The Return

When the charismatic ministry of Asa Donague swept into the little prairie community of Homer, Kansas in late 1923, no one could have foretold what would follow.

 ***Content Warning: Contains frank depictions of antisemitism, racism, and anti-Catholicism, as well as disturbing and violent imagery. Listener discretion advised.***

 “Old-Time Religion”, performed by the Criterion Quartet, arranged by Charles Davis Tillman, recorded 1920. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-35596/>, and included under fair use.

Cover image provided courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USW3-033945-D (b&w film neg.)

Transcript

NARRATOR

Episode Thirty-Four: The Return.

(“Old-Time Religion” plays)

NARRATOR

Like everyone else in the large pavilion, Grady Thurgood waits with bated breath. Rumors of the great Asa Donague, or “Ace” as he is sometimes nicknamed, have swept the countryside like a prairie wildfire, and Grady has so longed to finally see the man billed as the prophet Elijah returned to prepare the way for the Second Coming.

Grady Thurgood is so ready for an end to this rotten world. The death of his eldest grandson in the shattered forests of Argonne, and the deaths of his two youngest grandchildren in the flu epidemic that followed and that somehow spared him, have sapped so much of his former zest for life, and turned his mind heavenward.

This is why he had to come today, despite his daughter’s and granddaughter’s worried protests that it might prove too great a strain on his bad heart.

And clearly, much of the country feels the same. From Tennessee to Texas, Ace has roused the hearts and minds of the faithful, not only preaching from a travelling pulpit, but even over the airwaves of modern radio.

When his words are heard from coast to coast, Donague has prophesied, the great change will come, the Rapture and the Tribulations, and finally the Lord will return to create his Kingdom in the new promised land, America.

Grady longs for this too, to see his dead grandchildren returned, to live forever in the peace and perfection of the Kingdom to Come.

A murmur runs through the crowd, and Grady cranes his neck to see the little stage. The murmur becomes a roar of delight, and Ace, blond and grinning and handsomely middle-aged, steps into the light.

Something dark and muttering flits across Grady’s thought, and his excitement is momentarily soured.

Ace greets the crowd, his words of humility at odds with his emphatic showman’s smile and his practiced stage presence. Yet the crowd coos with each utterance, not least when he tells them that he is a Kansas boy, born and raised, and is glad to be home again. Grady frowns a bit at this – he has read and heard so many conflicting claims about Ace’s origins, from the son of a poor Appalachian preacher to the scion of an Oklahoma oil tycoon, each story supposedly coming straight from the horse’s mouth – but he shrugs off his doubt, thinking that Ace would certainly be the authority on the matter.

The crowd, packed tightly into the pavilion and sweating in the unseasonable afternoon heat, feels now like it is pressing in too closely around him, and he tugs at his collar. An ache has begun to settle into his jaw, and he feels like he needs to step outside and get some fresh, cooler air, but he dares not for fear of missing even a moment of Ace’s sermon.

Donague begins to rail against the moral corruption that has seeped into their nation, against the Jews and Papists flooding in from Europe, and of dark-skinned devil-worshippers more wicked still stealing across their borders in the dead of night. And only now does Grady fix upon the thought that gnaws on his subconscious: he knows this man who calls himself Ace. It is impossible, but though Grady’s sight is not what it once was, he is sure that this is the same man, unchanged in the past sixty years. Even the voice is the same.

This is the vendor of tonics, liniments, and oils who so long ago visited Grady’s distant hometown of Ithaca, Ohio, the man whose promised miracle cures wrought such strange and terrible effects upon those who partook of them, and who vanished the very night that the county sheriff came to find him, with Doctor Eldridge in tow.

 Memories long buried and better forgotten begin to roil in his mind, and suddenly the tent is as stifling as an oven, the roof far too low and the voices of the crowd around him overwhelmingly loud. Grady rubs at a sudden pain in his left arm and looks around for a path to the exit.

