“Everyone here is gossiping. It’s how they deal with boredom.”
{21}
January storms out, February swaggers in full of bluster and hostility. People disappear into homes and cars, invisible behind frosted windows. Cars and trucks are clouded perpetually in mysterious vapours. Shapes move inside shapeless winter clothing. People become their boots and coats and hats. Communication reduced to recitation, age-old commentary on the weather. Wicked cold. Snow like in the old days. The wind. St. Georges Bay a vast white plain of drift ice from causeway to the horizon. Dark dots visible through binoculars. Seals floundering. Men on Sundays shooting them for sport.
The Sunday Mass crowd dwindled as the very old and the young found reasons to stay home. The bishop had suggested that I take a break, skedaddle. Maybe he was right, I thought. Maybe I should break away. They could go to Mass in town. That’s where they were mostly going before my arrival, during the hiatus. Chisholm owes me. He could cover for me. Stella recommended the Florida Keys. Or maybe I’d like the Dominican Republic, where she knew of a condo I could have for free. Just a week, she said. It makes all the difference.
March break, she threatened. She was making plans to go.
“I might go with you,” I replied. Joking.
“Why don’t you,” she said. Seriously.
Right.
Young Donald O’Brian was phoning home once a week from Korea. The trip was doing him a lot of good. Nothing like distance to give perspective, Bobby O. said wisely.
Young Donnie was figuring maybe Toronto when he finished up. Not sure what he’d do there, but we pray, Bobby said.
“He’ll make a great priest,” I said dutifully.
A Wednesday night late in February, I came home from a card game at the O’Brians’ to find the glebe alight. There was a car parked in front and, beside it, the red truck that belonged to Sextus.
They were sitting in the living room, laughing, drinks in hand.
Pat looked up, a bit awkwardly but unabashed. “Look what I found on your doorstep.”
“Obviously you forgot,” Sextus said.
“Forgot what?” I said, trying to remember.
“That I was coming by for a visit.”
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“And who should I bump into ...”
“I wanted to drop by to talk about a date for the baptism,” Pat said. “Now they want to wait until the summer.”
“Summer sounds just fine,” I said.
“Let me get you a drink,” Sextus said, rising quickly.
And at that I had to laugh.
This, I thought when they were gone, is how it should be. Friendships should fit comfortably, merging and disengaging and flowing independently and at the same time interdependent, part of an unconscious choreography.
Alfonso knew. He was smiling through my anguish. She told me herself, unasked, in Puerto Castilla, he said. Actually, you walked in when she was in the middle of telling me. She was upset. She doesn’t know where this is going.
That makes two of us, I said. But don’t worry. Don’t turn it into a big deal.
But if you hurt her . . . I’ll kill you.
He was still smiling, but the eyes were serious.
She’s very, very vulnerable, he said. Did she tell you about the crazy husband?
Husband?
Estranged. But crazy as . . . what do you call it? A shithouse rat. In the FAES. The army, back home in Salvador. Anyway, it’s between the two of you and God. Just be careful.
Can we talk some more?
Of course, he said. All you want.
But there was a knock on the door. And through the glass I could see two policemen waiting.
MacLeod called again in March.
“I don’t know where to go with this,” he said. “I thought I’d run it by you. Did you by any chance hear anything about a letter?”
“Letter? There was a brief suicide note with the body. Basically . . . just four words.”
“Yes, I know about that. But I’m hearing that there was something else. Something more explicit.”
I said I’d ask around.
His voice went cold. “Father. No disrespect intended. But I’m not going to be fobbed off this time.”
“I hear you.”
Stella’s call was innocent enough. An invitation to share some leftovers. Perhaps a glass of wine. It had been weeks since I’d seen her. Not since the bishop.
She said she was avoiding hard liquor for Lent but that I was free to help myself. I declined. Solidarity, I said.
A glass of wine with the meal, then, she offered. Wine being food.
The night was sharp with frost. Through the fields the walk to her place takes twenty minutes. I needed exercise, I thought, setting out. And there was a secondary thought: leave the car at home, no point advertising.
Crystals crunched beneath my feet. My head was light with freshness. Before I crossed the pool of light in her driveway, I looked around. Guilty reflex.
There was a car on the mountain road, parked in darkness. Parked where I’d never seen a car before. I hesitated, felt a throbbing uneasiness. Perhaps I saw a movement inside the vehicle. A shadow within a shadow. Time seemed to stop, a strange heaviness suffocated thought. Then a sudden flare of light inside the car, a match held briefly to a cigarette, and then the pulsing glow. I started running toward it, propelled by an unexpected rage.
The car leapt forward. Ignition, power transmission, tire traction, gravel rattling: all one guilty, panicked reflex. I was at the end of the driveway when the car flashed by. I reached out, mindless, touched the metal of a door, hand bounced back. But I saw the profile.
