It’s time to think about life, she said. And this is it.
Non sum dignus.
Where is Father Roddie now?
In the renewed wave of futility I almost forgot the words of the Credo.
I wouldn’t have recognized MacLeod except for the smile. He approached as I exchanged greetings with the people afterwards, desperate to get home. Open a beer, scrounge some lunch. Go to bed.
“Father,” he said. And I knew by the voice and the ingratiating smile exactly who it was.
The fair hair was thinning. The paunch much too far advanced for a man probably only in his early forties. He seemed casually friendly, but I immediately suspected a serious reason for this unannounced visit on a Sunday. I asked him to accompany me to the house.
“I’m going to be right upfront,” he said when I’d set a mug of coffee in front of him at the kitchen table. “We’ve got a problem.”
I think I just stared, waiting.
“There was another suicide.”
{22}
I stood in the anemic light of the dying day.
I am the pastor of Stella Maris parish, Creignish, Nova Scotia.
The thought was comforting. Something about the clarity and the objectivity. This is who I am. No longer the rootless Purificator, named for the small linen cloth we use to wipe the chalice before and after Communion. What wit came up with that one? So many of these priests are clever, funny men. The freaks are so rare. But they’re the only ones I really know. How have I managed to spend twenty-seven years in this ministry and know only the bad ones? Why have I never been part of the wider community of funny, clever and perhaps even holy men? What is it that draws me to the tragic and the flawed?
I sat as darkness overwhelmed the struggling light.
Another suicide? Actually, it was the first, MacLeod said. A year ago. In British Columbia.
“There are affidavits filed.”
“Affidavits?”
“From people claiming that they were victims too. That poor fellow in B.C. was only part of a larger problem.”
“And did they mention Bell?”
“Oh, no. Not Bell. This is something altogether different. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it. Considering how tight you are with the bishop.”
I wanted to call Stella, just for the comfort of her voice, but I couldn’t because I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep quiet. And I could imagine how her face would freeze over as I collapsed under the weight of what I knew. And yet I also knew what I desperately needed.
“Well, if it wasn’t Bell—”
“Do you remember old Father Roddie MacVicar? I think we talked about him—God, it must have been six or seven years ago. Fooling around with some handicapped person. You kind of put me off the trail. Don’t get me wrong, I understand entirely.”
The smile was an accusation.
“Have you spoken to the bishop?” I asked. “About this suicide in British Columbia?”
“I tried. He as much as told me where to get off. But this much I know … he knew all about it.”
“You’re telling me the bishop knew about this all along?”
“This one and a whole lot more. Obviously, he’s pulling out all the stops to, forgive me for saying so … to cover it up.”
Monday morning, March 25, I realized that I was out of everything. Milk. Bread. Liquor. The drive to town is ten miles. Sixteen kilometres. I will never get accustomed to metric measurements. I weigh 182 pounds. I am six feet two inches tall. It takes thirteen minutes to drive the ten-mile distance, taking into account the usual hang-up at the rotary and the convergence of roads and causeway, cars bumbling for access to Smitty’s or the Esso station or the motels. Often a traffic jam when the bridge over the canal is open to allow the passage of a boat. Was it possible that I remembered a blacksmith’s shop there somewhere a million years ago? And a little canteen where we hung around as teenagers. A hangout for the handful of young people in the village and stragglers from town, inspecting the local stock.
That was a big word then. Stock. Depersonalized, agricultural. Aroma of wieners cooking on some electrical gadget with prongs. Sweating Pepsi bottles. Heavy chromed cars with dangling air fresheners and cowboy music. Sounds and smells of anticipation. Hormones buzzing in the restless stock. A horn blows. A stampede. Slamming car doors, splatter of gravel, the shriek of rubber and the old lady who ran the canteen craning her neck in disapproving witness, checking who was going where with whom.
Innocence.
I missed that, whatever value it had. I was Angus MacAskill’s boy from the Long Stretch. A skinny fella with red hair and a hair trigger. Into the books all the time. No money, no car. But respect. Oh, yes. Respect was the word. You had to watch him. A mean streak, meaner than his old man. Almost as mean as that Sandy Gillis, also from out there. But his sister. Now there! No parents to speak of. She has a different kind of streak. All wool and a yard wide. But don’t let her brother catch you even looking at her. Don’t let him catch you even thinking about her. Don’t ever let him hear you saying anything negative about his sister or his old man. You’ll be dead meat.
John and Sextus always thought it was hilarious that people were afraid of me.
Friendly smiles in the liquor store—or were they too familiar? Father this and Father that, as if I was in there every day. Somebody familiar up in the glass booth where the manager works, bent over paperwork. Looked up, nodded in my direction. A face from school. A name without meaning. Or could it have been that I was there every day by then?
There was a display of miniatures near the cash. The cashiers were talking about the weekend. The man in the glass booth was looking off into the distance, rubbing his chin. I picked a mini from the display, looked at it briefly, then slipped it into my jacket pocket.
Jesus Christ. What did you just do?
I broke into a sweat. I imagined that the man in the booth was watching. The store was silent, motionless and very hot.
