Aurora Dawn (7 page)

The morning sun, which had officially risen seventeen minutes earlier according to local almanacs, now lifted itself radiantly
over the eastern rim of the valley and slanted a white beam into the book-lined study of Father Calvin Stanfield, adding an
appropriate luminosity to the picture of that divine on his knees on a large crimson cushion, deep in prayer. The sun did
him the further grace of falling directly on the section of religious books opposite the window, throwing into clarity the
titles of many substantial theological tomes, classical and current, and leaving in decent obscurity shelves of philosophical,
biographical, epigrammatic, and fictional works that pertained wholly to the fleshly world. The taste thus shadowed seemed
to range across wide areas of literature. The library had the jumbled appearance of one that is frequently and hastily referred
to, and since the Father did not trouble to rearrange the books–and the faithful lamb who cleaned the room saw no incongruity–Spinoza
rubbed bindings with Mark Twain, Jane Austen with La Rochefoucauld, James Joyce with Lord Chesterfield, Keats with Clarence
Darrow, and so on, indefinitely. The last author’s obsolescent books were very well thumbed; they furnished forth an army
of familiar atheistical straw men for the Shepherd to strike down in his Sunday sermons.

In morning devotions the Father had a directness which might well be the envy of more polished clerics who sometimes struggle
against a wicked intuition that they are mumbling into a void. He had not the slightest doubt but that he was in colloquy
with his Maker, who, like himself, appreciated straight talk. It was his way to pray aloud and extemporaneously, alone or
in the congregation.

“Lord, I’m doin’ what I kin,” he was saying, “but you know what I got to struggle aginst. You gi’ me the call to preach, but
you also gi’ me a clownish soul, and I don’t hardly know what’s religion and what’s my own doggone carryin’ on half the time.
All I know is, the Fold has prospered, and my people pray and read their Bible and live Godly lives with their families under
these roofs you have blessed me to build; so no matter how unworthy a vessel I seem to be, you must know what you’re doin’.
Now this here young man from Radio City, New York, is a-comin’ to tempt me with fine gold, yea, with much fine gold, to put
our Saturday night revival meetin’ on the radio. You know I kin use that money; we got seventy families on the waitin’ list
that we jest cain’t take into the Fold ’cause they ain’t no room. I could build a whole mess of nice little houses with that
there radio money.

“But Lord, my soul is hungerin’ fer the glitter and the glamour and the clamor of fame, and that’s what I’m afraid of. Before
honor must come humility, and where-at is my humility? I’m puffed up with pride and success, and if I take that money, I don’
know but what I’m yieldin’ to a temptation that’s goin’ to be the beginnin’ of the downfall of the Fold. I rejected Temptation
once, Lord, and here she is, a-walkin’ back and forth in front o’ me agin, Lord, in her black chiffon nightgown.”

For a moment he bowed his head against his hands, which rested on the windowsill. Then he raised it again and spoke in a milder
key.

“Lord, I ain’t complainin’. If I didn’ have no problems, it wouldn’ be no glory to you if I triumphed. Only now and then I
git cornered, and I got to holler to the Old Man for help. I jest don’ know what to do. Nobody cain’t tell me it’s right fer
to use the Gospel to sell things, but here I been a-prayin’ fer money to enlarge the Fold, and here comes the old money, but
with a long string attached where I cain’t even see t’other end of it, and I don’ know but what the devil’s holdin’ it.

“Well, lemme git off that fer a minute, I reckon I been layin’ it on enough.

“Lord, I thank you fer the countless blessin’s of my life. When I think of me, a-hangin’ on to this spinnin’ ball in black
space, me smaller than a ant in yer eyes, the earth smaller than a ol’ pebble, I wonder how I got the nerve to talk to you,
and even more how it is you pay attention to me.
But I know you pay attention!
When I laid in that mud-puddle in Belgium, Lord, with the shells a-screechin’ ever’ which way around me, and vowed if you
got me out of that mess I would believe on you, you paid attention. A thousand fell on my left hand, and ten thousand on my
right; unto me them shells did not approach. I knowed then that you had me marked out to do some work fer you on this li’l
ol’ round ball you got hung up in space fer man to act out his days on. I ben doin’ my best, Lord, take it all around, except
fer this clownish streak I got in me, which maybe I sometimes think you put there fer a purpose too, seein’ as how I sure
lay it over the regular preachers fer bringin’ the folks in to meetin’ and gittin’ ’em worked up to the love of the Lord.
Maybe to herd these mountain sheep you need a real crooked stick, Lord, which is me.

