The Bighead

by Edward Lee

  Charity leaned eagerly forward in the couch. “But, Aunt Annie, how could you afford it?”

  Again, Annie’s poise seemed discrete, reluctant. “I came into a little money. Everyone did on the north ridge. I’ll—I’ll tell you all about it later.”

  “That’s…wonderful!” Charity celebrated.

  But Jerrica got the vibe: Annie didn’t want to talk about it, for whatever reason, not now, at any rate. Hence, she added quickly enough, “But Charity’s right, Ms. Walsh. The boarding house really looks nice.”

  “Oh, you silly thing,” Annie chuckled. “Please, call me Annie. Oh—let me get the tea!”

  Aunt Annie rose from the couch, quick and nimble for a woman of her age, and disappeared through dark-scarlet curtains. “Your aunt really is cool,” Jerrica took the opportunity to cite.

  “She is.” Charity gazed into a long pause. “She’s the most wonderful person. I don’t understand how I could’ve forgotten.”

  “Well, when you’re apart from someone for so long, they kind of fade from your memory.”

  “I know,” Charity admitted. “But Annie’s different. Lots of people are from around these parts. She’s…”

  “Exclusive,” Jerrica offered.

  Charity’s face beamed. “That’s it! That’s the perfect word!”

  “What’s the perfect word?” Aunt Annie inquired, arriving with a beautiful silver service of steaming tea cups.

  “Oh, nothing, Aunt Annie,” Charity said. “Just girls talking.”

  Annie smiled. “Oh, really? Well, you might not believe this, but I used to be a girl myself. And I know how girls talk. ’N fact, that’s why I saw fit ta put Jerrica’s room right next ta yours, Charity. ’cos there’s a connectin’ door, which yawl kin leave open to talk yer girl talk.”

  Jerrica, aside, assessed this. Hmmm. There’s a loaded comment…

  “Thank you, Aunt Annie, that was very thoughtful.” Then Charity’s voice turned dreamy. “It’s just do great to be back.”

  “And it’s great to have you back. I always thought that ya never should’ve left, but then…”

  “Aunt Annie, don’t,” Charity rushed in, leaning forward again. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  Annie sat back stolid in her seat. Then a pause unreeled.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” Jerrica asked, to break the odd ice. She’d already noticed the turtle-shell upturned on the hardwood table.

  “Oh, please do,” Annie invited. Jerrica relievingly lit a Salem, took a deep drag, and then watched with something like astonishment as Annie withdrew a long meerschaum pipe and loaded it with tobacco. The stereotypes dazzled her: Christ, Jerrica thought. This place is so hick. I’m surprised she didn’t pull out a corncob pipe!

  Jerrica then took a moment to look closely at Annie’s face. Yes, it was weathered yet genteel, crinkled yet pretty. Her blue eyes clear as a teenager’s. She seemed to have a terrific figure for a woman her age. I hope I’m so lucky…

  Then her gaze flicked to Charity. Different hair, different shape of face, but still pretty in some odd, backwoods way. However, the silence was piling up. Jerrica knew she needed to cut it. “Oh, that’s what I wanted to ask you about. It’s in my Lexus notes. Tell me about the abbey.”

  At once, Annie looked afrighted, pipesmoke sifting from her tiny white bowl. “The abbey? Oh, my goodness,” she eventually recovered. “That old place has been closed for decades.”

  “I remember you mentioning something about an abbey,” Charity said, “in one of your letters.”

  Annie sighed. “Oh, of course, but there wasn’t much to tell. It was after—well—after the state took ya. Wroxeter, they called it. Way on back in the woods past Croll’s fields. It’s nothing. The Catholics had some of their nuns running it for a time, as a rest center for priests.”

  “You mean a hospice,” Jerrica remembered from her Nexus search all too quickly. “For dying priests?” The abbey was obviously a sore point; it ruffled Charity’s aunt so quickly, Jerrica would’ve been a fool not to notice. Nevertheless, according to her research, Wroxeter Abbey had been reopened by the diocese as a care ward for priests. But what was the controversy?

  “There were problems there,” Annie finally admitted. “But that’s all in the past.” The shift in topics, then, was so quick, Jerrica knew she’d run afoul with her comment. “I’m sure you girls will like your rooms,” Annie said next. “Charity, of course, has her old room. And you, Jerrica, right next door, you have Governor Thomas’ suite. They named the road after him, you

  know.”

