Morte D'Urban

by J.F. Powers

  “That’s your pocket gopher, or ground squirrel, but they’re all the same.”

  “Must be hard for you to shoot with mittens on.”

  “Think so?” Wilf aimed the rifle at a tree stump in the distance, fired, and missed. He had released the trigger by a little pressure. “Pretty sensitive instrument. That’s why it’s best to keep the safety on.”

  “Gun empty now?”

  “No, she’s good for a few more.”

  “Where’s the safety?”

  “Right here,” Wilf said, snapping it on without comment. He put out his hand. “Long time no see.”

  Father Urban shook the mitten. He hadn’t seen Wilf for several years—the last time in a forest preserve near Chicago, at a Serbian national picnic, or had it been Croatian? “I Am an American Day,” anyway, with Father Urban, in a major address, welcoming the foreign-born in the name of all the discoverers of America, St Brendan, Leif Ericsson, and Christopher Columbus, all Catholics, lest we forget . . .

  “You drive up, Urban?”

  “Drive, hell.”

  “I thought maybe somebody drove you up from St Paul.”

  “I came by train and after that by foot,” said Father Urban. He explained about the taxi.

  “Should’ve given us a ring here. We’re in the book now.” Wilf sounded rather proud of this. “I could’ve met you.”

  “I didn’t know but what you’d be busy.”

  “Not so much doing in the morning.”

  Father Urban asked about the red-brick building.

  “Not in use at present,” Wilf said.

  “Looks the more habitable of the two.”

  “More about that anon,” Wilf said and pointed to a battered pickup truck parked behind the old stone mansion. He had found it in one of the fields, he said, and seemed to think that this would be hard for anyone to believe. “Quite a break, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Still runs, huh?”

  “Does now. Needed a bit of work. Quite a bit, in fact. But a lot less than some people imagined.”

  Father Urban guessed that “some people” referred to his immediate predecessors, particularly Father Louis, a capable man, one of the few Clementines about whom that statement could be made.

  “If I’d listened to some people, the old bus would be rusting away in some dump now,” Wilf said. “Oh, I know it’s not much for looks.”

  “No,” said Father Urban.

  “But we needed some means of transportation, and it came down to this or nothing.”

  “A hard choice.”

  Wilf stiffened. “Urban, you know how the Order’s run. I don’t have to tell you we’re on our own here. Sink or swim.”

  Father Urban nodded slightly. The members of the Order did have to support themselves wherever they were, but indigence, Father Urban felt, was too often a cloak for incompetence. And wasn’t it bad enough for the Order to own and operate such a vehicle without advertising the fact? On the door of the old wreck, in green paint, for everybody to see, were the words: ORDER OF SAINT CLEMENT.

  Wilf kicked one of the tires. “New rubber all around,” he said.

  Father Urban grunted and moved on, drifting around to the front door of the old mansion. “The man at the station kept calling this ‘the Home.’”

  “We’re lucky it isn’t called worse, considering all that’s gone on here.”

  “Like what?”

  Wilf said that the old house had been built for a lumber baron who had murdered his wife and a servant and killed himself—not in the house itself but in a barn that had long since disappeared. Quite a scandal in its day, and this probably accounted for the use to which the property had been put subsequently, for it had then been purchased by the county and turned into an old-people’s home, really a poorhouse. Fortunately, all that was very much in the past—all but the name “the Home.” In the thirties, the place had been operated as a sanitarium specializing in alcoholics. The red-brick building dated from that period. The place had continued as a sanitarium until World War II. The federal government had been interested in it then, but had backed out at the last minute. “Backed out only because the war ended. If the war hadn’t ended, I doubt that we’d be here today.”

  “What is the story on that?”

  “I’ll go into all that later, Father, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not a-tall.” Father Urban hadn’t noticed the wrought ironwork around the porch of the old house before, because of the heavy growth of vines. “A little bit of old New Orleans,” he said.

  “You might say that,” Wilf replied, as though he didn’t know whether Father Urban meant to be critical or not.

