The St. Michael Poker & Drinking Club

by Randle, Ned;

  O God, by whose mercy the faithful departed find rest,

  bless this grave, and send your holy angel to watch over it.

  As we bury here the body of our brother Tom’s Cat

  deliver his soul from every bond of sin,

  that he may rejoice in you with your saints forever.

  We ask this through Christ our Lord.

  Amen.

  Father Tom reached down and raked mulch over the dirt with his fingertips. made the sign of the cross over the grave, picked a petal from a Bourbon rose, put it in his mouth and chewed it slowly and deliberately, as he carried the garden trowel back to the garage.

  Chapter Two

  Once inside the rectory after burying his pet, Father Tom sat at his desk and looked around the room lighted only by the desk lamp. When his sense of well-being wasn’t discolored by the stain of loneliness, and now sadness, he found the rectory at St. Michael to be commodious and, despite its age, one of the finest houses he’d lived in as a parish priest. He looked out the window and contemplated Cat’s death, how he might have prevented it and, if an unpreventable sign, to what matter of consequence did it point.

  He could have kept the cat safe inside; there was plenty of room. Father’s house had many rooms, he mused. The rectory building was built in 1892, two years after the church proper was erected. Belle City had a goodly population of hardworking Catholics at the time, and both the church and the rectory were constructed from locally quarried sandstone by parishioner stonemasons, bricklayers, carpenters, and other skilled tradesmen. The building was stark but well-built and utilitarian, comprising two floors and a basement, more accurately described as a cellar. The building had a functional floor plan: the first floor included a priest’s study, where he now sat at his desk, with a bank of three double-hung windows opposite his desk overlooking the backyard, the willow tree and the rose garden, and now Cat’s grave. There were rows of bookshelves on two walls. The first floor also included a modest kitchen behind the study, a tiny bathroom replete with antiquated porcelain fixtures adjacent the kitchen, and a small housekeeper’s bedroom adjoining the bathroom. The housekeeper’s room hadn’t been occupied for over ten years, and as he sat at his desk in the dim light, Father Tom lamented that he hadn’t tried to lure Cat in and locked him in the vacant housekeeper’s room when he left the rectory to get his dinner. Hell, he thought, he could have outfitted the room with food and water and a litter box and kept Cat locked in whenever he was away from the rectory, and he may have avoided this heartache. It may have prevented the accident, he reasoned, but it was in neither of their personalities to have done that, and he scuttled the thought as a revisionist lamentation. Cats have free will.

  The second floor of the rectory included a full bath with an ornate, clawfoot tub with a jerry-rigged shower, a commode, and a single pedestal sink below a massive, gilt-framed mirror that allowed generations of priests to view themselves self-consciously when they stepped naked out of their bath. There also were two spacious bedrooms on the second floor to comfortably house two priests, the second bedroom a vestige from the salad days of the Catholic Church when even a middling parish in a town like Belle City employed a pastor and an assistant pastor. Pleased to again chastise himself for his negligence towards his pet, he reckoned he could have made the assistant pastor’s empty room a haven for the cat. Perhaps he could have converted the alley cat into a house cat with a comfortable room and plenty of food, but he hadn’t tried, and the words of St. John, Chapter 14, taunted him: “There are many rooms in my Father’s house, and I am going to prepare a place for you. I would not tell you this if it were not so.”

  I made no such promises, Father Tom told himself. Cats have free will.

  At least he had been comfortable in the rectory, even if he’d not shown Cat proper hospitality or stewardship. Each of the rooms, upstairs and down, was modestly furnished for the comfort of the resident priests. None of the furnishings was extravagant, except the priest’s desk in the study. Each bedroom suite was utilitarian, containing a bed, a chest of drawers, a dresser, and a bedside table, all fashioned from modest-grade woods, the varnish finishes darkened by time and neglect. The walls were bare, save for the ornate, porcelain crucifix hanging above the headboard of his bed. In the kitchen, an outdated table with a metal frame and Formica surface, and chairs with complementary metal legs and wire backs and vinyl seats were centered on the linoleum floor. The kitchen set was mid-century modern, tacky but useful. However, the dated table and chairs showed remarkably little wear, a testament to the truism that preparing meals and eating at home was anathema to most parish priests.

