The Black Mass of Brother Springer (3 page)

       The key to successful escape is "determination." The deserting husband must be willing to forsake forever his wife, his children, his relatives, his friends, his old Army buddies, and his former way of life. This isn't easy, and although statistics reveal that thirty percent try to get away every year, only five percent make it. But when one considers that we have about fifty million married men in the United States, five percent is a lot of loose husbands.

       I was not concerned with the others, I was only concerned with myself. And as I rode through the dark Florida night, I examined my motives. When I purchased a one-way ticket to Orangeville, I certainly did not intend to desert my wife. I bought the ticket unconsciously. "Give me a ticket to Orangeville," I said. That was all. But my sensitive conscious mind knew that my way of life was in danger. By becoming a writer I had escaped a dull, unrewarding, life-sapping job as an accountant in Columbus. My thoughts that morning, while sitting peacefully in my study, surrounded by books from the library, magazines, writing tablets and carefully sharpened pencils, had been forced into examining ways to obtain money, and the only way I really knew how to make money was as an accountant.

       What was I doing on this bus, riding to a tiny Florida village, and what could I possibly find at a dying monastery that would be worthwhile to write about? What indeed? I could fool my wife, but how could I fool myself? I was merely exhausting the few dollars I had left in a foolish expenditure, which brought, in turn, the necessity for fulltime employment that much closer...

       For a full year I had enjoyed the fruits of a published novel. In the peaceful quiet of Ocean Pine Terraces, I had watched the husbands of the neighborhood leave for work in the morning, and I had watched them return in the evening. A pitiful crew. While watering my lawn in the early evening I had watched them drive into their open carports, and I had waved to them kindly. I felt sorry for them, and although I knew I was hated and envied by most of the husbands on my quiet block, I could understand their feelings. As a writer I was above any outward show of emotion, and gradually, as the days lengthened into weeks, into months, I was incapable of feeling any kind of emotion.

       That year had taught me how to live, how to see, how to enjoy, and to fully realize what I had missed in life by working for more than ten years hunched over ledgers at the Tanfair Milk Company. At first my heart was filled with compassion for the others. I felt sorry for everyone. I loved everyone. How could I have felt otherwise? But there was no way to show my feelings, so I did not let myself betray them.

       How could I tell my next door neighbor, a trust officer at the Citizen's bank, that I felt sorry for him? When I saw him drive into his carport and dismount from his new car with a bulging briefcase under his arm, my heart flooded with pity for this poor fellow. His light would be on far into the night as he worked over papers from the bank. Could I have told him about the bright red cardinal that perched on my window ledge every morning, and how beautiful the little bird was, and how I missed the little thing when it failed to put in an appearance?

       Of course not. The only things I had in common with my banker neighbor were the chinch bugs in the lawn!

       I knew these working men. I had been one myself before becoming a writer, and I knew how they kidded themselves into believing that what they were doing mattered.

       Gradually, as the weeks passed, I shut all thoughts of my neighbors out, and lived entirely within myself. I wrote down my vagrant thoughts, snatches of imaginary dialogue, and a few short stories—the article on D. H. Lawrence. I read three and five books a week from the public library, books I had always wanted to read and had not read, and I reread many of my favorites. Once or twice a week I would drive to the beach and sun myself, lying quietly on the hot sands and basking in the subtropical rays of a bright and kindly sun. By myself I would swim out past the pounding surf, float on my back, and open my eyes to the changing colors of the sky. I was fully, vitally alive, and aware of the beauty of the world; the world that had been denied to me in the changing climate of Columbus, confined in the thick woolen clothing I had been forced to wear; the tight collars and the damned neckties.

       And to the dismay of my wife, I had gradually become celibate. How many months had it been? I counted on my fingers—five months—a long time to do without sex. But I was above it, and the thought of sex left me indifferent, uncaring—it was all so boring anyway, and messy on top of that.

