Morte D'Urban

by J.F. Powers

Father Urban nodded. “Yes, I know. I’ve been here once or twice before.” In fact, he had been there many times, and was known there even before he met Billy, who, however, was the only one of his hosts ever to urge him to make use of his account. Father Urban had done so on occasion, but this was the first time he had brought along a guest. The idea had been to give Jack something to remember in their exile. Father Urban was beginning to wonder, though, if his guest wouldn’t have been happier in a cafeteria.

  Jack flinched and drew back when a Turk passed with a piece of meat on a flaming sword. “You’d think they’d do that in the kitchen.”

  “Oh, that’s all part of coming here,” said Father Urban. He drained his glass, and the waiter was there to fill it up.

  “Maybe you could pay us a little visit when you’re through in St Paul,” Jack said. “At Duesterhaus.”

  Father Urban hesitated. No, he wasn’t ready to go into that. “I might,” he said. “Drink up.”

  Jack raised his full glass and downed it all. He seemed to forget all about his glass until the waiter came to fill Father Urban’s. “Save you a trip,” he said to the waiter.

  “You shouldn’t bolt your food,” said Father Urban.

  The waiter filled Jack’s glass and moved away.

  Before they finished the lamb, they were working on a second bottle of champagne, and Father Urban was passing into another phase. He was almost ready to be delivered of his secret. It could be a minor operation, only a few painful moments, and these under a light anesthesia of wine. Jack took people at their best and would see that Father Urban had been in a state of shock when the misunderstanding arose. Jack might not be hurt at all. In any event, he had to be told. Otherwise, their first meeting at Duesterhaus would be an ordeal. Jack would recall to the end of his days how the two of them had sat in the Pump Room enjoying what they’d thought was a farewell party, when all the time . . .

  “Lamb,” Jack said, going deeper into a matter that hadn’t interested Father Urban earlier. “We know Our Lord ate lamb.”

  Father Urban gazed around the handsome room. A man nodded to him. Father Urban nodded back and murmured, “Hello.”

  “Friend?” said Jack.

  “Apparently.”

  “If what we’re eating now . . .”

  “Shish kebab.”

  “If this has always been considered a great delicacy throughout the Middle East, as you say, I think it’s quite possible Our Lord could have eaten it at some time. We know Our Lord participated in at least one wedding feast, that of the poor couple who ran out of wine. Let’s hope they weren’t so poor they couldn’t afford meat, mutton if not lamb. I daresay lamb wasn’t so dear in those days. But there were a number of occasions when Our Lord dined with the rich and well-to-do—Pharisees and the like.”

  “I didn’t say Our Lord hadn’t eaten shish kebab. I only said I didn’t know,” said Father Urban, thinking they’d have some fine evenings together.

  The waiter filled Father Urban’s glass.

  Jack, again confronted by his full one, downed it all. “Save you a trip.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that,” Father Urban said, regarding Jack with suspicion. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Urban, I would, if you don’t mind.”

  “Shouldn’t drink so much.”

  “No.”

  “You can’t handle it.”

  “No, and I’ve never cared for it—not that this isn’t very good wine. One of the hardest things about the priesthood for me—the wine.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” Father Urban knew why, though. Jack had been trying to keep his end up.

  A little while later Jack said, “Why not pay us a little visit while you’re up that way?” Jack had shown signs of drowsiness before, but now, not waiting for Father Urban to reply, he closed his eyes and dropped off. Poor Jack!

  Whether Father Urban would have evaded the question again and left Jack with his illusion, or whether he would have sacrificed it to the truth, he didn’t know. He did know that the choice was no longer his, and that their next meeting was going to be much harder than it might have been for him. He would have to pay for misleading Jack into thinking too well of him, but not pay too much, perhaps, when one considered the high cost of fellowship to the author of “Danger Ahead!” Jack, as he must have done on a thousand and one nights, sitting up in a day coach to save money, was weaving in sleep, banking as the train took a curve.

