Bishop's Man

by Linden MacIntyre

  We retreated back into our silences. Somewhere nearby someone laughed.

  “That’s encouraging,” he said. “The sound of happiness.”

  “So, Jude, if you don’t mind my asking—what brings you here?”

  He sighed. “I’m a thief.”

  The word just sits there between us. Thief.

  He’s smiling. “And what about yourself? What brings you here?”

  “That’s a complicated question,” I say.

  “You don’t strike me as one of the usual run of addicts.”

  “I’m not. But I’m curious about you. I’ve known a lot of priests.”

  He stared at me. “How do you react to a priest being a thief?”

  “I’m assuming that you’re speaking metaphorically,” I said.

  “No,” he said cheerfully. “I’m a plain, unvarnished rip-off artist. Stole from the parish where I was an assistant. Knew how to fix the books so it wouldn’t show. Then, of course, there was an audit.”

  “But why?”

  “I had the absolute worst addiction there is. I’m a gambler who loses. Then I became a thief.”

  “Gambling?”

  “It started with lotto tickets. Before I knew it, I was back and forth to the casino in Montreal every chance I got and then some, getting deeper and deeper in the hole, until finally ...” He shrugged. “And then, as so often happens, I picked up another addiction to cover the disgust I felt. I found that there are pills. Legal pills. In the drugstore. All you need is a sympathetic doc. And hey, when you wear the collar, everybody is sympathetic to your screw-ups. Makes them feel better about their own when the clergyman goes down. Especially a doctor. They love fallen priests.” He laughed then. “I’m not being bitter about it. It’s all my own fault. From the get-go.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said.

  He held up his hand. “Say nothing. It’s all behind me now. It’s history. No more addiction. Except for the smokes. I tell them all that, but it’s like they’re waiting for more. Waiting for the big one.”

  “The big one?”

  “The sexual stuff.”

  I shrugged, hoping he would stop there.

  “But when you have my kinds of addictions, celibacy is a snap. Sex couldn’t possibly match the ecstasies I’ve experienced. Sex is for the uninspired as far as I’m concerned.”

  “I suppose you’re lucky,” I said. And I realized he was watching, waiting for my disclosure. “I’ve never had the problem,” I said finally.

  He stared at me and the look said, You can talk to me, and I believed him.

  “I have to admit,” he said, and I assumed it was to change the subject, “now that I’ve given up on the military and the classroom, I can’t begin to imagine what your calling could be.”

  “My father was a soldier once,” I said.

  “There you go. I wasn’t entirely wrong. You were perhaps ordained to be a military man.”

  On my second visit to Dr. Shaw, he asked me: “Have you ever had . . . self-destructive fantasies?”

  I hesitated, then I said: “Yes.”

  “But you’ve never acted on them.”

  “Obviously not.”

  He laughed. “I mean . . . no false starts, or ...”

  “No.”

  “And do you recall the circumstances that might have inspired these . . . fantasies?”

  “Very clearly.”

  He waited. I cleared my throat.

  “I struck my father once,” I said.

  “You struck ... ?”

  “With my fist. I hit him. And he fell.” I know the trembling is obvious.

  “Would you like a drink of water?” says Dr. Shaw.

  “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

  “Try to go on.”

  “I don’t think your father was ever out here,” Danny said. “He didn’t know anything about his connections. Seemed to me to be something else he didn’t want to talk about.” He laughed.

  “So, what did you two manage to talk about to pass the time?”

  “Well,” said Danny, scratching his chin. “He talked an awful lot about yourself. The sun rose and set on you. Yourself and your sister.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I think your father only mentioned Effie the once. In a roundabout way. Something about her being away, for a long time, not having much contact. Whatever.”

  “Yes. Effie. So he didn’t talk about her?”

  “No. Not that I remember.”

  When I look back now, it seems that Dr. Shaw and I sat staring at each other for an hour, but it might have only been a minute.

  “There was a misunderstanding,” I said finally.

  He raised an eyebrow, professionally puzzled.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “We’ve reached the crux of my problem.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  “He was fixated on my sister. I misunderstood.”

  The panic swells until I must struggle to squeeze breath into my lungs. And discover I am sitting on a hard wooden chair at the kitchen table, face drooling on the pages of a book. A philosophy textbook. It is called The General Science of Nature.