William?
“You’re dreaming,” Stella said.
“Who else could it have been?”
She laughed gaily. “Half a dozen I could name. Silly old bachelors from around. They all have crushes on me. Totally benign. It couldn’t have been Willie. Come on, now. Let me pour a glass of wine. Lighten up.”
“I’ve been trying to avoid the demon,” I said, somewhat reassured. “It’s Lent, you know.”
“The demon?” She laughed. “Isn’t that a Protestant concept?”
I followed her to the living room. She sat on the sofa. I sat opposite her, in an easy chair.
I asked about Danny Ban.
“He’s fine,” she said. “You don’t know Danny as well as I do.”
“What about closure? I thought people in your line of work were big on the idea of closure.”
“Now you’re mocking me,” she said, laughing.
“I’m serious,” I said, and suddenly I was.
She was studying me as if I’d revealed a new part of myself, and the look encouraged me.
“I want to ask you about something,” I said. “Did you know there was a reporter asking questions about Danny’s death?”
“No.”
“I had a call from him. He was asking about a letter Danny wrote . . . before he . . . before the day he died. Something that spelled things out. Explicitly, the reporter said.”
“Explicitly.”
I waited.
She smiled and patted the cushion beside her. “Sit here,” she instructed, like a mother. I stood, crossed the floor and sat beside her. “Here’s to the future,” she said, touching our glasses. “Happier times.”
“Happier times,” I said, wondering.
She sipped, reflecting. “This letter? The one the reporter asked about?”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t exist.”
“It was supposedly—”
“It’s a fantasy. Certain people have an aversion to the obvious. The truth sits there, plain as can be. Because it’s obvious, they assume it’s false. The real truth, for some strange reason, always has to be . . . obscure. Reporters are the worst when it comes to that.”
I pulled back.
“You saw that movie a few years ago . . . the Oliver Stone movie about Kennedy?”
> “No.”
“I was still in Toronto. Everybody was going on about it. The big conspiracy.”
I said I’d read something.
“All crap. I’ve read everything about Kennedy. I’m an expert.” She set her glass down on the coffee table, then caught the front of my sweater and pulled me toward her. Her eyes were searching. “It’s time to think about life.”
I agreed.
“Dwelling on tragedy is a waste of life. An abuse of the good things we get from the Almighty or destiny or whatever. That’s your field.”
“You’re probably right.”
“No. You don’t mean that,” she said, smiling, giving my sweater a playful tug. “Don’t put me off. I mean it. Love life. Experience it. We’re only here for a short while. We’ll be dead forever.” Our faces were then just inches apart. “Forget about the losers and the misfits. All the Williams. Are you listening? Come on.”
She stood and I stood with her, a sudden fear-touched ecstasy causing unsteadiness, but she was holding me then, arms tight around me, face pressed against my neck. “This is what life feels like,” she murmured. “Life should feel warm and safe.”
Then she looked into my eyes and smiled softly, and kissed me lightly on the lips.
“You can spend the night,” she said.
“Happiness grows from the unity of heart and soul.”
“That’s nice,” she said softly.
“What?”
“What you just said.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, the electric ecstasy now replaced by a dull sorrow.
“Just stay the night. It doesn’t have to be anything heavy. I just need ...”
She didn’t finish. I realized I was supposed to understand. But I didn’t.
“I have to do a lot of thinking,” I said.
“I’m not asking for ideas. I just want to watch you fall asleep again.”
“Again?”
“I’m not suggesting anything improper, you know.”
“I know. But just let me take things at my own pace. Please.”
“Sure,” she said. And smiled. And made it even worse.
When I was leaving, she held me at the door. “Your friend. Alfonso. You told me . . . how he died. Don’t you remember? You told me at Christmas.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Did they ever find out for sure? Who killed him?”
Her face became blurry suddenly. I had difficulty breathing.
“Yes,” I said.
I sat staring at the bay until it turned a dull silver colour in the morning light.
I woke suddenly to the relentless knocking, instantly alert to multiple circumstances. Through an open corner of a window, the cars were dense around the church. An empty bottle. A glass on its side near my foot, carpet still damp. Whisky reek.
Life. Death. Closure. Misfits. Willie.
Am I a misfit too?
Knocking on the kitchen door.
“Ye-ess.”
Scrambling now.
The child’s voice. Am I ready?
Ready for what? Shit. It’s Sunday again.
“Yes. Yes. I’ll be right there.”
Sunday morning and I forgot again?
The first reading. Paul to the Corinthians. Hard to get through. About charity. Charity is patient, is kind; charity envieth not, dealeth not perversely, is not puffed up . . .
