fightin’.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You condone their violence?”

“Who am I to condone or not condone?” said Willie, looking at the smoke rising from the tenements.

“That’s the sort of pussy-footin’ talk that just placates the sav—” the governor, seeing the color of Willie’s skin, broke off. He thunder-clapped his pink hands once more.

Willie said, “Maybe you should go on television. If you know how to stop it, why do you send for me?”

Shakily, Governor Beauregard lit a cigar. His mind was sore distracted. He had neglected his violets for nine days running, and it was the season they needed tenderness. He had left his plants in the care of Hilaire, his Jamaican manservant, whose clothes had smelled of smoke this morning and who was carrying on an affair with the wife of the lieutenant governor besides. The plants needed a kindly father; he was the kindly father—yet here he was, standing on top of the Civic Center with a weird priest whose color was confusing and abnormal, watching Baltimore burn.

“You give them love and they grow,” said the governor. “Give them indifference and they withah.”

Willie turned to the mayor of Baltimore, who had been praying from Simon de Montfort’s
Perfect Devotion to the Blessed Virgin
for three days and nights and who had promised not to utter a word to his fellow man that he did not know to be the truth—this in reparation for past sins of the tongue.

“You are the mayor. What do you suggest?” Willie said.

The man held his finger to his mouth.

Willie turned to the city controller.

“What’s wrong with the mayor?”

“He won’t answer any question unless he is sure he can give the absolutely true answer.”

“Where is the nearest television station?” said Willie.

The city controller started to answer but the mayor interjected an excited and even jubilant wave of the hand. He grabbed a telephone directory, opened it to the yellow pages, studied a column of addresses and then said clearly and distinctly, “I can tell you, Excellency, that the nearest television station from the place we are now standing, which is at the top of the Civic Center, is at the corner of Montgomery and Park, which is not less than five blocks and not more than eight, in a northwesterly direction, assuming you leave the center by the south exit and travel by cab on Ocean Avenue which is one-way, then turn onto… .”

When Willie got to the television station, the county sheriff, Archbishop Looshagger and a black civic leader named Gleason were already there.

“Those who perish by the sword will reap the wages of death, which are sin,” said Archbishop Looshagger, who had trouble remembering things and whose car at this very moment was burning in the cathedral parking lot, and the car he thought was his was being towed out of a no-parking zone by the police who, when they got the car to the station, discovered it to be a stolen vehicle.

“I don’t even know you, man,” said Gleason, “but you gotta do better than Tom-talk.”

“The dynamic of social change is dynamite,” said the sheriff of Baltimore County, a noted epigrammatist and wit.

Willie went on the air.

He asked the rioters to go home or, if their homes were burned down, to come to the Civic Center, where they could be assigned temporary lodging.

He asked the rioters to let the fire fighters come into the riot area to bring the fires under control.

He said he understood why people wanted to break things up but that it always wound up that people got broken in the process.

He asked the people doing the rioting what they won that was more precious than the fourteen lives that had been lost.

In the middle of his speech he broke down and wept because he didn’t know what to say and because he knew his words weren’t any good anyway and because on the monitor he could see the red flag on his breast and he remembered how light she had been in his arms as he carried her.

“Ah thought he was a great speakah!” snorted Governor Beauregard. “Mah God, he’s snivelin’! What you gonna ahcomplish with a snivelin’ nigra, ah ask you?”

The mayor, watching TV with the governor, put his finger to his mouth.

But the sound of Willie’s crying, which was the strangest sound that had been heard in Baltimore in many years, carried into the riot areas, and when they heard that sound, men stopped what they were doing, hands froze in the air, people carrying things out of stores stopped in their tracks as if this voice was one they had heard before, sometime in their childhood, from their mothers maybe or some preacher telling a story in a tent long ago. They stopped. And the riot too began to stop.

There was an hour or two of confusion. Then in the middle of the afternoon an explosion rent the air.

Willie went back on television, and this time he found himself unable to say anything. He was simply on camera, and some people said he was praying and some said he was weeping.

Gleason took the air.

