“It’s all changed now, though,” he would say. “A man can go for months without getting into a shootin’ scrape. It’s more excitin’ in this country, around the wells.”
Now and then Joshua would stare off into space and sigh.
“Son,” he would say, “the only thing I don’t like about this job is the lonesomeness. Sometimes it just gets me down.”
His sighs would become deeper.
“You see, son,” he would say, “I’m powerful fond of women.”
Old Man Ringle’s suspicions finally centered on Dave Kahn. A third accident occurred—this time a wedge was found in the hole. Ringle thought Dave was attempting to hold up the drilling so that the local men would be frozen out when the leases expired, and Dave and some others—no one knew who they were—could come in and snap them up.
Dave offered to submit the whole thing to a reading. It was taken at night, after supper, in Cecil’s house. Hugh Lynn trembled when he saw Old Man Ringle and his two sons walk in. All three were carrying guns. A neutral member of the company was chosen to conduct the reading. Dave sat by, showing no fear. The conductor asked whether Mr. Kahn was causing trouble at the well and carrying on activities detrimental to the interests of the company.
“This, we find,” Edgar said, “is untrue. The interruptions are coming from outside sources. Now, as we have given before, unless those here associated are united in their purpose and ideals, and are agreed that such moneys as may be obtained from this enterprise are used for those intentions which have been stated, which is for the good of all, and the help of their fellow man, then as we find, there will be frustrations . . .”
Hugh Lynn wrote about it to his mother:
“The men all say they will build Dad as many hospitals as he wants when the well comes in, but I suppose what the readings mean is that they will have to give a lot more to charity than they plan to give. I think they all expect to make millions and then give a few thousand to the hospital.
“Dad doesn’t think so. He says the men are rough, but they are all right underneath. He’s been getting readings on the hospital, and he is quite excited about it. He says the readings have picked out a place for it. The place is Virginia Beach, Virginia. He says that a long time ago a reading said the same thing, but one of Uncle Lynn’s friends on the railroad went there to see it when his train took him to Norfolk, and it was just a fishing village. Dad says that is what is needed, a nice quiet place near the sea. I hope it turns out that way, because I’d like to see the real ocean and swim in it.
“I’m leaving here the Saturday before Labor Day, so I’ll be home in time for school. Dad is going to get me some long pants. He’s feeling fine and wishes he could come home, but he says he has to wait now until the well comes in . . .”
—
In the summer of 1922 Gertrude returned to the Hill for her annual visit, taking Hugh Lynn and Edgar Evans with her. Hugh Lynn shook hands gravely with his cousins, Tommy House and Gray Salter. Gray was Will Salter’s youngest son. His mother had died when he was born, and Aunt Kate was raising him. He was older than Tommy, but younger than Hugh Lynn.
“Sorry I couldn’t come last summer,” Hugh Lynn said casually. “I had to go out to Texas and see about the well.”
“What’s going on out there?” Tommy asked. “Edgar is still there. When’s the well coming in?”
“Oh, there’s been trouble,” Hugh Lynn said airily. “We have enemies, you know. We all have to carry guns out there.”
“Can you smoke?” Gray said. “We can smoke.”
“No,” Hugh Lynn said. “It’s not good for you. It stunts your growth. But I can outshoot you with a .22.”
“Oh,” Tommy said, “you’re just afraid to smoke. Anybody can shoot a .22.”
“I’ll bet a cornsilk cigarette would knock you out,” Gray said.
“I’ll tell you about Texas,” Hugh Lynn said. “I know a whole bunch of cowboys. I was in the house where Zane Grey wrote The Border Legion.”
They wandered off to the orchard, where Gray and Tommy had a package of cigarettes hidden.
Gertrude told her suspicions to Dr. House. Something was wrong with the goings-on in Texas, she knew. Another year had passed, and nothing had happened but delays. Drilling had been suspended on the well again and again. Feuds had broken out between members of the company. They seemed always to be only a few feet away from oil, but they could not get at it.
