The St. Michael Poker & Drinking Club

by Randle, Ned;

  He didn’t know what to think of Theo Swindberg. He, like Billy Crump, was relatively new to town, so he’d heard no rumors about the man. He had known Lutherans, including Swindberg’s predecessor at St. Paul’s, and found them to be steadfast but priggish. None he knew had an ecumenical bone in his body. They tended to be insular and standoffish. In the past, he’d attributed their quirks as much to nature as church policy. Many Lutheran pastors, at least in the old days, came from the Northern Plains, and Tom, snug in his stereotypes, considered perhaps their phlegmatic personalities were the result of childhood exposure to numbing cold winds and bleak vistas and not to any innate defect of mind or spirit. One thing Father Tom appreciated was that the few Lutherans he’d known were not opposed to taking a drink now and then, in severe moderation, and if forced to, they could enjoy themselves, at least in a middling way. He put a checkmark next to his name and concluded he’d just have to see how the mop flopped with Reverend Theo Swindberg.

  As he resumed his doodling, he continued to mull over the idea of a poker club for clergymen, and despite his personal enthusiasm, he conceded the men on his list were not really situated the same as he was and could well have different outlooks, much less needs. Each was a married man, he understood, and hence each had the intimate counsel and companionship of a wife. Still, he didn’t envy them married, nor had he ever regretted not marrying. He’d spent too much time with altar societies and sodalities and other gatherings of women where he often was called upon to referee disputes over creases in the altar cloths, settle arguments over the choice of chancel flowers (he opted for roses where he could), and be the final arbiter as to the proper meat selections for a funeral luncheon. Hence, he didn’t covet spending interminable hours with any woman. Nevertheless, the others had wives, and he’d have to convince them the reason for the gathering was fellowship and not necessarily to relieve the loneliness inherent in their profession, even though he believed most married men were as lonely as he was.

  Father Tom decided if he could get the men on the list to hear him out, he could invoke his formidable powers of persuasion to convince them to go along with his plan. He didn’t yet know what he would say, but he was confident convincing words would come, as they used to come when he was a young priest and walked to the ambo with only a theme in mind and let a beguiling homily flow with no notes at all. He cautioned himself, however, as he sat at the big mahogany desk in the rectory, that he was older now and made it a practice of writing his homily out in full before the first Mass of the weekend, so he wouldn’t make a bumbling fool of himself by walking to the ambo after the Gospel reading with nothing at all to say to his flock. He made a note among the doodles to write down points of persuasion in the event he got the chance to talk to the other clergymen about his idea.

  After sitting for a while in near darkness contemplating the singular idea of a poker club for preachers, Father Tom placed a call to each church on his list, other than First Baptist, and as he expected, got no answer that time of night, which allowed him to leave a message on the answering machine, inviting the clergyman to a meeting at the St. Michael rectory. He didn’t disclose the nature of his call and said only he wanted to meet regarding a matter of utmost importance to each of them. He left only a date and time but nothing else of substance in the message. He then got up and walked to the window, rested his knuckles on the sill and stared out into the darkness in the direction of the rose garden and Cat’s fresh grave and considered what he had just done and why.

  Although his idea seemingly was conceived in loss and loneliness, he felt there was something beyond mere forlornness tugging at him. He considered himself a pragmatic priest and not a mystic by any means. Although familiar with the mystical writers—Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite, de Sales and the Benedictine mystics from St. Aybert of Crespin to Theobald of Provins—he found mysticism to be amorphous and personal, and he believed mysticism to be the bastard child of obsessive faith, and he was not one to obsess. As a parish priest, he found no need to mine the deeper veins of religious ore; he found plenty of flake on the surface. And as far as religious philology went, he preferred the writings of practical thinkers such as St. Augustine and Thomas Merton who, like himself, had each lived dissolute early lives and later found God.