  “Governor Thomas?” Jerrica queried over her Salem.

  “He was governor a hundred years ago, and, well, he was, you know, he was a fella who liked to get together with other fellas.” Aunt Annie smiled. “Back then, of course, being that way—gay’s what I guess ya call it—wasn’t something you told folks about. He had a wife, for show. But every Thursday night he’d bring his boy-lover to the house… Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t even consider.” Aunt Annie’s clear blue eyes focused with concern on Jerrica. “Maybe staying in such a room, with such goings on, might be offensive to ya.”

  Jerrica nearly laughed. “Not at all, Annie,” Jerrica said, “I’d be honored to stay in Governor Thomas’ room.”

  “Good, good,” Annie said. “Fine. ’cos it’s a nice room, it is. Perfect view into the woods. Goop!”

  Jerrica and Charity nearly jumped out of their seats at the exclamation. Goop? Jerrica wondered. What is that?

  At once, though, a tall man in overalls appeared at the parlor curtains. Jerrica nearly stared at him. Another cliche, another stereotype. Overalls, workboots, there were even a few strands of straw in his disheveled, shoulder-length hair. In fact, his hair length was the only thing that didn’t meet the cliches. His physique, though—Christ! Jerrica thought. All hard muscles on a large, tapered frame.

  “This here’s Goop Gooder, and this is Jerrica Perry and this over here’s my wonderful niece Charity, who I’ve told ya ’bout many’a time,” Annie said briskly, an edge of sternness to her drawl. “So don’t you mind ’em. You just leave ’em alone.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Goop said.

  “Jerrica, why don’t ya give Goop yer keys so Goop can git your bags out the trunk’a your car?”

  “Sure,” Jerrica said. She passed the keys. She smiled. “Hi, Goop.” Goop? You gotta be kidding me! That’s a name? “Nice to meet you.”

  Goop’s shucksy face blushed. “Aw, aw, hi—I’se pleased ta meet’cha too, Miss Jerrica, and you’d too, Miss Char—”

  “Goop!” Annie yelled. “Just get the dagged bags and take ’em up to their rooms!”

  Goop shrugged, without losing his grin, and ambled out for the front door, his big workboots scuffing the hardwood floor.

  “I know you’re a city gal,” Annie aimed at Jerrica, “and you might not think it’s too nice for me to be talkin’ ta Goop that way. But what’cha gotta understand is that Goop’s about the finest handyman in these parts, but he’s also quite slow in the head, and he can get a bit riled over pretty women.”

  “I understand,” Jerrica said. More backwoods convention, still more cliche. Slow in the head? Well, he looked fairly well packed in the pants, she boldly thought, unable to not notice the considerable endowment in Goop Goodman’s lower regions… It was something she always noted of men, something she, even if unconsciously, couldn’t help but flick her eyes on. This Goop’s crotch looked like he’d put the entirety of the Post’s sports section in his shorts.

  “Come on up, girls,” Annie bid. “She pushed through the parlor curtain, her arm around Charity’s shoulder, and led them toward a winding staircase. “Let me show yawl to your rooms.”

  Charity’s arm, in turn, slipped around Annie’s slim back. “Are there many guests right now?” she asked.

  “Well, hon, no, none right now, but I do gotta reservation comin’ tomorrah.” And at that instant, Annie paused on the stairs and looked over her shoulder at Jerr
ica.

  “It’s a priest, as a matter of fact,” Annie said. “Stayin’ here a week or so.”

  “A priest?” Jerrica asked.

  “That’s right, hon. A Catholic priest…comin’ all the way from Richmond.”

  Why on earth? Jerrica frowned. A priest? Coming to this place? Why? But Jerrica didn’t even need to ask.

  Annie continued up the steps, finishing her revelation. “He’s comin’ here to reopen Wroxeter Abbey.”

  (II)

  Had Alexander ever even heard of it?

  Shit, the priest thought. Wroxeter Abbey?

