“Your Honor!” I called.
Judge Davidson whirled around.
“Your Honor, please, would you respect me as a minister and let me have an audience with you?”
By now the guards had reached me. I suppose the fact that the judge’s life had been threatened was responsible for some of the roughness that followed. Two of the guards picked me up by the elbows and hustled me up the aisle. There was a sudden scurrying and shouting in the press section as photographers raced past each other trying to get pictures.
The guards turned me over to two policemen in the vestibule.
A policeman addressed me. “All right, mister. Where’s the gun?”
I assured him that I didn’t have a gun. Once again I was searched.
“Who were you with?”
“Miles Hoover, our youth director.”
They brought Miles in. He was shaken, more with anger than with fear.
Some of the press managed to get into the room while the police questioned us. I showed the police my ordination papers so they’d know I was truly a clergyman. They were arguing among themselves about what charges to book me on. The sergeant said he’d find out Judge Davidson’s wishes, and while he was gone the reporters pumped me with questions.
The sergeant came back saying that Judge Davidson didn’t want to press charges. They would let me go this time if I agreed never to come back.
“Don’t worry,” said Miles. “He won’t come back.”
They escorted me brusquely out to the corridor. There a semicircle of newsmen were waiting with their cameras cocked. One man said, “Hey, Rev’ren. What’s that book you got there?”
“My Bible.”
“Hold it up where we can see it.”
I was naïve enough to hold it up. Flashbulbs popped, and suddenly I knew how it would come out in the papers: A Bible-waving country preacher, with his hair standing up on his head, interrupts a murder trial.
As soon as they let us go, we hurried to the parking lot, where our car had earned another charge. Miles didn’t say a word. Once we got in the car and closed the door, I bowed my head and cried for twenty minutes.
Going back over the George Washington Bridge, I turned and looked once more at the New York skyline. I remembered the passage from Psalms that had given us so much encouragement: “They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.”
What kind of guidance had that been? How would I face my wife, my parents, my church? I had stood before the congregation and told them that God had moved on my heart. Now I must tell them I had made a mistake and did not know the heart of God at all.
3
Miles,” I said, when the bridge was fifty miles behind us, “do you mind if we drive home by way of Scranton?” My parents lived there. I wanted, frankly, to cry on their shoulders a bit.
By the time we reached Scranton the next morning, the story and my photo were in the newspapers. The Michael Farmer trial was well covered by the press, but news items on it had begun to run scarce. The grisly aspects of the murder had been explored until the last ounce of horror had been wrung from them. Now a bizarre sidelight appeared, and the papers made the most of it.
I worried how my parents would be affected by this. I was eager to see them, but now I dreaded the moment of meeting. After all, the name I had exposed to ridicule was theirs also.
“Maybe,” said Miles as we turned into their driveway, “they won’t have seen it.”
They had seen it. A newspaper was spread out on the kitchen table, turned to the account of the wild-eyed, Bible-waving young preacher who had been thrown out of the Michael Farmer murder trial.
“David,” Mother said, “what a . . . pleasant surprise.”
“Hello, son,” said Dad.
I sat down. Miles had tactfully gone for a walk.
I nodded my head toward the newspaper. “I’ll say it for you. How are we ever going to live this down?”
“Well, son,” my father said, “it’s not so much us. You could lose your ordination.”
Realizing his concern for me, I kept silent.
“What are you going to do when you get back to Philipsburg, David?” Mother asked.
“I haven’t thought that far yet.”
Mother went to the refrigerator and got out a bottle of milk.
“Do you mind if I give you a piece of advice?” she asked, pouring me a glass. Often, when Mother was ready to give me advice, she didn’t stop to ask my permission. This time, though, she waited, milk bottle in hand, until I nodded my head.
“When you get back home, David, don’t be too quick to say you were wrong. ‘The Lord moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.’ It’s possible this is all part of a plan you can’t see from where you’re standing. I have always believed in your good judgment.”
———
All the way back to Philipsburg I mulled over Mother’s words.
I took Miles to his house and then drove to the parsonage. The telephone kept ringing for the next three days. One of the town officials called to bawl me out. Fellow ministers told me they thought it was cheap publicity. When I finally dared to walk downtown, heads turned to follow me all along the street. One man who was always trying to bring more business into town pumped my hand and slapped me on the back and said, “Say, Reverend, you really put Philipsburg on the map!”
Hardest of all was meeting my parishioners that Sunday. They were polite—and silent. From the pulpit that morning I looked at the problem as squarely as I could.
“I know all of you must have questions,” I said. “You must be asking yourselves, ‘What kind of egoist do we have for a preacher, a man who thinks that every whim he gets is a mandate from God?’ This is a legitimate question. It would surely look as though I had confused my own will for God’s.
“And yet, let’s ask ourselves: If it is true that the job of us humans here on earth is to do the will of God, can we not expect that in some way He will make that will known to us?”
Stony faces, still.
