First Light

by Charles Baxter

  On the other side of town, near the park, he hears a loud resonant ringing and at first believes that this clamor originates inside his own head, the vibrating ring of tinnitus. He puts his hand to his neck to check his pulse. But no: as he moves up the street, he can tell that the bells are ringing, if that’s what they’re doing, in St. Luke’s Catholic Church. They’re louder and in some ways more distinct than he has ever heard them. Hugh, a non-Catholic, has set foot in this church only for baptisms, weddings, and funerals, so the place has for him an aura of crisis, of squalling, kissing, and sobbing. A small church, it smells on the inside of white pine and varnish. No one is parked outside and the bells continue to chime for no reason. His forehead is damp with sweat, and he has nowhere to go; he parks the car and hurries up the front stairs of the church.

  The idea of no one being inside the church is pleasing to him. He wants to smell the inside of St. Luke’s, especially the old, thick resinous wood. As soon as he steps inside the heavy front doors and stands in the foyer, he takes a breath and gazes toward the altar draped with white linen. The circular stained-glass window overhead throws down thickened beams of colored sunlight, tinting the dust in the air. It seems pure. Standing there, he thinks: virginity.

  From a door Hugh hadn’t noticed at the back, a priest appears, a young man he doesn’t recognize. Though Hugh doesn’t attend any church, he knows the regular priest here is Father Yaeger, and this person isn’t Father Yaeger. The priest is in a hurry but slows down as soon as he sees Hugh. He smiles, startled, and Hugh notices the priest’s large hands with thick fingers, a physical contrast to the young man’s tame, delicate face. Father a farmer, mother a waitress, Hugh thinks. “Hi,” the priest says. “Welcome. You must have heard the bells.”

  “Hard to miss them,” Hugh says.

  “I just turned them on,” the priest informs him, punctuating the sentence with a pantomime flicking-on of a switch. “Are they too loud, do you think?” He looks superficially pensive. “Because they aren’t really bells. They’re, well, I mean they’re bells all right, but they’re recorded. It’s a tape, a cassette. We have a new two-stage amplifier and a speaker system, Mackintosh and Micro-Acoustic.” He points to the ceiling for a moment. “It sounds pretty good, don’t you think?”

  “Very nice.” Hugh notes scars on the young man’s face.

  “We took up a collection for them last year. Our old bells weren’t solid, they were flaking and chipping … well, you don’t want to hear all this church talk, I’m sure. I’m Father Albert Duquesne.” He holds out his hand, and Hugh shakes it.

  “I’m …” Hugh plays with the idea of giving the priest an alias, but he can’t think of one fast enough. “Hugh Welch,” he says.

  “What can I do for you?” the priest asks.

  “Not really anything,” Hugh says. “I was feeling light-headed in the car from the heat, and then I heard some bells. So I came in to cool off for a moment.”

  “Can I get you some water?” The priest doesn’t wait for Hugh to answer. He reappears a minute later holding a small Dixie cup. “Here.” The water is not cold, but Hugh drinks it anyway. A bad well: it tastes of iron.

  “It’s not cold, is it?” the priest says, trying to laugh. “It came from the tap downstairs. But at least it’s clean.”

  “Thanks,” Hugh says, handing the cup back. The young man crumples it up, looks around for a place to throw it, glances at Hugh, and keeps it in his fist.

  “Have we … have we seen you here before?”

  “No,” Hugh says. “I’m not a Catholic. I live near here, and I’ve been in this church a few times. But I’m not a churchgoer.”

  The priest nods and wipes his other hand on his cassock. “But here you are anyway. An accident of, I guess you would call it, fate.” The priest smiles publicly to himself. “Excuse me for a moment. I should go turn off those bells.” He hurries out, and suddenly the sound of the bells goes instantly dead, without reverberations or echo. The air holds its pocket of silence, and then the priest comes bustling back. “People probably thought it was for a wedding, I suppose. Except it’s too early in the day. People don’t like to get married before lunch. They could, but they don’t. More likely, everyone driving by here thought we were having a funeral. Those you can have in the morning. You can have a funeral anytime. Why is that? I should think about it.” Hugh notices that he has gotten rid of the Dixie cup somehow.

