by J.F. Powers
One night, speaking of his first appointment, he was at pains to present Van as someone in a great tradition of the Church and not as some kind of nut, as Bill appeared to think when told of Van’s horny knees. “He was trying to go all the way, Bill, and still is, I guess. I was like that myself—just a tenderfoot, though—when I went to Holy Faith. But I soon woke up, or gave up, however you look at it.”
“What happened to your hair shirt?”
“I buried it.”
“Joe, where do you stand on all that now?”
“I’m sitting down.”
“That’s how you look at it?”
“Yes, because that’s how it is.”
That night, talking during commercials, they were watching an old movie, new to them, in which Tyrone Power, employed by a carnival traveling through a part of the South that looked a lot like California, had drunk himself out of his good job as a barker and now, fit for nothing else and attracted by the pay, a bottle a day, had accepted the job of geek, which seemed to mean that he—yes—bit off the heads of live poultry. Ugh.
“That,” Joe said, rising from his BarcaLounger, “calls for a drink.”
Bill, when Joe came out of the bathroom with their drinks, said, “Man here to see you this evening. A Mr McMaster.”
“Who?”
Bill must have seen that Joe recognized the name, and did not repeat it. “Just a courtesy call, he said.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Said just to tell you he’d call again.”
“Uh-huh. Thanks.”
At the next break for a commercial, Bill said, “Everybody’s talking about it, all my classmates.”
“Alka-Seltzer?”
“This drive. Arf.”
“That so?”
“Joe, you think I don’t know what you’re doing these nights when you go out?”
Joe gazed straight ahead, at the tube, and said nothing.
“You’re trying to raise money.”
“So?” But not looking at Bill.
“You’re in a bind.”
“So?” Still not looking at him.
“Joe, I think you should’ve said something to me about this.”
“Why?” Studying the action in a commercial for breakfast cereal, actually interested in it, a sack race.
“Why not?”
“Sack race.”
“Yeah, I can see.”
“Not a hundred-yard dash. Not a mile run.”
“Joe, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s a sack race, Bill. The priesthood.”
“Yeah, sure. Joe, I think you should’ve said something to me, but I know why you didn’t. You’ve got this thing about money and the priesthood, and I can see how you got it, what with your first Mass and all. I can see how you got the way you are, Joe.”
Joe looked at him then. “How’d you get the way you are, Bill, or were?”
“All right, Joe.” Bill blushed, remembering, it seemed, his reluctance to get involved in parish finance, his “Thanks” when Joe offered to handle the strong-arm stuff.
“Look, Bill. These may be the best years of your life as a priest, and as long as I have anything to say about it, as long as you’re here, I want you to be just that, a priest—and not a bill collector. Time enough for that when you’re a pastor.”
“Sure, Joe, and thanks. But what if I want to help? I don’t like it now, the way it is now, with you doing all the dirty work. I mean it, Joe. I want to help.”
“We’ll see,” Joe said.
Joe had a pastor’s concern for his curate, a father’s wish for his son to have it better, and he also had qualms about revealing how many dp’s there were in the parish—a reflection on his system—but since there were so many, and the servant, as Scripture says, is not superior to his master, and Bill was so willing to help, Joe decided to let him.
So the alphabetical list, lines drawn through the names of those Joe had failed with, halos around those, possibly three, he’d persuaded to try again, was split between them. And at nightfall, except on Saturday and Sunday, usually after a few innings and a bath, in Bill’s case a shower, immaculate in black and white (Joe had read that the Wehrmacht in WWII wore its dress uniforms in battle), they’d (more like the RAF now) scramble their planes, Joe in his black bomber, Bill in his little caramel fighter, give each other a comradely salute, a slow wave from their respective cockpits, and take off on the night’s mission.