When he looks back to the stage, the face of the preacher is shifting and rearranging itself like bubbling oil. Weakness takes Grady’s limbs, and he stumbles, falling into the worshippers before him and clutching at the squeezing agony in his chest.

The startled people around bend over him, asking questions that he cannot seem to arrange into meaningful words. And the only answer they receive is his fading, repeated whisper: Forgive me, Eva.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Outside the little town of Homer, Kansas, a fine house sits, somewhat incongruously, upon the open prairie. In that house, a young woman sits before her vanity, rouging her cheeks with a practiced hand. She is careful to apply just enough to add a hint of blush; too much, and her mother will tell her she looks like a prostitute.

As she appraises her handiwork, the sorrow that is never far from her thoughts surges again. It has been only four months since her grandfather passed, and she remembers how he would always tell her how pretty she looked after she made herself up, as though consciously trying to counterbalance her mother’s frequent criticism. The house, already robbed of her siblings, feels even emptier now without him, the evening colder and achingly quiet.

Her mother calls up the stairs for her to hurry so that they are not late to dinner with the Whitmans. Putting in just a few finishing touches, Eva rises and leaves her bedroom, descending to meet her parents. The three of them pile into the new Ford Tudor and drive into the purple, dusty evening.

As always, the Whitmans prove gracious hosts. Eva enjoys their company well enough, but can never fully relax during the meal or the postprandial conversation. She is all too aware that part of the reason for their frequent socializing with the Whitmans, aside from mutual business interests, is her parents’ desire for marriage between her and the oldest Whitman boy, Damian.

She has told her mother many times that she has no such interest in Damian, that it would be too much like marrying an elder brother, but her mother only smiles and expresses bland acknowledgement that is clearly dismissal.

As her father and Mr. Whitman step outside to smoke and talk business – the two of them co-own the little car dealership in town – their wives retreat to the kitchen to talk and clean up, and Damian’s brothers begin a game of rummy in the living room, leaving Eva and Damian alone the table.

The young man smiles shyly at her, yet she can see he is just as uncomfortable as she is. After a few polite exchanges that peter out into silence, he begins talking, as he often does and seemingly by reflex or compulsion, of his hope of leaving this little backwater burg and traveling to New York or Chicago, or maybe west to California. Sometimes he even talks of going abroad, to Paris or to Florence. He dreams of becoming an artist, surrounding himself with the most brilliant and creative personalities, elevating himself as he never could here to a world of rarefied beauty.

Eva smiles and listens as patiently as she is able, though she secretly harbors the belief that Damian will never find the confidence to follow through with these aspirations. And for the first time, it occurs to her that Damian knows this too, and that his incessant talk of the fantasy is a sort of grieving on his part. She wonders also if he is uninterested in her as she is in him, and if his mother also pressures him blindly into attempting to woo her, regardless of his wants.

A depth of sympathy for the boy she has not known before fills her now, and she decides to include him in her evening prayers.

When the older men return, Mr. Whitman is talking of the evangelist preacher, Donague. Eva and her mother are devoted Methodists, and she may not have paid the talk any mind if her grandfather had not shown such an interest in Ace Donague during his final days. As it is, her ears prick at the name.

Mr. Whitman is saying that Donague has remained in the area far longer than expected, and is talking of opening a more permanent ministry here, having for some reason decided that this is the perfect place for it. Mr. Whitman’s primary concern is the effect this might have on sales, but Mrs. Whitman, emerging from the kitchen, steers the conversation toward more theological considerations. Despite her husband’s scoffing disregard, she seems to hold Donague in high regard. Out of interest or politeness, Mrs. Thurgood takes up the topic, and Eva finds herself thoroughly intrigued by the mysterious preacher.

When they drive home, it is her father, normally so ambivalent toward religion, who suggests they go and see what this Donague has to say, to which the two women enthusiastically agree.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

True religion won’t put your pennies in the Pope’s gold-lined pockets, Donague proclaims, to cries of affirmation, and it won’t put your daughter’s virtue in the hands of dark men with dark hearts. It won’t weary your soul and leave you open to the Devil’s whispers. No, sir, true religion will put a smile on your face and a light in your heart. It will put the sword of the angels in your right hand.

