The St. Michael Poker & Drinking Club

by Randle, Ned;

  As Naomi sat at the table with scraps of paper and photographs spread out before her, evidencing the happiest days of her life as a schoolgirl, she again read through the names listed on the graduation program. Kids, she thought: all of them were kids then. And now they were no longer kids, and it was very likely many of them had kids of their own. She slumped back in her chair and breathed slowly to control the pain in her gut. At these times, when Theo was gone and she was alone, she allowed herself to admit that not having a child was a great disappointment in life, an even greater disappointment than thoughtlessly giving herself to a pretty young man. She did not allow herself to think of such things when Theo was in the house, because after their years of marriage, they could sometimes read each other’s thoughts. She was certain as to the cause of her barrenness and didn’t want Theo to find out.

  First as a small child and then as a young woman, she had sat in the church pew and listened to her father preach, and her father always preached on the same relentless theme—the wages of sin are death. Theo was fond of saying there are many types of love, but she was certain there were many types of death, too. And the death she was enduring in the form of barrenness was a result of her particular sin. As much as she wanted to believe in God’s grace and forgiveness, she was convinced she was barren as God’s punishment for giving into temptation.

  Not only was she laboring under the yoke of her sin, she compounded that sin monthly. Theo thought he was the reason they could not conceive a child, and she did nothing to disabuse him of the notion. He had, if she were honest about it, a fumbling approach to lovemaking. It was never like her first time with the boy in college, never that good. That’s how she knew what she had done as a college girl was a damnable sin. She didn’t believe Theo was physically deficient in regards to fathering a child. While he was awkward and at times incompetent, and in no way did he engender pleasure in her, he did what a man needs to do to impregnate a woman. Her body simply was not receptive, and although Theo didn’t know the irony of his comment, it was true their childlessness was an act of God.

  Now she was sick. She could barely keep down the tea. She’d had nothing to eat all day but a wedge of buttered toast. She felt cramped and gassy. So, the doctor thinks he knows the cause of my complaint, she thought to herself as she put the scraps of paper and photos back into the book. And he’s ordered tests to validate his diagnosis and recommend a remedy. He knows nothing, she silently contended. She had little use for tests or surgery or any other corporal intervention. She was sanguine when she considered the possible outcome. It was clear to her this recent affliction was another punishment from God, this time for the years of sin, the years of deceiving poor Theo and letting him think he was at fault for her barrenness. There was nothing any medical man could do to cure her sickness, she conceded. As her father always preached, the wages of sin are death.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Father Tom sat at the desk in his study working on his homily. His contemplation of Chapter 9 of The Gospel According to St. John, which related how Jesus healed the blind man, was intruded upon several times, however, by snippets of his conversation with Theo at the coffee shop, the interruptions perhaps provoked by the Gospel itself, particularly Verse 2 when the disciples asked Jesus if it was the man or his parents who sinned, causing him to be born blind.

  He lay down his pen and eased back in his chair. He would, he decided, give himself up to the interruptions and recall the conversation with Theo, word-by-word, as best he could remember, and perhaps by doing so, rid his mind of the constant intrusions. He could then get back to the task at hand. As he mulled over their conversation, there was one aspect which perplexed him: he’d noticed when they were together at the diner, not once did Theo say anything that would indicate he wanted to have a child, wanted to be a father. All his references were to Naomi’s feelings, and Tom couldn’t figure out if Theo’s attitude was ennobling or if the man realized, and admitted through omission, that he wouldn’t be a good father or had no interest in having a baby. But when Tom thought about Theo’s mauled fingernails, his anxious brow, and his doleful aura, he concluded Theo wouldn’t be the best of men to raise a child.

  From that conclusion, Tom’s thoughts naturally wandered to thoughts of himself, whether he would have been a good father. No, he quickly conceded. This thought prompted him to board another train of reverie taking him back in time to the point where his father abandoned his mother and him, and he felt the old anger in his belly. He’d been so hurt and dejected when his father left that he refused to look at a photograph of him from that time on, even though his mother kept a few in an old picture album. And when his mother died, he salvaged all photos of her and of himself but burned the photos of his father, after giving them a passing glance just to confirm it was him in the snapshots he was destroying.