  “My wife and I were married in the morning,” Hugh says. “Around ten o’clock or so. I can’t remember why.”

  “That’s unusual,” the priest says. “I almost don’t believe you. In a church? Oh, no. You said you weren’t a churchgoer.” The priest is scratching hard at his scalp. He sees Hugh watching him and says, “Chigger fly bite. I was fishing two days ago and forgot to wear a hat.”

  “Bites like that can be pretty bad,” Hugh says, feigning sympathy. “No, we weren’t married in a church. My wife’s cousin Harold did it. He’s a Presbyterian minister, but he had to be somewhere else that afternoon. A football game, I think. It was a Saturday. He came to our house, married us, drank a glass of champagne, and that was that. It was either Harold or city hall, and I didn’t want to be married by a clerk.”

  “The clerk doesn’t do it. The judge does.”

  “The city clerk can marry you. They have the power.”

  “No, they don’t,” the priest insists. “I’m quite sure. After all, they’re just clerks.” He looks at Hugh with an uncertain expression. “Well,” he says. “Can I show you around? Do you have a few minutes for that?”

  He shows Hugh the font for holy water, then takes him forward past the rows of pews to the altar. He genuflects, then points out details of the window glass and gives a brief history of the church, which goes back, he says, to 1936, when the previous church, which was also called St. Luke’s and stood on this site, was destroyed by a fire whose origin to this day has remained mysterious. “I was told,” the priest says, “that a Lutheran did it.” He laughs mechanically. “You say you live here, in Five Oaks?”

  “Nearly all my life,” Hugh tells him. He gazes toward the back, the southwest side of the church.

  “I’m new to this town,” the priest says. “I’m the assistant here. Do you fish?”

  “Some,” Hugh says. As a favor, he decides to give the priest a tip to a good spot, but not his best tip. “Try the south side of Silver Lake, in the afternoon especially, when the shade of those poplar trees gets out over the water. Near the Bill Martin summer place, this is, just beyond his boat dock. You’ve got to keep your lure from getting caught in the lily pads. If you can do that, you can probably catch yourself some bass. Big ones.” He holds his hands out, measuring.

  The priest nods. “I’ll remember that. Thanks.”

  Hugh nods in return.

  After another silence, the priest also gazes toward the back of the church, as if something were there, and in a quiet voice says, “Now what can I do for you?”

  Hugh points. “What are those?”

  “The confessional boxes.”

  “Do you listen to confessions?”

  “Yes.” The priest begins to walk back toward the rear doors. “Of course I do.” He makes quick, distressed movements of his fingers over his cassock.

  “You’re very young.”

  “Yes. People say that. I know I look like a kid. But a man’s age makes no real difference. He’s merely an instrument. The priest is an intermediary.”

  “Do people feel better after confessions?” Hugh asks, speaking to the priest’s back.

  “They feel better because they are better,” he says.

  “I’ve never confessed anything to anybody in my life,” Hugh says. “Not since sixth grade. I don’t think I could. It doesn’t seem very …” He stops in the center of the aisle, trying to find the word, while perspiration drips down the sides of his chest. The priest turns around and looks at him carefully. It is an adult look, Hugh notices: a shrewd look.

&nbs
p; “Very dignified?”

  “No,” Hugh says. “That’s not what I was thinking. It’s not very grown-up.”

  “Oh.” The priest leans against the side of a pew, whose wood lets out a groan from the weight, and in a gesture of great youthful fatigue Father Duquesne puts his hands to his face and brings them slowly downward, as if trying to wake himself. “Well, I suppose I could say that in the church, in this church, we are all children before God. That’s important: becoming a child again. It can happen. I could say that. But I think you know that already, and besides, that’s not what you came inside this church to hear. Or to do.”

  Hugh smiles. “What did I come in here to do?”

  The priest makes a throat-clearing sound. He glances at Hugh, then looks away. “Let me guess.”

