The Cardinal

by Henry Morton Robinson

  “For many years, as Your Eminence well knows, the parish of St. Peter’s has had slight function—and no revenue. Might it not be the part of prudence, Your Lordship, to close its doors at this time?”

  In his temperless state, Glennon would have nodded assent, but Stephen’s quick-taken breath caused him to turn a querying head. “You hold another view, Father Fermoyle?”

  “I do, Your Eminence.”

  “State it.”

  “With all deference to Dean Sprinkle, I disagree that the function of St. Peter’s is slight. Your Lordship saw its people kneeling at the grave today. Their number is upwards of one hundred and fifty. Thirty children of Sunday-school age are being prepared for first Holy Communion. I cannot believe that their spiritual needs would be best served by closing the church.”

  Studying his tea leaves, Andy Sprinkle saw a dark young man crossing his path. Because the Dean saw no money in the young man’s hand, he cheerfully waited for Glennon to roar, “What about parish revenues?” Within two sips of oolong, the Sprinkle prophecy was half fulfilled: Glennon clicked cup against saucer and asked:

  “What about parish revenues?” The words were strong, but the roar was weak.

  “Revenues could be found, Your Eminence,” said Stephen.

  “Where? How?”

  Short questions requiring a long answer. From a drawer in Ned Halley’s desk, Stephen drew forth a pen-and-ink map of the parish, unrolled it on the table, and placed his finger on the gorge. “This valley,” he said, “belongs to the parish. It was deeded to the church twenty years ago, but the title has never been recorded.”

  Lawrence Glennon examined the map. “What makes the property of special interest?”

  “A forest of prime timber, Your Eminence. Some twelve hundred first-growth pine trees. By cutting only three hundred of them—a fourth of the existing stand—I estimate that we could net thirty-five hundred dollars.”

  The Dean contributed a typical Sprinklerism: “Canon 142 of the Codex juris canonici expressly states: ‘Prohibentur clerici mercaturam exercere’—in plain English, priests may not engage in business.”

  “I am familiar with the canon, Monsignor,” said Stephen. “But our lumbering operation would not be conducted by a priest.”

  “By whom then?” asked Glennon, faintly alarmed.

  “It would be a joint undertaking, Your Eminence … somewhat on the pattern set by the Canadian fishing parishes. In Nova Scotia, pastor and parishioners share the fishery profits on a co-operative basis. Here in Stonebury, our local unemployed would perform the actual labor of chopping and sawing. Their wages would be paid from the sale of the lumber, and the remaining sum would accrue to the owner of the trees—namely, the parish of St. Peter’s. Both parties would benefit, and”—Stephen bowed respectfully to Andy Sprinkle—”canon law would not be infringed.”

  The Dean shifted his ground. “Apart from canon law,” he said, “is it the function of a parish to make economic arrangements for its people? We are interested in their spiritual welfare, yes. But I fear we shall find ourselves in deep and dangerous waters if we begin looking after their material prosperity.”

  Glennon was relishing the debate; his silence gave Stephen permission to rebut.

  “May I remind the Dean of Aquinas’ aphorism: ‘A certain minimum of material well-being is essential to the good life’? And may I point out that the whole weight of Leo XIII’s social encyclicals is on the side of a wider, more equable distribution of wealth?” The absurdity of the term “wealth” struck Stephen. He turned to the Cardinal. “The cutting of these trees would mean the bare difference between unrelieved poverty and a fighting chance to get our people through the winter.”

  Monsignor Sprinkle had saved his best argument till last. “The logging interests of Litchburg would quite properly protest if the parish of St. Peter’s began competing with them in the production of lumber.”

  “That might be true,” said Stephen, “if any logging interests were left in Litchburg. But the industry abandoned this area twenty-five years ago. The Litchburg dealers are mere jobbers; their interest is to buy semifinished lumber. I’ve gone into the matter with them, Monsignor. They are eager to pay nine cents a board foot for all the pine they can get.”

  Glennon’s hazel eyes rested appreciatively on Stephen. “Your plan has a certain short-range ingenuity, Father Fermoyle. But what about next year, and the year after that?”

