It was, I had thought at the time, a most peculiar attitude for a man in his position. But I was grateful to him for having said it when he did. The words had warned me against seeking any further advice from him about any serious subject. Another hopeful postulant, less fortunate, told me a few years later that he had confided his problems to the same man and was jocularly advised to put away such childish things and get on with “the real work.”
Faith, he was informed, is for the consumers of faith—for the congregation. Not for the priest. He is the supplier. True belief can be a real career-killer for the minister, gets in the way of clear-thinking, practical administration.
My friend subsequently resigned from the ministry, as did I, while that preceptor, a clear-thinking and practical administrator if ever there was one, became a bishop—which I suppose might be considered a textbook demonstration of the sure wisdom of that hypocritical bastard’s philosophy.
Of such is the new and malleable church-for-our-time raised high. There are no mistakes. And no coincidences.
Jake stirred, rising to his feet.
“Troublemaker,” I said, making a noise to alert him to my presence.
He peered into the gloom. “That,” he said, “could only be an ex-roommate.”
“Or a bandit,” I said. “Do you really feel safe enough to leave the doors unlocked at night?”
He didn’t seem to think the question was serious enough to warrant an answer. But he offered a final small bow in the direction of the concealed host before turning to make his way toward me along the aisle, adroitly avoiding a double stack of hymnals someone had left in the way.
“Confirmation class tonight,” he explained. “Normally, we’d hold it in the parish hall, but the furnace over there broke down again last week, and the fireplace really wouldn’t heat a closet. No sense trying to explain the articles of faith to people whose hands are turning blue before your eyes. And what do you mean, ‘troublemaker’? What have I done now?”
“Just a memory,” I said. “Nothing important. But while we’re on the subject of memory, how’s yours? For local gossip, that is. Something from a few years back…?”
He shrugged. “A priest hears things, of course. But I don’t know about repeating gossip.”
“All in a good cause,” I reassured him. “And all in aid of doing the job you got me out here to do.”
He still wasn’t convinced. But he waited for me to go on.
“Vollie Manion,” I said, listening with my eyes as well as my ears, and twisting all the emotional antennae to full gain. “Dana Lansing tells me she went to school with him. A couple of grades ahead, but remembers him well. Do you know him, too?”
Jake didn’t reply at once. But he didn’t have to. The reaction was too strong and too immediate for it to have been based on anything Dana might have told Helen about our encounter with the deputy on the night Bobby Don Thieroux was killed.
“As I told you this morning,” he said at last, picking the words carefully and trying to make them sound noncommittal, “I heard you had some kind of fight with him.”
“He hit me, and I hit the wall,” I said. “I guess you could stretch a point and call that a fight.”
He waited for me to go on, but I didn’t, and he used the silence to make up his mind about how much he wanted to tell me. I love Jake, but he has a glass head. Always did. And he had simply never done enough lying or evading during his lifetime to be worth a damn at it.
“Vollie was born in Farewell,” he said. “His mother was Roman Catholic, and he was brought up that way. Went to a parochial school—Saint Joseph’s, it’s just down the road—until she died. After that, I understand, the county was his guardian and wouldn’t leave him there. Trouble about it, but none of his mother’s people would take him in, because they’d disowned her when she got pregnant without being married and wouldn’t tell them who the father was.”
“The county supported him? He was a public charge?”
“Oh, no!” Jake emphasized the denial with an emphatic shake of the head. “There was money. Had been, to support her, and it kept coming for him after she died.”
“Money from where?”
“The bank.”
The fog was getting pretty thick.
“You mean the bank—the bank itself—was supporting Vollie Manion and his mother?”
“Of course not.” Jake was puzzled for a moment, but then his expression cleared and I could sense a similar easing in his emotional aura. We had arrived on safe ground so far as he was concerned. “I forgot you don’t live in New Mexico,” he said. “Some of the laws here are a little different. For instance, there’s a legal blinder that can be invoked on personal trusts. The bank pays out the money, but doesn’t have to tell anyone where it comes from.”
I nodded, thinking about it. “Not the worst idea I ever heard,” I said. “But there must be some way of getting at the information.”
“Of course there is. A judge can issue a search warrant if someone convinces him that a felony is being committed.”
“Uh-huh.” I had reservations about that; there is always a back door. But I kept the doubts to myself. “All that must have been before you got here. Let’s talk about the last few years.”
Jake cleared his throat and we were back to foot-dragging. “Well,” he said, and I could see him editing again, “Vollie had left the Roman faith by the time I arrived, and had joined this parish, such as it was; they were meeting in a storefront, trying to get enough financing to buy some land.”
“And he helped?”
“As much as he could, yes.” Jake stopped talking and I tried to wait him out again, but it was no-go.
