When the Big War ended, Saskatchewan was poised on the edge of sweeping change, but there were still elements from a pioneer past. One was the man we called the Cowboy Preacher. I want to tell about an incident in his life. In doing so, I must begin at the beginning by disclosing the kind of youth I was in 1945.
I was what would now be called a nerd. I had neither athletic nor social skills. I liked to read books, paint pictures, listen to music and sing songs. At the age of 18, my only normal characteristic was an interest in girls. I liked to look at them. I wanted to do more, but none of them would let me. Failure as a teenaged Lothario also diminished my self-esteem.
After leaving high school, a fateful decision was to be made. My parents had neither discussed with me, nor each other, what I would do next. The local bank manager offered a solution. He would shoehorn me into an executive training program that involved learning some of the sacred lore of banking, studying Portuguese and being sent to Brazil. I agreed, although I really wanted to stay in Saskatchewan to watch the wounds of the Depression and the Dust Bowl healing.
Banks were archaic, parsimonious institutions then. Bob Cratchit would have felt right at home with the massive ledgers, high stools, high desks and straight pens of a branch bank in Saskatchewan. The only concessions to modernity were a hand-cranked adding machine and a telephone. I grew to hate the place. I imagined I could detect the smell of mouldering money and hear the faint rustlings of banknotes propagating in the big steel safe.
I rebelled. I acknowledged I didn't want to be a banker, didn't want to live in Brazil and didn't want to learn the Portuguese words for "we are foreclosing on your house." I quit and went home again.
Back in the village, I was identified immediately as the useless young punk who threw away a golden opportunity and came home to sponge off his parents. The Cowboy Preacher rescued me.
He was a man who loved God and horses in equal measure. When he set off on horseback for a service in a country school, his saddlebag held a Bible, hymnbooks and an offering plate, but never a sermon. Sermons he could make up anytime at the drop of a Stetson. Although not a stellar performer from the pulpit, he did have a pulpit voice.
When he saw me trying to sneak unseen into the curling rink, he bellowed like a bellicose Brahma bull, "Good to see you, Bill. Glad you came back. You didn't belong in a bank. When you sign on with the moneychangers, they take you to their clothing store and sell you a suit. All their suits are black and of the same cut and size. They make you fit the suit. You are a smart young man. You are making your own suit."
Ears pricked up. All eyes were turned in my direction. By the next day, everyone in the village, including the village drunk, were of the opinion that I might soon make something of myself.
The Cowboy Preacher liked metaphors almost as much as he liked horses. He probably forgot the incident involving me quite soon because his mission of doing good deeds required him to make up new metaphors for so many others. I never forgot. I have lived his metaphor. I am well-satisfied with my suit and its alterations. Now, it is of stubbornly old-fashioned cut, frayed at the cuffs and spotted with gravy and ketchup, but it is all mine.
Good deeds perambulate. They radiate like rings from stones cast in the water. The Last of the Saddlebag Preachers went to the big pasture in the sky a long time ago. I wonder how many of his good deeds are still radiating in the world and how far they have travelled.