But the congregation was remarkably kind. Most of the people said they thought I had acted foolishly, but that they knew my heart was in the right place. One good lady said, “We still want you even if nobody else does.” After that memorable statement, she did spend a long time explaining that she hadn’t meant it to sound like that.
Then a strange thing happened.
In my nightly prayer sessions, Romans 8:28 came into my mind again and again: “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”
It came with great force and a sense of reassurance. Along with it came an idea so preposterous that for several nights I dismissed it as soon as it appeared.
Go back to New York.
I tried ignoring it three nights in a row and found it as persistent as ever. So I set about to deal with it. This time I was prepared.
New York, in the first place, was clearly not my cup of tea. I did not like the place, and I was unsuited for life there. I revealed my ignorance at every turn, and the very name New York was for me now a symbol of embarrassment. I was not going to drive eight hours there and eight hours back for the privilege of making a fool of myself again.
As for going back to the congregation with a new request for money, it was out of the question. These farmers and mine workers were already giving more than they should. How would I explain it to them, when I myself did not understand this fresh order to return to the scene of my defeat? Wild horses couldn’t drag me to my church with such a suggestion.
And yet, so persistent was this new idea that on Wednesday night, I asked my parishioners for more money to get me back to New York.
Their response was truly amazing. One by one, they again marched down the aisle and placed an offering on the Communion table. This time, there were more people in the church, perhaps 150. But the interesting thing is that the offering was the same. When the dimes and quarters and bills were counted, there was just enough�
��again. Seventy dollars had been collected.
The next morning Miles and I were on our way by six. We took the same route, stopped at the same gas station, took the bridge into New York. Crossing the bridge, I prayed, Lord, I do not ask to be shown Your purpose, only that You direct my steps.
Once again we found Broadway and turned south along this only route we knew. We were driving slowly along when suddenly I had the strongest feeling that I should get out of the car.
“I’m going to find a place to park,” I said to Miles. “I want to walk around for a while.” We found an empty meter.
“I’ll be back in a while, Miles. I don’t even know what it is I’m looking for.”
I left Miles in the car and started walking down the street. I hadn’t gone half a block before I heard a voice: “Hey, Davie!”
I didn’t turn around at first, thinking some boy was calling a friend.
“Hey, Davie. Preacher!”
This time I did turn around. A group of six teenage boys were leaning against the side of a building, smoking. A seventh boy separated himself from the group and walked after me. I liked his smile as he spoke.
“Aren’t you the preacher they kicked out of the Michael Farmer trial?”
“Yes. How’d you know?”
“Your picture was all over the place. Your face is kind of easy to remember.”
“You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”
“I’m Tommy. I’m the president of the Rebels.”
I asked Tommy if those were his friends, and he offered to introduce me.
“Hey, fellows,” he said, “here’s the preacher who was kicked out of the Farmer trial.”
One by one, the boys came up to inspect me. Only one boy did not budge. He flicked open a knife and began to carve an unprintable word on a “No Loitering” sign. Two or three girls joined us.
Tommy asked me about the trial, and I told him I was interested in helping teenagers, especially those in the gangs. The boys listened attentively, and several of them mentioned that I was “one of us.”
“What do you mean, I’m one of you?” I asked.
Their logic was simple. The cops didn’t like me; the cops didn’t like them. We were in the same boat, and I was one of them. This was the first time, but by no means the last, that I heard this logic. I caught a glimpse of myself being hauled up that courtroom aisle, and it had a different light on it. I felt a shiver.
The boy with the knife stepped up to me. His words, although they were phrased in the language of the streets, cut my heart more surely than his knife would have been able to do.
“Davie,” the boy said. He hiked his shoulders up to settle his jacket firmly on his back, and I noticed the other boys stepped back. Very deliberately, this boy closed and then opened his knife again. He held it out and casually ran the blade down the buttons of my coat, flicking them one by one without speaking.
“Davie,” he said at last, looking me in the eye for the first time, “you’re all right. But if you ever turn on boys in this town . . .” I felt the knifepoint press my belly lightly.
“What’s your name, young man?” His name was Willie.
“Willie, I don’t know why God brought me to this town. But let me tell you one thing. He is on your side. That I can promise you.”
Willie’s eyes hadn’t left mine. But gradually I felt the pressure of the knifepoint lessen. Then his eyes broke away. He turned aside.
Tommy changed the subject. “Davie, if you want to meet the gangs, why don’t you start right here? These guys are all Rebels, and I can show you some GGIs, too—Grand Gangsters, Incorporated.”
I hadn’t been in New York half an hour and already I was being introduced to my second street gang. Tommy called one of the girls standing nearby. “Nancy, take the preacher down to the GGIs, will you?”
The GGIs met in a basement on 134th Street. To reach their “clubroom” Nancy and I walked down a flight of cement stairs, weaving our way past garbage pails that were chained to the building and past a pile of vodka bottles. Finally Nancy stopped and rapped, two-quick, four-slow, on a door.
