Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  A thought began slowly to move the flesh around Sheffield’s mouth. “Wait, you mean they think you did it too?”

  Jolted, Raleigh blushed. Where was his brain? No one had told Sheffield why he was under suspicion; he didn’t know the police had his guns because Raleigh had thrown them in that cursed hole. Given the facts, Sheffield might, in all fairness (and Hayes considered himself the fairest man he’d ever met), blame Raleigh for making him a wanted man. On further reflection, the awful truth was that if Raleigh hadn’t taken those idiotic guns and dumped them in a panic, he wouldn’t now be stuck with Mingo at all. The realization that he’d flung this fat albatross around his own neck jarred the insurance agent so strongly, his body literally spasmed. He took a breath; embarrassing as it was to admit his folly to a fool (although, parenthetically, on the other hand, if the idiot hadn’t claimed twice in one day to be trying to commit suicide, he, Raleigh, wouldn’t have been forced to take responsibility for those guns), humiliating as it was, still it was only fair to say, “Mingo, I threw your pistols in the excavation where they found the rug and shoes. They have my fingerprints. At this juncture, they’re far more likely to be ‘after’ me than you.”

  Sheffield squeezed both his friend’s hands, sending a jolt of agony through the sprained wrist. “Raleigh! I’ll never let them get you. If they try, they’ll have to climb over my dead body. As God is my witness,” and here he actually raised his right hand, “I swear, you can count on me. I know you’re innocent and I’ll tell that to every court in the land.”

  This was not the response Hayes would have made and therefore not the response he expected; now he was even more embarrassed. Imbecilic as his neighbor’s vow might be, there was nevertheless something touching about it that Hayes wanted to balance. “Let me explain about why I threw your guns away.”

  Sheffield squeezed him again. “I know why. You’re my friend. Trying to save me from my darkest impulses, and I won’t forget that, Raleigh, till the day I die. Old buddy.”

  Hayes, speechless, shook his head and returned to the breakfast table. With a punch of the swinging door, Sister Joe came into the room, pushing ahead of her an alarmingly emaciated, barefoot young woman with very short platinum hair in which very black roots were visible. This nun wore a coarse white robe, a rough-hewn cross on a leather string, and had deep bruised circles under her eyes, as well as a scar across her cheekbone. She was introduced as the novice who’d broken into the Cadillac. To Raleigh’s expression of gratitude and his offer to pay for the gasoline, she bowed, solemnly crossing her hands over her chest. To Sister Anne’s request that she eat just one small piece of toast, she shook her head and backed slowly out of the room. Sister Joe explained that Mary Theresa was keeping a Lenten silent fast; all she would imbibe were juices and nuts—perhaps hypothesizing that even the Savior, wandering forty days in the desert, picked up in the occasional oasis the rare orange or almond.

  “I noticed her bare feet,” Mingo said. “It’s like in The Nun’s Story. When Audrey Hepburn was getting initiated, she couldn’t even talk to her best friend and she had to lie on a stone floor all night. Finally, she just got married instead, or became a scientist, I forget which. I guess getting into the nunhood is about as hard as pro football.”

  “About,” said Sister Joe.

  Mingo poured another bowl of cereal. “Do you get to choose what you give up for Lent? I mean, does it have to be eggs, or dessert, like that?”

  “Oh, it can be much worse,” Sister Joe told him. “Me, I’m trying to give up thinking I could run the world better than the people in charge.”

  Raleigh, who shared this opinion, shook his head. “But what if you’re right, why shouldn’t you think so? That’s false humility.”

  “Certainly is,” she agreed. “That’s why giving up eggs is a breeze, compared; why do you think pride is the worst sin in Hell, Mr. Hayes? Believe me, gluttony, lust, sloth, they’re dog poop compared to pride.”

  Sister Anne shuffled quickly in her bedroom slippers to the door, as she invited Mingo Sheffield to follow her and “take a tour.”

  “Show him the puppies,” called Sister Joe.

  “I love puppies,” Mingo said.

  “Here’s a thought, Mr. Hayes,” Sister Joe went on, busily washing dishes. “We’re both in the life insurance business. Ever think of that?”

