by Randle, Ned;
Father Tom wasn’t proud of his tendency to evaluate the worth of other men like one would grade livestock or vegetables. He thought it unchristian. And since he’d met Theo and Naomi, his heart was filled with the most grievous of sins, and he took pains to order his thoughts and behavior to counterbalance the weight of transgression on his soul. As he sat quietly in his study, he considered perhaps it were his own character flaws which caused him to devalue the Methodist and the evangelical preacher, and he tried to be more charitable in his consideration of the men. He prayed for both men; prayed for strength to love both men. But he still considered folding the club.
It wasn’t altruism or Christian charity that moved him to cast the two in a more benevolent light; he knew it was selfishness and fear which prompted him to do so. Lately, he took to worrying about the disposition of his own immortal soul, which until recently he took for granted was safe in the arms of the angels. He considered seeing a fellow priest for the Rite of Reconciliation. He’d not been so discouraged about the arc of his life since the lost days after he left Benedictine College and abandoned his mother, and although she’d forgiven him many years before her death, he still grieved for the pain he’d caused her, particularly when he was melancholy and lonely, as he was now, staring at his mother’s picture setting on his desk.
As he had done many times over the years, rather than seeking formal Reconciliation, he relived his lost days as a form of punishment or penance, he wasn’t sure which. He was just a kid, barely twenty years old and recently booted out of college, when he packed a few changes of clothes, underwear, and toiletries in an old valise and walked from his mother’s house to the bus station. He looked at the schedule on the wall and bought a ticket on a bus headed to St. Louis with the money he’d taken from his mother’s pocketbook. He had no particular reason for heading to St. Louis, other than the next bus leaving the station was bound for St. Louis.
He got off the bus in a small town along the route when the driver made a stop to pick up more passengers. He went into the dingy station and used the men’s room and bought a sandwich, but when the other passengers climbed on the bus he didn’t re-board. He heard the driver sound the horn and dodged out a back door when the driver came in to account for his passenger. He loped away from the bus station, turned and watched the bus pull out. He walked up and down the streets near the bus station until he found furnished rooms for rent, immediate occupancy. He walked back to the bus station and called the landlord from the phone booth, met him within the hour, and paid two weeks rent in advance from the stash in his pants pocket. He bummed some bedclothes—two sheets, a blanket, and a pillow—off his landlord. He made the bed and unpacked his suitcase.
His rooms were of the quality one would expect to be rented to a young man with poor prospects for weekly rent. They were one half of a shabby clapboard duplex, but they accommodated his meager needs. He had a tiny living room, a kitchen, a bath, and a bedroom. A skinny dope dealer and his woman occupied the other half of the duplex. Tom figured out the couple’s business by watching the parade of scraggly visitors going in and out at all hours of the day and night. At first, he thought the girl was whoring. And perhaps she was, but he later discovered their primary business was selling drugs. He didn’t pass judgment. He didn’t have a taste for the stuff himself, but what others did was their business. He preferred alcohol in those days, and he frequented several seedy bars within walking distance of the duplex.
The day after he moved in, he began looking for work. He bought the daily paper and walked to the bus station to call prospective employers. He was just about broke when he found a job as an unskilled laborer on a construction crew. He’d been walking around town knocking on doors when he saw a sign on a chain link fence: hiring. Inside the fence, Tom saw a couple backhoes, a skid loader, stacks of concrete forms, a couple cement mixers and piles of sand and gravel. Moving around among the implements of work were a couple young men about his age. He went inside the office and told the man sitting at a desk he was looking for a job. The man looked him over pretty good and remarked that he seemed to be well-muscled, stout enough to handle a laborer’s job. When he asked Tom if he had any experience, Tom told him the only experience he had was a week’s worth of looking for work. The boss remarked it didn’t take a goddamned Einstein to shovel rock and sand and carry hod, and if he wasn’t a goddamned troublemaker, he’d hire him on and make good use of him, if he was willing to work hard.
