road to aimee

Desperation will take you down roads unexpected. It will carry you like a baby in the teeth of a leopard through the jungle. It will haunt you like a ghost on a windswept moor, moaning with fear and hope. It will rock you like a boat in a tempest, threatening, threatening, always precarious. It will chase you like the very hounds of hell, and lead you like a prison guard down roads unexpected.
Sam’s road was ending, he imagined, at the newly tile sanctuary of the newly erected Angelus Temple. It led directly to Sister Aimee, her rich voice calling sinners – of whom he was chief. Her voice was dripping, wet with love and desire, calling them home.
Sam looked down at his torn shoes and filthy pants. He thought briefly of home and how things might be different, if only . . . But that was no matter now, none of it mattered, because he was here, in her Temple, in her presence.
------------------------------------------------------
It was Florida where he first laid eyes on her. He was working in an orange grove, picking the green fruit all day in the buggy swamps around Gainesville. The boss man, a short Italian immigrant who sang strange hymns all day, had told the men about a tent preacher who was coming to town. “And, boys,” he’d leaned toward them, one eyebrow raised, “she’s a lady preacher.”
Amid the catcalls and whistles, Sam had felt the old homesickness he'd burried for years work its way into his throat. The mere thought of this lady preacher comforted him.
The third night of the revival he determined to go forward for prayer. He’d seen cripples healed, the blind restored to sight, and men and women speaking in new languages, tongues they called it, at a single touch from the vision in the front.
Sister Aimee seemed to grow as the series of meetings went on, and this night was the climax of all he’d seen. She sang, she joked, she shouted, cajoled, and whispered to her audience of the judgment of God and the mercy of God. Women in the closer rows fainted as they stood to receive the power of the Holy Ghost. Men shouted, “Hallelujah!” and waved their arms.
Sam stood as he sensed the message coming to a close. He was in the middle, on the aisle, and knew what he must do. His shirt was clean, as were his face and hair. He’d even brushed his teeth. Now he was ready.
As Sister Aimee began her call for those who wanted a touch from the Holy Spirit to come forward, Sam was already moving. People rose to stand in front of him, but he managed to step around them, to squeeze past sweaty shoulders and around wide hips in print dresses. Once he fell down and almost had one of his waking nightmares from the war, but he shook the phantoms out of his head and carried on.
He was at the front now, ready for the touch that would set his soul free. Her hands were cool, like ice almost, against his burning cheeks. He felt himself begin to sway as Sister Aimee looked into his eyes and began to pray. Her breath was like old milk, but he didn’t mind.
He saw something there, in those green eyes, something the others in front of him hadn’t received, he was sure. She knew him, she understood him. He could tell, through the tone of her voice as it droned over him, pronouncing salvation and healing, her love.
Then the velvet cloud overtook him and he collapsed on the sawdust floor.
He lay there, slain by the Spirit, listening to the hum of voices and the occasional shriek of women as they received power from on high and danced in the aisles.
------------------------------------------------------
The war was fought in trenches. Battles contested meters of land so shot up that anything alive on it didn't stay that way for long. The trenches filled with water, rotting everything in them: boots, packs, foodstuffs, the feet and souls of the men who had dug and now occupied them.
He sat on his helmet, rolling a cigarette. Calvin Jerret slept nearby on a low platform they’d built from boxes. Sam looked at his buddy with the joyless smile of a boy who has grown up with death. They’d been through a lot, he and Calvin, since they left Haine two years earlier. The world had changed for them since then. From the farms and fields of Ontario to the muddy trenches of Ypres, everything had changed. They were men, now, merchants of death, who dealt it out to other former boys ripped by the same horrors. They were stone-hearted killers, unconcerned with living or dying, who woke each day in order to visit destruction upon the enemy, their own safety be damned. That’s what they told each other as they lay down to sleep each night.
Sam barely heard the whistle of the bomb before it exploded. He shouted, “Gas!” and scrambled wildly.
The chlorine gas filled the trench almost instantaneously. Sam’s throat constricted, his eyes caught fire. He gasped and fumbled his canteen open, trying not to breathe. He doused his kerchief with water and held it to his nose and mouth. With it across his face, he could still smell the poison, but it was a little easier to breathe.
Everything around him was green. He could hear men shouting, vomiting, crying for mothers who were at that very moment gathering eggs or folding laundry or cooking bacon across the Atlantic.
