The First of October

Autumn, 1949

The linoleum at the Mission never seemed to get clean. The preacher mopped every day, sometimes twice, but the white tiles stayed gray. He blamed the rats that ran from building to building, tracking in grime from the Skid Row flophouses. It came in on the men’s shoes, too, but the preacher was here to clean their souls, not their feet. 

There was probably a wooden floor underneath the linoleum that once was as shiny as the pressed-tin ceiling (which always needed a good dusting and never got one). Once, this was a place where women in hobble skirts and high heels walked across the wooden floor to look at ivory cameos and hats with peacock feathers. 

Now, a flimsy partition separated the “chapel” from the row of cots where the night’s converts would sleep. If there were any. Most of the men only came around when it was the last week of the month and their pension money had run out -- all spent on drink -- and they couldn’t afford the twenty cents for a liver sausage sandwich. They’d come into the mission and sing the songs. Then when the hour was up, they’d wolf down lunch and disappear, fortified by the preacher’s deviled ham. 

The first of the month was another story. 

Many of these men had been railroad workers in their younger days, and their pensions were generous, but it all seemed to go to the bars and the liquor stores that surrounded the Mission on all sides. The men especially liked the place where the women danced around without any clothes on. 

Wicked, all of it. 

The preacher leaned against the handle of his mop and stared at the calendar. The First of October. By All Hallow’s Eve, the place would be packed with hungry men, but today there would be hardly anyone. The alley next to the mission would be full of men passing bottles of wine back and forth, sharing all manner of disease. Tight little clusters of men in grubby clothes that left no space for God. 

The Mission had a massive store-front window with two pretty leaded glass windows above it. When the sun shone through them, it made elongated diamond patterns on the floor. There was no sun today, though. It had rained all night and now the sidewalks were muddy and plastered with red and brown leaves. 

When Maddie arrived, she hesitated at the door, afraid to leave mud on the preacher’s “clean” floor.

“It’s alright, Maddie,” he said. She pulled her shoes off and stepped inside. Maddie was his pianist. She arrived dutifully at ten o’clock every day, except for Sundays when she was attending services at her own church. Maddie’s church was Ukrainian Orthodox, but here that didn’t matter. The preacher kept the Mission non-denominational to avoid turning anyone off. 

Maddie went behind the partition to wipe off her shoes, then came back out into the chapel and sat at the piano. It always sounded tinny and some of the keys stuck, but Maddie could play any hymn and make it sound soft and inviting. She could play more than hymns; once the preacher caught her playing jazz riffs when she thought she was alone, and he slammed the cover onto the keys, bruising her fingers. 

The preacher knew it was the right thing to do but at the same time he feared she wouldn’t come back. Talented pianists were hard enough to find. How would he find another willing to give away so much free time, and on Skid Row? But Maddie did come back, and the preacher rewrote his sermon that day, making it all about how doing things in spite of pain brings us closer to God. It was one of his best sermons. He converted three men that night. They were grateful for hot showers and the fresh linens on the cots behind the partition. Two of them shook all night from the DTs. 

For a while, they were loyal followers who came to services every day, but eventually they wandered off, lured back into sin. 

Maddie spread fresh pages of sheet music across the piano desk and the preacher frowned. Maddie knew all of the usual hymns by heart; if it was a new song, she knew she had to run it by him first. But as she began to pick out the notes, he recognized the tune and remembered the words: 

Christ vanquisheth the ancient rites

In the land where heathens dwell

He rideth with his holy knights

To send Satan back to hell!

The preacher smiled. The lyrics dated back to Henry VIII’s time. It would make a good subject for his sermon: the Knights of Christ. He would give the men the opportunity to join the holy order of brave warriors, to become like the honorable men of Arthur’s Roundtable. That should light a few fires. 

The glass on the front door rattled. The preacher looked up to see Mrs. Onesorg, from the Swedish church, standing at the door holding a cardboard box in her arms. He knew it would contain her usual donation, leftovers from her Ladies Auxiliary meeting: dried ends of roasted ham and sweet pickles floating in an inch of brine. It wasn’t much, but she would grind the ham and the pickles together and stretch it by being generous with the mayonnaise. They were good sandwiches if you liked deviled ham, but the preacher hoped he wouldn’t be stuck eating them all after today’s sermon. 

“Good morning, Mrs. Onesorg,” the preacher said as he held the door for her. 

“I have some apple muffins today,” she said, “and molasses cookies!” 

“Wonderful,” he said as he took the box from her. The scent of cinnamon wafted up from the box. Mrs. Onesorg always seemed to have a heavy hand when it came to spice. She wore a camel-colored wool coat and walked with a slightly shuffling gait. The hat she wore reminded him of one his mother had. 

