Blood and Oranges, James Goldsborough [spicy books to read txt] 📗

she carried him strapped on her back in the Shanghai fashion. For the Chinese, Willie used everything he knew to spread the word of Jesus, things they didn’t teach at the seminary. He brought people to their feet shouting hallelujahs and hosannas, words they didn’t understand. He baptized and practiced the laying on of hands and healing. Exotic in their robes and pigtails, baggy pants and hobbled feet, parishioners were able to forget war and misery for a few hours and come to Jesus.

In the fourth year, with xenophobia and revolution sweeping the country, his life fell apart. Calvin caught scarlet fever and nearly died. Millie died in his arms from the cholera. How could he bring Jesus to the Chinese when he was so wretched himself? He found a pretty young amah to care for Calvin. Chun hua moved in with them and into his bed. As civil war reached Shanghai, the church ordered him home. He obtained papers for Chun hua, and they were two days from embarking when her brothers came, pummeling the pastor and taking the sobbing girl. In those terrible days, father and son clung to each other as never before. Not until they were onboard ship and moving down the Whangpoo did Willie believe the nightmare was over.

At first, the former grocery off Wilshire didn’t have many clients. Los Angeles was still a city of Protestant transplants used to granite and ivy, cassocks and scripture, things that weren’t Willie’s style. He called it the Church of the New Gospel and had a glass case built outside to advertise the name. People come to Los Angeles for a new life, so I’ll give them a new church, he said. Who wants fire and brimstone in a sunny place like this? People need to be lifted by Jesus’ message, not frightened by it.

Word got around. The Reverend Willie Mull had the dark good looks of a movie star, a beautiful, rich voice and was filled with the Holy Spirit. He replaced the Baptists’ battered upright with an organ and the gray-haired piano teacher in chignon with a pretty young music student from USC. With doors thrown open Sunday mornings, hosannas and hallelujahs sounded from Beverly Hills downtown to Bunker Hill. Willie called his congregation Soldiers for God, and the first hymn sung before every service was “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

He accepted his gift as God-given. In Shanghai he had baptized them, prayed with them, touched and consoled them. He healed them. By the time he reached Los Angeles he’d become an original, blending natural gifts with his own arduous personal journey. He knew what the people wanted before they knew it themselves. He was friendly and informal, though people understood his powers. He called himself Rev. Willie, never William, which was too stuffy, too Presbyterian.

It was the healing that first brought attention from the newspapers. Not all those coming to sunshine city were healthy young people looking to make a new start. Some were sick and some were old and some were lame and when they heard of the little church off Wilshire where you could be born again and healed by a vigorous young preacher whose little boy sat near the pretty pianist every Sunday, they came to see for themselves. When Willie stood over them, touching heads, calling out to Jesus and inviting them to throw away their crutches and walk down the aisle to embrace Jesus, some of them tried and some of them succeeded. The newspapers were skeptical. So were the mainstream churches.

One of those who was reborn, though in truth he had never been christened, was a man of indeterminate age who showed up one Sunday and never stopped coming, always in the same suit, which needed pressing, the same boots, which needed polishing and the same hat, which needed brushing. When Willie stood on the porch afterward shaking hands, this congregant, bald as a stone and with a great drooping mustache, always said “fine sermon, Reverend,” and moved on along. Willie, who sought to know all his Soldiers, found him a curiosity, someone who would have fit in better in his saloon-church on Turk Street than in the leafy suburbs off Wilshire. He would gladly have visited with him, but the man never lingered. Clearly of modest means, he never put anything in the plate.

Willie didn’t even know the man’s name. It was Eddie who told him: “You’re talking about Henry Callender,” he said one day, to his brother’s great surprise.

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They said the aqueduct would bring water enough for a city of one million people, and it didn’t take long. The trains from the East were full. Soon there was a Ford Model T plant, Goodyear and Firestone tire plants, even an aircraft company called Glenn T. Martin. The new movie industry liked the weather and moved out from New York to the place called Hollywood. Houses went up so fast companies bragged they could build a house, start to finish, in two weeks. The chamber of commerce sent out glitzy brochures around the country luring people to “life in sunshine city.” Macadam was laid and a sign hung out reading: “Welcome to L.A.’s Newest Community.”

Eddie met Number Seven at a beauty contest in Ocean Park. A rising real estate figure thanks to Mull Gardens, he was asked to help pick Miss Ocean Park, a contest held each summer on Lick Pier, between Venice and Santa Monica. Fellow judges were men of similar prominence—a lawyer from a famous firm, a Crocker banker, a Pacific Electric executive, a Doheny oil man, a vice president of Coulter’s Department Store.

He couldn’t say for sure why he settled on Number Seven. She wasn’t the prettiest, but was a bountiful girl with a sassy look that appealed to him. She had an easy way of talking to the mayor of Santa Monica, the host, that contrasted with the stylized method of girls trying too hard to be discovered. Incomprehensibly to him, Number Seven didn’t