Tom worked hard on the job, and the boss was happy with him, and he put away some money to send to his mother. He bought a small television and had a telephone installed. But he rarely watched television and never called anyone. He was a loner who usually left the job site right after work. Most evenings he would go home, take a quick shower, and go back out for the evening. Some nights, he’d eat; some nights, he didn’t bother to eat. One night a week, he played softball on the company team. Most nights, he’d stagger home drunk, weave around the cars parked in front of the duplex, fiddle with the front door key, and plop down on his bed, sometimes too drunk to undress. There were times, if the alcohol had not rendered him insentient, he’d lay on the bed and think about his mother, vowing to call her first thing the next morning, tell her where he was, apologize for taking her money and swear he was going to pay her back, but he never did. As time went by, the thought of calling her made him edgy and self-conscious to the point he quit considering it at all.
Sometimes, his evening spent in a bar ended with him and another patron rolling around on the barroom floor or the parking lot gravel to settle some real or imagined grievance. The hard work made his body lean and tough and he fancied himself a pretty good scrapper. He loved to fight. When he drank, he got obnoxious and feisty, and there always was someone at the bar ready to take up the challenge. Most times, he came out on top, but he found himself banned from a couple of his favorite watering holes. He always was embarrassed when he sobered up, but the embarrassment didn’t dissuade him from looking for trouble when he drank, and he often drank.
As he sat in his study, a middle-aged priest, he could feel his face flush as he thought about those lost days and the singular event that caused him to bring those days to an abrupt end. He considered the memory of whom he once was to be his most valuable moral asset. He made himself think about the young man he once was as a form of self-flagellation, particularly when he was overwhelmed by the burden of his own sin. Sitting at his desk, he recognized the seminal event of his lost days was apposite to his inappropriate thoughts about Naomi, and he forced himself to visit that event once again.
It was a Sunday morning when he woke up on the living room floor in his duplex. He tried to open his eyes, but he could do no more than squint. He touched his eyes and found them swollen, with only slits to see through. He rolled over and felt a searing pain in the ribs on his left side. The pain was so sharp he wanted to vomit, but he hurt too much to stand, so he crawled across the floor into the bathroom. He held onto the sink and pulled himself up, but when he looked in the mirror his face was so grotesquely disfigured he was nearly unrecognizable to himself. His eyes were purple and swollen. The bridge of his nose had a grape-sized lump and appeared to be broken. He had a gash through his lower lip down to his chin. His shirt was covered in dried blood. He leaned over the toilet and wretched, but the pain in his ribs was so intense he couldn’t bring himself to vomit.
He lowered himself to the floor and crawled back into the living room. He lay on the floor and tried to breathe slowly through his mouth. His foray into the bathroom had caused his mouth and chin to start bleeding, and he swallowed repeatedly to keep from choking on fresh blood. He calmed himself to keep from panicking. As he lay there, he desperately tried to piece together the events from the night before, as if doing so would piece together his damaged body.
He remembered standing at the end of the bar drinking beer, holding onto the bar to keep from falling down. He was woefully drunk and fe
lt rancorous and low, his feelings aggravated by loneliness and by the abject disdain he believed others in the bar were showing him. No one spoke, he remembered, but he imagined their thoughts, and he stared ominously at one guy until the man cursed him and asked what the fuck he was staring at. That much he remembered. But the confrontation didn’t go anywhere when he challenged him; the guy just laughed and said he didn’t want to fight the town drunk.
Tom remembered picking up his coins from the bar and staggering to the jukebox. He dropped some coins in the slot and pushed the buttons. The music started to blare, and he was too drunk to stand still, so he tried to dance around the room to keep from falling down. At first, he danced alone, banging into barstools and drinkers and tables until he headed for a cute little blonde sitting at a table with her man. He grabbed her roughly by the arm and pulled her up and tried to spin her around. Lying on the floor of his duplex bleeding, he recalled the frightened and disgusted look on her face when he pulled her close and tried to kiss her. As he swallowed his blood, it all came flooding back: he’d made a play for another man’s wife. He recalled her husband was big and brutish and grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him away from his woman and punched him in the face. Tom swung wildly and fell on the floor, and the man pounced on him, rolled him over, and sitting on his chest, punched his eyes and nose and mouth with both hands. Finally, when Tom’s eyes were swollen shut and he was choking on blood, a couple of guys pulled the man off, but as Tom was dragged away, the man came back at him, kicking him two or three times in the ribs with the toe of his work boot.
