The Bishop's Man Read online

  The eye is drawn to the broad expanse of St. Georges Bay, which sprawls before you, narrowing as it approaches the Canso Strait to the south, reaching toward invisible Prince Edward Island to the northwest. The dark outlines of Antigonish County define the mainland shore.

  Creignish. Creig means “rock.” It also means Peter. Upon this rock, said Jesus, I will build my church. And Peter’s church stood there, rocklike, on the stony banks of Creignish, a visible symbol of authority and permanence, like the Mother Church herself. Impervious to death and time and the winds of history.

  I realized I’d parked at the end of someone’s driveway. On a low knoll at the top of the lane there was an old house that had grown shabby since the last time I noticed it, many years before. I struggled to remember a name, something MacIsaac. And I realized that I once knew most of the people around here. Now they and I are strangers, set apart by the sacrament that I embraced in 1968.

  The old glebe house stood to the right of the church, at the end of a steep driveway. A tidy cemetery on the left wrapped around a hill with a large crucifix on its crown. The porch door was sticky and I had to use my shoulder to force it open. Inside there was a damp, familiar smell of decay and turpentine. The scent of history. The odours of my childhood. The Third World reek. Woodsmoke and kerosene. DDT. Boiled tea and old clothing. Rot.

  The door to the kitchen was unlocked and it swung wide to reveal a sterile interior. White walls. A tile floor of alternating white and black squares. A silver Saviour hung on a black cross above a doorway to the interior of the house. A pantry door, nibbled at the corners by mice. An unturned calendar, January 1991. More than three years old. I tore it down.

  I stood still there in the chilly kitchen for what seemed like a long time, trying to warm the moment by thinking of the place as home, but there was no comfort in the memory. I felt the presence of all the solitary men who stood like this before my time, staring into a lonely future. Probably kneeling to acknowledge acceptance of their fate.

  I knelt.

  Jesus. I didn’t ask for this, but help me make the most of it.

  I sought the worn wooden prayer beads in my jacket pocket.

  tegucigalpa’s airport is dingy, full of sullen men with guns. weary inspectors deferring to my collar. alfonso was waiting. had a little paper sign with something like my name in heavy ink. FR. MACKASGAL.

  I peer into the gloom of what will be my study. The other peril, I tell myself, is silence. I was so accustomed to the sounds of other people’s lives around me at the university. The old priests coughing and shuffling in nearby rooms, awaiting their eternal rewards. Squealing, slamming doors. Students rampaging in and out. Incessant booming stereos. Traffic passing endlessly on West Street. No more of that. Silence now. I must consider this a welcome change. Learn to work with silence. The silence can become a passageway to better places.

  Up a creaky stairway. This must be the bishop’s room, I thought as I peered into a large dark space. Every glebe house has a special guest room for the bishop. There was a faint smell of clammy wallpaper. I could see the dim shape of a bed and a dresser with a large water jug and wash basin. I could feel the dampness of disuse. I walked toward a slash of light and pulled back drapes, exposed a window. There were clumps of dead flies between the panes of glass. The sun was beginning to press weakly against the filmy sky. Small fishing boats dotted the choppy grey sea. Inside the room, the anemic light revealed the face of a sallow Jesus on the wall. On another wall, the Blessed Virgin, a hand raised in salutation, a child with a dead man’s face in the crook of her left arm.

  I lit a candle on the bedside table, hoping to defeat the smell of loneliness. Opened a sticky drawer. More dead flies.

  A smaller bedroom along the hall. Bathroom. A second large bedroom. Closet door ajar, metal coat hangers entangled. A faded Blue Boy print on one wall and another crucifix above the naked bed.

  Back downstairs, in the study, I found a large safe, pointlessly locked; the combination was taped to the outside of the door. It was full of ledgers. Records of births and baptisms, marriages and deaths. Parish finances. And photographs of old men in black suits and liturgical vestments.

