Father in a Fix

by Neil Boyd

  He was faithful to the fast in the main, measuring out meticulously the food the Church allowed on an inaccurate pair of kitchen scales he’d borrowed from Mrs. Pring. But he had these horrible lapses when he ravenously raided the food put in front of me.

  Another of his Lenten whims was to have the church door locked as soon as Mass commenced. He posted a trusted parishioner near the exit with the key, ready to open up if a child fell sick or a woman fainted. But God preserve the key-bearer if he otherwise unlocked the door before the celebrant had left the altar.

  ‘I want the Almighty God to have the honour due Him,’ was his exlpanation. The truth was he wanted everybody inside the building for both collections.

  On Friday, March 16th, he rang Dr. Daley to remind him that St. Patrick’s statue had not yet received its annual lick of paint.

  ‘Nothing must go amiss this time, Donal,’ I heard him say. ‘I was misfortuned enough the last occasion the Bishop paid us a visit when a silly dog tried to eat him.’

  Dr. Daley sent someone round immediately to make the Saint look spick and span enough to be borne on high in the procession.

  That evening, Mrs. Arbunathy called at the presbytery with a sackful of shamrock. Fr. Duddleswell thanked her warmly and retired to his study to examine it. In the long journey across the water, the shamrock had begun to wilt. He placed it, therefore, in a wooden box and left it in the garden to soak up the night dew.

  ‘Father D, you won’t get me wearing any of that stuff,’ Mrs. Pring declared.

  ‘I am sure I beg your pardon.’

  ‘I’m not going to be a hypocrite and pretend I’m fond of the Irish when I’m not.’

  Fr. Duddleswell was snorting like a horse with a heavy cold. ‘If you ever harboured the ambition of being me housekeeper in Heaven, Mrs. Pring, you can forget it entirely.’

  ‘Talking to you, Father D, is like talking to a wall without ears.’

  Remembering it was Lent, he controlled himself with an effort. ‘Woman, would you kindly open that door this side and close it the other?’

  Next morning when the great day dawned, the discussion about whether Mrs. Pring would or would not wear shamrock seemed academic. It had vanished in the night.

  Thirteen

  THE DAY OF THE SHAMROCK

  Fr. Duddleswell rushed madly into my study. ‘Father Neil, you would not be playing cruel tricks on your lovable old P.P.?’

  ‘What, Father?’

  ‘Jasus, I can feel the Big Black Fox breathing sourly on me cheek.’ He really did look as if death had come for him at that moment. ‘Start digging the hole down for me, lad. I am a gone man, so I am.’

  Suddenly he knew what had become of his shamrock. He crossed to the window, opened it and, finding a new lease of life, roared:

  ‘You bloody iniquitous goat.’

  Down to the garden and another roar in the direction of Billy Buzzle’s bedroom.

  Billy’s sleep-lined face appeared. You had to admire his presence of mind.

  ‘Happy feast day, Father O’Duddleswell,’ he yawned.

  Fr. Duddleswell explained with belligerence why his prospect of happiness had dimmed overnight.

  ‘Father O’Duddleswell, why are you getting steamed up over a few miserable ounces of green stuff?’

  ‘Green stuff,’ Fr. Duddleswell cried. ‘You bad potato, you Oliver Cromwell, you Black and Tan.’

  ‘Your fault,’ Billy said. ‘You drove my goat frantic with your fiddling, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  Fr. Duddleswell was furious. ‘I am warning you, at all the Sunday Masses, I am telling me parishioners that you and your Tory goat annihilated all our shamrock on St. Patrick’s Day.’

  It was getting to Billy that something of consequence had taken place for which he was being held responsible. ‘You wouldn’t do that to me, Father O’Duddleswell? Please, no.’

  ‘Indeed, I will, you rapparree. Me people would forgive you anything, Mr. Buzzle, even the stench of pig. But not ruining our festival by causing a famine of shamrock in the parish. That is the sin against the Holy Ghost, y’hear?’ He banged the fence. ‘No Irishman will ever take a bet with you again. Else I will refuse him absolution.’

  ‘Father O’Duddleswell, wait.’ Since his protagonist gave no sign of waiting: ‘Wait, I tell you. I promise you, you won’t see that goat no more after today. My Pontius don’t like him. The stinking goat keeps butting him in the flank, anyway. I’ll send him into the wilderness. Agreed?’