  “Been doing some painting, I see.” On the porch there was quite a gathering of rocking chairs, freshly painted, green.

  “Sometimes it’s what you don’t see,” Wilf said. “Funny thing about these chairs. For a long time, I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. Then one day it dawned on me—too many chairs. Too many of these rockers. So some I painted, some I threw out—those beyond repair—and the rest I put up in the attic, for the future. Another man might have seen what was wrong right away.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

  Wilf took one of the chairs by the ear and lined it up with the others. “You know, the evenings here can be very nice sometimes.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Just sitting here, watching the sun go down in all its glory. The house faces west, you know.”

  For a moment, Father Urban saw the two of them as others might someday see them—in a snapshot: “Frs Wilfrid and Urban in their favorite rockers.”

  “A grand place, this,” said Wilf, looking out at the grounds.

  “Yes,” said Father Urban, looking at the bare trees and bushes, the dead fields, the trees in the distance like black whiskers on the winter horizon.

  “You cold?” said Wilf.

  “Just numb is all.”

  They passed through a vestibule, through a door the upper half of which was frosted glass, with the letter “T” on it, and were in the house proper, at the foot of a wide, open stairway, and the juncture of two dark corridors. Immediately to the right there was a door with a sign on it saying, in green paint, OFFICE, and here Wilf left the rifle. Then saying, “First things first,” he opened the door across the corridor. “Originally this was the music room, I understand.”

  The chapel was about what Father Urban had expected. The altar at the other end was one of those old marbleized wooden jobs, and on the floor around it lay the green carpeting that had probably been thrown out at the same time. There were eight or nine old-fashioned mahogany pews, rather nice in their way. There were also a number of folding chairs, old church-supper specials, varnished wood, all slats and rattles. On the walls, the Stations of the Cross, dark pictures, were set about six feet apart. That was about it. Father Urban genuflected, and left Wilf kneeling in his wake, but as he did so he reminded himself to spend more time before the Blessed Sacrament. It was all too easy to neglect prayer if you lived at the pace he had in the world.

  Next Father Urban was shown into the refectory, which was comfortably warm, and might have been a very pleasant room. The high wainscoting need not be varnished like old office furniture, and the view from the alcove could be improved by setting out a few evergreens—and by replacing a pane of glass now cracked and fitted with a metal disc such as Father Urban had last seen on the bottom of a pot when he was young. There were two tables. Father Urban put clergy at the round one in the alcove, laity at the long one on the windowless side of the room. Both tables were covered with plastic, white becoming ivory, not very appetizing. Against one wall there was an old console radio, a “Majestic,” he saw when he went over to it, and remembered the once famous words, “mighty monarch of the air.” In the center of the room were three of the green rockers, the seats of these fitted with chunks of foam rubber; an overloaded magazine rack; and a heavy-duty stainless-steel smoking stand—a hotel-
lobby or club-car model, with a trapdoor top and a deep tank that seldom if ever needed emptying. There was a tray for glasses around the top of the smoking stand, and on the tray a dish of horehound drops. Father Urban helped himself to one.

  Wilf, who had gone into the kitchen, now returned with a corpulent young man clad in khaki coveralls and introduced him to Father Urban. “Brother Harold, Father. My good right hand.”

  Father Urban couldn’t recall Brother Harold from anywhere. He looked quite intelligent, though, and this wasn’t always the case with lay brothers in the Order of St Clement.

  “As a rule, we have our principal meal in the evening,” Wilf said, “but Brother, here, wants to depart from the usual today.”

  “Not on my account, I hope.”

  “Come, see,” said Brother Harold.

  Intelligent, yes, and light on his feet for a fat man but perhaps a bit feminine. Father Urban followed Wilf and Brother Harold into the kitchen. In the sink lay a big frozen fish, a vicious-looking thing marked like a snake. “Sturgeon?”

  “No, that’s your northern pike,” Wilf said.

  “Won’t it be quite a job?” Father Urban said to Brother Harold who only smiled.

