Morte D'Urban

by J.F. Powers

  “I thought we’d have to go back home if I was ever to get those sermons written, Father,” said Doctor Percy. “But I find I’m able to think here, after all. That’s so seldom happened before, away from my study. Mrs P. and I are simply delighted. She’s not feeling well today, however.”

  “Sorry to hear it,” said Father Urban.

  Doctor Percy offered to let Father Urban and his party shoot through.

  “No, you go right ahead,” Father Urban said firmly. He was wishing that the little man would hit his ball well into outer space and be sucked after it. But he topped it.

  “Tough,” said Father Urban, with feeling.

  The Bishop, however, appeared to be gratified by what he’d seen. “Father,” he said, “why don’t you ask your friend to join us?”

  News of the struggle had reached the novices in residence at the Hill, and after the third hole there was a small gallery following the play, creating another problem for Father Urban. Through his caddy, Father Urban sent word to the gallery that he didn’t want a repetition of what happened on the third and fourth holes. On those, the Bishop was attended only by his caddy and Doctor Percy only by his cart. Afterward, the novices began rotating nicely, three or four of them accompanying the Bishop and Doctor Percy at all times, in fairway, field, and stream.

  Father Urban had birdied the second hole and won it. On the third green, though, he had missed a five-footer. No. 4 had been the same thing again, only worse, with Father Urban blowing a putt that should have been conceded to him and would have been if the Bishop hadn’t overruled Father Feld. On the fifth, a dogleg to the left, Father Urban deliberately hooked his drive, but a gust of wind took it into the woods. Father Feld, in trouble, too, on that hole, recovered brilliantly. Coming to No. 6 tee, Father Urban was two down.

  As he saw it, he now had a choice of playing his regular game, hoping that Father Feld, whose irons weren’t reliable, and whose powerful drives might suddenly go haywire, would present him with the match. Or he could turn it on—and risk the consequences. This was exactly what Father Urban would have advised somebody else in his position not to do. This, though, he decided to do. He couldn’t afford to wait. There just weren’t enough holes left.

  For the next forty minutes Father Urban, inspired by the gallery, preached a great sermon in golf. In the novices, he saw himself as he had been at the start of his career, and remembered Father Placidus. One of Father Urban’s greenest memories was of the great man at games. Be a winner! Never say die! These words would ring out from the sidelines, and that day, forty years later, they were still ringing out for one man. Be a winner! That was why, for the next three holes, Father Urban’s tee shots went off like rifle fire, his approaches soared and dropped like swallows—why even the brass putter turned deadly in his hands.

  All this time, the Bishop and Doctor Percy were locked in mortal combat. They halved hole after hole with their sixes, sevens, and eights. Father Urban had never seen anything like it. Doctor Percy appeared to realize that the Bishop dearly wished to do unto him as he dearly wished Father Feld to do unto Father Urban, and boldly the little minister countered the Bishop’s praise for his young champion with some of his own for Father Urban. As the matches waxed hotter and the Bishop grew more and more partisan in his looks, language, and gestures, Father Urban found that he was glad to have the plucky little Presbyterian as an ally, and did not deny him words of encouragement and professional advice.

  No. 7 decided the match between the duffers. They drove to within a few feet of each other, the Bishop having the better of it. Doctor Percy then put his second shot up into a dense box-elder tree that stood by the green. After knocking around in the foliage for a while, Doctor Percy’s ball dropped nicely down onto a corner of the green. The Bishop then drove his ball up into the box-elder tree, and there it stayed. Sticks and stones from the rough were tossed up into the tree, Father Urban directing these exercises. The Bishop, standing off by himself, was approached by novices who doubtless saw this as their opportunity to make His Excellency’s acquaintance. Yes, it was certainly odd, the Bishop agreed, and granted them that the ball could be stuck between two branches, and that it could be nesting in a hollow of some kind. When other novices drew near and advanced these same theories, he showed signs of impatience, and did not respond at all when it was suggested to him that a bird or a squirrel had seized upon his ball, mistaking it for an egg or a nut. (“All right, fellas,” called Father Urban.) Two novices offered to go up into the tree, which looked unclimbable, and Father Urban didn’t care to discourage them in the circumstances. When the Bishop saw what they were about, however, he ordered them down. He then went to his bag and threw out another ball. But the heart had gone out of him and his game. He was strangely quiet on the greens. Doctor Percy went ahead in his match. Coming to the ninth tee, the Bishop was down two, beaten, and Father Feld was one down.