  Still, the images of the man at the time he left, both physical and temperamental, were fixed like an image on a wet plate in his mind, and he could see everything there was about the man as if he were standing right in front of him in his study in the rectory. His old man had been bandy-legged and wiry, but wickedly handsome, with an allure women could barely resist, and his comeliness had certainly contributed to his problems. He was dissolute, a gambler, and a drinker. When he drank, he caused trouble. Tom recalled at least two times his mother had to get out of bed in the middle of the night and bail his father out of the county jail where he was being held on misdemeanor charges of public drunkenness and disturbing the peace as the result of a bar fight or other such mayhem.

  Tom also knew his father to be incorrigible in other aspects of his life. Shortly before he left them, his mother woke up and found his father on the living room sofa with a strange woman. Tom had cracked his bedroom door to witness the commotion about the time his mother was beating his father mercilessly with a heavy candlestick. In the meantime, the woman scurried out the front door wrapped only in one of his mother’s sofa slipcovers. After his father escaped his beating and rushed out the door, Tom continued to peek as his mother unceremoniously picked up the woman’s abandoned clothing and shoes with a broomstick, dropping them like dung in a brown grocery bag. At daybreak she took the bag to the rubbish barrel in the backyard and burned it. It was shortly after this indiscretion that his father packed his bag and took off to Texas, ostensibly to look for work but in reality just to look. He never came back.

  The morning his father left, Tom lay in bed feigning sleep. “Tell Little Shithead I’ll be back,” he heard the man say, and for a while he missed his father. Mercifully, he remembered his father as neither brutish nor affectionate, merely indifferent, often referring to his son as Little Shithead, a sobriquet young Tom had transmuted into to a term of affection. As he aged, he considered perhaps his father had been prescient and envisioned his son’s years as a troublesome teenager and young man and hence nicknamed him. On the other hand, perhaps he, the father, considered himself a shithead and, consequently, referred to his son as Little Shithead.

  Tom thought himself a motley amalgam of both his father and mother. His hair and eyes and skin tone were dark like his father’s. He inherited certain of his personality traits from his old man, too. As a teenager and young man, he was dissolute and vexatious with a bad temper, fueled by a streak of unreasonable anger. On the other hand, he got his size and physical strength from his mother, who was a plain woman, but not unattractive, fair, tall, with broad shoulders and wide hips. She was a stubborn Catholic Irishwoman, nee Kelly, and his old man often said he’d made an honest woman of her, in more ways than one, when he, a fallen-away Presbyterian Scot, took her as his wife.

  As a priest, Tom tried to be like his mother, who displayed the wondrous dichotomy of womanhood: she was both tough and tender at the same time, and he believed those aspects of her personality served him well in the priesthood. And where he suspected his father was an atheist or at least agnostic, if the man even knew the meaning of the terms, she
was stubbornly devout but not showy in her Catholicism. She lived the parable of not allowing one hand to know what the other was doing. And without allowing anyone to know, she saved him from the devils his father vested in him, and in doing so, saved his life.

  For most of his life, he hated his father, or at least the memory of the man. When he was a young priest, he prayed for forgiveness, recognizing hate as a species of murder. But looking back on his circumstances as he neared middle-age, he recognized the pejorative Little Shithead, laid bare, was nothing but a crude reference to a kid his father never really wanted. He accepted, as an older man, that he really did hate the man and would confess as much when he saw another priest for confession.