  “Careful cutting and systematic replanting of seedlings would guarantee a small permanent income to the parish, Your Eminence. And that’s all we need to keep St. Peter’s open.” Stephen was pleading now. “The people of L’Enclume are thrifty and industrious. If we turn our backs on them, they will be economically stranded. But with the few dollars earned from the cutting of this lumber, they can be saved, both as citizens and Catholics.”

  Stephen’s challenge was the whetstone that Glennon’s steel needed. “There is merit in your plan, Father. I never like to close a parish, and I am quite willing to give St. Peter’s another chance. That is”—he turned with a fair imitation of deference to Monsignor Sprinkle—”that is, if the Dean has no objections.”

  Studying the tea leaves in his cup, Andy Sprinkle now saw the money in the hands of the dark young man. “I have no objections, Your Eminence.”

  “Good.” The old edge of authority was in the Cardinal’s voice. “You have my permission to give this project a trial, Father Fermoyle. Your authority will be that of rector here.” The glow of being in business once more suffused His Eminence. His circulation quickened. Life could go on, and Lawrence Glennon suddenly decided that it should.

  “I must be getting back to Boston,” he said, rising from the armchair that had been his melancholy throne. “Have Monsignor O’Brien put my bags in the car.” On the front porch he extended three fingers of farewell to Andy Sprinkle, then peered with exaggerated concern at a world of falling rain. “Is there an umbrella in the house, Father Fermoyle?”

  Stephen rummaged about in the front hall closet, found a venerable umbrella, and held it protectively over Lawrence Glennon’s head. Escorting him to the car, Stephen was obliged to curve his arm around the Cardinal’s massive person. At the feel of the lean extensor muscles against his back, Glennon gazed up at the strong-boned face above his • own.

  “You are not afraid of me, Father Fermoyle?” His observation was half question.

  “Afraid? Not at all.”

  “Most people are. Why aren’t you?”

  “I’ve never thought about it. But now that you’ve asked me”—Stephen assessed the problem objectively—”I’d say it’s because you remind me of my father.”

  “Do I resemble him in build or features?”

  “No. The resemblance isn’t physical.” Stephen tried to isolate the single characteristic that linked Lawrence Glennon to Dennis Fermoyle, and smiled when he discovered it. “It may help if I tell you that my father was sometimes called ‘Din the Down-Shouter.’ He roared a great deal, and pounded the table with his fist when he wanted to make a point.”

  “Did none of this frighten you?” asked Glennon.

  Stephen shook his head. “No matter how much Din roared or pounded, he always gave me the feeling that he loved me.”

  “He must have been a remarkable father. Is he still living?”

  “Very much so. But his voice and drive are beginning to fade.”

  Beginning to fade, mused Glennon. The male voice crumbling at the edge … the power drive sifting downward through the hourglass. … “It happens to all of us,” he murmured. “First we fade, then we fail.” The Daimler slid alongside; Glennon roused himself. “Finish up this job here, Father Fermoyle. Be pastor to this rural flock. I shall watch with interest.”

  Stephen’s arm lowered the older man into the puce-colored cushions. “Felling lumber is a far cry from translating mystical essays, my son,” said the Cardinal. “But there is a place in the Church for both.” He raised his hand with an affectionate
gesture, part blessing and part farewell.

  ALL DURING OCTOBER, axes rang in the gorge of L’Enclume. Tall pines swayed and crashed; nimble woodsmen lopped off boughs, fed the trunks to Hercule Menton’s improvised sawmill, then loaded wide boards onto trucks of the Litchburg Lumber Company. Under Stephen’s direction the St. Peter’s Lumbering Association—the first organization of its kind in the Archdiocese of Boston—was converting parish pines into employment and cash.

  And now, on November 2, the operation was successfully over. Stephen’s figures astounded him; after deducting all expenses, there would be a clear profit of $3680.24. More than two thousand dollars would go to the twelve axmen who had cut the trees down; each worker would receive $204.10 for six weeks’ labor—the highest wages ever earned in L’Enclume.

  Stephen finished his report to the chancery and looked unbelievingly at the staggering sum of $1131.04 credited to the parish of St. Peter’s. “What will I do with so much money?” he asked the graying embers in the fireplace.

