“He called again,” Mrs. Loring told him, and she gave him an oddly knowing look. “Last evening, while you were at novena. He asked what you were like. He said he was calling to find out what you were like. There was something very disturbed in the voice. It’s a voice that’s so grown-up, Father—I mean the talk is grown-up, and then it breaks on that little boy’s falsetto. It’s very upsetting. I told him to call you, and he said that he had.”
“He hasn’t called me,” Father Hennessey said.
This was the following Saturday, after a week of exhausting tasks—the Knights of Columbus dance for the CCD classes, dinners with parishioners, several visits to the hospital and to homes of the sick, four baptisms, one extreme unction, and a wedding; he felt hollowed out from the inside. He was sitting at the table in the kitchen, in the hour before confessions were to begin. He dreaded it now for reasons that would have amazed him, even a month ago: quietly he hoped for boredom. Mrs. Loring had fixed him soup, and she had taken the seat opposite him, sipping coffee, and worrying, and looking at him. “I don’t like it,” she said.
“Did he say anything else to you?”
“He asked if I believe in hell.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I didn’t know what to tell him. I told him to talk to you. And that’s when he said he’d called you.”
“Did he put it that way? He’d called me?”
“He said he talked to you.”
“If he calls you again, try to get his name for me, will you?”
“I did. I did that. He won’t give his name, or where he’s from. Just that he’s not from here.”
Father Hennessey stood. “I’ll be in my room for a few minutes.”
“If he does call you, Father, please tell him to stop calling me.”
Abruptly, he had a reasonless suspicion that she knew the boy, and had put him up to everything. He couldn’t help the thought—it was as if some part of him believed he might be able to trick the truth out of the very air. “Do you know the boy?” he asked.
Mrs. Loring stared—cold, dark eyes; a blank, concentrating face. “What?” she said.
“Nothing,” said the priest. “I’m casting about like a man in a net.”
• • •
Upstairs, alone, he said his office, but sitting on the bed this time. He heard Mrs. Loring leave. The kitchen was clean; the rooms of the house were in order. And still he felt as if something were intolerably wrong. The angles of wall and window and corner had kept their symmetry at the expense of some obscure, delicate aspect, whose absence made the whole house seem crooked. He knew this was pure imagining, and still he could not shake the feeling.
In the paper, there was the news that Alphonse Graham had pleaded guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor. There was no mention of the nameless juvenile, nor of any of the circumstances surrounding the admission of guilt—he had been let go at the high school; his wife had gone back east to stay with her aging mother. But Father Hennessey had heard the gossip. The poor man was finished. He would never teach again; essentially his life was over. The priest wished desperately, and with a kind of grieving appetite, to talk to him. He couldn’t think it away, or pray it out of existence.
When he walked over to the church to hear confessions he resolved that if the boy came, he would stop being contentious. He would try to hear the anguish and respond to it.
But the boy didn’t come. And he was not there the next week, or the week after that. Mrs. Loring hadn’t heard from him either, and in her mind the episode, whatever it had been, was over. Father Hennessey feared that he had driven the boy away. And he had overwhelming curiosity as to his identity. In the slow passages between three o’clock in the morning and dawn, he lay awake and was partly convinced that there was some supernatural element to it all: the boy’s appearance had been providential. Perhaps he hadn’t been a real boy at all, but an angel or a demon. And why, the priest wondered, in his wakefulness and his confusion, should this seem so far-fetched, in a life built on faith? An angel had been sent to goad him out of his apathy.
Real winter weather arrived: a bad snowstorm that turned to freezing rain and ice. All the leaves were gone from the trees and he hadn’t noticed. He spent Thanksgiving at a mission in the city, serving food to the homeless and hearing their confessions. He said a Mass at the center, and gave Communion. It was a struggle to feel it as the mystery he had always believed it to be. He was too weary, too tired of his own mind. When he heard confessions he kept listening for the boy’s voice, that distressed, reedy, sorrowful, faintly angry voice mouthing startling phrases, and when it didn’t come he felt low and depressed. He couldn’t explain it, any of it—not even to himself.
He returned to spending an hour in excruciating pain each evening, kneeling on the hard floor to say his office. He recognized the essentially indulgent nature of the thing, yet felt compelled to do it anyway. The pain helped him concentrate; it felt, anyway, somewhat expiative.
The day before Christmas Eve, he had to pay a call on a parishioner, an elderly woman who had taken an overdose of aspirin. She was a patient in the psychological wing of the hospital. She had done well there, and was nearly restored enough to go back to her life. Father Hennessey’s visit was one of the last things in her treatment, something her grown children wanted. She seemed unchanged from the gentle nodding presence she had been before the trouble: a little frenetic, but good-humored, even cheerful. It was impossible to believe that she could have tried to kill herself. He said a rosary with her, sitting at a window in the dayroom, overlooking the grounds. It was a bright cold day. He held her thin hand, gazing out the window, and he saw the boy approach the building from the far end of the parking lot, having come from the street over there; his coat was open, revealing a red sweatshirt. It was him, the one. Father Hennessey excused himself and hurried out and down to the front entrance. This was being given to him from on high. It was meant to be, and in this way, too—after weeks of worry. He was on the landing as the boy came up the stairs. The boy hadn’t seen him, walking head down, muttering something to himself. When he looked up and saw the priest, he stopped.