  You had no goddamned business spying …

  I study a stern, anonymous face above the Roman collar. Pious, slightly arrogant. He is wearing a hat even though he’s obviously indoors. Concealing baldness? A hint of hidden vanity? Was he one of those whose secret weakness undermined the Rock as nothing had before?

  Maybe they were classmates, he and Father Roddie. They’d have known each other. Old men, presumed exempted from temptations of the flesh.

  I closed the safe.

  I don’t belong here.

  But this is the priesthood. This is what you’re for.

  But that’s not why I’m here.

  There was a radio on the desk. I switched it on. The house filled up with mournful country music. I unpacked the few photographs that I’d brought from my rooms at the university. One I’ve carried with me everywhere. There are two men in uniform, one of them my father, and a third in work clothes with a hunting rifle in his hand, and a dead deer draped on the fender of a truck. There’s an inscription on the back: October ’41. Home from Debert. Three men, decades younger than I am now, faces still defined by innocence and curiosity, yet to be rewritten by experience. My father’s name was Angus. These were his closest friends, Sandy Gillis, in his army uniform, and Sandy’s brother Jack, holding up the deer’s head, a knowing expression on its lifeless face. Effie gave it to me. It had once belonged to John. He didn’t want it when they finally broke up their marriage. The rifle in Jack’s hand was the one his brother Sandy used in 1963.

  That photo, in a way, is my biography: three men who shaped what has become my life, created what became my family. My sister Effie, briefly married to Sandy’s only offspring, John Gillis. And Sextus Gillis, the son of Jack, closer to me than a brother once, smitten briefly, like his cousin, by my sister.

  In another photo, Effie is a child, red hair wild and unruly. And there is a more recent, formal portrait, Dr. Effie MacAskill Gillis, or Faye, or Oighrig nic Ill-Iosa as she sometimes styles herself now that she’s a scholar. The sharp-tongued history professor, with a rare smile for a stranger’s camera.

  And then there is the photograph from Puerto Castilla. Three ordinary people on a holiday. The younger me, tall and leaner of jaw, longer of hair. Jacinta in the middle, shorter, arms outstretched to catch our shoulders, hauling us together. Dark Alfonso on her left, me on the right. We are smiling.

  In one of seven boxes filled with books I find my diaries.

  1975. nov. 26. harsh dreams and the humidity and crowing roosters drive me out of bed early. dawns are pink and misty here. people emerge like shadows from the darkness with their packages and their children. trinkets, fruit and vegetables to sell, families trudging toward the glow of day. there is an old woman who cooks on a bucketful of burning charcoal. through doorways i see women bending over open hearths and the tortillas. everybody friendly to the new priest. and dogs barking at the roosters. the old woman at the smouldering bucket calls me padre pelirrojo.

  I closed the journal, then placed it and the others on top of an empty bookcase. There were a dozen journals. Careful, coded records of my years of ministry. The record of my sordid service for our Holy and Eternal Mother, a source of self-recrimination but also of security. At the university I’d leave them prominently displayed. Reminders of who I am and whom I work for. At the university, my visitors would eye them nervously. They’d mean nothing here, except to me.

  I arranged the journals carefully by year. Then I set the photographs on the mantel above a blocked fireplace. They are as alien as I am, I told myself. Strangers here. Strangers from the dead past. Chilled, I found a thermostat, turned the dial and heard the distant rumble of a furnace.

  In the house where I grew up, I have another photograph from just before that first assignment, in Honduras. I haven’t set eyes on it
in years, though I remember it in detail—the dreamy expression, the piety of innocence. One day it suddenly became too much. A reminder of all the contradictions. I shoved it in a drawer. I couldn’t find it now even if I wanted to.

  My sister Effie was the only one to notice it was gone. It was during one of her rare visits home.

  “What have you done with that lovely picture, your ordination portrait?”

  “I put it somewhere,” I said.

  “I still have mine,” she said. “It’s in my office in Toronto. Everybody comments.”