For Joe, by now, it was more of the same, but for Bill it was new, and if Joe returned to the rectory first, if Bill was still out there somewhere, as he was on the first night (watching TV with the family of the breadwinner who was expected to arrive at any moment but didn’t), Joe worried about him. He knew, from debriefing him, that Bill was catching a certain amount of flak—had been criticized for driving a foreign car, asked how much the rectory had set the parish back, advised that money matters should be discussed during business hours.
“Part of the trouble,” Bill told Joe, “is we’re calling on people during prime viewing time.”
“I know,” Joe said.
One night, after he’d been at it for a week, Bill said, “Parishioners in good standing could be used to do this job.”
“You want out, Bill? If you do, I’ll understand—no one better.”
“No, I just mean they are being used in some parishes.”
“For Arf, Bill, not for this. Don’t mention Arf to people, Bill, even indirectly. As far as this parish is concerned, Arf doesn’t exist. That’s not the problem here.”
“It’s not?”
“It’s a problem, yes, but it’s not the problem.” In admitting, in effect, that his system wasn’t working Joe had lost ground with Bill, as he’d known he would, but what Bill had proposed, and was perhaps still proposing, would be wrong. “It wouldn’t be fair to use parishioners in good standing for this, fair to them, or to the others, especially to them. It’d be like asking them to go to confession to a layman.” And Joe cited the case of the dp who wouldn’t talk to Bill because he was only the assistant, to which Bill nodded bleakly.
“On the other hand, Bill, this isn’t what we were ordained for, and whether we succeed or fail is immaterial.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“It’s not as if we were out trying to preach the Gospel.”
“No.”
“We’re just a couple of bill collectors.”
“Yeah.”
“So don’t take it so hard.”
“O.K.”
But Bill continued to take it hard, showing the weakness of his strength (innocence). Having done so well for his hairy missionaries, he may have thought he had a way with people. The trouble was, in Joe’s view, that Bill’s understanding of the Cross, like that of most young people today, was nominal, narrow, unapocalyptic, and so failure to him didn’t, as it did to Joe, make much sense.
When they returned to the rectory, though, their evenings out, fruitless for Bill and nearly so for Joe, became something else—the best nights yet for priestly fellowship. Joe, if he returned first, as he usually did, would hand Bill a drink (“How’d it go?”—“Still batting zero”), and Bill, if he returned first, now followed that practice (“How’d it go?”—“Lousé”). Bill hadn’t had occasion to make the drinks before, with Joe there, and need not have followed his example, but did. A little thing, yes. In other respects too, Bill was coming around—he’d entirely given up cigarettes for baby cigars and, almost entirely, the guitar (no little thing, in Joe’s view).
But priestly fellowship, like love, is perhaps best measured in intangibles.
So often in the past, even at the best of times, Joe had sensed in Bill a prim disapproval of the kind of thinking and drinking that went on in the study at night, a stubborn, subterranean desire to be elsewhere. Not so now. So often in the past Joe had been afraid to get up and attend to their glasses, lest Bill get up too—and go to bed. Not so now. So often in the past conversation had
become debate, one man arguing from received knowledge, the other from earned experience, each more interested in grinding his generation’s ax than in arriving at the melancholy truth. Not so now.
Their evenings out, apart, had tempered and brought them together.
One night, before Joe could hand Bill a drink, Bill handed Joe a check, saying, “Apparently these people have been living in the parish since May, but never registered. The check’s for more than it should be. I told the man, but he said, ‘Forget it. I’ll see you again in May.’ How about that?”
“Uh-huh,” Joe said, looking at the check again. It was for $750 and from Mr Lane.
“Is something wrong with it?”
“No, no.” Joe, still under scrutiny—because he hadn’t jumped up and down with joy?—moved over to the TV set, on which he deposited the check with due respect, and sat down with his drink. “How’d it happen, Bill?”
“I was next door, and when I left—no sale—the man was getting out of his car. He said hello and invited me into the house. After that, well, one thing led to another”—Bill glanced at the TV set, where the check reposed.
“Hmmm,” Joe said.