  “Brother, here, is used to it.”

  “I mean—won’t it take a while?” Father Urban had breakfasted early.

  “Yes, but it’ll be worth it,” Wilf said. “We’ll just leave everything to Brother.”

  In the refectory, Father Urban had another horehound drop. “Where’s Jack?” he asked Wilf.

  “Not here at the moment. I sent him out the same day he arrived. Place about sixty miles from here. Pastor I hadn’t heard from before. With things the way they are, I try to be accommodating.”

  “How are things?”

  “Pretty good, on the whole.”

  “I suppose you told Jack I was coming.”

  “Did I? No, I don’t think so. We didn’t have a minute together. I sent him right out.”

  It did seem to Father Urban that Wilf might have found time to tell Jack. “And when’s he coming back?”

  “I’m expecting him back on the evening train—in time for a little powwow.”

  Wilf took Father Urban to the office then. “You might care to familiarize yourself with that,” he said, and waved Father Urban away from desk, over to the wall where there was a crude plan of the house. Then he covered the clutter of papers and photographs on the desk with a newspaper. “Find your room yet? Your name’s on it. Here you are. Southern exposure.”

  “How’s the place to heat?”

  “Oh, it all depends. Of course, I’m not heating the whole house at present.”

  “Coal or oil?”

  “Oil. Furnace converted before I came. That was one thing I didn’t have to do.” Wilf moved over to a bookcase, one shelf of which had been partitioned off into cubbyholes. “Where you get your mail. See—your box has your name on it.” Wilf felt inside the box. “Nothing in it yet,” he said. From one of the other cubbyholes—one labeled PASSES—he removed a card in a clear plastic protector and handed it to Father Urban.

  “How’d you manage this?”

  “President of the railroad is a friend of ours.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Father Louis knew him. At least he once rode with him.”

  “Good man, Louis.”

  Wilf didn’t pick up on this. “It’d be nice if we could get another pass,” he said. “We just have the two at present. They don’t like it down at the station, of course. Loss of revenue for them. But with us here, attracting visitors from all over, they’ll be the winners in the end.”

  “I sensed something today.”

  “Was something said?”

  “Oh no. I just got the impression I wasn’t very welcome.”

  “Wacker. He’s the worst. But be that as it may. Telephone, typewriter, stationery, both paper and envelopes—all here, and feel free to use ’em.”

  Leaving the office, they went down the corridor that ran straight back from the front door, on their right the chapel, on their left a series of rooms. “Parlor,” Wilf said, rapping the first door and passing on. “Not heated at present. Another,” he said, rapping on the next door. Signs on these doors said PARLOR A and PARLOR B. The next door, which was the last, said LIBRARY, and this they entered. Here, too, it was cold enough for Father Urban to see his breath before him. On the walls were pictures of popes, Cardinal Newman and Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop Ireland of St Paul (who had been jobbed out of the red hat in Rome), St Clement of Blois (as he may have appeared), and several bishops. Father Urban recognized all but one of these and asked Wilf about that one. Bishop Dullinger, of the neighboring diocese of Ostergothenburg, Wilf said. “Over here, our bishop.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Father Urban. The face of Monsignor Conor, now, and for many years, bishop of Great Plains, had once been a feature of the diocesan press in Chicago.

  “It badly needs cataloguing,” Wilf said, with a flourish of his hand, taking in perhaps a thousand volumes.

  “Nothing very recent, is there?”

  “No money for books, Father. What you see here was given to us.”

  Father Urban could believe it. He didn’t know which he found harder to take, the whining or the bragging. Why talk of cataloguing this rubbish? Why call the thing parked out-side transportation? Wilf, it seemed, was trying to do it all with words and signs, and, yes, even in the library—rocking chairs.

  Leaving the library, they went up the back stairway and emerged into a large space (“not being heated at the moment”) that Wilf called the Rec Room: ping-pong table with a dirty piece of canvas over it (“drop cloth”), paper half off the walls (“be surprised how hard it is to get off”), tools lying around on the floor. “Formerly two rooms. Quite a job taking that wall out.”

