Bishop's Man

by Linden MacIntyre

  He’s right. I should get involved. Fight for this blessed little place. Real justice for a change, an act of contrition.

  Next to the Jacinta, long-lined and, at least in my imagination, lonely, stood the new Lady Hawthorne. Danny Ban had planned to take her home. Illness or his failing spirits intervened. Time to haul the boats, the boy said. He promised to look after it. Three days later he was dead.

  Now his mother wanted Mullins to back off. Stop blaming bureaucrats. How much did she know? How much did Stella know? I hadn’t seen her since the funeral. She hadn’t called. Dread was gathering in my gut.

  The vodka was cold and acrid in the throat, but the stomach was quickly warmed, the dread deferred. At least Mullins didn’t know a thing about Bell and therefore hadn’t got an inkling about linkage. Not yet, anyway. Nobody knew. Just the bishop and me. And we didn’t know anything for sure. This was where it became easy to think of death as a solution for things. What big loss if Bell snuffed it? Let’s say that little BMW of his took a sudden slide on the QEW, under the wheels of a very large truck.

  You ask that priest, that Brenton Bell they sent down here.

  There had been subtle changes since Danny’s death. Among the men from the shore, when I’d see them I’d feel a distance I hadn’t noticed before October. But maybe it was coming from the shared consciousness of loss. Maybe that’s why Stella never called. Danny Ban didn’t know a thing. But his wife seemed to know something. I could see it in her eyes, outside Mullins’s place. A quality of pain from some private knowledge that only made it worse. Maybe they all knew something I didn’t know. Or maybe they all knew what I thought I knew.

  Danny Ban wasn’t doing well at all, according to Mullins. Another mouthful, to get me home. Or, I thought, maybe I should visit them. Maybe I should go to Hawthorne.

  O my God, I’m heartily sorry for having offended Thee.

  There was one light burning as I drove up the long lane. It was in the kitchen, as far as I could tell. Their dog was barking. He cringed toward the car when I opened my door, tail swept low, rear end wagging, nose exploring my thighs and crotch. An outdoor light came on.

  Jessie met me just outside. She spoke in a whisper. “I’d just as soon if he didn’t know I went to see Father today.”

  I nodded, suddenly comforted by complicity. “I understand,” I said, although I didn’t.

  Danny was in the large living room watching television. An American program about policemen. He quickly killed the sound.

  “You don’t have to turn it off,” I insisted.

  “Ah, well,” he said. “Just passing the time.”

  I told him I was just passing by. Saw the boats at the shore. Thought of him and wondered how he was managing.

  “Good,” he said. “The place is some quiet now, of course.”

  “Stella was here, I heard.”

  “She comes and goes, poor Stella. It’s a bad time to be alone. She and the boy were pretty close.”

  I nodded. He has become smaller. He didn’t stand when I entered the room.

  “It’s the little things that get to you,” he said. “It takes longer to get used to the small changes.” He sighed.

  Jessie asked if she could get me something. Tea or something stronger. Something for the chill.

  “You decide,” I said.

  Danny ordered. “Get us both a drink of rum.”

  We sat, waiting.

  “No,” he said with a large sigh. “I couldn’t bring myself to haul his boat home. I think of her as his. Having to look out every day and see that thing sitting in the yard—that would be too much.”

  Over the rum, he talked about the city. He and Sextus and their crowd revelling in a brief spell of indestructibility. “You never spent much time in Toronto yourself?”

  “Long visits,” I replied. “I have the sense of it. Which is close enough for me.”

  “I hear it’s changed a lot. But it was a great place back then. The best of everything. All the work you needed, never stuck for something to do. A great crowd from home. Always a dollar in the pocket and a fast car to get around in. All a fellow needed.”

  “I missed all that,” I said, trying to smile.

  “In the summer you’d go to High Park or down to the Beaches and pretend you were home. You could look at that big old lake and imagine it was the ocean. Wicked, eh? You’d think if a fellow missed home that much he’d just pack up and go. But something kept you.”

  “What brought you back?”

  He laughed. “If it was up to herself, we’d never have left. Right, Jessie? Did you know we met up there? Never planned to come back at all. But I got in a little difficulty. Figured it would be best to come home for a while.”

  “He got in a fight at a Down-Home dance,” Jessie said sardonically. “That was the difficulty. As if that was something new.”

  On the silent television screen three policemen were holding a squirming, shirtless man on the ground while a fourth struggled to attach a handcuff to a wrist.

  “It was with a cop, actually,” Danny said, distracted by the TV. “He was doing security at the dance and he seemed to have it in for me. Anyway. For all I knew, they were going to put me away for squaring off with a cop. It was around that time the fishing gear and licences became available.”

