The Bishop's Man Page 5

  “I couldn’t agree more,” she said.

  I saw sincerity in her eyes and it touched off something close to pleasure. I even asked myself: Dare I believe that I’m beginning to feel more positive? Maybe that’s what happens in your fifties.

  That morning, working from parables about graven images, I was able to make some points about community. How in the absence of community we become strangers to each other, part of the universal alienation (without using that exact phrase). Alienated from ourselves, we seek to find our identities in what I called the Super Strangers, the phony personalities and fashions of commerce and celebrity. The false idols of the modern world. I took shots at Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan and a lot of other Michaels. The archangels of sleaze, I said, spreading a low, universal vulgarity. Where else would I have been able to do that and be listened to seriously? Certainly not at the university.

  “It’s not fit,” Pat said. “The commercial propaganda mixed in with all the other garbage on TV.”

  The previous Sunday my sermon had been a thinly disguised lecture about garbage along the roadside. Disorder in the countryside reveals disorder in the soul, I’d said. Perennial truth and concrete circumstances. My mission statement.

  I’m told that Father Chisholm at St. Joseph’s often talks of justice. But when I think about justice, I think of Alfonso. Justice for Aguilares, he would say, smiling self-consciously. That was his true vocation and, it turned out, his fate. Justice. It has been a hollow word to me ever since. Father Roddie would say that this has always been my problem, this emotional reaction to a word, part of a banal self-righteousness. Alfonso said it better: words in the absence of action are meaningless. Someday, I’ll dare to say that somewhere.

  Summer was beginning to wane, but on that early August Sunday afternoon the sky was a sharp mineral blue and the vast water absorbed it and the sunshine bounced back restlessly.

  Pat lives with a teenaged daughter and her widowed mother. She actually asked me out once. A “Platonic” invitation, she called it and I wondered if she really knew its meaning.

  “Momma is a big help,” she said. “But having her in the house kind of limits my social life, if you get my drift. So I go to Parents Without Partners in town, mostly for companionship. I wish you’d come sometime. You can be my date.” And then she laughed.

  “Why not,” I said.

  “I’m being bad. But really … I’d like to take you there to meet our group some night. Maybe you’ll get some ideas for starting something here.”

  “Are there all that many singles?”

  “You’d be surprised. Tons of singles. Even married people, living like singles … if you know what I mean.”

  I noted that my glass had, somehow, emptied. I felt the buzz. Lunch had been a few sandwiches left over from a social function in the hall the night before. An entire Sunday afternoon could melt away just staring at the glittering water. In the distance I could see a small boat approaching from the north, slowly passing the spear tip of land that gives Long Point its name.

  Maybe another Bloody Mary.

  On the way back from the kitchen with my second drink, I picked up the binoculars a former occupant had left behind. Some past pastor. Some past pastor’s spyglasses. Try saying that after a third Bloody Mary. I have a way with words, I’d discovered since I became a regular homilist. The ideas rise up out of nowhere with startling fecundity and the words just follow, like the wake behind a boat. The key, I thought, standing there peering through the binoculars toward where I thought the boat should be, is to keep your lingo simple. Talk the way your congregation talks.

  It was a typical Northumberland fishing boat, raked gracefully from high stem to transom, with the distinctively expansive workspace aft of the cab. Truthfully, I didn’t know a Northumberland from a kayak at the time. It’s something I’ve learned since. There was a froth of water churning at the stern, a graceful wake opening behind her like a bridal train. I could count five people, two men sitting on the washboards, three women who seemed to be in lawn chairs. The men had dark bottles in their hands. Silent mouths moving. Women, heads tossed back in silent laughter, hair fluttering. Men in golf shirts with brown arms. Brown woman shoulders. Long woman throats. I felt an unexpected pang. I could enjoy that, I thought. The boat. The water. There’s something pristine out there, where life originated if Darwin is to be believed. Something like envy swelled within.

  Intimacy.

  It’s a word Sextus used all the time. It’s what you look for at a certain point in life, he’d say. Intimacy. We strive for it because we need it.

  Down on the tennis court beside the hall, someone was batting a ball against the chain-link fence, chasing it, whacking it again. I directed the binoculars toward the sound. A woman wearing tiny shorts, scampering after the tennis ball. Alone.

  I smiled. Tiny shorts on tennis courts. And a softball diamond. A new parish hall. Somebody accomplished something here. Which of my predecessors was it? The place had come a long way since the fifties and Father Donald Rankin. What does it take to mobilize people?

  That was Alfonso’s dream. Mobilize the people, for that’s where the true power lies.

  What about the Holy Spirit?

  Yes. But where do you think the Holy Spirit lives? In the hearts of the poor, she lives.

  Not many poor here in Creignish anymore, I thought. Relatively speaking. Not like in Honduras. Not even like in my father’s time. So many men had to go away back then, like poor Jack Gillis, always in pursuit of wages, leaving sons at home to cultivate anxieties. My father home, anaesthetized by booze.

  The woman with the tennis racket runs like a deer, I thought, white teeth flashing like the froth behind the distant boat, chasing the ball with long, smooth strides. I wondered: is she married? Images resurfaced, I felt the gentle movement in my chest. It’s why the poets focused on the heart.

