Father Sweet

by J. J. Martin

  “I’ll find out where they are,” I said, walking back to the room. “Then you take it from there.”

  I got off the call and approached Danny, watching TV from bed.

  “Here,” I said, offering my phone. “Call and find out where they are, so I can go back home.”

  Danny sighed. “Not that simple, bud,” he said, scratching his nose and adjusting his tinted glasses. “I can’t just call up and say, ‘Hey, is Sweet there with his boy toy?’”

  “Why not?”

  “Think about it,” he said. When I didn’t respond, he carried on. “He’d run. And besides, if he’s there in Mexico, my guess is Gast will have more friends in the police than Melody will.”

  “This is just a bunch of bumbling priests who don’t know we’re looking for Sweet. Just tell them you want to find him for … yourself.”

  “Wish I could, bud.”

  I gritted my teeth. “So, if he’s down there already we can’t do anything?”

  “I’m sure he’s not there … yet.”

  “How on earth do you know?”

  “I’ve got an idea, but you’ve got to trust me. If we’re friends, you owe me that much.” Danny looked for the television remote.

  “I would not call us friends. I don’t trust you. I don’t know what to call you, frankly,” I said. “I think you’re a creep.”

  Danny shrunk at the comment.

  “If you say so,” he said, wheezing. “But I’m not.” He avoided my eyes and found the TV remote.

  “There’s more to this than you’re telling me.” Even before I finished my sentence Danny had sat up and turned his back on me. “You hear me?” I pressed. “I know that.”

  Danny switched off the television. “What do you think you know?” he cried.

  “I know what you’re about.”

  He took a while to respond.

  “No, you don’t. You don’t know what pastoral work is,” he said finally, quietly facing the wall. “Helping someone find an experience through prayer — like an otherworldly, Godly experience — that gives them hope. I live for that. You know there’s a bereavement group at the church, we laugh, we hug.” He twisted himself sideways. “Sometimes, I get a chance to do a homily that helps someone work their way out of a moral crisis. I can see it. You don’t know how good it feels to see someone nod or smile at something I said, to help them to be inspired. Being a pastor is the love of my life. I help people live life. I love it.”

  “That’s not what I mean. When you called the bishop after you molested that girl,” I said, and he cringed at my words, “it wasn’t because it was the first time. There were others. I know it. You’re as bad as he is. And you know it. I know it.”

  Danny’s face was blank.

  “There was never another time,” he said slowly. “That I would serve my own pleasure … the way Ben did with me — with us. That’s why I called the bishop. That is why Pete came to remove me. Father Sweet made me into this. He told me he became a priest because he had too much love to give. I didn’t know what he was saying. My vocation came from my injury. I am here to help. I want to be a vessel of peace and healing. I know you don’t believe me. Or maybe you don’t understand. But I swear that’s the truth.”

  “Who cares if you only acted on it once?” I said. “It’s in there.”

  “When it happened with little Emily — that was her name, by the way — I was terrified. I left the school. I cried at the rectory. I was sick.” Danny removed his spectacles and I saw his sunken and dark eyes swelling. He struggled to continue. “I have been celibate, and true since my ordination. I think of myself as bedevilled.”

  “Bedevilled. Like it’s not you, it’s your devil.”

  “No. It was me.”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  He opened his mouth and eyes as if to scream and shook his head in desperation. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “But it scared me.”

  Having let his words hang in the room, I waited while he cried.

  “Danny, I’m not letting you off the hook. I can’t. But if what you say is true, then help me now. Make the call.”

  He looked at my outstretched hand for a second, then shook his head.

  “Fine. No trust,” Danny said, wiping his eyes with a thumb. “But if you believe I’m here to help, allow it my way. You’ll get what you want, I promise.”

  “What will it cost me?”

  “Only a drive to Tijuana.”

  25

  I rented a Ford Focus from Avis and we left the next morning at dawn.

  I set a twenty-dollar bill on the nightstand and headed to the car. The maid approached on the breezeway.

  “Gracias por todos,” I said to her, pointing at the room. “I left you a little something in there.”