  “That’s right, Tom, we’re sending you to Wroxeter. Assessment and evaluation, you might call it.” Monsignor Halford’s high, cushioned chair creaked minutely when he’d leaned back, his fingers steepled in his lap. Halford was Chancellor of the Richmond Diocesan Pastoral Center. “In fact, we’ve already made arrangements for your accommodations. You’ll be staying at a nearby boarding house, since the abbey itself isn’t habitable as yet. It’ll be a nice project for you to take over. And, you’ll be happy to know, the diocese doesn’t consider this TDY, so you’ll maintain your benefice pay status.”

  Oh, that’s just fuckin’ great, Alexander considered now, Richmond long behind him. Like the extra hundred bucks a month on benefice should appease him. Alexander didn’t give a shit about money; his spirit had long since outgrown that. Benefice, my ass, he thought now. The diocese is greasing me, that’s what they’re doing. They’ll never give me my own goddamn parish, and they don’t have the balls to tell me to my face. So they send me on these little trips instead. At least Halford had let him take the old parish Mercedes, so the gruelling drive wouldn’t be all that intolerable.

  The reasons were legion, and none too surprising. Bureaucracy, like God, worked in intricate ways. He’d seen its many webs throughout his life: on the battlefield in South East Asia, on the college campus, in taverns and strip joints, and now, if not more so, in the Church. Alexander had been a priest for twelve years; they were no closer to giving him his own parish now than the day he’d graduated from the seminary. You’re a firebrand, Tom, Monsignor Halford had told him a hundred times. You’re like a high-powered engine that burns a little too hot.

  All right. Maybe it was true. Forty-five now, and fifty seemed dreadfully close. But he’d been an unlikely candidate for the clergy since day one. At twenty, he’d been an Army Ranger, 5th Special Operations Group. He’d sat in the bush behind Claymores, reading Thomas Merton and St. Ignatius between firefights. He’d killed dozens of men, and even a woman once—it was almost too proverbial—a pregnant woman. She’d been ten yards away from tossing a two-kilo satchel charge into a field hospital full of wounded. What appalled Alexander most was not the war itself but the notion in general. There’s no reason for this, he concluded each time he dropped Charlie in the peep-sight of his M16. Not in The Nam, not anywhere. It was the only thing he’d learned during his twelve-month combat tour, and perhaps the only real thing he’d ever learn in his life. C-rats, trenchfoot, crotch-rot; dysentery; chiggers the size of hazelnuts under his skin, mosquito bites more like dog bites—none of that bothered him. It was just the notion. There was simply no reason for people to kill each other.

  He’d slummed for a year after his hitch, working civvie jobs and doing the things that twenty-one-year-olds do, and quite a few of those things involved women. But the civilian world only reinforced what he’d learned in the field. Too much of life revolved solely around itself, everyone looking out for number one. Alexander didn’t want to be like that, and he knew there was a way out:

  God.

  The G.I. Bill took him through Catholic U. and a 3.9 grade-point average with a double major, philosophy and psych. Then, two more years divided between pissant jobs and volunteer work, mostly AIDS hospices. You knew you cared about people when you cleaned the shit out of their pants, for free. But…

  Would the Church take a former soldier, a killer?

  Admission to the seminary didn’t come easy. Talk about ballbreakers. It had been Halford himself who’d done the preliminary interviewing for Christ The King Seminary, upstate. “Why do you want to be a priest, Tom?”

  “So I can tell people how much I love Jesus. So I can draw them closer to Him,” came Alexander’s simple yet honest answer.

  “Not good enough,” Halford said. “Stock answer.”

  “I want to do things for the world instead of for me,”

  “Still not good enough.”

  But then Alexander had slapped several dissertations onto the priest’s desk. Abstracts he’d written on his own: the modern applications of the works of Ignatius, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Christian philosophies made functional in the 90’s. Alexander had graduated from the seminary first in his class at the age of thirty-two.

