Tender Victory

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  He had to stop, and leaned against the wall for a rest, for the passageway was becoming narrower and narrower. Then he started. Was that just the echo of his own voice, or was it a groan, near or far? He shouted again, and the groan answered. Now in the distant blackness he saw a tiny point of light, the light on a miner’s cap, on the sloping floor of the mine. There was no time for loping, for crawling. He began to run. The walls of the mine shuddered, but he did not hear. The little firefly of light came nearer, and he ran faster. And then, on the floor, he saw a semiconscious man lying, trying to struggle from under a huge beam of wood, which seemed to be steaming.

  Two whitish eyes glared up at Johnny in the narrow rapier of the flashlight, and two black lips grimaced in the black face.

  “Hold it,” said Johnny, and he put the flashlight down carefully. Blasts of heat struck his face, his hands, fired his lungs. He bent his powerful legs as he had been taught to bend them, and he took hold of the beam in the middle, slowly, surely, with his miner’s hands, and he began to lift. The beam moved in his grasp, but only a little. The miner had fainted; he lay outstretched, unknowing, uncaring.

  “Now, dear God,” said Johnny, “just give me the strength I need.”

  A deep and shaking rumble answered him, like the voice of an enraged and awakening giant. He heard it, and he knew that in a matter of minutes, probably he and the miner would be trapped, buried, lost forever. “God!” he shouted, desperately. “God!” He thought of his children, and he saw their faces, and heard their voices. He turned away from his vision of them, half sobbing, and renewed his efforts. He could feel his back and legs cracking, his muscles giving way, but he clung to the beam.

  Now he heard a faint, pattering sound. Stones, he thought, struggling with the beam. There’s going to be a real cave-in. The beam was coming up in his hands; one of the miner’s legs was suddenly freed. Johnny kicked it aside; he rolled with the beam, and freed the other leg. But he found himself impotently rolling as the beam continued to roll, for he had lost his balance. Then somewhere there was a crash and a scarlet flash of agony, and a stunning sensation, as the beam turned on him, and pinned him down.

  He lay still, shocked; one of his ankles had been caught. He was utterly trapped. He had freed the miner, but now there was no help for him himself. He tried to sit up, but the pain in his ankle sickened him and he suddenly vomited, and drew in breaths of smoking air which seared his lungs. “Help!” he called hopelessly. He said, groaning, “My children! My poor children! Father, take care of my children!”

  The pattering was louder, closer, and now, to Johnny’s swimming eyes, came the glare of a distant flashlight. “Help,” he whispered. And then, incredulous, he heard a shout: “Johnny! Johnny!”

  He pulled up his final strength and called back; “Here! Hurry, hurry, for God’s sake!”

  The flashlight jumped up and down and bobbed rapidly in the hands of a still unseen rescuer. The pattering became louder, and the long mine echoed. Johnny cried again, “Here, right along here.” He could see a figure dimly, now, behind the flashlight, a tall figure wearing a mask. He closed his eyes, weakly, in a fresh onslaught of agony.

  Someone was pushing at the beam that held him; suddenly it lifted, rolled, fell with a mutter of echoes. The miner was becoming conscious; he struggled to a sitting position, moaning. A voice was bellowing at him, “If you can do something, help me!”

  “My legs is broken,” whimpered the miner.

  “All right,” said the voice from far away, “start crawling or something, but move, damn you, move!”

  Johnny, disbelieving, recognized the voice. “Barry, Barry!” he whispered at the masked face.

  “Come on, Johnny, crawl up against me. That’s right; hold on. Lean against my arm; hold on to my shoulder. Go on there,” he said to the miner, who was dragging himself with remarkable alacrity on the floor of the mine. “Johnny, hold my flashlight; if you can use that ankle at all, use it, but don’t let yourself drop.”

  “Barry,” said Johnny, as they crept along the floor of the mine. He wanted to weep; he forgot his pain and his terror in this wonder. He pressed his coat closer about his face.

  “Never mind, keep your strength. Damn air’s getting worse every second. Your pal’s gone quite a way ahead. All right, Johnny, keep moving.”

