The Last Western (21 page)

One day Charley’s father came home from the Plasti-Bloom Corporation and slashed his throat, and he, Charley, had found him in the shower, and there at his feet was the sign he had kept on his desk.

Suddenly Charles Hurdon began to cry.

Willie put his arm on his shoulder.

“It’s okay, Charley. It’s okay, Charley. It’s okay, Charley,” he kept saying over and over again.

They walked through the night, and when the sun came up over Houston, Charley was still going on, pouring out a torrent of disconnected words—names of people, streets, dates, times he had tried to connect with someone.

When they got back to the seminary apartment building, Charley fell asleep in a chair. Then Willie knelt by his side and prayed the listening prayer as faithfully and sincerely as he could because he knew now that Charley’s spirit was nearly dead.

He had come to this place of ideas to manufacture a god out of such material as could be found there—words, books, theses, wonderful arrangements.

Willie determined to work very hard at being Charley’s friend, not knowing then how late it was for Charley and believing in his simpleminded way that love could repair anything.

*  *  *

On Thursdays the seminarians of Albert Einstein went into the city of the poor, the new slum of Houston that had been built on the ruins of the old.

There they tried to learn the ways of attending to the failures of the nation—old people, blind people, black people, people who could not learn, unmotivated people who had always been on public welfare and always would.

It was the happiest day of the week for Willie and the hardest for everyone else.

It was called Christian Witness Day in the curriculum of the theological school and was marked down in the prospectus as a lab in pastoral theology.

But it was just a day to Willie, a short day at that, nine hours, not enough time to solve great or complicated problems, but still enough time to listen to an old man trying to explain his life to himself.

Time for an errand or two.

Time for painting a room.

Time for taking a seventeen-year-old black boy to look for a job and then to console him when he failed to get it.

If Willie was the worst specimen in the glass compartments of the theology space rocket, he was the finest of the species in the ash and cinder world of the very poor.

Within a month the families in what was called the core area knew Willie well, and when he appeared in the streets, there would be a chorus of children to follow him along.

Willie chose Charley Hurdon as his companion on these excursions, and Charley tried in his stiff and awkward way to learn what Willie could teach.

He would watch Willie as he met people, listen to him as he called to the children, tried to see how he did it—the way he had of listening to people who had nothing to say except that everything was going to pieces, as always.

Charley was a fish out of water here, but Willie kept encouraging him, and when Charley sometimes succeeded in sitting still for a moment to listen to an old woman curse the welfare system, he was quick to congratulate him.

“We are here—that’s what matters,” said Willie. “The only way to learn is to do it.”

Willie believed that Charley could catch on to the Gospel like a man can catch on to playing golf just by going to the links.

One night as they boarded the monorail that would take them out of that dismal garden of struggling human plants, Willie said, “That’s the real seminary, Charley—not Albert Einstein. Everything we learn has to help these people.”

Charley wiped his thick glasses inside and out.

“What if you’re not cut out for it?” he said.

“Nobody’s cut out for it,” said Willie. “You just do it. And there aren’t any teachers for doing it except the Lord in the Scripture.”

“No, you have to be cut out,” said Charley with a sigh. “You are cut out and I am not.”

“Why do you talk that way? Half your trouble comes from telling yourself you can’t do things ahead of time.”

“I know myself,” said Charley.

They rode on for a while under a blaze of deodorant signs.

“The awful thing,” said Charley, “is that to me ideas are more important.”

Willie joked this off but he caught a new and deeper sadness in Charley’s tone.

Late in the afternoon of the next Thursday, Willie and Charley were repairing a radiator in the apartment of a black lady named Mrs. Spenser, whose grandmother could remember
her
grandmother speaking of the slave times.

“The good old days,” said Willie.

Mrs. Spenser could not hear anything, so Willie turned to repeat his joke in a sign.

Then he noticed that Charley had left the room.

He went to the hallway and called, but Charley was gone. He was nowhere on the street either.

Willie ran to the monorail and ran from the station to the residence hall.

He dashed up the steps to Charley’s room.

When he opened the door, he saw a shadow swing across the scholarly journals piled high on the desk.

He saw books stacked to make a platform, the body hanging from the pipe overhead.

At the funeral two days later, Father Catwall said that men should never try to judge the deeds of others and that mental illness was a disease like cancer or diabetes and that, anyway, Jesus Christ had defeated death.

But Willie, sitting in the last row of the chapel, knew that Charley had died of that worldwide plague of the century, the cold lovelessness that had gathered over the planet of man and that choked and smothered life in so many places that it was like a poisonous gas slowly being exhaled from an oven in a crowded cottage. No one knew that the oven was on—everybody was so busy talking and persuading one another—and the cottage was so crowded and so thick with the gas that when people fell they weren’t even noticed, and upstairs the babies were breathing, breathing.

But Willie had seen the oven, had seen the wound in Charley, and he knew he had not loved in time. He had made some ghastly mistake, perhaps of talking, of making noises, when something else was called for—what, he didn’t know.

So he wept hard and bitterly, so hard and so bitterly that Father Pomeroy asked him to leave and get control of himself and show some faith.

*  *  *

The years passed slowly, painfully.

Each new year brought changes in the course work.

In the middle of Willie’s fifth year the whole curriculum of the seminary changed. Now everything was taught from films. Into the theater of the spaceship the students trooped every morning at 8:15. They watched movies all morning long and in the afternoon discussed them.

Father Glanz, the Scripture professor, translated what he called the “filmic imperatives” into “their scriptural correlatives” and fed the results into Chi-Mon.

Chi-Mon wrote a paper which was circulated throughout the seminary under the title, “The Mythological Elements in Posttheistic Theology.”

The publication of this paper brought about another Roman investigation, and the film courses were stopped.