  It was the innocence that bothered me, I think. Maturity has stripped away my palliative optimism.

  they call me pelirrojo. padre pelirrojo. father red, because of my red hair. they should be careful calling anybody red around this place, alfonso says. back home in salvador they called me red. which is why i’m here. jacinta seems concerned. she has unusual green eyes.

  The day’s weak light was failing fast as night approached. I might feel warmer in the church, I thought.

  It was dim there and a kind of peace fell over me. Shadows absorbed boundaries, enlarging the possible, making the hollow, vaulted places more vast than I remembered. Surfaces and corners softened. Shadows from a solitary vigil light flickered. I noticed I was not alone. Among the wavering shadows a dark, motionless form, someone crouched in prayer before the banks of votive candles to the right of the altar. I stayed in the back. The prim kerchief told me it was a woman. I sat still, touched by her devotion.

  There used to be a rail between the people and the altar. A little fence. Women were not allowed inside the fence except to change the linen, scrub the floors. I remember women with their hair covered, working silently, efficiently, to minimize their time in the forbidden spaces. And I remember Sundays, people kneeling outside the sanctuary, elbows on the starched cloth of the altar rail, faces buried in dry, knobby hands. People lined up to receive the Blessed Sacrament, eyes intense with devotion and hope. Cape Breton, Honduras—the features blur in my memory. People shaped by hardship and faith into a common character.

  There was a flare of light at the front. The dear woman was lighting candles. Thanksgiving? Anxiety? Light now flickered in a red receptacle, casting rosy shadows. The glow of faith and hope.

  A shadow rose. I heard the clink of a coin. Another light flared briefly. Another candle. Another movement as she made the sign of the cross.

  She must be old, I thought. Lighting candles, praying for some small reprieve.

  The church creaked as a cold wind rose outside. A suffocating silence drifted down from dark recesses in the hidden ceiling as the cold currents of air wafted over me. The woman hurried by, head down, arms wrapped across her chest as if cradling a child. She didn’t see me. The glass front door whispered shut behind her.

  Back in the glebe, I found a loaf of fresh homemade bread and a bag of tea biscuits on the kitchen table. And a note.

  “If we’d known you were coming, we’d have baked a cake …”

  They’d drawn little music notes around the words. I vaguely recalled an old song. Ethel Merman singing “how’dya do, how’dya do, how’dya doooo.”

  “This loaf of bread will have to doooo.”

  It was signed Bob O.

  Bobby O’Brian showed up later to apologize in person for the lack of preparation, the shabby glebe. The women were beside themselves, he said. New priest coming and the beds not even made. I assured him everything was fine. He said that he’d been president of the parish council, but since there hadn’t been a resident priest for a couple of years the council had lapsed. Just in suspension, though. A lack of manpower. But ready to go again now that I’d arrived. Just say the word. His wife made the bread by way of contrition for the state of the glebe house. One of the priorities of the place was a new house for the priest.

  I told him again, the place was fine.

  “Did you try it yet? The bread?”

  “Yes,” I lied. “It’s fabulous.”

  “I’ll tell the wife. She makes the best bread in the county.”

  I smiled.

  Bobby was middle-aged, prematurely balding and on the heavy side. It was great to have a priest again, he declared. To see a light in the window of the old place.

  “Kind of hard to take, not having a priest. We were sure they were going to shut us down for good, after so many years. Would you believe we were the only church in the area once, years and years ago? St. James we were back then.”

  I nodded and smiled and said I knew that.

  He said, “Of course you do. I’m forgetting, you grew up in this neck of the woods. I did a little homework. Back of Port Hastings, you grew up. Out the Long Stretch.”

  “Not too much homework, I hope.”

  I forced myself to smile again.

  “The wrath to come …” Those bleak words of absolution say it all, now that I think of it. The grim warning in the burial prayers. I think it was at a funeral in 1970 that the innocence first began to wash away under a pounding rain. I remember a stormy day, the pungent incense fumes blowing back in my face, censer clinking on its chains, rivulets of water creeping out around the edges of the artificial turf that hides the muddy evidence of our mortality.

