“Let us listen,” said Benjamin.
So they listened once more. And this time Willie, hating his fear, tried to think only of the date and when he thought of the date, he knew that August 6, 1945, or any date like it was wrong because such a date rendered a sort of tribute to death and would cause people to forget that evil was everyday and seldom spectacular.
They discussed this point and at last decided to choose a date at random. Truman closed his eyes and stabbed at a calendar. His finger fell on November 24, a Sunday, the last Sunday of the liturgical year.
“That’s the feast of Christ the King,” said Felder. “My God, it couldn’t be better.”
“Most fitting,” Benjamin agreed.
Joto opened a missal and searched out the feast.
“Readings from Daniel, Revelations, John,” he said.
“The Spirit moved the hand of Truman,” said Thatcher Grayson.
“Ah well, Mr. Grayson,” said Willie, “maybe the Spirit moves everybody’s hands all the time if you really get down to it.”
It was late in the summer and November 24 was less than three months away, and the next day the announcement of the date went out to the world. There were many interpretations given to the choice of date.
“A Sunday, a nonworking day!” George Doveland Goldenblade crowed.
“Yes, but the unions have already declared the next day as a holiday,” said his executive vice-president. “And the banks are closing too. Good will.”
“Good will!” shouted Goldenblade. “You goddamn traitor, get out of here!” And then Goldenblade broke his own record for taking the name of the Lord in vain, and he fired the executive vice-president and brought charges of defamation of character against the man when he tried to protest.
That night Goldenblade called his brother on the videophone.
“Eminence Earl, this nigra pope is goin’ to wreck the business if we’re not careful. And what he is doin’ to Holy Mother Church is something that should not be done to a goshdarned diseased chicken that should have its neck wrung several times over for a lesson.”
“O mi lugi telirithi,” said Earl Cardinal Goldenblade. “Cui logo mi melithi?”
Willie began his secret fast.
He told himself that in the detail of Herman Felder he had been wrong.
He found a gloss in the Guidebook which he memorized: To distrust even a known enemy serves the kingdom of death.
Chapter five
The world hissed with rumors.
They came like snakes into the cities of man.
They coiled around the plan of L-Day.
Soon the plan could not be perceived, only the twisted creatures around it.
The rumors were of many kinds: the pope was insane; the pope and a few cardinals had a thermonuclear device with which they planned to terrorize and conquer the world on November 24; Pope Willie was not the true pope—the true pope was Les Garfield of Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
The rumors were more than rumors.
They were symptoms of what Herman Felder had called the fundamental schism.
They were epiphanies of man’s oldest choice.
“Beast or spirit,” Felder had told Willie.
On that either-or axis the world creaked slowly, like a Ferris wheel in a nightmare.
To the beast people of the world, here was proof positive. An enormous deceit was in the making, a vast betrayal. A magnificent dream was about to die.
In their kinder moments, the beast folk spoke of the L-Day Plan as a money-making venture, a promotional stunt, a program designed to win converts to the church.
In their true beast character, however, they reacted with fear, anger, derision. Many beast people called the plan a direct attack on the fundamental tenets of the free enterprise system.
Spirit people saw the plan in a different light. Bishop Mae M. Frapple of the United Heavenly Church of the Holy Paraclete Descending in Fire All Over spoke for many spirit folk when she told a rally in Madison Square Garden: “The Holy Spirit has sent this col-yured pope into the world to tell us the show is over! Come November 24, and Jee-sus Chee-rast is ridin’ in on the clouds and is gonna break asses all over the nation. Alleluia!”
Crowd: “Alleluia!”
In the beginning only the most literal-minded spirit people took the L-Day announcement as a prophecy of the end of the world.
But once the idea got into the hands of the ministers of the United Heavenly Church of the Holy Paraclete Descending, it began to spread to religious groups once considered moderate.
Had not the pope himself prophesied that the world would be consumed by flame?
Repent before the twenty-fourth! became the theme of a hundred thousand radio spots sponsored by the International Council of Charismatic Churches.
IS YOUR HOUSE IN ORDER? asked 10,000 billboards erected along the major highways of the United States.
Similar announcements, proclamations and questions were printed, broadcast and televised in every nation of the world.
The spiritist churches found astronomers and physicists and men of other sciences to back up their claim that the world would soon become the victim of a cosmic accident.
“The earth has been slipping dangerously out of orbit for a million years,” said Professor E. N. Magus, a Nobel prize physicist of London. “Now we have the ideal conditions for a burn. I would advise everyone to keep close watch.”
At first beast folk scoffed at the predictions of the spiritists, but it soon became a mirthless scoffing.
Spiritist farmers refused to harvest the fall crop.
Spiritist workers in the steel and the auto industries and in the great national defense programs began walking off their jobs.
Suddenly there were shutdowns, production cutbacks, commodity shortages all across the industrial world.
Sales in the JERCUS bloc fell for the first time in ten years.
