The Black Mass of Brother Springer

by Charles Willeford

  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."

  "That doesn't sound fair—"

  "Of course it isn't fair! Who said it was? Now," he pointed to a framed eight-by-ten-inch photograph of a Negro thumb-tacked to the wall, "take a good look at that nigger's face."

  I got up from my chair and examined the photograph. The Negro in the photograph was very old, and his eyes seemed to return my inquisitive stare. The photo had been taken full face, and beneath a square chin the Negro wore an old-fashioned Herbert Hoover collar and a black string tie. His hair was a thick, white skull cap resembling an English barrister's wig with the curls clipped off. The face wore a solemn, dignified expression, and there was a quiet beauty to the sharp, well-defined bone structure, especially the high cheek bones. Except for the tell-tale flattened nose and the shiny blackness, the face could have belonged to a Justice of the Supreme Court. In his youth, this had been a very handsome man indeed. I was surprised that I thought so. This was the first Negro countenance I had ever studied at close range and it was somewhat of a surprise to see character so deeply etched in a black face. Up to that moment, I had thought that all Negroes looked pretty much alike.

  "That is the Right Reverend Cosmo Bird of Birmingham, Alabama," the Abbott said, "founder of the Church of God's Flock, and the man who started the monastery."

  "I don't believe I've ever seen such beauty in bone structure before," I said admiringly. "He could have been a movie star with a face like that."

  "Well, he started the church in Birmingham. He made a pile of dough in nigger property in Pratt City, and he put most of the geedus into the establishing of more churches. There are three in Birmingham, two in Mobile, one in Atlanta, one in Nashville, one in Tuscaloosa, and one in Jax. All of them are as poor as hell.

  "When he kicked off in 1936 he left the rest of his money to a fund to establish a monastery here in Orangeville. He already owned the property here through some real estate deal, and in 'thirty-six, this location was really isolated. An ideal spot for a monastery. That was before they put the main highway through, and long before anybody ever thought of a freeway seven miles away.

  "He was an idealist, you might say, and way ahead of his time so to speak. He believed that white men and Negroes could learn to love one another, and the balance of the monastery was to be one white man to every Negro. In 1936 that was easy. There was a depression, and a monastery was a good place to sit it out. There were six monks in the beginning, three white men and three Negroes. They pitched tents, cleared out the palmettos and the jungle, built the cabins, planted the orange grove and set the place up. It worked fine for the first two years. The first Abbott, a white man by the name of Terence Norton, kept a diary, and I read it when I took over in 1954. They had quite a struggle.

  "In 1939 the trust money began to run out, and along with the lack of money, the trustees up in Birmingham began to lose control. First there would be all niggers here and then there would be all white men. This kind of trouble flared up off and on until the war started. The monastery also got some national publicity during the war when all of the monks refused to be drafted. They were willing to go into the Army as chaplains, with a commissioned status, but they wouldn't go in as privates. Too bad. They all went to jail except for the one white man and one nigger who were both too old to be drafted anyway. Do you begin to see the picture?"

  "It doesn't sound much like a religious order."

  "The Church of God's Flock has never been formally recognized as a real religion by any of the organized Protestant combines, but still, when you count the chips, its religious enough. All of our churches preach the Bible, and what do any other churches preach? The teachings of the Bible. And the churches old Cosmo Bird established are all still going, even if they are poor. The big foul-up was the monastery. Orangeville, Florida is too far away from Birmingham to be controlled. Correspondence takes time, and there was never any regular inspection visit from the trustees or representatives. As a consequence, the Abbott in charge, whoever he happened to be, had a nice control of the dough on hand. Some of these earlier Abbotts absconded with the dough, others kept the monks on short rations, and they'd quit, and so on. Being the Abbott was like—did you ever read The Golden Bough?"

  "I've head of it."

  "There's a legend in The Golden Bough that really fits this place
. Some small Greek island had a king, and the only way you could be the king of this island was to kill the current monarch and take his sword. So no matter who was king, he had to sweat blood all of the time because at any moment some son-of-a-bitch might be sneaking up on him with a knife. Well, that's about the size of it here."

  "You seem to have avoided being killed," I remarked.