  A sip of water helps. Dawn is not far off.

  “The incident itself was nothing. It was tied into larger matters, many of them mysteries, before my time. Something from the war.” I shrugged, hoping I’d deflected him.

  I hear a floorboard creak. I just sit. Waiting. The moment has finally arrived. The shadow pauses near her bedroom door. A match flares briefly. I catch a waft of hellfire. His eye sockets appear empty as he leans into the cigarette. He draws deeply, the ember revealing a face I barely recognize. He turns toward the door.

  Dr. Shaw was waiting.

  “Look,” I said. “You have to understand the family situation. There was my father, my sister and me, just the three of us, no mom. Our father was damaged by something that happened during World War Two. In Holland. There was an incident. A girl was killed. The details were never very clear. But it had a lasting impact on my father and a friend who was with him at the time.”

  The doctor made a note, briefly. “How was she killed, the girl?”

  “A knife.”

  “And your father never explained?”

  “Only cryptically. Apparently she shot his friend and was about to kill him. It seems he got her first.”

  “Did he ever mention why . . . she was . . . ?”

  “No.”

  I move quickly, grab a shoulder, slam it to the wall. Our faces are close. His face, my face. The same face. I choke on the reek of yeast and sulphur and old sweat.

  What do you think you’re doing?

  He is looking past me. Were it not for the cigarette, I could believe that he was sleepwalking.

  He seems limp but then makes a sudden squirming move, and I feel a jolt. The anticipation of being struck. That’s how it is. I feel the blow before it happens. A gift, they said in town. I could have been a boxer. I have anticipation. I hit the closest part of the face that is his face, our face, on the jawline, and he slumps to his knees. I hear a clatter, then I see the knife near his hand and I step back, shocked in the rush of satisfied awareness. The swiftness of it. A flash.

  He is making an odd gasping sound between the coughing and sobbing. I think he is going to gag. Now feeling calm, I squat beside him and carefully move the knife.

  I didn’t know it was you, he says, breathing hard.

  He reaches through the darkness, lays a trembling hand on my temple, fingers searching through my hair.

  I see my sister standing in her doorway, hands concealing most of her face.

  He sees her and jerks back.

  There she is again, he says.

  He is on his knees, groping for the knife. I grab it, quickly move away from him, hiding the blade behind my back.

  That’s her again. Look out!

  There is a wildness in his face.

  Effie is sobbing. Runs bac
k into her bedroom. Door slams.

  “And the friend, who was with him in Holland. Did you know him?”

  “Yes. He was a neighbour.”

  “Ever speak to him?”

  “No.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He . . . died.”

  There is a very, very long silence. The doctor seems to be expecting more. But I am finished.

  “You think your dad was having flashbacks?”

  “Obviously. What else could it have been?”

  He stares, nodding, unconvinced. “And it was after that . . . you had some issues.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe that’s enough for now. We can always come back to it.”

  I shake my head. “No. I put all that behind me a long time ago.”

  “Dunc, Dunc, Dunc,” the voice is saying in my ear.

  And then Jude is leaning over me, whispering fiercely. Hushing me like a father. I sit up quickly and he steps back.

  “That’s better,” he said. “That was some dream.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, shaken.

  “I’m going to have a smoke. I don’t care what they say. Okay?”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  He eased the window up a few inches and pulled a chair close, stared out at the night, puffing thoughtfully, blowing the smoke out through the crack. My sweat became a chilly second skin.

  “You can talk about it,” he said. “That is, if you feel like it.”

  “It’s an old dream. About an altercation I once had.”

  “An altercation?”

  “It was with my father. It keeps coming back ...”

  “Ah, well. Altercations with our fathers. An old, old story.”

  “I guess so.”

  “You called out . . . your sister’s name. That was what woke me up.”

  “Yes,” I said. “She was there. What else did you hear?”

  “Nothing intelligible.” He bent to the window, puffed and exhaled through the narrow space into the impenetrable night outside.

  “You didn’t say what kind of pills,” I said.

  “Pills?”

  “The ones you took when everything got to be too much.”

  There was a long silence. Then he made a list. Dilaudid. Percocet. Even Tylenol. Anything he could lay his hands on. Powdered and snorted. “Some inject, but I’m not into that. Have you ever heard of OxyContin?”