“He’s something in public relations at Cones. She—I met her—she doesn’t say much. There are two other children—I mean, she’s going to have a baby.”
“Hmmm,” Joe said.
“I told ’em they’d have to come in to register, one of ’em.”
“You’ve seen ’em, Bill, so it can be done over the phone.”
“They’ll be glad to hear that.” Bill removed his collar and coat, as was his practice, and collapsed on the couch with his glass from which he drank deeply while, as was not his practice, scuffing off his big black loafers and exercising his toes, spreading them, in his black socks. Ugh.
“You know what, Joe?”
“What?”
“I needed that.”
“Uh-huh.” Then, realizing that Bill—he’d glanced at the TV set—had meant the check, not the drink, Joe said, “Congrats.”
23. PASTORAL AND HOMILETIC
BROWSING AMONG THE shelves in the Licensed Vintner’s, Joe stopped to open the door for a truck driver with a dolly of canned beer, and then went up to the counter with a bottle of red table wine—he had to buy something—and paid for it. “Thought Mr Barnes worked Saturday mornings.”
“Not today, Father.” The Licensed Vintner’s wife, in mobcap, peasant blouse, and dirndl skirt (approved dress for female employees in the Mall shoppes), put the bottle in a parchment-look bag and slapped it. “There you go, Father.” But not without being preached at. “Have a good day!”
“Uh-huh,” Joe said.
He was getting into his car when the truck driver came up behind him and said something.
“How’s that again?”
“The old man. They let him go.”
“Mr Barnes?”
“Hey, don’t tell ’em I told you.”
“Don’t worry.”
“He’s workin’ out to Badger now, in the liquor store.”
“I see. Thanks.”
Browsing among the shelves in the Great Badger’s liquor store, Joe was accosted by a small humpbacked man in a gray business suit and a black sombrero with silver balls around its brim. “Don’t see what you want, sir, just ask for it. If we haven’t got it, we’ll be happy to get it for you.”
“Thanks. I’m waiting for Mr Barnes.”
“Your customer, Mr Barnes.”
“Yes, sir.” When he’d finished with his other customer, Mr Barnes, in a dark blue blazer with badger rampant on its breast pocket (certainly an improvement on the red shirt, white sleeve garters, and blue leather-look apron he’d worn at the Licensed Vintner’s), came nodding over to where Joe was, by an island display of gin.
“Case of this, Mr Barnes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And a case of my beer. Case of empties outside.”
“Yes, sir.”
Joe, having paid by check, which he’d never done at the Licensed Vintner’s, never having bought a case of anything there except beer, held the door open for Mr Barnes, who had the gin and beer on a dolly, and opened the car trunk for him. Mr Barnes nodded at Joe’s nice clean case, then went to the not-so-clean one on the dolly, opened it, and there, lying on its side, was a fifth of brandy (Christian Brothers).
“Compliments of the management, sir. That was Mr Brock himself who spoke to you.”
“The Great Badger himself?” (The truth was, the man’s face—hat, actually—had been known to Joe from reading the discount house’s shopping news.)
“Yes, sir.”
“I see. Well, be sure and thank him for me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mr Barnes then switched the beer bottles, the full ones for the empties, to Joe’s nice clean case, Joe helping in this operation, in the end laying the fifth of brandy down on its side, and that was it.
“Thanks, Mr Barnes. Glad to see you here.”
“And you, sir.”
Joe was about to drive away when he saw, coming out of the Great Badger, of all places, of all people, Barb, and was seen by her. She rushed (but with a slight skiing movement of her left leg) up to his car and gasped: “Where can we talk?” And like Lot’s wife, she looked back as if they might safely return whence they’d come, perhaps to the coffeeshop. Swiftly, before she turned into a pillar of salt, Joe opened the door on the passenger’s side for her.