       As a writer I lived in my mind. That was enough. I sighed deeply, an anguished sound brought up from deep within my chest. The sound awakened my companion, an elderly gentleman in a grey wash-and-wear dacron suit, and he glared at me.

       "What's the matter, buddy? You sick?" He asked.

       "No," I replied angrily. "Are you?"

       "I ain't making no noises like I was dying." The old man turned his head away from me and went back to sleep.

       Orangeville, population 603, was not a regular stop on the run from Miami to Jax, and the driver had his big bus in gear and on the highway again before I realized that I was on the ground. My Timex wristwatch indicated that it was four a.m. and there wasn't a single light shining in the little town. With my small overnight bag between my knees, I blinked sleepily in the darkness, and wondered where the monastery was, and how I could find it in the blackness.

       I didn't feel like standing in a dark filling station waiting for daylight, and I was in need of a cup of coffee. A mile or so back we had passed a SAVE! chain gas station, well-lighted by neon tubing, and I started back down the highway toward this oasis. There would be a Coke machine, anyway, and light, and an attendant to shoot the breeze with, at least.

       Facing the light traffic, I walked on the edge of the highway until I reached the all-night filling station. After a session in the men's room, I talked to the station attendant, a young man in his late twenties who taught American history at the Clewiston High School to supplement his income.

       He was glad to have company, and talked animatedly about a current project his students were working on; a class skit depicting the balances of Government which a friend of his at Florida State University had set to music.

       Waiting politely for a break in the monologue, I asked the teacher-attendant where the famous Church of God's Flock Monastery was and how I could get there.

       "It's closed," he said.

       "I know, but the Abbott is still there, and I have an appointment with him."

       "Did you ride the bus all the way into town?"

       "Yes, and then I walked back down here."

       "You shouldn't have done that. You should have asked the driver to put you off at the monastery. It's five miles back." He jerked his thumb in a southerly direction.

       I cursed and looked at my watch again. Four forty-five.

       "I'd better start walking," I told the attendant.

       "If you want to wait until six-thirty, I'll drop you off when my relief comes," he offered eagerly, reluctant to see me leave.

       "No," I shook my head. "The exercise will wake me up."

       We shook hands formally and I departed, carrying my light bag. The night was pitch black, and there was a smell of smoke in the air that came in strongly, and then drifted away again from a muck fire several miles away. I could make out a faint red glow on the horizon, and I recalled that there always seemed to be untended fires in central Florida. Cars on the highway were few and far between, and the highway was a straight gray line through the empty countryside. The night was noisy with crickets and insects of all kinds, and every five minutes on the dog, a bull alligator roared from the depths of the swamp oozing back from the right side of the highway.

       I walked with an infantry pace, ninety steps a minute, which would give me a rate of two and one-half miles an hour if I stopped for a break of ten minutes after the first hour. I was in no hurry, and I found the walk very pleasant, especially the sunrise part. A Florida sunrise is different from other sunrises. First the sky, which has been completely black, turns pearly gray, all at once, as though a dimmer switch had been thrown; a few moments later, the dimmer is turned up full to bright, and the sun is up. The sunrise doesn't sneak in, like mood music; it comes on full, and the state is flushed with a white heat; the sweat begins to flow, and you don't think you will be able to stand it. But somehow, high noon is no hotter than daybreak. So long as the sun is shining there is a maddening sameness to the heat which most Northerners never seem to get used to.

       An archway constructed of concrete brick and stucco, painted orange, fronted the entrance to the monastery, and a yellow gravel road led to a small line-up of one-room structures which resembled an abandoned motel. There were seven of the one-story cabins, and each of them was painted a different tint or shade of orange. At the far end of the short stretch of cabins, a fair-sized Butler building, also painted orange, gleamed in the sun, with a wooden, orange cross nailed to the slanting roof. This building, I supposed, was the chapel. Multicolored croton grew thickly about each building; interspersed with the croton were blue century and castor-bean plants, gallberry bushes, Florida cherry hedges, scrub palmettos and red, triple-blooming hibiscus. All of the untended foliage was well choked by gama grass and assorted weeds. Over the first cabin, marked OFFICE and ABBOTT in old English script, lettered in black paint beside the screen door, a galloping flame vine had been trained across the roof, and the spreading plant completely covered one entire side of the building.