  The priest’s study, where he now sat contemplating the death of his pet and what this death may augur, was his favorite room. There was a wingback reading chair with an end table on one side and a floor lamp on the other, in the ell defined by two abutting walls of bookshelves. Father Tom rarely sat in the reading chair, preferring to read at his fancy desk, the centerpiece of the rectory. The desk was old, large and ponderous and fashioned from fine mahogany wood. When he moved into the rectory, the bishop’s secretary, who had escorted him on a tour of the rectory, told him the desk had been a gift to the parish from a wealthy farmer made decades earlier. The desk was so old the donor himself couldn’t recall where it came from, but he said it had been stashed in his barn as long as he could remember, causing him to curse it on occasion for intruding on space he needed for storing bales of hay and straw. Finally fed up with working around the piece, the farmer and two hired men loaded it up on a mule-drawn dray and delivered it to the local German undertaker, who also worked as a cabinetmaker, and told him to recondition the desk for the priests’ house and send him the bill.

  The cabinetmaker painstakingly scraped away years of mildew and dirt and bird droppings and livestock dung. He removed and trued the drawers and installed new drawer rails and planed and leveled the base. He stripped the damaged finish from the exterior surfaces, a process both time consuming and laborious and which left him arm weary and coughing in his bed at night from inhaling noxious fumes. He carefully applied several coats of milky mahogany stain to the stripped surface. He lubricated the drawer rails with a fine layer of soap and fastened heavy brass drawer pulls to the drawer faces, installed the drawers, and worked them in and out along the soaped rails until he was satisfied that even the least manly of parish priests could easily work them opened and closed. Finally, he adduced a shiny desk surface that emitted a holy reflective aura by relentlessly applying and buffing the best carnauba wax the farmer’s money could buy.

  According to the blushing secretary who explained to Father Tom the nativity of the impressive desk, it long was rumored around town that after the desk was completely refurbished and delivered to the rectory and he received his pay from the farmer, the cabinetmaker stood his friends several rounds of beer at the local tavern and bragged in his broken tongue that he’d done sufficient penance, im Voraus, by restoring das wrack of priests’ Schreibtisch that he could commit sins, both venal and mortal, from that day till the day he died, and he’d never have to spend even one minute in purgatory, Gottverdammt!

  Father Tom was still sweating from his exertions in burying the cat and from the warmth and humidity inside the room, and had he not known better, he would have thought the heating system was in operation. The rectory was heated by steam generated in a boiler located in the cellar and fed through pipes to iron radiators which hissed and groaned under pressure to the point that at least one skittish priest, years earlier, suspected the radiators would explode, sending him to Kingdom Come in a scalding fog. He demanded the bishop allow him to take other rooms in the winter. Father Tom, however, found the steam-heated building cozy in the wintertime and the hissing steam comforting and the latent humidity good for his lungs and for the grand desk behind which he spent much of his time. However, when the weather warmed, as now, a parish work detail dutifully installed window ai
r conditioners in one of the study windows and his bedroom to cool the air and reduce the humidity that vexed more prissy priests with damp albs, limp soutanes, and soggy Roman collars. Father Tom pulled himself out of his desk chair and walked to the window and turned on the window unit and stood in the rush of cold air to cool himself and dry his shirt, until weak-kneed, he returned to his desk chair.

  It was in this weakened and mournful state that the idea for a social club comprised of men like himself, with similar education, experiences, and responsibilities, came to Father Tom. He sat lonely and heartsick, squinting at the lamplight reflected from the polished desktop where he’d intended to write his weekly homily as a means of filling the empty minutes and distract himself from his loss. But before putting pen to paper, he’d tried a couple of sentences of his homily aloud to see how they sounded, but without Cat to adjudge the strength of his words, he imagined them weak and hollow. Although he’d had Cat as his sounding board for only a few months, he couldn’t remember how he’d composed his sermons the many years before the animal arrived.

