Morte D'Urban

by J.F. Powers

  “They’re in here,” Chester said, and spoke of the wind, the sun, and the moon.

  “To think you get paid for this,” Billy said.

  “They’re in here,” Chester said.

  “Aw, shut up,” Billy said, and after that was silent.

  They returned to the lodge for lunch. It was Father Urban’s feeling that he’d look better to Billy, and that Billy would look better to him, if they spent more time apart, and so as they were getting up from the table, Father Urban said he wouldn’t be going out that afternoon, if Billy didn’t mind.

  “I don’t blame you,” Billy said.

  Father Urban slept most of the afternoon, but he was on the dock, breviary in hand, when the boat came in. Chester was rowing. Billy appeared to be in good spirits, so Father Urban called across the water, “How was it?”

  “Wonderful!” Billy called back.

  Paul had driven to town for “supplies” in the morning, but in the afternoon he had taken Father Urban’s place in the bow of the boat, and he was the first one to disembark. He was all wet. Chester and Billy were somewhat wet, too, Father Urban saw, but Paul was all wet. “If I could swim, I wouldn’t care,” he said.

  He told Father Urban what had happened. Billy had run the boat full speed through a place where tree stumps stuck up in the water, and he had nearly drowned Paul. Chester had rowed them home because the propeller on the outboard motor had been badly bent. Paul said, “Boss, you won’t get me in that thing again.”

  “Just wonderful,” Billy said, jumping out of the boat.

  “How was the fishing?” Father Urban asked.

  “The what?” Billy said.

  Chester stayed in the boat, bailing it out with a rusty coffee can, which, scraping the ribbed bottom and swallowing the dirty water, made a melancholy sound. The sun was leaving for the day, and when that happened that far north in September, there wasn’t much between you and the night. The lake, a light red wine before, was now black stout, and the air was suddenly dank.

  That evening Father Urban went out of his way to be nice to Chester. Two couples, thirty or so, arrived in time for supper, and were asked by Billy to join him and Father Urban in a drink later. They accepted. When the party had gathered, there was dancing to the jukebox, Billy starting it off with Honey, and the couples following. Then they all changed partners. Father Urban and Chester sat together, Father Urban telling him about the Hill.

  “You and me got the same problem,” Chester said.

  “How’s that?”

  “The cold months. We ought to operate in Florida in the cold months—instead of closing down the way we do.”

  “You may be right,” said Father Urban.

  “Mother taught her all she knows about cooking,” Chester said a little later, when Honey danced by with Billy.

  When Billy sat down to play, Father Urban understood why Chester had sold the old piano, and why he wasn’t happy about the new one. Chester had to get along with people.

  “Hello, Aloha! How are you?” Billy sang. A line or two was as far as he got into the lyrics, and his accompaniment was like falling planks. He had a glass on the piano, and another by the fireplace, where Father Urban and Chester and the others were sitting at three tables pushed together, for it was no longer possible to dance. Paul, as he must have done on many such occasions, sat on the bench beside Billy and backed him up with noises of his own, all made with his mouth. Paul’s “Ahhhhhhhh-ahhhhhhhh-ahhhhhhhhh,” first heard in “Bye, Bye, Blues,” was the full band behind the maestro, and suggested that Paul, like many of his breed, could carry a tune. Paul also did something out of the side of his mouth, with his lips held loosely together, that was rather like a trombone. The sweet trumpet parts he whistled, and whistled well. Unfortunately for Paul, and others, the band featured the leader’s piano and voice. “And now, folks”—this, while chording, called out in a genial manner that took Father Urban back to the days of radio, when some of the most important men in the country were the leaders of dance bands—“let’s go for a musical stroll down Memory Lane.” Billy played and sang “Three O’clock in the Morning,” “Diane,” and “Dinner for One, Please, James.” Then came “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?,” made famous by little Shirley Temple, “Dardanella,” made famous by the immortal Paul Whiteman, “Nola,” made famous by Vincent Lopez, and “Got a Date with an Angel,” made famous by the late Hal Kemp. “And now, folks, a medley of tunes from Bitter Sweet.” “Show tunes,” he said to one of the women when she crossed the floor—she’d been out of the room when he’d announced the medley. “And now, folks, who’ll ever forget this one? Sing along, if you like. ‘Here I go singin’ low, dodey oh, dodey oh, bye, bye, black-bird!’” One of the men, a fat man, did sing along, but Father Urban could see that Billy didn’t like it. “Now here’s an instrumental favorite, as played by Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Band—‘Smoke Rings.’” Billy went all out on this one, shoulders rolling, feet tramping. He motioned to Paul to rise and face the audience when it was time for his trombone solo, which he did. At the conclusion of this number, the leader played several notes to indicate that the band was taking a break, and rose from the piano. Everybody applauded, including Paul, even Chester and Father Urban.