  The closest he came to religious mysticism was his belief that God imbued the universe with an unfathomable harmonic, and through prayer, one might affect its vibration and hence effect desired outcomes. It was the same harmonic, he believed, that caused the walls of Jericho to crumble, aligned the molecules of water in the Sea of Galilee to allow Jesus to walk on water, and caused the earth to tremble and shake and rent the temple curtain when Christ was crucified. It was a conviction he felt most deeply when he finished working in his rose garden at twilight under the influence of his evening wine and he freed his soul from the shackles of theological convention and allowed it to meld with the light of the rising stars. He rationalized this belief not as mysticism but as religious science and as God’s intervention in the world through the natural laws of physics and mathematics.

  Relatedly, and something he never mentioned to anyone, was his tempered belief in certain aspects of astrology. Beyond the church calendar, he felt an affinity for sidereal time. His fascination with the subject began when he was a young man and recognized that the attributes of his astrological sign, Aries the Ram—headstrong and crass, obstinate and self-seeking—had defined his personality from the time he was a boy. It was his secret belief the Egyptians and the Babylonians had somehow tapped into the eternal harmonic and had devised an elaborate paradigm for charting signs, foretelling events, and defining personality traits. Consequently, each morning after his prayers, he opened the newspaper and read his horoscope to obtain another form of guidance for his day.

  He also was a believer in physical signs apart from signs of the Zodiac, another paradox of his personal faith he recognized and accepted after his mother intervened to save his life when he was a young man. He fervently believed God had set signposts for him throughout his life which pointed the way to where he now was in life: a portly, middle-aged parish priest lamenting the death of a stray cat. If the animal’s death were a sign, he didn’t know yet what it might portend. It did, however, leave him thumbing through the phone book, compiling a list of religious men he intended to cajole into gathering together for forced friendship, an odd idea at best. Yet, there was something about the idea that pulled at him from another realm, and he sat down at his desk and looked over the list of clergymen on his notepad. His eyes were drawn back several times to one name in particular—Theo Swindberg—which he had unconsciously highlighted with a halo of bizarre doodles, and he wondered if there was something about the Lutheran pastor, whom he’d never met, that figured preternaturally into his plan.

  Chapter Three

  When the rectory doorbell rang the next Thursday evening, Father Tom looked at his watch. It was exactly seven o’clock, the appointed time on the appointed day he’d mentioned in each message left on a church answering machine earlier the prior week. If the visitor ringing his bell was one of the local clergy responding to his telephone invitation, he was punctual. However, when Father Tom opened the front door, he didn’t see just one clergyman, he saw a clutch of men at his doorstep, and a rapid survey indicated they all had come but Northrup, the Presbyterian minister. Father Tom smiled, not only in welcome, but also as he imagined the firestorm of forced ecumenism his phone messages had engendered in the form of calls passed among the clergymen now standing on his stoop, two of who were dressed in clerical clothing and the third, the evangelical preacher, wearing a tasteful linen jacket, khaki slacks, dress shirt and tie. Father Tom looked them over and surmised the men had agreed, at least in the interest of professional courtesy, to go to the Papist’s lair, all together as a group, prepared for a clerical confab about a subject unknown.

  The men generally knew who each other was but they went through a
perfunctory round of introductions. In the spirit of collegiality, Father Tom insisted the others simply call him Tom. The Lutheran pastor referred to himself as Theo, and the Methodist and evangelical ministers also insisted on the informality of first names with no ecclesiastical styling. The Methodist extended the Presbyterian’s regrets, explaining that Thursday evenings were set aside for the meeting of his Presbytery and he just couldn’t miss it. After the pleasantries, Tom led the group downstairs to his rathskeller, as he called his basement in a jovial attempt at gentrification. But rathskeller was an inapt word; it wasn’t a rathskeller or even a basement, but a crude cellar defined by naked sandstone walls and a low ceiling of exposed floor joists. As the four men clomped down the wooden stairs the treads creaked and the stringers moaned under their weight. At the bottom, the men stood next to an archaic steam boiler. In one corner was an open sump pump and the entire place held the pervasive odor of must and mildew and the dank feeling of damp stone.

