The Last Western (20 page)

The unmarried seminarians, numbering about ninety, lived in an apartment building near the spaceship theologate, where the theories were taught by the frighteningly brilliant professors.

Another twenty-five or thirty married seminarians lived in various sections of the city.

Some of the married seminarians were ordained priests who had left the priesthood for one reason or another in the past and who had decided to come back to the ministry. They were undergoing a retraining period now.

The single seminarians were permitted to come and go as they pleased, though they were expected to spend their nights at their apartments and to come together for Mass at least once a week.

The seminarians were a congenial crowd, for the most part, most of them bright, most of them about the same age as Willie, though he, with his red hair already flecked with gray and with little lines beginning to appear around his slanty almond eyes, looked older.

Willie’s kindness and good cheer and his habit of laughing at himself endeared him to his fellow students, who talked often of his “simplicity” and his scandalous unseriousness.

“Good old Willie,” they would say after he had made a wrong guess in one of the classes where he sat taking in practically nothing.

At night the students would go up to the roof of their apartment building. There, with the city of Houston spread out before them, they would relax and joke and talk over the things that had happened during the day.

Sometimes they spoke of what they had learned on Chi-Mon—where a certain scriptural myth came from, what the Logos meant to Duns Scotus, the relationship between Immanuel Kant’s Categories and the Ideas of the philosopher Plato.

Willie would sit very quietly on the coping of the building, smiling his sad, lopsided smile, listening and nodding as his fellow seminarians talked, understanding nothing.

Sometimes, late at night, the students would follow Willie down to his bare cell of a room and continue the one-sided talk.

Willie would listen, nodding, not understanding.

Then, more often than not, the students would begin talking about other things—about themselves, their worries, their fears, certain doubts. Willie would listen carefully as in the old days at the William McKinley Arms.

Sometimes, late at night, the theories and arrangements did not seem enough for those who still had their plain senses. After a few months even the very brightest students found themselves coming to Willie’s room to talk away the night. They came like patients seeking a cure for that disease there is no name for, the sickness that overtakes those who know that knowing is not enough.

One night there appeared on the rooftop the haggard figure of Charles Hurdon, the most brilliant student in the whole seminary. Tall, pale, wearing thick glasses, he looked like an exhausted basketball player engaged in a lost contest.

There were three other students on the rooftop. They had been talking of a point in philosophy, which Willie not only did not understand but could not remember having heard discussed that afternoon in Father Rickaby’s class.

Charles Hurdon, listening for awhile, laughed suddenly.

“All that’s beside the point,” he said with a slight stammer. Then Charles Hurdon told Willie and the three others that, using Chi-Mon, he had proved that the world had reached the Y point.

“What’s the Y point?” one of the students asked.

“The end of usable resources.”

Then Charles Hurdon explained that the resources of the earth had been used so mindlessly for 200 years that the progress of decline was irreversible and that man’s enterprise was doomed.

The other students scoffed at this, but Charles Hurdon calmly argued his position.

One of the students said to Willie, “What about it, Willie? We going down for the count?”

“Only if we want,” said Willie.

“Sentimental
merde
doesn’t solve anything,” Hurdon snapped. He glared at Willie, then went down to his room.

Very late that night Charles Hurdon came to Willie’s room.

“I didn’t mean what I said.”

“It’s okay,” said Willie.

Then Willie saw how Charles Hurdon’s hands twitched and how his face was blotched. He seemed an advance man for the used-up world he had predicted.

“Can I help, Charley?”

Charley went away without a word. Willie knelt down and prayed in the listening fashion. He had seen the wound in

Charles Hurdon’s spirit and he asked for instructions.

*  *  *

Many of the students at the seminary remembered Willie as a baseball star, and in the early days at Albert Einstein they would ask him to pitch in the games they played among themselves.

But Willie would not pick up a baseball. Sometimes he would play other sports, always unseriously and carelessly but trying hard not to give offense to those who played earnestly.

In his first term the students would ask specific questions about his baseball days, but he was hesitant to say much, politely answering with a yes or no or maybe. After awhile the students got the idea he did not really care to talk about it, so they stopped pressing him on the subject.

Several times newsmen came to the seminary apartment building, hoping to interview Willie for radio or TV or the newspapers.

Willie politely refused to see them.

Even so, a story appeared in the Houston paper one day about “The Miracle Pitcher Who Had Decided to Hurl for God.”

Thoughtfully, the seminarians kept that edition of the paper out of the common room so that Willie never saw it.

But from that day on, Willie began to get mail from all parts of the country, from people who had remembered him as the greatest pitcher in baseball.

The letters were often kind but sometimes they were full of hate.

It’s niggers like you who are ruining the country and the national game, said an unsigned card from Iowa. You think you can turn down a lot of money and get away with it!

Another person wrote,
Do you think people want to be preached to by a chink-wetback who didn’t have enough sense to make a million dollars?

But making up for the bad notes were two letters Willie got one day from Clio and Mr. Grayson.

It had been almost two years since the night of horror in New York, and Willie could not wait to find out how Clio was, and where, and what he was doing.

The letter was postmarked San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Dear Willie: Don’t know what to say—just glad you’re OK. After NYC I tried everywhere to find you. I was afraid you got caught in the trouble in Houston. I heard your family got it—and Carolyn. All my people went too.

Martha and me got married after I left NYC and I been playing ball steady down here, in P.R. and also other places, Mexico,
etc.
Willie, you would not believe how poor people are in some of these places—people without houses or places to sleep, babies sick and hungry all the time, families living off the garbage of the rich. Terrible and I mean Terrible. Playing ball and making pretty good money but feel like I ought to be doing something, what I don’t know. Write will you? Martha is the best wife in the world.