“Dana didn’t tell me too much about Vollie,” I lied, “but I gather she didn’t like him a whole lot. Was she the only one who felt that way, or were there others?”
Jake squirmed, but I was surprised to sense another partial relaxation. He didn’t seem to mind the new direction the conversation had taken. I made a mental note to find out why.
“No,” he said, “she wasn’t alone. Vollie never did have many friends in Farewell, I’m afraid, and at first I just put it down to the fact of his illegitimacy. People stopped picking on him when he got big enough to defend himself, but the stigma was still there. This town can be small in more than one way. Only natural for him to throw up defenses.”
“Such as covert sadism?”
Direct hit!
Jake’s wa turned hot and cold and hot again all in the space of a second, and I knew I was zeroing in on the spot he had been trying to defend from the very beginning. But I couldn’t simply crash on through. I needed his cooperation. And he was a friend.
“I can’t discuss that,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Seal of the confessional.”
It was a real stopper.
Personal, private confession is most common, of course, among Roman Catholics. But it is not unknown in the Anglican communion. To the contrary, basic doctrine stipulates that “all may” confess privately if the need is felt, and “some should” do so, but “none must.”
The majority of the faithful, not surprisingly, pay attention to the last two words and skip the rest, confining themselves to the much-less-demanding general confession that is a part of the communion service.
But Jake had said Vollie Manion was reared a Roman Catholic, so it might have been natural—perhaps necessary—for him to bring certain problems to the one-to-one intimacy of private confession. That would explain Jake’s reactions when the man’s name was mentioned, and might also tell me a lot more than he had intended about the nature of the sins acknowledged and redeemed.
“Okay,” I said, “I understand, and we’ll try to stay away from the sensitive area. But there are plenty of other things you can tell me—matters of general knowledge.”
“Uh…maybe.”
He still wasn’t happy about any of this, and I couldn’t blame him, but we had to move on before
he could think of a good reason to shut up entirely.
“Vollie’s too young to have been in Vietnam,” I said, accepting his halfhearted nod in lieu of reply, “but talking to Frank Ybarra I got the impression that he hadn’t been with the sheriff’s department for any great length of time.”
He hesitated before answering. “That’s true enough.”
He was on guard and nothing was going to be easy, but it was information I had to have. Now.
“Talking to Vollie himself,” I continued, “I got the idea he’d been away from Farewell a few years ago, going to college in some other town. Is that right?”
Jake nodded. “He went to the state university. Did well there, too, I understand.”
“Uh-huh. Did he graduate? Take a degree?”
“Well…no.”
And there we were back on shaky ground again. I decided it was time to find out why, if possible.
“Was he ever in the service?” I prodded. “In the army or navy?”
Jake blinked, and I could see a whole phalanx of refusals forming up, ready to march.
“Old friend,” I said gently, “all of this would be a matter of public record. I could get it the hard way if necessary. Have someone back in Washington go digging through the files. And I’ll do that if I have to. But it would make things a lot easier—and shouldn’t intrude—if you’d just tell me as much as you feel you can right now. We’ve known each other far too long to keep on sparring.”
He nodded slowly. Reluctantly. “It’s not that I don’t trust you or that I don’t want to help,” he said. “But this is a lot more complicated than it seems, believe me.”
“I do. And you know well enough that I’d never ask you, of all people, to do or say anything we know you shouldn’t. But there really are questions here that I have got to ask, and answers I am going to get one way or another.”
“All right.” He took a deep breath, and I could feel the heat of his wa begin to cool slightly as he brought it under control. “Vollie Manion spent a summer working the harvest after he got out of high school, and then he went off to the state university.”
“Scholarship?”
“No, the trust money still seemed to be coming in, though I suppose he did have jobs on the side to pay for extras. The usual thing.”
I nodded, and he went on.
“At first he was going to study agriculture, I understand, but then he switched to public administration. Minor in law enforcement. Told people he was going to be a police officer, maybe in a bigger town like Albuquerque or Amarillo. He seemed to mean it, and I believe he was at the top of his class academically when he suddenly quit school and joined the army.”
“Why’d he do that?”
Jake shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “At least, not exactly. He told people here that he felt he needed to spend some time away from school; he was going to go through the army’s military police school, get three years of practical experience in the field, and then finish up the degree when he got back. But he didn’t do it.”
“Didn’t what, go back to school?”
“Didn’t do any of it. He joined the army, all right, but he never became an MP—something about an aptitude test—and he didn’t stay in the army the full four years he’d signed up for, and he didn’t go back to school afterward, either. Instead, he came back here to Farewell after a year and a half and joined the sheriff’s department.”
I started to ask another question. But Jake wasn’t through talking; he had only paused for breath. “I think,” he said with greater assurance than I’d heard in his voice before, “that this is as far as we’d better go in this particular direction. The next step would be one I couldn’t answer. Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said. “But I still need to get a couple more answers—on nonconfessional subjects—before we drop it for good. You say he came back to Farewell before his hitch would normally have been up. What kind of discharge did he get?”
