Soon the Light Will Be Perfect

by Dave Patterson

  At church, Father Brian, the young priest newly assigned to our parish, asks about our mother after mass in late spring when the air is growing hot and bees work at the lilac buds outside the church.

  “She’s doing well,” my father lies.

  “That’s good,” Father Brian says. “Did you ever find homes for those cats?”

  My brother begins to speak, but my father interrupts, “Yes, thank you.”

  * * *

  The morning of my mother’s first chemo treatment, my father rounds up the cats—some are pregnant again—into laundry baskets he tops with plywood and secures with bungee cords. He demands that my brother and I help him. We drop the writhing bodies into the white and blue plastic baskets. The captive cats make a collective wail.

  “I want them all gone,” my father says. He looks through us more than at us as we search the house for cats.

  It’s impossible to count them as they move in the baskets. We’re not sure if we have them all. Fights break out in the overstuffed pens, but we ignore the cries.

  “Are they all here?” my father asks. He’s struggling to get a cat under the plywood cover without letting others escape.

  “I think so,” I say.

  “That’s not good enough,” he says.

  My brother and I scour every room of the house, peering under beds, in closets, behind shelves, in the crawl space above the garage. We each come back to my father with a cat.

  “I think that’s it,” my father says. “We’ll deal with any that are left tomorrow.”

  My father slides one plastic basket into the backseat of his car. The scream of the cats is unbearable.

  My brother turns to head inside. “No,” my father says. “You two started this. You’re coming with me to the animal shelter.”

  Before my brother can move, a voice at the end of the driveway says, “He’s the one?” Frank’s thick finger points at me.

  Travis Bouchard is on his piece-of-shit bike behind his mother’s boyfriend. “That’s him,” Travis says.

  “What is this?” my father asks.

  “Your son owes me nineteen dollars for a cat he took last summer,” Frank says.

  My father glares at me over the plastic rim of his glasses.

  Before I can say anything, Frank says, “Nineteen dollars.”

  “Frank,” my father says, “we’re in the middle of something. I’ll deal with this after.”

  “No,” Frank says. “Now.”

  My father looks at me again. How could you have done this? his look says. The cats wail in the plastic laundry baskets. He turns to Frank. “Why don’t you just take a cat?” He points to the basket on the ground. “As you can see, we have plenty. Take as many as you’d like.” I want to tell my father that I already tried this, but I remain silent.

  Frank stalks down the driveway. Gravel crunches under his thick-soled work boots. “Just give me the money.”

  “I think you’ve gotten enough money,” my father says.

  “What does that mean?” Frank asks. He takes a few more steps closer. His shoulders are broad, his barrel chest and beer gut bulge beneath his white T-shirt.

  “We all know it’s you,” my father says. He’s not looking at Frank as he positions a basket holding the cats in the backseat of our car. I’ve never seen my father argue with another adult. “At the factory,” my father adds.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You steal from our desks at night when you clean the office.” I see my father clench his fists. “Leave now and we’ll call it even.”

  With a grunt, Frank lunges at my father and the two men fall onto the front lawn. The cats screech from their plastic cages. After they roll around a few times, my father pins Frank on the ground with his knees against Frank’s chest. Frank claws at my father’s shoulders until my father pins his arms on the uncut lawn.

  “Leave my house,” my father yells. “I have to take care of these cats, then I need to bring my wife to the hospital for chemotherapy.”

  My brother and I share a wide-eyed look. Travis darts down the street on his bike.

  Frank is motionless on the ground. My father shakes above him. Frank holds his breath for a moment, then he spits in my father’s face. But my father is not fazed. He is a man possessed—I wonder if this is what it looks like to be moved by the Holy Spirit.

  “I’m going to let you go, and you’re going to go home.” My father says each word slowly.

  Frank turns his head and looks out at the street. He whispers, “Okay.”

  My father pushes off Frank’s body and stands. Frank slowly gets up. Without looking back, he walks down the driveway. He spits on the gravel rocks, but continues down the road.

  “You kicked his ass,” my brother says.

  “Don’t use that word,” is all our father says. He wipes his face and glasses with the fabric of his shirt. The cats have been stunned into silence. My father slides the second basket into the backseat of the car and closes the door. “Get in.”

  My brother and I pile into the front seat together. I’m in the middle. We are both stupefied by what we’ve just witnessed. My father turns over the engine and says, “You know, they are not going to be able to find homes for all these cats—” He doesn’t finish this thought. We don’t respond.

  “You’ll need to confess this at church,” he says.

  We agree that we will. A small consolation for what we’ve been a part of.

  The cats whine in the backseat as we drive into town without the radio on. It’s a bright spring day. Sunlight flashes off the St. Jude medallion my father has affixed to his dashboard. We don’t talk. My father rubs his knuckles on his right hand. I stare at the red blotch on the side of his face from where Frank scratched him. At thirty-five, I think my father’s old, but now, years later, I understand that he was still very much a young man.

