Harvestman Lodge (55 page)

“It is, but it’s more. Rev. Cavness is a unique man. I’ve never known one quite like him, or one more the very image of the One he serves. He’s even harder to label than yours truly.”

“Rev. Cavness … is that the man who runs this place?”

Feely stopped on the corner of the sidewalk. “He’s the man who founded it. He’s still officially in charge, although age has slowed him and he leaves much of the actual day-to-day activity to others. Still, his approach to this work permeates everything that happens here, and I hope always will.”

Eli jotted on his notepad. “What’s his first name?”

“Larry. Well, Lawrence, I suppose. But he’s Brother Larry Cavness to those who know him. Some call him Rev. Cavness, but most of the people who come here are more comfortable with just Brother Larry. And that’s what his personal preference is, too.”

“How long has the mission been here?”

“Since 1975. Ten years. Brother Larry started it up entirely on his own, with nothing more than three rented rooms upstairs in this building, a few old army cots, and a cheap stove he stuck in a corner so his wife could cook for the people who came in. And in case you’re wondering, the answer is yes, they were probably in violation of every code on the books. Brother Larry hadn’t given even a thought to permits and licenses and insurance and on-going operational support and all that … he believed God had told him to start a rescue mission in Tylerville, and so he did it. No second thoughts, no questions asked, no delays tolerated.”

“Obviously they found a way to make it work, since they are still here.”

“It was surely a miracle that allowed it. It was a nightmare, initially, in terms of being a firetrap and a liability hazard. Thank God that old stove didn’t set off any fuse-box fires, or the worn-out staircase didn’t cave in under somebody’s weight while they trudged up to find a place to sleep out of the cold. Brother Larry welcomed anybody who came to him. He always tells his ‘flock of lambs’, or ‘flockers’, as he calls the people who came here, that he does not have all the answers for their situations, but can introduce them to someone who does. But here’s one of the things I love about Brother Larry: he sees his flockers as much more than souls to be saved for a life to come. He helps them in the most immediate, earthly ways as well. If they are hungry, or homeless, or in need of medical or mental health care, he tries to connect them up with people and agencies and programs that can provide what they need. Brother Larry is mindful of people as spiritual beings with eternal spiritual needs, and as physical and psychological beings with basic, temporal life needs. The most balanced man I’ve ever known.”

“Did he finally get insurance and so on for this place?”

Feely nodded. “I’m happy that, as time went by in those early days, many other local people stepped in to help Brother Larry with the things he wasn’t equipped to handle. Bankers worked with him to set up an operating account and get the mission connected properly with the IRS, the state and local authorities, and so on. The legalities, you know. Some insurance specialists helped him get his liability situation under control. Donations came in to let him rent more and more of this building; now the mission occupies all of it, cellar to rooftop. Brother Larry is the kind of man you just want to help out once you see what he’s doing. Nothing less than a great man. Great, good, and godly.”

“He must be remarkable.”

“An understatement. He’s absolutely the best man I’ve ever met in my life. Or that you or anyone else will.”

“That’s quite an endorsement, especially coming from you, Rev. Is it Brother Larry we’ve come to meet here?”

“It is. Let’s go on in and find him.”

THE OLD-FASHIONED BELL ABOVE the door jangled as the preacher and the journalist walked into the rescue mission. On a schoolroom-style desktop record player, a scratchy, ancient recording of a famous revival hymn played. “Let the lower lights be burning … send a beam across the waves … ”

A thin, prematurely aging woman whose difficult life could be traced in the shadows and contours of her weathered face walked up to Feely and gave him a massive bear hug, strong enough to drive the breath from his lungs despite her frail-looking frame.

“Wanda, I swear I think you’re out to kill me,” Feely said. “I can’t walk through that door without you nearly crushing the life out of me.”

“It’s because I love you, Rev,” she said. “You’ve done so much for us here, and so much for me.” Wanda looked at Eli. “I don’t know you, sir, but if you’re with Rev, you’re in the company of holiness, and that speaks well of you.”