Eva claps with the others. She has felt before the surge of spirit that comes with a good sermon, and with Christian fellowship, but never before has she felt it so powerfully as she does tonight. And there is something else to it too, some new strain of divine elation – a sense of invincibility, that no obstacle could ever hold her back, now that she has found her rightful place.

All things are possible through true faith, Donague says, seeming to echo her thoughts. And she isn’t certain, but he seems to be looking right at her as he says it.

He is so handsome, she thinks, and immediately chides herself for such impure thoughts. And even beneath the chaste shame, there is a part of herself that recoils even more profoundly at the intrusive thought. It feels, somehow, alien, not her own thought, but one implanted into her mind. The Devil, she thinks, as Ace says. He is old enough to be her father, and there is something almost lacquered and false about his face.

She chides herself again for un-Christian thoughts, and reaches to recapture the euphoria of the previous moments. It comes, but it feels somehow diminished, tarnished by her errant fancy.

We are all of corrupt nature, Donague is saying now, and it is only through the blood of Christ that we are redeemed.

This time, Eva is sure he is looking at her, and her heart thunders with mingled excitement and self-consciousness, feeling that he somehow sees through her, sees how wicked she is inside.

It is through Christ and His servants, he says slowly, that we find hope in eternal life, and the return of our fellow Christian souls, so dearly departed.

The faces of Grandpa Grady, of her brother Teddy wearing his uniform just before he was deployed to France, of Lily and Robert as they lay feverish and breathless with dark bluish spots blossoming upon their cheeks, flash through her mind, and she feels tears begin to stream down her cheeks. Beside her, she finds her mother too is weeping openly, and they clasp hands and share a sad smile. Even her father wears his heartache more openly than she has seen since little Robert’s funeral, four years past.

Yes, Donague continues, the Lord will return them to us, and reunite us all in His boundless goodness.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

At first, Eva feels a little guilty about abandoning the little Methodist church her and her family have attended since she was a babe, but over the following weeks, she sees so many of her former congregation among the worshippers at Donague’s ever larger Sunday meetings, that her misgivings gradually dissipate, and are replaced by growing vindication.

And the words of the reborn Elijah become ever more glorious, and so too do his wondrous works. Not only does he preach with unmatched passion and power, she sees him restore the sight of a little blind boy, return an old woman the use of her legs she’d lost age at the age of twelve, even pull the deathly cancer right out of an ailing mother of three.

With each miracle of faith, the crowds grow, and so does their devotion.

On the Sunday that marks a full year since her grandfather’s heart attack, the Thurgoods arrive to find that the foundations have been laid for the great church which Ace has promised to build.

It will be our shining Temple restored, he says, in our new Jerusalem.

And this night, Donague restores two souls, an elderly married couple whose bodies were so badly damaged by the fire that destroyed their home, that the authorities had proclaimed them dead.

Nothing is beyond the reach of the Lord, Donague smiles, or that of His faithful servants.

The crowd erupts with wild delight as the bodies relax from the contortions of a fiery death, as their charred eyelids open.

Then a man steps forward and onto the stage, and hijacking Ace’s fancy new microphone, asks loudly where Ace was born… and when.

The crowd falls silent, shock rippling through the massive marquee tent at this unprecedented disruption and disrespect. No one seems to have the courage to break the silence.

Donague’s smile slowly widens, and he says that he belongs to no particular land or nation, but to the whole world.

Incensed by that indefinite response, the man, who speaks with a strong Missouri accent, calls it the slippery answer of a swindler.

A collective hiss of disbelieving outrage fills the air, and Eva is sure that the temperature in the marquee has dropped fifteen degrees. The anger of the crowd is so audible, that she is not sure how many others hear the man’s next utterance, when he asks Ace if he remembers his face, or if he remembers what he did in the little town of Cadet.