Jake looked blank.
“Was it an honorable discharge,” I said, “or some other kind? Administrative, maybe?”
“Why, neither,” he said. “Vollie was released on a medical discharge.”
That surprised me. The hulking gorilla who had enjoyed bouncing his nightstick on my skull had seemed in perfect health. Physically.
“Vollie got hurt in the army?”
“I guess so. Or got sick. Anyway, he was in the hospital for several months before his discharge.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Oh, yes. I got a letter from him with the hospital’s location and his identification number on the return address.”
“But you don’t know why he was in there?”
“No…would that be important?”
I started to say that it damn sure might be, but thought better of it. I could find out the rest if I needed to, but it was more important for the moment to get the answer to the next question.
“I guess it doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Then ask your last question and let’s drop the subject. No offense, but this is really beginning to give me an itch in the ethics.”
“Just one more, then,” I promised, giving him a smile and trying to make the words seem casual. “You said Vollie didn’t make it into military police work as he’d intended. So what did he do instead?”
“Well, as I said, he didn’t stay in the service for the full four years. A lot of the eighteen months he did spend in uniform was used up going through basic training. And in the hospital.”
“Right. But every grunt rifleman gets cross-trained to be something besides—a communicator or a medic or a clerk—these days.”
Jake struggled with that. No reluctance this time, just honest effort, a snippet of information he’d never given thought to before. But he was willing.
“Oh,” he said finally. “Oh, sure! You’re right, Vollie did say something about the school they finally sent him to. And that may have been where he got hurt, now that I think of it, though he did tell me once that he enjoyed the work. But…I can’t seem to remember exactly what he said…”
He broke off, sweating it, and I shut up to let him have his best shot.
His fingers drummed on the doorway, and he closed his eyes with the effort of recall.
I was about to tell him to let it go; it was something I could find out through regular channels, and probably not all that important anyway. But then he relaxed.
“Aerial gunner!” he said, smiling at the successful memory-gymnastics and also, I suppose, because I’d promised it would be the last question.
“The army made Vollie a door gunner,” he said. “On helicopters.”
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
And the result?
We see the debris of such unexamined racecourse lives all around us…
TWENTY-THREE
The shortest route back to my motel led through the center of town, and I took it easy, letting the little red skate drift along at a pace well below the speed limit.
Nightfall had given a different face to Farewell’s main drag.
The town was big enough to have a couple of medium-size shopping centers on its outlying edges, but they didn’t seem to have done much harm to the original downtown commercial district. Stores that had branches in the semi-suburbs still maintained headquarters on Main Street, and I counted three drugstores, two supermarkets, five fast-food outlets, a pair of small-scale department stores, a clutch of dress shops, and five bars (cocktail lounges, their lighted plastic signs insisted) among the usual clutter of such miscellaneous enterprises as a shoe-repair shop, florist, record store, mom-and-pop café, hardware store, and hobby shop that filled the remaining space and elbowed for space on the side streets.
There was even a bona fide example of that most endangered of species, the single-auditorium downtown movie house.
And all seemed prosperous.
With one exception…
Unkempt and all too obvio
usly abandoned, Farewell’s single Main Street vacancy—For Lease: Will Renovate to Suit Tenant—stood at what appeared to be the main intersection; its architecture no less distinctive than the fading grime marks that spelled out Ranchers National in block letters across the faded Georgian revival front, proclaiming it a failed competitor to the Citizens National Bank, J. J. Barlow’s stronghold, which faced it, bland-modern and marble-prosperous, from diagonally across the street.
Hard times for some, opportunities for others.
This, we are assured, is the essence of the American way: Where there are winners there have got to be losers. Survival of the fittest. Darwinian economics in action. Devil take the hindmost. Make up your own slogan. It’s easy.
And surely a man whose living is derived entirely from a form of merchandising—you buy the cards from the dealer and sell them for the best price you can get—could have no possible objection?
Well, no. Not really.
I try to avoid playing poker with people who cannot afford to lose or with the emotionally disturbed, including the unhappy few who actually prefer to wind up on the short end. I do not take candy from babies, unless I’m really hungry, and the list of widows and orphans who have been the worse for knowing me is comparatively short. But while I will always give a man burying money, and have even been known to put up bail, it simply does not do to find oneself overcome with compassion while seated at a poker table. I might very well lend a friend a few dollars to get back into a game when he gets broke, but I will most certainly do my very best to take every penny of it away from him again on the next hand. Any other attitude makes nonsense of the game and leads inevitably to abuses. The whole idea is to get rich at the other players’ expense, and I have never seen anything wrong with this.
The Preacher Page 18