  I raised the glasses to the bay again, located the silent fishing boat, wondered where they could be going. Men and women fused in their silent intimacies, going nowhere in particular. The causeway from the mainland blocks the strait. Getting through by boat is complicated by the canal, the swing bridge. They’re nuisances, these boats, when you have to wait in the long line of traffic while they pass. But I could see why people fall in love with them.

  Now a man and a woman were standing near the stern, his arm over her shoulder, her face impressed upon his neck.

  Once, there were boats and a wharf at the village, before there was a causeway and a bridge. Ocean-going vessels sailed by silent and unhindered, heading toward the bowels of North America. And there were open fishing boats with no instruments of any kind, engines that sat in the centre and made a bang-bang kind of sound when running. In the fall, larger boats that looked like schooners came from Prince Edward Island loaded with bags of potatoes and buckets of salt herring. During lobster fishing a large motorboat came round. Men lived on it. I remembered the wharf smells of decayed fish and creosote, burlap and the dank smell of old sweat. And liquor. And the sounds of the men talking on the lobster buyers’ boat.

  And a man asking me if I was Angus MacAskill’s.

  And I said yes.

  Come on down, he said. Meet some people who were with your daddy in the war.

  There were men sitting around a small table in the forward cabin staring at me darkly.

  This here’s Angus MacAskill’s.

  They just continued staring and the look said they knew something I didn’t know. There was a bottle of black liquor in the middle of the table.

  One picked up the bottle and held it out. How about a little snort for the young fella?

  He seemed to mean it. I declined politely.

  If he’s anything like his old man, he’d suck rum out of a cow’s arse.

  Somebody behind me laughed. Then they all laughed.

  The man and woman on the boat were now embracing.

  On the last Sunday of Effie’s holiday at home that summer, I thought I
’d surprise her with a visit. She was at the kitchen counter fiddling with a new coffee maker. Sextus was standing behind her, arms around her waist, face buried in her neck.

  “I didn’t hear your car,” she said impatiently, patting her hair. Her face was scarlet.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “I’ve made some coffee. How do you take it?”

  “Milk, no sugar.”

  Of course, I thought: she’s sleeping with him again. I smiled.

  “What?” she said aggressively. Off balance.

  “Nothing.”

  “I bet.”

  Sextus refilled his coffee cup.

  “And how is the new apartment?” I asked.

  “Perfect,” he said. “You must come by. I’m still in the process of moving in.”

  “So I see.”

  Pat talks a lot about neediness. The importance of companionship.

  “Companionship?”

  “It’s something you can only understand if you’ve been through the loss of it,” she said. “I envy priests in that regard, your freedom from emotional entanglement.”

  The hollow rubber whack of a tennis ball. There is something sad about playing tennis with a fence. Her bare brown legs blurred as she dashed in pursuit of the fugitive ball, full white blouse-front wobbling. I put the glasses down.

  This is not a good idea, standing here drinking Bloody Marys, secretly watching wobbling blouses, people going about their intimacies on boats.

  Was it really only yesterday that John called to tell me that my sister was gone again? It didn’t surprise me. She’s always had an aversion to farewells.

  “I didn’t notice any lights last night. I wasn’t keeping an eye on her or anything. It was just something I noticed.”

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “I admire her guts, staying there. The place is full of memories. Not all good.”

  “I think she had … companionship … some of the time.”

  “Even so.”

  “I hear you,” I said.

  “One of these days … one of these days we should compare notes.”

  “We definitely should.”

  I noticed the solitary tennis player was walking toward a car. The boat was near a small point just south of where I stood.

  I stretched in the sudden chill … the afternoon descending toward the evening? Or could it be the onset of irrelevance? I’ve heard it’s what most people fear, turning fifty. But how can a priest become irrelevant? The needs are never-ending. Every face before me, staring back from the pews, every one is an opaque window on a bottomless pit of anxiety. I represent their hope. How can I feel excluded? I’m sure that even Bobby O. has problems, if I dared to ask. Maybe it was up to me. Maybe I should just invade their unintended privacy. Maybe they’re waiting for some evidence of my concern for them … waiting for me to make the first move.

  One last look through the binoculars. The boat was almost gone around the point, the man and woman at the stern now standing apart, facing each other, hands joined as if exchanging vows. The memory of another boat resurfaced, a father and his son. And I remembered what he’d said: You should drop in sometime. Visit.

  I’d said I might. Sometime.

  {4}

  It might not be such a bad life, I thought as I drove, head buzzing as the vodka metabolized. People mine their childhood experience to understand the existential outcomes. Sorrow, poverty, disaster. Our personal history on the Long Stretch could have been an exculpatory treasure trove if that’s what we were looking for, a wealth of excuses for all our adult failures. But we seem, somehow, to have survived. Effie even came away with character and curiosity intact, and she has become a scholar of ancient Celtic cultures. I suspect her mission was to somehow dignify our shattered heritage. My mission wasn’t quite as clear. But that didn’t seem to matter anymore. I became … the cloth.

  I laughed silently.