“I’ll go out and see,” Dr. House said.
He was anxious for a vacation. He was now assistant superintendent of Western State Hospital, near the Hill, and his patients were all mental cases.
“A trip to Texas is just what I need,” he decided.
When he got there, drilling was again in progress. The well was producing a great deal of gas. Standing on the platform one day, talking to the driller, Dr. House struck a match to light his pipe. The resulting explosion blew him off the platform and shaved off his handlebar mustaches. “We have suffered an irreparable loss,” he wrote to Carrie.
In his report to Gertrude he said the trouble seemed to be coming from outsiders, who didn’t want the well to come in before the company’s leases expired.
By the end of the summer this had happened: the leases ran out, the company’s money ran out, the well had not come in. During the last month it was sabotaged methodically. Once pieces from a tombstone were found in the hole.
The project was abandoned. Dr. House returned to Hopkinsville. Edgar, packed and ready to go, received a letter from Frank Mohr, the man who had started to build a hospital in Nortonville in 1911. Mohr had slowly gone blind, until an operation for the removal of his eyes was suggested, as a means of saving his life. He had then remembered the reading he had carried home with him from Nortonville years before. He got it out and read it. In case of blindness, the reading said—pointing out that it might develop from the effects of the accident Mohr had suffered—hydrotherapy was to be used. “I have taken seven hundred sweat baths,” he wrote to Edgar, “and my sight is restored.” He again wanted to do something about a hospital and suggested that Edgar visit him at his home in Columbus, Ohio.
Edgar went. He preferred almost anything to defeat. The idea of a hospital had become an obsession with him; he felt that he could not return home without realizing his dream.
Mohr was no longer wealthy, having lost most of his money during his long illness. He was sure that enough money could be raised, however, and set about outlining a campaign. While he and Edgar were in the midst of their discussions, a telegram arrived from Dave Kahn. Dave was in Denver and had talked with A. C. Bonfils, the fabulous owner of the Denver Post. Bonfils wanted to witness a reading. Mohr and Edgar went to Denver.
The reading was given in a hotel room, for the patient of a doctor nominated by Bonfils. The doctor and Bonfils were satisfied. Next day Bonfils offered to hire Edgar at $1,000 a day, on certain terms: he was to wear a turban; he was to give his readings while hidden from the listeners by a translucent curtain or veil; he was to be accompanied by bodyguards and was never to be seen alone; he was to ride in an expensive motorcar, with footmen abox and drawn curtains; he was to assume an Oriental name, preferably with a title attached. Edgar refused.
He and Mohr were stranded, and the squire arrived from Selma on the next train. Edgar had wired him from Columbus that he was going to Denver. The message had been garbled and reached the squire as, “Meet me in Denver.”
Dave wanted to help them, but he was almost broke himself. The best he could offer was food and cigarettes for the time being.
Then a telegram came for Edgar, relayed from Selma. It was from the Woman’s Club of Birmingham, Alabama, and it wanted to know how much Edgar would charge to deliver a lecture before its members. They had heard, the telegram said, of his “amazing powers.” The answer was sent immediately: three railroad tickets from Denver to Birmingham
was the price. The Woman’s Club, wondering what sort of riffraff it was dealing with, sent the tickets. Edgar, Mohr, and the squire arrived in Birmingham on October 6th.
On March 6, 1923, they were still there. The lecture had been an amazing success; people stood in line at the hotel to see Edgar and apply for readings. One lady, after getting hers, approached Edgar for advice.
“You told me to go back to the doctor who has been treating me,” she said. “He has told me that he can do no more for me. What shall I do?”
“What’s the doctor’s name?” Edgar said. He had met quite a few physicians in Birmingham; it might be one he knew.
“Woodall,” the lady said. “Dr. Percy Woodall.”
“Give him the reading,” Edgar said. “He’ll understand.”
