The Last Western (30 page)

He arrived in that venerable city just as Willie succeeded in putting down its worst riot in 150 years.

The fires had destroyed many splendid historic buildings, including the building called Independence Hall, where the heroic thinkers had gotten halfway through a new idea and given up.

That building now was a charred ruin and the great cracked bell that symbolized liberty for some of the people some of the time had melted away.

The President of the United States wept, live, on nationwide television and called the melting of the bell a tragic loss.

Many millions of Americans wept with him.

Other losses in the city of fraternal devotion were the seventeen people who had been killed in the tumult, but the President did not call them tragic, since they were not symbolic reminders of splendid thoughts.

Clio and Willie were together in an old motel that had once been elegant and handsome but had been pillaged and burned and turned into a hovel.

“You have good intentions, you are sincere,” Clio told him, “but you are wrong. If you had the final good of the people in sight, you would encourage them to finish the job, burn everything in sight, the whole rotten business.”

“And kill themselves in the process?”

“For the future,” said Clio, now a general of the Revolutionary Army of Brazil. “Don’t you care about the future?”

“What is the future?” said Willie. “Another cage. You want to kill people for the future good of society? What’s that but murder?”

“You are a sentimentalist,” Clio answered.

“What shall we call you who want to make people slaves of the future?”

“Nothing gets better without violence,” Clio said. “Violence is the vocation of our generation—to make things better, we have to be violent.”

Willie looked at him in the dim light of their ruined motel. It had been a long day on the sound truck and the city was quiet for the first night in a month.

“Old Clio,” he said fondly. “What ever happened to my friend Clio? He has become a great general. A hero.”

“Look at yourself,” said Clio. “Do you know, people call you a saint?”

Willie laughed.

But when the silence fell between them, they knew that the courses they were following made them enemies in an unfathomable way.

“And did the arms that you bought from Mr. Goldenblade make everybody happy?”

“It won us half the country.”

“What will you do now?”

“Win the other half.”

“What does winning mean?”

“Justice. Power to the people. A sharing of the resources of the country. The taking away of the big plantations from the few and the giving of those lands to the people.”

“If only all that could come about without killing.”

“If only the mountains were gold,” said Clio.

Afterwards, after Clio had gone to bed, Willie prayed and then read his mail.

The blanket industry in Delphi was flourishing. The people had written a long and loving letter, sending a dozen pictures of the church-factory.
When will you come back, Willie
? wrote the son of Sureness Jack.

This made Willie sad, for he had been gone a month now, and an official church agency in Washington had scheduled a tour that would take him to fourteen cities in the next six weeks.

Perhaps he would never go back to Delphi.

He lay down on his bed, placing his hand where the scarlet message had been written, and fell immediately into a deep sleep.

He had been having a dream lately—a wonderful dream where he seemed to float high above some dark, unknown terrain, and he began to dream this dream now in the motel that had halfway burned down in the middle of the poorest section of the city of brotherly caring.

In the dream he circled about in the air making no strong effort, but rather moving about as he wished with a sense of playfulness and freedom that was pure joy and that relieved all those vague, sad feelings that afflicted him during his waking hours when he saw the suffering.

The sad daytime pains were on the surface and could be borne. The old diamond of his hope shone through them always. And pain, he knew, came with the equipment and was always there, a difficult traveling mate.

But the pains hurt him more than he knew and wore him down, so that when he rested, the dream came quickly, and though he welcomed it, he attached no importance to it, thinking of it only as a drain for the tensions of the day.

When he slept these nights, he looked forward to the dream and came to love the few hours he could live in it.

Sometimes, with one part of his mind, he was fully conscious of the effect of the dreaming and he found himself standing away from his flying self, giving thanks to the Loving One for this nighttime journey, thinking how wonderful it was to fly, to go beyond the limits and play in the unmeasured spaces where there were no charts or maps, where nothing had been planned and thinking was always discovering and the natural mood of one’s mind was a joyous wonder.

At other times he dreamed more purely and perfectly and there was no difference between the sleeping, half-thinking Willie and the soaring Willie, and those dreams took him far, far into the boundless, clockless places where even the beating of his heart came more slowly between long pauses.

And sometimes, caught up in the rapture of the flight, he did not want to come back, though he knew he must come back.

And he found that when he told himself, Go back now, at that moment he woke up, refreshed and ready for the day but with a lingering regret that he had left a lovely place, and that regret became the first sad pain of the day.

He had flown far out in his dreaming flight that night in the city of Philadelphia when the dull thudding began, some repeated sound that finally became loud and insistent, and he knew that he must go back.

It was a man knocking on the door, a very old black man bearing a telegram.

“I didn’t know there was anyone working in the motel tonight,” said Willie sleepily.

“They got me to come in around nine o’clock. I would have come in and worked free if I knew you was among us.”

“I’m afraid to look at the telegram,” said Willie. “It means some other city is in trouble.”

“But you’re givin’ rout to the trouble,” said the old man. “The Spirit is workin’ through you in a powerful way.”

“You are very good to say that, my brother,” said Willie. “What can I give you?”

“Nothin’. It is me who should give. But I got nothin’. The fire consumed everything I owned, though it wasn’t a good deal to begin with.”

“My poor brother,” said Willie.

“Don’t feel sorry. Many others lost their health and the Baker family lost their son.”

“I met Mrs. Baker last night.”

“It’s all the work of the evil spirits,” the old man said. “You are drivin’ the evil spirits away and I am pleased to be near you. When I heered you was comin’ to the town I knew then that the evil spirits would be leavin’.”

“If men work together and learn to love each other,” said Willie, “no evil spirits can enter their cities.”