       Twenty feet behind the row of cabins, an orange grove, of perhaps twenty or twenty-five acres, stretched up and over a rise of ground and reappeared in the distance, halting atop a small hill which held a crudely constructed, slowly revolving windmill. Downwind, which did not help, a waist-high corral, dotted with seven packing boxes, had once held goats; I could tell by the smell.

       In front of the Abbott's cabin, or "cell," a man in a black, ground-length cassock performed calisthenics, counting "One, two, three, four" in a loud practiced voice of command. I lit a cigarette and watched him as he bobbed to "burpies," an exercise so tiring it made me weary to watch him. The Abbott was a thickset man, at least six feet tall; with a round, hard paunch and a closely shaven head well-tanned by the sun. His face was red and wet from the vigorous exercising, and his nose was a misshapen potato grafted sloppily onto a flat, freshly-scraped face. Rat blue eyes, set well apart, looked me over appraisingly, but he did not stop the exercising or the counting. There was something odd about the man I could not fathom for a moment, and then I noticed that his eyebrows were also shaved away, and there was a silver medal (a pair of crossed rifles and a cross-bar labeled Expert Rifleman) pinned to the cassock above his left breast. Shaved eyebrows are unusual, and not every man of God wears a shooting medal, and this combination, I decided, accounted for the strangeness.

       "Good morning," I said. "Are you Abbott Dover?"

       "One—!" he screamed with a rising inflection. "Two, three, four!" And he stopped at the position of a soldier at Attention, breathing heavily. "These burpies are rough, boy! Ever try any?"

       "Not since I got out of the Army," I laughed.

       "I am a soldier of the Lord," he said easily. "Had your breakfast yet?"

       "No, sir," I replied. "Just a Coca-Cola down the road."

       "Come on in then, and we'll whomp up something."

       I followed the Abbott into his cabin, sat down at the table, and slid the overnight bag under my chair. Before I had a chance to look around the room, the Abbott questioned me as he broke eggs into a large frying pan on the electric stove.

       "Are you a pilgrim, boy? Or are you interested in a little real estate? Or are you just a bum looking for a handout?"

       "I'm a little of each, I suppose," I answered warily. "I'm a writer and I read in the Miami paper about your monastery closing, and thought there might be an article in it."

       "There might be at that, but I don't want any publicity. There's been too much already, and a dead dog knows enough to lie down. Do you want some grits with your eggs?"

       "Yes, sir."

       The room was much larger inside than one would suspect from looking at the outside, and the arrangement of the furniture had been planned to give as much space as possible to the center of the cell. An apartment-sized refrigerator sat in one corner; next to it was a four-unit electric stove, and there was a doorway leading to a separate bathroom. A studio couch, covered with rumpled sheets, was alongside one wall, and the table where we ate breakfast was beneath the window. In a sort of an alcove by the bathroom door there was a disordered desk piled high with books and papers, and on a narrow shelf above the desk there were more books, most of them Bibles. The terrazo floor was bare and the furniture, including an easy chair and its flanking end table and lamp, was Sears-modern.

       I sat down to breakfast and ate hungrily. The Abbott set a good early morning table. We ate four fried eggs apiece, a pile of grits, a heaping plateful of hoe cake dripping with melted margarine and orange marmalade, and then we talked over coffee, taking turns on the filling of pottery cups from a huge gray enamel pot on the stove.

       "I'll tell you about the Church of God's Flock monastery, Brother Springer, and then you'll know for yourself why it isn't worth an article in a newspaper or magazine." Abbott Dover took a large bit out of a plug of Brown Mule, chewed contemplatively for a moment, and then spat into a pot containing a giant philodendron.

       "You'll let me be the judge, then?"

       "No. I won't okay anything you write, and if you do write anything I'll issue a denial."