An hour later Woodall called on the telephone. He was now practicing osteopathy, having taken it up while teaching anatomy to the students at Franklin. He remembered Edgar and reminded him of the reading given while the blind Dr. Bowling was present. “You’re still a marvel at anatomy,” he said, “but I don’t know about the treatment you suggest. I’ll tell you just what I told the woman herself—she’s losing her hearing, you know.
“I told her I had never done what you suggest. You tell me to go up under the palate and perform finger surgery in the region of the Eustachian tube. I’m going to do it, but I don’t know what will happen. I’ll keep you informed.”
The lady herself reported, six weeks later, that her hearing was normal.
Early in March the city officials decided to ask Edgar for a license, a situation which involved the embarrassing necessity for explaining what it was he was doing. About the same time enthusiastic friends reported that they had pledged, among local people, the sum of $60,000 for a hospital. A reading was taken to settle the question of where, in Birmingham and its environs, the building should be erected. Again it suggested Virginia Beach, as it had before, in Selma and Texas. The Birmingham committee disbanded. Edgar, morose but determined, packed his bags and started traveling again.
He went to Texas, but things were worse there than when he had left. He went to New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Kansas City, Dayton, and finally back to Selma. He was determined, suddenly, to carry the thing on by himself. If others could not do it for him, then he would do it himself. He wrote to Gertrude, who had stayed the winter at the Hill, that he was coming home for good. She returned to Selma to meet him.
Hugh Lynn was sad at leaving the Hill. He and Tommy and Gray were good companions. They had dug the trench for the water main that brought modern plumbing to the house, and with but a single accident: Gray put his pickax in Tommy’s skull one afternoon. To celebrate the advent of running water they burned the outhouse down. It was distinctly not the season for outhouse burning, and everyone in the neighborhood spent a horrible day.
Tommy and Gray taught Hugh Lynn to smoke, but he didn’t like it. One day Aunt Kate caught Gray smoking. He fled to the cherry tree and refused to come down. Aunt Kate brought a switch, a chair, and the evening paper to the foot of the tree and settled down to wait.
“How long are you going to stay there?” Gray asked.
“As long as my heart beats,” Aunt Kate said grimly.
“Kate the skate,” Gray said.
Eventually he came down and took his licking. Later he showed his welts to Tommy and Hugh Lynn.
“You two are afraid to get licked,” he said.
“I am not,” Tommy said.
“Neither am I,” Hugh Lynn said.
“Nobody ever licks you,” Gray said.
“We’re not afraid,” Tommy said.
“No,” Hugh Lynn said. “We can take as much as you.”
“Bet you can’t,” Gray said.
“Bet we can,” Tommy said.
To settle it they let Gray give them a licking. He whipped them to a frazzle. They didn’t cry.
“Now do you believe us?” they asked when he was finished.
“Sure,” he said. “Put ’er there! You’re real he-men!”
The night before Hugh Lynn was to leave they went out to the bottom land for a final smoke together. Tommy spat reflectively when his cigarette was lighted.
“Why couldn’t Edgar make a lot of money and build that hospital?” he asked Hugh Lynn. “The readings know everything, don’t they?”
Hugh Lynn tried to explain.
“God won’t let people make money unless they deserve to,” he said.
Gray sneered.
“The whole world is full of crooks,” he said.
“But they didn’t make their money through the readings,” Hugh Lynn said. “If God gave Dad this power He meant it to be used for good, and those fellows who’ve been taking him around here and there must be just promoters and maybe they were planning when they got the money to run off and leave Dad and not put up the hospital.”
“Why wouldn’t the readings know that?” Tommy asked. “They ought to know that.”
“Maybe they do,” Hugh Lynn said, “but Dad’s asleep and doesn’t know what he says. Maybe he says that and they don’t tell him.”
“Why, those crooks!” Gray said. “I’ll bet if I was there I’d put a bullet right through a fellow’s eyes if he tried to pull a thing like that on Edgar!”
