The Last Western (18 page)

That night Father Benjamin asked the community to reflect upon the words of Sister Mary Julia Zipp of the twentieth century, who had written in the Guidebook:
Now art glorifies the artist, affirming the part above the whole. That is why art too serves death.

The community listened in silence for twenty minutes. Willie listened with the others, trying to understand what Sister Mary Julia had meant.

At the end of the listening, Truman brought forth the package that had arrived that morning. He carefully removed the wrapping and held up what appeared to be a blurred, overexposed photograph measuring two feet by three feet.

Solemnly, Truman held this strange, whitish image before the assembly of Servants.

Father Benjamin, standing by Truman’s side, gave the sign that meant
search
, then said, “This is the last work of Brother Joto, now in prison with Brother Herman Felder. Brother Joto has sent this work to us for meditation and then destruction.”

Father Benjamin looked at Willie as he continued. “Brother Joto has repudiated all artistic endeavors, but he has given us to understand that this final painting may convey a message to our community. Let us then contemplate this abominable painting, as Brother Joto has called his work, and if it contains a message for us, then let our hearts receive it with love.”

Truman set the art piece on the mantel. The Servants gazed at it in silence.

Looking at the picture, Willie at first saw only blurred shapes and shades of white—a confusion of planes and angles and circles, all of white.

Then he saw a sort of pattern—white suns, white stars, white planets, all seen through a series of vertical white bars.

As he looked longer at this strange design, he saw the faint outline of another shape. It seemed at first the upper part, the head, of an animal—the head and shoulders of a gorilla or monkey, a white beast, half man, half ape, caught in a storm of white.

Then the figure moved.

Willie stood up. The other Servants looked up at him.

He could not take his eyes off the painting now.

The ape face was changing—turning into human faces, faces he could not bear to look upon.

He saw his father.

He saw the face of his mother.

Now Cool Dawn.

Carolyn.

Clio.

Thatcher Grayson.

The face of Robert Regent smiled before him.

A brilliant light shone from the center of the picture. He began to see color in the painting—green, blue, gold, red—and something more. He saw first a face, then a figure robed in fire, coming toward him.

He cried out, then fell.

When he came to, Truman and Father Benjamin were cradling him, giving him red wine to drink. The other Servants had left the common room.

“What is it you saw?” Father Benjamin asked softly.

“I don’t know,” said Willie. “Faces.” He tried to remember. “Where is the painting?”

Truman pointed to the fireplace. The fire had consumed all but the frame of the painting.

Truman made a sign that meant
sameness
; then a sign that meant
winter, snow.

“The
dona
of the others,” said Benjamin, “were pictures of beasts in need of care. A frozen gorilla, one brother said. Another said that the painting showed the coming of an ice age.”

“The faces?” said Willie.

“No one saw faces,” said Father Benjamin, and Willie saw that his eyes were bright with tears.

*  *  *

The next day Truman was gone.

Where
? Willie asked in sign.

Benjamin indicated prison bars.

“A substitution?” Willie said in regular speech.

“Brother Truman has gone to join Brother Joto and Brother Herman Felder in the East for a time.”

Willie felt sad that the Man of Sorrows had gone.

“He made the best signs,” he said.

Then Father Benjamin told Willie that when Truman had been shot down on his mercy flight, he had fallen into the hands of an army fighting for great ideals in Asia.

Officers of the army believed Truman knew secret plans of the enemy army and that the plane he had been flying and that they had destroyed had carried not blood, as Truman contended, but a new type of liquid bomb.

“That is how he came to make beautiful signs,” said Father Benjamin.

Willie said he didn’t understand.

“To encourage him to tell the secrets,” said Benjamin, “they removed his tongue.”

Willie started to cry, but Benjamin stopped him with a sign that meant
great gift
,

“He is stronger than we are,” Father Benjamin said. “Since he is protected against all lying, he is the knight of impenetrable armor.”

A deeper peace
came to the desert retreat.

Willie worked in the fields and in the barn. He prayed with his brothers and sisters. He came to learn all the ways and customs of the Silent Servants of the Used, Abused and Utterly Screwed Up.

He read the sayings and recommendations of the Guidebook, praying over them and searching out their often difficult meanings.

He decided to read the Scripture all the way through from Genesis of the Old Testament to Revelations in the New. This proved to be difficult because he was a slow reader and could not make sense out of many happenings in the Old Testament.

He asked Father Benjamin to help him read the Scripture. So Father Benjamin waived the silence rule for an hour each day so that Willie might be instructed in the Scripture and in the more difficult sections of the Guidebook.

With Father Benjamin’s help Willie began to see the pattern of the Old Testament happenings, though there were still many stories and events he found strange and complicated.

For the first time since the days when Cool Dawn used to read the Gospels to him, Willie went through the books of Matthew and Mark and Luke. He relished what he read, copying the sayings of the Lord in the back of his Guidebook and committing them to memory.

Father Benjamin helped him to understand the letters of Paul, with their thunder and sunshine, their anger and their love.

With Benjamin’s help he came to know and love the strange, beautiful Gospel of John.

The sixteenth chapter of the Gospel moved him to tears.

“When will all men be one?” he asked Father Benjamin.

“When divisions are no longer worshipped.”

“In our time?”

“If we learn to put away our fears.”

Willie puzzled over a special group of Guidebook notes dealing with social and political matters, and in particular the sayings of Sister Cor, who had died in 1993.

“The sayings of Sister Cor about Marxism and capitalism and monism—I understand none of those things.”

Little by little Father Benjamin explained.

Capitalism was a system where each person owned things and the right to own things was held to be sacred and being one individual person was held to be the most sacred fact or truth of life.

