Wheat That Springeth Green

by J.F. Powers

  Upstairs, the architect had simply gone about his business: pastor’s suite (study, bedroom, bath), curate’s bedroom and bath (for the curate Joe didn’t have but hoped to get), guest room and bath (occupied on Saturday nights by Father Felix, the elderly monk who helped out on weekends), living room (seldom used), dining room, kitchen. (The housekeeper, Mrs Pelissier, a widow, was well paid, ran a car, and lived out, in her own little house.) Downstairs—that is, in the basement but surprisingly airy—was the rectory’s outstanding feature, the office area: two offices (each with lavatory), waiting room, two conference rooms, and two (to use the architectural term) powder rooms.

  The office area was all Joe’s idea, which he could be passionate about, particularly with clerical visitors.

  Just as the heart of the church is the altar, he’d say, so the heart of the rectory is, or should be, the office. Offices, rather, for pastor and curate don’t sleep in the same bed, do they? No, but all too often, even in old rectories where space was not a problem, even where several men were in residence, what did you find? One office. And it a no-man’s land, used by one and all, or a den for the pastor or whoever met the public, with everything in it pickled in smoke or otherwise smelling of him—no place to take a woman. (On the other hand, Joe knew of a rectory where, until recently, the office was also the housekeeper’s sewing room.) There were still rectories where the action took place in the front hallway, with everything—Mass cards, baptismal and marriage certificates, pamphlets, rosaries, stoles, birettas, and hats—on the hat rack. There were still rectories where parishioners and salesmen, for want of a waiting room, waited in the dining room, roosted on the stairs, rectories where converts, Scouts, and sodalities, for want of conference rooms, conferred in ill-lit church basements with steam tables, echoes, and mice. “Fortune-tellers do better! I ask you”—so Joe in his presentation had asked the Arch and his reverend consultors, moving them visibly—“is this any way to carry on the most important business in the world? The only business in this world that’ll matter a damn in the next!”

  That morning in April Joe came out of the rectory with a beer case and two bags, a small one of brown cloth, a larger one of brown paper. He put the beer case in the trunk of his black Dachshund, the bags on the front seat, and got in beside them. He took the pen from the desk set above the dashboard and made a list on the memo pad there: BANK, BEER, DUMP, BOOZE, HOSP. He started the car and, with nothing coming from either direction, backed into the street. The next thing he knew he was almost run into by a speeder. He wasn’t surprised when he saw who it was, Brad, and called to him out the window.

  “After all you read about safe driving.”

  “Not in my column, you don’t, Padre, and never will. That’s a promise. Ciao.”

  Joe made an unscheduled stop in the next block, spoke to a child playing in the street, a boy, who then left his tricycle in the street, at the curb, and looked pleased with himself, saying, “Park car, park car.” Joe pulled in to the curb, behind the tricycle, and the boy looked pleased saying, “Park car, park car.” “Yeah, yeah,” Joe said, getting out, lifted the boy onto the tricycle, and pushed it up the nearest driveway. When Joe returned to his car, the boy was saying to his (as Joe had taught him), “Park car on walk, not in street.”

  Approaching Inglenook’s period shopping mall—cobblestones, gas lights, board signs—Family Grocer & Fruiterer, Apothecary, Ironmonger, and so on—Joe noticed that the weather ball, from which the mall took its name, Ball Mall, and for which a color code too often appeared in Hub’s Column (Hub being Brad’s nom de plume) in the Inglenook Universe—

  When weather ball’s red as fire,

  Temperature’s going higher;

  When weather ball’s white as snow,

  Down temperature will go;

  When weather ball’s royal blue,

  Forecast says no change is due;

  When weather ball blinks in agitation,

  Watch out, folks, for precipitation—

  was gray, not working.

  Joe turned into the Yellow Brick Road, the service lane that ran around the Mall and was roofed over with fiberglass, primrose dappled with daisies. He drove up to one of the bank’s kiosks and dropped the brown cloth bag, the Sunday collection, into the chute. The teller on the TV screen, recognizing Joe, held up an empty bag, apparently a nice clean one. Joe nodded, saying through the voice tube, “Much obliged,” meaning it. And wondered once again if there was anything in the idea of reviving the practice of coin washing—ladies’ maids, he’d read, had done this in the past—a small service that banks could perform, and would if they cared as much as they said they did in their advertising. In any case, what about paper money? Before it was put back into circulation it could be dry-cleaned and pressed on the premises. If banks were looking for a new approach (as they should be, to judge by their advertising), a way to worm themselves into the hearts of depositors, one that would really work, well, there it was . . .

  He followed the Yellow Brick Road around to the Licensed Vintner’s, where, fortunately, the part-time employee, the old man, was on duty, and not the Licensed Vintner or his son—a couple of slobs to whom a beer case was a beer case. The old man removed the nice clean one from the trunk of Joe’s car and was gone for some time. Joe, though he couldn’t see him, could hear bottles clinking. When the old man returned with the case, he said, “Same one you had before, sir,” and then of some stacked nearby, “No telling where they been, sir.” “Much obliged,” Joe said, meaning it, and after he’d paid, knowing the old man to be untippable, thanked him again, this time by name (Mr Barnes).