  So it had been that Tom long accepted his experience with his own father, albeit limited, likely rendered him unfit to be a father. Perhaps, then, it was his father, he reasoned, even more than his mother, who had directed him to the priesthood. He could be Father with no emotional entanglements, enjoy paternity in a nominal sense only, and if he simply did his job and followed the precepts of the Mother Church, he could avoid damaging anyone else for their lifetime.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Thoughts of his parentage invariably led him back to his lost days. When his mother arrived at the duplex to take him home after he was severely beaten, Tom could barely hobble to the door to answer her knock. When he opened the door, his mother issued a loud gasp, and hesitant to touch his damaged face, let her hands fall limply at her side and wept. Tom enveloped her shoulders in his arms and gingerly lay his head on her shoulders and cried with her.

  When she had no more tears to cry, she helped her son into the house and set him on a kitchen chair. She proceeded to clean his wounds with soap and water. She shuddered at the gash in his lip and chin and told him he likely needed stitches to close the wound. He sat there mutely and accepted her painful ministrations, thinking it rightfully-earned pain. Once he was cleaned up and salved, she told him to stay on the chair, and she moved quickly through the rooms of his warren collecting and packing his belongings in the valise. As she worked, Tom could hear her sniff back tears, and he hung his head and wept bitterly, but silently, over the things she surely must be seeing: half-filled cocktail glasses with doused cigarette butts, tattooed around the rim with ruby red lip prints; mounds of dirty laundry on his bedroom floor; plates with congealed and moldering food scraps in the kitchen sink; and his foul bathroom with its filthy sink and shower and overflowing trash can where he had, several nights before in a drunken stupor, indiscriminately flung a used condom.

  Once outside the duplex, she helped him into her car, where he rested his head on the back of the seat and said nothing. As they drove, the only sound he made was the occasional groan or gasp if she hit a bump or took a corner too sharply. His mother said nothing either as she drove. Once they arrived in their home town, she drove to the hospital and helped him out of the car and into the emergency room. He sat stoically on a gurney as the doctor manipulated and taped his fractured nose. The x-rays showed two cracked ribs on his left side which, the doctor explained, would just have to heal on their own. The doctor irrigated the slits that were his eyes with a warm salt solution and then examined them as best he could with an ophthalmoscope. His preliminary impression was there was no structural damage to the eyeballs, but he recommended Tom see an eye doctor when the swelling went down. Finally, the doctor sutured the gash on his lip and chin, a painful procedure even with anesthetic that caused tears to leak from his eyes and trickle down his cheeks.

  After the hospital visit, his mother drove him to their house. She helped him out of the car, but before they went inside, he told her he wanted to see her rose garden, and she walked him over to the flower bed, and barely able to see, he bent over and sniffed the Rugosa and Wichurania and Mister Lincoln roses, finding the sweet scent palliative and reassuring.

  Once in the house, she helped him undress and tucked him into his bed. His face ached and throbbed, and he didn’t feel like sleeping. She insisted he rest, left the room, and closed the door behind her. He lay in bed listening to her walk around the house with purposeful steps. He knew she was trying to make the house comfortable for him. He heard her unpack the valise and start the laundry. As she moved about, Tom, who hadn’t attended Mass in years, was amazed when an earworm from his youth crept into his head:

  Gentle woman, quiet light,

  Morning star so strong and bright

  Gentle Mother, peaceful dove

  Teach us wisdom, teach us love…

  As the hymn coursed through his mind, he lay in bed, the edge of his quilt between his teeth to muffle the sound, sobbing, allowing tears to flow from his damaged eyes until they pooled in his ears. He was both embarrassed and relieved by the crying.

  As the days went by, he knew he was a burden being bedridden, but his mother was unfailingly cheerful and attentive to his needs and brought him everything he needed. She was still working, so she would make him breakfast and serve it to him in bed and set a wrapped sandwich on the chair beside his bed for his lunch. When his ribs healed sufficiently to allow him to roll over in bed, he reached for his glass of water on the nightstand and felt a strange object. He picked it up and held it close to his face and saw that it was her old Bible. He rolled on his back and lay the Bible on his chest and vowed when his eye problems resolved, he’d read the book, cover to cover.

  With her help, he progressed from bedridden to chairbound to ambulatory in a few short weeks. He would spend the time she was at work reading the Bible or doing the crossword puzzle in the newspaper. When he could move about, he washed the dishes, swept, tidied his room, and sometimes cooked a rudimentary meal for their supper.

