The St. Michael Poker & Drinking Club

by Randle, Ned;

  “Forgive me, Christ Jesus, for I have sinned,” he recited out loud. “I am a bad man, a known sinner, a sinner worse than St. Paul and not worthy of your intervention. But it’s not for me that I call on you. It’s for her, and she is good.”

  He held the rosary in his hands and concentrated on the recitation bead by bead, trying to drive all other thoughts out of his mind. He began to fervently pray to the Holy Mother for guidance and asked that she instill in him just half the faith his own mother possessed when she had prayed that he would call after he’d abandoned her, He had called, and she came and saved him. With prayers to Mary, Mother of God, his mind had drifted to his mother and then to women in general and then to the image of Naomi standing in front of the Lutheran church, her soft skirt billowing in the breeze. He didn’t know how to rid his mind of the simulacrum that now stood lewdly at the forefront of his thoughts so he banged his head viciously against the tabletop and reveled in the pain. “Get behind me, Satan!” he shouted.

  “Oh, God,” he prayed aloud again, his head throbbing, “who didst break the chains of blessed Peter the Apostle and didst make him come forth from prison unscathed, loose the bonds of Thy servant, held in captivity by the vice of lust and by the merits of the same Apostle, do thou grant me to be delivered from its tyranny.”

  He knelt in the waning light of the small candle and begged for abnegation of his self-interests, of his sinful feelings. His head ached from striking it against the table, but he still felt Naomi encroaching on his consciousness. He grabbed the willow branch and sat on the floor and beat the soles of his feet with the thickest end of the branch until he thought he was going to piss his pants from the pain, but he held his water and rolled onto his knees, leaned his elbows on the table, and recited another decade of the rosary. Between the nettling pain in his feet and the words of the rosary, he lost all thought of Naomi and began to feel self-satisfied, which he knew was, in itself, another sin, and at his realization that she’d abandoned his thoughts, she returned.

  I sought pleasure, sublimity, and truth not in God but in his creatures.

  He picked up the willow switch and flogged his back. With the switch in his right hand he beat his bare back as hard as he could until he felt fluid trickling down to his waist. He couldn’t tell if it was his heavy sweat or blood or both, and he reached around and ran his finger through a rivulet, touched it to his lips and tasted the metallic taint of blood. He took the switch in his other hand and proceeded to mercilessly whip the skin on the other side of his back to drive out his impure thoughts.

  He also wanted to remove all questions regarding the solidity of his faith through the application of the willow branch. His faith needed to be that of mustard seed, but he stopped flogging himself when the pain nearly robbed him of reason; he couldn’t continue, he knew, if his self-abuse distracted him from his contemplation and inquiry. It was a damning dilemma.

  So intense was his pain and so deep his concentration and so fervent his prayers that he began to hallucinate. Alone in the dark library, he heard raspy voices muttering rough oaths; he felt the jostling of grimy bodies against his own; he felt acrid cigarette smoke curling into his nose; he had the taste of whiskey on his tongue. From across the room, he saw a group of men lazing against the bar which stood in place of the bookshelves, drinks in hand, smirks on their faces.

  “I am Little Shithead, and I can whip any son-of-a-bitch in the place,” he shouted toward the men, but they only laughed and mocked him with obscene movements of their hands.

  You promised no fighting, Tommy, echoed through the room.

  “Mama?”

  No fighting.

  “But I have to.”

  No fighting.

  “It’s different this time.”

  Fighting is fighting.

  “I fight for God, Mama.”

  You’re not fighting for God, Tommy. God did not ask you to take up this fight.

  “You’re right Mama; you’re always right.”

  Then who is it that asks you to break your promise to me?

  “Just a man, like me.”

  Just a man?

  “For his wife.”

  Another man’s wife?

  “Not just for another man’s wife, Mama; for another of God’s creatures.”

  But you promised no fighting.

  “I swear on your grave this is the last time.”

  Is this the last time?

  “Yes, Mama, I promise.”

  That’s Mother’s precious little lamb.

  “Oh Little Therese of the Child Jesus, please pick for me a rose from the heavenly gardens and send it to me as a message of love,” he prayed aloud.

  He rubbed his eyes and shooed the voices and visions from his head and looked about the room to get his bearings. He still was on his knees before the prayer shrine. He tried to lift his arms but couldn’t. He ached physically. His knees and elbows were numb from pain. The welts on his back burned and itched. He ached emotionally, as well. He sat on the floor and felt impotent, felt that his efforts were weak, and that he was not up to the task Theo had asked him to perform. He rebuked himself for his failure to solidify his faith, like Christ’s Disciples in the Book of Matthew. He had the Bible verses in his memory but didn’t trust his memory in such a state.

  He picked up his Bible from the table and turned again to Chapter Seventeen of Matthew and read:

  “Afterward the disciples came to Jesus privately and asked, ‘Why couldn’t we drive it out?’ ‘Because you have so little faith,’ He answered. ‘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 again recognized that such a faith may be small, as small as a mustard seed perhaps, but that small faith must be absolutely solid and not circumscribing any doubt that could make it porous and fragile.

