Page 18 of If Looks Could Kill

October dawned with golden days and bright blue skies, but we female Salvation Army soldiers were too busy to notice. That was fine with me. I’d rather be busy than follow Pearl around from saloon to saloon.

Whatever their philosophical arguments against it, the women of the Bowery Army corps attacked the new initiative like it was the devil himself.

And, give her credit, no one attacked it with more zeal than Captain Jessop.

While the wider city around us clamored with the strife and tumult of a presidential election, and while the Bowery frothed with its usual influx of seekers of recreational vice, we did our best to assist its poorest citizens by soaping and souping them.

To clarify: not hands-on soaping. Here is what Soup, Soap, and Salvation looked like.

Each morning, we joined the other female soldiers in the corps kitchen, donned aprons, and prepared soup.

We peeled and chopped bushels of carrots, potatoes, and onions while on the stoves, in six great fifty-gallon vats like witches’ cauldrons, we boiled scores of plucked chickens.

We shredded the meat and returned it to the pots of broth, to which we added sacks of dried beans.

The carrots and potatoes. The eye-burning onions.

The controversial barley. A generous scoop each of salt and pepper.

Then we let it simmer for hours. It looked too thin and heartless to ever become soup until, magically, it did.

There’s so little you can do to actually rescue anybody, I find.

I felt so impotent most of the time. So unsure of how to do any good in a city full of need.

But this hearty soup, I knew, would feed hungry bodies.

A good, homely meal, the only one they’d have all day, possibly all week, would bring some comfort.

Help them sleep. Give them hope for tomorrow.

Next, the soap.

Soap, like soup, is practical. Pearl and I assisted with the bathing stations for women and girls.

We filled up the heating stove with coal so the bathers wouldn’t freeze while they washed.

We didn’t wash actual bodies, thank goodness, nor even see them indisposed, as they were behind curtains, but we filled the tubs with warm water, helping out a bit with a hot teakettle when needed.

We laid out scratchy towels and scrubbing cloths and little curls of brown soap we’d sliced off large bricks of it.

Lieutenant Amanda Dillinger collected the bathers’ dirty clothes and brought them to us.

We soaked and sudsed and scrubbed the clothes, then draped them over clotheslines.

We gave them clothes to wear while they waited for theirs to dry.

These were donated used clothes, washed and mended by women in our recovery program.

Lieutenant Dillinger let them keep their new outfit along with their original.

They came with one dirty outfit and left with two clean ones, one still damp.

So that’s the soap. Soap and soup. Some days, instead of the bathing stations, we went to the Foundling Asylum and helped rock and feed the babies, which I enjoyed, except when the funk of diaper odor wafted off them. There the need for soap was even more urgent.

By this point each day, it was time to hit the streets, canvassing saloons, singing songs, selling War Cry s, and begging people to come to our meetings and be saved.

Then, thoroughly downtrodden by defeat, we’d head over to the Five Points Mission School, where we taught night classes in spelling and reading for children who had spent the day selling newspapers on the streets or hunched over needle and thread or cigar-rolling racks in sweatshops inside their tenement homes.

The poor little urchins fell asleep slumped over their desks.

They couldn’t help it. They were plumb exhausted from a sixteen-hour day of work.

Last came the part of the day I liked least, the part that lit up Pearl like a Christmas tree.

Time for salvation.

They weren’t all bad, the preachers.

There was Captain Paddy Campbell, who had misspent his teenage years boxing in pub basements.

He was only a few years older than Pearl and me, but he’d crammed a lot of sin (his words) into his pre-Army years.

He believed that what all these restless city lads needed was good, healthy exercise in the fresh air to steer them away from crime and liquor and toward God.

There was something guileless about Paddy.

He really wanted to help boys make something of themselves.

He had a tender heart. Children climbed all over him, and he ate it up.

A big barrel of love, yet handy to have around if fights broke out in the soup line.

He could give you a black eye for Jesus’s sake without any irony, pick you up afterward, dust you off, embrace you like a brother, and slip a chocolate bar in your pocket as you left. He was a terror, all right.

He insisted on teaching all us ladies the proper technique for delivering a punch because it might save our lives in a dark alley someday.

The horrified look on Amanda Dillinger’s face as Paddy barked at us to lock our wrists, wind up, step into it, punch right through the bugger, and slug ’em into next Tuesday is a sight I’ll still laugh about when I’m as old and arthritic as she is.

Captain Paddy. We could do worse.

Such as, for example—

But that would be unkind of me.

Officer Wilfrid Rugger, then. He was tall and willowy, and played the organ, not that we had one.

His sermons were carefully written, quoting theologians and Old Testament prophets.

He was harmless and put people to sleep, which was probably what they needed after a long, hard day. Officer Wilfrid didn’t bother me.

Then there was Officer Purse Laurier, who had thrown away his college education and his parents’ support to enlist in the cause. What he lacked in funds he made up for in self-satisfaction. Pearl deserved him.

He told his story, and women swooned. Others told their stories, and men felt understood.

Jerusha Bean and other older women told their tales of abusive husbands and thankless children and how coming to Jesus changed it all, and the women in the audience threw themselves upon the floor, calling upon Jesus to chasten their families.

As for me, I did not preach. What was there to say?

I’d lived a comfortable life in my father’s home, in the care of my maiden aunt.

My sins were beige; my prospects and aspirations, beige.

I read books, dabbled at oil painting, and had luck keeping potted ferns alive.

Such I might be doing still, had I not happened upon an Army meeting one day out shopping with Aunt Lorraine, and the sight of young women my age, preaching and leading and traveling and scandalizing their parents, went to my head.

Not the most stirring tale of conversion ever told.

I do have faith, in spite of all I say. I have something like faith. I want to do something good in the world for Christ, for the love he feels for others, one of them being me.

When it comes to salvation, that’s all I’ve got.