The St. Michael Poker & Drinking Club

by Randle, Ned;

  “Do you like the roses?” he asked Cat in a near whisper. “Roses were my mother’s favorite flower. She grew roses in our backyard. Red roses were her favorites.

  “There’s an old song, ‘Red Roses for a Blue Lady.’ When I was a kid, she had a record by Vaughn Monroe and she’d play it on the record player and sing along. She also used to sing it when she was working in the rose garden. A capella. She had a lovely voice, but she’d butcher the lyrics when she didn’t have the record playing. Funny, the things that came out of her mouth. Anyway, the woman loved roses.”

  Tom sat silently watching the sun go down. He scanned the heavens, knowing at this time of year Sagittarius set at sunset. Did he really want to see Sagittarius set?

  “Got a call from Theo Swindberg today,” he said toward the dead cat. “Wants me to pray for his wife. Can you believe that? Me, praying for Naomi Swindberg. I’ve often prayed about Naomi Swindberg but not for her. Well, that’s not quite true; I’ve been praying for her and Theo since he first told me she was sick, but now he really wants me to pray for her. To heal her. I don’t know what to do, Cat. Don’t know if I can do it,” he added, exhibiting a malignant uncertainty of which the weak spirited are prone.

  “Why don’t people want to die where they should and when they’re supposed to anymore? You know how many parishioners I’ve had over the last ten years or so who’ve refused to accept the inevitability of their deaths? They traipse off to the Mayo Clinic or MD Anderson or some such place looking for a miracle cure and they die anyway, in a strange place, away from home. Seems to me they’d be better off if they’d just stay home and die in their own time, in their own beds, where their parish priest can perform the proper rites.”

  He sat in the twilight, sipping his wine.

  “Their last exercise of free will, I assume,” he finally said. “You understand that; cats have free will.”

  He grew pensive and contrite. “I suppose that’s not a charitable way to feel on my part. Selfish. But if I pray for Naomi Swindberg, that would be selfish.”

  He took a last swallow of wine and held up his wine glass to reflect the last rays of the disappearing sun. “Shall I pray to have this cup removed from me, Cat?”

  He set the glass in the dirt at the margin of the rose garden. Slowly, he felt his old anger rise as he contemplated Theo’s request. Or was it a demand? A challenge to the primacy of the Mother Church? An invitation to failure? Or, was Theo asking him to atone for his own stuffy self-righteousness that invited God’s retribution? As he sat there sweating in the warm evening air, he began to see the skinny Lutheran, along with his lovely wife, as a bane. Was Theo testing his faith? On whose authority? Who the hell does Theo Swindberg think he is that he can put me to the test, me a priest with almost twenty-five years’ service to the Lord? Bastard. He grabbed his wine glass and threw it against the trunk of the willow tree, shattering it and sending shards of glass into the grass under the willow branches.

  It was nearly dark. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled around in the grass, picking up the pieces. He put his palm down on a sharp piece and cut the skin. His palm bled and he held it up in the twilight and asked aloud, “Stigmata?” He laughed at his irreverence. He cursed Theo again, and then pulled himself up, walked to the alley, and dropped the broken glass into the trash can before returning to the rectory in the dark.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Back in the rectory, Father Tom’s face was beaded with a funky sweat induced by the warmth of the evening and the heat of his ire. He went into the kitchen, pulled a paper towel from the roll, blotted the blood from the palm of his hand, and wiped the sweat from his face and head. Back in his study, he flopped down in a side chair, wiped his brow again with the paper towel, and stared obliquely at the bookshelves. He was troubled.

  Although he believed in the salutary effect of prayer on the sick, he was a skeptic in regards to faith healing. Prayer, he knew, could give the ill strength of spirit to bear their illness and its inevitabilities, but proponents of faith healing avowed complete cures, and he wasn’t sure if he believed their claims. Or had mastered their techniques. He was aware of the bevy of well-known faith healing priests—Richard McAlear, Hugh Thwaites, Andrew Apostoli—but he knew none of them personally and had no way to seek their counsel. And according to Theo, he had no time to make a trip to visit one of these priests before deciding what to do.

  Father Tom got out of his chair, walked over and stood in front of the bookshelves. When he’d moved into the rectory, he’d conducted a brief inventory of the volumes left on the shelves by priests who’d lived in the house before him. He’d added a few of his own books to the collection. He looked over the titles until he located his copy of Anointing and Pastoral Care, a study text he’d owned since his days in the seminary but had consulted only a few times as a parish priest, believing as a practical priest, proper pastoral care of the sick was a practical art, often a matter of common sense and common compassion. He didn’t feel ministration to the sick a proper subject of pedagogy. Nevertheless, he took the text from the shelf and held it in his hand as he continued to peruse the book titles.

  He found, on the bottom shelf next to collection of books by Bishop Fulton Sheen, an array of books covering subjects generally associated with the black arts, mysticism, and charismatic practices. Looking over the dusty spines he saw volumes dedicated to paganism, witchcraft, possessions, exorcisms, and mystic practices of every ilk. He ran his fingers through the accumulated dirt on several titles attributed to Edgar Cayce and assumed from the period graphics on the dustcovers that the priest who’d donated them to the rectory library probably procured them sometime shortly after the double-barrel blast of the Vietnam War and the Nixon presidency crippled his faith in God’s good guiding hand in the affairs of man. Perhaps the priest who read Cayce began looking outside the Mother Church for reassurances and took some comfort from the nebulous concepts of clairvoyance, reincarnation, and karma.

