The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “Well, just in time for coffee.”

  “I’ll have tea,” Father Russell said, a little out of breath from the walk.

  “You’re winded,” said Tarmigian. “And you’re white as a sheet.”

  It was true. Poor Tarmigian’s cheeks were pale as death. There were two blotches on them, like bruises—caused, Father Russell was sure, by the blood vessels that were straining to break in the old man’s head. He indicated the trees all around, burnished-looking and still loaded with leaves, and even now dropping some of them, like part of an argument for the hopelessness of this task the old man had set for himself.

  “Why don’t you at least wait until they’re finished?” Father Russell demanded.

  “I admit, it’s like emptying the ocean with a spoon.” Tarmigian put his rake down and motioned for the other man to follow him. They went through the back door into the older man’s tidy little kitchen, where Father Russell watched him fuss and worry, preparing the tea. When it was ready, the two men went into the study to sit among the books and talk. It was the old man’s custom to take an hour every day in this book-lined room, though with this bad cold he’d contracted, he hadn’t been up to much of anything recently. It was hard to maintain his old fond habits, he said. He felt too tired, or too sick. It was just an end-of-summer cold, of course, and Tarmigian dismissed it with a wave of his hand. Yet Father Russell had observed the weight loss, the coughing; and the old man was willing to admit that lately his appetite had suffered.

  “I can’t keep anything down,” he said. “Sort of keeps me discouraged from trying, you know? So I shed the pounds. I’m sure when I get over this flu—”

  “Medical science is advancing,” said the priest, trying for sarcasm. “They have doctors now with their own offices and instruments. It’s all advanced to a sophisticated stage. You can even get medicine for the flu.”

  “I’m fine. There’s no need for anyone to worry.”

  Father Russell had seen denial before: indeed, he saw some version of it almost every day, and he had a rich understanding of the psychology of it. Yet Tarmigian’s statement caused a surprising little clot of anger to form in the back of his mind and left him feeling vaguely disoriented, as if the older man’s blithe neglect of himself were a kind of personal affront.

  Yet he found, too, that he couldn’t come right out and say what he had come to believe: that the old man was jeopardizing his own health. The words wouldn’t form on his lips. So he drank his tea and searched for an opening—a way of getting something across about learning to relax a bit, learning to take it easy. There wasn’t a lot to talk about beyond Tarmigian’s anecdotes and chatter. The two men were not particularly close: Father Russell had come to his own parish from Boston only a year ago, believing this small Virginia township to be the accidental equivalent of a demotion (the assignment, coming really like the drawing of a ticket out of a hat, was less than satisfactory). He had felt almost immediately that the overfriendly, elderly clergyman next door was a bit too southern for his taste—though Tarmigian was obviously a man of broad experience, having served in missions overseas as a young man, and it was true that he possessed a kind of simple, happy grace. So while the priest had spent a lot of time in the first days trying to avoid him for fear of hurting his feelings, he had learned finally that Tarmigian was unavoidable, and had come to accept him as one of the mild irritations of the place in which he now found himself. He had even considered that the man had a kind of charm, was amusing and generous. He would admit that diere had been times when he found himself surprised by a faint stir of gladness when the old man could be seen on the little crossing bridge, heading down to pay another of his casual visits as if there were nothing better to do than to sit in Father Russell’s parlor and make jokes about himself.

  The trouble now, of course, was that everything about the old man, including his jokes, seemed tinged with the something terrible that the priest feared was happening to him. And here Father Russell was, watching him cough, watching him hold up one hand as if to ward off anything in the way of advice or concern about it. The cough took him deep, so that he had to gasp to get his breath back; but then he cleared his throat, sipped more of the tea and, looking almost frightfully white around the eyes, smiled and said, “I have a good one for you, Reverend Russell. I had a couple in my congregation—I won’t name them, of course—who came to me yesterday afternoon, claiming they were going to seek a divorce. You know how long they’ve been married? They’ve been married fifty-two years. Fifty-two years and they say they can’t stand each other. I mean can’t stand to be in the same room with each other.”

  Father Russell was interested in spite of himself—and in spite of the fact that the old man had again called him “Reverend.” This would be another of Tarmigian’s stories, or another of his jokes. The priest felt the need to head him off. “That cough,” he said.

  Tarmigian looked at him as if he’d merely said a number or recited a day’s date.

  “I think you should see a doctor about it.”

  “It’s just a cold, Reverend.”

  “I don’t mean to meddle,” said the priest.

  “Yes, well. I was asking what you thought about a married couple can’t stand to be in the same room together after fifty-two years.”

  Father Russell said, “I guess I’d have to say I have trouble believing that.”

  “Well, believe it. And you know what I said to them? I said we’d talk about it for a while. Counseling, you know.”

  Father Russell said nothing.

  “Of course,” said Tarmigian, “as you know, we permit divorce. Something about an English king wanting one badly enough to start his own church. Oh, that was long ago, of course. But we do allow it when it seems called for.”

  “Yes,” Father Russell said, feeling beaten.