  Now they heard a thundering behind them, as the mine caved in at their rear. The thundering followed them, and dust and thicker and more blinding smoke. The pain in Johnny’s ankle became a nauseating numbness; he could use it a little better now. The two men moved foot by foot along the mine floor, keeping to the rails.

  Now they could see a blaze of light in the distance, and in its light the figure of the miner, moving on all fours like a bear. “Broken legs, hell,” muttered Barry. His old war scars were stretching in pure torture; sometimes he had to lean Johnny against a wall and stop a moment from sheer exhaustion. The thundering was closer behind them, the lowering charge of a mighty bull, a Minotaur raging to destroy them.

  “We’ll make it,” said Barry through the mask. “Look, there’s the elevator; he’s getting into it. Just like him if he gives the signal to pull up!”

  “He won’t,” said Johnny. “No, he won’t. He’ll wait for us.”

  There was a loud and deafening singing in his ears, and a sensation of sliding, sliding down forever. Barry’s voice was miles away in space, calling. And then he felt himself being pulled over a body, over something that struggled under him, and he was being carried away. He could not see now, or even hear. He felt only a tremendous straining in his arms, as if someone had pulled them about a neck. He thought vaguely, I carried Barry like this—somewhere—I don’t remember. … There was a tearing sensation in his wrists.

  He was rising. There were shouts and calls and blinding floods of light; something was creaking and swaying under him. He could see and hear again. The shaft of the mine was all about him, and above, a brilliance like the sun. He was lying on the floor of the elevator, the miner hunched beside him, and above them both stood Barry, grinning through his black lips, his mask discarded. “Well, Johnny,” he said, “I guess that makes us even. You carried me out of hell on your back, and I did the same for you!”

  The elevator reached the top, and eager hands seized the three men and pulled them away. Now the thousands gathered in the vicinity lifted their voices in a roaring ovation. An instant later the mine collapsed, and the earth trembled, and vomited smoke and fire which belched up the empty shaft.

  38

  On Easter morning Johnny stood before the altar, leaning on his crutches.

  There had never been such an Easter morning since the first, thought Johnny, full of joy and gratitude and awe. The altar bloomed with avalanches of flowers which spilled down to the floor in a blaze of color and in clouds of perfume. The soft and shifting light of the mighty candelabra had never been so all-embracing. But to Johnny the most beautiful and inspiring vision was the crowded faces upturned to him in love and deepest attention. The doors stood open to the sweet spring air, and crowds jostled on the steps to listen. Sunshine poured into the church from behind them, accompanied by an unpolluted wind.

  He said, and his strong and sonorous voice reached the farthest listener in full power: “There is not a day or an hour that God does not rise from the dead, when the stone of the Holy Sepulcher is not again rolled back from the tomb by unseen hands, when the Resurrection, like the sun, does not shake the soul with adoration, and blind the eyes with glory.

  “Each deadened heart, each lost heart, each forgetting and hating and disbelieving heart, is the tomb in which God lies, waiting for His Resurrection. And then, at some midnight hour, at some turning in a lost lane, in some cold and colorless dawn in which there is no hope, in the shadow of a solitary tree where a lonely man rests, or perhaps in the very welter of a city or on the silence of a hill, or in the empty places of grief and sorrowing and bitterness and desolation, or in the clanging heart of a prison or in a narrow ro
om in a tenement, the deadened heart feels the awful silence of the sacrificed God, and remembers what it has forgotten, and is contrite, and cries out, ‘Father, forgive me, for I have sinned!’

  “It is then that God stirs on the stony couch on which the grieving man had abandoned Him, and the grave wrappings of man’s sins fall from Him, and the stone of the sepulcher is rolled aside in the passionate hands of contrition, and God steps forth in His light before the dazed and penitential heart—the Resurrection ever new, ever eternal.

  “As at Christmas God is born again to man, so at Easter He rises again from the dead for man. Blessed be His Name! Blessed be His most merciful Name, forever and forever!”