  Father Urban looked up at the ceiling. The wall had been yanked out like a tooth, the gap crudely plastered over, and now, presumably, was expected to heal itself. Letters from Father Louis, and rumor, had prepared Father Urban for such sights.

  “More than we bargained for,” said Wilf.

  “I daresay.”

  “But well worth it. Now retreatants will have a place to go in their free time. (We don’t try to enforce total silence here.) And in the event of an overflow crowd, why, we’ll just bring in some folding chairs and pipe the conferences up from downstairs—you realize we’re standing right over the chapel, don’t you?”

  “Own a public-address system, do you?”

  “Not at present, no.”

  Father Urban had suspected as much. “A good one costs like hell, you know, and there’s no use having any other kind.”

  “Wonder if we couldn’t pick up a good one secondhand?”

  “I really couldn’t say,” said Father Urban. He went over to the window and gazed out at the frozen lake.

  Wilf came and stood beside him and, after a moment, said, “Think you’ll be happy here?”

  After meditating several replies, Father Urban said, “I don’t know why not—do you?”

  “No, there’s a lot to be done here. You may not think so, but there is.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, I know this isn’t what you’re used to. Maybe it’s a lot less than you expected. Maybe you didn’t expect much. I don’t know.”

  Father Urban felt that Wilf was asking for his support—for more support than should be expected from a man who had been treated so shabbily. “What are those trees that keep their leaves?” he asked.

  “That’s your red oak.”

  Father Urban moved away from the window. “Have you had many overflow crowds?”

  “Can’t say as we have, as yet.”

  “Any?”

  “No.”

  They left the Rec Room, going out by another door. In the corridor, there were more signs: TOILET, TUB, UTILITY CLOSET, FR WILFRID.

  “Where do you get your signs?”

  “Brother Harold’s taking
a course by mail. Show-card lettering.”

  “Oh?”

  “His ultimate goal is sacred art.”

  “Oh.”

  “I want retreatants to feel at home here, but I don’t want ’em barging in where they’ve no business. That’s just one of the problems here.”

  “I’d say you’ve got that one pretty well licked.”

  “My room,” Wilf said, throwing open the door. Wilf had an antique bed with a high carved headboard. “It was in the attic. Otherwise, I can assure you, I wouldn’t be sleeping in such a fancy bed.”

  “Don’t tell me that’s a feather mattress.”

  “Somebody who was here on retreat sent it to me. It belonged to his grandmother who had just passed away—in a hospital, he said.”

  Wilf, who seemed a little nervous about his bed, went over to an old roll-top desk. “I do without a dresser, you see.” He opened and shut one of the drawers. He had his black socks in it. “No rug,” he said, pawing the floor. “But you’ll want to see your room.”

  Father Urban’s bed was narrow and steel, monastic indeed compared with Wilf’s, but there were two throw rugs, a dresser with a spotty mirror, a floor lamp, a green rocker, and an easy chair upholstered in glistening red imitation leather. Wilf had only a couple of the green rockers in his room. Father Urban felt that Wilf had made an effort for him. But it did seem a bit chilly in the room to Father Urban, even though he was still wearing his overcoat. “Is the heat on in here?” he asked.

  Wilf went over to the register. “Closed,” he said, and opened the shutters. “But maybe I’d better check to see that this isn’t one I’ve got turned off in the basement.”

  “I wish you would,” said Father Urban. He laid his attaché case on the bed and, as he did so, pressed down on the mattress—actually, he preferred a firm mattress.

  “This new chair really belongs in the Rec Room,” Wilf said, “but I don’t see why you shouldn’t have the use of it until such time as we need it there. Before too long, I hope to get more chairs of this type. Nice, isn’t it? I got a pretty good deal on these. Just the two at present, and I gave the other one to Father John.”

  “How about the rugs? Are they here to stay?”

  Wilf stiffened. “I don’t see why not,” he said.