  Father Urban shook him gently with one hand, and with the other he hailed a blackamoor coffee boy.

  2. A GRAND PLACE, THIS

  AFTER THE FIRST night of the mission in St Paul, the only question was whether the floor of the old church would hold up for the duration, so great were the crowds. Unfortunately, the pastor wasn’t on hand to see them. But the first assistant, who said he knew the boss’s every wish, seriously considered calling him in Hot Springs to urge him to fly home a few days early, in time to hear Father Urban. That was how the first assistant felt about Father Urban. And the second assistant, who belonged to what the first assistant said was an old St Paul family, kept taking Father Urban out to eat. They went to the best restaurants in the Twin Cities, and in the end Father Urban awarded the palm to the Criterion. As for the people—they gave as good as they got, and were, as Father Urban told them, wonderful. The first assistant was wonderful. The second assistant was wonderful. It was that kind of mission, Father Urban’s last mission, and he went out like a champion.

  On the final night, after the solemn closing, the assistants threw a party for Father Urban in the rectory. With plenty to drink, snacks provided by a caterer of imagination, and with none of the company much over thirty (except Father Urban), and no laymen present, it was a pretty lively affair. Father Urban was very favorably impressed by the quality of the St Paul clergy. Along about midnight, however, somebody turned up the volume on the hi-fi and there were other indications that the party might get rough. Father Urban was asked whether it wasn’t possible for preaching, even good preaching, to defeat its own purpose.

  “Ah, ha!” he said.

  “I’m not talking about Billy Graham, or Fulton Sheen.”

  “You’re talking about me.”

  “Well, yes, Father.”

  First Father Urban threw them a curve by putting in a good word for Billy Graham, and then he said, “I’ll answer your question by telling you a little story.” Somebody groaned. “All right. Then I won’t. I’ll give it to you straight. The big miracles happen—or they don’t—after I’m gone. That’s all there is to it. It’s up to you.”

  “It’s up to us.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “After you’re gone.”

  “Yes.” That, said Father Urban, was when the real work began, the long haul. That was when they could be thankful they were what they were—priests of the order of Melchisedech, with the sacraments, the wisdom, the power, and the glory of the Church behind them. Oh, the task that Father Urban set them was great, of course it was, but it was not too great—not for them. After all, it was not required that they succeed, but only that they do their best. Father Urban said he sometimes thought there were those who considered this too much. “I may be wrong.”

  By their silence, the young men showed that he might be right. Yes, they seemed to say, they saw what he meant, and it wasn’t too much to ask of them. “Sometimes, though”—this from one of them—“don’t the people get all hopped up?”

  Father Urban let it appear that he was temporarily at a loss for words, which was not the case, for he had been over this ground before, on many such occasions. The trick was in making it seem that each time was the first time. “Hopped up? Has anything ever been achieved in this world except by people hopped up? Salvation least of all! Our Lord said, ‘Go, and teach ye all nations.’ He did not say, ‘Go, and have ye a beer.’ Oh, I know what you’re driving at, but I think anybody who’s ever seen me work will tell you I preach a pretty clean mission. I
keep the razzmatazz to a minimum.”

  “That’s true,” said the second assistant.

  “Yes, and that’s why I can’t understand it,” said the first assistant.

  “But you know,” said Father Urban, easing up and smiling, “I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t preach and conduct myself in such a criminal manner that the local clergy would seem like living saints to their parishioners! Maybe that’s the answer to your question! If so, it opens up a whole new field!”

  In one way or another, the young men applauded Father Urban, and he, thinking he wouldn’t do much better than that, got up and bade them all good night. They wouldn’t let him retire, however, until he’d given them each his blessing, and then three of them followed him to the foot of the stairs, one asking where he was off to next. For Father Urban this was the hardest question of the evening. Early in the week, with everything going so well, in church and out, he had decided to say nothing about his next stop. He had met a lot of people in St Paul, and yet not one of them, though they all knew he was a Clementine, had so much as mentioned the foundation at Duesterhaus. This had shown him how much of a splash the Order was making in Minnesota and had made what was happening to him seem even more of a comedown. So he just smiled now and said, in the words of St Paul, “God knows,” and got the hell upstairs.