  It was more than writer’s block. It was as if in his loneliness he was bereft of the faith which in the past had inspired his sermons and caused the words to flow. He was neither mawkish nor sentimental, so his response to the loss of the cat that curbed his religious zeal at the moment was to curse the homely animal for getting itself killed. And as he sat at his desk, he could feel his temper rise, a temper easily made manifest in his youth and legendary among his classmates at Benedictine College before the Dean of Men suggested he withdraw from school rather than face expulsion for fighting. It had been a lifelong struggle to hold his temper in check, his cross to bear, and now in middle age he felt the heat of that temper at the thought of the driver who killed his pet by speeding recklessly through the alley, unmindful of the harm he caused.

  Part of controlling his anger over the years was learning to isolate the source of his anger and then dealing with it. He contemplated the source of his anger, beyond the natural antipathy toward the killer of his cat. As he thought deeper about it, he recognized the true source of his rising anger was not just the animal’s death, but also the realization, once again, of the often-suppressed but ever-present solitariness of his vocation. By wandering into his life, Cat had both made him aware of his aloneness and then assuaged it, only to die and leave him to grapple with it, even more alone. Father Tom rose from behind the desk and walked to the window overlooking the rose garden and shouted, “Goddamn you, Cat!” startling himself with the echo of his oath in the room. He immediately crossed himself and silently asked the Lord for understanding and forgiveness for breaking the third commandment of the Decalogue and for losing his temper, a species of murder, he knew, under certain fundamentalist dogma.

  His fever cooled by his outburst, Father Tom turned off the air conditioner, went to the kitchen and poured a glass of red wine. Back at his desk sipping wine, he considered ways to address the reawakened recognition of his solitary existence. When he was younger, he had hoarded and prized his solitude like gold. But as he grew older, he wondered if he’d been wrong to squander by remaining aloof the time he could have been among others. And he felt the sense of waste more acutely as the time he’d been allotted, time which at one time seemed endless and expansive, had a defined and seeable horizon.

  It was not that he always was alone; he had a parish family, of course, but he was close to no parishioner in particular, and the requirements and responsibilities of his office required it to be that way. He could have a beer or two with the men of the Holy Name Society, but he found them to be distracted by lives so different from his own that they seemed to be from another world which, in reality, they were. The priests of the deanery got together on a regular basis to provide camaraderie and support, but he found their practiced piety and perfunctory pronouncements on problems inherent in the priesthood unsatisfying. The diocese offered interventions for obsessive afflictions such as alcoholism, drugs or pornography, but ignored the underlying cause. The bishop was obtuse and unapproachable on the subject. Besides, Father Tom didn’t want to discuss his problems with any of his fellow priests, much less the bishop; he didn’t want anyone to get the idea he couldn’t handle the job. St. Michael was a plum assignment, and the bishop, with whom he’d had his difficulties, would be all too eager to move him on at the slightest provocation.

  Father Tom knew he was heading for a rough patch, and he needed to take steps to keep from slipping into an intractable melancholy. His busiest time of the year had just ended with Easter, and he was now in Ordinary Time and looking at a stretch of solitary days and nights through late spring and summer, with little to occupy his mind but the baseball. In autumn, after the World Series, he could look forward to Thanksgiving and prepare for Advent and Christmas, but he needed a diversion now.

  He considered getting another cat to keep him company. The local animal shelter always had litters of kittens to pawn off, and it placed appealing mug shots of potential adoptees in the newspaper to tempt the softhearted. But living where he did, with a busy street in front of the rectory and the racetrack of an alley behind, he didn’t want to risk getting attached to another animal only to have it indiscriminately slaughtered by some pimply-faced kid driving too fast his old man’s car. He could keep a cat locked in the rectory with its accoutrements in the housekeeper’s room or the assistant pastor’s bedroom, as he’d just considered, but the charm of a cat is its insouciant independence, so keeping the animal penned up in the rectory wouldn’t be right. He quickly nixed the idea of another pet.

  It was just after he dismissed the idea of getting another cat to leaven his loneliness, and as he poured himself another glass of wine, when he hit upon the idea of organizing a group of clergymen for fun and fellowship. The words “fun and fellowship” actually floated through his mind in that eureka moment, and he chuckled aloud with embarrassment and wondered if it was the wine or his age, or both, that caused him to think of such corny terms. What he envisioned, in that instant, was a poker club like the one he joined at the seminary where similarly situated men could get together in their free time and play cards, have a few drinks, share a few stories and relax.