  A little while later, Father Urban heard how Billy had happened to buy the building now occupied by the Clementines on the near North Side. He’d asked the previous tenant, ¡Panache Ltd!. to locate some Little Jack Little records for him, scarce items. “‘I’m not asking have you got ’em,’ I said. ‘I’m asking—can you get ’em?’ Know what the bastard said?”

  “What?” said Father Urban.

  “‘Wouldn’t if I could.’ So I bought the building and told him to move. I told him he could and would. He did.”

  With one of the party, a Mr Inglis, Billy then fell to arguing the merits of shooting wolves from airplanes. In Father Urban’s opinion, what Billy really objected to was people having such fun in airplanes and thinking of themselves as noble conservationists. Billy had the heavy stockholder’s loyalty to the railroads. “Upsets the balance of nature,” he said to Mr Inglis. “We need the wolves. Too damn many deer anyway. Ask the farmers.”

  “I’ll have to do that,” said Mr Inglis.

  “Go ahead. I’ll wait,” Billy said.

  “What d’ya smoke?” said the other man, the fat one, to Father Urban.

  “Usually cigars,” said Father Urban, raising the one in his hand.

  “Bob,” said the man, putting out his hand.

  They shook hands, though they’d done so earlier, and since Bob showed no interest in his name, Father Urban didn’t repeat it.

  “Here. Try one of mine,” Bob said, shuffling a cigarette half out of the pack. “They’re all new.”

  “Maybe later,” said Father Urban, showing Bob the cigar again.

  “Go ahead.” Bob shuffled the cigarette farther out of the pack. “They’re all new. No filter.”

  “All right,” said Father Urban, taking the cigarette. “I’ll smoke it later.”

  “Smoke it now. Go ahead. Here.” Bob struck a match for Father Urban.

  “Thanks,” Father Urban said, and there he was with a cigar in one hand, a cigarette in the other.

  “What d’ya drive?”

  “We have a new Rambler station wagon.”

  “How d’ya like it?”

  “Fine.”

  “What’re you doing about parking in your town?”

  “No problem.”

  “No? Where you from?”

  “For many years I traveled out of Chicago—”

  “Chicago! Don’t tell me you haven’t got a problem there!”

  “I now call Minnesota my home. Duesterhaus. Near Duesterhaus. No problem.”

  “You won’t like this, but some of these little towns are worse than the big ones.” Bob said he was proud of the facilities in his town, which was second to Rochester in the state. “That’s on a parking space–per capita basis.”

&nb
sp; “Is this your business—parking?”

  “Oh hell, no.”

  “You just feel strongly about it?”

  “Oh hell, no. We had this problem in our town, and we licked it. Why can’t others do the same? What d’ya drive?”

  “Rambler.”

  “How d’ya like it?”

  “Fine,” said Father Urban, putting out the cigarette.

  Honey brought Bob a steak sandwich.

  “Sure you won’t have something, Mother?”

  “No, thanks,” Honey said. She was sober.

  “How about you, doc?” Bob said to Father Urban.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Like to have you meet my wife.” Bob’s wife was dancing with Paul.