  The next morning, after saying the early Mass, he took a taxi to the station and boarded one of the few passenger trains still in operation on the Minnesota Central, the Voyageur, or Voyager, as it was called.

  The country beyond Minneapolis seemed awfully empty to him, flat and treeless, Illinois without people. It didn’t attract, it didn’t repel. He saw more streams than he’d see in Illinois, but they weren’t working. November was winter here. Too many white frame farmhouses, not new and not old, not at all what Father Urban would care to come home to for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Rusty implements. Brown dirt. Gray skies. Ice. No snow. A great deal of talk about this on the train. Father Urban dropped entirely out of it after an hour or so.

  The Voyageur arrived in Duesterhaus a few minutes before eleven that morning, and Father Urban was the only passenger to get off. Since the Order’s new foundation was not in but near the town, he went into the station to ask about a taxi, rather doubting that there would be one in such a place as Duesterhaus appeared to be. The station agent, writing at his desk, seemed unaware of him. An old dog lying behind the counter woke up and gave him a look that said, Can’t you see he’s working on his report?

  “I’d like to call a taxi, if I may,” said Father Urban, giving the town the benefit of a doubt, and then he waited.

  Presently the agent got up and came to the counter. He pushed the telephone at Father Urban and tossed him a thin directory. “Cost you a dime to call,” he said.

  The dog opened its eyes, as if it wanted to see how Father Urban would take the bad news.

  Father Urban put a dime on the counter.

  The dog closed its eyes.

  “Under Herman,” said the agent, going back to his desk.

  The directory was for Olympe, the nearest town of any size, but Father Urban discovered the Duesterhaus numbers in the back pages. “Herman’s Hardware is all I find here.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s it.”

  A woman answered the phone at Herman’s and said he’d have to wait awhile. He told her who he was and where he wished to go, thinking this might help, but it didn’t. (The woman had to mind the store, and her husband, besides being in the hardware and taxi business, was also an undertaker, she said, and as such would be occupied for the next hour.) Father Urban put another dime on the counter and called the Order of St Clement—the foundation was so listed in the directory. He hadn’t done this before because he preferred to arrive under his own power. There was no answer. He picked up the dime.

  “How far is it out to the Order of St Clement?” he asked the agent.

  “The Home? About a mile.”

  Father Urban felt that they were talking about the same place, but that the agent was trying to be difficult. “Like to leave my luggage and call for it later.”

  “We can’t be responsible.”

  “I understand.” Father Urban went over to his traveling bag and attaché case, intending to carry them back to the agent for safekeeping.

  “Leave ’em there. As safe there as anywhere.”

  Father Urban moved the pieces away from the door. Then he decided to take the attaché case with him, remembering that a dog had once wet on it in Pittsburgh. He asked the way to his destination, this time referring to it simply as “St Clement’s.”

  “The Home?”

  “Have it your way.”

  “To the stoplight, and turn right.”

  “Much obliged,” said Father Urban, wondering what ailed the man and thinking that if this was how the town welcomed a priest there was plenty of work to do there.

  Duesterhaus was a one-stoplight town. New and old yellow lines ran at cross purposes on the pavement, marking a recent change from diagonal to parallel parking. The main street was a state highway. The drugstore was the bus station.

  Father Urban came to the stoplight and was in no doubt that he should turn right. Here, however, an old yokel in overalls stared with such curiosity that Father Urban, as a favor to him, asked the way out to the Order of St Clement’s place.

  “Better ask inside, Reverend.”

  Father Urban nodded and kept going. He wasn’t—whatever the old fool might think—afraid to enter a tavern, but he didn’t have to prove it to himself or anyone else. Dear God, the situations you could find yourself in! What he needed was a peg or two from the silver flask in his attaché case. On second thought, that was not what he needed. Many a good city man had gone down that drain. Yes, and even worse fates, it was said, could overtake a city man in desolation—women, insanity, decay.

