Embracing Darkness
Page 7
His attention was quickly drawn to a path between the end of the lawn and the bushes in front of the rectory. Intrigued, Father Poole decided to follow it. As he looked up from the path, Poole saw the small house owned by Old Man Benson. Thirty feet from the house, the priest noticed not only that the porch light was still on but also that a dark figure was rocking back and forth on the left side. It was too far away to tell exactly who it was, although Father Poole would have bet that it was the one person who, as he already knew, lived in there.
His hope for an early meeting with this neighbor was realized when he heard the figure yell, “Fancy a smoke, do ya?”
The priest walked hastily up the path to the front porch of Mr. Benjamin Benson.
NINE
Ben Benson
“Don’t know if ya heard me. I asked if ya wanted a smoke.” Mr. Benson’s words sounded in the thick, humid air, a cloud of smoke surrounding him like a white silhouette against the yellow glow of his porch light. In front of the porch was a white sign with black painted letters that read “BENSON.”
Father Poole saw this and asked, “Mr. Benson, I presume?”
Benson took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled. “Yep! That’s me. Ain’t had no one else livin’ up here in… Je-ody! Longer than I care to remember.”
The priest didn’t know what to say to this. It seemed a sad existence to him, living alone on the top of a hill with no one to talk to. “So you live alone?” Father Poole asked.
“No man comes out his home at three in the mornin’ just to look up at the stahs,” the old man said, as if ignoring the priest’s question. Benson’s melodic New England accent reminded Father Poole of his paternal grandfather.
“No, thank you,” the priest replied in delayed response to Benson’s original overture. “I don’t smoke.”
Mr. Benson looked the other way, his cigarette clamped tightly between his yellow teeth. “Warm night, ain’t it?” the old-timer commented.
“Yes,” Father Poole began as he cleared his throat. “It is. I would ask whether it’s always this hot in Holly this time of year, but I came here from Exeter and… .”
Benson shot him a friendly look and said, “It’s different up on the hill.” The old man continued, “Everything is different on the hill. Hell, we don’t even have the same water as the rest of the town. Theirs comes from a natural source, I’m sure; ours comes from charity. Once a week, every Wednesday in fact, Eugene Simmons and his two young boys, I think eleven and thirteen, come up with their buckets. They fill the two copper reservoirs, one behind my house and the other on the side of your rectory. That way we have runnin’ water like the rest of society. Eugene’s pa, Xavier Simmons, and I go back a ways. He used to do it for me as a favor, seein’ as how I’m all alone and cahn’t rightly get my own water up here. Yep! Nice o’ his boy to continue the favor for me. I throw their dad a couple o’ bucks every now and again. He says he don’t want it, Eugene that is, so I give it to his sons. They even help out A’gyle Hobbs an’ bring water up for the rectory. Your Father Carroll never appreciated the ha’d work those two boys do. He’d tell them that God would reward them in heaven for their efforts!”
The priest nodded in response to Mr. Benson, who had put out his cigarette and begun lighting a fresh one. “Well, sir. Since our water comes from the same charitable source,” Father Poole began, “I’ll be happy to split the cost with you.”
“I already told you he don’t accept no money,” Benson snapped but in a playful way. “I just give his two sons a few bucks, and that seems to keep everyone happy. No need to fix somethin’ that ain’t broke!” He flicked a short ash from his cigarette and put the butt back in his mouth. He did this so quickly that Father Poole thought for a moment that the old man might just swallow it. “C’mon up here, Father, an’ sit with me a while.”
Feeling a sudden urge to go back inside and up to bed, Father Poole said apologetically, “Thank you all the same, but… .” He rotated his upper torso toward the rectory as he tried to think of something to say.
The old man suddenly added, “You ain’t tired. You wouldn’t be out here for no clear reason then. Nope! Tonight you’re like I am every night. Cahn’t sleep a wink, and you’re out here in the hope that you can keep your sanity, starin’ at somethin’ other than your bedroom ceiling. Now come on up here and pull up a chair.” He leaned forward and smiled amicably. “We’ll become better acquainted.”