  “You know, I don’t think it’s a question of either one of them being interested in anybody else. There doesn’t seem to be any romance or anything—nobody’s swept anybody off anybody’s feet.”

  The priest waited for him to go on.

  “I can’t help feeling it’s a bit silly.” Tarmigian smiled, sipped the tea, then put the cup down and leaned back, clasping his hands behind his head. “Fifty-two years of marriage, and they want to untie the knot. What do you say, shall I send them over to you?”

  The priest couldn’t keep the sullen tone out of his voice. “I wouldn’t know what to say to them.”

  “Well—you’d tell them to love one another. You’d tell them that love is the very breath of living or some such thing. Just as I did.”

  Father Russell muttered, “That’s what I’d have to tell them, of course.”

  Tarmigian smiled again. “We concur.”

  “What was their answer?”

  “They were going to think about it. Give themselves some time to think, really. That’s no joke, either.” Tarmigian laughed, coughing. Then it was just coughing.

  “That’s a terrible cough,” said the priest, feeling futile and afraid and deeply irritable. His own words sounded to him like something learned by rote.

  “You know what I think I’ll tell them if they come back?”

  He waited.

  “I think I’ll tell them to stick it out anyway, with each other.” Tarmigian looked at him and smiled. “Have you ever heard anything more absurd?”

  Father Russell made a gesture, a wave of the hand, that he hoped the other took for agreement.

  Tarmigian went on: “It’s probably exactly right—probably exactly what they should do, and yet such odd advice to think of giving two people who’ve been together fifty-two years. I mean, when do you think the phrase ‘sticking it out’ would stop being applicable?”

  Father Russell shrugged and Tarmigian smiled, seemed to be awaiting some reaction.

  “Very amusing,” said Father Russell.

  But the older man was coughing again.

  From the beginning there had been things Tarmigian said and did
which unnerved the priest. Father Russell was a man who could be undone by certain kinds of boisterousness, and there were matters of casual discourse he simply would never understand. Yet often enough over the several months of their association, he had entertained the suspicion that Tarmigian was harboring a bitterness, and that his occasional mockery of himself was some sort of reaction to it, if it wasn’t in fact a way of releasing it.

  Now Father Russell sipped his tea and looked away out the window. Leaves were flying in the wind. The road was in blue shade, and the shade moved. There were houses beyond the hill, but from here everything looked like a wilderness.

  “Well,” Tarmigian said, gaining control of himself. “Do you know what my poor old couple say is their major complaint? Their major complaint is they don’t like the same TV programs. Now, can you imagine a thing like that?”

  “Look,” the priest blurted out. “I see you from my study window—you’re—you don’t get enough rest. I think you should see a doctor about that cough.”

  Tarmigian waved this away. “I’m fit as a fiddle, as they say. Really.”

  “If it’s just a cold, you know,” said Father Russell, giving up. “Of course—” He could think of nothing else to say.

  “You worry too much,” Tarmigian said. “You know, you’ve got bags under your eyes.”

  True.

  In the long nights Father Russell lay with a rosary tangled in his fingers and tried to pray, tried to stop his mind from playing tricks on him: the matter of greatest faith was and had been for a very long time now that every twist or turn of his body held a symptom, every change signified the onset of disease. It was all waiting to happen to him, and the anticipation of it sapped him, made him weak and sick at heart. He had begun to see that his own old propensity for morbid anxiety about his health was worsening, and the daylight hours required all his courage. Frequently he thought of Tarmigian as though the old man were in some strange way a reflection of his secretly held, worst fear. He recalled the lovely sunny mornings of his first summer as a curate, when he was twenty-seven and fresh and the future was made of slow time. This was not a healthy kind of thinking. It was middle age, he knew. It was a kind of spiritual dryness he had been taught to recognize and contend with. Yet each morning his dazed wakening—from whatever fitful sleep the night had yielded him—was greeted with the pall of knowing that the aging pastor of the next-door church would be out in the open, performing some strenuous task as if he were in the bloom of health. When the younger man looked out the window, the mere sight of the other building was enough to make him sick with anxiety.

  On Friday Father Russell went to Saint Celia Hospital to attend to the needs of one of his older parishioners, who had broken her hip in a fall, and while he was there a nurse walked in and asked that he administer the sacrament of extreme unction to a man in the emergency room. He followed her down the hall and the stairs to the first floor, and while they walked she told him the man had suffered a heart attack, that he was already beyond help. She said this almost matter-of-factly, and Father Russell looked at the delicate curve of her ears, thinking about design. This was, of course, an odd thing to be contemplating at such a somber time, yet he cultivated the thought, strove to concentrate on it, gazing at the intricacy of the nurse’s red-veined ear lobe. Early in his priesthood, he had taught himself to make his mind settle on other things during moments requiring him to look upon sickness and death—he had worked to foster a healthy appreciation of, and attention to, insignificant things which were out of the province of questions of eternity and salvation and the common doom. It was what he had always managed as a protection against too clear a memory of certain daily horrors—images that could blow through him in the night like the very winds of fright and despair—and if over the years it had mostly worked, it had recently been in the process of failing him. Entering the crowded emergency room, he was concentrating on the whorls of a young woman’s ear as an instrument for hearing, when he saw Tarmigian sitting in one of the chairs near the television, his hand wrapped in a bandage, his pallid face sunk over the pages of a magazine.