  “If I tie it up, what do we do?” asked Father Feld. “Maybe we should decide that now.”

  “Whatever you say,” said Father Urban.

  “The Bishop wants it to be a sudden-death play-off. He’s tired.”

  “Sudden death it is, then,” Father Urban said, and slipped over to say a few words to the gallery. He was afraid of a celebration on the ninth green. “Remember, fellas. No matter what happens, these people are our guests.” He thought of asking the novices to cut down on the applause for him, which was increasing, but he let it pass. “The guests of the Order,” he said, and wondered if perhaps there hadn’t been someone like him, some elder tribesman hoping for the best, who had spoken thus to the young braves gathered on the shore a few minutes before the white men landed four hundred years ago.

  No. 9, three hundred eighty-five yards, par four, was called “The Volcano” on the score card. The fairway ran gently downhill until interrupted by a broad, shallow creek, once the joy of cattle, and then it ran uphill, for a while gently, then very steeply, to the green. The creek severed the fairway diagonally, so there were three ways to play the hole. If one crossed the creek at its nearest point, the hole could be a dogleg to the left; or it could be a dogleg to the right, if the second shot was the one over water; but the best way was to play the hole straight, and to hit a drive that traveled no less than two hundred yards on the fly.

  The Bishop and Doctor Percy chose to cross the creek at its nearest point, and both made it to the other side on their drives. Father Feld then took the direct route, and got one of his better tee shots of the day. Finally, Father Urban stepped up, removed his panama, put it back on, assumed his stance—he had twice been mistaken, in years past, for Tommy Armour —and shot. Bang! Just nothing for a while and then, in the distance, a jiggling, and then a tiny white hole in the green fairway that hadn’t been there before. Then jubilation among the novices. Their gray champion had outdriven Father Feld!

  Father Urban handed back his driver for what he hoped would be the last time that day, and called for his seven iron. Then he tried to join the Bishop, who seemed to be in a hurry to have it over. “Be a bridge here next year,” Father Urban said, crossing the creek behind the Bishop, on steppingstones. “Maybe just old telephone poles,” he added, but he got no response from the Bishop.

  Across the creek, the company split up, the Bishop and Doctor Percy going off together—they would be approaching the green from the right—and Father Urban and Father Feld going straight up the hill, followed by everybody else. Once again the Bishop was alone with his caddy, but that, Father Urban believed, was how the Bishop wished it now.

  Father Urban watched Father Feld mis-hit his second shot, saw it punch at the rim of the volcano, and roll back down ten yards—into a bad lie, Father Urban would have bet. Father Urban then went on ahead to his own ball, thinking that No. 9 was one of those holes that revealed how much more there was to golf then being able to give the ball a ride. Father Feld’s irons had found him out. He was in trouble now.

  From where Father Urban took his second shot, it was
still impossible to see the flag, but he knew where the green was, and where the hole was on the green. He swung, taking up a little turf. From what he felt, and then saw, of the shot, there wouldn’t be much wrong with it, he thought. Confidently, he called for his putter and continued the ascent to the green, drawing the gallery of novices after him. When they saw where Father Urban’s ball lay, they murmured and moved back to the rim of the volcano so as to be in position to see Father Feld hit his next one—on which probably everything, if he had a chance at all, would depend.

  Father Urban had kept going toward his ball. It was eight feet away from the cup, and back of it at that. “Close?” he asked Brother Harold, who had come down from the clubhouse in time to hold the pin.

  “Well, I was afraid to leave the flag in,” said Brother Harold.

