The Father Pat Stories

by Patrick Gossage

  Father Pat had spent a lifetime finding confirmation for his adolescent belief that the human animal must accept that in the final analysis it is truly alone in nature, but that nature can give back and sometimes be the best companion. His life would follow the iron law that, as his mother would say: “the apple never falls far from the tree”. Pat’s detached ways, his concern for his own eternal soul were reinforced in his teenage encounters with his friends and family at the cottage on White Lake, and, henceforward, in the continuity of his experiences of peace and serenity in his canoe.

  There were years when Pat could only draw on his memory for the canoe perspective. The red craft that was the locus of all this emotional and spiritual development was not to be always a yearly part of his life. It hibernated in Whitehaven’s sinking garage for a couple of summers while Pat was at seminary and longer while he did his years as a Member of Parliament and summered elsewhere. The red canoe aged too. Pat and his brother Peter kept the cottage after his mother died and his father became ill and retired to a veteran’s hospital. The canoe had many adventures at the hands of Peter’s children, and guests. Its ribs were broken and replaced, its canvas torn and duck tape used to patch it up until it couldn’t be patched any more. It was re canvassed and eventually covered with shiny red fibreglass. Once it was blown off the dock in a storm, became airborne and literally flew down the beach. But it survived.

  Returning from Ottawa to parish and pastoral duties in the anxious and indulgent eighties, Father Pat was also reunited with White Lake and the canoe which were both now physically closer — a modest hour and a half drive north. Luxury of luxuries, the middle aged priest could go up by himself in the early spring and late fall and paddle in peace to his heart’s content. Forget the non-belief that characterized his upwardly mobile middle class ex-urban parish. Stop agonizing over how irrelevant even prayer was for most of the churchgoers he could even talk to.

  So, on that spring morning, so full of peace and beauty, it was time for Father Pat to let his over-active ponderings and memories drift away as he pried the canoe around to head into the dock. Paddy knew there were treats waiting and started to wag energetically in anticipation. A light breeze was coming up and his reveries were over. Time to feed the dog, cook up some bacon and eggs for himself, then head back to the city. The canoe and the lake would wait. They would always be there to connect him with eternity.

  Paddy, Deirdre and the Dump

  ON THE DRIVE back to Ridgewood from White Lake Father Pat had lots of time to consider the sometimes ridiculous but surprisingly effective adventure he and his two friends had engaged in in the past few weeks.

  It began at one of his regular lunches with Deirdre. The rector of suburban St. Bart’s Anglican Church, and Deirdre Donaldson, political columnist for the Toronto Record must have seemed an odd couple indeed at their regular rendezvous. On this slushy March day in Bradley’s Grill in the Royal Hotel, near the paper’s downtown office, it was snowing.

  Had you entered that dimly lit relic of the 1950s, whose wood paneling had years ago absorbed all the cigarette smoke it could handle, you would have noticed in the first booth on the right a striking, tall, no-age woman with thick auburn hair and almond eyes. She was listening intently to a rumpled Anglican priest with greying hair, puffy eyes and the kind of restless hand and body movement you would expect more from an anxious advertising executive than a mature man of God.

  This was not a mis-located counseling session between a priest and his parishioner. Far from it.

  Bradley’s regulars knew that you could set your watch every Wednesday when this curious couple met to exchange heaven knows what confidences in booth number one.

  “THEY GO BACK twenty-five years.” Terry Wilson, Father Pat’s friend of very long standing, was lounging at the bar of Bradley’s, waiting for one of his irregular downtown lunches with his pal, trying to explain to George, the bartender, that these customers weren’t quite what they appeared.

  “Remember the St. Matthew’s scandal?” he began. “How the Record did a series of articles that proved the priest hadn’t been dipping into the collection plate but was framed by a developer he had been fighting? Well, the priest was Father Pat and the reporter who cleared his name was the woman he meets every Wednesday. He owes her a lot.”

  “I still think it’s O-D-D,” George spelled out the word for added impact. “Looks like a long standing affair if you ask me. But of course it’s none of my business.”

  Terry studied his draft beer.

  He’d been to seminary in the 1960s with Father Pat, but he dropped out after two years to pursue his anxious and beautiful girlfriend. Pat had no such problems. His determined sweetheart, Brenda, knew full well the dignity that was conferred on the wife-of and that the homes that went with the churches where her fiancee, then husband, would serve were often the best on the block.

  “Your calling was simply not strong enough, old boy,” Father Pat was fond of saying. And apparently his mission to seize the woman of his dreams was not either. She left him. Terry drifted from writing to television production to public relations. He reconnected with his priestly friend when Father Pat decided political activism was the answer to his own dark night of the soul, put being an active priest on hold and sought election in suburban Ridgewood, where his parents had lived until he was ten or so. Terry reappeared to manage his campaign.

  “So much for serving God,” Terry was fond of saying. “Now you serve the party and that weird leader.”

  The reply was always the same. “Well, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s …” Father Pat would shoot back and Terry would bow down and pretend to kiss the hem of his jacket and they would collapse with mirth.