  "That's because I got down to fundamentals." The Abbott smiled broadly, opened the screen door and spat a stream of tobacco juice into a withered sparkleberry bush. "You're looking at a man who only made one mistake in his life. I've never mentioned this mistake to anybody, but maybe you can learn something from my mistake. I'm originally from Lincoln, Nebraska, and when I was a boy we didn't have many niggers up there. I went to a movie one Saturday afternoon, and I took a seat high in the balcony where you were allowed to smoke. Pretty soon a nigger girl came along and sat down beside me and gave me a proposition. She only wanted two-bits, and I was only eighteen at the time, and in Lincoln, Nebraska, nookie was hard to come by. So I gave the girl a quarter; she popped it into her mouth and we climbed to the very last row in the balcony. I dropped my pants, the girl dropped hers, and bent over the seat—can you picture this?"

  "Very well, sir," I said politely, holding my breath.

  "Well, this was the exact moment that the damned projector broke down. The film stopped, the screen went white, the houselights were turned on while they fixed the projector, and every son-of-a-bitch and his brother turned around and looked up at the little square hole in the projection room. Here I was, right under it, with my pants around my ankles, and this nigger girl with her dress all hiked up and bent over the seat, you see—what are you laughing at?"

  "I think it's funny." I wiped my streaming eyes.

  Abbott Dover scowled darkly, which made me break into fresh peals of laughter. He nodded soberly.

  "I suppose it is funny at that. Anyway, I spotted a former school teacher in the audience, two women friends of my mother's, a dentist and several boys that I knew around town. Nobody laughed at me; they were horrified, I supposed, because I had a pretty good reputation. I pulled up my pants and scooted down the stairs and I've never been back to Lincoln since. I joined the Army in Saint Louis, and I stayed in the Army until I retired in 1954. The moral of that story is never look at the projector when it breaks down."

  "It sure is a good story," I said weakly, holding my sides.

  "I didn't mean to get off the track, but one mistake can change the course of your entire life. I vowed never to make another, and I haven't. I came out of the Army a retired first sergeant, with a nice bank account, and a yen to settle in Florida. I still don't think it's safe to go back to Nebraska. This was in 1954. I'm wheeling down the highway out there in my new Ford convertible, and I spot this place. It was after dark, and I thought it was a motel, so I pulled on in. There were only three monks here then, two niggers and one white man. They put me up for the night, and the next day I saw what the situation was and took over. The place was going to rack and ruin."

  "How did you get control so easily?"

  "I told them I'd put the monastery on a paying basis. The orange grove was ready for picking, but the three monks were too lazy to get their butts out there, and they were living on goat milk and grits. The original fund was long gone; there were two years of back taxes due on the property, and the Abbott, a tall, lean ornery son-of-a-bitch named Hank Childers, didn't have enough sense to pound shit in a rathole. All he knew was how to keep the two niggers in their place. Childers was a fruit tramp and didn't even know how to read and write his own name. The two niggers were decent enough men, but they just sat around reading the Bible. They were real monk types who needed the right kind of leadership. And I provided it.

  "I hired some pickers and made a few dollars out of a crop that would have rotted on the trees in two more weeks. I got rid of the goats, and I chased Hank Childers away with a plank across his rear end after I found out the lay of the land. I sat in here and read through all of the accumulated papers, paid the taxes, had the property titles searched up in Orlando, and then bought myself a monastery for a one dollar bill. I'm the sole owner, much to the dismay and chagrin of the nigger trustees up in Birmingham. Have a chew?"

  "No thanks," I waved away the plug of Brown Mule, "I don't know how you did it. What are some of the details?"

  "Uh, uh," Abbott Dover shook his head and grinned. "I've told you enough already."

  I pulled the news clipping out of my shirt pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to Abbott Dover. "This is the news item that was in the Miami paper. What happened to the monks? Where were they reassigned?"

  Abbott Dover glanced incuriously at the news item, crumpled it into a small ball, and flipped the wad of paper in the general direction of a waste-basket.