I proceeded to the cash, paid for the bottle of Scotch in my hand. The miniature in my pocket felt like a stone.
As I walked toward the door, I was overwhelmed by a sexual excitement.
At Tim Horton’s I ordered a sandwich and a large black coffee at the drive-through, then parked in a private place. A small cocktail before lunch? Why not. I emptied the mini into the coffee. The sandwich was also breakfast. The coffee shop was bustling with trade. The town’s social hub. Retired people and the unemployed, banished from their homes by edgy wives or loneliness. I don’t miss that. Home is my castle because I’m the only occupant. If this was England, I’d be a vicar. A better word. A vicar living in a vicarage. But the vicar always has a missus. A missus vicar. And if we had a son, he’d be … Mac Vicar. Very funny. I open the bottle that I paid for. Pour a bit more into the coffee to improve the flavour.
She said it: Live life.
The young man in B.C. drove his big, expensive four-by-four pickup truck into a grove of trees somewhere on the B.C. Lower Mainland and shot himself. What do they mean by the Lower Mainland? I’ve never been to B.C. I should go. A man should see his own country. Stella said take a holiday in the Dominican Republic. Maybe I should go instead to B.C.
The note he left blamed Father MacVicar.
“Everybody called him Father Rod,” MacLeod explained. “Apparently an awesome philosopher in his time. A Platonist, whatever that might be. An internationally renowned expert on Aristotle.”
Did I detect a smirk?
Did I have any idea where Father MacVicar might be now?
No, I replied truthfully. In B.C.?
I understand somewhere in Ontario.
And how would you know that?
It’s in one of the affidavits.
The Scotch and the coffee were like sunshine in my veins. I stared around. There was a crystal glare glinting off the other windshields. The large window of the coffee shop was impenetrable. If I was an ordinary man, I could have just walked in and sat and talk
ed with the familiar people. But I am not an ordinary man. I am alone.
Did you really steal something in the liquor store? The tingling in my lap returned. I laughed aloud.
And then my spirits sank. I should have gone to see Stella. Wise, compassionate Stella. Told her everything. But where would I have started? What did I tell her before, when I told her about Alfonso? Did I tell her who killed him? Do I really know who killed him?
Yes.
Oh, Stella. There was so much goodness there. I’d be damned if I corrupted it. What is it about women? Why do we feel the need to turn to women, and in doing so degrade them, bring them down to the level of our lowest needs? I never really knew a woman before Jacinta. Only my sister, and she was just a girl. She is still just a girl. I smiled, thinking about my sister.
And there was Barbara. I almost laughed at Sextus and his ludicrous insinuation that we did anything more than fumble around in the back seat of a car on a moon-washed night at the shore. Where was it? Troy Beach. Why do they call it Troy?
The memory is warm now. And if there had been more than fumbling, I wouldn’t have this gentle recollection of our innocence. I understand that she was anything but innocent, but I can now remember our brief time together with a purer kind of pleasure. No regrets at all. The way things should be.
But then there is also purity in the memory of Jacinta. No guilt whatsoever. Even now, after all these years, a sense of joyous satisfaction. Could that ever be repeated?
Donald A. said he and Barbara lived next to the little store on the old Sydney Road. Now he’s Don, from working away, a stranger. I wondered what she looked like after all the years.
Drop by. He said it.
It was a tidy brick house. Don had done well in the construction trades. Even in March, the shrubbery seemed trimmed and cared for. Burlap wrap on the smaller bushes. Yellowed grass flattened as it was everywhere. Mulch on flower beds. Why was I there?
Live life, Stella said.
“My God, will you look at who’s here,” said Barbara. She was smiling broadly.
“You recognize me,” I said.
“The hair. I’d know that hair anywhere.”
Pelirrojo, I thought, and smiled.
I was in my leather jacket and jeans, baseball cap in hand.
“Come in, come in,” she said.
The interior was heavy with a scent that Stella calls potpourri. Or maybe carpet cleaner. There was a lot of carpet. We went straight to the living room. Large generic prints of wild animals and flowers on the walls, furniture that was either new or mostly unused. She instructed me to sit. A large Persian cat jumped from behind me, stretched and yawned, then sulked out of the room.
“It’s a miracle you caught me home,” she said. “I’ve been out all morning.”
By the look of her she’d been out at a beauty parlour. I calculated that she was just over fifty, but she could have passed for someone ten years younger.
“I bumped into Don,” I said, “after Mass a while ago. I was just passing and stopped by on an impulse. I … I don’t suppose he’s in?”
“No. He’s on a construction job at the mill. A big maintenance shutdown. Works all hours.”
Suddenly I felt a profound awkwardness that all but silenced me. Why had I come here? “I won’t stay. I’ll come back another time for a proper visit.”
“No. Don’t be foolish. Sit.”
And so I did.
“I was just going to make myself something,” she said. “Coffee. Or maybe you’d rather a drink? I think we have everything.”
“Maybe. For old times’ sake.”
“Yeeess,” she said enthusiastically. “My God. How long has it been?”
“It depends.”
“This is embarrassing, but did we go out together for a while?”