“Hello,” Father Hennessey said.
They stood there.
Finally the boy came up another step, hesitating, stopping again.
“It’s me,” the priest said. “Father Hennessey.”
“What?”
“I believe providence put me here today, to see you. Why have you stopped coming?”
The boy shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“I saw you,” said Father Hennessey. “Remember?”
“No, I mean I don’t understand about it. What good it’s supposed to do. I’m not even Catholic. My mother is.”
The priest took a stride toward him, and then sat down on the step, resting his elbows on his knees. He couldn’t stand. The air stung his cheeks. He looked over at the boy and said, “Please, sit down.”
The boy shook his head. “I can’t. She’s in there. My mother.”
“Oh.” Father Hennessey stood, with some effort. “Of course. I’m sorry.”
“She’s—not right in the head—”
“How long?”
“Since my father left. And now my sister’s—well. She’s gonna have a baby.”
Father Hennessey said nothing. He felt something drop under his heart. He could not find the strength to draw in the next breath. He straightened and tried to collect himself.
“Yeah,” the boy said, having seen the reaction.
“What’s your name?” the priest managed to get out.
“I don’t believe it, Father, any more than she does.”
“Your mother?”
“No, that’s not right; my mother does believe it. And it’s put her in the bughouse.”
“That isn’t what’s done it—” Father Hennessey said. And realized the note of pleading that had been in his voice. “Remember what we talked about, though—pride and des—
” The priest stopped, having seen the impatience in the boy’s countenance.
“Look, everything you said to me I said to her, okay? Jesus isn’t around to chase the devils out of her.”
Father Hennessey wondered at the force of his own feeling; he was close to tears. The boy seemed almost forbearing.
“Yeah,” he said. “Well—I gotta go try again.”
“I didn’t help,” Father Hennessey told him. “But—but faith—faith can help.” He did not feel the words, and he saw the boy perceive this. He held his hands out slightly from the sides of his body, a gesture of helplessness.
“He made the angels, and they rebelled. Right?”
“Yes. That’s right, son. And there’s an adversary—”
“And then he made Adam and Eve and they were in the garden and the snake tempted Eve.”
“Yes—the adversary—”
“How can he be perfect if he makes mistakes like those, Father? Mistakes like me, and my mother?” There were tears in the voice. The priest was sure of it. He couldn’t find his way to the words that would help.
“Faith,” he got out. “We aren’t given—”
“Stumbling along,” the boy said simply, but without conviction, holding out his own hands. The priest saw that the fingers were knotted and curved slightly with the arthritis. There was something beautiful about them in their strange variance from the hands one expected a fourteen-year-old boy to have. Father Hennessey had a sense of having come face-to-face with a living sanctity. It stopped his breath again. He watched the boy go on up the stairs and into the building.
What disturbed him most that night, lying in bed thinking about it, was that he had gone through everything in these last few weeks only in terms of himself. That fact glared at him in his sleeplessness. He got up and paced the floor, and then knelt and tried to pray, and couldn’t. His mind kept presenting him with a picture of the boy, walking up the steps of the hospital and in.
He began to wonder if he were not becoming unhinged.
In the morning Mrs. Loring arrived early, and went about her tasks with a certain briskness. Or had he imagined it? He said, “I met our friend.”
“Who?” she said.
“The boy. The one who kept calling.”
She said nothing.
“I’m sorry for what I said to you yesterday.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Father.”
“Our caller—the one you talked to about me. He’s going through a very bad time. He’s a nice boy. A—a—well, a very special child.”
“Everyone’s special in their way,” she said. “Usually.” She smiled, and seemed to want him to take this as a joke.
“Is everything all right with you, this morning?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said, as if surprised that he would ask. “Everything’s fine. Everything’s just fine.”
Throughout that day, he attended to his duties with her help, and when she left to go to her own house, her own life, he went for a long walk alone around the grounds of his church. The moon was out again, and it was clear and quite cold. The wintry chill went down through the cloth of his tunic and gripped him. He stood in the shadow of the church and looked up. He had a moment of being frightfully aware of it as mere stone; it was a building, the work of human hands, stone and brick and mortar and wood. The stars were ranged far and wide above it, sparkling.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
This is Richard Bausch’s eighth volume of short stories. He is also the author of a volume of poetry and eleven novels. In 2004 he won the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction. He is a past Chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and lives in Tennessee, where he holds Moss Chair of Excellence in the Writer’s Workshop of the University of Memphis.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Bausch
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The following stories have been previously published, some in slightly different form: “Trophy” in the Fiction Issue of Golf World; “Something Is Out There” in Murdaland; and “Blood,” “The Harp Department in Love,” “Immigration,” “Overcast,” “Reverend Thornhill’s Wife,” and “Sixty-five Million Years” in Narrative Magazine. “Byron the Lyron” appeared in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction: Seventh Edition, edited by Richard Bausch and R. V. Cassill (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bausch, Richard, [date]
Something is out there: stories / Richard Bausch.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59288-0
I. Title.
PS3552.A846S59 2010
813′.54—dc22 2009027437
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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