  She smiled. “Ah! Thank you.”

  For a moment I felt the warm peace of a small kindness.

  Finally, Danny appeared. We drove onto the freeway in silence. Ten minutes later he said something. “I saw you spoke to the cleaning lady. You told her about the toilet?”

  “What do you mean? What about the toilet?”

  “Clogged. I left a huge turd in there. Couldn’t get it down.”

  I sighed. Danny handed me twenty dollars.

  “Here,” he said. “I appreciate that you’ve been paying for everything.”

  “Where did you get this?”

  “You forgot it on the nightstand.”

  I grit my teeth while my shame argued with our travel momentum. We did not turn around.

  It took four hours to reach the border at San Ysidro. Long enough for the radio stations to change. The heat enchanted the highway into a blurry mirage as we made our way south. Los Angeles’s extended concrete suburbs gave way to dirt and scrubby roadside bushes festooned with Cheetos and potato chip wrappers like ribbons.

  The border itself came upon us as a multi-lane parking lot worthy of a Boxing Day sale. The American side wasn’t too bad, but the Mexican side was an ocean of cars. It wasn’t true, of course — it must have been a mirage of the heat creating a hallucination — but I was certain cars were piled on top of each other, scrambling to get across the border like beetles crawling over fresh dung.

  Danny and I parked to visit the border facility washrooms. Inside, I saw desperate men strip down and bathe themselves using paper towels. Beside the car lanes there was an officious and inefficient pedestrian crossing, where exhausted children seemed to outnumber exasperated parents in a sweaty parade entering the United States on foot. It was noisy, and the heat and honking from cars was annoying, but I noted that I heard no child cry. It was as if this was normal, and no one found it chaotic and heartbreaking.

  The lineup of men, women, and children marching into the U.S. on foot was a few hundred metres long. Some had small encampments within the lineup, with umbrellas and picnics set up. As if to encourage symbolic interpretation, a ziggurat-like ramp system forced the migrants to exert their leg muscles to enter the U.S. It looked like a little tower of Babel.

  “These are the legal immigrants, I guess,” Danny said. “Better life. For their kids.”

  “Looks like the apocalypse,” I said, climbing back into the driver’s seat. “Where are all these people going?”

  “Wish they had a shop or something,” Danny said. “I would sell my soul for a cold Coke right now.”

  “There’s a Coke machine right there,” I said. He looked at me, and I handed him a five-dollar bill.

  A customs guard wandering through the parking lot nodded at me from behind his mirror sunglasses. His jawline showed he thought we looked suspicious. Probably figured we were druggies of some kind. That’s what I would have thought.

  “Where you boys from?”

  “Canada,” I said.

  “Canada?” he cried, suddenly jovial and amused. “Canada! What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Well, we —” I only just started to respond, when he interrupted me, laughing.

  �
�Now, you two be careful. Tijuana ain’t Mon-tree-all! These people will rob you blind and make tortas ahogadas of you!”

  “Okay.”

  Danny got his Coke and we entered Mexico. There was no real inspection at the border. They saw our Canadian passports and simply waved us through.

  We drove past the multi-lane car queue which, by my calculation, stretched for the length of Ottawa, from the beginning of Nepean to the edge of Gloucester.

  Tijuana looked like a suburb of Los Angeles. Low-rise and concrete, but overgrown with plants that could survive the heat. There were as many auto-body shops as houses. The people looked identical to most of the Angelenos we’d left behind. The border struck me as incredibly arbitrary.

  “Why would anyone fight with their life to leave here, only to wind up in the American version of this same place?”

  “California used to be part of Mexico,” said Danny. “And the Natives and Mayans, or whoever was here before that. Everyone’s moving around like they always did. Only there’s a fence now.”

  Our destination was through Tijuana, and with traffic it took us nearly forty-five minutes. It was three o’clock, and it dawned on me that returning would involve a longer wait at the border. I was exhausted, but dreaded the thought of staying here to sleep.

  Danny pulled out a worn-out piece of photocopied paper he consulted while I drove.