  The goat which had slipped its lead in the night came prancing towards Fr. Duddleswell. A superb animal to look at.

  I had called through the open window, ‘Find him a good home, Billy,’ before I realized what I was saying.

  ‘As for you,’ Fr. Duddleswell said stridently, as he stormed into my room, ‘I want you to get a replacement for the shamrock.’

  ‘Fly over and back to—?’

  ‘Father Neil,’ he groaned. ‘Go to the park, lad, and pick whatever clover you can. Enough of the shamrock has come through the post for me to put a coating of it on the top. Pray the Bishop will not notice anything untoward.’

  I was already slipping out of my cassock. ‘How long have I got, Father?’

  ‘Take as long as you like, Father Neil, provided you are back here within the hour.’

  Grabbing Mrs. Arbunathy’s sack, I cycled to the park. It was raining. I was wearing my raincoat as well as a muffler to hide my collar.

  Clover was in short supply. I searched for it in the wet grass on my hands and knees. If not clover, anything that would pass as shamrock.

  Next to the part was a series of allotments surrounded by a tall, wire fence. Because of the foul weather, no one was working the allotments. I decided to climb over the fence and look for a shamrock-substitute in more promising surroundings.

  I was about to make my ascent when a police patrol car passed by. I bent down to tie up my shoelace. When I stood up, the car had gone. Laus Deo semper.

  The fence presented no problems to one my height and at last my luck had changed. I came across yards and yards of chickweed. A gentle tug and it came away in big streamers. Within five minutes, the sack was full.

  ‘’Morning, sir.’

  The two policemen in the patrol car had returned. ‘Good morning, Officers.’ Caged in, I was forced to address them through the wire.

  ‘Short visit, sir.’ The taller of them, with a brush moustache, acted as their spokesman.

  ‘It’s raining,’ I said, outwardly calm but inwardly in turmoil.

  It was an improbable tale I had to tell. Who would credit that I was looking for something like shamrock on a wet Saturday morning in someone else’s garden allotment? Before coming to St. Jude’s, I had never been in trouble with the police.

  ‘Forget your key, did you, sir?’

  ‘I don’t have a key. Not to that gate.’

  ‘You do have other keys, do you, sir?’ I made no reply. ‘What were you doing in there, sir, taking a stroll?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

  ‘Let me be the judge of that.’

  I tried him and, afterwards, he acknowledged I was right in the first place.

  ‘All right, sir, climb back over here.’

  In my nervous state, my foot stuck in the topmost hole in the wire and I nearly broke my ribs as I fell forward on the policemen’s heads.

  ‘Open up that sack,’ the taller policeman said, adjusting his cap.

  I obeyed. He saw there were only weeds. His companion muttered, ‘He must’ve realized we were on to him.’

  ‘Tip all the goodies out, please, sir,’ the senior policeman said.

  It was nothing but chickweed.

  His companion noticed for the first time that I was wearing a clerical collar. He again muttered behind a gloved hand, ‘I reckon we’ve got a nutcase here, Jim.’

  Jim said, ‘Shall we book him?’

  ‘What for? Nicking weeds?’

  ‘Look here,’ Cons
table Jim said, coming over stern, ‘we can’t have this sort of barbaric be’aviour. Not on our patch. In future, if you want weeds, you grow ’em, understand?’

  They marched off—self-consciously, I thought—to their car. Greedily, I stuffed the weeds back into the sack and cycled home.

  I fended off Fr. Duddleswell’s congratulations. He noticed because he said:

  ‘Are you celebrating Mass, Father Neil, that you turn your back on me like this?’

  In common with Mrs. Pring, I was determined not to sport greenery of any kind that day. I even made up my mind to alter the funny story I was being made to tell. It would end: ‘Yours, Almighty God. P.S. The Saint dearest to my heart sends his love, the Englishman, Patrick.’

  If the audience didn’t find that amusing, too bad. I didn’t become a priest for laughs.

  ‘Father Duddleswell, Father Boyd, a hundred thousand blessings on the both of you.’

  The Bishop, his thin shoulders covered by a scarlet cloak, his red-ribbed cassock spattered with green, was in sparkling mood.