  Then the answers began coming in. …

  Stephen’s first care was to mark Ned Halley’s grave with a stone. In a creek bed he found a huge granite boulder flecked with feldspar, and asked Hercule Menton to search it for flaws. With his quarryman’s hammer Hercule tested the boulder for secret defects. “She ring solid” was his final verdict. Leaving the other planes rough, he polished one face of the stone, and on this quartz-gleaming surface, Stephen bade him carve the simple epitaph:

  IN MEMORIAM

  EDWARD EVERETT HALLEY

  JUNE 10, 1855—AUG. 16, 1918

  “A PRIEST FOREVER, ACCORDING TO THE ORDER OF MELCHIZEDEK”

  Carting, polishing, and carving Ned Halley’s headstone cost Stephen sixty dollars.

  Next he bought seedlings for the pine forest and set them out between the stumps of the felled trees. Three hundred seedlings and the labor of planting them came to one hundred dollars—an investment that would be returned fortyfold in twenty years.

  The bulk of the money went into repairing the church. Its interior was plastered and painted, the front doors were rehung on new strap hinges of wrought iron. For the sanctuary and altar steps, Stephen bought a new burgundy-colored carpet. A decent armchair for his study and a new cotton-tufted mattress for his bed took a quick fifty. And after much poring over catalogues from ecclesiastical supply houses, Stephen ordered some new vestments and a gold-plated chalice at a cost of two hundred dollars. He paid himself two months’ arrears in salary (one hundred dollars) and bought a ready-made suit of clerical broadcloth—the first since his ordination—for thirty-five dollars. By this time the parish bank account was down to three hundred dollars and the young rector began to think of putting on the brakes.

  But it was impossible to stop short. He took cross-eyed nine-year-old Angela Boisvert into Boston for a delicate operation that centered the child’s eyeballs and transformed her squinty face into confident prettiness. On the day that he fetched Angela home from Boston, Stephen dropped into a small bookshop, and permitted himself the luxury of an hour’s browsing. In a heap of secondhand tomes he discovered a copy of L’Art des luthiers italiens, containing many full-page illustrations of violins made by the Cremona masters. For five dollars he bought the book and presented it to Rafael Menton on the lad’s seventeenth birthday.

  Rafe was making better fiddles than Hercule now—rugged instruments with a voice big enough to sing above the stompings of country square dancers. Though Rafe’s violins were selling locally for twenty-five dollars apiece, the young violinmaker had no illusions about their quality. “Crates,” he called them contemptuously, and kept on trying to turn out more graceful instruments. But the mysteries of design and construction, the secrets of glue and varnish, eluded him. Hercule could teach him no more; short of studying with a new master, L’Art des luthiers italiens was the most encouraging gift Rafe could have received.

  Laying the book on his workbench, he turned its pages with devotional wonder. “Do you think that violins as beautiful as these will ever be made again?” he asked Stephen one day.

  “I do, Rafe.” Stephen said the thing he believed. “American artists will produce works—violins among them—that the ancient masters never dreamed possible. No valuable part of tradition will be lost, but we will add New World accents and fresh strength to the old designs.”

  Rafe lifted his eyes from the colored plate of a glorious, golden Amati, and gazed at the clumsy contours of the maple block he had been carving. “I know you mean what you say, Father. But right this minute,”—he hefted the inert maple as though it were lead—“it’s awful hard to believe.”

  THIS was the happiest time of Stephen’s life. The war to end war was over; the jubilant Armistice rocket that filled the sky with sparks of golden hope had not yet come down a dead stick. Into his pastorate Stephen poured the vigor of his young thirties, an inexhaustible flood of love and energy. The winter set in bitterly cold, and Stephen shuddered at the thought of the hardships that the sale of the pine trees had averted. On his parish rounds he noticed the good effects of the little cash earned by the axmen of L’Enclume: a new rocking chair in the Crèvecoeur living room; fresh tar paper on the d’Éon roof; a nickeled parlor stove here, a square of carpet there. The children went shod in stouter shoes, housewives burgeoned out in cheap calico dresses, and Adèle Menton wore a new tortoise-shell comb in her hair.

