“No. His theology is mostly focused on helping people with their physical needs. All that’s important, of course, but he’ll hit a dry spell someday and need something more than social causes to keep him going.”
“I guess you’re describing the kind of religion I have, Dean.”
“For now, yes. But if you’re serious about writing on the deeper life, you simply cannot ignore the centrality of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Big John made a prophecy about God’s plan for this century. He said that ninety-nine percent of the world will largely be in spiritual darkness for the first fifty years. Then the last fifty years will see a tremendous surge of spiritual vitality and an equal onslaught of Satanic forces, followed soon after by the Second Coming of Jesus. You’ll probably be here to see it. I won’t.”
“I’m not sure I want to be in God’s plan after seeing what happened to my father in Timmeton.”
“Painful, I’m sure. But so is what he’s going through now.”
He paused for reflection. “A watershed time for your whole family.”
“You mean a testing time.”
“More than that. Change through growth. Don’t be afraid, Julie. You are very special to the Lord.”
Awed, somewhat numbed by Dean’s words, I was silent for a long moment. “How do you know these things, Dean? I mean, you are so flat-footed in your statements that one could call you a fanatic.”
“I am a fanatic, Julie. I try to keep it under wraps with most people. The Lord has indicated that my time on this earth is limited, but I still have important work to do with certain people. You are one of those.”
I shook my head. “You talk as if you have some kind of direct pipeline to God, that you speak to Him regularly. They put people like you in mental institutions, Dean.”
Again he chuckled. “God has a way of communicating to people who truly seek Him out. Not exactly as He did with Old Testament figures like Noah and Abraham and Moses, but I believe He does it today in His own way. Have you never experienced Him this way?”
After a pause, “Yes, just once.”
“Tell me about it.”
With some reluctance, I told for the first time the full story of the night Bryan McKeever had passed out at the wheel of his car and I had called for and received God’s help.
Dean was thoughtful. “That confirms what I’ve felt about you, Julie. God has special plans for you. Just don’t be in such a big hurry to grow up.”
With that, we were both silent until we entered Alderton.
When I walked into the house at about seven-thirty, I found the family already at the dinner table. They greeted me with silent nods, except for Tim, who was crying, head down. Anne-Marie looked at me with tears in her eyes.
“Boy’s dead!”
“What happened?”
Tim lifted up angry eyes. “Someone poisoned him, that’s what.”
“When?”
“This afternoon.”
“How do you know it was poison?”
“We took Boy to the vet,” Dad said sadly. “He’s pretty sure it was poison because of a certain smell in Boy’s mouth.”
“What a hateful, cowardly thing to do!”
I tried to brighten the meal with a description of my trip. But there was such heaviness in everyone’s spirit that I suspected there was still more bad news.
Mother confirmed it as I was helping her with the dishes. “We are being evicted from our home,” she said.
“What!”
“The owner called your father this afternoon at his office. There’s some clause in our rental agreement that allows him to do this. We have to move out by the first of October.”
Another numbing blow! I shook my head in dismay. “Well, I guess we’ll have to move in with Dean and Hazel. They invited us, you know, if something like this happened.”
Mother just stared at me.
After the dishes were done, I found my father in the study, sitting at his rolltop desk. When I lashed out at our landlord, he looked at me numbly. “That’s not the worst of it.” Then he handed me a letter to read. “Vincent Piley circulated this letter to just about everyone in town.”
Written on Yoder Steel stationery, it vigorously refuted the Sentinel editorial, calling it irresponsible journalism, and assured Alderton citizens that in the most unlikely case of dam leakage or flooding, the new waterway would direct any overflow into Somerset Valley. Then came this final bombshell:
Another reason the Sentinel is not to be trusted involves Kenneth Wallace himself. He is new and inexperienced in publishing, having been a clergyman in Timmeton, Alabama, until he came to Alderton a year ago. An officer of his church told me that because Mr. Wallace had suffered a nervous collapse several years ago and had been hospitalized for almost a month, there was reason to believe he was mentally unstable. I and others here in Alderton believe that Mr. Wallace has still not recovered from that illness, which makes his credibility and that of the Sentinel questionable, to say the least.
I was shaken by the letter, only too aware how most people felt about mental disorders. “How are you going to answer this?” I asked the Editor.
He shook his head. “I’m not.”
Boy was buried Saturday morning out by The Rocks. Tim requested all members of the family to be on hand for an 8:00 a.m. funeral. At 7:55 we gathered in the kitchen for a proper march to the grave site.
My father was dressed in his formal preaching gown; Mother, the children, and I in our Sunday clothes. If I was tempted to smile at the strange sight of a backyard funeral for a dog, one look at Tim’s face stopped me. His eyes were puffy and red; his face stricken by the death.
Slowly we marched from the kitchen to the grave site. A surprisingly deep hole had been dug at the farthest corner of the yard. Beside it lay Boy’s body, wrapped in a small brown blanket. My father asked Mother to give an opening prayer. She thanked God for Boy and his happy spirit and for giving our family so much fun. “Take Boy into Your heavenly animal kingdom,” she concluded.