  The Father Pat-Terry-Deirdre triangle had been tightly laced together for nearly twenty years. Terry got to know Deirdre through his public relations business. More than a decade before Father Pat was toying with politics and spending more time smoking and contemplating on the wide, screened-in verandah of his parent’s summer cottage, or drifting on summer nights in his beloved canoe, than on urban parish business. Terry was contemplating whether he should become involved with Deirdre. She was on her way to Ottawa to become a correspondent for the Record.

  But he had been cold to the subtle messages she had sent. At that time he felt that Father Pat might cross the line and himself become involved with her. He felt he had to stand aside for his friend whatever the priest’s intentions.

  FATHER PAT’S WEDNESDAY lunch with Deirdre, on March 28 to be exact, occurred on a cold and vile day when the last snowfall of the winter was reduced to hillocks of slush the consistency of some sort of filthy brown sherbet. Father Pat was just warming to this week’s story, as he liked to call it.

  “I’ve got this guy who cuts my hair …” he said. Deirdre smirked as she looked at Father Pat’s greying mop that had hardly seen a comb let alone a barber’s scissors for at least two months, “… yeah … I know,” Father Pat continued.

  “Anyhow, he’s also really important in the Ridegwood anti-dump coalition. He’s the Chairman of the group and his name is George Cartwright and he comes to church every now and then.

  “Well, last Sunday he hung around until I’d finished shaking seventy-three limp hands after the morning service. Out of the blue he started accusing another one of my ‘faithful’ — an odd duck who farms a few miles away, a guy called Al Frame — of selling out on the landfill issue.

  “Made a real case against him. Not the kind of thing I like to hear on a Sunday.” He too smirked.

  “I thought you had really exhausted your options in beating the landfill,” Deirdre said. She had written a column on the bitter battle the small community was waging against the province’s plan to put one hundred and fifty acres of city garbage into a site near Ridgewood, a nineteenth century town which still retained its rural seat flavour and was the heart of Father Pat’s community.

  “Not quite,” the priest said. “To get access to t
he site, a road would have had to be built through this guy Frame’s farm. Would have involved expropriation and he was fighting it. He’s become a sort of local hero — although we have been paying his legal bills.”

  “So what’s changed?” Deirdre asked, leaning in to Father Pat, and touching her long fingers together around the stem of her wine glass.

  “Cartwright overheard a guy who owns a gravel pit talking to a friend while waiting for a haircut, saying the road was going to be built and the bids were out for gravel. Cartwright asked around and sure enough, Frame seems to have caved in. He’s ready to take the province’s offer. Worse, Cartwright told me there’s a rumour of an under-the-table deal by which Frame’s brother Walter, a contractor, will get a political appointment in return.”

  Deirdre knew that the local provincial member was the Minister of Transport, so such an offer for a local would be easy.

  “Dear Deirdre …” he said. Here it comes, she thought. “Could you see if you could track down this supposed appointment for Frame’s brother? Please?” Father Pat loved his connection not just to the person of Deirdre Donaldson, but to the influence and access her paper conferred, power he could occasionally plug into through her — when she was in the mood.

  This was one of the things he missed about politics. Since returning from Ottawa and giving up his seat in parliament, he’d lost an easygoing and mutually beneficial relationship with a whole raft of reporters. They’d served each other well. Now there was really only Deirdre to engage in discussions on the mysteries of politics and power — who was in, who was out, who were winners and who were losers and, of most deadly interest, who was abusing power.

  The old clock at Bradley’s struck a wheezy two. Ohmigod, Deirdre thought, I have a story to do, and I’m getting sucked in by old Pat again.

  Father Pat had just finished his second scotch and was considering a third, the “buzz” that his father had assured him was the only real reason to drink at all.

  This Wednesday there was an aged female parishioner waiting to see him back at the parish, strangely enough on a spiritual matter — and he would be late. Brenda would be annoyed having to entertain her.

  But he lingered.

  The two fell silent. He found himself looking down intensely at Deirdre’s fingers. A snippet from the Prayer Book

  flashed by: “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts …” But there was always so much that developed after a couple of hours of commiserating.

  He looked up. She was fixing him with her large brown eyes.

  THE NEXT LARGE brown eyes he saw were those of his dog, Paddy, who rushed up to nuzzle him as he opened the sagging oak door to the rectory. Paddy had one of those appealing question mark tails that was now particularly animated since Father Pat normally took the black and red-part-shepherd with him when he did his rounds. Only once a week was Paddy not welcome when Father Pat trekked to the city for his lunch with Deirdre.

  If the welcome from Paddy was fulsome, including her trademark submissive rollover legs-up act so she could have her tummy scratched, the welcome from Father Pat’s wife, Brenda. was justifiably anything but.

  “You’re nearly an hour late,” she said testily. “I ran out of small talk with your Mrs. Blackstone half an hour ago. She’s in the den. Don’t forget your brother and his wife are coming to dinner. I’ve got enough to do with the cooking.” Where has love gone? Father Pat thought. Problem was, he knew the answer.

  Brenda turned heel for the kitchen, leaving Father Pat still changing gears from the city and trying to get his head back into a suitable frame of mind to deal with Mrs. Blackstone’s difficulties in understanding God’s mercies.