“Father, it’s about Greg. His induction notice came today, but he says he won’t go. ‘You quit school, so now you have to go.’ But he says no, he won’t. ‘What’ll your dad say? You’ll break his heart.’ Father, this war means so much to Brad—me too with Scott in it. But, Father, what I’m really worried about is Brad. Things aren’t good for him these days. They don’t appreciate him at the paper. They won’t let him go to Saigon—too controversial, they say. They killed his story on that poor family that lives next to the dump—too controversial, they say. They want him to quit, he says. Father, he’s going through hell these days. And now this. Father, will you talk to Greg?”
“Have him come and see me, Barb.”
Shortly thereafter, from the tire swing in the Gurriers’ yard, Joe, viewing the herd of old cars grazing in the tall grass, said, “Jim, what d’ya mean you’re looking for a ‘buyer’ for your ‘inventory’? What’s it worth?”
“Plenty. Even as scrap.”
“‘Even’?”
“Just one of my options.”
“What’re the others, Jim?”
“Kids buy up these cars. Couple spoken for.”
“What about the rest? Let’s say you don’t find a buyer.”
“Get me a rig in here like they haul new cars on.”
“I see. And what’ll that cost you?”
“Not so much.”
Joe got out of the swing. “You might break even, huh?”
“Wouldn’t pay me,” Jim explained, “just to break even.”
“I see. Haul ’em where?”
“That’s the trouble—I might not have room for ’em if we move back to the city.”
“‘If,’ Jim?”
“We might not move back.”
“Oh? Why’s that?” If the proposed expansion of the dump went through, the Gurriers would receive some compensation—on which Joe had assured them he’d make no claim—and they could be back in the inner city where they wanted to be and the action was.
But before Jim could explain, Nan came out of the black house with drinks garnished with mint, which grew on the outer banks of the dump and had also, in the Gurriers’ Holy Family period, cropped up in one of Joe’s sermons—which Nan, it seemed, remembered. “Praised be God for green things,” she said, improving on Joe and Gerard Manley Hopkins. “Jim tell you about this reporter, Father?”
“No.”
“Didn’t get around to it,” Jim explained. “Talkin’ about my inventory.”
“Reporter from the local paper, Fath
er.” Nan was obviously pleased to be the one to tell him the good news. “He’s doing a story about us maybe losing this place. He was real uptight about it.”
“Family man himself,” Jim explained.
Joe, wondering how he could tell them the bad news, decided not to, and used the sprig of mint in his drink to stir the ice cubes in it, then tried it—yes, the red table wine. “Where’re the kids, Nan?”
“At Badger, Father. Registered nurse in the playroom.”
Jim explained, “It’s not free. You have to show a sales slip.”
Nan said, “But I don’t like to park our kids there too long, Father.”
Joe nodded, gravely, in tribute to motherhood, and wanted to depart on that note, but couldn’t, not yet. “Look. If I were you people I wouldn’t count too much on a story in the local paper.”
“Oh, we don’t,” Nan said. “Not on that.”
“The wire services’ll pick it up,” Jim explained.
“And TV,” Nan said.
Joe sniffed. “This reporter tell you that?”
“No, but that’s how it works,” Jim explained.
“You see it all the time,” Nan said.
Joe sniffed. “Look. I thought you people wanted to leave.”
“We did, but now we don’t,” Jim explained.
“And why’s that—Nan?” (Joe preferred, but only slightly, talking to her.)
“Father, until this reporter interviewed us and the kids, and took pictures, I guess we just didn’t know how we really feel about this place.”
“And how’s that, Nan?”
“Father, it’s our home.”
“I see. That how you feel too, Jim?”
“Plus I have to think of my inventory.”
“I see.”
That night when Joe returned to the rectory (having been summoned to the city by the little hospital nun who watched over Father Day) Bill and Father Felix were drinking beer in the study with Greg, a muscular, long-haired type in a (to look on the bright side) plain white T-shirt, but in overalls and sneakers, these with fuzzy worn places around the toes and laces dangling, picking up germs.