Tom lay on the floor of his duplex, battered and bleeding and trying to recall how he got home. He tried to reconstruct the minutes after his beating. He remembered the bartender giving him a bar towel to stanch the blood flowing from a gash that ran from his lower lip to his chin before he told him to get out and never come back. He recalled that he couldn’t see to walk home, so one of the other barflies led him home like a horse in blinders. The guy opened the front door and pushed him in, and he staggered forward and passed out on the floor, where he still lay after his aborted foray into the bathroom. He rested his head on the floor, stared at the ceiling, and contemplated his situation. He knew he was damaged but wasn’t sure how badly. He didn’t know what to do. He needed help but didn’t know where to turn. He grabbed the telephone cord and pulled the telephone off the end table. He dialed his mother’s number. She answered only with his name:
“Tommy?”
“Mama, can you come and get me?”
“I knew you’d call, Tommy. I went to Mass this morning and prayed to the Holy Mother that today you’d call. I knew you would call.”
“Mama, can you come and get me?”
“Of course, Tommy. I’ll come and get you.”
He told his mother where he’d been hiding out, the name of the little town and the street address of his shabby duplex. He hung up the phone and lay on the floor and wept. And it hurt terribly to cry.
Now, as he sat at his fancy desk in the study of the St. Michael rectory looking at his mother’s picture and having wicked thoughts about another man’s wife, he was disgraced by thoughts of his beating. Yet, he didn’t feel sufficiently chastened, so he rubbed his finger along the vertical scar that trailed from his lower lip to the cleft in his chin, and as he did so, he felt the tempering heat of ignominy, and it was good.
Chapter Nine
The most recent evening they cleaned up after the poker game, Theo had amazed Father Tom with his knowledge of the current baseball standings, as well as the team records and statistics that put the teams in their places. Without looking up from his broom and dustpan, Theo began discussing baseball, in general, and the St. Louis Cardinals in particular, supporting his comments with an array of arcane numbers and percentages, which informed Tom that Theo had done considerable homework on the subject. The comments he made as he swept the cellar floor seemed incongruous coming with such assurance and force from the usually deferential pastor.
From the first gathering of the club, Tom had taken Theo for a bright man, so his grasp of this minutia was not all that surprising; what Tom did find surprising, however, was how Theo had invested himself in the subject and was eager to cash in on his investment. It was apparent to Tom that Pastor Swindberg had watched the ballgame on television the previous evening when he made pointed comments about the team’s inability to move runners along. In the course of the game, the Cardinals had stranded at least eight runners on base, Theo said. And it was a chronic problem, he pointed out, supporting his remarks with the team’s anemic batting average with runners in scoring position. Theo also pointed to the team’s lack of stolen bases, citing the number of attempts, the low number of successful steals, and the corresponding high percentage of men thrown out due to stealing. As he listened, Tom found Theo’s comments and opinions not only interesting and well supported in fact but also consonant with his own thoughts. Tom tossed in his own observations regarding the team’s shortcomings, such as its overall lack of team speed and paucity of good throwing arms in the outfield. He countered Theo with his opinions as to ways to improve the roster. The two clerics finally agreed, as they fussed with their domestic chores, that the local big-league team’s manager had to go.
“Did you ever play baseball, Tom?” Theo asked, as he stored the broom and dustpan in the corner, reluctant to have the conversation end.
“I played when I was a kid. Everybody played baseball in those days. I played in high school, too. Played some intramural at college,” he added, then stopped abruptly when he realized where even a casual comment might lead. He did not want to provide Theo with a segue into his lost days. He didn’t want Theo to ask him anything about his college days and he certainly didn’t want Theo to pry into the life he’d led after he dropped out of college. He didn’t want to tell Theo the truth, which he would have been required by his conscience to do, if he asked.