  Once his body was healed and he felt strong enough to be useful, he went out and looked for work. He’d acquired marketable skills as a construction laborer and found a local contractor willing to hire him. As he worked during the day, he rarely interacted with the other employees, preferring to keep company with his own thoughts and to avoid the temptations offered by after-work drinks in the company of rough men. He spent his evenings at home with his mother, often outside on his hands and knees, weeding and pruning in her rose garden when the weather was good and her roses were in bloom. After supper, he’d often repair to the living room to read the Bible, surrounded by her quiet solicitude. His mother knitted or crocheted and avoided the television so as not to disturb him. One evening as he was reading, his mother approached him quietly with an unrequested cup of fresh coffee. He took it from her hands and looked down and reread the scripture passage from St. John he’d just finished reading: Then saith he to the disciple, Behold thy mother! and he was both amazed and terrified and his hands trembled, spilling coffee on his knee. He felt for sure it was not an instance of mere happenstance.

  It was during his silent hours of hard labor on the construction job when he arrived at a plan of redemption. He’d contemplated the recent signs in his life: he’d survived a savage beating that could have killed him; his mother had prayed for his call and he had called her that very day and she had nursed him back to health; and finally, the correspondence between her appearance in the living room with a cup of coffee and the verse from St. John. He was not sure where the signs were pointing, but he was convinced he had a purpose in life, and if he cleared his head and listened only to his heart, his path would become clear. And it did.

  As much as he wanted to, he didn’t share his plan with his mother. He was concerned he’d fail and disappoint her once again. She never questioned him, and she let him be. His first step was to enroll in night classes at the local community college to complete his general requirements. He looked forward to class and found he enjoyed school for the first time in his life. Although he was physically weary at the end of the workday, he was emotionally and intellectually fresh and participated in class discussions, made sure his assignments were complete, and studied diligently for examinations. He was
amazed to discover the breadth of his own intelligence when matched against that of others in class, an attribute he’d always obfuscated with self-loathing and anger. He took as many classes as he could fit in his schedule and in three semesters, he had his prerequisites completed.

  His next step was to apply to and be accepted into a four-year college about twenty miles from home. He’d saved money living at home with his mother, and after contributing to household expenses, there was enough to buy a used car to commute to class. He finally quit his job to concentrate on his studies. He’d done some research and determined that for him to remain on the path he’d set for himself, he would major in philosophy. It was in college where he first was introduced to the Greek philosophers and the classical categorization of various types of love: eros, philia, ludus, agape, pragma, philautia.

  Although he appreciated classical philosophers, he gravitated to the quasi-philosophical writings of Christian apologists such as C.S. Lewis. He relished Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain and was particularly drawn to the tortured Confessions of Saint Augustine, for whom he felt an affinity. He kept an Augustinian quote as his lodestar as he traveled forward on his path: “My sin consisted in this, that I sought pleasure, sublimity, and truth not in God but in his creatures, in myself and other created beings. So it was that I plunged into miseries, confusions, and error.” Saint Augustine distilled into few words what Tom himself was feeling and provided further impetus for cleansing remorse and a quest for redemption.

  As college graduation neared, Tom took a bold step, one he knew could result in a significant setback if not successful. He placed a call to the Diocesan Vocation Director and asked for a meeting. At the meeting, Tom confessed his sketchy history as a practicing Catholic, but he also confessed his heartfelt desire to become a priest. He tried to explain, to the director’s obvious amusement, what he felt were signs from God. He told him the signs were his calling. The vocation director was skeptical. Tom needed his support to be admitted to St. Meinrad Seminary, the only seminary he’d researched thoroughly and was determined to attend. When the vocation director balked, Tom felt his face flush with anger but held his tongue, didn’t get sarcastic, didn’t make a challenge, though he felt challenged, even disrespected. He internalized the director’s skepticism and sarcasm and felt it was God’s test.