  “Close enough,” said Father Urban, taking off his hat. He saw Monsignor Renton emerge from the clubhouse and waved, watching just that portion of the sky where he expected Father Feld’s ball to come into view, and failing to see the ball that came from the right and hit him on the head.

  12. GOD WRITES . . .

  FATHER URBAN WAS taken unconscious to the hospital in Great Plains where he was anointed by the chaplain, X-rayed and heavily bandaged about the head by doctors, and put to bed. He regained consciousness during the night. By that time those who could have told him more of what had happened had gone home. All he could find out from the sisters was that he’d been struck in the head by a golf ball. In the morning, his speech was almost normal, and he discovered that he was in the Bishop’s suite.

  That afternoon, he was permitted to have visitors—Wilf and Brother Harold, Monsignor Renton—but was forbidden to talk to them. Since his head was bandaged down over his eyes, his visitors tended to ignore him after the first few minutes.

  However, he learned that it had been the Bishop’s ball, and that the Bishop no longer proposed to take over the Hill for a seminary. The Bishop was trying to create the impression that he wasn’t entirely influenced by this unfortunate but unavoidable accident, but what else, asked Monsignor Renton, could have made him change his mind? “An act of God, if ever I saw one.”

  Father Urban regarded this statement as unsound and probably heretical in its implications, since it made short work of him as a responsible instrument of God’s will in an orderly universe. Father Urban doubted, however, that he, given the chance, could have wrought the great change that had come about through the wayward action of the Bishop’s ball.

  “Actually,” said Monsignor Renton, “I didn’t see it. I thought somebody’d opened a bottle of champagne.”

  “Be that as it may,” said Wilf. He was amazed to hear what had been going on right under his nose, and wondered why he hadn’t been told.

  Thereafter, what could have been an occasion of rejoicing was marred by pettiness. Wilf seemed to think that Father Urban had gone over his head and that anything was preferable to that, and Monsignor Renton seemed to say that what had happened on the ninth green was pretty much what he’d had in mind all along, and that Father Urban, if it had been left to him, would have queered everything by using less peaceful methods of persuasion on the Bishop.

  “They’re saying he should’ve kept his hat on, but that’s where they’re wrong—if you follow me.”

  “Yes—if what you say is true, Monsignor.”

  “It’s true all right. You guys don’t have a thing to worry about now. Just keep your nose clean. I see he’s sent flowers.”

  “What I can’t understand, Monsignor, is why Father, here, didn’t tell me.”

  “Probably he didn’t want you to be worried—needlessly.”

  “But that’s part of my job.”

  “How’s the hay fever, Brother?”

  “Better, thanks, Monsignor. I’ve been getting these new shots.”

  “Grateful as I am to Father, here, I don’t think he should’ve taken it all on himself.”

  “I had the misfortune to be looking somewhere else, and I thought somebody’d opened a bottle of champagne. The chances are it didn’t sound like that to him.”

  “Since I’ve been getting these new shots, Monsignor, I ran across an article that claims it’s all in your head—like seasickness.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it. It’s quite possible he heard nothing at all. We’ll have to ask him when he feels more like talking. I’d be interested to know.”

  “I know I’ve been a lot better since I’ve been getting these new shots.”

  “I still think I should’ve been told.”

  “Frankly, I didn’t see any way out for you guys.”

  And Father Urban, lying there, listening with the ears of one blind, wondered greatly at the ways of men.

  But when the Bishop himself dropped in and expressed hopes for Father Urban’s speedy recovery, and complimented him on his play in the match with Father Feld, the earlier visitors, too, paid tribute to the patient.

  “He’s one in a million,” said Monsignor Renton.

  “One of our best men,” said Wilf.

  “A dazzling performance,” said the Bishop, repeating himself.

  Father Urban smiled mushily and broke his silence. “Up to a ploint,” he said.