  Tarmigian looked up, then smiled, held up the bandaged hand. There wasn’t time for the two men to speak. Father Russell nodded at him and went on, following the nurse, feeling strangely precarious and weak. He looked back over his shoulder at Tarmigian, who had simply gone back to reading the magazine, and then he was attending to what the nurse had brought him to see: she pulled a curtain aside to reveal a gurney with two people on it—a man and a woman of roughly the same late middle age—the woman cradling the man’s head in her arms and whispering something to him.

  “Mrs. Simpson,” the nurse said, “here’s the priest.”

  Father Russell stood there while the woman regarded him. She was perhaps fifty-five, with iron gray hair and small, round, wet eyes. “Mrs. Simpson,” he said to her.

  “He’s my husband,” she murmured, rising, letting the man’s head down carefully. His eyes were open wide, as was his mouth. “My Jack. Oh, Jack. Jack.”

  Father Russell stepped forward and touched her shoulder, and she cried, staring down at her husband’s face.

  “He’s gone,” she said. “We were talking, you know. We were thinking about going down to see the kids. And he just put his head down. We were talking about how the kids never come to visit and we were going to surprise them.”

  “Mrs. Simpson,” the nurse said, “would you like a sedative? Something to settle your nerves—”

  This had the effect of convincing the poor woman about what had just taken place: the reality of it sank into her features as the color drained from them. “No,” she said in a barely audible whisper, “I’m fine.”

  Father Russell began quickly to say the words of the sacrament, and she stood by him, gazing down at the dead man.

  “I—I don’t know where he is,” she said. “He just put his head down.” Her hands trembled over the cloth of her husband’s shirt, which was open wide at the chest, and it was a moment before Father Russell understood that she was trying to button the shirt. But her hands were shaking too much. She patted the shirt down, then bowed her head and sobbed. Somewhere in the jangled apparatus of the room something was beeping, and he heard air rushing through pipes; everything was obscured in the intricacies of procedure. And then he was simply staring at the dead man’s blank countenance, all sound and confusion and movement falling away from him. It was as though he had never looked at anything like this before; he remained quite still, in a profound quiet, for some minutes before Mrs. Simpson got his attention again. She had taken him by the wrist.

  “Father,” she was saying. “Father, he was a good man. God has taken him home, hasn’t He?”

  Father Russell turned to face the woman, to take her hands into his own and to whisper the words of hope.

  “I think seeing you there—at the hospital,” he said to Tarmigian. “It upset me in an odd way.”

  “I cut my hand opening the paint jar,” Tarmigian said. He was standing on a stepladder in the upstairs hallway of his rectory, painting the crown molding. Father Russell had walked out of his church in the chill of first frost and made his way across the little stone bridge and up the incline to the old man’s door, had knocked and been told to enter, and, entering, finding no one, had reached back and knocked again.

  “Up here,” came Tarmigian’s voice.

  And the priest had climbed the stairs in a kind of torpor, his heart beating rapidly and unevenly. He had blurted out that he wasn’t feeling right, hadn’t slept at all well, and finally he’d begun to hint at what he could divine as to why. He was now sitting on the top step, hat in hand, still carrying with him the sense of the long night he had spent, lying awake in the dark, seeing not the dead face of poor Mrs. Simpson’s husband but Tarmigian holding up the bandaged hand and smiling. The image had wakened him each time he had drifted toward sleep.

  “Something’s happening to me,” he said now, unable to believe himself.
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br />   The other man reached high with the paint brush, concentrating. The ladder was rickety.

  “Do you want me to hold the ladder?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you want to know if I wanted you to hold the ladder?”

  “Well, do you?”

  “You’re worried I’ll fall.”

  “I’d like to help.”

  “And did you say something is happening to you?”

  Father Russell was silent.

  “Forget the ladder, son.”

  “I don’t understand myself lately,” said the priest.

  “Are you making me your confessor or something there, Reverend?”

  “I-I can’t-”

  “Because I don’t think I’m equipped.”

  “I’ve looked at the dead before,” said Father Russell. “I’ve held the dying in my arms. I’ve never been very much afraid of it. I mean I’ve never been morbid.”

  “Morbidity is an indulgence.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Simply refuse to indulge yourself.” “I’m forty-three—”

  “A difficult age, of course. You don’t know whether you fit with the grown-ups or the children.” Tarmigian paused to cough. He held the top step of the ladder with both hands, and his shoulders shook. Everything tottered. Then he stopped, breathed, wiped his mouth with the back of one hand.

  Father Russell said, “I meant to say, I don’t think I’m worried about myself.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “I’m going to call and make you an appointment with a doctor.”

  “I’m fine. I’ve got a cold. I’ve coughed like this all my life.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  Tarmigian smiled at him. “You’re a good man—but you’re learning a tendency.”