  “Truly I tell you,” he continued reading in the waning candlelight, “if you have faith and do not doubt, not only will you do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will happen.”

  He dropped the Bible on the tabletop and stared at his mother’s photograph.

  Who do you think you are? he heard her say.

  “Tommy. Tommy Abernathy. Mother’s little lamb.”

  But who do you think you are?

  “Father Thomas Abernathy, pastor of St. Michael Catholic Church.”

  But who do you think you are? she asked again, continuing his internal dialectic.

  “Just a man.”

  Why are you even considering this?

  “Because Theo asked me.”

  But why are you considering this?

  “He says I’m an instrument of God.”

  Aren’t we all instruments of God?

  “Yes, we are all instruments of God, Mama, and therefore I’m an instrument of God.”

  Why save her from death? Isn’t the release of her soul to God preferable?

  “Theo needs her to help him through life.”

  Do you love her?

  “Christ said love one another.”

  Do you love her?

  “There are many types of love.”

  Do you love her?

  “Yes.”

  Is that why you’re willing to do this?

  “I want to save her.”

  For Theo?

  “Yes.”

  Or for you?

  “For God. She is one of God’s most perfect creatures. God will save her through me.”

  But who do you think you are?

  “Just a man who loves one of God’s most perfect creatures.”

  You will save her even if you can’t have her?

  “Because I can’t have her.�
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  You will save her even if you can’t have her?

  “I will save her because I can’t have her; and when I save her, I’ll never look at her again. I will never again think of her in any way.”

  Then why save her?

  “When I save her, I’ll know the world is more beautiful because she’s in it, even though I’ll never look upon her beauty again.”

  Who do you think you are?

  “I am merely a man, yet an instrument of God.”

  How strong is your faith?

  “Strong enough to save her.”

  But how strong is that faith?

  “My faith is like that of a mustard seed.”

  It was with this thought he nodded off to sleep, exhausted from the rigors of contemplation and fervent prayer and flogging. He woke with his head resting on the tabletop. A shard of sunlight slipping through a gap in the curtain panels settled near his cheek. He raised up slowly; he was cramped and stiff. His knees and elbows ached, and he had a pounding headache. His back burned and itched. His prayer books were scattered across the tabletop. He rested his head in his hands and conjured up the previous night, how he had prayed, and the hallucinations which indicated what God had decided for him. He eased up from the floor and limped on sore feet to the telephone on his desk. He connected the phone jack and dialed St. Paul’s parsonage.

  “I’ll do what you asked me to do,” he said when Theo answered, “but only if I can do it alone, with no interference. And you can’t question my methods. Also, we must give each other our solemn promise we won’t tell a soul.”

  “As you require, Father,” Theo responded. And after a short pause, he added, “You are the instrument of God.”

  Tom winced at his last remark, a remark which caused his back to sweat and smart as if freshly flogged by the willow switch. Yet he accepted the remark without comment. He needed to accept it with unquestioned faith. If he had any doubt whatsoever, all would be lost.

  “We’ll begin tomorrow afternoon.”

  He next placed a call to the bishop’s office but got no answer. He left a message on the secretary’s answering machine, instructing the secretary to tell the bishop he needed to take a short leave of absence and that the bishop needed to find a temporary replacement for St. Michael. He could be gone a couple days or as much as a week, beginning today. He provided no further explanation, hung up, and disconnected the phone line.

  Perhaps he did have faith like a mustard seed, he reasoned, but he had little faith that the bishop would respond fairly to his message. Since being named bishop of the diocese, the man had displayed a capricious and arbitrary turn of mind, even in small matters. In large matters, he could be petty and demanding, favoring those who displayed obsequious fealty and ignoring those with an independent approach to priestly duties. Despite his many years of dedication to his parishes, Father Tom had been passed over for Monsignor several times for reasons he could attribute to nothing other than having earned the bishop’s disfavor. Now, in view of his commission from Theo, he wasn’t concerned about the bishop’s favor or his obsession with hierarchy and protocol. Nor was he concerned about the ramifications of leaving St. Michael without an explanation. He understood, under the circumstances, a temporary replacement at St. Michael could turn out to be permanent if the bishop decided to retaliate, which he was prone to do, but Father Tom believed the stakes were too high to worry about what his disappearance from St. Michael for a few days might mean to his middling career.

  Father Tom went upstairs to take a shower. Naked, he stepped into the bathtub and turned his head to look at his reflection in the big mirror over the sink. He stared for a minute at the welts and cuts and blood on his back.

  Ecce homo.

  After he showered, he donned his pajamas, put a few pairs of clean briefs, two T-shirts, and his toiletries in his grip. He would pack more accoutrements before he left for Theo’s. And although it was only mid-morning, he pulled down the window shades and darkened his room and went to bed. He knew he needed to rest; he didn’t know after today when he would sleep again.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Father Tom called a cab to take him to the Lutheran parsonage. When they pulled up to the curb, he saw Theo peeking through the front window blinds. He got out of the cab as quickly as his sore legs allowed and paid the driver. He knew Theo would be skittish and uncomfortable having a priest in front of his house in broad daylight, dressed in a soutane, band cincture, and Roman collar, and he didn’t want to make the poor man any more uncomfortable, so he jogged up the sidewalk to the parsonage as quickly as he could.