  To that end, he pulled the telephone directory out of the desk drawer and thumbed through the Yellow Pages listings of Belle City churches. He had some familiarity with the other denominations in town and their pastors, primarily institutional knowledge he’d accumulated during his years at St. Michael. On his pad, he wrote down headers for three columns: Church, Pastor’s Name, and Church Telephone Number. He listed the United Methodist Church, Grand Hope Nondenominational Family Church, First Baptist Church, Second Presbyterian Church, and St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in the first column and their respective pastors, Brian Metzger, Billy Crump, Jim Dunlevy, Donald Northrup, and Theo Swindberg, in the second column. He referred to the Yellow Pages for the church phone numbers, which he printed in the third column. There were dribs and drabs of other churches in town—a liberal United Church of Christ, a fundamentalist Church of Christ, and a mysterious Apostolic Church—but they had tiny congregations, and he didn’t even know their ministers’ names. He thought he’d start with the bigger churches and, if successful, cast his net farther at a later time.

  He considered the roster of names as he doodled along the margins of the pad and sipped wine. In his initial assessment of each man, he drew from his deep well of stereotypical insights, insights he’d often relied on to take the measure of a man; they’d never let him down. Of the clergymen on the list, he knew only one personally—Pastor Brian Metzger. They’d participated in at least two ecumenical services in past Lenten seasons, and Father Tom found him to be affable and pleasant. He had a lovely wife and two college-aged daughters whom Father Tom had met at the services. Metzger was a pillar of the community. He also was a man who seemed to know everyone’s business, an attribute Father Tom thought might prove to be both amusing and useful. He place
d a checkmark next to Metzger’s name.

  He knew nothing of Billy Crump, who had moved to Belle City within the last couple of years to start a church, which he did with great success. Father Tom only learned his name when the question was posed to him in the deanery meeting as to who was shepherding the new feel good-church housed in an abandoned grocery store in Belle City. He was embarrassed not to know, but an old retired priest, who made every meeting to feast on the free sandwiches and yellow cake provided at the meetings and who seemed to know everything, mumbled through his crumbs that the little evangelical bastard’s name was Billy Crump. Father Tom, knowing nothing of Crump’s lineage, shrugged-off the old priest’s comment as hyperbole at the time. But now, going down his list, he reckoned from the priest’s pejorative and the roguish look on Pastor Billy’s face plastered on the billboard at the south end of town that the evangelical might be a sport, and he placed a checkmark next to his name as well.

  Tom drew a line through Jim Dunlevy’s name. He fancied himself a realist and conceded it would require far too much effort to bring him into the fold, particularly when the Baptist heard his scheme, at least as he now envisioned his scheme, and Father Tom knew from practical experience an activity he might consider an innocent amusement likely could strike a hidebound Baptist as frivolous and dissolute or even ungodly.

  Father Tom stared at the list. He was on the fence regarding Donald Northrup. He was acquainted with the man: they were fellow Rotarians the first couple of years Father Tom was in Belle City, until the priest, bored, discouraged by the rampant commercialism of the club, withdrew. In his limited view, Northrup was a throwback, a late nineteenth-century man, who held memberships and offices in nearly every organization or club in town. If Northrup participated, it wouldn’t be long before he tried to wrest control from Father Tom. And he knew other Presbyterians in other towns where he’d served, and if money was to change hands, his prejudices informed him Presbyterians love money too well, and Northrup might be a problem in a nickel-dime card game where hands could easily be bought, and players could be forced to fold by well-heeled players. Nevertheless, he placed a checkmark next to Northrup’s name. He decided to invite him, primarily because Northrup was a stalwart of the Belle City religious and business communities, communities which Presbyterians seemed to view as interchangeable, and might take offense if he wasn’t invited. And besides, Father Tom was confident he would withstand Northrup’s strong personality. Moreover, he considered himself an accomplished poker player, and he licked his chops at the idea of putting some Presbyterian cash into the St. Michael coffers.