  No, Hayes had never thought he and the Church were in the same business; he assumed that the nun was talking about how, by piety, one could insure a place in Heaven, as opposed to Hell. Not believing in either as a destination, he had no more faith in that kind of insurance than his relatives (who gave every impression of not much believing in death—despite continual evidence to the contrary) had any interest in buying his kind of life insurance. His reply

  was therefore noncommittal. “I suppose so, in a sense.” Scraping more plates, the sweatshirted nun pursued her analogy.

  “Our premiums are higher, but then so’s the payoff.”

  “Eternal life?” Hayes regretted his sarcasm as soon as he heard it;

  no need to sound ungrateful, given their hospitality.

  But she grinned. “You bet. Anyhow, don’t get me talking shop. I

  told you, I gave up advice for Lent. Otherwise, believe it, I’d be a real

  buttinski on your case, Hayes.”

  Affronted, Raleigh reached in his jacket for his spare spectacles.

  “I don’t follow you,” he said coldly as he blew on the glass. Sister Joe rested her crossed arms on her athletically plump

  bosom. “Anything we can do to help? Cops? Lawyer?”

  “No, thanks.” Raleigh Hayes was not interested in sharing his

  problems; he never had been. He would drive for an hour searching

  for an address before he’d stop to ask directions. Of course, it rankled

  that circumstances prohibited his going immediately to the Mount

  Olive police station to file charges against those hoodlums. He,

  who’d never called on the police in his life; now, when he wanted

  them, they wanted him for a capital crime. It simply wasn’t fair. Of

  course, Hayes could have filed a complaint anyhow, returned home,

  sorted out with Chief Hood (a moron but a fellow Civitan) the misunderstanding over Mingo’s guns, and so settled in again to his

  upright life. But the fact was, he didn’t want to. Having once set out

  (however inadvertently, however irrationally), having once undertaken this idiotic quest, all of his will, the whole generative drive of

  his soul was now concentrated on its fulfillment. Nothing could keep

  him from completing, to the dot of the letter of the law, every task

  set him as a precondition to his father’s return. His life was set aside,

  blinkered. He could see nothing but this goal and his unyielding

  resolve to reach it. Not because it was worthy, but because he had

  bent his character, his self to the task, and, for that cause, no one and

  nothing could stop him.

  Before the Thermopyleans said good-bye to the Sisters of Mercy, Raleigh (now breezy in one of Mingo’s mammoth Hawaiian shirts) borrowed the Mother Superior’s office to telephone Aura. In his own room, a surly nun was already stripping the sheets for the next spiritual conference—some school guidance counselors on retreat from teenagers. The sour curve of this nun’s mouth was reassuring to Hayes. All that good cheer and matter-of-fact kindness prominent in her ten companions had unsettled him. Why should God succeed in tricking nuns into happiness?

  As it appeared that Aura had already left to “make up” at a television studio, he spoke only to Caroline, and to her only briefly, because Kevin was waiting.

  “Waiting for what? Who is Kevin?”

  “Oh, rilly, Daddy, you know, Kevin. Like Kevin, you know. Oh, Daddy, please please please don’t sell the wagon, give it to me! We need three cars.”

  Hayes recall
ed with a groan that he’d bought a Cadillac. “You’re too young,” he said.

  “I mean, it’s toedully unfair. You and Mom are never home, like you aren’t even interested in my whole life, and I don’t have any clean clothes to wear, and then you treat me like a baby!”

  “Caroline, I assure you I don’t have any clean clothes to wear either, if that makes you feel any better.”

  Hayes was spared further comparisons of injustices committed against himself and his daughter, by her abrupt screech, “Ohmigod! Kevin’s blowing up. Mommy said, tell you, call back this afternoon. Bye, Daddy, kiss kiss kiss.”

  Looking up from the buzzing receiver to the desk across the room, Hayes saw Sister Catherine, her plain intelligent face swathed in a white wimple, pulling the handle of an adding machine with the resigned look of a regular customer at a one-armed bandit in Atlantic City. She announced in her peaceful accent, “If the Church hadn’t enjoined us to poverty, these bills certainly would. Thank God for the dogs.”

  Here was a subject with which Raleigh could genuinely sympathize. “Your mortgage must be horrendous, a place this big.”

  “Oh, heavens, Mr. Hayes, we could never afford to buy Mercy House; it’s all we can do to keep our small charities going, the unemployment in this area is so bad, and the farms in such trouble. When I first came here, I could not believe the farms, how small they were, and poor.”

