by J. J. Martin
Copyright © J.J. Martin, 2019
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All characters in the work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cover image: istock.com/SlothAstronaut
Printer: Mi5 Print, Toronto
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Martin, J. J., 1970-, author
Father Sweet / J.J. Martin.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4597-4396-0 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-4597-4397-7 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-4597-4398-4 (EPUB)
I. Title.
PS8626.A76954F38 2019 C813’.6 C2018-906504-4
C2018-906505-2
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19
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Contents
Author’s Note
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
Part Two
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
Five Months Later
1
2
3
Acknowledgements
Book Credits
author’s note
I am asked often if this story is true.
This is a work of fiction. It is not a Million Little Pieces memoir. It is a personal story inspired by unfortunate, all-too-real circumstances.
Some readers, especially those familiar with the Hollywood film industry or my former fellow parishioners at Good Shepherd Parish in Blackburn Hamlet, may believe they recognize certain persons. I have not lifted anyone whole cloth from reality and plunked him or her into this story, though they may have influenced particular characters. So, I encourage you to resist the urge to cast living or dead real-life persons in the roles of the fictional people in the novel.
What I have tried to do, however, is capture certain places and times, and maybe some shadows of truth. Hopefully nothing that matters has been lost.
It is important to note that clerical abuse of authority, which has resulted too often in physical and sexual abuse, is real and ongoing. It is impossible to talk about clerical sexual abuse in Canada without mentioning the Church and state’s exploitation of Indigenous communities, and the settler community’s failure to acknowledge and stop that abuse. The Canadian government colluded with Christian churches to abuse thousands of Indigenous children for generations. The last residential school was shut only in the 1990s.
The connection between governments and church-run schools did not end there, however. To this day, Canadian governments continue to subsidize and administer Catholic schools in state-sponsored religious favouritism unique to Canada among similar countries. Although I attended these schools, a debate is long overdue regarding whether or not they should exist as taxpayer-supported institutions.
Cases of abuse continue to be revealed around the globe. As I was editing one portion of this book, I deliberately toned down the pedophilic overtones of the fictional Mexican apostolic society. However, taking a break one evening, I was shocked to read new details of the Peruvian Sodalitium Christianae Vitae of Father Luis Figari. This society can best be described as a priest-and-child BDSM cult. Truth is so often worse than fiction.
If you wish to do service against the very real atrocities of clerical abuse, state-sanctioned or otherwise, I advise you to donate money or time to the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and/or to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. Both are real institutions seeking justice. The former offers help to individual survivors, and the latter focuses on large-scale reconciliation and restitution issues, involving the tens of thousands of Indigenous children in Canada who suffered as a result of systematic exploitation and oppression by the state and Christian churches.
For additional reading, there are excellent academic and non-fiction resources available for your review. I recommend the very powerful A Knock at the Door, edited by Aimée Craft, or the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, available from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and of course, A.W. Richard Sipe’s seminal Sex, Priests, and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis. Finally, there are endless heartbreaking personal stories available through the SNAP and TRC websites.
J.J. Martin
Autumn 2018
Caught in a mess of evil and good.
— Alex Janvier
part one
1
August 1978
One time, my younger brother Jamie and I found a robin’s nest with only one egg in it. It reminded me of our suburban town. Like an egg in a nest, Blackburn Hamlet was snuggled into a forest on all three of its sides. If I could have had my way, I would have chosen to live in those woods, where I felt free, instead of the house I shared with my parents and Jamie on Woodwalk Crescent. Of course, twelve-year-old boys are not given such choices.
Although the town was one hundred and fifty years old when we moved there in the early seventies, a big rush of development had refashioned Blackburn, changing it from a dingy old farming village to a suburb of Ottawa with new houses strung out along roads that echoed with the sounds of road hockey, bikes, and balls.
You could bicycle every street in an hour, easy. Whenever we did, we traced all of Jamie’s and my regimented world. School.
Home. Scouts. Church.
One bright morning, we passed the rectory where Father Sweet lived. The door opened, and I was startled to see Danny Lemieux, another altar boy I knew, emerge with a backpack, as if he had slept over. His eyes met mine as I rode past him as if in slow-mo, and we stared at each other without greeting.