  Poor Jack Gillis. His death was as unremarkable as his life. He was visiting my father late one night and dropped dead.

  His only son was glassy-eyed. “What the fuck was that all about?” Sextus said, gesturing angrily toward the casket. “Is that it?”

  Jack’s sudden departure had caught him off guard. Jack was relatively young. There was so much left unsaid, undone; death should have meaning, not this feeling of betrayal, of something interrupted. Sextus repeated all the common phrases of confusion after unexpected loss, but later, calmed by liquor, he became more analytical. He spoke of how his father, travelling for work, was mostly absent from his life; how their occasional coexistence always suffered from anticipated separation. It was how most people grew up here, in this godforsaken place, scrabbling for survival.

  “You don’t have to explain,” I assured him.

  In the end he admitted his real anxiety: a father’s death reveals the awful tragedy of deferred conciliation. “I’m not talking about reconciliation,” he said fiercely. “I’m talking about the basics. I’m talking about what you, yourself, know all too well.”

  I just listened. It’s my job, I told myself. I nodded, gripped his shoulder reassuringly. “You’ll be okay.” This I knew for sure.

  Sextus bounced back quickly, as he has always done. It’s never long before he finds some sleazy analgesic. That was how I saw it then. How easily our lowest needs take over and redirect the heart away from grief. I see them still, Sextus on one side of Jack’s open grave, my sister and her husband John, standing close but somehow disconnected, on the other side, John’s face a mask of pain. He loved his uncle Jack. Or maybe he could already feel the other bond, could see the future coming.

  I hear the awful words again: “I am seized with fear and trembling, until the trial shall be at hand, the wrath to come.”

  “That day, a day of wrath, of wasting, and of misery, a great day, and exceeding bitter. When Thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.”

  My priestly words linger in the flap of wind. I observe my sister’s stealthy glance, the ghostly smile.

  “I am desperately unhappy,” she has told me.

  “I blessed your marriage,” I’d replied. “You will find the strength. You and John, together.”

  She laughed.

  “Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord.” And in the pouring rain, the mourners murmured the response: “And let perpetual light shine upon him.”

  Perhaps John was still unconscious of the mute transaction happening between his cousin and his wife. Truthfully, I see it only now, knowing what unfolded afterwards, the monstrous betrayal she later justified by calling it compassion.

  “Sextus needed me,” she said. “My husband didn’t.”

  After Mass o
n my first Sunday, I had lunch in the hall with the Catholic Women’s League. Some of them I recognized from high school, self-conscious girls transformed by time into plump and pious matrons. I wondered if they remembered me as I remembered them. They wanted to know if I’d support them in a campaign to revive the daily rosary in the home. Why not, I thought. We need it now more than ever before, they said, and I nodded.

  We used to say the rosary for peace, I said. Maybe we could focus on the Balkans or the Middle East. The Holy Land especially. They seemed uncomfortable with that, and proposed the integrity of the family and the sanctity of life instead. We should pray for strength against the forces that are bent on destroying traditional structures in the home. And life itself. That’s where all the problems start. Crime and wars included.

  More tradition, more religion, more tribalism—just the cure for Yugoslavia, I thought.

  “You’ll have to help me here,” I sighed, raising helpless hands. “I don’t have much experience in a parish.”

  “Oh, we’ll look after you,” said one, vaguely flirtatious.

  The others laughed like the girls they used to be.

  I realized the flirt looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t remember a name. Then she was serious again.

  “The family that prays together, stays together. We have to get back to that idea, and then all the other problems will take care of themselves.”

  She said her name was Pat. Some distant image stirred. We were somewhere unremembered, and she and Sextus were together. A night-blue sky over the black glitter of the sea. I struggled to remember, eventually gave up and promised to mention the rosary from the altar sometime soon.

  On their way out, I overheard their whispering, talking about me.