  But it didn’t take him long to realize they’d never give him his own parish. You’re too valuable as a psychologist, Tom, had been Halford’s favorite excuse for years. Valuable? Sometimes a priest would quit, and it was Alexander’s job to reel them back. He generally succeeded but always wondered if it was the right thing. Why goad a man to do what he doesn’t want to do anymore? The rest of the time he sat in the little office behind the Richmond Main Rectory, trying to put broken men back together. Priests never came to him on their own, they were ordered to psychotherapy by either the diocese or the court. He got a lot of drunks and a lot of alleged pedophiles. Antabuse for the drunks, behavioralist thrashings for the pedos. “You’re a goddamn priest, you asshole!” he’d rail at them. “Priests don’t feel up kids! And I don’t want to hear a bunch of liberal horseshit about bad childhoods and hormonal imbalances. You’re a priest, and you have responsibilities! People trust you because of that candyass collar around your neck, and you have an obligation to them. If you screw around with anymore kids, you’re gonna go to fuckin’ jail, then you’re really gonna know what sexual abuse is. Is that what you want, tough guy? You want to be the cellblock bitch? You got any idea what cons do to pedophiles in the joint? They’ll make you boy-pussy, chief. They’ll turn you to a punk in less time than it takes you to say three Hail Marys, and they’ll be trading you back and forth every night for cigarettes. But that’ll be the least of your worries, hoss, because if you do it again, I’m gonna kick your ass so bad your own mama won’t recognize you.”

  He put them on Depo-Prevera and left them to wonder. Needless to say, there were many complaints about Alexander’s methodologies. But the diocese never stepped on his tail because his success rate was so high. Any priest gone bad was an embarrassment, and the Church didn’t like embarrassments. Here’s the problem. Fix it. They didn’t care how.

  But what of Alexander’s own problems? Celibate since twenty-eight, not once had he even considered breaking his vows. Hell, I don’t even jerk off. He smoked and drank in moderation, and—well—he had a propensity for foul language, not a priestly trait. Once he’d called Monsignor Tipton an asshole at an ordination reception, during an argument over whether or not girls should be allowed to acolyte. Halford had nearly shit his cassock. “Damn it, Tom! That man’s going to be a cardinal someday, and you just called him an asshole!”

  Alexander shrugged. “He is an asshole.”

  “That’s beside the point! He could request a reprimand! You want that on your Church record? He could have you reassigned to a mission in Africa, for God’s sake.”

  “Let him,” Alexander said. “I’ll kick his bootie with my tooty fruity.”

  “He deserves respect!”

  “He deserves my foot up his ass.”

  “You’re impossible, Tom!” Halford continued with his tirade. “You’re so indecorous, so…profane. You cuss worse than a longshoreman. There’s absolutely no excuse for a priest to use that kind of language.”

  “What language would you prefer? French? German? How about Lower Latin or Sanskrit? Anyway you look at it, Tipton’s an antediluvian asshole with medieval ideas that are contrary to the needs of the worship
pers. It’s guys like him that keep the Church in a constant state of regression, and I told him so. I call them like I see them. Tipton’s a shmuck. A shit-head. A pantywaist Church-bureaucratic dick-lick who’s in the bizz only for his own self-aggrandizement, and if the Pope ever makes him a cardinal, I’ll bend over and blow chunky on his raiments.”

  “God Almighty, Tom,” Halford groaned.

  Such, then, was Alexander’s clerical plight. If he couldn’t be a priest in any real way, he wouldn’t want to be one at all. And if the diocese wanted to keep him swept under a benefice rug because he had a foul mouth, then so be it. At least they couldn’t fire him. Though art a priest forever, they’d promised at his own ordination. They’re stuck with me, and I like that. Besides, I’m probably the best diocesan psychologist in the country, and they know it.

  It was almost, in fact, amusing. Any priest wanted his own parish, and Alexander knew he’d never—ever in a million years—get his. And why?

  He laughed out loud behind the wheel. Because I cuss!

  So let the cards fall where they may. It was fate, wasn’t it? It was Calvian predestination, which Alexander didn’t even believe in.

  If God doesn’t want me to have my own parish, he reckoned, then I guess He’s got a good reason, and I ain’t gonna argue with Him.

  And in the meantime:

  There was always Wroxeter Abbey. He’d be up there at least a month, to assess the cost of reopening, to recalculate maintenance expenditures, and to supervise preliminary refurbishments. Well, it would be good to get away for awhile. Richmond was beautiful in the fall, winter, and spring, but, conversely, a drab, hot, ugly city in the summer.

  Yeah, it’ll be nice to get out into the great outdoors.

  Deep in Virginia hill country now, Alexander took the old Mercedes around the next bend, to the exit off of 23.