The theology of St. Augustine became the new staple of the Albert Einstein diet.

In his room Willie fed on Scripture and the sayings of the Guidebook. He spent whole nights in the listening prayer, and often he thought of Charles Hurdon, whose unintended sojourn became his only lasting impression of the nine years he spent at the Albert Einstein theologate.

In the books
of man the world is charted and the world is arranged and all is carefully placed in boxes.

The brain of man ceaselessly erects cages for the confinement of all that would run and flow.

And since all of life is a running and flowing, man can never hope to capture it all. Nor will he ever stop trying to trap as much as he can.

Willie loved the running and the flowing and did not feel, as others do, the need to trap and cage.

When he came upon the books of man, he felt sorry for the running, leaping things that had been snared.

Something there was in his spirit that moved him to unleash all that he found.

So he seemed a misfit to the guardians and hunters, trappers and planners, who operated the Albert Einstein Seminary.

Each semester those serious men gathered in an airless place of artificial light and urged the rector of the seminary to dismiss him.

Father Catwall, the rector, believed in cages also, but he knew of cages never dreamt of by those theorists of God and the heart of man.

“You have got to understand the position of the diocese,” Father Catwall would say. “How can we take a popular man like this, a folk hero practically, and say he isn’t good enough to be a priest? That is an insult to the common man.”

“Many would applaud the dismissal,” said the professor of moral theology. “After all, your common man knows he threw away a fortune in baseball.”

“What of the reputation of the diocese when he begins to teach and preach?” said Father Pomeroy. “What, when he tells people that what they believe and what they do are the same thing?” Father Pomeroy was referring to something Willie had written on an exam.

“Or when he says the postmodern Scripture is just another myth, except not as beautiful as the old?” said Father Glanz, quoting from another exam.

“Still he is a good-hearted young fellow,” said Father Catwall, “and there is always the example of the Cure of Ars.”

“For God’s sake, spare us that,” said the professor of moral theology.

And for God’s sake, and Willie’s, they were spared that. The case was referred to Monsignor McCool, the handsome chancellor, who called Willie in for a chat.

“Gosh, Willie,” Monsignor McCool said, flashing his toothy smile, “the profs have got me on quite a spot. They want me to flunk you out.”

“I know,” said Willie, feeling he had been through all this before.

“Do you really try? Some of the men say you don’t show any interest in the studies. Why, you’re scheduled for ordination next year. You’ll be a priest. And as a priest you’ll have to give instructions, you’ll have to teach and preach. People will expect you to answer their questions. So you have to know theology.”

“Why?”

“Why? Why, to answer the questions people have. People have great problems of faith today. No belief in God or Christ or the sacraments.”

“But if you don’t believe,” Willie said, holding up his hands, “how can theology help?” The monsignor appeared not to hear the question.

“I think of Doctor Phelps of the atomic research division,” the monsignor said. “He does not think there is a God, so we have these talks every Tuesday evening. We’re reading many books together. I believe we’re getting somewhere.”

“Does he not believe in a false god, or does he positively reject love?” Willie asked.

“I beg your pardon?” said Monsignor McCool.

“Doctor Phelps. Is it that he cannot accept the false god that is often preached, or is it rather that he cannot love?”

“Why—we—that—you—what’s that got to do with it?”

“With what?”

“What has not—loving—got to do with not believing?”

“Everything,” said Willie.

That is some heresy whose name I have forgotten, thought the monsignor.

He decided to try another tack.

“You will grant that there are some theological problems.”

“Well,” said Willie, “everybody has problems.”

“But suppose a person came to you with a definite problem in theology. What would you do?”

“Send him to a theologian.”

“Suppose a theologian weren’t available.”

“Well then, I would ask him to be patient.”

“But this man is in anguish, in great doubt and suffering.”

“Over theology?”

“His faith is giving way,” said the monsignor.

“But that is not what you said, monsignor. You said he had a theological problem.”

“All right, all right,” the monsignor said, his smile not quite so good-willed, “then let’s start over again. Let’s say a person comes to you in spiritual distress. He has begun doubting certain things. He asks you to help him. This is an intelligent person, a bright person, someone who reads theology. He asks you for help.”

“I would try to be his friend,” Willie said.

“You would restore his faith through friendship?”

“I would hope to show him love.”

The monsignor, doodling with a pencil, traced a little cross on the calendar of the Silver Swallow Mortuary, which lay open on his desk and was his appointment book.

“Tell me—ah—how that would work?”

“I do not know how it works,” said Willie, “only that it does. We learn to know the Loving One through some experience of loving.”

“Surely,” said the monsignor, “you have tested your—should we say theory?”

“To some degree,” said Willie. “And I have learned from my failures.”

“Tell me of a failure.”

“Charley Hurdon.”

“But he was mentally ill,” said the monsignor, drawing a circle around the cross on his calendar.

“He was unloved,” Willie said sadly. “We did not show him love.”

“We cannot be blamed for his illness,” the monsignor said firmly.

“I can be,” said Willie. “I was his friend.”

“What could you have done for him?”

“I have not learned that,” Willie replied. “I have only learned what not to do, the endless talking and all the rest.”

The monsignor, biting his lip, remembered an old dream he once had of being a White Father missioner. It was a long time ago, before he had a career.

“You think you could have saved him?”

“Not I—God. Charley and God could have worked it out,” said Willie.

The monsignor chuckled and drew a second circle around the encircled cross. He saw that it was no use trying to talk to Willie.

“You are confusing many, many things in that line of reasoning,” said the monsignor.

“Possibly,” said Willie.

Once the monsignor had wanted to serve the poor, but he had come into another world and now from the other world, Willie seemed to him like a retarded child, one of those crippled persons who makes little things society needs that a machine does not have the patience or endurance for, or else the machines are put to more important service.