  Father Tom moved past the Cayce bibliotheca and pulled from the shelf a book entitled Healing by Francis MacNutt. He stared at the author’s photograph on the cover and tried to recall if he’d ever heard of the man before but didn’t think he had. Had he heard of a man named MacNutt, he likely would have remembered him, he reasoned and, as he was wont to do when he was under stress, his sense of humor took a dark turn and he wondered if his name, MacNutt, considering the subject matter, was in some way eponymous or simply a happy coincidence.

  He took both the MacNutt book and Anointing and Pastoral Care to his desk, turned on the desk lamp, and sat down to read the notes on MacNutt’s book jacket. MacNutt was billed (or billed himself, Tom figured with cynicism) as an expert in the healing ministry. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1956 but married in 1980. The notes were sketchy, and Father Tom reckoned somewhere between his ordination and his marriage some event took place that caused MacNutt to leave the priesthood, casting some doubt on his bona fides. Nevertheless, he turned to the table of contents, and with Theo’s comment that his faith was wavering fresh in his mind, Tom’s eyes were drawn to a section heading devoted to the issue of faith, including the faith to be healed and the mystery of faith.

  He skimmed through the pages dedicated to issues of faith and found them unsatisfying. MacNutt, in his opinion, focused too much on the faith of the subject and whether the subject had sufficient faith to be healed. Father Tom believed Naomi must have sufficient faith to be healed, if her faith was required, but she likely was insentient at this point and wouldn’t be an active party to any faith healing. On the other hand, Theo, as her surrogate, had great faith that she could be healed but lacked sufficient faith in himself to mediate the healing. For that task, Theo wanted him, Father Thomas Abernathy, a poker playing priest near the end of his career. Father Tom wondered if the stress of Naomi’s terminal illness, along with his inherent anxiety and morose worldview, had addled Pastor Swindberg’s mind. />
  Nonetheless, Father Tom had not refused Theo’s request out of hand, which, he conceded, said something about his own mental status. He questioned his own motives for even considering the request. Did he leave the door open because he wanted to spend Naomi’s last days at her bedside, praying disingenuous prayers, sharing her last gasps of life with her husband? He shook his head to rid himself of the thoughts, which were, he knew, both melodramatic and morbid. Not to mention covetous and sinful.

  He had MacNutt’s book in hand and his finger between the pages, so be began to read the section dedicated to the issue of the faith of the healer, rather than the healed, but found the text unsatisfying. It begged the question: what faith is sufficient? If he were to accede to Theo’s request, and if faith healing were to be effective, it only would be so if his faith were unassailable and powerful enough to prompt God to affect the great harmonic sufficiently to reverse the course of her disease. That was a pretty tall order, and he again couldn’t believe he was considering it.

  But he was.

  Closing MacNutt’s book on his lap, Father Tom decided to look at the question of the sufficiency of his faith in the same practical way he’d looked at other issues over the years of his priesthood. He recognized the issue had two aspects: the amount of faith he held in his heart and the strength of that faith. Even if he had wholehearted faith that he could heal Naomi through his intervention as an instrument of God, as Theo referred to him, he still was troubled. He needed his faith in the healing power of prayer, through the Holy Trinity, and ultimately through himself, to be above reproach, and he conceded it was not.

  Theo’s comment, “My love for her doesn’t let me fully realize my faith” was uppermost in his mind, and it flummoxed him. Just thinking of Naomi, just hearing her name, revved his pulse, causing a tightness in his chest that robbed him of his breath, forcing him to pant to take in air, and it had been that way since the first time he saw her in front of St. Paul’s. But Theo’s implication was another matter. It compounded his distress, particularly in view of the fact he was actually considering Theo’s request. Alone in his study, he concentrated on his breathing, trying to push Theo’s comment and his own feelings for Naomi out of his mind. His respirations slowed along with his heart rate. In a state of quietude, he admitted to himself that if he was going to help Naomi, he had to squelch all feelings for her. If not, he could not, as Theo could not, fully realize his faith.

  Tom placed MacNutt’s book on the corner of his desk. He walked across the study, picked up the end table that sat next to the wingback chair, carried it to the middle of the study, and set it down about three feet away from the bookshelves. He closed the window curtains, went back to his desk, and disconnected the telephone. He trundled upstairs to his bedroom, unplugged his bedside telephone, turned to his dresser where he took his pocket knife from the drawer and slipped it in his trouser pocket. He then picked up a neatly folded cloth from the drawer and carefully unfolded it on the palm of his hand, exposing a medal about the size of a quarter. He rubbed his thumb across the medal, which bore a relief of St. Rita of Cascia, patron saint of the impossible. It was an icon he’d carried in his pocket every day during his years at the seminary and one which he’d retired to one of his mother’s hankies upon his ordination in honor of completing a task he’d viewed, at one time, as impossible for a man of his background and temperament.