  “I met her. Very nice.” Father Urban turned back to Mrs Inglis and Chester. Earlier he had been discussing the course at the Hill with Mrs Inglis, a golfer, and not a bad-looking woman. She was a southerner who’d had the good fortune to marry a man by the same name (“I’ve never changed my name!”). Father Urban had pulled out of the conversation with Mrs Inglis after she said she was going to tell him a secret if she wasn’t careful. Before that, he had more or less given up on Chester, who had put on a black leather bow tie for the evening and was now talking about the first Mrs Henn. “See anything funny about that sign?” he asked Mrs Inglis and Father Urban.

  Father Urban concentrated on the sign, but saw nothing funny about it. It simply said, “WE DON’T KNOW WHERE MOTHER IS, BUT WE HAVE POP ON ICE.”

  “You never saw one that said ‘Mother’ before,” Chester said. “They all say ‘Mom.’”

  “He’s right!” cried Mrs Inglis.

  “That could very well be,” said Father Urban.

  Billy joined them. “You know that friend of yours, Father Louis? He’s not a bad guy, but he’s a knocker. And that other friend of yours, Monsignor Whatsit, he’s another. All your friends seem to be knockers.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said Father Urban.

  “Doc Strong had that sign made special for Mother,” Chester said.

  “His first wife,” Billy explained to Mrs Inglis.

  “When Mother died, I was going to take it down,” Chester said. “But I talked it over with people that knew Mother. Like Doc Strong. Doc knew Mother as well as I did. And Doc said no.”

  “I still think you should take it down,” Billy said.

  “Doc said, ‘Mother wouldn’t want us to take it down.’”

  Paul and Bob’s wife were still dancing but everybody else—Mr and Mrs Inglis, Honey and Billy, Bob and Father Urban—observed a moment of silence. For Father Urban, it was a painful moment.

  “That’s the kind of person she was,” Chester said.

  After another painful moment, Billy said, “All right, Chester. But should we leave it up when you check out?”

  Everybody was watching Chester.

  Father Urban stood up, saying, “Chester, if I were you I wouldn’t try to answer that question now.” He let it be seen that he was saying good night. He bowed to Mrs Inglis, shook the hand of Mr Inglis, who was standing, and asked Bob, for whom standing would have been difficult, not to move.

  Billy tried to get Father Urban to stay. “Some office to say, Billy.” And Billy, who only once before during the evening had shown the company his better side, while at the piano (“And now, folks . . .”), took it very well. He explained to Mrs Inglis that Father Urban really wanted to stay—to dance and have fun—but couldn’t because he belonged to a very penitential order.

  Father Urban, looking back as he went out the door, and waving an adieu, was afraid that Billy was developing the penitential theme for the whole company. Well, if so, it couldn’t be helped. There were worse things to worry about. Two days and nights of close association with Billy had left Father Urban feeling anything but complacent about their relationship. More had to be done for Billy in a spiritual way than Father Urban had been doing. Fortunately, the sins of the flesh weren’t the worst kind. Billy’s character, however, wasn’t quite what Father Urban had believed it to be. A few spoons seemed to be missing.

  Billy, Paul, and Father Urban set forth the next morning, with Billy at the outboard motor—a different and more powerful one. During the night’s revels, Billy had decided that Chester was bad luck, and had told him so, which was a hell of a thing to say to a guide, and so Chester wasn’t in the boat. As for Paul, he had said the day before that Billy wouldn’t get him into the boat again, which probably accounted for his presence there. Father Urban wished that none of this were happening.

  Billy ran them around Bloodsucker twice—in the hope, Father Urban guessed, of embarrassing Chester, who was not recommending it that season. Billy then took the boat up a narrow, stumpy stretch of water leading into Snowflake. Chester had warned them to reel in if they went through there, and Father Urban and Paul did so. Billy didn’t. He had trolled through there the day before, he said. This time, though, his hook caught on something. He took the boat back and worked for a while to free his line. Then he got mad and broke it. “That didn’t feel like twenty-five-pound test to me,” he said. Then he had to put on a whole new works—leader, spinner hook, and minnow. “Here,” he said to Father Urban, motioning him to take charge of the motor, “you’re not doing anything.”

