When Willie came to the community, the Silent Servants numbered twenty-four, but this figure fluctuated from week to week with the comings and goings of visitors.
The visitors puzzled Willie until Father Benjamin explained that these were brother and sister Servants enroute to a mission or temporarily without assignment and in need of retreat.
One day two sister Servants arrived, wearing dresses so tattered and soiled that they resembled the slave women Willie could remember from the TV history lessons he had seen at Custer High.
Benjamin gave a sign with an earthen pitcher, filling it, then shaking it until it was empty. Then he gave the sign for love.
These women, Willie learned that night, had just been released from prison, where they had served three years for crimes of arson committed by others.
The visitors were of many colors and ages. Sometimes a man and wife, a Servant couple, would appear at the camp. Once a family of five came and stayed a week. All the visitors wore the shabby ragtag habit of the Society.
At Eucharist, seeing these strange ragpicker men and women, and sometimes children, Willie felt a rush of tenderness and solidarity. He began to think of them as his own brothers and sisters.
In the bare common room where the community celebrated Eucharist, the Servants would hold occasional listening services.
In these services Father Benjamin would read a passage of Scripture or a portion of the Guidebook. Then all would listen in silence for twenty minutes, a half hour, a longer time.
Sometimes, instead of a Scripture reading, a brother or sister would tell a story, perhaps a story of personal conversion, in sign tongue. The community would consider this story in silence, contemplating its meaning, “letting it enter” as the Guidebook phrased it.
After the listening period, the Servants would share the fruits, or dona, of their contemplation—sometimes in words but more often in sign.
“To give each other ideas?” Willie asked Father Benjamin.
“Not ideas,” said Benjamin. “Pictures, dreams, visions.”
Father Benjamin called the dona “visualizations,” and before each listening service he made slow counterclockwise motions with his left hand. It was as if he were trying to take the cap off a bottle.
Willie marveled at the pictures and stories the brothers and sisters shared with one another—wonderful visions of beautiful and joyful happenings and places and conditions that love had created or would soon create.
But sometimes the dona were hard to understand, and sometimes they were not happy but sad.
One night, especially, the dona brought Willie to tears.
That was the night the Man of Sorrows appeared at the ranch of the Silent Servants of the Used, Abused and Utterly Screwed Up.
They were at evening meal when the Man of Sorrows arrived. The sun had run off after a hard day’s burning, leaving behind a feverish sky, a sweat of fire.
The man rose out of that scarlet expanse like a creature thrown up suddenly by a wild red ocean.
He stood in the doorway, motionless as a tree, casting his shadow over the table where they ate.
He was a huge man, a giant, with shaggy black hair and a tangled beard, and he wore an expression of such abject melancholy that the room itself seemed to darken in his presence.
With a little cry of welcome, Father Benjamin went to him immediately and embraced him.
Now all the Servants were up from their places, circling the Man of Sorrows, pounding him on the back, embracing him.
He returned these attentions with the most gentle and beautiful sign gestures Willie had ever seen, but all the while the dark eyes were full of unspeakable sadness.
Benjamin led the visitor to the place where Willie sat, moved and faintly frightened by the giant’s appearance.
“Brother Truman,” Father Benjamin said.
Standing up, Willie held out his hand.
The Man of Sorrows embraced Willie, folding him into the rags of his wretched clothing.
“This is Willie, our visitor and possibly our novice,” Benjamin said.
The giant’s sad face seemed to brighten at this news. He patted Willie’s shoulder, then seated himself at the table.
He ate in silence while the Servants scurried about to bring him food, occasionally replying in sign to various questions asked of him.
After he had finished his meal, Father Benjamin asked Truman to lead a listening service.
“We have our novice here,” Father Benjamin said, “and we have other visitors who do not know Brother Truman’s story.”
The Man of Sorrows moved slowly, painfully to the center of the common room where the brothers and sisters sat in a circle.
He paused a moment. Then with those same beautiful signs, Brother Truman began the story of his life.
His first signs portrayed childhood—growing up in a large city.
Happy father. Happy mother. The father goes away. A uniform of some sort. The father flying. The mother and son together.
Then sadness. Something happening to the father. Hurt. In jail.
Joy. Great unexpected happiness. Father comes back.
But not joy after all. Something has happened to father.
Now moving away. Father and mother and boy going somewhere. Many somewheres.
Flying.
The Man of Sorrows made airplane movements with his hands—strange, dangerous, wild movements.
“Stunt flying—for a carnival,” Father Benjamin whispered.
The strange dangerous flight gestures continued. Then—smack! The airplane had plunged into the ground. Father dead.
Pause.
Now the mother and son moving again. Something about a name. Something has changed.
Willie strained to see the signs the Man of Sorrows made.
The mother has gone now. More flying.
This time, he, the Man of Sorrows, is flying.
Stunt flying.
Pictures. Something to do with movies.
Then more flying. Flying to other countries. Some kind of flying mission. Flying food—no, blood—somewhere.
