The Last Western (17 page)

In Washington, a spokesman for the Apostolic Delegate said that the Silent Servants were not an official religious congregation of the Catholic Church but that the activities of the sect had been reported to Rome.

In Rome, Giuseppe Cardinal Agadio, Vatican Secretary of State, said that as far as the Vatican was concerned, the society did not exist.

“Canonically speaking, they are nowhere,” the prelate said.

Attached to this press clipping was a huge headline taken from another paper that said, BLEEDER FREED! A page later, Willie found still more headlines.

FELDER TURNS UP IN NORTH KOREA! HELD AS SPY!

State Department Says Felder a Traitor!

Leaked JERCUS Military Secrets in India

Hero Denounced by Russia, China, U.S.,

Euro-Group, Canada, Japan and United

Arab Republic! Execution Predicted

Underneath these headlines was a news report from Hong Kong: (Hong Kong, June 10)
Radio Ghandiville today accused Air Force General Milton “Gunner” Felder of having pilfered microfilmed military documents during his recent stay in the capital. The official government radio denounced Felder as “a despicable enemy of the human race” and joined the nations of the newly formed JERCUS Alliance in sentencing Felder to death.

Farther on in the Guidebook amidst various sayings and quotations from Scripture, Willie found another press clipping, this one of apparently more recent times.

SECRET SECT MEETS IN MIAMI—OR DOES IT?

Son of American Traitor

Conducts 2-Man Convention

(Miami, Florida)
Is there such an organization as the Silent Servants of the Used, Abused and Utterly Screwed Up?

That’s what some 200 newsmen from around the world are asking themselves today as the first U.S. convention of the society opened, listened to a brief address, conducted a business session, and closed in Veteran’s Auditorium yesterday—all in less than 20 minutes.

The only two registrants to the convention were Herman V. Felder, 28, a filmmaker and heir of the Felder cosmetic fortune, and a minor league baseball manager named Thatcher Grayson.

Hands trembling, Willie brought the book up to the lamp.

There was a picture of the two registrants, and one of them was Mr. Grayson of the New York Hawks. It was a very young Mr. Grayson, hatless and smiling, but it was the Hawks manager without a doubt.

Willie read on.

Felder, the son of famed U.S. flying ace Milton Felder, executed for treason several years ago, said, “the convention was a success in that no one showed up.”

When quizzed about the objectives of the sect, Felder said, “One of the objectives is to not attend any meeting held in this insolent city.”

(The mayor of Miami in a news conference later in the afternoon said that Felder was welcome to leave Miami anytime he wished.)

The press was barred from attending the sessions of the convention, but it is believed Felder read a poem titled, “Now I Got Nobody but the Man Upstairs, and He Gone Downstairs, Baby Mine.”

Felder declined to answer a question about his own membership in the society but he invited the 200 newsmen to attend a demonstration of what he called the world’s greatest camera, which he said would revolutionize filmmaking.

When the reporters asked to see the camera, Felder said he would not show it within the city limits of Miami and asked the reporters to join him in a field outside town.

None of the newsmen took him up on the invitation.

Felder was in the news last year when his feature length cartoon film, “Up the Roundup,” was banned throughout the United States by the Supreme Court, which called the picture a “traitorous philosophical obscenity.” The film featured the illustrations of famed Japanese artist Joto Toshima, currently serving a dome-passing sentence in Trenton, New Jersey.

Thatcher Grayson, the other conventioneer, is the 45-year-old manager of the Sweetwater Cowpokes, a farm club under the ownership of the New York Hawks.

He said that he had come to the meeting because he was “interested in spiritual things.”

The Silent Servants have been in the news over the past several years in various parts of the world, usually in crisis areas, where their services are alternately described as humanitarian and useless.

The society has reportedly been under the surveillance of the CIA for eight years.

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 hand, 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.