  “Are you from…” He was going to say “somewhere in Europe,” but she had already said, “Wisconsin. Swedish.”

  “What are you doing in North Carolina?” he asked her.

  “I was sent here.”

  “But why?”

  She smiled. “One always wonders that.”

  “I mean, there can’t be many Catholics around here.”

  “Precious few,” she admitted. “But we’re not missionaries, Mr. Hayes. We’re here because of Mercy House. It was bequeathed to us by a local gentleman.” She pointed at a disgruntled photograph on the wall. “Poor man. He converted to Catholicism, and his family renounced him. And so he left his entire estate to us, but with the condition that we build on his land here in Mount Olive. I’m terribly afraid he did it for the express purpose of spiting his relations.”

  Raleigh, who was then searching his appointment book for the number of one of his own relatives, accidentally said what he was thinking. “Perhaps you should have refused to be a party to such a motive.”

  Sister Catherine looked at him. “What a foolish thought, young man.”

  Raleigh did not consider himself either foolish or young, and would have been pressed to say which accusation was more offensive. He walked back to the phone and, reaching his cousin Jimmy Clay on the first ring, apologized for awakening him. He then hurried into an involved, although abridged explanation of why the Cadillac hadn’t been returned, followed by queries about the car’s cost and the station wagon’s trade-in value. “Ned Ware can draw up the loan with Aura, Jimmy. Jimmy? Are you awake? What? Stop whispering. I can’t hear you.”

  Muffled grunts replied. “Ungh, trying to sneak out of, ungh, cord’s caught, damn, out of here, hold on, lemme shut, door here, one sec, damn, cord’s too short, there!” Hayes then heard the click of a door closing and, immediately afterward, a startling whispered outburst from his cousin. “Raleigh! Guess what! You’re looking at the happiest man alive! She’s in there. She is, no kidding. Sweet yamakadamas, can you believe this, Raleigh? I did it! I did it, old Ral, twice! A big two! Listen, I can’t talk now, got to get back before she wakes up. But I just want to thank you sincerely, okay, from the bottom of my heart. Sincerely.”

  Now Hayes was whispering as well. “Jimmy, what are you talking about? Thank me for what?”

  “Oh, my group’s gonna go wild about this! They were so right. About not tensing up, and just letting my feelings show. That was it. All it was. Huhuhhhuhuhheeheehuh.” Mirth overcame Clay, as Raleigh took a stab at its source.

  “Tildy’s there?”

  “All because of you.”

  “Me?”

  “That angel gave me a ride home after Mingo ran off after you in my car. She said she’d never seen me so, get this, Ral, ‘virile’ before! Me! The thing is, if you hadn’t told me off—I mean, I know you didn’t mean a word of it, just trying to get me in touch with my more assertive male potentials—and boy oh boy, did it work! When Tildy saw me light into Whaletail, well, she just gets goosebumps all over. How about that! Got to go, Ral, got to wake her up and see about getting married. You think I should? Or…Well, I am so happy, I’m hanging off the roof.”

  Raleigh glanced at the miserable philanthropist on the wall. “Jimmy, I’m sorry—I mean, I’m glad for you, but, isn’t it against the law to marry your cousin?”

  “Ral, don’t get negative on me. You’ve got that tendency. Let’s don’t look for problems. ’Sides, we’re only second cousins.”

  “No, Jimmy, Big Em and Lovie were sisters. That means—”

  “No problem. Tildy was adopted, she told me so.”

  A preposterous claim, but why on earth had she made it? Except, of course, from an understandable desire to escape so disastrous a gene pool. Then again, suppose she was adopted? As Aunt Victoria lamented, the family often neglected to mention details.

  “But, Ral, listen, I owe it all to you, Brainface, and I want you to be my best man, you will, won’t you? Alllll…righhhhhttt! Bye-bye.”

  “Jimmy, the car!”

  “Hey, no problem. I’m giving Aura the deal of a lifetime.”

  Having replaced the phone, Hayes walked to the window and muttered, “Deal of a lifetime.”

  “Were you speaking to me?” asked Sister Catherine, her hand still on the adding machine lever.