  Remembering, no doubt, that next day was Palm Sunday, he pointed to his limousine and said, ‘I would prefer to travel by donkey myself, like our Blessed Saviour, y’see? But would the Holy Father hear of it? He would not.’

  We knelt on the pavement to kiss his ring before bowing him into the house where Mrs. Pring, in a shamrock-patterned apron, was introduced. My bosom heaved and suddenly felt bare. Mrs. Pring, my only ally, had betrayed me.

  Waiting in Fr. Duddleswell’s study was Canon Mahoney, the Bishop’s own theologian, as orthodox as St. Augustine. The Canon, bald and friendly, possessed a torso like a big D. By choosing him as guest preacher, Fr. Duddleswell indicated he wasn’t intending to take any risks.

  The Bishop wasn’t long in noticing the glaring absence of shamrock on my person. ‘Father, you are surely not one of those,’ he asked me, ‘that have no respect for the land of saints and scholars?’

  ‘On the contrary, me Lord,’ Fr. Duddleswell put in gallantly, ‘’twas Father Neil who supplied us with the shamrock you are about to bless.’ He plucked half the display off his own cassock and pinned it on mine. ‘It goes with the colour of your gills, lad.’ he whispered.

  Soon he was the one turning green. The Bishop said:

  ‘Father Duddleswell, I would have you know I have a nice surprise in store for you.’

  I think for one moment Fr. Duddleswell was expecting the Bishop to say he was promoting him to Canon.

  ‘Yes, me Lord,’ he gulped.

  ‘After your good housekeeper has served us an evening meal as arranged, Monsignor Pat here and myself will be attending your concert.’

  ‘But, me Lord,’ Fr. Duddleswell protested, thinking of the alcohol on sale, ‘that cannot be.’

  ‘And why ever not?’ the Bishop enquired suspiciously.

  ‘’Tis too great an honour to bestow on any parish,’ Fr. Duddleswell whimpered.

  The Bishop beamed as if to say it was for self-sacrifices of this sort that he was consecrated in the first place.

  While the Bishop was vesting in the sacristy, Fr. Duddleswell took me aside.

  ‘At some point in the ceremony, Father Neil, I want you to root out Dr. Daley. Warn him that the bloody Bishop is coming to the concert, so it must be dry, like.’

  I promised and waited for my opportunity.

  The Bishop, in gold cope and mitre, bestowed his blessing on the congregation as the ministers and servers processed slowly round the packed church. St. Patrick’s statue, borne on its platform by four strong men, headed the procession and the Bishop brought up the rear. The choir and congregation were in excellent voice with, O Patrick, hail, who once the wand’ring race.

  Examining my thoughts, I was surprised at the calmness with which I was facing what I sensed, for no reason I could pin down, to be impending disaster.

  It began as soon as the men set down the statue on a table on the sanctuary. The Bishop arrived and, with an onrush of unrehearsed emotion, stepped forward to kiss it. Fortunately, he first clasped the statue with both hands and thus discovered that the paint was. wet. Certainly he lost a glove which spent the rest of the ceremony glued to the statue, but at least his lips didn’t have to be wrenched free from the Saint’s tacky feet.

  During the early part of the ceremony, I could hear the church door being rattled noisily. I wondered why Fr. Duddleswell, on this day of days, still insisted on the door being barred against latecomers.

  The sermon was good, at any rate. Canon Mahoney took as his text St. Patrick’s words: ‘I was a stone lying in deep mud until the Mighty One in His mercy took hold of me and put me on top of the wall.’

  He spoke of Patrick’s ‘Vision of the Night’ when the young Saint read a letter addressed to him which began, ‘The cry of the Irish’ and he thought he heard the cry of those who lived near the Western sea be-seeching him, ‘Come again and walk among us.’

  A prayerful man was Patrick. He managed each day to get through thousands of ejaculatory prayers and all one hundred and fifty psalms, many of them at night while he was up to his neck in icy water.

  The genius of the Saint, the Canon said, was to take a piece of wood sorrel that grew in abundance in that wild, wet land and by it to elucidate the ineffable mystery of Catholicism. The preacher’s words were memorable for their simplicity.

  ‘Now, my dear brethren, you all know the sacred Trinity is the heart of our holy faith, even though we cannot make head nor tail of it. It is a mystery of faith, which is to say it is more of a riddle than is a riddle itself. Three persons in one God. Is not the very point of Almighty God revealing this mystery to us, now, to make us realize how shamefully ignorant we are? Besides, my dearly beloved brethren, what need would there be of the submissiveness of faith if you or I understood the words, “Three in one and one in three” which I am now preaching to you about.’

