Unbroken_ A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption - Laura Hillenbrand [182]
One day that October, Cynthia and Louie were walking down a hallway in their building when a new tenant and his girlfriend came out of an apartment. The two couples began chatting, and it was at first a pleasant conversation. Then the man mentioned that an evangelist named Billy Graham was preaching downtown. Louie turned abruptly and walked away.
Cynthia stayed in the hall, listening to the neighbor. When she returned to the apartment, she told Louie that she wanted him to take her to hear Graham speak. Louie refused.
Cynthia went alone. She came home alight. She found Louie and told him that she wasn’t going to divorce him. The news filled Louie with relief, but when Cynthia said that she’d experienced a religious awakening, he was appalled.
Louie and Cynthia went to a dinner at Sylvia and Harvey’s house. In the kitchen after the meal, Cynthia spoke of her experience in Graham’s tent, and said that she wanted Louie to go listen to him. Louie soured and said he absolutely wouldn’t go. The argument continued through the evening and into the next day. Cynthia recruited the new neighbor, and together they badgered Louie. For several days, Louie kept refusing, and began trying to dodge his wife and the neighbor, until Graham left town. Then Graham’s run was extended, and Cynthia leavened her entreaties with a lie. Louie was fascinated with science, so she told him that Graham’s sermons discussed science at length. It was just enough incentive to tip the balance. Louie gave in.
——
Billy Graham was wearing out. For many hours a day, seven days a week, he preached to vast throngs, and each sermon was a workout, delivered in a booming voice, punctuated with broad gestures of the hands, arms, and body. He got up as early as five, and he stayed in the tent late into the night, counseling troubled souls.
Graham’s weight was dropping, and dark semicircles shadowed his eyes. At times he felt that if he stopped moving, his legs would buckle, so he took to pacing his pulpit to keep himself from keeling over. Once, someone brought a baby to him, and he asked whose child she was. He’d been away from home for so long that he didn’t recognize his own daughter. He longed to end the campaign, but the success of it made him sure that Providence had other wishes.
When Louie and Cynthia entered the tent, Louie refused to go farther forward than the back rows. He sat down, sullen. He would wait out this sermon, go home, and be done with it.
The tent was hushed. From someplace outside came a high, beckoning sound. Louie had known that sound since his boyhood, when he’d lain awake beside Pete, yearning to escape. It was the whistle of a train.
——
When Graham appeared, Louie was surprised. He’d expected the sort of frothy, holy-rolling charlatan that he’d seen preaching near Torrance when he was a boy. What he saw instead was a brisk, neatly groomed man two years younger than himself. Though he was nursing a sore throat and asked that his amplifier be turned up to save his voice, Graham showed no other sign of his fatigue. He asked his listeners to open their Bibles to the eighth chapter of John.
Jesus went unto the mount of Olives. And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them. And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without