“You blessed me with everythin’, Lord, except the greatest blessin’ of all, a virtuous wife and children. I got no arrows
to my quiver, and they ain’t nobody risin’ up in the gate to call me blessed. I ain’t complainin’. I sinned with Gracie in
London, I know I did. I dreamed of her last night agin, and she turned into thin air in my arms, same as always. Lord, I dunno
if you ever stop to figger that I was unredeemed then and you cain’t hardly hang me as high fer what I done then as what I
might of done after. But thy will be done. Not as I will, but as thou wilt. Still, I ain’t no Saint Paul, Lord. I ain’t that
pure in spirit, and I’m mighty lonely in the long nights, I don’t mind tellin’ you. Must I go on alone? Even Moses took a
Cushite woman, and he was gittin’ on to eighty-three when he done it. ’Course there it is. Him takin’ her got the congregation
all riled up and Miriam and Aaron murmured agin’ him, and Miriam wound up with the leprosy and there was general hell to pay.
Well, Lord, I reckon even if I did find Gracie after all these years and tried to bring a little English-talkin’ Cockney gal
in among these here folks it would bust up the meetin’, is that the idea? I reckon you know best. I sure couldn’t take no
other woman, married as we are in yer eyes. I ain’t no Mormon. Thy will be done, Lord.

“Thy will be done in everythin’, Lord. On this here radio deal, how about tellin’ me what to do? I don’ want to take bad money,
but I don’t want to let it pass by if it’s permitted me to take it. Will you guide me to the answer, Lord?”

Father Stanfield rose from his knees and walked to a little stand by his desk, on which there rested a large, worn Bible.
It had been his practice for twenty years, in moments of extreme perplexity, to open the Good Book at random and put his finger
blindly on a verse. If the verse thus isolated could possibly be construed as pertaining to the problem at hand he would abide
by the answer with rigid resolve. The morning sun played on his hands as he placed them gently on the Bible, bent his head
and said, “The Lord is nigh unto all that call upon him–unto all that call on him in truth.” He opened the book near the middle,
and his finger fell upon the forty-second verse of the second chapter of the book of Ezra:

The children of the porters: the children of Shallum, the children of Ater, the children of Talmon, the children of Akkub,
the children of Hatita, the children of Shobai, in all an hundred thirty and nine.

Slowly and respectfully, the Faithful Shepherd closed the book, returned to his habitual place of devotion by the window,
and knelt again. There was a faint smile on his face, good-natured and a little wry.

“All right, my Father,” he said. “I gotta figger it out alone, is that it?
I
think the problem is too big fer me but
you
think it ain’t, and so you tossin’ her right back in my lap. Thy will be done. You know I’ll do the best I kin. Inspire me
to do the right thing fer the Fold, Lord. I ain’t worth much, but the Fold is a fair work, a sweet home fer many folks who
love God, and also much cattle.”

His voice dropped lower, and he began to murmur rapid, indistinct prayers, evidently routine devotions.

Since we cannot hear him, and since you may suspect a touch of extravagance in the picture of the Faithful Shepherd which
we are drawing: a suspicion which, if unallayed, would cloud the veracity of our whole tale: we must fill in a detail or two
of his background, at the risk of tedium. One of our beautiful young ladies reappears in the next chapter; you may slop directly
to that if you believe unquestioningly all that has been said about the Father.

Calvin Stanfield was born and reared on the slopes of the valley, most of the arable land of which now belonged to the Fold
of the Faithful Shepherd. His father was a farmer, remotely of English extraction like most of the valley people, who dug
a small living out of an un-co-operative patch of soil, and sought no further satisfaction in the things of this world. The
old Bible which we have watched the preacher use was his. As his farm was the only area of the earth that interested him,
so the Good Book was the only acreage in the land of literature that seemed to him worth tilling. In his youth he had read
two or three novels which had struck him as a lot of silly, protracted, and pointless lies; and he had returned with much
satisfaction, and the resolve nevermore to stray, to the Book which could be depended on for truth, and which had such sound
sense in it as, “Boast not thyself of tomorrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth,” and “The fool shall be bound
with the cord of his own sins.”