“Holiness?” Feely said. “Far from it, Wanda, if you’re talking about me. So very, very far from it. But nearer to it than last year, or last week, or yesterday, I dare to hope.”

“That’s right: You got to always keep going forward, a step at a time, or two if you can manage it,” Wanda said. “That’s what Brother Larry and Brother Donald are always telling us.”

“They’re right, as usual,” Feely replied. “We’ll never become perfect, but we can always become better. Wanda, I want you to meet my friend, Eli Scudder. Eli works for the
Clarion
and is in charge of a magazine they’re producing for next year’s bicentennial. It will focus on the heritage and identity of our town and county, and I knew it would be incomplete without the story of Lower Lights Mission.”

“Pleased, ma’am,” Eli said.

“Same, sir. Reverend here is right, you know: this place has saved many a life in this town. Mine included. So many who are here, or have been here, would be dead and gone to a hopeless grave if not for the work Brother Larry and Brother Donald have done. Why, even Brother Donald wouldn’t be the fine man he is if he hadn’t found Lower Lights Mission.”

“I know who Brother Larry is, but the Donald name is new to me.”

“That would be me, sir,” came a voice from Eli’s left. He turned to see a man probably in his fifties, but with an indefinably youthful bearing and demeanor, approaching from what looked likely to be the office area of the rescue mission. The man came to Eli with hand extended. His grip and handshake were firm.

“Brother Donald New,” he said, his East Tennessee accent noticeable. “Assistant director of this mission. Just call me Brother Donald. And you are … ”

“Eli Scudder, sir, of the
Clarion.
Special projects editor, the project being a one-off magazine devoted to the heritage of the town and county, to be published for next year’s bicentennial. My friend here, Rev. Feely, tells me we would be amiss if we fail to include Lower Lights in it.”

“We’d be proud to be a part of it. Unless it is paid advertising you’re talking about. We got nothing in our budget for advertising. We live by donations here, and whatever we get goes back into the work.”

“I’m not speaking of advertising, sir. Just a story and a photo or two. No cost to the mission.”

“Then we’re in business, young man.”

Feely asked, “Brother Donald, is the big guy in?”

Donald New flicked his eyes heavenward. “Always,” he said.

“I meant the other big guy. The one with the size thirteen shoes.”

“No, Brother Larry isn’t here today. He’s got a cold powerful enough to drop an elephant. Myrtle told him to stay in, and for once he did what she said.”

“Good for him.”

“Anything I can help you with?”

“Yeah. Let’s talk about what Eli’s going to need from you.”

They followed Brother Donald into his simple, square office with its cheap veneered paneling and fluorescent lighting. Donald sat down behind his small desk while Eli and Feely took the mismatched folding metal chairs across from it. Beside them in a corner were flowers in white plastic holders of the kind seen in discount funeral parlors.

“Are you preaching a funeral today, Brother Donald?” asked Feely.

“Hmmm? Oh, the flowers … no. No funeral. But I am visiting the cemetery. Personal trip. The graves of my late wife and daughter. They’ve been too long without flowers. I’ve never been one to focus much on the earthly remains of ones who have gone on … those are just cast-off garments, so to speak. But I do regret it when I see other graves covered with beautiful blossoms and my own loved ones are without. So for the sake of my own peace of mind, sometimes I will place flowers on their graves. That’s what those flowers there are for. I’ll place them on the graves this evening or tomorrow.”

“I didn’t realize you had family members here, Don,” said Feely. “I’ve never known any other people here with the last name of New.”

Brother Donald smiled. “There’s a story behind that, Brother Kyle. New isn’t the name I was born with. It’s the name I took for myself when it became just what that word says: new. The old name was of a man who sinned every kind of sin, cared nothing for the God who made him, was unfaithful and unloving to wife and family as well as to the Almighty, and who, after turning his back on the best gifts he had, spent several years in prison. That’s where I met Brother Larry … he visits prisons, you know. He tells prisoners what they need to hear, and what can make them, well, new. With the help of Brother Larry and this mission, I became new, too. A new man deserved a new name. So ‘New’ I became. I even went through the legalities and had it changed officially in a court of law. Kept my first name, changed my last.”