  Tom had decided against having the meeting in his kitchen or study, thinking the rectory proper too Catholic for their comfort. He’d tried to make the cellar hospitable by setting in the middle of the room a five-foot long, white, plastic table with foldout metal legs and an array of mismatched chairs at the table. There was a porcelain light fixture with a bare bulb over the table. It wasn’t the greatest configuration for playing cards, but it was the best he had without wrestling his pristine kitchen table down the stairs. He’d covered the table with an old altar cloth, which none of the Protestants could distinguish from a linen tablecloth, and in anticipation of at least one attendee, set bowls of potato chips and pretzels on the cloth. He told the men there was beer and soda-pop in the ice chest sitting against the wall. He also had two bottles of wine on the ice chest—one white and one red—which were, he assured them, neither tampered with nor blessed but were consubstantial with the wine remaining in the vintner’s casks from which they were bottled, a remark that drew a snicker from the Methodist, but the Lutheran merely frowned. Tom noticed the play-on-words went right over the head of the evangelical preacher.

  When Tom prodded them to help themselves to a drink, he was pleasantly surprised to see Theo Swindberg fish out a can of Budweiser from the ice chest. Metzger asked for one as well. The evangelical politely asked Theo to hand him a diet cola. Tom helped himself to a can of beer and encouraged the men to take a seat at the table, and to avoid any impression of primacy, he promptly sat down as well. The arrangement was awkward with Father Tom on one side of the long table, Swindberg and Metzger on the opposite side, and Crump at one end. The men watched each other warily. Tom quickly studied the faces around the table, wondered what each man’s astrological sign might be and, more importantly, tried to get a quick read on each man as one might any opponent.

  Brian Metzger, the Methodist minister who sat directly across from him, was large, about six feet two inches tall, robust and well-muscled and in good physical condition for a man in his fifties. Tom knew Metzger was an avid golfer with a low handicap but an interest in heavy betting on the course, even during a friendly skins game. Metzger had a thick shock of auburn hair with no trace of gray and an open, pink face and just a hint of calumny in his blue eyes. Although he’d moved north from Texas many years earlier, the soft, sophisticated Dallas country club timbre of his voice was still recognizable when he spoke.

  Pastor Billy Crump, sitting to Tom’s left, appeared to be in his late fifties or early sixties but could have been significantly younger or older. Tom noticed as he followed him down the steps that he was quite short but compact. Tom didn’t expect Crump to be so short. He’d only seen the man’s head on the billboard and assumed a head that large likely topped a towering frame. Crump was a chucklehead. Tom wondered, as he looked him over in the flesh, if the man had a difficult time finding a hat to fit. His large head was covered with close-cropped black hair liberally sprinkled with grays and whites. He had a tan, weatherworn face, darting brown eyes and a perpetual smile encircling abnormally white teeth. He spoke in a soft, buttery voice, and he struck Tom as a man comfortable in his own skin, whatever skin he chose to wear that day. And he was a different sort of clergyman from the others, Tom knew. His education as an evangelical preacher likely was less formal and more fluid than that of the others. As a result, his behavior would be less predictable, and he presented as a man to keep a close eye on.

  Tom finally zeroed in on Theo Swindberg, who was seated to Metzger’s left. Swindberg was skinny and angular with thinning brown hair and downcast hazel eyes. His age wasn’t readily discernible, but Tom adjudged him to be younger than he looked, perhaps in his mid-forties. He could see that the Lutheran pastor was skittish, fidgeting with his beer can, uneasy in the silence and uncomfortable with the circumstances of the gathering. Had he passed him on the sidewalk wearing no collar, Tom wouldn’t have taken him for a clergyman; he looked more like a middle school math teacher or a bank clerk. He struck Tom as something of a mimsy, but he also sensed that if they got into a card game, Pastor Swindberg would be a careful man, a calculator of odds, and not prone to risk taking.