“This man is nothing but a tool of the racist structure of this city,” he said.

Willie was still visible on camera, still silent, eyes down, weeping or praying—or was he sleeping?

“What has he been able to guarantee us? Nothing!” said Gleason.

But the people in the riot area and all over the city were watching the sad figure behind Gleason, the figure who in some way seemed not the healer of the riot but its principal victim.

By nightfall, people were beginning to show up at the Civic Center. The firemen had entered the burning areas. The riot was ending.

Four hundred twenty-six arrests were made.

Among those arrested was Archbishop Looshagger, who had come to claim his stolen car, which he said he remembered buying at the H. L. Mencken Used Car Bonanza six weeks earlier. The police found no record of this transaction and the archbishop was charged with theft.

“Father, forgive them, for I shall pass this way but once,” the archbishop said. “And if the light loses its flavor, what shall it be salted with—a reed blowing in the wind?”

The state and local officials went on television to assure the populace that the riot was over.

“Once more, we have proved that Maryland is the cradle of liberty, forbearance, peace and love,” said Governor Beauregard. “People, like African violets, need love. That is why ah am here. That is why the bishop is here. That is why the militia is here. That is why the Edgar Allan Poe Motor Lodge, Condominium and Adventure in Living is here.”

“Speaking only for myself,” said the sheriff, “I’d rather be merry than burn.”

“In exactly one hour and twenty-two minutes it will be

Friday,” said the mayor.

*  *  *

Willie stayed in Baltimore the next day and the next, helping people find the things they had lost in the riots, helping people get out of jail, helping people find food and clothing.

By the end of the second day, the Red Cross arrived with many supplies, and an emergency clean-up force set to work.

Everyone seemed happy to be cleaning up the riot area but no one talked about the things that had started the riot.

Willie had been staying in a rooming house in the riot area. His phone rang often but he was never there to take the messages. He was at the Civic Center where the emergency services had been headquartered.

On his fourth night in the city he got back to his room very late. There was a note on his bed from Thatcher Grayson.

We have a day game with the Orioles tomorrow. Can you be at the park? Been trying to reach you since you been in town doing God’s work.

The next afternoon Willie took a cab to the ball park. The cabbie recognized him.

“I remember you from the old days,” he said, squinting at Willie through the mirror. “Ah.”

“I seen you pitch many times. I seen with my own eyes.”

Willie was looking at the ruined buildings where Professor Death had been giving his lessons. People were carrying mattresses and television sets and odd bits of furniture in and out of the tenements.

“And after I seen it, it wasn’t glory no more.”

“I beg your pardon, brother?”

“What you did—it spoilt the glory. It overthrew it.”

The cabbie, stopping for a light, turned around.

“What gave you the right?”

“What right is that, brother?”

“To capsize it completely. Why—why, once I knew the averages. All of them. The ERAs. The RBIs. I seen and studied and mastered the greats. From when I was seven years old, which is now near fifty-four!”

There was a honking of horns. The car shot forward.

They drove for a block in silence through many charred instructions.

Willie tried to comprehend what the cabbie had said.

Waving his arm, the cabbie turned around again. “Overthrowing it—just like that!” He snapped his fingers. “Like it was—lies!”

“Brother, I—”

“I could recite them all. Ruth. Foxx. Williams. Aaron. The hurlers. The great moundmasters. Johnson. Matthewson. Grove. Until you!”

“I—”

“You sank it all. America’s pastime. Why?”

“Bro—”

“I’ll tell you why!” the cabbie was shouting and the car was weaving. “Because the monist conspirators put you up to it! Don’t think I don’t know.”

The cabbie braked the car and swerved to avoid hitting a parked truck. The ball park loomed ahead.

“My brotherin-law—Lawson Cudd, the podiatrist out of L. A.? He can prove it. He got the literature—how everything was faked. To wreck our traditions and tear down the country! He gave me a pamphlet—
How They Are Worming Their Way In
—and it is there in black and white!”

There was more honking. The cabbie was driving on the left side of the road.

“By God, the Iwo Jima Society get hold of you, you’d
know
, preacher, you’d know!”