“Amen to that,” said the old man. “But hardly nobody give the matter any attention. Each man shine his own shoes, bendin’ over without lookin’ at the distance to the place where the brother sits. There’s a dark valley gets made there. That where the evil spirit walks without gettin’ seen.”

“There is truth in what you say, my brother. With what you know of these matters, you should be able to do much in the neighborhood where you live.”

“If we had a neighborhood,” said the old man.

“You will build a new one, I know,” said Willie.

“If you say that, I can believe it.”

“You have to believe it for yourself, my brother.”

“I will try,” said the old man. “But when you get to be seventy-nine it’s hard to believe in new things.”

“You believe in the Lord.”

“I do. He is all I believe.”

“Well, the Lord is the one who throws a strong light on those dark spaces between men that you spoke of. It is in the Lord that each man can see the other as his brother.”

“But oftentimes men want only to save they own skin—polishin’ the shoe again.”

“It is a struggle for every one of us,” said Willie, and he embraced the old man.

“God go with you always.”

“Feel like I’m with God right now,” said the old man.

Willie opened the telegram, expecting the worst, and the telegram was in certain ways worse than the worst.

The telegram said that he had been appointed a bishop of the Roman Catholic church, an auxiliary to the bishop of Houston, with special assignment outside the diocese.

The telegram said that he had the right to refuse the appointment and then advised him to go to the office of the archbishop of Philadelphia the following morning and make his decision known to such representatives of the church as he would find there.

The telegram was signed by the apostolic delegate in Washington and by Archbishop Tooler of Houston.

At first Willie considered the telegram a joke, but he knew officials of the church did not do joking things.

Then certainly it must be a mistake. But when he read the telegram again he knew it was not a mistake.

A bishop. The thought of it appalled him, then made him laugh.

He had no way of knowing of the various telegrams that had been sent back and forth between other people during the past three weeks, none of whom considered it a funny or joking matter.

He is mentally simple enough
, George Doveland Goldenblade had written to his brother, Cardinal Goldenblade of New Orleans,
so it wouldn’t swell up his head. And making him a bishop would prove to the nigras and the radicals that the church is not a racist organization as so many monist traitors have alleged. He is young and simpleminded and will be a miserable businessman. On the other hand, if we are to stop the spread of these riots, the church will have to do some extraordinary strange things. I believe that making this cloud a bishop would help cool things down. I think of him going into those ghettos in his colorful garb and knowing the nigras, I know a tactic like this would succeed. If the delegate can see it as a public relations gesture… .

Willie read the telegram a third time.

How could he talk to people as a bishop? That high, noble office would take him away from everybody.

He wondered if Clio might still be awake.

He walked down the corridor to his room.

There was a slit of light under the door, so he rapped quietly.

A dark face appeared in the opening crack: glasses, a moustache.

“What do you want?”

“Is Clio there?”

“What do you want with him?”

“Who is it?” came Clio’s voice from the background.

The door swung open, disclosing a dozen young men sitting in a ragged circle on the floor. Clio was in the midst of them.

The faces of the young men were black, most of them, but several were Latin, possibly Brazilian.

The young men were of Clio’s age, or a little younger.

They said nothing, only looked at Willie coldly, their faces sending signals of contempt.

Then one of the youngest said, “The great peacemaker, who plays into the hands of the—”

“Shut up,” Clio said sharply.

He came to the door.

“Can I talk to you?” said Willie.

Clio closed the door behind him. When Willie showed him the telegram, Clio laughed.

“That’s the way I feel too,” said Willie.

“Take it, man, take it,” Clio said. “What the hell? Think of all the things you’ll be able to do as a superpriest.”

“I won’t be able to do anything. How can I be with the poor as a bishop?”

“There’s something to be said for it,” said Clio. “Who’s going to tell you what kind of a bishop you have to be?”

“There are rules that they have.”

“Who cares about rules? You should absolutely take it, even though they only want to use you—your name.”

Willie shook his head slowly. There was a red fire-escape light at one end of the hallway, and in its glow the face of his friend was tired and unhappy. He wished suddenly that they were boys again and that life could be turned back.

“You might as well be a big shot,” Clio said.

Willie felt the presence of some alien thing in the hallway, as if a third person had opened a door behind them. He turned around to look, but there was no one there.

“Clio,” he began, and then didn’t know what to say.

Clio felt the same confusion.

“Take it,” he said once more. “What difference does it make—I mean, nothing changes.”

Willie felt tears coming into his eyes. He had the panicky sense that something was being lost forever. There was this bright, beautiful world that he knew, but then he thought,
He has his own world
. He had a picture of Clio with a gun then.

He took Clio’s hand impulsively.

“Don’t kill, Clio!” he blurted out.

Clio gripped his hand, looking at him steadily. Then they were shaking hands and the moment passed and they were making a promise to have dinner together that night.

But that night Clio was on a plane to Mexico City and Willie was on a plane to Houston.

They had meant to keep their appointment but the choices they had made were set, and from now on, the choices would break all the appointments they would ever make between themselves.

*  *  *

In the morning Willie went to the chancery office in Philadelphia.

Newsmen followed him.

“Willie! Willie! Hey, Reverend.”

They wanted to ask many questions but he said nothing. His face was fixed in the set, sad smile.

In the night he had made up his mind, or rather his mind had been made up for him by the secret that he carried with him, that told him,
Let them do what they will do
.

“Where’s the next riot?” a newsman shouted.

Willie kept walking.

As he reached the stone steps to the chancery, a man stepped out of the crowd—a tall, thin man with an ashen face and red-rimmed eyes, wearing a white trench coat.

Without a word he handed Willie a note then fell back into the brood of newsmen and disappeared.