The Last Western

by Thomas S. Klise

  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.

  Chapter five

  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 peo
ple 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.

  Still, thought the monsignor with that part of him that had once wanted to serve the lepers of Africa, there is a ministry in the church for such people.

  The monsignor, circling the cross, was thinking of the simple chores every priest must do, visiting the hospital, talking to the old people, comforting the bereaved.

  He was also thinking of the letter he had received only yesterday from the Bishop of Santa Fe, asking for the loan of a priest or two to serve in certain border towns where priests were badly needed.

  His eyes fell on the motto of the Silver Swallow Mortuary: A Refined Setting for a Time of Mutual Understanding and Support.

  The handsome monsignor thought of the illiterate poor of the border towns. This young man, he reasoned, might never meet a sophisticated person with a theological problem. In fact, steps could be taken to make sure he did not.

  So he’ll always he with his own kind anyway, thought the monsignor, looking at Willie’s frayed shirt and paint-spattered work pants.

  He circled the cross a third time and put his pencil down.

  “Well,” he smiled brightly. “Well, Willie, we’re going to take a chance on you. Maybe the world has enough theologians. But one thing—if ever you do run into someone who needs to know the ans—”

  “I’ll call you!” Willie said, laughing with relief and delight, for he had feared the outcome of this interview.

  And the monsignor laughed too, though it was just a reflex, for he was already thinking of his appointment that night with Doctor Phelps.

  The professors of the seminary did not like it when the word came down to pass Willie in all his courses, and the professor of Canon Law threatened to resign.

  But soon the whole matter was forgotten because Monsignor McCool was appointed auxiliary bishop of the diocese of Houston, and no one wished to bother him with petty personal problems in the seminary.

  * * *

  And so on a hot Saturday morning in June, in the twenty-eighth year of his life, Willie was ordained a priest of God.

  The next day in the church of Saint Martin de Porres, which had been badly burned in the riots ten years before and had never been fully repaired, Willie celebrated his first Mass.

  Only a few people came to the Mass, residents of the neighborhood who had come to know Willie on the Christian Witness Days and a few newsmen looking for a story about the Athlete Who Had Discovered the Great Sport of Religion.

  The newsmen were disappointed by the simple proceedings at the church.

  Old Father Horgan preached a homily about how only the poor of the earth could possibly grasp the Christian message since they alone were free. All middle class people and all rich people had too many things to keep them happy and confused and asleep, and few of them knew what was going on.

  But they were not as bad off as the explainers of the world, Father Horgan said, the people who had everything figured out. They were in a truly sad way and they, especially, did not know what was going on.

  Father Horgan here mentioned churchmen, politicians, and the writers of the world.

  These remarks did not set well with the newsmen, who were convinced Father Horgan was speaking of them. They concluded the priest was senile.

  But Willie himself was the main disappointment. He had no star quality.

  Someone had brought a baseball around to the sacristy before Mass and asked Willie to throw just one pitch for a picture.

  But Willie would not so much as touch the ball.

  At the Mass there was no drama the newsmen could see.

  One of the reporters, a Catholic, thought that Willie looked a trifle odd.

  Standing at the altar, gazing at the congregation with his slanty eyes and strange smil
e, he held out his arms wider than most other priests, and the Catholic reporter told the others about this peculiarity.

  “What difference does it make?” the other reporters said.

  The Catholic reporter could not explain it, but it was strange, he said.

  When Willie held up the sacraments of the Lord and asked the people to look upon the signs and try to see in them the Lamb of God, his voice broke into a little cry, and the Catholic reporter said that was odd, too.

  But not odd enough for the reporters to make a story out of it.

  “He is a weird man,” the Catholic reporter said.

  His companion said that was hardly news—ten years ago he had thrown away a million dollars.

  The bored newsmen left before Mass ended. So they missed Mr. Grayson’s little speech.

  Mr. Grayson, to the great surprise and delight of Willie, had flown in from New York for the Mass, arriving just at the moment Willie came down the aisle in the entrance procession.

  Willie and Mr. Grayson embraced each other joyously, and Willie greeted him by name when he asked for prayer. He greeted all the people he knew by name.

  Mr. Grayson, though not a Catholic, stood and sat and knelt with the others and even took Communion with them.

  At the final blessing Willie scooped up what appeared to be a splendid wedge of the solar system with his long thin arms and sent a shower of love across his friends.

  Mr. Grayson held out his arms to catch whatever it was Willie was pitching and immediately began to speak in tongues.

  Father Horgan and Willie listened respectfully to Mr. Grayson’s six-minute outpouring of language, which no one could understand.

  When it was over, Willie went down to where Mr. Grayson was standing, perspiring greatly.

  He put his arm around his old coach and said, “My dear old friend, that is right and good to talk that way, but we have to talk as men do, too, don’t we? Because we have all got to be people someway?”

  “In the spirit,” Mr. Grayson said, “people reach up out of their skins.”

  Then all went to the parish hall which had forty-six broken windows out of a total of forty-six windows and where once the Sisters of Saint Francis told the children that there were three, no more and no less, persons in one God. There, in a one-time classroom, drinking coffee from paper cups and eating day-old doughnuts a poor man named Zacho had brought instead of a bottle of Boston Old Port Wine, the poor of Saint Martin parish celebrated Willie’s priesthood.