  “Okay.”

  The priest suddenly turns the full force of his attention on Hugh, and Hugh sees in his eyes a cold intelligent glint that tells him why this young man is here, dressed up in these black institutional clothes, tethered by his love for the Blessed Virgin and for God. “It’s your life,” the priest says, “that brought you in here this morning.”

  “Okay. But what about my life?”

  “A weight in it.”

  “What kind of weight?”

  “You can’t talk,” the priest says. “You can’t ever talk.” Instantly Hugh’s hand dives down to his left pocket, where Noah’s letter is. Noah: but with my hands, Hugh thinks. “It’s not despair, but you feel dispirited. You feel mute.”

  Hugh smiles.

  “Do you have a house?” the priest asks.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re like me,” the priest says. “You wander around the house late at night.”

  “Sometimes I do that.”

  “Everybody says, I bet that all your friends say, about you, I mean, that you’re doing just fine.” Father Duquesne smiles, enjoying this despite the heat, and Hugh thinks: this kid is acting as if he’s a fortune teller. “Of course, I’m overstepping the bounds here.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “You must, well, you must imagine that there’s some way to the spirit besides God, and you probably say to yourself that this whole structure”—he waves his right arm in a large, room-inclusive gesture—“is a sizable fraud. But,” he adds, “here you are anyway.”

  The two men smile at each other and wait.

  “I wanted to talk about my sister,” Hugh says suddenly.

  “What about her?” They are still standing in the aisle. Outside a horn honks twice. Honk if you love … something.

  “She’s coming here, for a visit. With her husband and son. She’s real brilliant, my sister, a physicist. I don’t even know what it is she works on. I can’t understand it. But she’s had a hard life, in some ways, and I’ve tried to help her when things have happened. I’ve tried to be a brother to her. No one knows how to do that in this country, how to be a brother. But now I don’t know that she ever needed my help. I thought she did. Maybe not. I’ve lived my life thinking she needed me to help her. Now I’m not sure.”

  “You must love her very much,” Father Duquesne says.

  “I did.” Hugh corrects himself. “I do.”

  “What does she mean to you?”

  “My sister? What does she mean? Do people mean? My father once told me to watch after her, to take care of her. So I tried. Maybe that’s not something you’re supposed to do, but those were the instructions I had. I think about her a lot. It’s not like being married. It’s this other kind of love. There’s no name for it. Sometimes I think I’ve spent my life watching her, watching over her.”

  “Oh,” Father Duquesne says. “What,” he asks quietly, “did you ever do that was so terrible?”

  “What?”

  “In your life,” the priest says, a strained expression on his boyish face. “That would make you take care of someone who didn’t need it?” He shakes his head. “Well, listen, Hugh. I should … there are some things here I should be doing. But we can talk some more, if you’d like. We could set up an appointment.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You want to go fishing some day this summer?”

  Hugh looks at the priest. Smart ass. “Thanks, but probably not.”

  “Well, if you do, give me a call.”

  “I will.” Hugh smiles. “Now let me guess.”

  “Guess? Guess what?”

  “Let me guess about your life. You guessed about mine. No reason why I can’t do the same.”

  Father Duquesne raises his hand to his scalp, pats his head on a bald spot over which he has combed hair from the side, and glances out one of the leaded windows at the traffic, passing in distorted waves through the thick irregular glass.

  He shrugs. “All right.”

  “What about this? Your father worked as a farmer, probably, and your mother was a waitress when they met. Or he was a farm boy, and she lived in town and read books, and they met in one of their high school classes. One of your parents was rough and the other wasn’t.” He has steam on it, power, and he knows he can go as far as he wants to, and he’ll still be right. “Your father was the one who taught you to fish, and it was your mother who usually went to church. She was the one you really loved.”

  The priest’s mouth is opening in surprise or anger or even amusement, but Hugh can’t be sure which one it is, and he is determined to continue in any case.