A place of war.
The plane flying, suddenly hit, falling—Truman coming down in parachute.
Bars. Great steel bars. Darkness. Years of darkness, stretching on.
The common room was still. Willie could feel the coldness and darkness of the dungeon where Truman had been held.
Now Brother Truman slowly made the seed sign that meant hope. But the seed fell from his hand.
The sign for love—it, too, dropped.
Faith signs—the signs for all that faith promised—one by one fell from his hand like grains of sand.
Now Truman made a long find-and-open sign—’the Guidebook, somewhere in the prison he had found the Guidebook.
An even more profound stillness came over the Servants as the Man of Sorrows stood before them. He was like a tree that had been beaten and stripped and sapped of life. A minute passed, five minutes; then came the saddest sign of all.
The Guidebook opening, and then closing.
The sign of signs—the sign of the Loving One—cut, gone.
He believes in nothing, Willie thought.
The great hands opened and moved out—except in us.
Now a sign that meant all Truman had was here—this moment, these people, this room.
Fingers, hand holding something: But it is enough.
Father Benjamin went to Truman and slowly embraced him. Each Servant did the same. When Willie put his arms up to the great shoulders, he looked into Truman’s eyes and saw how all the pitiful human lights had died, and he burst into tears.
Truman held him fast. He made a sort of soft moan, then went out of the common room, to his cell.
Willie sat down, still weeping.
Father Benjamin sat down beside him. He asked what pictures Willie had seen.
Willie said, “I don’t know—wounds.”
Benjamin gave Willie the sign of the open ha
nd, which in the Guidebook meant thrive.
Willie returned the sign, but without feeling.
They sat together for a while; then Willie said, “I didn’t understand that part in the middle, about his name.”
“His mother changed the name, out of imagined guilt or shame,” Father Benjamin said slowly. “She wanted to give him the name of a distinguished person, like a past president of the country.”
“Why?”
“Brother Truman’s real name was Ernest Bleeder, and it was his father who was saved by the sacrifice of our beloved Brother, Gunner Felder, considered the traitor of his age.”
The next day out in the fields the sun cast a mist of gold over the Man of Sorrows.
Willie worked by his side.
Tentatively, as they dug in the soil where they would plant beans, Willie gave Truman the sign of God’s love for man.
Truman opened his hands, palms down.
Willie took his hands and turned them up.
Truman looked at his hands; they both looked at the hands as if they expected to see something growing there.
Truman then took Willie’s hands and put them in his own as if to say, Thank you anyway.
“It doesn’t matter so much,” said Willie. “You love others.”
Truman gazed at Willie strangely. Then gently he put his great hands on the flaming hair.
Willie felt an intense commotion of the spirit.
Later he would think back to that afternoon as being the time he truly entered the society of the Servants.
* * *
One morning there was a parcel at the gate, a package addressed to Truman.
Willie saw Truman take the package to the common room and place it on the shelf above the fireplace. The Servants went to work in the vegetable garden, but Truman did not join them. He stayed behind in the common room where Father Benjamin joined him from time to time.
That night Father Benjamin asked the community to reflect upon the words of Sister Mary Julia Zipp of the twentieth century, who had written in the Guidebook: Now art glorifies the artist, affirming the part above the whole. That is why art too serves death.
The community listened in silence for twenty minutes. Willie listened with the others, trying to understand what Sister Mary Julia had meant.
At the end of the listening, Truman brought forth the package that had arrived that morning. He carefully removed the wrapping and held up what appeared to be a blurred, overexposed photograph measuring two feet by three feet.
Solemnly, Truman held this strange, whitish image before the assembly of Servants.
Father Benjamin, standing by Truman’s side, gave the sign that meant search, then said, “This is the last work of Brother Joto, now in prison with Brother Herman Felder. Brother Joto has sent this work to us for meditation and then destruction.”
Father Benjamin looked at Willie as he continued. “Brother Joto has repudiated all artistic endeavors, but he has given us to understand that this final painting may convey a message to our community. Let us then contemplate this abominable painting, as Brother Joto has called his work, and if it contains a message for us, then let our hearts receive it with love.”
Truman set the art piece on the mantel. The Servants gazed at it in silence.
Looking at the picture, Willie at first saw only blurred shapes and shades of white—a confusion of planes and angles and circles, all of white.
Then he saw a sort of pattern—white suns, white stars, white planets, all seen through a series of vertical white bars.
As he looked longer at this strange design, he saw the faint outline of another shape. It seemed at first the upper part, the head, of an animal—the head and shoulders of a gorilla or monkey, a white beast, half man, half ape, caught in a storm of white.
Then the figure moved.
Willie stood up. The other Servants looked up at him.
He could not take his eyes off the painting now.
The ape face was changing—turning into human faces, faces he could not bear to look upon.
He saw his father.
He saw the face of his mother.
Now Cool Dawn.
Carolyn.
Clio.
Thatcher Grayson.