  "The late Cosmo Bird, Brother Springer, was a man of vision. He worked out a method of perpetuating the Church of God's Flock forever. But he died, and forever is a long time. His plan was fairly sound, however, and the church is still going, as I told you before. If the monastery had been established near Birmingham, for instance, the church would be at least twice as large. The original idea was to have two types of monks here. One, the contemplative type who stay until they die. The other type was to take seminary training here, and when it was completed; they were supposed to go out as ministers to either an established Church of God's Flock church or to start a new one. The monastery was not only to be self-supporting, it was to make money, and also, each church was to kick in so much money each month. The Abbott was to be the titular head of the church, like the Pope in the Roman Catholic church. Have you ever studied religious history?"

  "No, sir. Well some, I guess. I saw the movie about Martin Luther."

  "In other words you don't know a damn thing about religious movements. Anyway, all churches have a rough row to hoe at first go round. Some of the earlier popes were worse bastards than I am, believe me, and I am only looking out for Number One. The provisions were all spelled out, and I followed them. Everything I've done is legal and by the book. I reassigned the two Negro monks to the churches needing ministers in Mobile and Atlanta, and I ran Hank Childers off the property."

  Abbott Dover rubbed perspiration off his bald head with a dish towel, carried the dirty breakfast dishes into the bathroom, placed them gently into the washbowl, and turned on the tap.

  "So now, each of the Church of God's Flock churches has a minister—except one. That's the little church in Jax. When I sell this place, and I've got several deals cooking, I plan to stop by Jax on my way to Washington D.C. and ordain one of the lay church members there, and give him the church. My work will then be done, with God's help, of course."

  "Do you have the power to ordain a minister, just like that?" I asked, unable to hide the surprise in my voice.

  "I told you I was titular head of the church didn't I? Who else could do it except me?"

  "There's so much; it hasn't all sunk in, I guess. But how, as a sergeant in the Army, did you pick up so much knowledge about religion?"

  After scattering a cupful of Tide onto the dishes in the washbowl, Abbott Dover returned to the table and sat down.

  "Look, Brother Springer," the Abbott said softly, his flat, blue eyes shining with merriment. "Don't get the idea that just because a man is in the Army that he's a stupid son-of-a-bitch. In the Army, I was what you might call a fair-weather first sergeant. In peacetime, it was very pleasant to be a first sergeant, but when the bugles blow for war, and they blew them twice on me, I looked around for a softer assignment, out of danger. The safest spot of all is that of Chaplain's assistant, and this was the duty that saw me through World War II and the Korean fracas. This is very pleasant work. You assist three or four chaplains, usually a Catholic priest and a couple of Protestant ministers. Once in awhile you see a Hebe, but not often. And you keep the administration, what little there is, going along, writing letters to mamas, telling them their boys are getting spiritual advi
ce and so on, keeping little card files on the soldiers concerning their religious preferences, getting a detail to sweep the chapel, and answering the telephone. I used to listen in on those chaplains—Brother, they never had it so good. They all had commissions, and they were raking in from three to ten times as much money as they did on the outside. I never met a chaplain who wasn't a phoney—"

  "Come now, Abbott," I protested. "That's a pretty strong statement!"

  "It's true, nevertheless. I've been watching you as I've talked. Your mouth has been hanging half open half the time. Tell me, Brother, did you ever meet a minister like me before?"

  "No, sir, I sure didn't!"

  "Well I'm the only honest minister you'll ever meet! I've got the Bible down pat. I've read the Bible again and again. I didn't have much to do, and I wasn't averse to writing a sermon now and then when one of the chaplains was stuck. But you'll never see me put on any mealy-mouthed act about saving your soul or any crap like that. Because I can tell you right now, you don't have a soul and neither do I. When we die, and we will if we stick it out, a black curtain will drop before our eyes, and the hunger pains will disappear from our bellies. You're an educated man and a writer so you must know something about people. Do you honestly believe that there is such a place as Heaven, milk and honey, two-bit cigars, and that there's a golden throne waiting someplace for you to put your lazy ass on?"

  "I don't believe that. No. But ministers do, I'm sure they do."

  "Nope. You're as full of crap as a Christmas turkey if you believe that. I'm a minister, and I've got the papers to prove it. You could be a minister too. It is merely another occupation, that's all, no different from any other soft job. Most ministers are smarter than ordinary people, and the only real difference is, they are a lot lazier. The stuff they put out in the pulpit is entirely different from what they believe. I know how they work. If they are really good they get into the big pay brackets like the revival circuits. In fact, the less a minister believes, the more effective he is when he talks about religion."