  I’LL NEVER LEARN, thought Father Pat as he poked at the thick slice of pork roast while his brother’s diatribe on the garbage problem flowed over and around him, threatening to drown him entirely.

  “Bloody hell, they don’t even come around to the back anymore to pick up my garbage. I have to take it to the curb. What the hell do I pay taxes for? I bet I pay five times the taxes you do Pat, and what do I get for it?”

  Father Pat’s successful younger entrepreneur brother, Peter, felt he had earned the inalienable right to lecture on nearly all public policy matters because he paid more taxes than “anyone I know.” Father Pat’s attempt at a sympathetic recounting of the dump problem had, as usual, backfired and only stirred Peter and his equally opinionated wife (incongruously nicknamed Belle) to increase the volume of rhetoric.

  Brenda banged dinner plates in the kitchen as the chorus of complaints crested in the dining room.

  “Most of you suburban guys with the nice big properties, clean air and lots of space come to the city every day and contribute to our garbage,” Peter spluttered through his wine glass which he raised peremptorily for a refill. “Then when it comes to taking any back — Oh no! Not on your life! Not in my back yard!”

  “You’ve got to admit you people out here want it both ways,” Belle chimed in, swinging a chubby wrist laden with expensive bangles in front of Father Pat to get wine for herself. “You’re not going to win this one. Don’t forget it’s your garbage too.”

  “As for the minister,” Peter continued, talking over his wife’s continued whining. Noise on noise, Father Pat thought. “I did a contract for him a few years ago — and I might want to work with his department again.” This in the tone of a veiled threat to someone who would never understand the basic logic of the amassing and preserving of wealth.

  “Anyhow, seemed like an OK guy,” Peter continued. “He’s one of the few ministers who hasn’t been found out in some scandalous situation or another. He’s powerful. I wouldn’t mess with him.”

  A word to the wise, Father Pat thought as Brenda brought in desert, a magnificent layered cake.

  Its appearance prompted Peter to another rush of self-congratulatory prose. “You know absolutely the best place in town for fancy cakes is Desires — just above Elm — right near us. Fabulous place, but very expensive. Belle got a cake like that last week and we took it to the Ungerwood’s, they thought…”

  “I made this myself.” One of the things Father Pat most admired about Brenda was that she was very very hard to impress. This remark, delivered flatly, effectively sunk her brother-in-law in mid-sentence.

  FATHER PAT DRAGGED himself up to bed that evening more than a little discouraged. He pulled the covers up and formed them around himself as far as he dared on the right-hand side of the old bed so as not to disturb Brenda, who was deep in her book. He wondered, as he had so often before, if he shouldn’t spend more time on the healing arts. He had not been very helpful to Mrs. Blackstone. His favourite biblical admonition, “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s,” flashed through his mind. Then, with a silent mental nod to his maker, he dozed off.

  The following two weeks leading up to Easter were peaceful enough. Father Pat spent the Saturday before the Easter weekend doing what he liked to tell Terry were his “spiritual calisthenics”, his own peculiar preparations for the most joyful day in the Christian church calendar.

  In reality this meant taking a very long, lonely hike with Paddy in the hundred-acre woods that bordered Ridgewood the Saturday before Easter weekend. This year, as was usually the case, the early April sun had started to bring the frost out of the ground, and in the forest stillness the gurgling, dancing sounds of rivulets bubbling toward the local creek were, to Father Pat at least, the music of the yearly rebirth of which the Easter festival was the spiritual locus.

  Nevertheless, as Paddy bounded in and out of sight that Saturday, Father Pat was musing on the very human problem of what he was going to say to Al Frame, who always showed up, for reasons best known to himself, at Good Friday early service along with one or two other faithful. It would be hard to avoid him.

  Father Pat thought about his own role in the community at large. Was he approaching Frame’s sudden change of heart about fig
hting the dump as spiritual or moral issue, or was it a political matter? Caesar’s turf, not God’s. He was very conscious of his church colleagues’ disapproval of the anti-development work he had spearheaded in the city in the late 1960s. Was the dump really of the same order? Was keeping city garbage out of the country a question of ethics or of convenience and appearances. Did such issues relate at all to his ministry?

  “Damn. Too many big questions and not enough even small answers,” he cursed under his breath as he watched his beloved dog take the creek with one joyous leap.

  His mind turned to Deirdre. Her long face and generous mouth were before him. How he would love to be walking hand in hand with her. He mused at why she had not married, and for the briefest moment it was nearly twenty years ago and things, he supposed, could have been different. How convenient and correct for his own stability, for his own routine, and perhaps for Brenda and all the years they had spent together, that they weren’t.

  GOOD FRIDAY WAS overcast as befitted its sombre message of the martyrdom of a reformer. Al Frame and his brother Brian showed up with a record five others for early service. Reading the Gospel recounting the lurid scourging of Jesus by the Roman governor Pilate, Father Pat caught Frame eyeing him pointedly as he finished the dry little service. He was still thinking of the Roman Governor Pilate and his unwillingness to take a moral stand when confronted with the problem of the troublesome minor prophet Jesus. He doffed his communion robes and went around to shake hands with the few.