  His wife laughed, took my empty glass and left the room.

  “The funniest thing was I started getting Christmas cards from that same cop a couple of years later. Kind of his way of saying, if they wanted to do something, they’d have had no problem finding me. Real friendly cards. Every year friendlier, like we really knew one another. Actually, one came the other day. Where did you put that, Jessie?”

  “It’s around somewhere,” she called wearily from the kitchen.

  “He was saying how Toronto has changed. How it’s gettin’ dangerous. No more good clean fights, like in the old days. Nothin’ but guns and gangs anymore.”

  Then there was a long silence.

  “Isn’t going to be much Christmas around here this year,” he said.

  I nodded sympathetically.

  “I think he got to be deputy chief, that cop did. Retired now, of course.”

  “That’s a good story.”

  “It was me persuaded Jess to come home. Big mistake, looking back on it.”

  Jessie returned and put a fresh drink beside me.

  “Not to say bad things wouldn’t have happened there too. But it’s like you expect bad things to happen among strangers. They kind of catch you by surprise when they happen at home. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “He could have become anything, you know. With a few of the kind of opportunities you get in other places. He could have been a priest, for all I know. He talked about it once.”

  I nodded. The comfort phrases normally would rise from instinct, but I couldn’t utter a word. So we sat quietly for another minute.

  “I don’t think I mentioned this before,” I said eventually. “Father Bell, or former Father Bell, I should say . . . Brendan was around last summer asking about everybody. I don’t suppose you saw him?”

  “No,” said Jessie. “But he called after the funeral and all. Expressing sympathy. He seemed to feel real bad about what happened.”

  “Salt of the earth, that Father Bell was,” Danny said. “Typical Newf. Never knew a Newfoundlander I didn’t like. It never crossed my mind to ask him . . . maybe Danny tried to get in touch with him. That’s the hardest thing of all. Thinking he was so sad . . . and he never tried to talk to anybody.”

  Jessie bowed her head and became silent. Wiped her face furtively.

  “He never talked to you. Right?”

  I shook my head. “I never really got the opening.”

  “Oh, I can well understand that feeling,” Danny said.

  But even if I had had the opening, what could I have said?

  I remember Sandy Gillis on the doorstep. I think it was the last time I ever saw him. Mid-Novemb
er, 1963. He seemed sober, which was unusual. He normally only came to our place drunk. To start fights with my father. Every time they talked about the war, they fought. Is the old man in? No, I said, even though he was asleep on the kitchen lounge. But Sandy seemed uncharacteristically subdued. Something about him changed. Fight gone. He seemed to be staring at my feet. Ah, well, he said, it isn’t anything important. But he continued standing there, as if trying to think of things to say. I think he asked about my studies. I remember his eyes, disconnected, as if wired into a different time and place, or some new, fatal knowledge. And still, the words were unusual for their warmth. I was uneasy. It was the disconnection between the words and the eyes and everything I knew of him. He turned suddenly and stepped away. Paused briefly.

  “You don’t have to mention to the old fellow that I was here,” he said. “It was nothing in particular.”

  And he was gone. I should have seen what was coming next. But the future has no substance until it turns the corner into history.

  {18}

  The bishop seemed concerned. I had two calls in a week. Not from the secretary or one of his flunkies, but from himself.

  “And how is Creignish these days?” he’d ask, as if he didn’t know.

  That was mid-December.

  “Creignish is just grand,” I said. “Winter is settling in, of course.”

  “You should plan on a getaway after Christmas. Skedaddle for a week. Someplace hot.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Good.” He then paused, as if wondering how to get to the point of the call, so I decided to help him.

  “I spoke to Mullins,” I said. “I relayed the message.”

  “Ah, yes. Mullins. Good.” Then he cleared his throat. “You didn’t happen to hear from some reporter named MacLeod?”

  The name was familiar. I hesitated. “About what?”

  “The kid from Hawthorne. The suicide. You know the family, I think. MacKay. This MacLeod’s been calling around.”

  I hadn’t heard from a reporter named MacLeod. “Who did he call?”

  “Mullins.”

  “Mullins?”

  “He called Mullins, asking about Bell. Didn’t know the first name. I’m afraid Mullins gave it to him. Then Mullins called me, all confused. Asking what’s up with Bell. First I thought you must have filled him in.”

  “The reporter is whistling in the wind.”

  “Probably,” he said. Then: “I don’t think we have to worry about him. We were wise to keep Mullins out of the loop. I think I’ve dealt with this MacLeod before, years back. Over some of the other stuff. He’ll go away.”

  “And how was Mullins?”