  “Jesus,” I said, pointing at a swollen pink motel with fluorescent green trim, festooned with hearts and wedding bands. “Look at that forsaken place.”

  “Turn here,” said Danny, pointing at the street by the motel. We drove three blocks of dry, fenced-in bungalows and car repair shops before Danny asked me to pull over.

  It felt unsafe, this neighbourhood. Every window was barred, and whatever yards there may have been were hidden behind breeze-block walls or enmeshed with military-grade wire. At the corner was a razor-wire fence enclosing three lots. It was the most significant structure of the neighbourhood: two houses and a giant, windowless cube. Everything was painted beige. A cross made of two iron beams towered over the highest roof and a half-dozen flags flapped from the buildings.

  Half the flags were the Vatican yellow and white, and the other half were pink, emblazoned with the words Él Te Ama. He loves you.

  “That’s it,” said Danny, opening the car door. “You coming?”

  He darted out like a puppy racing to the off-leash. There were no pedestrians on the street, and I left the Focus tight against the curb. The air had a sultry, leaded quality to it. I locked the car and followed Danny to the steel gate.

  Danny buzzed the intercom. “Tell the monsignor that Reverend Daniel Lemieux is here to see him,” he said. He needed to repeat his name two more times before the gate clicked open for us.

  We were greeted at the door by a tall, cassocked man with short black hair. He blessed Danny, who introduced me in turn, and we were whisked into a small vestibule with a half-pew.

  “This feels familiar, somehow,” I said.

  It was underlit and the walls were covered in a red velvet wallpaper. It was the same taste in decor from Father Sweet’s rectory. The dim lighting, the collection of framed Victorian etchings, classical replicas and pottery, the suffocating miasma of incense.

  “Leave the talking to me,” he whispered. “Don’t mention Sweet straightaway.”

  “I’m going to be sick.”

  A boy entered, no more than ten. He wore a white-and-green cassock, like a choirboy. His hair was clipped Marine-short. “Gentlemen, please follow me,” he said.

  The boy led us down a dark hallway into the outdoors, across a small patio. A burbling Home Depot fountain stood in the patio’s centre. Against one wall, an old bathtub was turned up on its end, creating a makeshift grotto to cover a figure of the Virgin Mary. The geraniums planted there clung desperately to life, withering in the sun.

  We entered the second, dark house, which was not air-conditioned and had a fishy smell under the frankincense. The boy led us to a long, dark room, the end of which featured a rococo wooden desk. The boy stopped us before we entered.

  “The Reverend Monsignor Aloysius Gast,” the boy said.

  In the darkness, I could make out a figure behind the desk.

  “Come,” said Gast, waving his arm at us. “Come to me.”

  26

  Another boy, outfitted in the white-and-green cassock, entered the room with a silver tray and three glasses of lemonade.

  “Thank you, pusio,” said Gast, taking a lemonade

  In the shadows. I was unable to make him out except to see he was scrawny. Danny and I lounged in creaky leather chairs opposite his desk. This was his office. One wall was lined with books, the other with bright, vivid art.

  The old man’s voice was reedy as a stick of rawhide. “Canada,” he said. “Bah. Backwater. A lost cause. At one time I thought Canada had a future. Government support of Catholic schools, the bishops in command of Quebec, and so on. I imagined America’s inevitable conversion. Latin America below and Canada above, the pressure would be too great. Imagine: a Catholic Hemisphere. Oh! Then, poof! Roncalli’s ridiculous revolution, we lost Quebec, and it was over.”

  “Some of us have faith, Monsignor,” said Danny.

  “That’s quite an art collection,” I said, gesturing at the large canvases filling every space, ceiling to floor. It was a display of mostly naked saints and swooning Christs, bleeding and suffering.