Something strange passes across Donague’s face then, his eyes seeming to glow with a ruddy light for an instant, before he resumes his smile and says, in a voice that seems to fill the tent despite being soft as a spider’s step, that there are none so deaf as those who will not hear. Then he raises his right hand slowly as though in a lazy Roman salute, then just as gradually lets it fall. As if this were some predetermined signal, about a half dozen men from the congregation fall upon Ace’s challenger and drag him forcefully through the crowd, and outside.

After a few moments, Ace resumes his sermon on the promises of hellfire for the unbelievers as though there had never been any disruption at all. And bizarrely, his flock too seems to immediately forget the events of the preceding moments. Even Eva’s parents stare at Donague raptly, without a hint of distraction or discomfort.

Feeling very alone and not knowing what else to do, Eva tries to also return her attention to the preacher, to lose herself once more in his mellifluous baritone. But she cannot stop herself from turning periodically and looking toward the tent flaps through which the man, and his assailants, disappeared.

After about twenty minutes, the men who dragged him out return, stony-faced and silent. There is no sign of the one they took from the tent. Eva can’t be certain, but she thinks she briefly glimpses split knuckles on of the men’s hands, before they disperse back into the gathered throng.

(Unsettling music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Over dinner that evening, neither of her parents make any mention of the disruption at the meeting, and even act as though they have no memory of the event when Eva cautiously brings it up. They argue about it with growing heat for a few minutes, before Eva lets the matter rest, the words dying on her lips. A few moments of silence pass, where no one touches their meal, and after a while her father says lowly that if anyone dared to disrespect Ace under his own roof, let alone call him a liar, there could be no punishment too harsh for them.

Eva delicately sets down her knife and fork and asks to be excused from the table, claiming a sudden feeling of malaise. Her parents acquiesce, and Eva retreats upstairs to her bedroom, locking the door behind her for only the third time in her life. Then she sits at her vanity and gazes blankly into the mirror, seeing not her own reflection, but seeing again how her father’s eyes had shone so fiercely when he echoed Donague’s sentiments of punishment and condemnation.

She begins to weep silently, as the walls of her bedroom press in. For the first time, she recognizes it as the room of the child she was and not that of the woman she is, and feels imprisoned, even crushed, within it.

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

For the next three weeks, she refuses to attend Sunday services, no matter how much her parents try to cajole or coerce her into joining them. Even when they tell her Donague’s church has been constructed, with marvelous speed and just in time for the coming cold of autumn, she refuses, and once her father becomes so angry that he tells her that at age twenty, it’s high time for her to find a husband and stop living on his dime.

That night, she cries herself to sleep, missing more than ever her loving grandfather, and the elder brother who had always been quick to come to her defense, or to comfort her with his gentle presence after an argument.

Eva hardly eats during this time, coming down for only a few meals a week, and occasionally pilfering the odd bite from the kitchen when her parents are out of the house.

In the evenings, as she lies in bed reading or thinking or drifting gradually into sleep, her father comes to tell her through the door that they are worried about the state of her mind, and for her everlasting soul. And he says that if she does not emerge of her own accord and begin behaving herself again, they may be forced to commit her to the care of an asylum.

She makes no answer to these threats, not doubting them, but feeling powerless against them. Something in the mesmeric hold the new preacher seems to exert over the community, over her own household and, but a short while previously, over her own mind, terrifies her on a wholly unprecedented level. Most of all, it makes her wonder if she is indeed losing her grip on reality, and if her own perceptions and memories are to be trusted.

Perhaps, she thinks sometimes, there was nothing sinister in the ejection of a confrontational troublemaker from a single, and otherwise peaceful, service. Perhaps she has inflated its significance in her fancy. But why does no one else seem to recall it? And how has Donague’s influence spread so quickly, and sunk roots so deeply?

On the fourth Sunday of her self-imposed isolation, she comes down for a late breakfast, after her parents have gone to the day’s service. Over toast and oatmeal and fried bacon and eggs, she reads the week’s edition of the Homer Gazette, and her eyes fall on an article about a visitor to the area who has gone missing, a certain Mr. Drees. At once she recognizes the description as the man from Missouri, and her appetite deserts her. The article makes it clear that the local police have concluded that he has simply left town, and is therefore no longer their concern, but Eva feels a horrible certainty that Drees will never be seen again, at least not alive.