  It’s all in how we look at things. On a sunny day the clouds don’t matter even if the experts say they do.

  I sensed in Bobby O. someone I should really get to know if I had any realistic hope of being useful in this place. He is untypical in his optimistic generosity. He says we can worry about tomorrow when and if tomorrow comes. There should be a dozen like him. He’s like the culture in the yogurt, the source of a larger life. A few like Bobby O. and you have community. Through him, perhaps, I could continue what my predecessors started. Obviously someone had had a secret for mobilizing people, for making them care about the parish in a time of secular distractions. What did they expect from me? Was I to be a catalyst? Or is the clergy’s role more passive now: a symbolic conduit to a better place … some reassurance that the here and now is only a beginning?

  There was a working parish council again, women engaged in the good fight for family, both living and unborn. Serious talk of a parish bulletin, which would be my responsibility. Editor and censor. I told them up front that I had almost no parish experience other than a spell in Honduras, which didn’t really count. I didn’t tell them why it didn’t count and I didn’t mention my first pastoral assignment, where my priesthood started and almost ended. I told them that in many ways I was a novice.

  “Clearly not a nun … but you get my drift.”

  They giggled.

  Nothing in the seminary or since had prepared me for what I now faced every day. Relating an opaque theology to contemporary circumstances. Seeking guidance in the ruminations of great medieval minds, now rendered unintelligible except in transparently manipulative parables, the old promises and threats designed to sway the superstitious, now empty. I thought of Pat and laughed aloud. I thought of Sextus and my sister. There was nothing in my experience, personal or pastoral, to help me deal with these realities.

  But it didn’t seem to matter. It seemed to be sufficient that I was here. It hurts, they’ve told me, when a place loses a school, a post office, identity. Losing the church would be the last straw. I agreed with everything. The church is the guardian of life itself, a lonely sentinel. I didn’t tell them what I really thought: how the spire has been supplanted by the satellite dish. I dared not tell them what I think about the right to life.

  They wouldn’t listen anyway.

  † † †

  I realized that I was driving northward, aimlessly. Maybe I could drop in unannounced and share an hour with Mullins in Port Hood. No intransigent anxieties in Mullins, nothing that can’t be handled in the time it takes to pound a small pockmarked ball into a slightly larger hole eighteen times on a sunny afternoon. I could visit Mullins. Catch up on the gossip. Mullins helped with one of my successes. Brendan Bell. The fugitive from Newfoundland. I could have sent him anywhere, but Mullins seemed to like him. God, if he had known why Bell was there, prissy Mullins would have had a fit.

  Mullins—someone said at a recent priests’ retreat—Mullins wouldn’t know hot pants from sweatpants!

  Big haw-haw-haws.

  Then Brendan went away as planned, no harm done, married by now I’m sure. His new disguise.

  Married.

  Christ.

  The image returns. Pathetic Parents Without Partners clutching at each other in the slow dancing, trying to recover whatever thing the missing partner stole. Wounded people limping toward a momentary refuge in a bed. Probably only reminding one another of the fragile joy they thought was permanent in that distant moment when they were all swaying and sweating and singing “Could I have this dance for the rest of my life?”

  Pat actually tried to persuade me to join them on the floor.

  “No way.” I laughed, appalled.

  Whoops. What was this? A sign I’d never noticed before marked a turnoff. Hawthorne Road, a narrow gravelled side road, vanished at a curve. I slowed and turned, a supernatural influence directing me. Or booze. But still I felt like an intruder.

  Drop by any time, he said. Danny Ban whom they used to call Danny Bad. Perhaps it was time to visit Hawthorne. Find out
why.

  I ask my father: Where is Hawthorne?

  He just stares.

  Is it far?

  It’s far, he says.

  How far?

  Who was talking about Hawthorne?

  Nobody.

  Good. I don’t want to hear any more about effing Hawthorne. Okay?

  Okay.

  I entered the lane with the mailbox marked MacKay fully intending to back out again, turn and retreat back down the gravel road. Then before me was a large split-level house with two cars and a half-ton in front. A dog roared. A door opened. I waved from where I sat then drove forward. There were small fields on either side of the lane, their corners invaded by stumpy spruce trees. Probably vast meadows once upon a time, now shrunken by the creeping forest.

  And I suddenly remembered, vividly, the heap of fresh earth, dead flowers scattered. Now there was just Effie and me and our father standing on the side of a narrow road that skirted a shabby section of the city. The vast chaotic steel mill belched smoke and ash and a fine red dust.

  “This is where she’ll always be,” he said. “Remember, when you’re bigger. You’ll always know you’ll find her near the smoke.”

  Effie was clutching a shabby doll, her expression sombre.

  “And over there,” he said, pointing, “that’ll be your grandma.”

  “Who was she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was she from here?”

  “No.”

  “Where, then?”

  “Hawthorne.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  The house was relatively modern. Beyond it, a barn leaned perilously, a stout beam propped against one wall to prevent complete collapse. What appeared to be the hull of a new boat rose optimistically nearby, swaddled in tarpaulin.

  Danny Ban descended from a high deck at the front of the house. He was moving carefully, one hand gripping the railing. The wary dog stayed close to him.