He did not hear Sister speak again until 1921, and by that time he had walked much of Georgia and South Carolina, offering kindness where it could be offered, helping the helpless, preaching the equality of all people regardless of race. In all that time, in that year and a half, he had not touched a drop of liquor, a deck of cards, or the exposed skin of a woman.
On the day he heard Sister’s voice for the second time he’d found himself with a little money in his pocket, and he’d taken a seat on the porch of a country store near Sumter, South Carolina, where he’d just unwrapped a pork sandwich. The tinny drone of a radio whined from inside the store, and as its operator switched through the few stations it could pick up from over in Columbia, he heard Sister’s voice beckon to him. He leapt from his seat and went inside and begged the store’s owner to leave the dial where it lay. Then he leaned against the counter, his sandwich growing cold, and listened to the voice of the woman who’d changed his life.
She and her mother had made it all the way to Los Angeles, California, and there she planned to build a grand temple that would save the world. What she needed now were prayers, prayers and donations, to ensure that the power of God could continue to touch lives with even greater speed than she’d been able to achieve these last few years on the back roads of America. For a donation of five dollars, Sister herself would send the faithful patron a personalized letter and a small replica of the hundreds of chairs that would one day fill the Angelus Temple.
He checked his pockets and found a little over four dollars. He hadn’t held a steady job in years, and money meant nothing to him aside from the ease of buying food, and there was plenty of that in the fields he passed and the woods through which he walked on his travels.
He asked for a pencil and wrote down the postal address in Los Angeles, then he pondered the uneaten sandwich on the counter beside him and the unopened, sweating glass bottle of Coca-Cola that sat beside it. He calculated what he’d just paid for each. He refolded the wax paper around the sandwich and asked for his money to be returned, but the store owner would only let him return the Coca-Cola, and even that he accepted begrudgingly. He ate the pork sandwich and waited while the store owner opened the till and counted out the money for the Coca-Cola.
When he finished eating he asked the owner if there was anything a good man could do to earn honest money for a good woman’s cause. For the rest of the afternoon, he unloaded boxes in the storeroom and stocked shelves. That evening he swept out the store and swept the porch and the porch steps. For all of this work, work that had felt both natural and fulfilling, the store owner gave him a dollar, which, combined with his existing funds, was plenty of money to buy an envelope and postage to send five dollars to Sister Aimee Semple McPherson.
He took the envelope and the stamp from the store owner. After a brief consideration of where he would be a month from that date—he figured he’d shoot for Greenwood, South Carolina—he scratched out a note in the best penmanship his left hand could muster.
Dear Sister,
I saw you at a revival out side Augusta. I send you these hard earned 5 dollars and hope your dream comes true. I look forward to getting a letter from you. I look forward to getting that little chair too.
Your friend . . .
(Here he paused, his pencil hovering above the page. He smiled, decided to sign a new name, a name he’d gone by ever since that day.)
. . . in peace and justice, Brother
What the boy at the crossroads had thought were castles were actually the buildings of a Catholic monastery. Brother crested a hill and spotted a monk in a cassock hoeing rows of what looked to be cabbages in a small, neatly turned field. He waved to the monk. The monk stopped hoeing and stared at him for a moment. He leaned against the hoe and wiped at his brow. Then he raised a hand to shield the sun from his eyes so that he might see Brother more clearly. He waved back.
The small order of Benedictine monks at Belmont Abbey were quiet, holy men, benefactors of the small college of the same name that the order had founded in 1876. On the campus, a couple hundred Gaston and Mecklenburg County farm boys in suits and ties wandered from classroom to classroom in search of the mysteries of a proper liberal arts education. Meanwhile, the monks, whose cloistered lives allowed them almost no awareness of the comings and goings of the students, prayed, studied, maintained the life of the monastery, and volunteered their time in the local mill communities. They took Brother in without hesitation or question. They did not ask his name or who he was, and that was fine with him because he did not want to be who he’d been.
The monk he’d first met in the field that April day was Father Gregory, a gouty, red-faced old man who’d come from Pennsylvania. Brother spent most of his time with Father Gregory, working in the garden, cleaning the monks’ quarters, walking the abbey’s grounds, listening to the gurgle of the small fountain in the courtyard.
Brother slept on a cot in a closetlike room in the monastery’s basement. Here, while listening to water pass through the pipes and the sounds of the forest outside the basement door through which he was allowed to come and go as he pleased, he would lie awake until sleep found him, the tips of his fingers touching each angle of the tiny wooden chair that sat upright on his chest. He pondered the promise he’d made to himself to be good, to know good, to do good.
And then he saw Ella May Wiggins, and his memory of beholding Sister coupled with the dark guilt of his past life caught up with him there in a crowded field in Gastonia. Like Sister, this woman Ella stood atop a stage with a vast audience spread out before her. It was a cool evening in early May, not long after dark. Brother stood with Father Gregory and Father Elian on the edge of the crowd, shoulder-to-shoulder with gaunt-faced millworkers, policemen, and newspaper reporters. He and the two monks had traveled the few miles to Gastonia to help feed the strikers who they had learned would be evicted from their homes the following morning. He had expected to help them, but he had not expected to see Ella or to feel her story uncoil itself in his heart.
And then she sang, and Brother was struck dumb by the beauty of it.
Chapter Six
Claire McAdam
Friday, May 10, 1929