  After the sermon, the Bishop blessed the three-leaved symbol of faith artfully spread out by Fr. Duddleswell in a silver bowl. From time to time, the Bishop poked his ungloved finger among the greenery as if he could not believe his eyes.

  Fr. Duddleswell saw personally to the distribution of the ‘shamrock’, then the Bishop led the congregation in reciting the rosary.

  This was the best opportunity I would have of slipping away from the sanctuary in search of Dr. Daley. He was in the back row, snoozing. I woke him up and briefed him on both the problem and Fr. Duddleswell’s drastic solution.

  ‘Lord save us’, the Doctor said hoarsely, ‘the Great Statesman of St. Jude’s is cracking his whip like a whale’s tail tonight. Is Charles wanting us all to suffer from the dry rot?’

  ‘That’s the message, Doctor.’

  ‘Thank you kindly, Father Neil. I have an hour to sort this out while you clergy are at dinner. Leave everything to me.’

  The church door was still being rattled furiously so I went to investigate. The custodian of the key that evening was Tim Fogarty. To my surprise, Tim was himself pushing and tugging at the door.

  ‘What’s up, Tim?’ I asked.

  ‘Trouble, Father.’ He was whispering so that the crowd in the vicinity wouldn’t hear him. ‘I locked up, as ordered, when the procession started. Then some idiot came late, found the door locked and tried to open it from the outside with his own key.’

  ‘Now it’s jammed?’

  ‘Can’t shift it, Father.’

  ‘Hope nobody faints,’ I said. ‘I suppose, though, you can always take them into the sacristy.’

  ‘Sure, Father. I’ll try and get this open before the ceremony is over.’

  A second, more horrific thought struck me. ‘I only hope there isn’t a fire, Tim.’

  ‘What’s that,’ somebody enquired next to Tim, ‘did somebody mention a fire?’

  Tim shook his head vigorously to stop a panic and I hurried back to the sanctuary where I was due to expose the Blessed Sacrament for Benediction as soon as the rosary came to an end.

  E
verything went well until I was putting the Blessed Sacrament back into the tabernacle. The last two hymns to be sung were, Father of all those far-scattered sheep of Christ and the gem of them all, Hail glorious Saint Patrick, dear saint of our isle.

  Either I was seeing things or the congregation was leaving the church via the sacristy. My eyes swept over the moving throng and I had no difficulty in lip-reading what the ushers were saying. One word: ‘FIRE. As I removed the monstrance from its stand high above the altar, it was clear to me that the only flames on view were coming from the candles.

  People near Tim Fogarty must have picked up our snatch of conversation. My ‘fire’ had swollen into a full-scale rumour that the whole building was ablaze.

  The ensuing panic was arguably the most orderly ever seen. Still bellowing out Hail Glorious Saint Patrick and genuflecting at the top of the centre aisle, the congregation was making its way through the sacristy, into the presbytery and out into the street.

  What with the din of the organ and the fullthroated singing of the choir in the loft and the ministers on the sanctuary, none of them realized that the church was being evacuated.

  I returned, guilt-ridden, to my place at the side of the altar. What could I do but wait for the rest of the ministers, still with their backs to the pews, to grasp what had happened?

  After the last tear-filled reduplication of For God and Saint Patrick, For God and Saint Patrick, For God and Saint Patrick and our native home, Fr. Duddleswell, to the Bishop’s left, said, ‘And now, me Lord, your final blessing.’

  The Bishop inclined his head for Monsignor Pat to put the mitre on him; he took his crozier from an altar server and turned round to face a completely empty church.

  Several hundred people had left without trace. It was, as Fr. Duddleswell commented later, the greatest disappearing act since the earth opened and swallowed the enemies of Moses.

  ‘Father Duddleswell,’ the Bishop said shrilly.

  Fr. Duddleswell had sunk to his knees, facing the altar with his eyes closed, to await the blessing. He too turned and looked about him as if he were peering into a mirror and couldn’t find his own face.

  There was nothing for it. We genuflected and returned without ceremony to the sacristy where Tim Fogarty started to apologize for the strange occurrence.