  After three days in the hospital, it was all he was really suffering from. His big bandage was gone, the lump on his head was almost gone, and he was feeling fine except for occasional headaches. Plenty of visitors. Two days later, he was released from the hospital but was under orders to take things easy for a while (his headaches still came and went), and so, rather than return to the Hill and perhaps accomplish nothing under such a restriction there, he sought and got Wilf’s permission to move out to Lake Lucille. The accident had been kept out of the papers, but Mrs Thwaites had heard of it from her doctor (who was also the Bishop’s doctor and therefore Father Urban’s), and she had invited Father Urban to convalesce at her home. Katie called for him in Mrs Thwaites’s car—a Packard, old but not old enough, one of those postwar models that always made Father Urban ask himself, Who killed Packard?

  The house looked and felt better to him in August, and his room faced the lake. Lots of peace and quiet and no outboard motors, for Mrs. Thwaites owned all the land around the lake. In the morning, Katie drove him to town, to the Cathedral, where he said Mass, and then she drove him back to the house. He spent most of the day in his room, in a Morris chair, in the company of the great historians from the library downstairs, but sometimes he could be seen moving slowly about the grounds, under the great oaks, reading his office, and wearing his cassock—he had decided against slopping around in slacks while there. Once he saw Mrs Thwaites watching him from one of her windows, and tried to get a squirrel to take a green acorn out of his hand, but it wouldn’t, nor would a dove. In the afternoon, he had tea with Mrs Thwaites in her room, with the sets on. On the first day of his stay, they got on the elevator, and she showed him her bomb shelter, which was well stocked with food and water, games and reading matter, walls and ceiling done in soft pastel colors approved by psychiatrists, and plenty of closet space.

  For the next three days, though, he didn’t see Mrs Thwaites except at tea, with the sets on. Mrs Thwaites still preferred television to anything else, it seemed, unless it was dominoes with Katie. (Father Urban wasn’t asked to play.) They never met at table, but ate all their meals (just so-so) in their rooms, off trays delivered by Katie or by an old woman who said she worked for Mrs Thwaites in the summertime, “when she entertains more.” This, though Mrs Thwaites did have some card-playing friends, seemed to mean visits from her daughter Sally and Sally’s husband. Dickie, who had wound up his affairs in Ostergothenburg, was living and working at home again but was away just then. His little Porsche wasn’t in the coach house, where Father Urban looked for it, and saw a red pony cart, an electric car (on blocks), and a square piano, much like the one his mother had played.

  And then the weather warmed up, got hot, in fact, and stayed hot for about a week. Earlier in the
season, Father Urban had experienced the heat of summer in Minnesota, but this was worse, like August in Indianapolis or St Louis. At night, tiny bugs that no screen could stop, and large moths that came from nowhere, interfered with his reading. He saw more of Mrs Thwaites during this hot period. There were late-afternoon cruises on “Tilly,” the launch, an ancient but sound craft with a faded brown-and-white striped canopy. Mrs Thwaites, in her wheelchair, gazed out at the path of bubbles in the water, and Father Urban stood, or sat, beside her, and Katie, at the helm, kept within easy reach of the shore (“In case of a storm,” Mrs Thwaites said). Once around the lake, which was shaped like an egg, and flecked with islands and reef-like rocks, was always enough for the old lady, and took about an hour. They talked against the soft music of the launch’s motor—talked mostly of Mrs Thwaites’s family.

  On the first of these excursions, the old lady spoke (as she hadn’t before in Father Urban’s presence) of her dead husband. Where was Andrew spending eternity? “Pray for him, ma’am.” Andrew had been a great enemy of the Church, like St Paul, but there had been no road to Damascus for Andrew. “Pray for him, ma’am—and I’ll do the same.” The old lady was also worried about Dickie. Was it well for the boy to be out in the world? “There’s much good to be done in the world, ma’am.” But wouldn’t he be better off in a cloister, a boy like him? “Not necessarily, ma’am. By the way, I had a note from Father Excelsior today. He sends his best. Where is Dickie now, by the way?” The old lady looked unhappy and said that Dickie was away. Away. That was all Mrs Thwaites would say.