  No way to address me, Father Urban thought. They changed seats, Father Urban sitting in the stern on one of the two life-preserver cushions in the boat. Before Billy sat down, Paul slipped the other cushion under him, restoring it to its proper place. (Paul, first into the boat that morning, had taken the cushion to his place in the bow, and Father Urban had been quietly doing without it.)

  Father Urban took the boat into Snowflake and turned right, as Chester had done the day before. He kept fairly close to the shore. Billy grabbed a minnow from the pail at his feet, took a stitch in its back with the hook, and cast it out behind the boat. It made a little splash.

  This roused Paul, who had been dozing, and he now lowered his own minnow, which was quite dead, into the water. Paul didn’t seem to care whether he caught any fish or not. Father Urban recalled that on the drive north Paul’s part in the conversation had consisted mostly of remarks like “I was fishing out of the same boat when the boss landed this whale in Florida.” Father Urban didn’t know how Paul managed not to compete with Billy in Florida, but in Minnesota he used a dead minnow.

  “This isn’t what I came up here for,” Billy said, addressing the trees on the shore.

  “No,” said Father Urban, also to the trees. If this went on, what would it be like when they finally gave up and rode back to Henn’s Haven? Paul, the non-swimmer, had probably been thinking of the return voyage when he pinched the life preserver. Father Urban had been hoping that wind, sun, and moon would do whatever had to be done to improve the fishing, but he was afraid they hadn’t. He had been hoping that it would be possible to go back early, having caught their limit, and get some sleep, and that when they woke up everything would be different—so different, in fact, that he would not find it inconvenient to have a little talk with Billy on the subject of his personal life.

  This was a subject that Father Urban hadn’t had to concern himself with in the past, since he was not Billy’s confessor. Until Father Urban arrived at Henn’s Haven and saw Honey—saw Billy with Honey, rather—there had been no reason to suspect that all was not well enough with Billy. For Father Urban’s part, he wished it were none of his business. Billy, however, was known to be a big benefactor of the Order, and as such he had to behave himself in public. What did it mean? Either Billy thought very little of Father Urban or—what was more likely—considered him to be very unworldly indeed. This was an idea that many people had of the clergy, and perhaps the clergy indulged them in it, as did the major communications media, but Father Urban didn’t see how he could have conveyed that idea to quite this extent.

  He was up against a situation that had often confronted the Church, and one that had cost her heavily in liv
es and property. Father Urban had given a lot of thought to this particular aspect of ecclesiastical history, which, generally speaking, suggested that it is too hard for some people, and all too easy for others, to do the right thing. Father Urban felt that Clement VII had been the wrong pope to deal with Henry VIII, and he wondered what the feeling was in Heaven on this point. Centuries later, Pius IX, who had begun so well, had thrown down his cards in a fit of self-righteousness, and the Church was still trying to get back in the game. A bad mistake, that, since it had left the other players at each other’s mercy—and thus had prepared the way for World War I, the Russian Revolution, Mussolini and Hitler, World War II, and now the Bomb.

  Father Urban had preached a great many thrilling sermons on saints who had really asked for the martyr’s crown, but he believed that there were others from whose lives we might learn more that would serve us better in the daily round. What of those who had remained on the scene and got on with the job? The work of the Church, after all, had to be done for the most part by the living. There was too much emphasis on dying for the faith. How about living for the faith? Take Lanfranc and William the Conqueror—of whom it was written (in the Catholic Encyclopedia and Father Urban’s notes for a book he might write someday): “He was mild to good men of God and stark beyond all bounds to those who withsaid his will.” Lanfranc had recognized the importance of being more than merely right. He must have operated with great finesse, for he had got William and Matilda to found two abbeys by way of penance for their contumacy. Thereafter, the Conqueror was always careful to show himself a considerate and respectful son of the Church. Call the book “Lambs Who Lay Down with Lions and Lived.” Maybe call it “Conquering Lambs.”

  “Hold it,” Billy whispered.

  Father Urban glanced at Billy’s line and saw that it wasn’t engaged. Then, as the boat turned a rocky corner, he saw what Billy saw—a deer. Its antlers had looked like a floating branch.