It then dawned on Father Poole. Why not? I am going crazy just staring up at my ceiling, he thought to himself and began to climb the stairs, which to his delight creaked just as much as the rectory’s.
He sat to the left of Mr. Benson in a wooden chair considerably smaller than the old rocking chair on which Benson was seated. Father Poole’s chair seemed as though it was made for a child. Feeling his hips become wedged, he tried shifting a bit, sitting on his right buttock and crossing his left leg over his right, but that only made it worse. He then tried several times in vain to have his forearms support most of his weight by leaning them on the chair’s arms. This was only a temporary fix, and he found himself growing uncomfortable every twenty seconds after shifting into a new position.
Mr. Benson said, “The name’s Ben Benson. Oldest fah’t up here on Holly Hill, probably in all o’ south’n New Hampshire for that matter.”
He put his cigarette into his mouth and extended his right hand to the priest, who was trying desperately to conceal his discomfort in the tiny chair. Father Poole saw Ben’s hand, laughed uneasily, and tried to determine if he could hold on to the chair so that he could shake the old man’s hand, which now hung motionless in front of him.
“Nice to meet you, Ben! I’m Father Phineas Poole.”
The two released each other’s hand, and Benson brought his to the ever present cigarette, taking one last drag and then putting it out. Instead of exhaling the smoke first and then speaking, he simply allowed the smoke to drift out on its own as he spoke.
“Yep! I know who you ah’r already. I spoke with A’gyle Hobbs earlier this week. Said they’d all be expectin’ the new priest any day from over Exeter way. St. Luke’s was it?”
Phineas lost track of the conversation, watching in bewilderment as Ben Benson lit another cigarette. “What was that?” Father Poole asked quickly, snapping out of his daze. “St. Luke’s. Oh, yes! Yes, indeed! I was a priest there for five years.” Then he motioned with his chin toward St. Andrew’s. “But now I have my very own parish.”
Ben was still facing the church but never took his eyes off the priest. “Yep!” he said. “You sure do. I ain’t no Catholic myself, but if I was to be one, it’d sure be convenient getting to church services on Sundays. I’m over eighty years old, an’ I ain’t been to church since the year the Titanic sank. Let’s see, that’d be… oh, what? Thirteen years now?”
Father Poole thought that unfortunate, since he himself had rarely missed a Sunday Mass. Even as a young boy, growing up with one parent who was a Catholic and the other who was an atheist, he could remember missing church only five times: two Sundays in a row for chicken pox and three Sundays for measles.
“Yep!” Benson continued. “Your own parish.” Then he nonchalantly added, “I’d be gettin’ my house in order if I was you, Father.”
The priest’s brow buckled. He paused for a second or two, trying to find some way to respond. “What do you mean?” Father Poole finally said.
Benson just grunted and took another puff of his cigarette. “You got a history here. Je-ody, if you ain’t got yourself a little history!”
Poole at first had no idea what the old man was driving at, but he then realized what the man presumably had in mind. “Oh, you mean Sister Ignatius, don’t you?” Father Poole replied.
Again the old man grunted. “Yep! Sister Ignatius. That crippled woman in the kitchen. Even your ol’ pastor, that Father what
’s-his-name again?”
“Uh, Father Carroll.”
“Yeah,” Ben shouted. “That’s the fella, that’s the fella. Names go outta my head just as easy as they come into it. Yep! Unfriendly sort, he was. Think he was the reason why no one comes to your church? Sweaty, sloppy, belchin’. Stuttered like a frightened child havin’ to fess up somethin’ he done wrong.” Ben paused, inhaled, and then continued. “Yep! Fine piece o’ work everyone be at that there church o’ yours. It is yours now, you know. You’re the one in cha’ge now, my friend. Just make sure you watch out for that nun in there.”
Father Poole frowned at Benson. “Why? What has she done?” he asked, afraid to hear the answer.
“She’s hot an’ cold, that one is. You notice yet how she is? One minute she’s up, another she’s in yer face somethin’ fierce. Je-ody! That Sister there’s a cause for concern, she is! Must be her addiction. Yep! I’ll be willin’ to bet the shiny nickel in my pocket that there’s the reason.”