  Once he was satisfied with his quick reads of the men at the table, and aware of the awkward silence, Tom set aside his beer and addressed them in his rumbling priest’s voice.

  “You’re probably all wondering why I invited you here this evening. I think it’s best to just get to the point and let the chips fall where they may, so to speak. And I’ll rely on your professional discretion as to things discussed here this evening.” As he spoke, he could feel his pitch of his own voice rise up the scale until it was reedy and harsh. He found it disconcerting. And while he’d prepared an outline of remarks, he left it in his pocket. He was growing so uncomfortable, he just wanted to get the whole thing over with, so he prattled, he realized later, and demeaned himself, but once he spoke, he couldn’t take back his words:

  “For reasons I won’t go into now, I’ll confess I’ve been suffering from an acute bout of loneliness. No, let me correct that; it’s more of a chronic loneliness. And a sense of isolation. I recognize it’s an occupational hazard, but it’s become uncomfortable all the same. Maybe it’s my age. When I was younger, I turned my back on the company of others. At one time, I even considered a monastic life. But I digress,” he smiled weakly. He could see the men around the table were as uncomfortable as he was.

  “As I’m sure you guys can appreciate, sometimes the cares of this office wear me down, and I have no one to talk to, no one who understands the demands of shepherding a flock.”

  He tried to stop himself when he saw his confession had little effect on the other clergymen. Nonetheless, he moved onto the main point.

  “That said, I realized I spend little or no time in the company of other men of the cloth, others who might understand the demands of the job.”

  “Don’t you have any priest friends?” Crump asked bluntly.

  Tom wasn’t prepared for the question. He remained silent and mentally inventoried his friends and found the ledger blank. Truth was, he had no real friends, much less any priest friends. He’d always been a solitary man, making only one good friend at the seminary, a little man from southern Illinois nicknamed Shorty. Tom had lost track of Shorty after they left the seminary, and he tried only one time to contact him, when he first started to feel the pangs of isolation, a few years after he was assigned to St. Michael. At the time, he was sitting at the desk in the study, deep in his cups, poisoning his attitude with wine and reminiscences when he recollected his friend Shorty and decided to try and contact him. He wrote a brief note, stuck it in an envelope and addressed it to Shorty’s Christian name, c/o St. Meinrad Seminary, thinking the seminary likely kept track of its alumni and would forward the note to his old friend. After several weeks, he received a large envelope from St. Meinrad. He opened it, and inside was the envelope addressed to Shorty, torn open, with UNDELIVERABLE scrawled on the front, the contents misfolded and crammed insid
e, obviously after being read by someone at the seminary. Tom had been in a fog when he wrote the note, so he took it out of the envelope and read what he’d written in nearly illegible script:

  Hey, Shorty, what the hell you been up to, you little fucker?

  He crumbled the letter and the two envelopes in his hands and tossed them into the trash can, cursing himself for his idiocy and cursing the nosey goddamned priests at the seminary who opened his mail.

  “It’s no secret most of the priests in this diocese are old, Billy,” Tom finally answered disingenuously, knowing he was about to place the blame for his lack of fraternity where it didn’t belong, “and many of the younger priests are imported from other countries. In either case, my fellow diocesan priests and I have different sets of interests, so to speak. And besides, they don’t get my jokes,” he added with a wry smile.

  Tom started to sweat and itch around his waist, feeling more uncomfortable, wanting to be out of the situation he’d irrationally created. “So, anyway, here’s what I have in mind,” he hurried on, condensing the entire plan to a few short sentences. “We, that is, the local clergymen, would get together on a regular basis, socialize, enjoy ourselves, swap stories and anecdotes, preserving confidences, of course. Perhaps discuss the scriptures, you know, like a busman’s holiday? I also thought it might be fun to spice up our meetings with a few drinks and a friendly game of poker. Say a nickel-dime game, just enough to make it interesting? We can donate any winnings to our respective church coffers or to the poor. I see it as a collegial form of fund raising.”