Dad opened his Bible and read several verses of Scripture. Then he turned solemnly to Tim. “Do you want to say a few words of good-bye to your friend?”
Tim nodded vigorously, the tears streaming down his face. “So long, Boy. I miss you so much. But I know we’ll see you again, because God won’t let such a happy dog just . . . just . . . just go away forever. Be a good dog in that new place you’re in. Don’t forget, Boy, I love you.”
That little talk left us all dissolved in tears. Anne-Marie just shook her head when Dad asked her to say a few words.
Then it was my turn to read a special poem for the departed. It was a hurried, maudlin effort about our “aching loneliness,” with Boy to be placed “in cold and furrowed earth” and other such phrases.
My father and Tim then lifted up Boy’s body and placed it gently in the grave. Dad picked up the shovel to fill the hole with dirt, but stopped, thinking perhaps, that this might be too hard for the children to take. Standing very erect, he asked us to close our eyes as he pronounced the benediction.
Mother, Anne-Marie, and I filed back into the house while Dad and Tim stayed to fill up the grave. Into the ground over the body a wooden stake was driven with the word BOY printed on it crudely, and the date of death, September 6, 1935, underneath.
Then we changed into work clothes and headed for the Sentinel office to distribute the current issue.
When we gathered for breakfast Sunday morning, I wondered if my parents intended to go to church. How could they face the people at Baker Memorial after the circulation of Mr. Piley’s letter?
The question never came up. Dad was already dressed for church. Mother had been weeping, I could tell, but she did not say a word that gave away her true feelings.
We walked to church as a family, nodding to everyone we saw. At the entrance to Baker Memorial, we all shook hands with the usher; my father asked him to seat us in the front row.
After a boring sermon by the substitute preache
r, the Editor led the way out of church, shaking hands and smiling at everyone he encountered. Most people seemed embarrassed; some hostile looks were cast our way. The Piley family had been sitting near the rear of the sanctuary. They were gone by the time we got to the front door. None of the McKeevers were in church.
After we had greeted everyone in sight, we walked back to Bank Place again as a family.
Never had I been prouder of my father.
In this issue of the Sentinel the Editor had continued the story of the four-man attack, playing up Graham as “the high school football star who, heedless of injury to himself, tore into three of the masked invaders.” A picture of Graham in his football uniform was featured.
I clipped the story and picture and sent them with a short note to the Penn State football coach, imploring him not to discontinue Graham’s scholarship because of an injury suffered in a heroic effort.
The story also recounted the escape of James Sanduski and quoted a statement from the police chief that efforts were being made to recapture him. No further mention was made of the Kissawha dam nor of the response to the editorial about it.
So far, twenty-five letters had been received, all but three criticizing the Sentinel. Several referred to the Piley letter.
Monday’s mail was so heavy that the Editor took the whole stack to his office to open. After the blows of the past week, I could tell he was braced for more bad news. He turned over all of this week’s writing assignments to Emily and me, with the exception of the editorial, which he promised to have done by Wednesday.
With all the advertising eliminated, Emily and I would have to scramble to fill the extra space. On a sudden impulse I did a short story of Boy’s funeral, the words flowing out from my deep emotion. The focus was on Tim’s bereavement, and it was titled “Why Would Anyone Poison a Happy Dog?” I wondered if the Editor would okay it.
Next I called Spencer Meloy to get an updating of his work in the Lowlands. Spencer had so much news that he came to the office and talked for an hour about the way the Community Center was bringing the Lowlands people together. I spent the rest of the morning writing it up as a feature story.
The movie It Happened One Night was back for a rerun at the Palace after winning the Academy Award as best picture of 1934. The film technique of its director, Frank Capra, had received such worldwide recognition that it made an interesting feature story for the Sentinel. Graham took me to see it again Monday night, our last date before he would leave for college.
Afterward, we sipped sodas at Exley’s Drug Store and reminisced over our first date at this same film almost a year before. Graham was embarrassed that his father had discontinued the ads for his auto supply store in the Sentinel. “We had quite a family row over it, Julie. McKeever’s gone too far this time. Tell your father to keep up the fight.”
We were silent for a while as a question formed in my mind. “Graham, do you go to church?”
“Not very often.”
“Why not?”
“Church bores me, I guess.” He thought a minute. “I’d go more often if Spencer was the preacher.”
I laughed. “We’re both the same. We like action. Spencer does something about a problem.”
Graham took a long drink from his glass. “I believe in God, but He seems pretty far away from what goes on in this world.”
“I used to think that way too, Graham. Now I’m not so sure.”
Later that evening Graham suggested we drive up to Lookout Point. I didn’t object one bit.
At breakfast the next morning I told Dad about Graham’s encouraging words. He smiled grimly. “I hope he’s right. The mail is almost entirely against us.”
On Wednesday I was saying good-bye to Graham when Dean Fleming arrived and presented my father with a check for $750, enough for the $600 loan payment plus some extra. “We will survive,” were his words, which Dad reported to us at dinner that night with misty eyes. After the bank note was paid on Thursday, the Editor mailed off a check to the Cloudsville Times to cover the first two printings they had done for us. There was barely enough money left to pay Emily her weekly salary.