She outlines the article in the red ink her father sometimes uses for his finance ledger, and sets it at his accustomed place at the head of the dining room table. Then she cleans up the remains of her breakfast, and hides herself away again in her bedroom before her parents return. Somehow, those hours of waiting, no matter how anxious and terrible they seem, are less so than the long silence in the house after the roar of the Tudor, and the opening and closing of the front door, announce her parents’ homecoming.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

She is sleeping late that Tuesday morning when her father knocks, around ten o’clock. Eva wakes feeling very afraid, sure that her father is going to scold her for laziness and childishness, and maybe finally follow through on his threat to commit her to an institution, but instead he has come to tell that the authorities have located Mr. Drees.

He was discovered late last night, he says, after she throws on a robe and hesitantly cracks open her bedroom door, in a farmer’s field about twelve miles away. When they found him, he was walking slowly in circles, pissing himself and mumbling, in a childlike voice, a single word over and over again: mama.

At first, he was assumed to be drunk, but an overnight stay in the county jail brought no sign of sobering. The only change was that Drees became even less responsive, almost catatonic. A doctor was summoned, and he declared that Drees had suffered some profound shock, or was perhaps even struck by a freak bolt of lightning, despite the otherwise clear weather of the previous days.

There was absolutely no sign, her father assures her, of any violence inflicted by human hands upon Mr. Drees. The doctor who examined him was Mrs. Whitman’s father, and Mr. Thurgood came to tell Eva the news as soon as he heard it.

After giving her a few moments to absorb all of this, her father asks if she will finally let go of her hysterical insistence that there is something sinister about Donague and his congregation, if she won’t at last return to the fold. There is so little time, after all, to choose the right side.

She tenses when he says this, but she can find little reason to argue. And she wonders if indeed she has let her imagination lead her astray, or let the Devil whisper in her ear.

Yes, she agrees reluctantly, she will return to Donague’s church.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

From the Atlantic to the Pacific, Donague croons into the microphone, we will sanctify this land, cleanse it of the Jew and the pagan, of the Greek and the Papist, of all the false Christians and swarthy foreigners that swarm like corpse-flies on every border, and even in the very heart of the country.

A roaring cheer fills the little church, deafening, and Eva is surprised to see even mild and timid Damian Whitman, who dreams of Paris and Florence and New York, shouting his approval in the row ahead of her.

The church is fuller than it has ever been, not even standing room remaining. Though she knows it is merely her fancy, it almost seems that the rafters and the very foundations quake with the collective voice of the gathered devotees.

We will make this the perfect, Godly land it was always meant to be, Donague smiles, a shining city on a hill, white and clean. And it shall all start here, tonight, in this very house filled with the Holy Spirit.

Donague beckons to Miss Hendry, his new church organist, and begins to lead them all in “Are You Washed in the Blood?” Something strange happens when they come to the chorus, though. Eva can see the mouths of her fellow worshippers moving to the traditional lyrics, but she could swear that the words coming out are changed, and that the words the Lamb have been replaced with this land.

Even as she notices this, she looks at Donague and perceives that his face has begun to metamorphosize, to curl inward upon itself in subtle metamorphosis like thick and roiling smoke. It seems in one moment some grotesque amalgam of the canine and the simian, in the next gruesomely porcine, then wickedly draconic. And the eyes – the eyes are the worst of all, like whirlpools of blood, fire, and darkest winter midnight.

I am mad, Eva thinks wildly, and in the same moment the thing called Asa Donague looks directly at her and grins lasciviously, licking grey lips with a long, blue-black tongue.

She screams and falls back into the young couple behind her. A few of the surrounding faces turn toward her, concerned and confused, but her outburst seems to be the sole source of their alarm. The young husband joins her father in helping her to her feet, and when she points shakily toward that impossible face, they clearly do not understand, do not see what she does.

