Priestdaddy

by Patricia Lockwood

  • • •

  ON AN EASEL are pinned stacks of pictures of all the seminarians, smiling, with white windows at their throats and their names underneath. You’re supposed to take a picture of a seminarian and pray for him every night. The most handsome seminarians are almost gone, a few unfortunates have hardly been touched. I examine each one in turn and try to find its counterpart in the room, but it’s hard to tell them apart—their faces are too smooth and too ancient at the same time. They appear to be missing their beards. They look like Civil War reenactors who are reverse-aging into babies.

  The ceiling is low, and the lights flicker fluorescently and emit an insect whine. The whole place smells like where coffee goes to die. Even what comes out of the taps is suspect, as if it might have caught a blessing from the holy water. There’s a book on the communal bookshelf called Sometimes God Has a Kid’s Face, and a few steadfastly inartistic paintings hang on the walls: velvet-skinned saints, guardian angels guiding children over bridges, Last Suppers that look like dogs playing poker. Through a window in a side door I can peer into the church itself, which I have only ever heard described as ugly, as ugly beyond belief.

  Christ the King is so ugly that my father is trying to rip its guts out. He calls the altar the big rock candy mountain and he hates it so much that as soon as he’s able to raise the money he’s going to tear it out and put in a new one. The steps are slippery and circular and people always trip going up and down them—it’s going to kill someone someday, he says of the big rock candy mountain. He can barely make it up those stairs on his knee replacements; my mother fears he is going to fall.

  On my way out the doors, I walk past the holy water and almost dip my hand in to genuflect and make the sign of the cross. Memories of religion reside mostly in the body, as if it’s a light gold sport that you played during childhood in a vacant lot. Your hands and the hands of your friends all moving together within some larger organism, the comfortable and gold-oiled grooves of your position, the hope that this time the ball will disappear over the fence and never be seen again; God had taken it.

  • • •

  BACK AT THE RECTORY, the gumbo is simmering on the stove, in the battered aluminum stockpot that my mother uses to cook for crowds. It’s the color of the flood and everything is swept up in it. I stir it with a wooden spoon and discover that her arthritis isn’t the only reason the chopping took so long: each piece of celery or onion or bell pepper is exactly the same size, almost supernaturally so. My mother and I are after perfection. We are seeking a particular click in the head. We share the feeling that if we hang a picture or set a sentence down just right, we will instantly and painlessly ascend to the next level. We will be recognized, and the time we spent will be multiplied into forever and given back to us.

  “Yes, I am OCD,” my mother confessed to me once. “Obsessive-compulsive . . . [long pause] . . . DIVAAAAAA!”

  She adds the shrimp at last, waits for them to just turn pink, and we carry the gumbo and the ground sassafras and the white rice over to the church. The phrase “like white on rice” used to obsess me. I couldn’t understand what it meant, but I knew it held some sort of key, and when I unlocked it, I would understand something about language. Like white on rice. Like white on rice. The meaning flickered on, two steps ahead of me.

  “What took so long?” my father asks when we finally arrive, but he knows, he isn’t really angry. Without even bothering to listen, my mother goes straight over to the refrigerator, and without ceremony, begins stabbing a block of ice in the freezer. “I told them about this refrigerator!” she repeats as she stabs, her voice barely able to contain her joy. The knife is a full six inches long and the arc of her arm is swift and merciless. She looks like she’s avenging someone’s death, as she so often does, and the final element of the scene clicks into place for me: yes, this is it, I’m home.

  • • •

  THE DAY IS CLEARHEADED; it thinks of us. The sphere across the street still rains. The sphere in here is filled with the old, cloistered, rosewood-scented air of a thousand years ago. All the seminarians line up to spoon out rice and gumbo, and then file back to their round tables to hunch over their bowls and eat. In between bites, they tighten their circles and argue in their private language, one that has been formulated to settle the biggest of big questions.

