The Infinite Plan Read Free Page A

perfect map of the universe, with all its laws and secrets. When he awakened, there was no trace of the venom, and his mind had entered a superior plane from which he never intended to descend. During that radiant delirium, the Master had commanded him to divulge the Unique Truth of The Infinite Plan, and he had done so with discipline and dedication, despite, as he never failed to inform his listeners, the grave impediments that mission entailed. Reeves had repeated the story so many times that in the end he believed it and had completely forgotten that the scar had been acquired in a bicycle accident. His sermons and books brought in very little money, barely enough to pay for renting the meeting sites and for publishing his works in inexpensive pocket-size editions. He did not taint his spiritual labors with gross schemes for financial gain, as was the case with many of the charlatans traveling around the nation in those days, terrorizing people with the threat of God’s wrath in order to swindle them out of their pitiful savings. Nor did he resort to the offensive practice of whipping his audience into a frenzy of hysteria and then exhorting the foaming-mouthed participants rolling on the ground to cast out the Evil One—primarily because he denied the existence of Satan and was repelled by such performances. He charged a dollar to come in to hear his sermons and another two to leave: Nora and Olga stood guard at the door with a pile of his books, and no one dared pass by without purchasing a copy. Three dollars was not an outrageous sum, considering the benefits his listeners received; they went home comforted by the certainty that their misfortunes were part of a divine plan, just as their souls were particles of universal energy; they were not abandoned, nor was the cosmos a black space in which chaos prevailed: there was a Great Unifying Spirit that gave meaning to life. To prepare his sermons, Reeves used any source of information at hand: his experience and his unfailing intuition, things his wife had read, and gems from his own perusal of the Bible and the Reader’s Digest.
    During the Great Depression, Reeves earned a living by painting murals in post offices; in that way he had come to know almost the entire country, from the humid, sweltering lands where echoes of weeping slaves still reverberated to icy mountains and tall forests. But he always returned to the West. He had promised his wife that their pilgrimage would end in San Francisco, where one luminous summer day in a hypothetical future they would unload the truck for the last time and settle down forever. Even after the jobs painting post office murals had dried up, he still occasionally painted a commercial sign for a store or an allegorical canvas for a parish church. At those times the travelers would stay in one place for a while and the children would have the opportunity to make friends. They would brag and boast to their playmates, spinning a web of such yarns and fibs that they themselves would tremble at the terrifying visions: bears and coyotes that attacked by night, Indians that chased them to rip off their scalps, and outlaws their father fought off with his shotgun. Scenes flowed from Charles Reeves’s brushes with astounding facility, from curvaceous blondes holding a bottle of beer to an awesome Moses clutching the Tablets of the Law. Such major commissions, however, came infrequently; it was more usual to sell only the smaller canvases Olga helped him paint. Reeves’s own choice was to reproduce the nature he found so enthralling: red cathedrals of living stone, sere desert flats, and abrupt shorelines, but no one bought what they could see with their own eyes, things that reminded them of the harshness of their fate; why hang on the wall the very thing they could see out their window? So from a National Geographic clients would select the landscape closest to their fantasies, or the picture whose colors went with the