  A tabby cat leaps over the bench seat and lands on my lap. We stare at the cat, dumb. My father swerves toward the shoulder of the road before steadying the car. More cats follow, until our laps are covered in cats. I look back—one of the plywood lids lies on the car floor. Two cats huddle on the dashboard. A gray cat nuzzles against my father’s leg next to the gas pedal. We continue to the shelter, saying nothing, while these cats, perhaps ten or fifteen of them, pad over our thighs on the first day of my mother’s chemotherapy.

  II

  My brother kicks my foot when the alleluias begin. I’ve spent most of the mass staring at my mother in her usual spot next to my father. With her church makeup she applies from an old Mary Kay kit, the signs of cancer—pale skin, forehead creases, gray lips—are gone.

  When I don’t stand, my brother smacks my arm. Father Brian nods at me to do my duty as an altar boy. It’s the third cue I’ve missed this mass. The alleluias are already finished when I take my place next to the lectern, hoisting a bronze candleholder as Father Brian reads from the Gospel of John. But I don’t hear the Word. This morning, my father told my mother she should stay home from mass. Missing church is a mortal sin—collect enough of these and you’ll burn in eternal damnation; my mother’s sickness must be serious.

  Father Brian ends the reading, reciting, “The Gospel of the Lord,” and when I don’t move, he touches my elbow and motions me to return my candleholder and sit with the other altar boys so he can begin his sermon.

  “The devil is everywhere,” Father Brian starts. My mother nods in her seat; my father puts his arm around her shoulder. “But the Lord will return and end the devil’s tyranny over our souls. When the Lord does return to the earth and the seven trumpets of the apocalypse sound from the sky, you better be doing something righteous.” He smiles.

  Next to me, my brother whispers to Scott Billings, an altar boy a year older than my brother. Scott smiles at something my brother says. Father Brian preaches that many in our town are
succumbing to drugs in these hard times instead of seeking the Lord. “We need to pray for these lost souls,” he says. The men and women in the pews nod and mouth silent amens.

  “Even in dark times, when jobs are hard to find and the temptation to sin is strong, we must turn to the Light of the World.”

  I don’t hear the rest of his homily as I stare at my mother and try to imagine an empty space where she has sat every Sunday morning of my life. Father Brian returns to his seat when his sermon is finished. My mother catches me staring at her. She smiles and I smile back. But her smile vanishes, and she begins to cough. My father stands, quickly leading her to the back exit of the church. Her coughing echoes against the rafters of the hollow building in the silence that follows Father Brian’s homily.

  During the Liturgy of the Eucharist I miss the cue to ring the bells as Father Brian turns cheap table wine into the Blood of Christ. I tell myself I’ll go to confession for letting my mind wander during mass. But even my brother is distracted, watching the back of the church where my parents disappeared.

  After mass I don’t remove my white robe like I’m supposed to. I push through the church doors and run out to the parking lot where I find my mother reclined in the passenger seat of our car with the windows down. She opens her eyes when I cast a shadow over her.

  “Why are you still in your robe?” she laughs.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Go change so we can go home,” she says in a low voice and closes her eyes. I want to ask her what happened and if she’ll ever be able to come to church again, but I don’t. Church members eye me in my robe as they drive out of the parking lot. Mrs. Richardson, a widow who had a stroke last fall, frowns at me as she slowly drives by in her white Buick.

  In the back room where the altar boys change before mass, I unzip my robe and place it on a plastic hanger. Muffled laughter comes from the closet in the back of the room. I push open the door. The half-full jug of Carlo Rossi burgundy Father Brian uses for communion is raised to Scott Billings’s mouth. He lowers the bottle and wipes a red stain from his upper lip with the back of his hand. My brother grabs the bottle and raises it to drink. The red wine splashes in the clear jug. He swallows and holds the bottle out to me. “The Blood of Christ,” he laughs, and I reach for the jug, my hand trembling like a thousand amens.

  III

  My brother and I stay in the car the first few times. My mother rolls down the windows partway, double-checks that we have snacks, locks the doors and says, “Do not leave the car. Your father and I will be right over there. Yell out the window if you need us.”

  She looks pale, but after the first two chemotherapy sessions, she hasn’t vomited. She’s mainly just sleepy now from the medication she’s on, staying in bed most hours of the day, too weak to do anything. My father had told her she should stay home, but she thought it would be good to be part of the community today.

  Our car is parked in a school lot facing the main city street. Twenty adults from our church wave homemade signs at the cars driving by. A man from church raises his sign in the direction of a red truck. The driver honks his horn and gives the man the finger.

  “What if I have to pee?” my brother asks.

  “You’ll be fine,” my mother says.

  My father leads her to the group of adults from church. She clutches her sign at her side. I helped her make it last night: Abortion Stops a Beating Heart. A crooked heart outlined in red permanent marker surrounds my letters.

  My father puts his arm around my mother to help steady her and raises his sign. I read it out loud, “Jesus loves the children of the world, the born and the unborn.” My brother helped make my father’s sign, though he quit before it was done to meet up with some kids from his grade who live in our neighborhood.