Sam fumbled his gas mask over his head and breathed shallowly for a second. Then he saw Calvin.
Calvin was crawling through the mud. Sam thought he was trying to get low enough to breathe. Sam bent toward him, shouting, “Your kerchief, Calvin! Your mask, for godsake!”
But he was too late. At the bang of the canister opening, Calvin had sucked in air as he startled awake. His first response had been to stand up, breathing in again. His lungs had filled with chlorine gas, and he jerked into the beginning of a long death.
In a panic, Sam pulled his friend up and out of the trench, into the fresh air. He was heavy and slid back into the trench twice, splashing into the muck. For a moment, he despaired of ever getting Calvin out and wondered if he kept falling just to spite his rescuer.
Finally, they both lay gasping on the lifeless ground. Calvin’s face was almost as green as the gas in the trench below. Flecks of white foam ringed his mouth. He lay so still that Sam wondered if he was dead. Then he convulsed violently, vomit streaming from his mouth. He choked as he aspirated the bile, head lashing back and forth like he wanted to break his neck. Sam rolled him over and tried to clear his airway, knowing even as he did that it was too late.
That’s when the gunfire started. Out of the trench under the clear blue sky, Sam saw the earth explode around him. Without thinking, he flung himself behind Calvin’s form, tipping the other man onto his side to provide more coverage.
Bullets thumped into Calvin’s loose form, who screamed once, then lay still. Sam prayed his friend was dead, or that he would be soon. Then he prayed without much expectation of being heard that he would die soon, too.
His prayer went unanswered. For six hours he huddled behind the death of his best friend, waiting for night to hide him and bring the winds that would clear the trench behind him and allow him to slide into the relative safety of its wet embrace. Occasionally Calvin would stir, cough weakly, then shudder. Random bursts of gunfire reminded him of the enemy, just in case he should forget.
Finally, mercifully, the wind began to blow. Clouds rolled over the platoon’s position and rain fell. The water and wind dissipated the poison. Sam slipped on his belly into the trench, and lay in the mud, too tired to cry, too shattered to do anything.
Years later he could still see Calvin, or what was left of him, when they’d finally been able to retrieve his shattered corpse. Part of his head had been shot off, and the rest of his face grinned idiotically with white teeth and the stippled meat of his jaw hanging at a crazy angle from his loose neck.
He returned home to Haine, but every time he saw one of the Jerrets or even when he didn’t, he would remember the sight of his friend’s half face, grinning wildly with lifeless eyes. He woke up crying at night.
Sam’s father was a patient man, usually holding Sam’s hand and trying to talk him through his nightmares. But after a while Sam started to feel his father’s resentment, knowing that every night before they retired to their own rooms, the old man walked in dread. When Sam left, he told himself it was for his father’s sake, not because he hoped to finally leave everything that reminded him of the trenches and Calvin and death.
------------------------------------------------------
She stood on the stage of that Temple, an angel if ever there was one, clad in clouds, her lips a cluster of pink flowers. He knew, even as the line drew him closer to her, carried him like a river to her, that she would remember him from Florida, would deliver him at last. He thought about her cool hands and his cheeks burned with it.
“She’s God’s own angel,” Sam breathed to the man next to him, “God’s own, with healing in her wings.”
The man looked sharply at him but said nothing. Sam looked again at his ragged clothes.
------------------------------------------------------
For a time, after Gainesville, the prayers of Sister Aimee held back the demons. But deep within, the Great War had stripped him of himself. He began to wake again sweating and coughing on the choking blackness of it all. The memory of Sister Aimee’s touch wasn't enough to quell his anguish.
It was in Pittsburgh that everything finally broke. He was working in a mill, living in a boarding house run by a matronly woman called Mrs. Morgan. One Sunday afternoon several of his housemates decided to go fishing. Sam went along.
At the lake, he felt almost happy, remembering childhood days of fishing and swimming. Calvin was there, full faced and full of life. It wasn’t until they were walking back, laughing and joking and pushing each other that the dam broke. Bill Miles shoved Sam into a drainage ditch. It wasn’t a hard shove, but Sam tripped and slid head first into the water. Everything – the trenches and bombs, the boredom and terror, and especially Calvin Jerret’s torn-off face – everything roared back at him like some primeval beast from the muck. He screamed and screamed and screamed, as if he hoped the sound would push the horrors away. He grabbed a stick and beat his attackers, thrashing his friends bloody. Finally, mercifully, someone punched him into unconsciousness and they dragged him off to the hospital. When he came around he was discharged.