  Back downstairs in the library, he placed a votive candle, the St. Rita medal, a rosary, the photograph of his mother, his Bible, and the Virgin Mary statue on the end table. He went out the back door and walked through the darkness past Cat’s grave, where he made the sign of the cross, to the willow tree where, amid the mass of dangling branches, he could barely make out the arrangements of the stars overhead. He took out his pocket knife and felt around among the branches until he found one to his liking. He cut off a section about four feet long and about as big around as his little finger and used his knife to strip it bare, letting the leaves and bark fall in the grass under the tree.

  Back inside the rectory, he placed the willow switch on the floor next to the table, locked the backdoor, lit the votive candle, and turned off all the lights, leaving the study sparsely lit by a flickering flame. The room was warm and stuffy. He took off his shoes and socks and stripped to the waist, tossing his dress shirt and T-shirt into the corner. He knelt before the table and faced the bookshelves. In an amorphous pool of yellow candlelight, he prayed.

  He admitted, in his opening prayer, that he wasn’t properly prepared, in a classical sense, to effect the healing of Naomi Swindberg through prayerful intervention. What he confessed was true. He’d had no education or training in the process; his area of formal study had been Pastoral Theology, and little of his coursework was relevant to the present problem. Prayers for health and healing were a routine service offered by all priests, but intense concentration on the healing of a damaged human was the purpose of a healing novena, he reasoned, and sending a sick parishioner to a novena was the pastoral equivalent of a family practice doctor referring a patient to a specialist.

  Nevertheless, Theo had given him a commission, he prayed, but he’d not yet agreed to take on the task and he was praying for guidance. Or perhaps a sign. He began earnest contemplation by reciting aloud an Our Father and a Hail Mary and then another Our Father. It occurred to him, as he recited the second Our Father, that the first thing he needed to do was clarify in his mind the genesis of Naomi’s affliction so he could focus on the proper approach if he acceded to Theo’s request. Determining the approach might help him decide whether he should even get involved. He admitted it was a tail-wagging-the-dog approach, but he was empty of ideas. So he cleared his mind of all thoughts and listened to the voice of his heart. After at least an hour of deep contemplation, the voice kept calling him back to the saving grace of Jesus Christ, but he wasn’t sure if that was merely an artifact of Christian dogma or a genuine guiding voice.

  Still, he plodded on. Surely, despite her bodily affliction Naomi was held gently in Christ’s good graces. In light of such grace, he concluded, Naomi’s illness could not be the work of the Devil, so an exorcism was not warranted. Neither was her cancer divine retribution for some personal sin, nor God’s method of disciplining her, conclusions which negated the dogmatists’ and fundamentalists’ arguments as to the cause of her cancer which plagued him as he prayed. What it was, he finally concluded, was simply an unhappy accident of nature, a biological or genetic time bomb, randomly planted in her otherwise perfect body at birth, that finally exploded, sending its murderous shrapnel into all her vital organs.

  This, his heart told him, was most certainly true.

  But what was to be done for her? His heart told him he had the answer, he just had to find it. He considered the question for another hour or so, until his head pounded and his body stunk in the heat of the study. If, as he fervently believed, God made man, God can rectify any defects in a man, genetic or biological or accidental, if one could move Him to do so, without putting Him to the test. Tom saw his clear path: he would, if he determined he could, beseech God to heal her with complete faith that He will heal her, not to prove anything to him or to Theo about the nature of God, but only because she, as one of God’s finest creatures, deserved healing.

  Once he settled on the proper path, he again questioned whether or not he should be the one to go down the path. He opened his Bible, and by the flickering candlelight, turned the pages until he found Matthew 17:31, which he read aloud: “For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” He questioned whether his faith was sufficient, like that of the mustard seed, sufficiently strong to move the mountain Theo had asked him to move.

  He understood the conventional teaching of the parable, yet he knew there had to be more to it. At times, Christ could be subtle. He wanted to di
vine the subtler meaning of scripture as instructed by Augustine. He closed his eyes and visualized the mustard seed itself: small, hard, spherical, with the beeswax hue of a dead body. He intently concentrated on the image of the seed, praying that the inherent quality of faith would leap out at him. He lost track of time. He was sweating and thirsty but vowed he’d not take a drink until Christ opened his eyes. His knees ached from kneeling on the floor, and his back and shoulders were sore from hunching over the table in prayer. The votive candle was nearly sputtered out. He doubted himself and considered it folly, at his age, to punish himself in this manner. He considered getting up from the floor and calling Theo to tell him to find another man. But as felt the hard surface of the table under his elbows, it came to him: the mustard seed is small, but hard and solid. Even though it is small, faith like the mustard seed is hard and solid, with no interstices in which doubt or the Devil could hide.

  Once he was satisfied with his divination of the subtle meaning of the mustard seed parable, he next needed to determine if he possessed such faith, hard and solid though small, that would warrant agreeing to Theo’s request. If he prayed fervently enough, he assumed Christ would disclose the strength of his faith the same way he disclosed the inherent mystery of the mustard seed.