  “I think he was more concerned about the protocol of me sending you to talk to him about his sermons on the shore than about Bell or some reporter asking strange questions. Knickers in a knot over that. I stroked him and he felt better. But you don’t think Bell ...”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Even so, there’s the optics. This would be our Mount Cashel if the media got wind of it.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything to it.”

  “Would you happen to know how to get a hold of Bell?”

  “Maybe. To do what?”

  “Tip him off. Tell him to keep his head down. Don’t talk to any reporters.”

  In the morning, I called the chancery in Toronto, told them who I was and that I was trying to find a friend who used to work there. Brendan Bell.

  There was a chuckle. “Ah, Brendan.” She just happened to know that he spent his winters in the south. In the Caribbean, she thought. “You know he’s married.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s done well for himself. Turned into quite the businessman.”

  “Oh?”

  “Hotels, I think. Anyway, he gets to spend his winters in the tropics, lucky man.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a way of reaching him?”

  “Well, I have a cellphone number somewhere.”

  A place in the tropics. A BMW. Hotels. A wife. I remembered the look of him the previous summer, all tanned and athletic. Handsome, you could say. Full of self-confidence. They say the eyes reveal the state of the soul, and his eyes were clear as the blue sky that day.

  For a few foggy moments I couldn’t be sure if I was sleeping or awake. There was a phone call. Someone named MacLeod. It was 1988 or 1989. There was an older gentleman, the caller said, an older priest, a retired professor, now an assistant at the cathedral . . . living on the campus. There was a rumour. They call him Father Roddie.

  I hadn’t heard. And why call me?

  “Someone said that if anybody knew about it, you would.”

  “Someone is trying to lead you astray,” I said. I ran my fingers through my tangled hair. I could see his face, a window on his sanctity.

  Keep the bishop out of it this time, I thought.

  Father Roddie was a bit dishevelled when he greeted me at the door of his apartment, squinting in the dim light. The years had bestowed a reassuring aura of harmlessness. He was pot-bellied and grey. His face had assumed what seemed to be a permanent expression of piety and kindness.

  “Come in, come in,” he said. “I haven’t seen you for years.” We shook hands. “You still have the grip,” he said with a laugh.

  I smiled.

  “I’d forgotten all that,” he said. “The misunderstanding.”

  I nodded.

  “And you dropped out of sight for a while, I do believe. The missions somewhere, wasn’t it?”

  “Honduras.”

  “Ah, yes. Lucky you. I always regretted missing the experience of the far-off lands.” He sounded genuine. “Actually, I remember you more clearly from before all that. When you were just a student. Quite bright. You stood out. Great grasp of . . . large concepts. You were interested in the European phenomenologists, I think.”

  We were still standing in his doorway.

  “It’s like yesterday,” he said. “You’d be coming to my place in Chisholm House for our little chats. You must remember? You’d be spouting Heidegger at me . . . just to get my goat.”

  And we both laughed then.

  “What am I thinking?” he said. “Keeping you standing here like a stranger. Come in. Come in.”

  His room was austere, but the walls were jammed to the ceiling with books, newspapers and manuscripts strewn about, and half-read books lay open on every available surface. We made small talk for just a minute or two longer.

  By then I had developed an instinct for guilt. You could feel it in the room even before it became obvious in the eyes.

  After a lull in the conversation he said, “I think I know why you’re here.” He sighed and smiled. Removed his glasses, wiped them slowly with his sleeve.

  “Oh?”

  “No Heidegger today, I guess. Just as well. I’m a little rusty on my German. Would you have a drink of something?”

  “No.”

  “I’m aware of some of your . . . shall we say extracurricular activities during the past few years.”

  “Activities?”

  “Oh, come on. The Exorcist. You must have heard that one. The Purificator. No malice intended. You’ve done some great work. Hard, thankless work, performed with admirable discretion.” He sat there smiling, confidence returning like the tide. “A one-man Inquisition. Remember how mad you’d get when I’d bring up Heidegger’s Nazi affiliations?” He never stopped smiling. “By the way, does Alex know you’re here?”

  “Alex?”

  “Bishop Alex. We were classmates, you know.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “We play bridge once a week. We’re partners. Maybe that’s how I know about your . . . work. Alex thinks you’re the cat’s pyjamas. Wouldn’t be surprised to see you in his job one day.”

  “I didn’t know he played bridge.”

  “I’d been planning to talk to him, actually. About certain malicious stories. You’ve obviously heard them. There�
�s a reporter spreading them around. A fellow named MacLeod, I think. You’re sure I can’t offer you anything? I think you like Balvenie.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Well, then. Let’s just get it out in the open. I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been putting it off. Confronting this thing.”