Bishop's Man Read online

  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 on 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.

  “Well, he’s different,” said one.

  The others murmured in assent.

  Sextus showed up unannounced on a Sunday afternoon in May. He said he was home from Toronto for an extended visit. I had trouble hiding my surprise and I suspected there was something wrong because he hugged me. Walked straight in, arms wide, an
d grabbed me.

  “You look fabulous,” he declared. “Maybe there’s something to this celibacy racket after all. I should try it.” He was fidgety, couldn’t stop moving, checking out the meagre contents of my dreary room. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned . . . It’s been at least ten years since my last visit ...”

  He was smiling then, one knee slightly bent, head slightly tilted. He said it was amazing how nothing seems to have changed in the old ’hood. He was staying out at the old Gillis place, the Long Stretch. Temporarily.

  “The old place.”

  “Yep,” he said. “Me and John, two old bodags, making tea for one another.”

  I guess my face revealed my skepticism.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Effie said I should check the place for firearms before venturing in. But John and I put all that crap behind us long ago.”

  Eventually he said that he’d had a small health scare. “Some medical issues,” was how he put it. He was standing in front of my bookcase and plucked a volume.

  I ventured: “So it’s been ten years since you’ve been home?”

  “More like eleven,” he said absently. “Macquarrie, eh? Funny name for an existentialist. I thought they were all French or German.” He sat, flipped open the cover. “Nineteen seventy-seven. That was just after you got back from . . . that place. Who was RM?”

  “Old priest. Former philosophy prof.”

  “Existentialism, eh?”

  “One of my interests,” I said.

  “Mine too, lately.”

  “I didn’t realize.”

  He sighed. “One day a Paki doctor sticks his finger up your ass and you just know by his face. This is bad, speaking existentially.”

  There was a long silence.

  “So that was the health scare,” I said, to break it.

  “I’m okay. It was a false alarm.”

  “Thank God.”

  “I did,” he said. “It’s shocking, just how quick the faith comes back.”

  Before he left, he stood for a while before the mantel, studying the photo of my sister.

  “Just look at her.”

  I couldn’t read the tone.

  “Believe it or not, she was a major help when I was . . . pretty down there, for a while.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” I said.

  Then he picked up my photograph from Puerto Castilla. “Who’s he?” he said, pointing at Alfonso.

  “A guy I knew,” I said.

  “And the babe?”

  “Another friend.”

  Then it was the picture of our fathers and his uncle Sandy. “I think this used to be in the old place,” he said.

  “Effie got it from John when they split up. She gave it to me.”

  “Did you know that Uncle Sandy used to have a picture of Gracie Fields, from the same time, just before they went overseas? I wonder where that one got to? It was autographed. It’s probably worth something now. On the back of it she wrote: Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye. Then her name. Scrawled, but you could make it out, clear as anything.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “I always wondered where he got that. There was a man, eh, Uncle Sandy. It wouldn’t surprise me if he took a run at old Gracie. You remember how he was?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And look at himself, my old man. Poor old Jack.” He shook his head. “They didn’t have a clue. But then again ...”

  “I didn’t know that you were coming home.”

  “I meant to call,” he said, and smiled. “You know the way it is, how time goes.”

  “I know.”

  Now that I’m in middle age, the nights are always difficult, I find. I toss my body into various positions, awaiting sleep, but I just grow more alert. When I do sleep, my dreams persuade me that I’m still awake. I tell myself perhaps I need pills. Sextus said he took medication for a while for sleeplessness. Said it’s very common at our age. Especially in times of stress. And of course the stress increases with the weight of years. But he won’t take medication anymore and has started smoking pot instead. Said he can get it for me, any time. It’s everywhere in town. Better for you in the long run, he said.

  I smoked pot once. Alfonso had it. Where he got it, I have no idea. I remember laughing a lot, an innocent hysteria. Lying here alone, swathed in the damp silence of the old house, I think of Alfonso as frequently as I think of Jack and Sandy Gillis and my father. What goes through our heads when suddenly we have to face the inevitable? Death imposed, or death chosen? Occasionally the questions drive me out of bed, to get up and get out to try to shake the feeling of despair. At the end of life, I wonder, how much comfort, really, is belief? Did it help them?

  Sometimes I’ll shuffle to the bathroom, study the face in the mirror, now baggy-eyed, skin sere and thin. Soon throat and chin will become one continuum of sagging flesh. The ravages of half a century expose themselves at night. Time, the vampire, sucks away the juice of youth while we’re asleep. I can imagine the women from our earnest little meetings, and see them in such solitary moments. In their mirrors. In their husbands’ eyes. The night and time are harder on the women.

  The women named me Pelirrojo.

  The red hair now has a dusty look to it, fading like everything else. Bulging flab below the rib cage. And it gets worse from here on. After fifty.

  dec. 16. alfonso nagging me again today about my spanish, or lack of it. says i’m useless here without it. the only word you’ve learned, he said, is pelirrojo. i’m going to hand you over to jacinta. gracias, i said. worse things could happen to me.

  The doctor once told me: Don’t just lie there. Get up. Do something. And on many nights that summer I would follow his advice, leave the house for the damp, cool air outside, the fragrance of the mountain. The sea would whisper as I made my way through darkness to the silent church to kneel before the bank of candles. And I would think of Jacinta, wondering where she was. And pray to Alfonso, remembering his fate. Wondering what, if anything, went through his mind.

  jacinta works at the hospital. she is a specialist in malnutrition and works with children. pretty in a modest way. very dark hair accentuates the green of the eyes. the kids are something else. sorrowful, silent, dark, empty faces, gap-toothed, snot-encrusted noses. thin hair the colour of clay. scab-encrusted scalps. ribs sticking through tissue-flimsy skin. you wonder how they get like that. jacinta will teach me to speak spanish . . . fluently, alfonso said.

  Jacinta. My secret garden, the place where understanding blooms.

  {3}

  Early in July, Effie called to say that she’d be coming home for a visit. I was briefly tempted to comment on this odd coincidence, she and Sextus, after such long absences, returning. She claimed the purpose of her mission was to celebrate my special birthday. My turning fifty.

  “This I’ve gotta see,” she said.

  I laughed and said that age is just a number, a convenience for administrators, bureaucrats and bookkeepers.

  “Then we’ll celebrate your health, wealth and common sense.”

  I offered her the bishop’s room, but she told me she’d be staying at the old place. Home. “If that’s okay.”

  “It isn’t really very comfortable,” I said. “Still pretty primitive.”

  “I plan to do something about that.”

  So I told her where the key was. Under a stone on the doorstep.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

  “You haven’t even seen the place for years. I haven’t done much since.”

  She ignored me. “The place seemed solid then, no sign of damage. Nothing that a little TLC won’t fix.”

  “Go crazy,” I said.

  She’d been back once before that, briefly in 1987, her first repatriation since the cruel abandonment of John, the unseemly flight with Sextus after his father’s death seventeen years earlier. She didn’t explain her long absence or the unexpected end of it, just said she wanted to visit th
e old place on the Long Stretch. Our old home.