  “I think so.”

  “The answer to everything,” he said.

  “I didn’t realize.”

  “If heaven will feel that good,” he said, shaking his head slowly, “I can hardly wait. I couldn’t begin to describe it to you.” His voice was sad. “It doesn’t seem fair.” Then he laughed in the darkness.

  “What?”

  “Any time you think you’ve found heaven on earth, some bastard comes along to inform you that, sorry, it’s really hell.”

  Jude finished his cigarette and squeezed the ember between a thumb and a forefinger that were yellowed to the knuckles. Closed the window but remained sitting, staring out.

  “Do you say Mass here?” I asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Tell me the next time. I might go.”

  “Tomorrow, after breakfast. Have you ever been an altar boy?”

  “Long ago.”

  “I’ll need a server.”

  “Oh, no,” I said quickly. “I couldn’t—”

  “Come on. Do me a favour.”

  “Okay,” I said, suddenly feeling trapped.

  “I’m going to try to grab a couple of more hours before the bloody gym-nuisances start at it again.” He was quiet for a moment. “Your sister’s name is Effie, right?”

  “Yes. Did I tell you that?”

  “You called it out just now. A lovely name, that. It makes me think of something solid but still . . . mysterious, wild and beautiful. Like the escarpment in the distance.”

  “It sounds like you might have known an Effie once.”

  “My dear man, yes, indeed I did.”

  I thought he was asleep, but he spoke from the darkness once more. “The once I should have gambled . . . I never did.”

  Dr. Shaw asked: “And did you ever discuss it with your sister? Why he was going to her room? What else might have happened?”

  “No. We were kind of distant by then.”

  “I have to ask you: did you think she was being abused?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. Depending on how we understand abuse.”

  “But you never asked? Not even after you became a priest?”

  “She moved out before then. And shortly after that, everything became complicated.”

  “The suicidal impulses. They began after this . . . altercation with your father?”

  “Not immediately.”

  “Do you recall when?”

  “Yes. My father’s friend, who was involved in the incident. The man who died. He killed himself, actually.”

  The doctor raised his eyebrows.

  “Later, in my own life, I’d find myself thinking a lot about what he did. And one day it came to me, objectively . . . that he’d made a reasonable choice, his way of escaping memories he couldn’t live with. It just seemed to me to be a legitimate solution. A final fix. For everything.”

  “There is nothing reasonable about suicide.”

  “I know that now.”

  “And what do you think prevented it . . . when it seemed to make sense to you?”

  “I didn’t have the balls to do it myself.”

  “And when did you decide to be a priest?”

  “Around that time.”

  He sat silently, thinking. The silence stretched.

  Finally I spoke: “So you’re thinking that the priesthood was a substitute for suicide?”

  “Actually, no. But is that what you think?”

  “It never crossed my mind before.”

  After Mass, I put away the cruets and bottles as Jude was folding his vestments. It had been a small congregation. Three people in the tiny chapel. A small, piney multi-faith room without any of the usual stations and statues out of consideration for the Protestants and Jews who might be inclined to go there for prayer or meditation. Wouldn’t want to distract them with our idolatry.

  Jude had a thoughtful approach to the liturgy, but I noticed that his hands and arms were shaking during the consecration.

  “Thanks for that,” he said.

  “My pleasure,” I said.

  He was carefully arranging his chalice in a box with a velvet lining. “This is just about the only thing I didn’t pawn.”

  “It looks expensive.”

  “My father gave it to me. That was why I couldn’t bring myself to let it go. The poor old skipper. Hardly something he could afford.”

  “You and your father were close.”

  “Not really.” He snapped the case shut then turned to me. “So, how long were you in the business?” he asked with a small smile.

  “Business?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Maybe just a guess. You’re the first altar boy who knew my part better than his own.”

  “I didn’t realize.” I could feel my face burning.

  “It was at the consecration. Maybe you didn’t notice. I just stopped. You kept going.”

  I felt a surprising sense of loss. Then guilt. “Another priest in denial,” I said. “What does that tell you?”

  “Oh, I’ve done it a hundred times. When I’d be playing the tables at the casino, obviously I dressed and behaved like a layman. I think that was half the addiction. The thrill of becoming somebody else. It feels good. We’re natural performers, in a way. Always acting in a role of one kind or another.”