The truth was, he had continued to play ball after he left Benedictine, but he didn’t care to share the details with Theo or anyone else. Tom slowly dried the inside of the ice chest with a rag, while Theo quietly puttered around the table, making sure the bags of chips were closed, smoothing the tablecloth, and arranging the chairs in an orderly alignment, deferential to Tom’s silence.
Still, by the time he finished wiping out the ice chest, Tom was so thoroughly immersed in reverie prompted by Theo’s question, he stood silently staring at the empty cooler as if it secreted memories from his youth. What Theo’s question about playing ball caused Tom to conjure up was a suppressed memory of a specific incident related to ball playing, an unseemly and embarrassing event from his lost days, and the details he recalled weren’t pretty and caused him to blush with shame thinking about them with Theo in the room.
During the time he was hiding out, after he’d been on the job with the construction gang about a week, one of his co-workers asked him if he wanted to play on the company softball team. They needed players, the fellow said, and Tom looked like a guy who could hold his own on a ball diamond. The company team, his workmate explained, was one of eight teams in a men’s slow-pitch softball league, and the team rosters for the most part comprised tradesmen and laborers and construction workers and farm hands. They played Wednesday evenings in the city park on a poorly lit diamond that was functional, but rough. The field suited their style of play, the guy added with a laugh. Wear a cup, he was warned, and a mouthguard might be a good idea, too. It wasn’t baseball, Tom understood, but close enough, and he jumped at the chance to play. He saw it as a way to get out of his room and hang around with other men and do something other than hang in the bars and get drunk, at least on Wednesday nights.
When he showed up for his first game, the first thing Tom realized was he likely had wasted the money he’d spent on new sneakers; several of his teammates were ready to play in high top work boots. His team was a motley collection of good old boys, some of who
m had a gift for the game and others not. His buddy from the job who managed the team was sitting on a bench along the third base line making out the lineup and told Tom he’d be playing third base and batting last in the order, at least until he got an idea how he could hit, which Tom thought was fair and suited him just fine.
The second thing Tom realized was the guy stuck him at third base because no one else wanted to play the position. In slow-pitch softball, as Tom soon learned, the ball is pitched underhanded and loops down toward home plate from a slow, high arc, which provoked aggressive batters and one-night-a-week wonders to swing the bat with all their might. There were generally two outcomes: the hitter would pop up or hit the ball viciously. Also, most hitters tended to pull the ball and since most batters were right handed, Tom, in his first inning at third, got plenty of action. Fielding chances at third were not without risk. The infield was rough and ill-kept, with clods of dirt and exposed rocks that caused the ball to take random bounces or wacky caroms if it struck a chunk of crap just right. In his first inning in the field, Tom took a few glancing blows off his chest and thighs, but he kept the ball in front of him and made the plays, which caused his teammates to hoot and holler and laugh. Between innings he’d rearrange the bulk in his crotch, repositioning the jock and cup he wore under his jeans. After the first inning, as he sat on the bench drinking a can of beer, the guy next to him showed him a chipped front tooth and a bruised jaw he’d earned playing third the week before Tom joined the team.
Now, as Tom stood in the rectory cellar, ice chest in hand, his memory gravitated to one particular softball game on one particular Wednesday night late in that particular softball season of his lost days. His team was tied for first place in the league, and the two teams were scheduled to play a playoff game. After getting clobbered in the gut and chest and legs by unpredictable balls in the first few games he played, Tom made it his business to carry a rake home from the job and he’d spend about a half hour before each game raking out the dirt around third base, which he did again before the playoff game. When he took the field, he was able to concentrate on the play, rather than on self-defense, and in the playoff game, he made several stellar plays at third, robbing batters of sure hits down the line. The game was tied in the late innings and tempers were short. The volatile atmosphere was inflamed by the beer the men drank on the bench between innings. Tom had been hectored relentlessly by the opposing players for several innings when he was in the field. They tried to rattle him, hoping he’d make an error at third, hoping they could cop a run on a misplay and win the game. But for seven innings, he hadn’t flinched at any ball hit to him.