  Darrell walks through the doors carrying two angular bags of trash, lets the sun in for a second, and then exits out the other side. He is dying, but we don’t know that yet. For now he seems like the only person here who isn’t standing with one foot in the afterlife, who isn’t trying to rush heaven before his time.

  Darrell is one of the handymen. He works under a man named Chuck, a screaming male tornado who leaves general destruction in his wake. The sounds of crashing bottles and power tools accompany Chuck wherever he goes; he moves in a whirl of nails and wrenches and loud invective; he is a force that could rip gates off their hinges. He sees it as his duty to shout at Darrell. Darrell sees it as his duty to withstand.

  • • •

  I’M STANDING AWKWARDLY by the trash when Darrell comes to get it again. How can one roomful of people generate so much garbage? He looks at me a little bit sideways, because there is the risk, in this place, that if you look someone full in the face, you might see the starkest, most brutal Old Testament verse written there, like CIRCUMCISE YOUR CHILD ON TOP OF A MOUNTAINTOP WHILE A RAM WATCHES, and by then you’re caught, it’s too late to look away again and pretend you didn’t notice. He doesn’t know if I’m one of them or not. He asks me where I’m from, and I start to talk too much about Georgia.

  “You ever watch The Real Housewives?” he asks me hopefully.

  “Is that the show where insane blond women are always pointing really long fingernails at each other while holding glasses of champagne? And then one of them yells a catchphrase like Girl, don’t even start with me, because I’m a bitch on wheels and I just stopped at the gas station!”

  “That’s exactly the one.” He laughs, and it’s the first laugh I’ve heard in ages that is set loose from theology and participating in the world. It almost seems to be in a different key, glad and major after so much minor. “Anyway, there are some Real Housewives down in Atlanta, and they might be the craziest ones.”

  Finally, someone with a functioning sense of who is crazy and who is not. I edge toward the tubs of ice. “You want a beer, Darrell?” I ask.

  “I don’t drink,” he tells me, a solemn spark in his eye, as if maybe he really does, or maybe he really did, and then tells me the best place to go downtown for dancing. “You gotta go to the Power & Light District,” he says, which sounds weirdly religious, as if it had been named by a youth pastor, and then he slams his fist into his palm and calls it out again, louder, “Power & Light!”

  • • •

  THE SICKNESS IS IN HIM, healthy in itself, flourishing, like a sunflower that turns its head to something we can’t see. It grows up on a resilient stalk and does not leave him. It is happening so fast, the footage speeds up, it rustles taller and taller. For the last six months, he has confided to the secretaries, he can’t keep on weight no matter what he does. The women in the office adore him, and urge him to go to the doctor, but some men won’t go to the doctor for anything: it can only be bad news. He is dying and we don’t know that yet, but maybe he does.

  When I was a girl, I thought so hard about the saints who stayed young in glass coffins, paused waxy and glowing in their incorrupt bodies. Were the sicknesses preserved inside them too? The tumors, the epilepsies, the common colds? The little cavities in the teeth, the holy anorexias? If they died hungry, did they stay that way? If they died angry, could they keep it?

  He doesn’t look skinny to me, he seems as solid and ongoing as anyone here. But it is hard, while people walk among us, to imagine their absence; while they are present, they are a bread that is passed and passed among us and never c
omes to an end.

  • • •

  NOW THE PARTY is almost over, and my mother and I are sitting at our own table, blooming from the wine and laughing at jokes that no one else here would find funny, and chatting with the few seminarians who have remembered to thank her. The seminarians from other countries, she has observed, are the only ones who thank her every time. Everyone else assumes she just comes with the church. I see Darrell bouncing on the balls of his feet in a corner, his attention searching the floor so he doesn’t accidentally catch the eye of some wild-haired prophet who wants to drag him out to a conversational desert and share his rhetorical locusts with him. For a split second I wonder, “Why is he still here,” and then realize that he has to stay until everyone is gone. My mother beckons to him from across the room. “Darrell, come eat,” she calls out, serene. Her voice is finally musical when she is offering something to someone, though most of the time we beg her not to sing. “Sit down a minute and eat,” and Darrell sits down to eat my mother’s shy, by-the-book, fish-out-of-water gumbo.