By the middle of September all the economic indicators of the world pointed to calamity.
“There can be no question,” said The Wall Street Journal, “that this country, Europe, and much of the industrialized Orient is headed for the most ruinous depression of modern times. The entire JERCUS economy is in hazard.”
A committee of international bankers called upon the pope to clarify his message lest disaster befall the market.
“Where have the bankers been during the years of starvation?” Willie asked his advisors.
But then another sort of news reached his ears, and he knew then that he had to speak to the world once more.
The news concerned the reappearance, in Texas, of a rite unknown since the days of the Albigensian heretics in medieval France.
A sect of spiritists calling themselves the Second Comers had begun to practice and encourage ritualistic suicide—”to go to the Lord generously and save Him the effort of coming to you,” as an editor wrote in Second Wind, the newspaper of the Second Comers.
In Dallas, Houston, and several other Texas cities, 300 people took their lives in the third week of September, and the suicide rate began to climb in other parts of the U.S. and soon throughout the world.
The suicides occured among both spiritists, who wished to bring about what one of them called a personal L-Day, and beast-folk who had fallen into despair over developments in the stock market, real estate speculations and grain futures.
Fear seized whole populations; people phoned their lawyers to draw up wills.
“For whom?” the lawyers would ask.
When an asteroid struck the earth near Hangchow, China, Earl Cardinal Goldenblade, who had emerged as the leading spiritist spokesman for the U.S. Catholic church, told a nationwide TV audience that the asteroid was a heavenly sign, foretold in Scripture, that announced the coming end of the world.
Bishop Mae Frapple joined Cardinal Goldenblade in an hour-long network revival which called for a mass on-the-air Baptism of the Spirit and a universal outpouring of tongues, so that, in the words of Bishop Mae F
rapple, “the Spirit will know we are on his wavelength.”
That night 60 million Americans rushed into the streets shouting “Te legurithi mihi!”
The following night the Second Comers sponsored a nationwide telecast during which a young man named Cy Proust, who had worked for the largest mechanical bird manufacturer in the world, took his life, live and in color, at the climax of the oration of Bishop Mae Frapple, by firing a .38 revolver into his right temple.
The program drew the largest viewing audience in the history of U.S. television, and the network immediately signed Bishop Mae Frapple and Cardinal Goldenblade to produce a nightly show, called This Is Your Death, which, according to the contract, would “feature a live, on-the-air bona fide suicide certified by a representative of the U.S. Coroner’s Association.”
Sixty-five thousand Americans volunteered for the show the first day it was announced. According to the contract for the program, the show, using film and live interviews with friends and relatives of the volunteer, would recap highlights of the person’s life. At the end of the program, an announcer’s voice would say, “And so, (Arnold Morgan St. James), this is your death.” With a silver-plated revolver, engraved with his initials, the volunteer would shoot himself.
The program became the most popular program in the United States, and within a week similar programs began to be telecast in every country of the world where civilization had prevailed.
So the pope spoke to the world again.
“It is not the end of the material world,” said Willie in tears. “It is the end of the world of slave arrangements and of barriers and traps and prisons—the things I spoke of earlier. It is the beginning of a new world.
“It is not a time to give up or take life. It is the time to begin life—the kind we have to live in order to be people.”
He said more, he made more words, but the words did not make any difference because the confusion had gone too far, and on the night of his speech most of the people were watching the new death programs, and those who did see it became even more convinced that the pope prophesied the end of the world because he had used that phrase in his speech and even though he had qualified it, people could not make qualifications or understand them, and many of the spirit people said that the pope had actually gone farther in his second speech then in the first, and the beast people rejoiced at the scandal that was coming and at the fear, and they watched the suicide programs with relish, and around the world in the fourth week of September, the suicide rate quadrupled.
* * *
Dusk in the smallest room of the papal apartments, a bare blue cell stripped of everything, with only a single bulb hanging from a cord.
“What can I do? What can I say to stop them?” Willie asked his brothers. His eyes were red from crying and the lines of grief were deepening on his face, and he was older.
“Nothing,” said Felder. “Another speech would accomplish nothing.”
“In Germany yesterday, they said 138 people killed themselves—138 people,” Willie repeated, and wept again.
“The old fixes breaking up,” said Felder offhandedly.
“They are people,” cried Willie. “I did not mean that people should be broken.”
Benjamin said, “Some cannot stand the life which is new and therefore painful. Death seems preferable.”
“Did I not speak the truth, Father Benjamin?” Willie asked.
“When the truth of life comes to nonlife, there is a great struggle and some cannot survive. Truth brings death.”
Willie held his head in his hands.
“I don’t want to deal with death,” he said.
“You must deal with death before any of the others,” said Benjamin.
Outside, the fall night was coming on and the air hummed with traffic and death’s motors roared amid the old stones and the broken pillars.