A girl opened it. She held a can of beer, and a cigarette hung sideways from her lips. Her hair was unkempt, and the shoulder of her dress was pulled down in a revealing way. This girl was a child, a girl in her teens.
“Maria?” said Nancy. “Can we come in? I want you to meet someone.”
Maria shrugged and opened the door wider. The room inside was dark, and it took me a while to realize that it was filled with kids. Boys and girls of high school age sat together in this cold and ill-smelling room. Someone switched on a wan overhead lightbulb. The kids slowly looked up.
“This is that preacher that was kicked out of the Farmer trial,” said Nancy.
Immediately, I had their attention—and their sympathy. That afternoon I had a chance to preach my first sermon to a New York gang. I didn’t try to get a complicated message over to them, just that they were loved as they were, there, amid the vodka bottles and the boredom. God understood what they were looking for. And God had higher hopes for them.
Once, when I paused, a boy said, “Keep it up, Preach. You’re coming through.”
It was the first time I heard the expression. It was the highest compliment they could have paid my preaching.
I would have left that basement hideout, half an hour later, with a feeling of great encouragement, except for one thing. There, among the GGIs, I had my first encounter with narcotics. Maria—she turned out to be president of the GGI Debs, the girl-gang attached to the GGIs—interrupted me when I said that God could help them toward a new life.
“Not me, Davie.”
“Why not you, Maria?”
She pulled up her sleeve and showed me her inner arm at the elbow. I could see little wounds on it like festered mosquito bites. Some were old and blue. Some were fresh. I suddenly knew what this teenage girl was trying to say to me. She was an addict.
“I’m a mainliner, Davie. There’s no hope for me, not even from God.”
I looked around the room. No one was smiling.
Maria had expressed the opinion of the experts: There was virtually no hope for the “mainline” addict, the one who injects heroin directly into the bloodstream.
Maria was a mainliner.
4
When I got back to our car, still parked on Broadway, Miles seemed truly glad to see me. I told him about the two gangs I had met within an hour of setting foot in New York. Miles had the same thought I had.
“You realize, of course, that you’d never have had a chance with them if you hadn’t been thrown out of court and got your picture taken?”
We drove downtown, and this time we went in person to the DA’s office.
“I wish there were some way,” I said, “to convince you that I have no other motive than those boys’ welfare in asking to see them.”
“Reverend, if every word you’re saying came straight from that Bible of yours, we still couldn’t let you see them. The only way you can see those boys without Judge Davidson’s permission is to get signed permission from each of the parents.”
Here was another avenue opened up!
“Could you give me their names and addresses?”
“I’m sorry. That we would not be at liberty to do.”
Back on the street I pulled the now tattered page from Life out of my pocket. Here was the name of the leader of the gang: Luis Alvarez. While Miles stayed with the car, I went into a candy store and changed a five-dollar bill—it was almost our last money—into dimes for the phone booth. Then I started to call all the Alvarezes in the telephone book.
“Is this the residence of Luis Alvarez, the one who is in the Michael Farmer trial?” I would ask.
An offended silence. Angry words. A receiver slammed in my ear. It became clear we would never reach our boys this way.
I joined Miles in the car. There in the car, with the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan towering over us, I bowed my hea
d. “Lord,” I prayed, “if we are here on Your errand, You must guide us. Lead where we must go, for we do not know.”
We started to drive aimlessly in the direction the car was headed, which happened to be north. We got caught in a traffic jam at Times Square. When we extricated ourselves from that, it was only to get lost in Central Park. We drove round and round before we realized that the roads there form a circle. We took an exit just to be out of the park. We found ourselves on an avenue that led to the heart of Spanish Harlem. Suddenly, I had that same incomprehensible urge to get out of the car.
“Let’s look for a parking place,” I said to Miles.
We pulled into the first empty space we found. I got out of the car and took a few steps up the street. I stopped. The inner urging had gone away. A group of boys were sitting on a stoop.
“Where does Luis Alvarez live?” I asked one of them.
The boys stared at me and did not answer. I walked on.
A boy came running up the sidewalk after me. “You looking for Luis Alvarez?”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
The boy stared at me. “Is that your car?” he said.
“Yes. Why?”
The boy shrugged. “Man,” he said, “you parked right in front of his house.”
I felt bumps form on my flesh. I pointed at the tenement house in front of where I had parked. “He lives there?” I asked.
The boy nodded.
I have questioned God sometimes when prayers have gone unanswered. But answered prayer is still harder to believe. We asked God to guide us, and He set us down on Luis Alvarez’s doorstep.
The name Alvarez was on the mailbox in the dingy vestibule—third floor. I raced up the stairs. The third-floor hall was dark and smelled of urine.
“Mr. Alvarez?” I called, finding a door with the name painted in neat letters.
Someone called out in Spanish from the interior of the apartment, and hoping it was an invitation to come in, I pushed the door open. I peered in. Seated in a red overstuffed chair was a slender man, dark-skinned, holding a rosary. When he saw me, his face lit up.
The Cross and the Switchblade Page 2