  Once inside the house, Theo led Father Tom to the master bedroom where Naomi lay in a hospital bed provided by the hospice service. He found the room warm and stale, and he began to sweat under his soutane, causing the welts on his back to smart as if fresh. A good sign, he thought, a good reminder. The only aspect of cheeriness in the room was the late morning sun shining through an east window. He told Theo to leave the room and lock the door behind him. He warned him to not interfere, no matter what, and to stay out unless called for.

  Once Theo left the room, Father Tom walked over and lowered the window shade, leaving the room dimly lit by seeping yellow light. He looked around and saw the room was well suited to his purposes. It was intimate and clean, and there was a comfortable side chair adjacent the hospital bed and an adjoining bathroom for his personal needs. He stood quietly next to the bed and listened. He could hear Naomi’s shallow breathing, very likely slowed by morphine drops, liberally dosed by the hospice nurse, as he’d seen in other cases, ostensibly to relieve discomfort but also to augment the natural, sometimes reluctant, pace of death. Naomi’s skin had the beeswax color of the living dead. Her hands were outside the sheet, and he saw they were thin and veiny but beautifully manicured. The nail beds had begun to turn blue.

  Death used a varied palette, and he had seen its work before: the mottled gray of the old dead, the saffron-skinned cirrhotic, the cherry red faces of the sweet family of five who’d died in their sleep from a faulty furnace flue. One of the worst he’d seen was early in his priesthood, back in the 1980s, when a distraught wife asked him to say a funeral Mass for her husband, an accountant named Ferguson who’d hanged himself. By the time they’d cut him down from the garage rafters, he was as purple as a plum, and no amount of mortician’s makeup could make him sufficiently presentable for an open casket. He’d said Mass for Ferguson and prayed for the repose of his soul, which was not routinely done for a suicide in those days, and for the first time, he’d incurred the disapprobation of the diocesan hierarchy. That act, along with subsequent others, earned him the reputation as a maverick, and he maintained a reputation among succeeding bishops as a priest to keep one’s eyes on.

  Now his eyes were on Naomi. He could see she’d been prepared for him. The hospice worker, who’d left just before he’d arrived with instructions not to return until called, had given her a sponge bath and washed her hair, which was still damp and brushed straight back away from her face. She had faint, pleasant odors of soap and shampoo about her. Her eyes were closed, and she appeared insentient, much as he’d anticipated. She was covered to her neck with a sheet, and her citrine cheeks were crisscrossed by prominent blue veins which gave her face a pale yellow-blue cast. Under the sheet her arms were crossed on her chest, like a corpse. Father Tom observed that her arms were quite thin, and he also could see the outline of her knees under the sheet. She was much thinner than the last time he’d seen her standing in front of St. Paul’s. Yet, despite the wasting and discoloration, he still thought her lovely, and at the thought of her loveliness, he felt the burn and prickle of the welts and wheals on his back, and he easily shoved the thought from his head and prepared for his work.

  He opened his grip and looked at the items he’d piled on top of his underwear that morning. He had packed his Bible, the copy of Anointing and Pastoral Car
e, his rosary, the St. Rita medal, the Virgin Mary statue, a glass vial of olive oil, and a small, plastic bottle embossed with the words “Holy Water” in gold paint. He carefully placed his books and icons on the bedside table. Next, he lifted out a silver aspersorium and an aspergillum. Finally, he took out a clean T-shirt which was wrapped around a full bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey, two bottles of drinking water, three packages of beef jerky, and four Almond Joy candy bars and set them in a neat arrangement on the dresser top. Once he had all accoutrements in place, he sat in the side chair and contemplated Naomi and her tenuous hold on life.

  After about ten minutes of staring, he took the vial of oil in his hand to warm it, opened it, poured a dollop on his thumb, and anointed her forehead with the sign of the cross. He then recited the older, shorter prayer for the anointing of the sick he held in his memory: “May the Lord who freed you from sin heal you and extend his saving grace to you. Amen.”

  Dissatisfied with the brevity of his prayer, he picked up the copy of Anointing and Pastoral Care of the Sick, opened it to a marked page, placed his oily thumb on her forehead, and read aloud, “Lord God, all-comforting Father, you brought healing to the sick through your Son Jesus Christ. Hear us as we pray to you in faith and send the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, from heaven upon this oil, which nature has provided to serve the needs of men.”

  Naomi didn’t move under his touch nor respond to his voice. Her face was impassive, and her breathing remained shallow and labored. He stood at the bedside holding the bottle of oil, considering her shaky hold on life, and contemplated performing the Sacrament of Extreme Unction. But he wavered. Extreme Unction was a sacrament for Catholics, not Lutherans. Moreover, performing the rite was not what Theo had asked him to do. Although he understood the commission Theo charged him with, he also considered his obligation to Naomi and her immortal soul. He finally concluded that performing the sacrament might be a concession to the power of death, a pre-emptive admission his faith was porous and weak, so he put the vial of oil back in his grip and resolved it would not be needed.