The words seem loaded with mockery. Could they hear the hypocrisy in my voice? Somewhere else in Corinthians Paul assures me that purity is power, the freedom “to attend upon the Lord without impediment.” Fine for Paul, I thought. Paul the Pharisee, who saw the light and laid down the law for the rest of us. Thanks, Paul.
I could hear the sound of my own voice, empty of conviction, intoning the mandated reading for the day. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child. But when I became a man, I put away the things of a child.
Am I really a man?
And in the Gospel, Jesus restored sight to the blind man. I wonder if he ever cured a hangover.
God forgive me.
Chastened, I spun a spontaneous and mercifully short homily about spiritual blindness. How the Resurrection restored our sight so that we might know the truth. Only after we embrace the truth does our redemption become possible. Truth and redemption. Codependents.
I studied the captive faces before me, momentarily restored by a passing sense of purpose before the dread returned.
It’s time to think about life, she said. And this is it.
Non sum dignus.
Where is Father Roddie now?
In the renewed wave of futility I almost forgot the words of the Credo.
I wouldn’t have recognized MacLeod except for the smile. He approached as I exchanged greetings with the people afterwards, desperate to get home. Open a beer, scrounge some lunch. Go to bed.
“Father,” he said. And I knew by the voice and the ingratiating smile exactly who it was.
The fair hair was thinning. The paunch much too far advanced for a man probably only in his early forties. He seemed casually friendly, but I immediately suspected a serious reason for this unannounced visit on a Sunday. I asked him to accompany me to the house.
“I’m going to be right upfront,” he said when I’d set a mug of coffee in front of him at the kitchen table. “We’ve got a problem.”
I think I just stared, waiting.
“There was another suicide.”
{22}
I stood in the anemic light of the dying day.
I am the pastor of Stella Maris parish, Creignish, Nova Scotia.
The thought was comforting. Something about the clarity and the objectivity. This is who I am. No longer the rootless Purificator, named for the small linen cloth we use to wipe the chalice before and after Communion. What wit came up with that one? So many of these priests are clever, funny men. The freaks are so rare. But they’re the only ones I really know. How have I managed to spend twenty-seven years in this ministry and know only the bad ones? Why have I never been part of the wider community of funny, clever and perhaps even holy men? What is it that draws me to the tragic and the flawed?
I sat as darkness overwhelmed the struggling light.
Another suicide? Actually, it was the first, MacLeod said. A year ago. In British Columbia.
“There are affidavits filed.”
“Affidavits?”
“From people claiming that they were victims too. That poor fellow in B.C. was only part of a larger problem.”
“And did they mention Bell?”
“Oh, no. Not Bell. This is something altogether different. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it. Considering how tight you are with the bishop.”
I wanted to call Stella, just for the comfort of her voice, but I couldn’t because I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep quiet. And I could imagine how her face would freeze over as I collapsed under the weight of what I knew. And yet I also knew what I desperately needed.
“Well, if it wasn’t Bell—”
“Do you remember old Father Roddie MacVicar? I think we talked about him—God, it must have been six or seven years ago. Fooling around with some handicapped person. You kind of put me off the trail. Don’t get me wrong, I understand entirely.”
The smile was an accusation.
“Have you spoken to the bishop?” I asked. “About this suicide in British Columbia?”
“I tried. He as much as told me where to get off. But this much I know . . . he knew all about it.”
“You’re telling me the bishop knew about this all along?”
“This one and a whole lot more. Obviously, he’s pulling out all the stops to, forgive me for saying so . . . to cover it up.”
Monday morning, March 25, I realized that I was out of everything. Milk. Bread. Liquor. The drive to town is ten miles. Sixteen kilometres. I will never get accustomed to metric measurements. I weigh 182 pounds. I am six feet two inches tall. It takes thirteen minutes to drive the ten-mi
le distance, taking into account the usual hang-up at the rotary and the convergence of roads and causeway, cars bumbling for access to Smitty’s or the Esso station or the motels. Often a traffic jam when the bridge over the canal is open to allow the passage of a boat. Was it possible that I remembered a blacksmith’s shop there somewhere a million years ago? And a little canteen where we hung around as teenagers. A hangout for the handful of young people in the village and stragglers from town, inspecting the local stock. That was a big word then. Stock. Depersonalized, agricultural. Aroma of wieners cooking on some electrical gadget with prongs. Sweating Pepsi bottles. Heavy chromed cars with dangling air fresheners and cowboy music. Sounds and smells of anticipation. Hormones buzzing in the restless stock. A horn blows. A stampede. Slamming car doors, splatter of gravel, the shriek of rubber and the old lady who ran the canteen craning her neck in disapproving witness, checking who was going where with whom.
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