  Daily he explored the full possibilities of the priestly life. He attended the sick, counseled the discouraged, and solaced those who came to him with human cares. For relaxation he would skate, far up Spectacle Pond, where the men of L’Enclume were cutting ice. Through winter twilights he skated home, tingling with cold, happily aware (like that earlier poet-skater) of a Presence in the leafless wood, and happiest when, like him, he cut across the reflex of a star.

  Contact with the outer world was scant. He rarely left Stonebury and seldom heard from anyone but his family or a few old friends. Occasionally a letter came from Quarenghi telling of diplomatic adventures or some canonical crux; at wider intervals, a postcard from Orselli promising a renewal of their loves when the postwar Atlantic passenger runs began again. “Are you a bishop yet?” the Captain scribbled, and Stephen smiled as he recalled Orselli’s hopes for him. Far away and long ago … echoes from another sphere. …

  Into this obscure Eden, the serpent crawled—a buxom, good-looking serpent named la veuve Agneaux. Stephen began hearing whispers about la veuve—the Widow—who lived in a substantial farmhouse just across the New Hampshire border and wove spells for a not-too-select clientele. The spells were usually woven on a cash basis, but often—cash being scarce—her customers paid for her favors in day labor. La veuve had the best-tilled fields and the highest woodpile in the surrounding countryside.

  Occasionally her business judgment wavered. Like the Wife of Bath, she had a weakness for men “meek, young, and fresh abed.” And it was this weakness that caused la veuve to burn, by no means hopelessly, for Rafael Menton. She had met him at a barn dance, liked the music he made in her blood, and promptly took him home for a command performance, the first of many.

  Stephen learned of the affair from Rafe’s mother. Shawled and grieving, Adèle Menton came into the parish house one snowy afternoon. “I am worried about Rafe, Father,” she began, then very simply told the story of la veuve’s blandishments. “Speak to him, Father,” she pleaded. “Warn him against this woman. Tell him of the great danger …”

  Stephen could agree that Rafe was in danger—but not chiefly from la veuve. Sooner or later, adelè must realize that the lifeless quarries of Stonebury, the stagnant air of L’Enclume, were the real threats to her craftsmanly gifted son. He sat down beside the grieving mother and tried to buoy her with knowledge of God’s secret way with His chosen ones.

  “It would be easy for me to read Rafe a lecture—urge him to avoid this woman. At the proper time I may do so. But la veuve is only a part of Rafe’s trial. He must struggle with a still h
eavier burden—the development of the luthier’s skill breathed into him by the Holy Ghost.”

  The idea that le Saint-Esprit had anything to do with Rafe’s fiddle-making was entirely new to adelè. She checked her tears as Stephen went on. “Rafe should get away from L’Enclume. He needs better instruction in the art and practice of violinmaking. Offhand, I can’t tell you where he’ll find the right master. But he’ll find him.

  “Meanwhile, be loving with your boy. Say nothing about la veuve.” Stephen smiled down at adelè Menton’s tearful face. “Loosen your hand a little—as God does sometimes. Rafe will not stray far. Be confident, as I am, that the son of those tears can never be lost.”

  FROM CHILDHOOD, the crèche (or manger) had always seemed to Stephen an essential part of Christmas. The humble tableau of the Holy Family surrounded by the Magi and dumb kine never failed to renew in him fresh wonder at the mystery of the Incarnation. All children, he knew, loved that scene in the stable, and this year Stephen determined to satisfy their longing with a real crib.

  Early in December he set the whittlers of L’Enclume to carving the conventional figures of wise men, shepherds, and oxen. To Hercule Menton he assigned the carving of Mary; Alphonse Boisvert undertook Joseph; to Rafael went the coveted honor of whittling out the Babe. For two weeks cunning jackknives flashed in the lamplight, and the more the soft pine wasted, the more the figures grew.

  Now the painting began. Stephen distributed tiny cans of precious vermilion and crimson lake. Gilt dust was mixed with banana oil for the gold crowns of the three kings. The Virgin’s robe was traditionally blue; Joseph’s tunic came out a yellowish brown (too much gamboge), and the Infant’s cheeks were the rosiest pink that ever glowed in a stable. Stephen had to smile when he saw that Rafe had given the Babe brown eyes.