“Man who care for RevCon,” said Joto, “man who watch starve tabulator. Made strange discovery this day. In India, Africa and in South America and other lands where there is method of taking starve count, these numbers have been falling since announcement of L-Day.”
“What—what could be the reason?” said Willie, his face brightening for the first time in two weeks.
“It seems, as I contemplate situation,” said Joto, “in these areas, landowners, market bosses, growers and other wealthy large people become filled with panic for well-being. Look to flee territories, seeking treasures that they put away. When flee lands, leave food behind. Poor come and get food and eat well for first time in many years.”
“Why, that’s wonderful!” said Willie.
“Not so, Willie,” said Joto. “Food must be replenished. Managers and in-between folk, processors of food and such, especially those of spiritist mentality, not bothering to plant for new season or even harvest in those areas where crop is in. Feel world ending and all. In few weeks, says statistics man, food supplies end all together and situation return to worse than normal.”
Willie groaned. They all groaned.
Herman Felder made a quick, sweeping motion with his cigarette.
“A few thousand people die at their own hand—crazy wealthies. We get all hot and bothered. Where was the heat and the bother when the thousands were dying daily of starvation?”
“We were always bothered,” said Benjamin. “What is the point you make, Brother Herman?”
“Well,” said Felder, “everybody dies; there is a certain ironic justice to what is happening.”
Willie stared at Felder, his eyes filling with anger.
“You think it good that poor, foolish people kill themselves just because those same foolish people, out of frailty and many other weaknesses, lacked compassion for the poor?”
“There is a certain compensation in the processes of life,” Felder said gently. “And in great changes that make life better, it is to be expected that some will die.”
“Oh God,” said Willie, “I have heard that line until it makes me yearn for death myself.” And he left them and went into the papal garden to pray alone.
Two nights later he spoke to the world once more, and this time he spoke so clearly that no one in his right senses could fail to understand, though in truth not all that many people were in their right senses—millions of people were playing spirit and millions of others were playing beast.
“Woe to those who take life,” he said, “their own or another’s. Woe to those who encourage the taking of life and who refuse to support life and who discourage the growing of foods and say that the material things do not matter.
“An old world is ending and a new one is being born, but the new one is but the old transformed.
“L-Day is not a day for acting as an angel or acting as a beast. It is a day for man acting the best he can as man.
“That is what I said in the beginning, and I grieve to see what is happening because of the meanings some have given to what I said.
“It is a new world that will be reborn because we will be reborn.
“What have we asked of you but this—that you go to your enemy and make peace with him.
“That is all.
“But that is enough.
“Do not, in the name of God, put a meaning on this plan that brings death to a single person.
“For it is not the death of men that we seek but rather the death of death’s kingdom—the fear and the pride and the greed and the power and the domination of man by man.
“That world of old arrangements needs to die, and it will die on the twenty-fourth of November if we are faithful and if we are pure of heart. Yes, it will burn away and we will be people.
“Just people.”
That seemed to settle it in Willie’s mind.
And for a little while, the worst of the excesses tapered off a bit and the world fell into a sort of melancholy daze, but there were interpretations given even to this lull, and some said it was the calm that comes before a great storm.
Bishop Mae Frapple kil
led her nineteen-year-old husband as a sacrifice to the Spirit and was jailed on charges of disorderly conduct.
This Is Your Death continued to be a popular television show, but after Willie’s third speech volunteers fell from 90,000 a day to 20,000.
The stock exchanges showed a few tentative signs of recovery.
The laboring forces, half of them, went back to work.
October 1 came and went in a haze of blue and gold, but even the natural signs of fall became, in the eyes of many, portents of evil days ahead.
The leaves had fallen along the pathways where the popes had walked for 500 years.
It was twilight and the lights of Rome shone green in the distance.
Willie and Thatcher Grayson sat on a marble bench and watched the Tiber turn the color of wine.
“Tomorrow you meet with them again, the theologians and the officials?” said Thatcher Grayson.
“They want to prove me a heretic.”
“I fear for you, son. They will press you on the Servants, L-Day, everything.”
“I am ready for—anything,” said Willie.
“You do not know how far men will go,” said Mr. Grayson.
“But I do, Mr. Grayson,” said Willie, thinking of Angola. “I know that men will do anything.”
He looked down at the old river that was still as a sleeping snake.
“You know why I asked to see you tonight, Mr. Grayson.”
Thatcher Grayson stood up suddenly. “You don’t know what that man will do.”
Again Willie thought of Angola and Etherea. He took Thatcher Grayson’s arm. “Nothing is to be feared, my dear friend. How can I expect others to make peace with their enemies if I cannot make peace with him?”
“He will never make peace.”
“Still I must try. I must find him and try.”
Grayson turned his face to the shadow of Saint Peter’s basilica. “He goes to a remote place in the last week of November. It is just after the baseball owners’ convention. He goes to the place and shoots ploves.”
“What are ploves?”
The Last Western Page 43