  “No, ma’am.” Raleigh said his farewells. Then on a sudden impulse he did something he instantly regretted. He took two hundred-dollar bills from his envelope of cash, and placed them quickly on her desk. Stiff-mouthed, he mumbled, “I’d like to offer a contribution, a payment, your hospitality, appreciate it.”

  The elderly nun looked at the money, then at the donor. He didn’t smile and neither did she. Finally, she opened a drawer. “As payment, it’s too much. As a gift…” She took out a pad. “…It’s lovely of you, and it’s tax deductible. I’ll give you a receipt.”

  Hayes was still blushing when he left. Blushing because he had thrown away two hundred dollars on Catholic nuns when he only gave ten dollars a week to his own church, on whose records his contributions were publicly acknowledged, and privately compared: if he were going to throw away money, he should have at least done it where he’d get the credit for it. Blushing, too, because he felt it might have been more honorable had he left the money anonymously behind at Mercy House, or at least not so eagerly accepted the tax receipt. His scruples were ethical; they had nothing to do with Christianity; as he’d explained to Sister Joe, he was not interested in insuring his immortality. Eternity was too much to get through. Life was hard enough.

  His own ethics did interest our hero, and these he kept considering even after Mingo and he were back on the road. He was bothered by Sister Joe’s notion that pride should fling someone into Hell’s lowest depths. Why in the world should pride—reasonable, legitimate pride, now; not unjustified conceit (as if he thought himself as bright as Einstein), or deluded vanity (as if he imagined every woman he met desired him)—but why should a proper, appropriate pride in authentic virtues (for who could deny that Raleigh Hayes was a decent, responsible, intelligent citizen, a faithful husband and a good provider), why should pride like his be a sin worse than hoggish gluttony, worse than bestial lust, worse than improvidence! It was utterly infuriating that he should be made to feel guilty for feeling a little proud that within the puny borders of his admittedly insignificant life, he had done nothing to disgrace himself or injure others.

  Our hero harbored no aspirations for glory or grandeur, even moral grandeur. Naturally he hoped that if Life, hurling together its great chronicle, should fling
him for a conspicuous instant forward into singularity, then he would acquit himself as well as the next man. He liked to think he would have hidden Anne Frank in his attic. But not since high school had he been absurd enough to believe Life had any grandiose plans for him at all. He was not going to lead a nation, an army, a cause, nor cure cancer, not paint masterpieces, nor sail the farthest, run the fastest, build any fortune or following or any better mousetap to bring America running to his doorstep—not even so fast-forgotten a mouse trap as the hoola hoop. Not only had no heroic role been written for Raleigh W. Hayes, he was the most minor of minor characters in the epic of his age; in all likelihood, he would never be noticed beyond the limits of Thermopylae, and, except possibly by his descendants, would soon be only a vague memory there.

  This modest appraisal caused Mr. Hayes no grief. If he was not to be even a footnote in history’s book—and over the centuries, how many thousands, now nameless, had scrabbled to get there—what difference, in the last analysis, had even the greatest heroes made? The Caesars and Christs? In the last analysis, the world tumbled on, wobbling through millennia, a speck on an infinitesimal granule of space, a drop in the bucket of chaos. So what? He could still, he would still, take pride that among the microscopic scintillas called man, he, Raleigh W. Hayes, was a virtuous specimen.

  As the insurance man silently conversed with himself in this way, beside him in the Cadillac, Mingo Sheffield (the lump poking from the center of his forehead making him look as if he were about to turn into a unicorn) smoked and babbled. “I guess you couldn’t ask for a nicer bunch of nuns anywhere, hunh, Raleigh?”

  “Um hum.”

  “Poor old Sister Anne. I forgot what she called her leg disease. Wasn’t she sweet? I told her I was going to come see her again and take one of their marriage retreats. Vera’ll love it there. And that poor little Mary Theresa, you wouldn’t believe the life she’s had. You didn’t get a chance to talk to her, but I swear. Before she met Jesus, she was in women’s prison three different times and even tried to stab her own daddy with a fork. Then she fell in with a bad crowd. Her girlfriend gave her that scar while she was sleeping! But she ought to eat more. I want Vera to sit down and talk to her about how dieting can be pretty damn dangerous if you don’t have the right information. Hey, did you see that? ‘Eat at Chill’s. Where the Bill Won’t Kill.’ That’s cute! One mile. Let’s stop, okay? I’ve got to have some eggs or I’m nothing all day.”