  On the outskirts of town, Joe slowed down when he came to the dump, but saw Jim Gurrier prospecting, and drove on. He looked the other way until he’d passed the dump and the unfinished house in the next field. The Gurrier place—black with tar paper, still waiting for Jim to put on the siding; the PARTS sign in the front yard; the old cars multiplying in the weeds; the tire hanging from the big tree; the limp clothesline—depressed Joe. The Gurriers depressed him. He had moved Jim and Nan and their three (now there were five) children from the inner city. He had found the unfinished house for them and the down payment on it. He had thought that a suburban parish like his own needed people like the Gurriers, a leaven of God’s poor. He had tried to see the Gurriers as the Holy Family, Jim and Nan as Joseph and Mary, only with more children. It couldn’t be done, not by Joe anyway, not with the Gurriers. Jim, who Joe had hoped would shape up in time, still avoided all parish functions, including Mass, and Nan still went to everything—at first she’d inspired and embarrassed people with her talk of holy poverty in the inner city, now she bored them with it. If the Gurriers did move back to the inner city, as they said they might (to be close to the action), Joe wouldn’t be sorry. It hadn’t worked.

  Joe was passing the Great Badger, “the discount house with a heart,” which meant not only that the savings it realized through its wise volume purchases were passed on to you, the customer, in the usual manner of discount houses, but that your dependents in the event of your death would get to keep whatever you had been buying on time, with no further payments or charges of any kind. The Great Badger also hired the aged and handicapped. It was flourishing. Its real competitors were the big department stores in the city and other discount houses in fringe areas—and not the smocked and gaitered tradesmen on the Mall. They couldn’t keep up, they knew it, and they were bitter. While they had more or less gone into hibernation after the Christmas rush, the Great Badger had staged a series of colossal interlocking sales during which it had stayed open, according to its ads, until??? And now, to serve its customers better, it was staying open six nights a week until nine, Sundays until five. They were very bitter about this on the Mall, and Joe couldn’t say he blamed them. The Great Badger itself, a forty-foot idol—its enlarged, exposed, red neon heart beating faintly in the sunlight that morning—sat up on its hunkers in the middle of the parking lot and waved a paw at cars going
by. Joe did not, though he sometimes did if he had a passenger, wave back.

  Joe was passing an industrial park, coveting the grass and geraniums, where once had stood the small machine shop that begat the medium-sized defense plant (Ketteridge Cartridge) that begat the giant Cones, Casing, Inc., which, with branches at home and abroad, was so important that it could afford to advertise not its many products—nose cones for missiles as well as ice cream cones, casings for bombs as well as sausages—but its humble birth, using only an artist’s sketch of the small machine shop (looking like the village blacksmith’s place of business in the poem) and three words, CONES + CASING = PEOPLE. Cones (as it was called) owned the corporation that owned the Mall, and was said to be so diversified that it was crisis-proof. Joe hoped that this was true, since many of his parishioners earned their daily bread there, but he also hoped that those who earned it by producing doomsday weapons could find other work. For Joe to say nothing, living among and off them and feeling as he did, was prudent but hard when a whiff of self-righteousness came his way, hinting that he was beholden to the freedom-loving military-industrial complex for protecting him from its opposite number in freedom-hating you-name-it. But then, running a parish, any parish, was like riding in a cattle car in wintertime—you could appreciate the warmth of your dear, dumb friends, but you never knew when you’d be stepped on, or worse.

  Nearing the city limits and advocating as he did the returnable bottle, Joe deplored the heavy fall of beer cans along the way, the shining fruits of the weekend. To his surprise, he drove by several big ammunition-depot-type liquor stores such as he ordinarily patronized when stocking up on the hard stuff (the Licensed Vintner and his son being Catholics and Mr Barnes a non-Catholic), and so, having shown a firmer resolve to amend his life than he might have if he’d stopped and bought a case of gin (though he might weaken when he passed that way again), Joe felt better about himself when he arrived at the hospital and knocked on the chaplain’s, Father Day’s, door.

  “Ah, Joe!”

  “Time to turn myself in again, Father.”

  Slowly, because Father Day had a game leg from one of his, now, rare sprees, they went up the corridor to the chapel and into a box where Joe knelt and waited for his old confessor to sit down and slide the wicket between them.

  “All right, Joe.”

  “Bless me, Father. Sorry to say I’m still eating and drinking more than I should, especially the latter. And still not as good as I should be with the parishioners—they still give me a pain in the ass. I’m sorry, Father.”

  “Parishioners are people, Joe, and people have souls.”

  “I know, Father. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be downhearted, Joe. Don’t despair. Be on your guard there. Despair’s really presumption, you know. Expecting too much. We can’t change the world, Joe. Our Blessed Lord couldn’t do it, Joe. But we can change ourselves. That’s enough. Sometimes it’s too much. Prayer, Joe, more prayer. Our best bet. Take it from me, though God knows, and so do you, I’ve made a bollux of my life.”

  “No, no, Father.”