“We ought to go with him,” Tommy said. “Then everything would be all right. Then Edgar could tell us where to dig for buried treasure and we’d dig it up and build the hospital. We could do it!”
“Sure!” Gray said.
“Sure,” Hugh Lynn said.
But he wasn’t sure; he wasn’t at all sure. Why hadn’t the hospital been built at Birmingham, when the money was raised? Why did the readings keep saying Virginia Beach, which was over on the Atlantic Ocean, away from everybody and everything? Why couldn’t his father just cut away from all those people and take readings for himself, and ask how he could get the money to build the hospital? Why couldn’t the readings tell what rich man to go to for help? Why didn’t they name the ones in the company in Texas who were crooked? Why didn’t they tell where money could be found, just as Tommy suggested, so they could dig it up by themselves?
It looked as if something was wrong. Could it be that the wrong was with his father? Had he changed? Was he crazy for money, too? If that was so, the readings would naturally go haywire, and after a while they might not be any good even for telling sick people what was wrong with them.
“Let’s have another cigarette,” Tommy said.
“Sure!” Gray said.
“Sure,” Hugh Lynn said.
He sucked eagerly at the smoke.
“You’re learning,” Gray admitted.
Tommy said, “You’ll be able to inhale soon!”
FIFTEEN
Selma was glad to see the Cayces back. Edgar was especially welcomed; he had been absent four years, and no one in that time had been able adequately to carry on the work he had begun with the young people of the Christian Church. He took it up again, and soon the Seven Class and his Christian Endeavour group were functioning as before. Most of the old members returned, bringing with them younger sisters and brothers.
His friends found Edgar an older man in every way. His appearance had not greatly changed, except for some gray in his hair, but his manner was different; he was more reserved, more hesitant about expressing himself on questions that involved broad principles of human conduct, more inclined to be tolerant of human weaknesses. He did not seem cynical or disillusioned, but he apparently expected less of his fellow man and was inclined to judge him more softly. Yet he seemed determined to get more out of himself.
During the seven quiet years in Selma between 1912 and 1919, he had built up a sureness of himself; he had piled up within his mind an integrity that he believed would not break down. He had fought out his battles with the force he thought of as the devil, and
he had come to feel that he was safe from it. This was the conviction that made him feel he must do something with the strange power, or talent, which he possessed. He had become afraid that unless he found a way to give it to the world he would himself be lost.
So he had tried. For four years he had given everyone he met an opportunity to participate in the venture. He had tried with all the powers of both his conscious and his subconscious mind to find ways of making enough money to build and endow a hospital. All these efforts had failed. He had discovered that his individual victory over the devil was one that had no effect upon other men. It had to be repeated in each of them; and because this had not taken place, the plans he had tried to carry out with them had failed. He had been certain before he left that no one could make of him, consciously or unconsciously, a tool for evil. That had been proved true. But he had been unable to gather about him the men necessary to make him a tool for good. There were honest men; there were brilliant men; there were good men. But there seemed to be no wise men.
He believed that they existed somewhere, and that he would eventually meet them. Meanwhile it was better to go on by himself, making preparations. “They also serve,” he remembered from Milton, “who only stand and wait.”
The workroom of the studio was converted into an office for the business of the readings. Stationery was printed, and Edgar sent an announcement to everyone on his mailing list. He also advertised for a stenographer and tried each applicant by having her attempt to take down a reading.
Most of them did poorly, for Edgar spoke in technical language, often with long, involved sentence structures, and a plethora of conjunctions, prepositions, and relative pronouns. Punctuation was a difficult matter; sometimes he seemed to be trying out different ways of expressing a thought and would wander around in the middle of an involved syntax until the best grammarian could do no more than roughly separate the phrases by dashes, parentheses, and colons. More than a dozen girls were tried before one turned up who wrote accurate, readable versions of all that was said. She was the older sister of one of the Junior Christian Endeavour experts, a pretty blonde named Gladys Davis. She was hired as Edgar’s secretary.
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