Father Poole’s eyes widened. “What do you mean, addiction?” the priest interrupted. “You mean, like an addiction to morphine?”
Benson laughed quietly under his breath and continued, “Yeah, that’s what I mean alright. That sort of addiction. However, nothin’ as fancy as morphine.”
There was silence for about half a minute before the priest’s curiosity reached a boiling point. He wanted to know more; he needed to know more. “An addiction to what, Mr. Benson?” said Father Poole finally.
Benson said flatly, “Glue. She likes to sniff glue. Oh, not the paste that kids use in grammar school. I mean your thick, brown, stinky kind. You know the one, I reckon. It looks just like maple syrup. Yep! You can easily mistake that stuff for maple syrup. I wager a whole bunch o’ people who stock that glue in their homes would accidentally poison themselves if it wasn’t for the smell.”
Then it dawned on Father Poole. The smell, he thought. THE SMELL!
After Sister Ignatius had finished her supper, he had noticed the smell, and he had sensed it before then as well. What’s more, there was some extreme change in her demeanor between the time he snapped at her about how to get Mrs. Keats’s attention and the story about the fate of the dear woman’s husband. She had gone from quiet and unsociable to playfully talkative in the space of a minute.
She must have had the stuff in her lap, the priest thought. She must have sneaked a whiff while I had my eyes fixed on Mrs. Keats. Now things were starting to make sense to Father Poole. “And is that the reason why her nose is so red?” asked the priest.
“In my opinion,” replied the old man, “that’s the reason why she is the way she is. Mean-spirited, cusses up a storm. Wooee, Father! You should hear some of the things that come outta that woman’s mouth! And her supposedly a religious woman. Je-ody!”
Then Father Poole remembered why he had come downstairs in the first place, besides getting ice for the bump on his forehead. “Where do… ?” began Father Poole, embarrassed that he needed to ask a neighbor, and a stranger at that, about sleeping arrangements within the confines of his own church. “Do you know where Sister Ignatius and Mrs. Keats sleep? We’ve got a problem if they sleep anywhere in the rectory. I can’t allow women… .”
Benson grunted and said matter-of-factly, “Your cook, I hear, sleeps in your kitchen, which is basically an extended room of your church. I believe your rectory is connected to the kitchen by a small hallway. It’s like Siamese twins. They’re connected but still different. Different roofs altogether, Father. And your Sister Ig-nauseous stays up in the bell tower!”
Father Poole looked at Ben Benson dumbfounded. Things seemed to be getting stranger and stranger.
“And she spies,” Benson added. “I can see her some nights at her window up in that tower, sometimes usin’ a handheld telescope to spy on me. Hell, she’d have even spied on Father Carroll if he had come outside. Once or twice I even saw the end of that telescope following A’gyle Hobbs as he went down the hill on some errands for the church. He brings up your goods from the general store and brings down your ga’bage. He usually brings stuff down on his way home and brings stuff up the next mornin’. Trust me, you’ll never have this place all to your lonesome. That nun only goes down into town when she feels like it, and I got a hunch it’s only for herself, not for your church. And your cook, I hear, is afraid of goin’ outta doors. Sort of a… phobee kinda thing.”
“I think you mean ‘phobia,’ Ben.”
Benson replied, “Yep! That’s what she got, alright.”
Phineas looked back toward the church and sighed. Then, under his breath so that the old man couldn’t hear him, he murmured: “Agoraphobia. Any wonder that she’s got it? Probably afraid her husband will come back for her.”
Ben Benson continued, “But she follows A’gyle Hobbs with that telescope o’ hers every chance she gets. Even as he walks down the hill at the end of the day to go home. She even spied on that Keats couple when they was married. Yep! Spying on them with that friggin’ telescope!”
The final piece in the jigsaw puzzle, Father Poole thought. It wasn’t so much of a secret now how Sister Ignatius knew about the domestic abuse within the Keats’s residence.
