The Last Western (16 page)

He crossed a shopping plaza and bounded up a ramp of oncoming cars, all honking and swerving to avoid hitting him.

“Get out of the way!” a man yelled.

“Stop him!” shouted another.

He tumbled down an embankment, landed on his feet and took up his race again.

He headed down a gravel road, passing a subdivision, and then ran on into open country.

He ran without any sense of where he was going and without any sense of tiring either.

He had the vague idea that if he could keep running, the world and its certainties would go on floating and bobbing like this, smearing before his eyes—nothing had to be final.

The road narrowed and curved into a grove of trees.

It went up and down a hill and into a denser growth of trees.

He was well out of Houston now, though for all he knew he was still downtown.

He came into a remote, almost deserted area with strange vine growths appearing from time to time at the side of the road.

He ran on, pumping his legs harder and harder.

He thought that he was running faster all the while but in truth he was moving slower now, his body gradually wearing out.

When he came to the top of a little rise, he saw the great sun bursting before him, so close it seemed he could plunge into its fiery heart.

He pumped his legs faster but he tripped on something and went flying into the gravel face down.

The fall dazed him.

He got to his feet slowly and started to run again but his legs refused to work and down he fell again, this time a few feet off the road in a patch of wild blue flowers.

There he lay until dusk when an old beat-up panel truck came down the hill, its yellow headlights gleaming like cat eyes in the gray-green air.

The truck passed Willie, then stopped and backed up.

Two bearded men wearing faded work clothes got out of the truck and walked to the place where Willie lay on the side of the road.

They spoke not a word, but after making several rapid movements with their hands and fingers, they picked Willie up and put him on an old sofa in the back of the truck.

One of the men climbed in the back of the truck and sat down next to the sofa where Willie lay while the other got into the cab and started the engine.

Then the old truck chugged off into the darkness, heading toward a cluster of broken-down buildings that were only blurred shapes in the moonless night.

For a month
Willie lay in a bed in a strange, bare room that overlooked a vegetable garden, a row of spindly pines and beyond the pines, a winding stream that was muddy and ugly most of the time, except in the early morning.

At dawn, when the world struggled up for another day, the stream was blue and lovely.

Beyond the stream, beyond the bare fields, the city of Houston sprawled out under the blank gray sky.

Little by little, day by day, the smoke over the city had cleared away, and Willie knew the riots were over, though most of the time he did not think of the matter that clearly.

He was aware only of some awful happening that had cut him off from all that he knew and loved, and he knew that this happening had occurred in the city and that the smoke was related to it.

Sometimes he knew the city was Houston and he remembered having spoken to Father Simpson, and once at night he dreamed that he stood in the bare place where the William McKinley Arms had stood.

At all times he knew that his loved ones were lost.

But sometimes he would look at the city and imagine it was Chicago or Boston or New Orleans.

Several times a day strange, bearded men would come to his room, offering food which he could not eat.

The men would examine the bottle that stood at the head of Willie’s cot, replacing it sometimes with another bottle. They would examine the tube that led from the bottle to Willie’s arm. Sometimes they would feel his pulse.

Now and then a man who seemed to be a doctor came to call. He would listen to Willie’s heart and peer into his eyes with a penlike flashlight.

Once or twice he gave Willie an injection that put him to sleep.

Willie gazed out over the gardens and the muddy, sluggish stream, at the city of Houston.

He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him.

He felt nothing, only an emptiness.

He wondered from time to time if he were really alive.

One night he heard men singing.

He thought he must be dreaming.

But then the melody of the song came more clearly to him and it seemed somehow familiar.

He thought he would ask about it the next day.

But the next day he remembered nothing.

Two nights later he heard the singing again.

He got out of bed and started down the corridor toward the room where the singing seemed loudest.

But he was too weak to reach the door.

His knees gave way beneath him and he fainted.

A little later he had the vague memory of silent men carrying him through the corridor and placing him on his bed.

The next morning an old man with a long white beard, not one of the regular visitors, came to Willie’s room.

He wore a strange tunic, made of gunnysack and other rags patched together.

He put a little card on the stand beside Willie’s bed.

When the old man left, Willie reached for the card. It said, THE SILENT SERVANTS OF THE USED, ABUSED AND UTTERLY SCREWED UP ARE WITH YOU.

Willie tried to make sense of these words, but it was too much work.

He fell asleep for another week.

Then one night the singing woke him again.

He got out of bed very carefully and tried his legs while supporting himself on the edge of the bed.

When he was satisfied he could walk, he started down the shadowy corridor once more.

He came to a broad wooden door that looked like the door to a barn.

He tried to open it, but it was no use. He was too weak.

He was about to try it again when the door gave way and there stood a bearded man wearing a ragtag garment, motioning Willie to come forward—a slow gentle motion that seemed to say
Welcome
.

Willie entered an open courtyard where eighteen or twenty men, similarly garbed in gunnysack tunics, stood about a bare wooden table, singing.

In the center of the table stood the old white-bearded man who had given Willie the strange card.

He was holding a cup and a loaf of bread.

The man who had met Willie at the door led him to the old man at the table.

The old man broke the bread and gave a chunk of it to Willie.

“Body of Christ,” he said in a cracked old voice.

“Body of Christ,” said Willie, and he ate the bread.

Then the old man gave Willie the cup—a tin cup it was, such as crippled beggars used to hold out for the pennies of the rich.

“Blood of Christ,” said the old man in his cracked, wavering voice.

“Blood of Christ,” said Willie, and he sipped from the cup.

It was the first food he had eaten in six weeks.

BOOK THREE

Any one of us can prepare a body. But the

cosmetizing of the corpse in such a way

as to suggest peaceful and blessed repose

—that is the great and merciful art we

must now devise.