  He passed a cemetery, Protestant. Father along the road, he saw a rabbit take off into the cornstalks. It would be something, he thought, if he could learn the ways and habits of animals, could read their tracks in the snow, could tell the flowers and trees by their leaves, the birds by their eggs—“So you thought this was an owl egg, did you, Johnny?”—and could take more of an interest in the weather, too. He had read that there were subtle pleasures to be had from all this. Perhaps. Too bad he couldn’t begin then by enjoying his hike. The wind was getting to him, though. He wasn’t dressed for the great outdoors, and to walk faster, he felt, might be an invitation to the invisible dogs barking the news of his coming from farm to farm. What if he had to run for it? Wouldn’t it be better to stand his ground and beat them off with his attaché case until help arrived? Too late. Hounds. Mastiffs. Dead, perhaps eaten. Anything could happen here.

  What if, when he reached the summit of the long rise he was climbing, there was still nothing? What if the station agent had lied to him? That would be going pretty far, yes, but from what he’d seen of the agent, it wasn’t out of the question, and later the man would simply deny everything. You turned right? I said left. The joke would be on the stranger. The dog would laugh. No other witnesses. No recourse. Father Urban trudged on, almost resigned to the idea that he’d been betrayed by the first man he’d met in Duesterhaus.

  And then he was standing still on top of the long hill, looking down, seeing what he had finally come to. About fifty yards up from the shore line of a frozen lake (the other end of which he had seen in Duesterhaus and then lost sight of and forgotten) stood two sizable structures, one an ornate old mansion of gray stones, mansard roof, and a heavy brown beard of vines, the other a long, low red-brick affair, the obvious product of fairly recent times. They were as different in their architecture as a steam packet and an ore boat. Sheds and cribs and coops seemed to stir at their moorings whenever the wind blew hard, and perhaps some of them did. Chickens and pigs might have figured in the economy of the place at one time. There was no telling what did now. There was no sign of life.

  A board bore the legend ORDE
R OF SAINT CLEMENT in green paint. The lettering was sharp and elegant, worthy of a tombstone, but the colors, green on cream, didn’t do much for each other, and the sign, besides being nailed to a tree, had been peppered with shot, so that the over-all effect was rather like FRESH EGGS FOR SALE.

  He left the blacktop road for the dirt one leading down. Under closer scrutiny, the low red-brick building appeared to be unoccupied. He heard a cracking noise—the first suggestion of life about the place—and went in the direction of it. In a field, at some distance from him, a muffled figure was moving slowly through the dead grass and weeds, through the haze. Father Urban coughed. The figure, that of a man, rounded on him. When Father Urban saw the gun, a rifle, he feared for his life, thinking this was some half-witted yokel—who, having been given hunting privileges, and having killed a stranger, would get off scot free at the inquest.

  “Never do that,” the man called out.

  “Hello, Wilf. I wouldn’t have known you.”

  “Game make a noise like that sometimes,” said Father Wilfrid, who, on account of his broad nose and padded cheeks, had been called Bunny in the Novitiate. Bunny Bestudik. He wore a very long coat of rich devil’s-food brown, with a collar of pearly nylon fleece. His headpiece, though, was soft and black with an olive cast to it, genuine fur, which, in places, looked as though it had just been licked by a cat. He was a few years younger than Father Urban and had a sandy look.

  “What kind of game?”

  “Well, deer do.”

  Father Urban doubted that any deer in its right mind would show itself in broad daylight in such an open area.

  “Gophers,” Wilf said, patting the rifle. “That’s what I’m after.”

  “For a moment, I was afraid it might be people,” Father Urban said, smiling, remembering the big rabbit who shot the hunter in Struwwelpeter.

  “It’s no laughing matter. They’re here in great numbers. See.”

  Father Urban observed a small, smooth hole in the ground. “They can play hell with a golf course. Or is that some-thing else?”