“Yep,” Mr. Benson went on. “She ain’t too kindly toward me. Not that I care none. See, I’m alone and have been since 1919 when my grandson moved away. He’d been stayin’ with me. My son and his missus were killed in a train wreck outside Boston back in 1905 when my grandson was just two, maybe three. They died, but he made it out alive. He come to stay with me permanent. In 1919 he took himself a bride an’ up an’ left. Ain’t been back since.”
“Is he your only family?” Phineas asked.
“Yep! He’s all I got. He and his wife. Ain’t got no kids yet, though. But they’re both young, not yet twenty-five either o’ them. My wife died some time ago. When Johnny up an’ left, I was all alone.” He then leaned over the arm of his rocking chair, patted Father Poole’s thigh, and said, “You know, I’m eternally grateful for the company tonight, sonny. You don’t know what it means to a lonely old man.” Father Poole sympathetically put his hand on the old man’s. Then Benson sat back in his chair and continued, “Yep! I’d like to have a great-grandchild before I’m cold in the ground.”
Father Poole felt a bond with Mr. Benson almost immediately. He adjusted himself in the tiny chair, which by now had rendered his right buttock numb, to draw closer and said, “Mr. Benson?”
“Mmm?”
“You’ve been here since the construction of St. Andrew’s, correct?”
Ben Benson chuckled and said, “My boy, there ah’ people in that there town below that say I’m as old as this damn hill itself. I remember the day they came to lay the foundation for that there church o’ yours. It was back in ‘91, I believe. Covered what progress they’d made with a huge ta’p in late fall o’ that year an’ worked like the dickens on it the followin’ Ma’ch. It was finished later that year. Nice addition to the hill. A pretty-lookin’ church. Whitewashed panelin’ all around her. She shines in the sunlight, but not at all practical.” Then, sounding apologetic, he said, “Uh, no offense, Father.” He then sat back in his rocking chair and lip-rolled his cigarette. “Is it as pretty on the inside as on the outside, Father? I ain’t never been in it myself.”
Father Poole grinned widely. “To tell you the truth, Mr. Benson, neither have I.”
The two men remained silent for several seconds, gaping at one another before the old man broke down and roared with laughter. Father Poole soon joined in. Once their heavy laughter had died away, Father Poole, trying to catch his breath, inquired: “That’s just my point, Mr. Benson. Why on earth would they build a church up here?”
“Cheap land,” bluntly asserted the old man.
“But why such a large rectory? The church is an appropriate size for a small parish, but the rectory… .”
“And what would that be, Ben?”
“My maple over yonder. You can barely make her out in the da’k, but she’s there. My granddaddy was one of the first white men to come up here. My kin came up here from Concord over a hunnert years ago, and that tree was gigantic even then. My daddy was just a babe himself when my family settled here. They were livin’ in town back then. This house wasn’t built until 1860. I helped my father raise the timbers.”
Father Poole said, “It’s a charming place, Mr. Benson. It has a lot of character.”
Benson overlooked the compliment. “At first my father wanted to cut down that beautiful tree and use the wood from its enormous trunk to help build the house. I protested, ‘No, daddy. Don’t kill my tree!’ I do feel a kindred spirit in that ol’ gal. I do, Father.”
The priest nodded slowly as Ben Benson continued his story. “Yep! That tree an’ me have been through a lot. I used to climb her when I was a boy and young man. Even on my weddin’ day I took off my suit and climbed her branches. Even used to take my boy up there every chance I got. It became our own little game, climbin’ up there. He grew to love that tree as I had. Oh, I know what you’re thinkin’, Father. ‘How the hell does anyone get up that tree? She’s enormous.’ Well, you cahn’t see it now, pitch black as the night is, but back when we first moved to Holly, down in the town I mean, I used to come up the hill to this ol’ tree an’ read to her. Frankenstein was my favorite as a boy. Even the Portland Daily Chronicle. An’ I swear to you, Father, when I read to her, she’d be happy. She’d flap her branches in the air. You’ll say it was just the wind doin’ it, an’ I’d be inclined to agree with ya that the wind did blow most of the time when her branches got to goin’. There always seemed to be a breeze to keep her stirr’n. That’s when a maple’s happy.”