“I had no idea, Brother Donald,” Feely said. “I didn’t know your story.”

“May I share that story, briefly, as part of my magazine piece?” Eli asked.

“You may. I’m always glad to share the story of how I became a ‘New’ man, in more ways that one.”

“What was your name before?” Eli asked.

“I’d rather leave that out. That man is gone now, washed clean of his sins. Now, from the inside out, in soul and in body, I’m simply Brother Donald New, servant of the Most High God.”

Eli nodded and scribbled fast so he wouldn’t lose the words.

Conversation turned to the history of the mission itself, and of its founder Larry Cavness.

“Brother Larry’s story wasn’t much different from my own, in some ways,” Brother Donald said. “There was one key difference: he was raised in a devout, righteous home and knew the truth of the Lord even as a child. But he strayed. As a young man he joined the Navy and ‘saw the world,’ as the saying goes. Like so many, though, the seeing of it changed him and stole away the best parts of his raising. He became as vile a heathen as any man you’d know, as vile, even as I was in the worst days of my former self. Hard to imagine that of Brother Larry, isn’t it, Kyle.”

“Impossible. The man is so permeated with holiness now I can’t think of him doing even the smallest wrong.”

“Well, he was a wicked man at one time. He’s told me his story many times, and shared it with our flockers time and again. They connect with it, because it’s the same thing that so many of them are living.”

“Did Brother Larry have addictions?” Feely asked.

“Liquor. He was into it deep. In one way it saved him.”

“What do you mean?”

“One night, dead of winter in Cleveland, Ohio, a drunk former sailor named Larry Cavness passed out cold in an alley beside a church. It started to snow, and he was lucky enough, or sufficiently protected by angels, I prefer to believe, that he woke up and saw he was likely to freeze where he was. He got up and stumbled over to a back door of the church. It was unlocked. He slipped inside and found a corner back behind the baptistry area. He settled down there and realized it was a Sunday evening. Out in the sanctuary, people filed in for the evening service, never knowing there was a drunk tucked away out of sight. But he was there. Brother Larry was able to hear the singing and the preaching as clear as anybody else in that building. He sat back there in the dark, hearing things he’d not heard since his childhood, and hearing at the same time that ‘still, small voice’ that the Bible talks about. The divine voice that whispers to the straying sheep, ‘Come home to the fold.’”

“Was that his point of change?” Feely asked.

“It was the start of it. You know as well as I do that, most of the time, human change doesn’t happen at one moment. It happens over time. You start down a road to something new and better, and slowly and steadily you get there. It was that way for me, and that way for Brother Larry before me, hidden in that back of that church.”

“You getting all this, Eli?” Feely asked.

Eli was writing faster than he realized he could, trying to make sure he caught all of Brother Donald’s words, because he liked the flow and patterns of his speech. “I’m getting it,” he said.

“Brother Larry sneaked out of that church when the service was over. Nobody ever saw him. He came back the next day and found the preacher who’d been doing the talking in the service, and that man introduced Brother Larry to the Lord. He put the drinking aside, just toughed it out with the help of that good preacher, and went from being Larry the drunk to Brother Larry, servant of God. He found a job detailing cars here in Tylerville, and when he started noticing other men in town who were drunkards and addicts like he’d been, that’s when God said, ‘Larry, you need to start me a rescue mission.’ And here we are, all those years later, because Brother Larry heeded that instruction from the Lord. This place has given help to more than six thousand men since that time, and a hundred fifty women and as many families. Brother Larry hasn’t done it alone … there’s a whole bunch of folks who have stepped up to lend a hand. We have doctors who will take care of our flockers for free, especially their children, and dentists who do the same. We’ve even got a local vet who helps out when we get families in who have driven into town and have no place to go. Sometimes they’ll have a cat or a dog packed in the car with them.”