“Once,” I said, feeling the blush on my cheeks.
“Young and crazy,” she laughed, and left the room.
This can’t be so bad, I thought.
I didn’t remember the colour of her eyes, a pale blue, or her hair, which had become a rich auburn over time and with the attention of beauticians. She has kept her shape, I thought. Breasts actually larger than I remembered. Do they grow in middle age?
When she returned with drinks, I said, “You’ve done well for yourself. You and Don. It’s a lovely place you have here.”
“We get by. It was hard for a long time, with him travelling and the kids young.”
“Don said you had two boys, I think.”
“Yes,” she said brightly, then fetched two framed portraits from the mantelpiece. Sat beside me. “Donnie and Michael. Both working away.”
She was close, our thighs and elbows in contact. The boys were handsome in a rugged way. One of them had his father’s boyhood face, even the trace of mockery that was never far from the mouth.
A giddy shiver passed through me. The memory or her thigh. Maybe both.
“He told me what they did,” I said. “One’s in Toronto?”
“Donnie is at the Ontario Food Terminal, for one of the big companies. Mike’s the creative type. Designing websites in Boston, whatever that means. Wants to be a writer, if you can imagine.”
“Fine-looking boys.”
“They take after their father,” she said, then returned the photos. “And yourself? I think I heard you were away somewhere. In the missions, was it, for a while?” She returned to the large chair a mile away across the room. Her brow was creased.
“Two years,” I said. “In Central America.”
“That would have been different.”
“It was.”
A momentary silence, both thinking back.
“I think it was probably only once or twice we went out,” she said. “I don’t think it was very serious.”
“I don’t think so.”
“The reason I remember is that they teased me a lot about you, after you went to the san.”
“The where?”
“What did I say?”
“The san.”
“Oh God,” she said. “I’m sorry. Last week was the anniversary of my mother’s death. She passed away in Kentville. Forty years ago exactly. At the sanatorium there. I meant the sem. My head, these days.” She shook it, smiling privately.
“San, sem. I suppose when you think about it, there isn’t much difference.”
Her head rolled back as she laughed. Her throat was white and the skin became as smooth as if she were still a teenager. And the words came back: I guess you’re mad at me.
She was studying my face, perhaps remembering too. “Your mother also … if I remember rightly.”
“Yes. Point Edward. Or St. Rita’s, actually. They took her there at the end. She’s buried in Sydney. Whitney Pier, to be exact.”
“I didn’t realize we had so much in common.”
I smiled.
“But I guess it wasn’t so unusual then. There was a lot of it around in the fifties. Not like now.”
“Yes,” I said.
She took our glasses to the kitchen.
“The strangest thing just came back to me,” I said after the third drink.
“What’s that?” she asked, head cocked to one side. She had refreshed her lipstick in the kitchen.
“You seemed to know that I was thinking of becoming a priest, even though I wasn’t absolutely certain at the time. Maybe you felt safer, being with me.”
“Oh, no,” she said, clapping her hand over her mouth and blushing. “I doubt that. I was awful back then. I can’t imagine what you thought, me bringing that up. Trying to tempt you, I suppose.”
“Well … I still remember it.”
She was blushing and looked away—toward the photos on the mantel, I imagined. “I can’t believe I brought that up.”
I realized then that we were holding hands. When did that happen? When she’d brought the third drink, she sat beside me. And asked about when my mother died.
“I don’t remember much about it,” I said.<
br />
“Neither do I, mine. But I was only twelve.”
She is fifty-two, I thought.
“I have vague images,” I said. “Adults telling me she was happier dead and that I should pray to her.”
There was true sadness in her face. “It would have been worse for you,” she said. She shrugged and squeezed my hand.
“My mother died in 1951,” I said.
There was music somewhere. There was another drink. The light was fading in the room. Now she was sitting with legs folded beneath her, studying the contents of her glass.
“After you went to the seminary,” she said, slurring slightly and laughing, “you wouldn’t believe what some of them were saying. The girls.”
The gurrels.
“Try me.”
“That we … No. I’m not going to say it. You’d die.” She put her drink down and caught her face between her palms, blushing and shaking her head. Her laugh was childlike. “They were saying that we had … gone all the way, as we used to put it. Can you believe it?”
I laughed, surprised by my calmness.
“Somebody went spreading that around!”
“I can’t imagine who.”
“You must think I’m terrible, remembering something like that how many years later. God.”
“It doesn’t feel like so many years.”
“No,” she said seriously.
“The years have been good to you. You haven’t changed.”
She blushed again. “But I don’t think we did … did we?”
“No. We didn’t. I’d certainly remember.”
She was moving around the room, tidying up, when I returned from the bathroom. They have this instinct for tidying up. What would that be like? Somebody in the house with a natural urge to pick up and to clean up? A soft voice murmuring on an unseen stereo. This is the kind of place real human beings live in. Music in the background. I should have a stereo.
“It seems that we have met before and laughed before …”
“You’re back,” she said. “I was wondering.”
“I really should go.”
“… who knows where or when.”
“No, stay,” she said quickly, then smiled. “I mean, there’s no rush.”
The Bishop's Man Page 23