  Johnny looked down at the first pews, as the notes of the new organ which Dr. McManus had presented to the church in Johnny’s name thundered against the walls of the little church and soared against the narrow wooden ceiling. There sat the old doctor, gazing at Johnny with the deep and welling fullness of love that a man gives to a son born to him in his aged years just when he had abandoned hope. And there was Lorry, seeming, to Johnny, to resemble an angel in her white wool suit and white hat, with the turquoise blue of her tender eyes shining with pure and serene love. And there, as he moved his glance, sat his old friend, Dr. Francis Stevens, beaming with pride and unashamed of the tears on his plump cheeks. And there was Barry, whose life he had saved and who had saved his life, most moved and attentive, and beside him his stepmother, Mrs. Summerfield, and beside her Mrs. Burnsdale.

  How greatly God has blessed me, and for nothing, thought Johnny. He smiled at the McGees, at all his friends, at the massed worshipers, and he raised his hands. This was a church where the congregation stood for the benediction, but now all dropped to their knees and bowed their heads in one spontaneous motion to receive his blessing.

  The bells rang triumphantly to the bright air.

  “He is risen! The Lord God has risen!”

  39

  Johnny could limp carefully with his cane now, for his broken ankle had healed. It was June, and the parsonage was complete. The family had moved in only a few days ago, for the carpenters, the bricklayers, the plumbers, and the plasterers had worked with a frenzied zeal to complete the home of this most beloved man, in order that he might enter it as soon as possible.

  Union hours had not hampered them; they had worked from sunrise to the last twilight willingly, and with sweat. In fact, their union delegates, like the masters who had stood over the slaves with whips at the building of the Pyramids, were constantly hovering around, threatening, though threats were not needed. And now it was complete, with fine new furniture, with gleaming porcelain and burnished floors and beautiful fabrics and thick rugs. The unions had contributed the imported brass knocker on the door, which had once hung on an English baronial door, and the plate-glass windows. It was the miners’ union which had replaced the wooden pickets with the intricate black tracery of an iron fence.

  “It is really a mansion, on the inside,” Johnny would say. From the street it appeared as a snug yellowish-brick house, three stories tall, with wide windows. “I don’t know why everybody does all these things for me. Everybody’s planted my garden, everybody’s built my parsonage, everybody’s furnished all the rooms, everybody has given me everything, and I don’t know why. I haven’t yet been here a year, and I’ve stirred up a lot of controversy, and made myself obnoxious now and then with my zeal, though it’s true that I’ve learned a lot from Barryfield. In fact, I owe Barryfield my whole life.”

  When Lorry had suggested to Dr. McManus that he rebuild the church to match the parsonage, it was Johnny who said, “No. It was his father’s church, and because it was his father’s church it is beautiful and right to me. And it belongs to me, too. Though,” he added, smiling at the doctor, “a new carpet wouldn’t be too much out of the way.”

  “These parsons,” said the doctor. “They’ve got bottomless bellies. Tim Kennedy and his friends gave John Kanty a whole new setup inside his church—everything, imported statues, lace and linen cloths from Ireland, new bells, new altar—everything. They clean up the outside of the church, and put up new carved doors. And then what does he ask? The mayor gave him a Buick, and he says, ‘Well, a priest with such a fine church and such a car should not be asked to drive that car all by himself. It’s demeaning.’ He wants a chauffeur, he says, and means it, by God!”

  “I bet he gets one, too,” Johnny said.

  “And there’s that old rabbi,” said the doctor wrathfully. “Sol Klein and his smart-as-paint pals get their rabbi big silver goblets for Passover, lined with gold, and he’s pleased. For about five minutes. And then he says that his father, who had been a rabbi, had had a fur-lined broadcloth coat, and he says to Sol that he’s an old man now, and doesn’t feel so well in the winters any more, and he’d certainly appreciate a fur-lined broadcloth coat like his father’s, to keep him warm!”

  “I know,” said Johnny. “He’s in New York now with Sol, getting fitted. Mink, no less.”

  “It’s all your fault,” said the doctor gloomily. “You’ve given your friends ideas.”

  “A laborer is worthy of his hire,” Johnny said solemnly, with a wink at Lorry.

  “You cost too much. I suppose you fellers have a union, too,” the doctor replied darkly. “For the first time in its history Barryfield believes the clergy are sacred and indispensable. What are you, Johnny? The clergy’s walking delegate?”