Marxism was many different systems but fundamentally it was a system that made the state the owner of property instead of individual persons, and the national state was held to be supreme.

Monism was the new movement in the world toward one universal government and source of ownership, a world state that aimed to erase all national and racial boundaries.

Willie tried to understand.

“Sister Cor writes that all these systems are lies and follies because they are substitutes for God. And worse, she says here, they are substitutes for man.”

“It is a most complicated subject, but Sister Cor says many true things.”

“Does our Society believe in a system?”

“The Servants believe only in the peopling of people.”

One afternoon, happening upon an entry by one Furlong Dog, Willie found these paragraphs:

JERCUS
is an alliance of the Northern people of the world, the possessors, against the Southern people, the non-possessors. Nothing unites the Northern people—Russia, Europe, the U.S., Japan and China—not religion, not culture, inheritance, nothing. Nothing that is, but
GREED
. For years many of the Northern countries fought against each other, but now they are united in the common cause of avarice.

This sinful greed has cemented over all the past differences and made the rich nations into a family. The JERCUS alliance is the most evil fact of the present day world and the Society must do all within its peaceful power to bring it to ruin. I am to be hanged on the morrow for spying on
JERCUS
military operations in Canada. Peace to all.

“What Brother Furlong says of JERCUS—is it true?”

“Largely,” said Benjamin.

“What do we do about it?”

“Pursue a more radical politics.”

“What politics?”

“The politics of the Kingdom of God.”

After a few months Father Benjamin said he had taught Willie all that he could teach of the Scripture and that it would be better for Willie to continue his Scripture study in silence.

So Willie went on with his reading and praying of the Scripture and the Guidebook, but in the silence commanded by the Servants.

Soon he learned to listen in the manner the Guidebook prescribed and soon began to live what in former times men called the mystical life, though in truth he had been living the mystical life since childhood, and Benjamin had seen this and given way to it, rejoicing and marveling over it.

The mysterious, unseen things had always been real to Willie but the longer he stayed with the Servants, the more truly he knew them and felt them.

He experienced the unseen realities, such as God’s presence and God’s love, as other men taste and smell and hear and have sex. It was as if he had a second set of senses that allowed him to sense the unseen, the unheard, the unfelt. He was filled with a peace and joy that he neither understood nor thought to question.

Sometimes, it is true, he would look back with grief upon his previous life.

But all that, he felt, was in the care of God.

In fact, only God made it bearable.

So for a year, and more than a year, he lived in a sort of daze. He wanted nothing but to go on living just this way, with his brothers, with the routine of the day, his prayers, the Scripture and the Guidebook.

But one spring afternoon as he scraped his hoe across the still hard ground, he lifted his eyes to the horizon, and there he saw, really saw for the first time in months, the city of Houston.

And the daze ended.

As he looked at the city, he felt strangely troubled.

He tried to work but his eyes kept drifting back to the outline of the city.

It was not the past that troubled him at that moment, not the loss of his loved ones, but the city itself—the way it shone there in the hazy sun.

For a second he had the odd and frightening sensation that Houston had somehow moved toward him in the last hour, or perhaps during the night. It seemed to be asking him a question.

He fell then to thinking of things he had not thought of in months, odd things that come to people in quiet moments, those unimportant things that for some reason or other stick in the memory: the forlorn statue of Richard M. Nixon in the little park near the William McKinley Arms, the bird Mrs. Sarto used to own, how it sang only at seven in the evening, the way Clio said
onions
—Clio!

Suddenly a hundred faces floated before him, the poor and black and young and old, the clear and wrinkled faces of the people of the old neighborhood, Mr. Branch and Officer Judge and José and Louie and Sally and Mac and Charlotte and old Mr. Sprague, the druggist.

Surely not all the people had been killed in the riots.

Where were they? How were they getting on? What had happened to them? What had happened to Clio?

The hoe fell from his hand, and he was stricken with feelings of guilt.

Here at the place of the Servants he had been living in peace and serenity, while just a few miles away, who knew what sufferings people might be enduring?

What right did he have to possess peace and serenity when others, his brothers and sisters, lived in hardship and pain and misery?

And they
were
, these others, his brothers and sisters. There was no doubt of that. In the Scripture of that afternoon he had read those remarkable words in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, which begin with verse 31.

Willie went to his room and knelt in prayer, listening. He prayed through the night, missing the evening meal. The next morning he went to Father Benjamin’s room.

In sign language, which at that moment was very difficult for him, Willie asked:
Should we not go to the city
?

Father Benjamin gave a sign that Willie did not understand.

Willie saw the Guidebook on Father Benjamin’s desk.

He opened it to a page he had often read and pointed to a recommendation that was one of the earliest entries in the book.

The Servants will always choose the way of serving the poor, the lonely, the despised, the outcast, the miserable and the misfit. The mission of the Servants is to prove to the unloved that they are not abandoned, not finally left alone. Hence, the natural home of the Servants is strife, misfortune, crisis, the falling apart of things. The Society cherishes failure for it is in failure, in trouble, in the general breaking up of classes, stations, usual conditions, normal routines that human hearts are open to the light of God’s mercy.

Father Benjamin read the recommendation and nodded.

Willie, taking a piece of blue paper, wrote his question again:
Then shouldn’t we go to Houston
?

Father Benjamin read the question, turned the paper over and wrote his answer:
We have a message for Houston and also a mission. The time is coming.

Willie puzzled over this answer.

He took another sheet of paper and wrote,
There must be much work to be done right now. Why do we wait
?

Father Benjamin smiled at this. He took the paper, turned it over and wrote,
The time is very near. The mission is not what you think. Pray at Eucharist tonight for illumination.