The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [97]
“I don’t remember your face,” Linstrom said, “so I guess you’re not a member of my congregation. I never forget a face. I don’t see why the men don’t come here and worship. I think I have one of the nicest chapels in the West Pacific and last Sunday I only had five men at the service. I’m trying to see if I can’t get one of the photographers to come down from headquarters and take a picture of the place. I think there ought to be a photograph of this chapel in Life magazine. I have to share it with Father O’Leary, but he didn’t give me much help when there was work involved. He didn’t seem to care where his men worshiped. He’s over to the officers’ mess, playing poker right now. It’s none of my business how he spends his time but I don’t think a minister of the gospel ought to play cards. I’ve never held a playing card in my hand. Of course it’s none of my business, but I don’t approve of the methods he uses to get his congregation together, either. He had twenty-eight men here last Sunday. I counted them. But you know how he did it? There was a whisky ration last Saturday and he went down and pulled the men out of line and made them come to confession. No confession, no whisky. Anybody could fill up a church if they did things like that. I put out the stationery and the magazines and I painted the Welcome signs myself and whenever my wife sends me cookies—my wife bakes oatmeal cookies; she could make a fortune if she wanted to open a bakery—now when my wife sends me cookies I put them in a dish out here but that’s as far as I’ll go.”
“I want some emergency transportation,” Coverly said. “I want to go home. My father’s dying.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, my boy,” Lindstrom said. “I’m very sorry. I can’t get you emergency transportation. I don’t know why they send people to me. I don’t know why they do this. You can go and see the major. A man got some emergency transportation last month. At least that’s what I heard. You go to the major and I’ll pray for you.”
The major was playing poker and drinking whisky at the officers’ club and he left the card table gruffly, but he was an amiable or sentimental drinker, and when Coverly said that his father was dying he put an arm around his shoulder, walked him over to the transportation office and got a clerk out of the movies to cut his orders.
He left before dawn in an old DC-4, covered with oil and with a picture of a bathing beauty painted on its fuselage. He slept on the floor. They got to Oahu in the disorder of a hot summer dusk with more lightning playing in the mountains. He left for San Francisco in a transport at eleven the next night. There was a crap game and the un-insulated plane was very cold and Coverly sat in a bucket seat, wrapped in a blanket. The drone of the motors reminded him of the Topaze and he fell asleep. When he woke the sky was a rosy color and the flight clerk was passing out oranges and saying that he could smell the land wind. A solid cloud ceiling broke as they neared the coast and they could see the burned summer hills of San Francisco. A few hours after clearing military customs Coverly hitched a ride on a bomber to Washington and went from there to St. Botolphs on the train. He took a taxi from the station out to the farm in the middle of the morning and saw, for the first time, the signs on the main road on the elm tree, VISIT THE S.S. TOPAZE, THE ONLY FLOATING GIFT SHOPPE IN NEW ENGLAND. He got out of the cab and looking around he saw his father, searching for four-leaf clovers in the meadow by the river, and he ran to