  It was another Sunday now, a June Sunday, and Johnny moved slowly with Lorry about his garden and looked at it with happiness. He was certain that no roses had ever bloomed as these roses were blooming, in fragrant clusters of yellow, white, pink, scarlet, and crimson. The birds, as they flew overhead, cast fragile shadows over the thick grass. And over all the untainted sun threw a cataract of light over the valley city. The mountains were visible, mantled in green and mauve and lavender, standing against a sky of the palest blue. Bees hurried among the blossoms of the garden on their ancient business of pollination, and all the business of life. Johnny and Lorry stopped before the children’s trees, and Johnny touched Emilie’s green lilacs with a slow hand. “I can never leave here,” said Johnny. “This is my children’s home; these are my children’s trees; and Barryfield is my children’s life.”

  He looked at Lorry and his dark-blue eyes softened. “Dear Lorry,” he said. Her own eyes shone on him, and it seemed to him that he looked into her heart, cleansed of all ugliness and dread and loneliness and fear. “I think, Lorry, that I’ve always loved you, from the very first time I saw you. Only your box came safely out of the fire. If I were superstitious, I’d think that was a sign.”

  She put her hand over his. “Wasn’t it?” she asked.

  Johnny bent his head and kissed her full on the mouth, and they clung together with a sense of joy and fulfillment in the yellow radiance of the garden. Then they walked on, with Johnny’s arm about the girl’s slender waist. “How wonderful it is to be at peace,” murmured Lorry.

  He held her tighter. He looked at the sky, and then a chill wind ran along his nerves, senselessly, he thought. “Peace,” he said. Peace, he prayed. Please, God, let our hearts turn to each other, everywhere in the world, and let there be understanding, and freedom again for the oppressed and the enslaved, the multitude of the suffering, and let those who do not know Thee be released from the darkness and return to Thee. Let no man’s hand again be lifted against his brother, nor the scarlet thunder of guns destroy the patient land, nor death mushroom again in the eternal sky.

  For what else does a man live? Johnny asked himself. He lives only to know God and serve Him in this world, and to be joyful with Him forever, after death. A man must live for God, or die in his heart and his soul, for there is nothing but God.

  The children exploded from the rear door of the parsonage into the garden, their faces gleeful with mirth. Debby danced in the rear as the others rushed upon Johnny and Lorry. Pietro could not control his exuberance. “Aha!” he exclaimed, t
hrowing out his arms. “Listen to us! We have romance!”

  “So we have,” said Johnny.

  “It’s not romance,” said Kathy, the precise. “It is love.”

  “And marriage,” said Jean. “They will be married,” Max added solemnly.

  “I’m going to be the flower girl!” Debby shrilled, tugging commandingly at Johnny’s arm.

  “Kathy too. I promised,” said Lorry. “Besides, it won’t be until September.” She stroked Kathy’s golden hair.

  “No, no, you don’t understand!” screamed Pietro excitedly. “You will marry them, Papa, but not in September. Soon! It is too bad they are old, isn’t it?” His voice fell to a tragic note.

  Then he bounced up and down like a ball with impatience. “It is the doctor and Mrs. Burnsdale! Who else? We saw them kissing, in the big room, and they told us, and Uncle Al will live here with us forever!”

  Debby and Kathy, whose faces were glowing with joy, looked like flowers, thought Johnny, in their white dresses and blue ribbons, and the boys were grave young men now, as they regarded him seriously, waiting for his comment.

  “The family,” said Johnny, smiling at Lorry. The children watched them with shy pleasure when Lorry turned her beautiful head and kissed Johnny on the mouth.

  Pietro said with a dramatic sigh of satisfaction, “It is our family.”

  The children raced off in a swirl of color and energy. There was Jean, running now, Jean who would be a priest, and there was Pietro, the great singer, and Max, the sculptor, and Debby, the beloved woman, and Kathy, the mother of many children. Johnny could see them all in the future, with a sudden clarity of light and knowledge. He held Lorry’s hand tightly. Perhaps there would be other children too, to fill the house before these left, one by one, in the ways God had planned for them.