  “Can you believe this shit?” my brother says. He twists the knob on the stereo from the Christian station to the pop station we’re not supposed to listen to. He adjusts the bass and says, “They leave us in the car like we’re babies.”

  On the sidewalk the adults sing in unison: “Be a hero, save a whale. Save a baby, go to jail. Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.”

  “If I didn’t have to babysit you, I could at least be out there with the adults. I’d have my own sign, too.” He stares out the window.

  “You’re not babysitting me,” I say. My parents wanted us to come along today to witness this cause our church is fighting for. It’s supposed to inspire our faith. Abortion rallies have incited violence all over the country—the adults at church agreed it might be dangerous for children to stand on the street and hold signs, so my parents insisted we stay in the car. I didn’t fight my mother when she told us; since she started getting sick, I haven’t wanted to let her out of my sight. My brother must feel the same way, because he didn’t argue with her, either.

  Out on the sidewalk, Father Brian stands closest to the road. Everyone in the church adores Father Brian, including my brother and me. He’s younger than the other liver-spotted priests we’ve known.

  A white van slows down, and a woman leans on her horn. She sticks her head out her window and screams, “Keep Jesus out of my pussy!”

  The adults shake their signs. The woman steps on the gas, and her car lurches away. My brother erupts with laughter. He repeats the word pussy. He turns up the radio. Bass rattles the change in the ashtray. I laugh.

  “You don’t even know what that word means.” He glances at the adults for a moment. “I’m not staying in here,” he says, and before I can try to talk him out of it, he unlocks his door and gets out. He leans his head back into the car and says, “You stay here,” and slams the door.

  He moves along the back of the group, staying clear of my parents. There are a few extra signs on the sidewalk. My brother pushes them around and chooses one that reads Abortion is the Worst Kind of Child Abuse. He flourishes it in the air like a sword. He works his way to the front next to Father Brian. Our parents haven’t spotted him. When he’s next to the young priest, my brother joins in with the adults, singing, “All we are saying, is give life a chance.”

  Father Brian looks down at my brother and smiles. He puts his arm around him, and they sway back and forth to the rhythm of the chant.

  I want to get out of the car just as my brother had, but I don’t. Car horns boom from the road, and the drivers either wave kindly or give the finger. I am most interested in how my parents will react when they see my brother holding a sign.

  To be careful, I rotate the radio dial back to the Christian station and turn down the bass. I don’t like the music on this station, but I don’t have the guts to revolt as overtly as my brother.

  A car horn shrieks. It’s the white van from before. The woman who yelled about her pussy holds an egg out the window. The adults groan. The woman heaves the egg at the crowd and it strikes Father Brian in the chest. He doubles over, dropping his sign. Some of the yolk splatters across my brother’s cheek. Everyone surrounds Father Brian and my brother. My parents move toward them. I sit up in my seat.

  Father Brian stands and the protesters cheer. My father places his arm around my brother, and he says something that doesn’t look like yelling. My mother wipes my brother’s cheek with the sleeve of her sweater.

  A man my father works with at the plant shakes my brother’s hand. Our neighbor, Mr. O’Connor, pats my brother on the shoulder.

  A woman with a large camera who has been taking photos of the protesters from a distance all afternoon approaches the group of adults and aims her lens at Father Brian. The priest holds up his hand to stop the photo and points at my brother. My parents push my brother toward the young priest and together they smile for the camera.

  After Father Brian and my brother’s picture gets in the newspaper, my brother is allowed out of the car during the protests while I eat off-brand potato chips and listen to Christian radio alone.

  The publici
ty has increased everyone’s confidence in the cause. During his homily, Father Brian calls for the protests to be moved directly to the Planned Parenthood office. “God is calling for us to take greater action,” he declares, holding up the newspaper image of himself with my brother. “We need to go right to the source of this sin.”

  The drive to the clinic is quiet. We’re nervous. My mother glances out the window at the moving landscape; she appears to be having a good day. Tomorrow she has another round of chemo.

  My father is the only one who speaks on the drive. “Remember,” he says, “if we go off the sidewalk, we will be arrested. Some people are planning on getting arrested. No one in this car is going to jail.”

  In the backseat next to me, my brother laughs under his breath like he’s planning on doing something heroic. He stares at the creased newspaper photo of him and Father Brian he keeps folded in his back pocket. Since the last protest, my parents are proud of him in a way they’d be proud of another adult.

  My father had suggested that I stay home today. “It’s probably better that way,” he’d said that morning. “Things could get out of hand.” But I refused, insisting that I would stay in the car and not sneak out like my brother had. My father looked tired, like he didn’t have the spirit to fight me. I’m not sure if I wanted to go to be near my mother or if I didn’t want to miss out on something my brother was getting to do.

  We park across the street from the clinic. It looks ordinary. The walls are concrete, the metal roof brown. It doesn’t look like the workshop of the devil, as the adults call it. A large crowd of protesters has already gathered. I recognize some of the faces from church, but most of the people look unfamiliar. Standing between the crowd and the Planned Parenthood building are three police officers. They drink coffee and laugh with one another. Television crews from local stations point large cameras at the crowd.