Mark Dunn - We Five

Molly looked up from the paper. “I’m sorry, but I have my stenography class at that hour.”

The girl, whose name was Mirabella, was on friendly and familiar terms with both Maggie and Molly due to the fact that the three of them had attended grammar school together. She turned to Maggie with the same bright and hopeful look. “What about you , Mag?”

“I’ll try ,” fibbed Maggie, “but I cannot imagine your new husband will have many others in attendance. ‘The Extinction of the Human Race’ is a very depressing topic for this month’s ‘Lecture for the Masses.’”

“And yet it’s something to which we should all be giving serious thought. Futurists tell us that humankind may not survive this new century — that the tragedy of Galveston was only the first of many such devastating catastrophes that will, in the end, wipe all human life from the planet.”

Maggie handed the paper announcement back to Mirabella. “You and your newlywed professor husband sound like those sandwich-board-wearing fanatics who stand on Market Street and preach the end of the world. You dismiss the fact that there are a good many others — like that Mr. Bellamy whom Ruth’s been reading — who believe quite the opposite. By the way, Mirabella: what does your husband predict will be the nail in the coffin of our species — the one big, final event which will make all humankind disappear forever?”

Mirabella frowned. “Well, it sounds to me like you aren’t coming, so I shouldn’t tell you anything , but of course I will because we’re friends. Reggie lists five different potential agents of permanent annihilation.”

“Perhaps you should name them some other time, Mirabella,” said Molly, uneasily. “Mag and I are both late for work.”

“Then I’ll walk with you. I should vacate this block anyway. The Salvationists are about to start caterwauling on that corner and they’ll drown me out completely.”

Maggie and Molly resumed their brisk walk along Bush with Mirabella falling into skip-step next to them. “First. Water. Reggie calls this the Noachial model — whatever that means. Then. Fire. Either by the hand of nature or by the hand of man. Oh, let me see. Slow down, will you? Wind. Tornadoes, hurricanes — we’ve seen a good deal of that already. Then earthquake, volcano — that sort of thing. ‘Earth eructions,’ my horned-rimmed honey calls them.”

“Earth e rup tions?” asked Molly.

“No. E ruc tions. Like big terrestrial belches. Isn’t my new husband clever? He’s such a wooz.”

Maggie and Molly nodded as one, or rather like two kittens tracking a playfully dangled bit of twine with their whole heads.

“Anyway, don’t we get a taste of that from time to time here in wambling ol’ Frisco? Oh, do slow down just a smidge. I’m going to trip, I really am. Thank you. And the last one — hum, what is the last one?”

“Yes,” sighed Maggie with only slightly masked annoyance, “what is the last one? Molly and I are dying to know.”

“Well, if you’re going to be like that, I won’t tell you.”

“Mag was just having fun,” said Molly pacifically. “Please tell us the last one.”

“Yes, I remember it now. It’s the sun.”

Maggie stopped. Her companions halted as well. Maggie glared at Mirabella. “You mean the human race could go extinct from too much sunshine? Would this apply to Eskimos and Santa Claus too?”

“Well, what do you think causes droughts, for Heaven’s sake? Moonbeams ?”

Maggie snorted. “Mirabella Hampton Prowse, you are a moonbeam. A true mooncalf.”

“Of whom we are very, very fond,” Molly hastily put in. She reached over and demonstrated her fondness for her former grammar school desk-mate by giving her a little buss on the cheek. Then she seized Maggie by the arm and the two dashed off. “Very late!” Molly tossed back. “Love and kisses to you and the professor!”

After Maggie and Molly had put themselves a good distance ahead of their gaped-mouth friend, they slowed their pace to a stroll. “I know it was mean to dash away like that,” repined Molly, “but I also knew if I didn’t do something , you were going to chew her up for breakfast. You were , weren’t you?”

Maggie grinned and nodded. “But not breakfast. Dinner. A big plate of mooncalf’s liver.”

Zenith, Winnemac, U.S.A., July 1923

(from

Five Saints, Five Sinners,

by Gail Lowery)

Since the two of them seemed, at least for the time being, to be getting along, Molly wanted so badly to speak to Maggie about the marriage proposal, and how, should Mrs. Barton accept it, a union between their two parents might redound to the benefit of all concerned. But she kept her ongoing promise to her father and scrupulously avoided the topic. Instead, the two friends, as they strode past the solid brick mansions and quaint wood-frame houses of oak-lined Ninth Street, turned their conversation to the day that lay ahead, one greatly anticipated by Maggie and Molly and their three circle-sisters.

The woman for whom the five worked, the famed female evangelist Lydia DeLash Comfort, had “come home.” After several peripatetic years preaching the holy gospel in tents and auditoria throughout the country, money was raised (and was still being raised) to build a great Christian “tabernacle” in Zenith, the city of her birth and the place where her evangelizing career had begun. When construction of her “Tabernacle of the Sanctified Spirit” was completed in a couple of weeks, it would dwarf all other houses of worship in this middle-western metropolis, and be the envy of every pastor, priest, and rabbi in town.

The opening, the unveiling, the “Inaugural Service of Sanctified Celebration,” was scheduled for a week from Sunday. Leading up to this day, Maggie and Molly, and their equally assiduous sisters, Carrie and Jane and Ruth, were pitching in alongside all the other employees of “Sister Lydia’s Square Deal Ministries” to make ready the big day. We Five handed out circulars to spread the word about the tabernacle’s jubilant opening. They answered telephones and prepared mailings in the tabernacle office. They also worked as factotal Christian soldiers in service to all the various auxiliary groups that were popping up like mushrooms in Sister Lydia’s sacred garden, as the evangelist’s ministry, which had once been popular only with Pentecostals and others who spoke in tongues and rolled around on the floor, was now becoming a transformative and very nearly respectable religious and cultural phenomenon of significant renown. There was still the little residual matter of the Sister’s miraculous healing powers and whether these miracles would continue, with or without the reputed snake-oil operandi. But regardless, it was hard to deny that Sister Lydia’s Square Deal Ministries had the potential to become veritably global in its scope and outreach.

Yes, Sister Lydia DeLash Comfort was doing the nearly inconceivable: she was becoming even more famous than Mary Pickford.

Today, though— today the saintly singing sisters were finally getting to sing. Under the leadership of choir director Vivian Colthurst, choir rehearsals in preparation for the inaugural celebration were finally getting underway. It was on this warm Monday in early July that We Five (lovingly named by Miss Comfort “Sister Lydia’s Quintet of Songful Seraphim”) joined the other fifteen women hired by Lydia on the basis of the mellifluity of their laryngeal pipes and their willingness to lead the congregation once daily (except Thursdays) and three times on Sunday in making the requisite joyful noise unto the Lord.