My father had approved all our copy on Wednesday and set up the front page himself. To my surprise, he featured my story on Boy’s death in a box on page one. Dean Fleming drove the forms to Cloudsville on Friday and once more we distributed the Sentinel on Saturday. When I read through the paper again that afternoon, it looked strange without the ads, but it had a lot of reader interest. A biased opinion, perhaps, since I had written most of the paper myself.
Spencer Meloy called our home shortly after seven on Sunday morning. I answered. “We’re burned out,” he said in a voice that shook with anger.
“What are you saying?”
“The Community Center burned down. Fire started about five a.m. The fire truck was here about ten minutes later. Not in time to save the building, but in time to keep the flames from destroying the rest of the block.”
“What caused it?”
“No one knows. One fireman said defective wiring. I don’t believe him.”
I told Spencer that Dad and I would come right down.
The Editor and I dressed, gulped down some cereal, jumped into the Willys, and drove to the Lowlands. Smoke was still rising from the ashes when we arrived. A crowd had gathered, sad-faced men and women who stared at the charred debris with such mournful faces that I felt almost sick with anger at Old Man McKeever. Who else would be behind this?
Margo and Spencer were there, picking through the smoldering ruins. Margo had in her hands a half-burned basket from the front hall; Spencer was holding a large blackened pot. As all of us stood there, feeling utterly helpless, Spencer looked up, his eyes suddenly alive.
“We’re going to build a new center here in the Lowlands that will be twice as big and four times better,” he promised.
As the Editor and I walked to work Monday morning, his spirit was heavy, his face drawn. “I just don’t see how much longer we can go on this way,” he murmured. “I can’t expect Dean to keep lending us money. His resources must be limited.”
“He considers it his fight, too,” I said.
“I know, but there has to be some kind of positive response from the people here in Alderton that they want the Sentinel. If they’re as opposed to it as the mail indicates, I won’t want to continue publishing, no matter how much money Dean has.”
I had to agree with him. Without support from local citizens, there would be no point in continuing.
“The people have to speak out now,” Dean said later. “Especially after that fire in the Lowlands. Ken, let’s get our group together at the cabin.” It was late that night when the Editor got home.
Tuesday morning I saw the stacks of letters piled up on my father’s desk. On a sudden impulse, I asked if I could read them. The Editor readily agreed. On my desk I set up two piles: eighty-six against the editorial, ten for it.
It was simple to catalogue the ten positive letters. All but one were handwritten on personal stationery. The one typed letter came from a retired businessman.
Putting the eighty-six anti letters in categories was harder. The first discovery was that sixty-five of them were typed. This disproportion at first seemed to indicate that most of those letters were from professional people. But as I skimmed through the typed letters, I discovered that all but five of them were on plain bond typing paper. Only five professional or business people had used company stationery.
Quickly I read through the twenty-one handwritten letters. Only two were on business or professional stationery. This has to be significant, I thought. But what does it mean?
When I had studied the typed letters, I realized that they were all about the same length. The same words and phrases kept reappearing.
Then I noticed something else: in one piece of correspondence, the bottom of the lowercase letter t was broken. Then I almost jumped out of my chair. The same broken t was in a second letter. And a third!
Quickly I searched through all sixty-five typed letters and found that twenty-one of them had the broken letter t. The same typewriter had been used for twenty-one letters!
Then if one person had written twenty-one letters, would further analysis show that other letters had been mass-produced? It did.
Grouping together those letters that used the same phrases, it was easy to conclude that probably only four people had written all sixty-five typed letters.
Next I turned to the names of the people who had signed the letters. Hard as I tried to find similarities, I had to conclude that each signature was genuine. Then came another thought. I checked our subscriber list and discovered that only nine of these eighty-six critical letter-writers were subscribers.
When I took these findings to the Editor, he pounded his fist on his desk in excitement. “The best news I’ve had in days. Someone engineered most of these negative letters! They’re phony! Julie, that’s great work!”
Wednesday morning the Editor asked Emily to do a similar analysis of our subscription list to see how many we had lost. She worked on it to midafternoon, then came back to us wide-eyed. “I just can’t believe it,” she said. “Our subscribers are increasing, not decreasing.” The Editor, Dean and I crowded around her report.
On October 1, 1934, total subscribers were 4,340. On January 1, 1935, the number had fallen to 4,183. Then the rise began. By August subscriptions had risen to 5,016. On September 1 they were 5,162.
During the first ten days of September, when the flood of negative mail and calls had poured in, subscriptions had not fallen but risen by another 138.
The Editor was incredulous. “But, Emily, I thought we were getting a lot of cancellations.”
“Mr. Wallace, I confess to you that I was thoroughly deceived by these people,” Emily said with flushed face. “They used abusive language to me on the phone and then demanded to have their subscription canceled. I told them this had to be done in writing and assumed this was happening.”