His few belongings were waiting by the curb in front of Mrs. Morgan’s. Bill sat on the porch. Sam knew what the luggage meant, and he wordlessly bent to pick up his pack.
Bill walked slowly down the steps.
“I’m sorry, Sam,” he said, sticking his hand out. “Didn’t mean for this to happen. Just playing around, you know.”
“I know, Bill. I’m not mad. Not really even surprised, actually. I don’t suppose I have a job waiting at the plant.”
“No, them bastards heard about it and fired you. They give your last check to Mrs. Morgan to take care of any expenses she got off you. Talked her into giving it to you.” Bill pulled a wad of crumpled bills from his overalls and thrust it toward Sam.
“Thanks, Bill. I don’t know what I’m going to do now. Who’s going to hire a shell-shocked maniac?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you should go west. You know, get some new perspective. Travel might do you good.”
“Yeah, maybe, maybe.”
That’s the way his journey started. It was not an intentional thing; he just boarded the first train west. The train pulled into Akron, Ohio at 6:30 that night. Sam stumbled wearily off the train and headed up the hill to the Haven of Rest Mission.
After a dismal meal of potatoes and a thin strip of something that looked, smelled, and tasted like the over-boiled ass of a dog, he slept under a bridge, afraid that his night terrors would get him tossed from the mission.
But when he woke in the pre-dawn, he couldn’t remember exactly what his dream had been, but he felt relaxed and soothed and comforted as he hadn’t been in years. There was that little buzz of contentment at the back of his skull as he set out in search of breakfast.
Sam slicked his hair back and smoothed his coat before he opened the door and stepped inside the corner coffee shop. He caught his reflection in the window as the door opened. He hardly recognized the happy man looking back at him. He whistled as he stepped to the counter.
There was a Beacon Journal lying on the formica. Sam pulled it to himself and ordered a full meal: coffee, toast, eggs, sausage – the works. He flicked the paper open the “The Nation” section, feeling just like any other man enjoying breakfast on a beautiful morning in Akron.
On page 2C he noticed a story, a blurb, really: Angelus Temple Opens. The rest of the article detailed the more than five thousand seats of the sanctuary, the airy stained glass, and the charisma of the preacher, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson.
Sam remembered his dream. He dreamt of Sister Aimee’s commanding voice and light touch, her compelling certainty.
It made sense to him, actually. The city of angels, the temple of angels. He would go there and be delivered by the Queen of Angels herself.
------------------------------------------------------
In Sioux Falls, Sam spent a week in jail for fighting with a railroad bull, where he ate well and rested. In Denver his pack was stolen, and he'd resorted to stealing a blanket from a clothesline. Salt Lake's Mormons had fed him well, pressing him to consider the message of the Prophet Joseph Smith, pointing to their own temple, but he refused and slipped out of town late one night
------------------------------------------------------
At last, he thought as the line for prayer carried him forward toward his destiny, at last.
Sister Aimee would deliver him, he was sure. She would remember him, too. There had been an almost electric connection back in Gainesville. His scalp tingled with the thought of it.
The choir sang like the Host of Heaven and the capitals of the pillars gleamed like theheavenly Jerusalem descending to earth. Sam moves on feet that seemed to never touch the ground.
Finally, the way was clear, and only a handful of people stood between him and ultimate completion. Several people were laying hands on the faithful, mumbling in exotic tongues and occasionally shouting. Sam carefully positioned himself so as to be close to Sister Aimee (“My Aimee,” he said to himself, then added a few other syllables to show himself that he was really just speaking in tongues). She was there, her clear voice calling down blessing upon blessing for each person she touched.
He approached the front, eyes closed in expectant rapture, ready for the sweet press of her palms against his face. Hands touched his shoulders and a voice – deep, resonant, male – filled his ears.
Sam’s eyes darted across the stage to where Aimee, his Aimee, had moved and now bowed over a man as she had once bowed over him. Her hands stretched over his oily scalp and her head tipped back slightly, her mouth moving in the ecstatic prayer of one filled with the Holy Ghost and power.
He felt the air go out of him as he collapsed to the tile.