The face of Robert Regent smiled before him.
A brilliant light shone from the center of the picture. He began to see color in the painting—green, blue, gold, red—and something more. He saw first a face, then a figure robed in fire, coming toward him.
He cried out, then fell.
When he came to, Truman and Father Benjamin were cradling him, giving him red wine to drink. The other Servants had left the common room.
“What is it you saw?” Father Benjamin asked softly.
“I don’t know,” said Willie. “Faces.” He tried to remember. “Where is the painting?”
Truman pointed to the fireplace. The fire had consumed all but the frame of the painting.
Truman made a sign that meant sameness; then a sign that meant winter, snow.
“The dona of the others,” said Benjamin, “were pictures of beasts in need of care. A frozen gorilla, one brother said. Another said that the painting showed the coming of an ice age.”
“The faces?” said Willie.
“No one saw faces,” said Father Benjamin, and Willie saw that his eyes were bright with tears.
* * *
The next day Truman was gone.
Where? Willie asked in sign.
Benjamin indicated prison bars.
“A substitution?” Willie said in regular speech.
“Brother Truman has gone to join Brother Joto and Brother Herman Felder in the East for a time.”
Willie felt sad that the Man of Sorrows had gone.
“He made the best signs,” he said.
Then Father Benjamin told Willie that when Truman had been shot down on his mercy flight, he had fallen into the hands of an army fighting for great ideals in Asia.
Officers of the army believed Truman knew secret plans of the enemy army and that the plane he had been flying and that they had destroyed had carried not blood, as Truman contended, but a new type of liquid bomb.
“That is how he came to make beautiful signs,” said Father Benjamin.
Willie said he didn’t understand.
“To encourage him to tell the secrets,” said Benjamin, “they removed his tongue.”
Willie started to cry, but Benjamin stopped him with a sign that meant great gift,
“He is stronger than we are,” Father Benjamin said. “Since he is protected against all lying, he is the knight of impenetrable armor.”
Chapter three
A deeper peace came to the desert retreat.
Willie worked in the fields and in the barn. He prayed with his brothers and sisters. He came to learn all the ways and customs of the Silent Servants of the Used, Abused and Utterly Screwed Up.
He read the sayings and recommendations of the Guidebook, praying over them and searching out their often difficult meanings.
He decided to read the Scripture all the way through from Genesis of the Old Testament to Revelations in the New. This proved to be difficult because he was a slow reader and could not make sense out of many happenings in the Old Testament.
He asked Father Benjamin to help him read the Scripture. So Father Benjamin waived the silence rule for an hour each day so that Willie might be instructed in the Scripture and in the more difficult sections of the Guidebook.
With Father Benjamin’s help Willie began to see the pattern of the Old Testament happenings, though there were still many stories and events he found strange and complicated.
For the first time since the days when Cool Dawn used to read the Gospels to him, Willie went through the books of Matthew and Mark and Luke. He relished what he read, copying the sayings of the Lord in the back of his Guidebook and committing them to memory.
Father Benjamin helped him to understand the letters of Paul, with their thund
er and sunshine, their anger and their love.
With Benjamin’s help he came to know and love the strange, beautiful Gospel of John.
The sixteenth chapter of the Gospel moved him to tears.
“When will all men be one?” he asked Father Benjamin.
“When divisions are no longer worshipped.”
“In our time?”
“If we learn to put away our fears.”
Willie puzzled over a special group of Guidebook notes dealing with social and political matters, and in particular the sayings of Sister Cor, who had died in 1993.
“The sayings of Sister Cor about Marxism and capitalism and monism—I understand none of those things.”
Little by little Father Benjamin explained.
Capitalism was a system where each person owned things and the right to own things was held to be sacred and being one individual person was held to be the most sacred fact or truth of life.
Marxism was many different systems but fundamentally it was a system that made the state the owner of property instead of individual persons, and the national state was held to be supreme.
Monism was the new movement in the world toward one universal government and source of ownership, a world state that aimed to erase all national and racial boundaries.
Willie tried to understand.
“Sister Cor writes that all these systems are lies and follies because they are substitutes for God. And worse, she says here, they are substitutes for man.”
“It is a most complicated subject, but Sister Cor says many true things.”
“Does our Society believe in a system?”
“The Servants believe only in the peopling of people.”
One afternoon, happening upon an entry by one Furlong Dog, Willie found these paragraphs:
JERCUS is an alliance of the Northern people of the world, the possessors, against the Southern people, the non-possessors. Nothing unites the Northern people—Russia, Europe, the U.S., Japan and China—not religion, not culture, inheritance, nothing. Nothing that is, but GREED. For years many of the Northern countries fought against each other, but now they are united in the common cause of avarice.
This sinful greed has cemented over all the past differences and made the rich nations into a family. The JERCUS alliance is the most evil fact of the present day world and the Society must do all within its peaceful power to bring it to ruin. I am to be hanged on the morrow for spying on JERCUS military operations in Canada. Peace to all.
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