The scales, she thinks, have fallen away from her eyes – and from hers alone.

She tells her father that they have to leave, this instant, and plainly he thinks she is ill – or perhaps hysterical, as he has so often called her in the past few weeks. He reassures her that they will be home soon enough, and when she grips his shirtsleeves and tells him that it must be now, he tells her sternly to stop making a scene. Eva looks to her mother for support, but the older woman’s eyes are fixed adoringly on the thing upon the dais.

The singing around her turns distorted and cacophonous, like all the screeching and screaming and wailing of all the ages condensed into a single, hellish dirge. Eva claps her hands over her ears, her head feeling on the verge of bursting like an overripe watermelon in the sun. All around her, the congregation sings on in a mockery of worship. The Asa-Thing holds aloft a Bible bound in white leather, but the shiny gold lettering upon the surface is all wrong, as though reflected in a funhouse mirror.

Sing, the thing commands her, in a voice like the croaking a titanic drowned bullfrog, like the rustling hiss of a billion cockroaches. And the urge fills her to obey, her lips moving as though of their own accord to form the words of the corrupted hymn. Images fill her mind, visions of war greater than any the earth has ever seen, of worldwide slaughter and the desecration of both bodies and souls without reason or goal beyond itself, of endless miles of industrial crematoria for both the living and the dead, of ghoulish feasting by naked and emaciated things that might once have been men but whose eyes now are like the thing behind the pulpit, and whose hands are caked in the blood of countless mothers and babes.

Though it is agony, like white-hot razors are being pressed to the soft flesh of her lips, she forces them to stop the song, and to form a single new word: no. It comes out as a mere whisper, but the visions falter.

She is sure the flesh of her mouth is being ripped away, but she says it once more, a little louder, and once more she is in the church, looking into the abyssal eyes of Asa Donague. Where before they were filled with awful glee, there is now frustration.

Kneel, he hisses, submit.

Molten barbed wire twists in her veins, and she feels tears of blood trickling from her eyes, from her nose and mouth, from every orifice and even from under her nails. Still, she screams: no.

The frustration turns to rage, and a great winged shadow fills the church from wall to wall, and then it becomes light, white and coldly searing. The bodies of the worshippers are engulfed in the white flames, which consume without burning, and Eva shrieks with them in a new infernal chorus. She falls alongside the corpses of her parents, which are shrunken and desiccated now as though aged by millennia.

She is too weak to do more than raise her head, and even with this small effort, her bones crack brittlely, and she is sapped of all strength.

Too soon, Asa says, blazing and fattened now to the size of a bull elephant, It was still just a little too soon. Another couple of decades, perhaps, or another century.

It looks down at her with mild surprise, as though it had already forgotten her, or had not expected to find her still living and conscious. It casts its gaze toward the remains of her parents, and chuckles mockingly.

Have no fear, it tongues its long teeth. They have served a purpose. They will nourish me, and make me stronger. They will serve to bring a new god into this world, just as they dreamt they might. And they will join so many others in serving me, in building my kingdom.

No, Eva says, her voice faint and throat dry.

The Asa-Thing only laughs, and becomes a great winged shadow once more, and then it is gone.

Eva’s head sinks feebly to the floor, and her mind tumbles into darkness.

(Bleak music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The woman that emerges from the church a full twelve hours later is not the hale and handsome twenty-year-old that entered it, but a woman who looks past eighty, frail and wizened and moving very, very carefully down the steps and over the rough grey prairie. She leans upon a cane, borrowed from one of the many, many dead within the church, who are now no more than fine ashy dust that the slightest breeze will disperse. And yet, there is a kind of strength of spirit, an abiding tenacity, in the woman’s steady march into the dawn, and her slow steps are a promise to never surrender. Her face glows with the ruddy, rising sun, her eyes having gazed into the deepest pools of night, and yet still open to the faintest of lights.

No, she whispers into the cold November wind, forever no.

(Hopeful music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and music by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]