Dr. Ambrose Felder

In an address before

The American Mortuary Association

July 4, 1891

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The war-horse
of the world galloped once more about the sun.

The leaves curled and grew brittle on the trees.

One night a little snow fell, then more snow, then a record amount.

Christmas came twinkling and glistening—a muffled tumult of bells—and then the long pull of January, gray as death under the chill, white sky.

Willie stayed on at the house of the Silent Servants of the Used, Abused and Utterly Screwed Up.

At first it was a case of having nowhere to go, but as the weeks wore on, he came to like the life for itself.

He donned the ragtag tunic that was the uniform of the Servants.

He worked in the gardens and in the barns.

He milked the cows and fed the chickens.

Every afternoon from 4:00 to 5:30 he read the Scripture in his bare cell.

In the mornings he joined the Servants for the silent hour of praise.

In the evenings he joined them for Mass.

It was only at Mass that the servants used their voices. The rest of the time they used sign language similar to that used by the deaf and dumb.

It took Willie a long time to get the hang of the sign tongue, but at the end of his first six months, he could say such simple things as
Please open the door, I’ll plant that, Where’s the hammer
?

The reason for using sign language was set forth in the Guidebook which had been left by the founders of the Society:
Men have created a false world with words, which they use to cover up their sin. Better the language of deeds, of loving and serving those who have been crushed by the words of the world.

All words are lies
, someone had added in red ink.

And someone else had added an entry in purple crayon:
Even these words
.

To the Servants, all books, except the Scripture, were treacherous, and even the Guidebook was looked on as a changing list of suggestions, trustworthy only to the degree that they might inspire a deed of love.

When Willie first told the white-bearded Father Benjamin, who was more or less the head of the community, that he wanted to stay with the Servants, Father Benjamin gave him the Guidebook and a Bible.

Then the old man took two slips of blue paper, wrote a crayon word on each and inserted them into the books.

In the Bible the blue slip said: HINTS.

In the Guidebook, the slip said: LESSER HINTS.

Willie sat up all that night reading the Guidebook. It was a collection of history, sayings, news clippings, recommendations, bits of poetry, occasional jokes.

Of the foundation and beginning of the Society, the Guidebook provided only a little information:

The Society traces its origin to Second Isaiah and is represented in the figure of the Suffering Servant, prefiguring J.
(Five lines of Greek followed here.)

In the early Christian ages Origen refers to certain “asininities of the Roman pontiff” and offers views on diverse subjects which, according to Bl. Peter the Mad (1228-1264), give evidence to his (Origen’s) founding of the Society. In modern times the title of founder is variously ascribed to:

Claude of Liverpool
, burned at the stake for destroying the writings of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and Albert the Great and more than half the theological library of the University of Oxford;

Henri de Grote,
imprisoned (1721) for inscribing certain unseemly words on the rose window of Chartres
;

George L. Cross
(1799-1851), English convert poet and proponent of the theory of personal papacy
;

Milton “Gunner” Felder,
American pacifist Air Force general executed in 1986 by joint court martial of the armies of India, China, Russia and the U.S.A. for multilateral treason and author of the book Kamikaze Kristianity.

Since the Society considers its history trifling and since no exact records exist, no one knows who the founder is.

And no one cares, someone had added in orange ink.

The final entry on this page was a question lettered boldly in green poster paint: BUT WHO IS THE REAL FOUNDER?

Underneath, written twenty-eight times in twenty-eight different ways—penned, penciled, typed, scrawled, scrolled—were the words JESUS, CHRIST, J, HIM, THE LORD and in one case THE SPIRIT.

Willie turned to a further chapter called “Purposes of the Society.”

Under this heading there was a list of words and phrases, all crossed out:

Matthew 25:31-46

Identifying

Being with filthy men

Befriending fools and victims of fools

Serving uselessly the used

Compassioning

Listening to JERCUS adherents and other asses

Listening to JERCUS enemies and other asses

Filling emptiness

The only word remaining in the list that had not been crossed out was
substituting.

A little farther on in the book, Willie came across a collection of yellowed press clippings.

The first of these, from an undated New York paper, bore this banner headline:
AIR ACE TO GHANDIVILLE IN EXCHANGE FOR CONDEMNED PILOT.

Gunner Felder, Renowned Flier, Presumed Dead

Affiliation with Religious Sect Revealed

(New York) Milton N. “Gunner” Felder, famed U.S. pilot and holder of the Congressional Medal of Honor, was reportedly executed in Ghandiville on Friday of last week according to a Reuters dispatch filed late yesterday in Hong Kong.

Felder, 56, the millionaire flying ace of several Asian conflicts, was last seen alive at an airstrip outside Manila on Wednesday of last week. According to Philippine authorities, Felder announced his intention of flying his private plane to the revolutionary capital to offer his life in ransom for Navy Lt. Samuel R. Bleeder, shot down by rebel forces in an air strike against Calcutta last May.

Bleeder, convicted of “crimes against the Peoples’ Republic of India,” had been sentenced to death last week.

Felder’s widow, the Washington socialite Nancy Waterfield, was unavailable for comment.

Felder’s son, Herman Felder, a 22-year-old filmmaker living in Hollywood, disclosed that the air ace had been “greatly agitated by world events over the past year and a half” and had recently become a member of a Roman Catholic religious order called the Silent Servants of the Used, Abused and Utterly Screwed Up.

When pressed for details of the nature of the society, the younger Felder declined comment.

The Felders are the heirs of Frost R. Felder, founder of Agape, Inc., the cosmetic manufacturing firm which was sold ten years ago for a reported $175 million.