Calvin was his one child. The boy, hemmed in by his environment, inherited his father’s two preoccupations: the farm and the
Book. It was old Stanfield’s habit to make Calvin read aloud five chapters of the Bible each night, and though the poor lad
had treacherous going through the genealogies and the diatribes of the Prophets (for his father skipped nothing), he was well
rewarded by the fragrant simplicity of the tales of the Patriarchs, by the gorgeous pageants of Joseph, Moses, and Joshua,
and by the thrilling, bloody passages of arms in the books of the Kings. It happened that the boy had a sound, retentive mental
apparatus, so that he grew to young manhood with a knowledge of Holy Writ by chapter and verse which might have confounded
divines in the cathedrals of remote cities.

At the age of eighteen came the revolt, that occasion in the life of each of us which seems an earthquake, and which is as
commonplace as first love, and Calvin decided that his father was a fool, trapped in antique, useless habits of thinking.–How
many of us marry our first love? How many of us retain the heady, delightful conviction that the old man was all wrong? How
pleasant it would be, indeed, if each of us could strike across untrodden green meadows in the ancient journey! Good friends,
who have broken your ankles and scratched your skins and fallen in holes in the green meadows before groping back to the old
dirt path, was not that first leap over the stile, into the long grass, unutterably sweet?

Calvin found it so. The first World War took him off the farm and into the roaring excitement of a military camp near a city,
and awe for the Good Book crumbled and vanished before the scathing profanity of the incredibly wise shoe salesmen and shipping
clerks with whom he mingled. By the time he was transported to England, Calvin was an enthusiastic, even a crusading, heathen;
but performance lagged behind conviction, as it usually does, and while in camp he actually did nothing worse than become
very drunk two or three times.

Performance overtook conviction in London. The reader will forgive me if I omit the distressing particulars, but, as he may
guess, there was a young lady named Grace. Suffice it to say that young Calvin Stanfield began to feel the unease of remorse
at approximately the time that his life began to be endangered. It should not be a source of satisfaction to rational churchmen,
as it seems to be, that men on battlefields return to their old beliefs: the cries of a scared child to its father have no
logical or intellectual force: but anyway, Calvin Stanfield had a sudden great accession of faith while cowering in a shell
hole during his first engagement. He quoted aloud psalms of David that were very much to the point, and he vowed that if he
were delivered from this pit he would believe and do. He kept his word, and during the rest of that conflict which we once
thought of as a Great War, he was known in his regiment as Holy Cal.

So much must be told in order that the reader may understand the motions of Father Calvin Stanfield. The rest would make an
absorbing study for a few of my patient audience who are interested in folkways, comparative religion, and sociology. His
return to his native valley, his growing reputation among the farm people for sanctity, his impulsive usurpation of the local
pulpit and self-ordination when the starving minister abandoned the parish in the black time of the Depression, and the coagulation
of a few acts of charity on his part into a self-sustaining rural communal settlement which rapidly expanded, all these things
are not without color and excitement, but they took place entirely without the interposition of any pretty young ladies. It
is plain and believable, I trust, that a man like Calvin Stanfield should become a lay preacher, and should take dispossessed
rural families into his home to labor alike and share alike; and that such a group, fired by religious fervor and released
from debt loads and competitive markets, should prosper and grow by degrees into a large, successful co-operative enterprise
in agriculture. Such was the Faithful Shepherd, and such was his Fold. In the interest of brevity–for I am sure that some
readers, accustomed to staccato loves, killings, hates, rapes, and reconciliations in the modern manner, consider me painfully
periphrastic–I will omit recounting how the name “Faithful Shepherd” was acquired, since it would require my reproducing most
of the text of Stanfield’s first sermon, preached impromptu one gray Sunday morning when the flock arrived at the local church
and found that the minister had quietly abandoned his post.