  • • •

  DEATH IS CLOSER TO CHURCHES, in both obvious and invisible ways. Death is in the pews every week and puts its dim money in the collection basket and walks out every Sunday with a different family on its arm, gallant and black-suited, opening the doors for them and ushering them through. People who are closer to the beginning and the end have a place in churches: they orbit around them, held by some force. The boy who rakes our leaves and shovels our snow recently lost his mother. The woman who teaches music to sixth-graders stepped in front of a train. The man who lives next door is missing something in his throat, so his wife never eats solid food in front of him, out of a feeling of solidarity. There is always a phone call in the middle of the night. There has always been an accident. There is always something unfixable wrong with a baby. And a voice is saying, “Please come.”

  After Mass, I would often pass by the living room where I was not allowed and see my father talking, talking, talking to shadow figures with their backs turned to me. They were in need. They had runaway sons and pregnant daughters; they had absent husbands and alienated wives. They had, at the end, terminal diagnoses. The living room was the church, as much as the building next door. Sunday after Sunday in our living room sat the unthinkable and spoke to my father.

  That room was smaller on the inside than the outside. As soon as you stepped across the threshold, the world shrank down to an abnormal cell. The information in the air was all black news, as the information in a kitchen is all cups of flour and snips of herbs and someone cares for you. A hush was settled over the carpet like the first dusting of a snowstorm, the one that shows whether it will stick or not, and it sank soft into the night-blue cushions of the couch. During the week we never went in there—it was too frightening. You could still see the prints where the people had been.

  As long as I lived in my father’s house, I remembered to set a place at the dinner table for the unthinkable, to include it in the conversation, to pass the bread to it and refill its red wine, but I’ve been away so long that I’ve forgotten. I have to learn how to do it again.

  Being next to the church also meant that sometimes a stranger knocks on the door at three o’clock in the morning, asking for five dollars for gas, his children are waiting in a locked car off a shoulder of the highway, there were always children waiting just outside the picture, five dollars. We couldn’t say yes that often because then they would all come; they all needed help, every one. Need in the human being is a natural state. Need water, need food, need green money, need meaning, need touch and need talk, need I don’t know what. If we said yes to one, then a man might show up at the house the next night, hungry for a conversation about what happens when you die. My father always answered the door, and spoke in a low paternal voice that was soothing to me even through the walls, but he could not always help.

  What calls a person to a life-and-death job, a middle-of-the-night job, an edge-of-the-cliff job? My father lounged horizontal at home, and sent us up and down the stairs to fetch for him, but when the call came at three in the morning, he was up and out the door without the smallest sigh or protest, to serve the unthinkable, to read the ritual words to it, to plump the pillow under its head. His Last Rites kit sat on the stairs just by the front door: a square plastic bottle of holy water and a smaller one of golden oil, called chrism, and a round metal box with a simple cross on top that held the host. It was a source of fascination to me—an elevated survival kit, with a space allotted for each precise instrument you might need in the fight against death. The holy water didn’t smell any different from regular water, but the chrism smelled as if it had been wrung out of olives in the Holy Land. We called it Last Rites, but the Eastern Orthodox had a similar ritual called The Office at the Parting of the Soul from the Body When a Man Has Suffered for a Long Time, and I liked that better, because I liked words.

  • • •

  I WAS RAISED to think about the body. The body hung off a piece of carpentry at the front of the church; all my attention poured toward it. There was nothing else to look at, nothing in the world. The ribs heaved, the chin touched the chest, the hair stiffened with sweat and the last words were nailed to his lips. The color of wood, but we called him white. If I stared long enough, my head would unfocus and my borders would expand up and out, up into the spires and out toward the wide walls, and I would start to feel the church was my body and I was a small pulsing red point of pain in it.