  “Here, in Latin America, there is an appreciation for the mortification of the body. This is lost in the North. The Latino understands flesh. They understand poverty and pain. It is in this appreciation for the passion of Christ Jesus, the suffering, that the commons are connected to God.” Gast rose, stooped and crooked, and clutched a cane. He crept over to a large oil, a pubescent, erotic-looking Saint Sebastian. He paused before moving on to a forsaken Christ crucified, the eyes rolled orgasmically upward, sweat and blood coursing over the lurid body. “In a hot clime, there is thirst, you see? There is poverty, fervor, lust, and pain. All those things that bring Jesus close to the skin. Yes? The body. The Latino knows suffering. Bodily suffering. That is the Mediterranean Christ. Look. We have lost this in our so-called ‘First World.’” His fingers, brittle as dried bone, traced the form of Jesus’s nude hip. “‘The fruit of such spirit is Joy.’ That is from Galatians.”

  “Beautiful,” said Danny.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “An adulteress was to be stoned,” said Gast. “And the Lord scratched in the dirt, a message. Perhaps the most mysterious moment in the gospel. What did he write in the dirt? Hm?”

  He was asking me. I said, “I don’t know.”

  “Everything that is not recorded,” he said, raising his finger. Light passed through the long tip of his fingernail. “All the grants to our noble tradition. Everything that is secretly passed through apostolic revelation.”

  “Bishop Jean-Marc wants me to go to the Servants of the Paraclete,” said Danny.

  Gast’s face curdled at the sound of an enemy. “The Paraclete. Bah. Such a fraternity would be unnecessary but for that abominable Second Vatican Council, which emboldened the flock against their priests. Every common parishioner believes he can judge the servants of God on his own. Unthinkable to previous generations.… What do they know about our ways?”

  The boy re-entered the office, bringing a plate of cookies and cashews.

  “Ah,” said Gast. “Biscochitos. Michael, bring those outside. We’ll go sit in the sun.”

  Michael bowed and gave Gast his arm for support. “The faithful thinks the Church is what they see on Earth,” Gast said. “Hope. Faith. Charity. Manifestations of ‘kindness’ and so on. They do not know what our sacred charge is. And that is what Roncalli got wrong. The faithful thought they had been given the keys. They had not. They do not understand what mysticism we manage.”

  In the sunlight of the patio I got my first real look at the man.

  Gast was just under fiv
e feet tall and wore a black cassock with red trim and purple sash. On his head he placed a wide-brimmed parson’s hat against the sunshine. It gave him the appearance of a nineteenth-century missionary. His skin was a sun-cured leopard pelt of moles, liver spots, and de-pigmented blotches. His eyes glinted, rheumy and yellow behind his greasy spectacles. Sideburns and ear-hair combined loosely to create a small fringe under his hat. His glasses sat on his face crookedly, propped up by an enormous cluster of verrucae on his cheek, like a fleshy cauliflower floret. As someone who had willed himself to live more than one hundred years through spite and spellcraft, it was no wonder he looked the way he did.

  “Thank you,” he said to Michael. “Soon he will become exoletum and will cease to be my Ganymede. He will join the seminary. I shall miss him.”

  Michael led Gast to a small, rusty loveseat. Danny and I pulled up café chairs not unlike the ones my mother left in her backyard. Gast and Michael sat holding hands, and the boy placed his head on Gast’s shoulder.

  I felt complicit for witnessing such a display.

  “Before Roncalli, there was a place for us in communities,” he said, touching his breast. “We were accepted and welcomed into homes. They listened to us. Obeyed us. We smoothed the rough edges of society. Appeal to the law and the educators, and they would give us their sons. Now, we are outsiders.”

  Gast selected a cashew from the little bowl. “Do you enjoy cashews? They resemble homunculi. Nascent potential. An embryo,” he said, fondling one with his fingertips and contemplating its “face.” “May they remind us to protect the life of the unborn so that they may reach the salvation of the Lord.” He puckered his lips to receive it on the tip of his tongue.

  I was making a face, because Danny prodded me with his shoulder. “Have you heard news about Father Sweet?” Danny asked.

  “Ah, the mercurial Benjamin Sweet and his boustrophedon life,” Gast said, shaking his head. “Which side is he on now? We shall see. We shall see.”

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  “Do you know him?”