  “You were the smart one in the family,” Hugh says, “the one with all the brains, the kid they put their small hopes on. Older, younger, it doesn’t matter in a Catholic family. Your mother stood at the sink doing dishes, and whenever you were in the house, she’d say, without turning around, Where’s my best boy? and you’d answer, Here I am. Best boy right here. Your brothers and sister got you to help them with their homework. You kept to your books.” Hugh is hearing all this, taking dictation. “You didn’t go out much. Everyone was worse than you were. They always got into trouble, but not you. You weren’t on any teams, and you—”

  “—No,” Father Duquesne interrupts. “That’s not true. I played basketball.”

  “Okay.” Hugh nods. “There was a hoop and a backboard set up on the garage roof. Anyway, you were the first one in the family to go to college. You took courses in everything but mostly in psychology, so you could understand why you had turned out the way you had, so unusual. You liked girls, but not so much that you couldn’t do without them. You didn’t lie awake at night thinking about them, the way your friends did. After graduation, you signed up. You signed your name on the line. Your whole huge family, all your cousins, came out for your … what’s the word?”

  “Ordination.”

  “That’s it. Ordination.”

  Hugh stops. It has gone far enough. The priest’s face has reddened—facial alchemy going on underneath—but now Hugh sees that the color, which appears in mottled, speckled dots where the acne has left its scars that make him think of a star map, is one of humor and laughter. The priest is laughing. He is exploding charges deep within his stomach. He puts his hand down on a windowsill for a moment’s support. He coughs twice. Fumbling, he reaches into a pocket for a piece of Kleenex. He wipes his mouth.

  “That’s some tune you can play,” he says.

  “Was I right?”

  “Some,” the priest says. “Some right. I won’t say what. But there is one last thing I’d like to know. Wherever did you learn to do that?”

  “From my mother,” Hugh says. “My family is full of failed psychics. And I’m a salesman.” He puts his hand out. “Thanks for your time, Father.” They shake.

  He turns and is heading out the door, getting one last whiff of the pine wood, when the priest calls after him, “Sure you don’t want to go fishing later this summer?”

  “I’ll give you a call,” Hugh says, not turning around. Then the impulse takes him, and he does turn around to get a last glimpse of the priest. “Don’t you go blessing me,” he says loudly. “Don’t you pray for me.” />
  Hugh thinks he hears the priest say, “I won’t,” but it may only be his imagination speaking to him, because he is already halfway down to his car, radiating heat waves in the summer sunlight. As he unlocks the car, he glances toward the church and sees Father Duquesne at the back window, looking out at him, his face partitioned and colored by the leaded-glass segments. The priest is smiling. He is waving. His hand is segmented by the glass frames so that the wave is broken and jerky, as if seen in a repeatedly spliced film that has been run through a projector too often.

  • • •

  He drives twenty miles away from Five Oaks, southbound down the interstate freeway until he reaches an exit for a Holiday Inn. It is early afternoon. He takes a single room, drives his car around to the entry door, and goes inside. He turns on the air conditioner. He takes off his shoes and lies on the bed for almost thirty minutes. He loves motel rooms and always has. He stares at the wallpaper, which depicts a Venetian canal, complete with gondola and gondolier, in a broad and crude Impressionist style. He dials a number, receives no answer, then dials another. In one hour there is a knock on the door. He rises from the bed, opens the door and lets a tall, quiet-looking woman of great dignity into the room. Once inside, they kiss. She is carrying a small brown paper bag; from this bag she removes a bottle of New York State rosé wine. After toasting each other with glasses from the motel’s bathroom, they take off each other’s clothes and get into bed.

  The two of them stay in the room for a few hours. They talk, make love, talk some more, then doze off. When Hugh wakes from one of these brief episodes of sleep, he looks over at his lover, the brown-haired, brown-eyed woman next to him. She is watching the television, a black-and-white movie about gangsters. She has kept the sound low for his benefit. Watching the film, she gives off charged particles of female contentment; Hugh can feel them in his shoulders. As he puts his hand over her thin, delicate waist, he sees in his mind’s eye the young priest, Father Duquesne, waving at him from behind the leaded-glass window. A wave, he thinks; not a blessing.