Love. Clio

P.S. Guess you really want to be a priest. OK. Good luck in it. But if you ever want to play ball, come on down here. Your pal.

Tucked in the letter was a color print of a black child. On the back Clio had written:
Here’s my boy. I named him after you. Some cat isn’t he?

The baby in a yellow blanket looked like Clio.

Willie, feeling silly, cried over the picture, which he pinned up over his desk.

Mr. Grayson’s note was briefer. It had come from Chicago.

Son, you chose the right road, the God road. More and more I too am interested in the spiritual side. I been going to the Church of the Holy Spirit Who Blows Men’s Minds. We pray in all languages. I’m still with the team. We are losing. Your friend, T. Grayson.

Willie answered both letters that very day, and from then on, he kept in regular touch with Clio and Mr. Grayson.

He also kept in touch with the Servants, who were awaiting trial in the Houston jail.

He went to the jail three or four afternoons a week, but even in jail the Servants kept to their rule of silence.

Once Willie passed a note to Father Benjamin saying,
Surely here we can talk. I can get aid for you maybe
.

But Father Benjamin’s written reply was,
We are one now with all the unvisited abandoned prisoners of the world. Should we be better off than they?

So Willie’s visits were strange occasions. He would sit outside the cell of Father Benjamin or one of the other brothers.

Sometimes they would pray together, but more often they would sit or kneel in silence.

The guards took note of the frequency of Willie’s visits and thought that it was most suspicious that Willie and the Servants did not speak to one another.

In their reports they said,
Undoubtedly, they are conspiring in a code, or The red-haired Chinese Negro subject is communicating certain messages to the prisoners in sign language, obviously an attempt to conceal the nature of the plot being planned. Recommend getting an expert to tell us what they are hatching, preferably someone who understands sign language and the way a traitor’s mind works.

One afternoon on his return from the jail, Willie got word that Father Catwall wanted to see him in the office.

Father Catwall had heard about the visits Willie had been making to the jail.

“We can’t stop you going down there,” the rector said. “In fact visiting people in the pokey is a Christian act. Still, the people you are visiting are definitely oddball types and it’s rumored you spend a lot of time with them.”

“What’s wrong with that?” asked Willie.

“Nothing, except that, you know, you’re a celebrity. People watch you more than they do the other fellows. You can’t project a bad image without it reflecting on the seminary and on the diocese and on our most reverend bishop.”

Willie said nothing. There was nothing he could think of to answer Father Catwall’s argument.

“Then there is the matter of your studies,” Father Catwall said. “Your semester grades are, well, what would be a good word for them—miserable?”

“Miserable would be a good word,” said Willie cheerfully.

Father Catwall said without smiling, “What I am telling you is cut down on the visiting of the oddballs and put in more time on the books. After all, as a priest, you’ll have to know the answers. You do grasp that, don’t you?”

That night Willie went to see old Father Horgan, who had become his confessor and his spiritual director.

Willie told Father Horgan, as he had told him before, of his troubles with the studies.

“And now Father Catwall has asked me to cut down on visiting my brothers in the jail and spend that time studying the books, which won’t do any good, seeing as how I don’t understand what is in the books.”

“Do as they say,” said Father Horgan. “Besides, it will not be so difficult now. Just a while ago I heard on the radio that the Servants were being transferred to a high security prison in Atlanta, Georgia.”

Willie went to his room, full of sad thoughts of his brothers, whom he had loved and whom he thought he would never see again.

That day he had received a postcard from Clio. The card showed a cathedral in Brazil.

Clio had written:
Willie, when you get up there and become a priest, you aren’t going to build churches like this are you? People in this town sleep in the streets. No one should have to do that, not with churches like this one. Someday the people will take over maybe, just take charge. Why they don’t right now is what I can’t understand anymore than I can understand this church.

Willie scotch-taped the card to his wall with the cathedral facing inward so that he could see only the handwriting of his friend.

Then he picked up the book of theology that he had been reading for two months without the slightest comprehension.

*  *  *

The progressive theories of the Albert Einstein Seminary regularly brought investigators from Rome.

When the investigators appeared on the campus, the seminarians reacted with undisguised glee.

“Pomeroy’s getting sacked!”

“Rickaby’s resigning!”

There would be a missing professor in the classroom, an overheard row in the faculty lounge; the atmosphere of a criminal trial came into the spaceship. The investigation would last a week, then one day the severe-looking Romans, with their black attache cases, would be gone.

The theories would recommence—new ones, variants of the old ones or sometimes very old ones that had been so long forgotten that, resurrected, they seemed avant-garde.

There was a row at the beginning of Willie’s second term at Einstein, and a new old system was introduced to the curriculum. It was called Thomism.

Willie tried diligently to understand Thomism, but it was as mysterious to him as the abandoned system of mathematico-theologism.

*  *  *

Charles Hurdon, of the thick glasses and the stammering manner, came to Willie’s room at three in the morning.

“Can we walk?” he said.

“Sure,” said Willie.

So they walked, Willie and Charles Hurdon, through the dark streets of Houston while Charles told a rambling story of his life.

He began by saying he was unintended. Willie asked what this meant, but Charles Hurdon did not explain.

He spoke first of his father, who worked for a corporation that made Plasti-Bloom and on his desk kept a sign that said,
Try a Nice Warm Bath.

Then he spoke of how, when he was a boy, he lived in a room by himself without companionship and how he invented a cat named Foro, who later changed into a person.

His mother used morphine because, Charles Hurdon said, “She could not stand the sound of the human voice—my voice.”

Then Foro had died.

“I grew up and I went to school—I got good grades. There was a girl named Marilyn. I think I loved her.”

They were walking now near the ball park of Houston, the old Astrodome. As Charles talked, Willie could almost see the face of the mother going in and out of the hospital.