It was so much better spending time outside town. To the south was an ancient marsh. To the east, farms and scrub led to the original wilds. And to the north and west, past a municipal nursery and bound only by rivers, was unspoiled land that we kids turned into a playground, outside the reach or rules of adults. We could be ourselves there.
It was a place of woodland, farms, and muskratty bogs, full of fox and beaver, too close to the city for bears, I believed. We did whatever we pleased on the well-packed mud trails we said were made by Indians. Often Jamie and I would collide with friends, hiding and then hollering amid the trees and ravines. We built forts, shot at raccoons with BB guns, caught frogs, and slid naked in the clay at Green’s Creek, the local trickle.
We knew that Nature held death and danger. Our parents were always telling us that. But to boys, danger sounds like adventure. Except for bears, of course. I did not like to think of bears. Nature was the first place I discovered beauty and peace. You just relaxed and there it was. Truth. As much as you arrived in Nature, it entered you. It was obvious how to act and what to do. Everything made great sense. Not like at home.
The 1970s were a time of transformation. Traditions were changing, confusing the adults. And confusing us. At home, I kept myself organized at all times and thought of myself as a Scout, even when the troop was not in session. It was my defence. Exactly as Baden-Powell advised. I made my bed each day and slept at night with the windows open as late into each season I could. Each morning, the dawn chorus would wake me, and I could be the first to rise. My first cool breaths could be the wet air of the forest around Blackburn. If I was careful and didn’t make any noise, I could enjoy the quiet of the house. I could even slip outside, and to the garden shed.
There, we protected that lone robin’s egg in the nest we found, and we kept it warm with a box and a light bulb.
I probably gave it a name, the unhatched chick. But I don’t trust my memory to recall, not entirely.
When you name something, you give it a soul. We can’t give names to the things we don’t know, and nameless things aren’t familiar to most of us.
What I do remember is that the egg never hatched, despite the waiting and my hopeful midnight visits. Weeks went by. Eventually we cracked it open. And there, inside, we found the shrivelled ball of a dead monster.
This was the summer Jamie and I, both of us devoted Boy Scouts, were building a platform tree fort a fifteen-minute jog from our home into the bush. Finishing our outpost far from adults, before school started in September, was the most important thing in the world to me.
This was the last summer I slept with the window open.
Every person has one summer in their life that claims him, and this was mine.
2
“Come here,” I said to Jamie. “I’ll teach you how to know if rain’s coming.”
We stood at the edge of a small clay escarpment, above the Green’s Creek ravine, observing treetops and the birds scattering and socializing. Behind us stood a big, old chestnut tree, whose trunk branched at ten feet into a giant hand, as if to catch a huge chestnut ball dropped from God.
It was in this tree where we were building the fort. My mind had it kitted out like a multi-level Japanese forest temple from a Samurai book I’d seen in the library, but it had become modest in the building. A mostly level platform lashed and nailed into the crook of the “hand,” and some half-dreamed plans to construct a roof.
It was loud with swishing trees as the wind turned.
“You know, the bush communicates,” I said. “Know what I mean?’
“Sort of,” Jamie said, but he didn’t really look like he did.
“First, listen,” I said. “The birds sound different. Hear it? They’re all chirping at once? Means ‘take shelter.’ Right before the rain starts, they’ll go silent. You listen for that. Now, smell.”
We both inhaled, enjoying the gorgeous smell of the air, drenching our lungs with oxygen.
“That wet-plant smell? You get it?”
“Yah.”
“Like when you crush weeds. Plants give off that scent before it rains. About a half hour.” I stretched out my hand at the poplars. “Now, lookit. See, the leaves show their undersides. They do that when a front comes in, the wind will blow. The leaves twist.”
“Hmm,” he said.
“I bet you five dollars Mum is having a migraine.”
“Nah. We haven’t been home since morning.”
“Huh?”
“She said we give her migraines.”
“Wanna bet?” I said. I smacked his shoulder. “Mum gets migraines when the air pressure drops. And it drops before it rains.
“I’ll take that bet, sucker.”
“Good. You’ll pay me tonight.”
I laughed. I planned to give him plenty of grief later, making it look like I was profiting off him.
“Now, you wanna know the last way to tell if it’s gonna rain? For real?”
“K, how?”
“Check the newspaper night before.”
He grimaced. “Aw, you bugger.”