The preacher’s mother had loved to tuck an ostrich feather into her hatband. She also wore skirts that were tight at the ankles, forcing her to take tiny steps, much like the old lady was doing now. 

Mrs. Onesorg greeted Maddie, who had opened the piano lid and was attempting to reset a hammer that had frozen in place when she struck the key. 

Behind the partition, there was a makeshift kitchen, which was nothing more than a small ice box and a steel table. The preacher set down Mrs. Onesorg’s box and unpacked it for her while she screwed her portable meat grinder to the edge of the table. 

While Mrs. Onesorg prepared the day’s luncheon and Maddie loosened the stuck hammer, the preacher sat down near the storefront window and began to write his sermon. 

The tales of King Arthur and his knights come from a time when Europe was pagan. These primordial stories linger today because they are of men who demonstrated bravery and honor. Their valor is not lost to the ages. It is available to us today, if only we choose to lay down our vices, and take up the swords of Christ…

As he wrote, he lost his concentration, a series of images flashing through his mind. Mrs. Onesorg’s shuffle...his mother’s hobble skirt with the emerald green stripes...his mother, ten years later, standing in front of a mirror in a mauve drop-waist dress with a pleated skirt, complaining about how it hung like a sack...Justyna, the Polish girl who cooked, wearing the same dress after his mother had cast it off. 

The Sword of Christ is forged from His holy blood which, when exposed to the heat of God’s infallibility, is made harder than any terrestrial metal…

Justyna’s bare breasts...the tiny bed in her little room at the top of the narrow staircase that only she was supposed to use…

The first step toward becoming one of Christ’s Knights is to lay aside the fardels of sin that you cling to. The sin of drink. The sin of pride. The sin of living in filth and refusing to be cleaned by His love.

The train station...Justyna sitting next to the window...he pretending to forget something on the platform...watching her shouting and smacking the window with both hands as the steam engine whistled and the train began to leave the station…

Christ’s sword is polished by the holy wool of the Lamb of God…

The preacher scribbled over the last line and set down his pen. He glanced at Maddie, whose hair fell in front of her face as she practiced the doxology. He wondered why she didn’t wear her hair in a more fashionable style but appreciated that she didn’t bother with vane frivolities. 

The sun had finally burned through the morning’s rain clouds and sliced through the storefront window. The light caught the ruby highlights in Maddie’s hair. Justyna’s hair had looked like that in the glow of the lamp with the celluloid shade on the small table next to her bed. He heard once that Justyna and the child had returned to town but, if it were true, he wouldn’t know it. They never crossed his path. 

Sometimes, he saw girls like Maddie and wondered...but Maddie was too young. Justyna’s illegitimate daughter would have to be in her thirties by now. Maddie was only twenty-two.

Maddie began to play “Crown Him with Many Crowns,” the hymn that started every service. The preacher glanced at his watch. He gathered up his notes for the sermon; he would have to improvise the second half of it. 

He propped open the front door. The warmth of the damp air surprised him. He turned to the alley next to the building and called to the men who stood there in a closed circle, sharing a bottle of wine. The preacher called to them, asked them to renounce sin and join the service, but they ignored him and continued to pass the bottle around. 

By the time Maddie had completed the hymn, the mission was still empty. The preacher glanced over his shoulder and nodded to her, and she began to play the hymn again. 

A group of men emerged from the cage hotel across the street, but they disappeared around a corner, probably to spend hours in a dingy bar. The preacher felt a flash of anger. How could these people live without God? Didn’t they know that each drop of drink they consumed today would drown them in the afterlife?

Finally, a few men in out-of-style suits came to the door and took seats on the folding chairs. One of the men shuffled in on wobbling knees. His eyes rolled around in his head like the cars on a Tilt-a-Whirl. The lapels on his suit were stained with some dark substance as if someone with dirty fingers had tried to rough him up. The piney scent of gin wafted from his breath, even from several feet away. 

The preacher clenched his jaw. It was time to make an example of one of these vile sinners. 

“Sinner!” The preacher shouted. “God does not want to hear your praises when they are belched and slurred! You are not welcome here!”

The man’s eyes rattled to the front of his head as the preacher grabbed him by the collar. The preacher noticed that the man’s eyes were red, and the look in them was a sad one.

“Out!” The preacher bellowed as he shoved the man through the glass door. The preacher turned away after he released the man, but glanced over his shoulder as the mission door slowly closed. Through the storefront window, the preacher watched as two men in dirty clothes caught the man by his arms to keep him from falling to the pavement, and then linked their arms across his back to support his weight as they guided him home.

As the men disappeared from view, the preacher realized that the only thing he was watching in the storefront window was his own reflection.