  “Good of you, Joe. I am doing better these days.” (Joe heard his old confessor knock on wood.) “All right, Joe. For your penance, the same again—the holy rosary daily. Let’s make that nightly, Joe. Pray for my intention. Misereatur tui omnipotens Deus . . . ego te absolvo a peccatis in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen. Love God, Joe, and have a trick in you.”

  After walking his old confessor back to his room, Joe looked in on patients from the parish. He planned to turn over the bulk of his practice to his curate if he ever got one, for this part of his job, with the growth of the parish, was getting to be too much for one man, the maternity cases alone. Sure, birth was a big deal—after death, the biggest deal—but what was there to say about either one of them, after a point? To pass the time that morning, Joe said to a nun who came in with a glass, “Sister, you still on the hard stuff?” and got a laugh. Top banana in the maternity ward, but he was tired of his routine and glad again to bow himself out and be on his way.

  He drove by the ammunition depots again, all but the last one.

  The dump was deserted, and so he drove in and disposed of the brown paper bag, his empties.

  When he saw “car” parked not on walk but in street, at the curb, he wasn’t surprised—the story of my priestly life and pastorate, he thought—and drove on.

  9. IN JEOPARDY

  THAT EVENING JOE was in the study having another beer and watching TV, the Twins, when Brad phoned.

  “Suppose you caught my column, Padre.”

  Joe hadn’t, but thought it safe to say, “Brad, why not give the weather ball a rest?” Joe hated it when Brad, off freeloading with what he called the working press at fun-sun resorts and military installations in hitherto unspoilt parts of the world, remembered the weather ball (so he wrote in his column) and got all . . . misty; or woke “betimes” in a strange but very comfortable bed (here a nice plug for hotel or base) and found the weather ball was only a . . . dream; or, circling at 10,000 feet, looked down and saw the weather ball like a lamp in the window and knew he was . . . home. “After all, Brad, it’s not the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty.”

  “Who said it was?”

  “Rather see Hansel and Gretel, or whoever they are, come out of their little house and say cuckoo.”

  “You kiddin’?”

  “No.”

  “May I quote you?”

  “No.”

  The Twins pulled in the infield, hoping to cut off the tying run at the plate. “Pretty busy here, Brad.”

  “Doing a survey of local churches—about HR 369.” (A bill before Congress containing goodies for Cones, Casing—its NG3 missile was said to be far ahead of others in the field, perhaps too far ahead, with three nostrils in its nose cone.) “Will you be having public prayers for the success of the bill, Padre?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. These things are best left to the lobbyists, Brad.”

  “May I quote you on that, Padre?”

  “No.”

  “I understand you’ve been approached by your parishioners.”

  “Happens every day, Brad. Lost pets and so on.”

  “I wouldn’t say this is the same thing, Padre.”

  “No.” Unfortunately.

  “I don’t have to tell you, do I, that jobs’re at stake?”

  “No, and I’m sorry about that, more than I can say.” To you, you bastard.

  “May I quote you on that?”

  “No.”

  “This is all off the record then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ciao.”

  The Twins were in a tight spot—bases loaded, nobody out, a three-two count. Foul ball. Another. The phone rang.

  “St Francis.”

  “If you’re St Francis, I’m Lyndon B. Johnson.”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “That’s all right. Been reading the Good Book.”

  “Not a Catholic then?”

  “That’s all right. Don’t like how you’re running things over there. Hate your methodology.”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “That’s all right.”

  Joe had hung up. Another foul ball. Then a wild pitch! The phone rang again.

  “Yes?”

  “St Francis?”

  “Hold on. I’ll call him.” Joe put down the phone. He picked it up when the inning was over—three unearned runs! “Still there? Hold on. He’s coming.” The Twins came to bat and went down in order, two swinging. To think these clowns had won the pennant only three years ago, Joe thought, and picked up the phone. “Hello? Hello?” Gone. Good. Joe was going for a beer when the phone rang again.

  “Yes?”

  “St Francis?”

  “Hold on, will you? We’re trying to trace your call. Hello? Hello?” Gone.

  Leaving the Twins to their fate, Joe wandered over to the windows with his empty glass
—maybe he’d switch to gin, but he was in no hurry—and staring out at the night saw, in the distance, the weather ball, royal blue (“Forecast says no change is due”), and farther away, on a hill, flood lit and sea green, the water tank, the new global type, around it blinking, spelling and respelling itself in neon white letters, INGLENOOK, which, though, Joe had to take on faith since only three letters were visible from the study windows or from any terrestrial point—that was planning for you. NOO, NOO, the water tank said to him (he was wishing the problem of public prayers for HR 369 would go away), and then the weather ball turned red as fire (“Temperature’s going higher”) and the phone rang again.

  When Joe next caught Brad’s column, read “Public prayers for the success of HR 369 to be offered in all local churches . . . except one,” he was tempted to sit down at his typewriter and have a go at the military-industrial complex, its pols and flacks. To the Editor of the Universe . . . and could already hear them at the Chancery. “Hey, what’s with our man in Inglenook?” “Gee, I don’t know. I pulled his file, but all it says is good hard worker fond of the sauce.” “That could be it.”