I felt proud of my skills, which I’d learned from other Scouts, the Scout leaders, guys like Mike Racine, reading, and, most of all, listening to the bush. There’s nothing fake about a woodland. It’s not pretending to be anything it’s not. And there was more there than we could see or hear. Butterflies see colours we can’t. The flowers have colours and patterns invisible to us. Animals hear sounds our ears are unable to catch. When you are in the forest, you may have your opinions, but you need to assume it knows more than you do. That’s being natural. I remembered what Mike had told us: “Within Nature, there’s vast freedom.”
I loved Nature and I hated school. I hated it because it was everything opposite to the bush. But, of course, Jamie and I were not in control of our own lives. We were just kids. We had to endure the rules, do our chores, to satisfy our teachers, priests, and parents so that they would leave us in peace.
“Well, well, if it isn’t the gaylord brothers,” said a pubescent, cracking voice.
Coming up the trail were Rob and Squirm, two bullies, each a year older than me.
“Two little queers, running through the trees, k-i-s-s-i-n-g,” said Rob, who was tall and smarter than troll-like Squirm.
“That doesn’t make any sense, kid,” I said to Rob, keeping my cool.
“Don’t call me kid, you kid.”
We moved to leave. I didn’t want them to get any sense there was a tree fort behind us. Fortunately, the lumber we stole from palettes behind Joe’s Variety was stacked and hidden in the bushes. You couldn’t spot the actual structure unless you looked up the tree.
“Whoa, whoa! Where you off to in such a hurry?” asked Squirm.
“Nowhere,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “You sucks want to talk?”
“How about you, shorty? You scared?”
“Don’t call him that,” I said.
“Fuck you guys!” My brother’s voice was downright squeaky whenever he shouted, and it didn’t help him appear any more threatening.
“Shorty’s feisty today!” They laughed at us.
“Sticks and stones,” I said, and then pulled out a rumour that had been circulating behind Rob’s back for ages. “Lookit, I don’t give a care. But I’m not the one who showed his dink to the hobo.”
Rob and Squirm exchanged surprised glances and my little brother’s jaw dropped.
“You shut up,” said Rob, jabbing his finger at me.
Squirm searched for a comeback. “He made good money off that.”
“Yah! I got ten bucks, you fag.” Rob was sneering down at my little brother.
“You
like that word. Takes one, I guess.”
Rob gritted his teeth. “We got something for youse. Squirm, bring the bag over.”
Squirm came to the front lugging a black garbage bag. I started breathing hard when I saw by the sag of the plastic that something big and dead was in there.
“We got a little present. Since our paths crossed. Hey, you still shitless over bears, Fonzarelli?”
Now would be a good time to take off, but I couldn’t catch Jamie’s eye. He was staring at the garbage bag.
“This loser was in Cubs with me,” said Rob to Squirm.
“Yah, before you got kicked out of the pack,” I said.
“I couldn’t stand hanging out with you babies anymore.”
“Right,” I said. “Is that why they sent you home? Like a baby?”
“I wasn’t the one who cried when we went to that stupid little zoo in the country. All over some old bear.”
I shrugged and tried to appear that this wasn’t a big deal, but it was true. I nearly fainted on a field trip to an animal reserve in Kanehsatake, a Mohawk community in Quebec. We were at the fence for the bear enclosure. I drifted to the back of the pack, next to Akela, and even found myself clutching at his elbow. The cedar bush shook, and a big male bear lumbered toward us. To my eyes, the scrawny chain-link fence seemed useless as chicken wire against those claws and a good shove from those legs. I gasped and cried and the whole pack laughed. The ruckus drew the attention of the bear, which — curious, and maybe hungry — stood up to get a look at the kid in the back trying to climb up Akela’s arm, and meanwhile my heart choked me.
Squirm, who was a big dumb kid, probably held back a grade but so brawny he might one day have a career in football or security, manoeuvred behind us.
“Why don’t you leave us alone?” Jamie said. “Mind your own business.”
Rob seemed delighted by these questions. He took a deep, malicious breath like he’d been given the perfect opportunity to teach us something important. “’Cause,” he said, with a hunter’s smile, “you’re here, and we’re here. So here we are.”
My brother and I looked at one another.
“And now we found you and shorty running around like queer squirrels doing God knows what.”