  After I received Communion, I knelt down in the pew and watched. The people who were sick often went last, in wheelchairs and on walkers and assisted by their daughters. On Good Friday, a man hauled himself down the aisle on two crutches to kiss the foot of the cross. He had waited till the very end so he wouldn’t hold up the line, and I never saw anything so dogged. His own feet dragged, seemingly useless. His legs twisted down like a flag from the hip. The seconds were slower in his service and the organ kept going as long as he moved and the spotlight of personhood shone on him, and all of us watched the body.

  • • •

  THE PEOPLE WHO DO odd jobs around churches are the ones who really need the work. The job is five dollars in the middle of the night—it’s a wife and children waiting just off the shoulder of the highway. It’s a past that swallowed a person up and spat him back out here, naked and with nothing to his name.

  We have always had a handyman, someone to fix, patch, rewire, uproot, tear down and nail up. He comes with the church, like Jesus, and he always has that same smell of hardware stores and the mustaches of uncles. A faint beerishness, a knowledge of sports, a body that expands to fill the space. He comes when my mother calls, because if she cannot put her mark on these anonymous places, how can she ever feel at home? This is the first I can recall us having two, though. Maybe they both needed the job, so much that it had to be multiplied like loaves.

  I wake on weekend mornings to hear Darrell mowing the back lawn while Whimsy barks joyfully and frisks around his legs, and every so often he comes into the house to help move my father’s bed up or down the stairs—whenever the pain in my father’s back becomes unbearable, he decides a change of scenery will do the trick. If Chuck is accompanied everywhere by the sounds of indiscriminate hammering, Darrell is attended by his adjectives, all of which are bright spots in the language. His patience, my mother tells me, is infinite. But what would happen to him if it weren’t?

  When I ask my mother why Chuck hasn’t been fired, her mouth sews itself into a straight line. “I wish he would be. I hate the way he talks to me,” she says. “I hate the way he talks to Darrell. Bellows at him, treats him like a child, just blows up at him for any old thing.”

  I know he would never talk to Darrell that way if he weren’t black, the same way he would never talk to my mother that way if she weren’t a woman. I’m so afraid of Chuck that every time I hear him blasting through the door, shouting “MAINTENANCE!” at the top
of his lungs, I race into my room to avoid encountering him. Whenever the call comes, “ANYBODY HOME,” I whisper “no” to myself and run upstairs. The whole duration of my stay passes without me ever catching a glimpse of him. As I describe Chuck now, he is faceless, just six feet of sounds and their effects. And once or twice I hear Darrell’s voice swept up in the velocity of his like a piece of paper, saying, “You know that won’t help anything. Yelling like that isn’t going to do anything.”

  Sometimes I even find myself crouching, staring out the side window at the blue sky, silent and still and spelling out M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I in my head the way I did when I was small. I listen for the slam that means he is gone. No one’s home, I’m not home, there’s no one here. You can be so objective, finally, when you feel like you don’t have a body at all.

  • • •

  I RECOGNIZE THIS AS BLUSTER, because my father is a blusterer. If you have a blusterer in your house, you must treat him as the weather, capable of gathering himself in a second and storming. If a blusterer does harm, it is as the weather does harm: by flattening and blowing down. This is more a feature of fathers, I have found. God too spoke out of the whirlwind.

  Sometimes the bluster is even funny. Every so often, during his rages, my father would yell “HOMEY DON’T PLAY THAT” at the top of his lungs, to demonstrate how much he would not accept the bullcrap of whatever was going on. No one knew where he had picked it up. Did he stay up late and watch In Living Color after we were in bed? He pointed at us and shouted it, HOMEY DON’T PLAY THAT, like it was one of the commandments. Who was homey? Was he homey, or was it God? Did homey signify some sort of respect for the natural order, which we were disregarding through our actions? Our Homey, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, you do not play that, on earth as it is in Heaven.