The Holdout

by Gracjan Kraszewski

  No

  If three women asked me to become a

  polygamist, and these

  three women were chomping at the bit to become

  Sister-wives? No.

  What if Bill Henrickson told me to do it? No.

  If the Catholic Church allowed it? Not going to happen.

  But if…? No, polygamy is yucky.

  Doctor Molly Molls Smokin’ Wendy Weathers. That name’s a mouthful. Kind of like the Baconator, come to think of it. I am going to stop nicknaming women. This has got to stop and I’m going to quit, cold turkey. I mean it this time.

  Question: How is it that a man (me, Rhett Lawson) can be a devout Catholic and a virgin waiting for the wedding night and someone who has never cheated on a woman in his life and will never cheat on his wife, will never cheat on his wife because for him adultery is like murder, it is a capital crime as far as he is concerned, a crime that destroys families, and yet this same man while living all the aforementioned things with the deepest devotion and sincerity is at the same time arguably the most lustful man who has ever walked on the earth, is a man who cannot separate the idea of “woman” from the idea of “sex” in his mind, a man who imagines sleeping with each and every single woman he sees, and is a man who has no problem living the commandment to not covet thy neighbor’s wife yet fails horribly at keeping Our Blessed Lord’s injunction to avoid “adultery of the heart” a sin committed all the same, as the good Father Will has told me, with a single girl and who when not wallowing in all this stuff busies himself with making up the stupidest, most adolescent, demeaning, offensive and objectifying nicknames for women?

  Answer: Dirtbag. Scumbag. Disgusting loser. Concupiscent loser; oozing sinful puss everywhere. This is a good definition of me.

  Alternate answer and question: Do I lust after women because in the many tangled webs of concupiscence, so tangled they are indeed much like the Gordian Knott, my constant lust for women is really the misplaced thirst for God that all of humanity possesses? In other words: is my lust just a perversion of a true, pure appreciation for the beauty of women, not simply a physical beauty but a dim reflection of the Eternal Beauty of the God who is Beauty itself that is present in all his people for they are made in his very Image and likeness?

  Whatever my malady, thank God there is an antidote to all of this.

  Speaking of antidotes…I am going to confession in two days, right before the wedding. Father Will likes to talk about Mama a lot. Okay with me. I love Our Mama too. Father Will tells me that she told those three shepherd children in Fatima one hundred years ago that more souls go to hell from sexual sin than anything else and that many souls have no one to make sacrifices for them. Scary thought about hell and its inhabitants: C.S. Lewis argued that those who make it to hell are the most successful of rebels. They remain rebels to the end. God is constantly doing everything—I mean everything, even something so drastic as sending His only Son to earth to die for the sins of all people—to try to get these people to come back to Him. The father in the parable of the Prodigal Son, in Luke 15, that’s really not about a guy who owns a vineyard or something and his terrible second son who goes off to squander his inheritance and comes back repentant and the father sees him and moved with compassion puts a ring on his finger, kills some animal for the feast, and has his servants put a robe on him…no, it’s really about God and God’s endless mercy towards us, we, all people, prodigal sons and daughters. Who woulda thunk it? Anyways, these successful rebels who end up in hell refuse to become to repentant prodigals. They spurn God’s endless calls to return home. They go to hell because they commit the one unforgivable sin, sometimes called blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, of final impenitence. The door to hell, Lewis says, is locked from within.

  I am very happy to be able go to confession. The wedding day is going to be a fresh start to everything.

  Brent is here along with his fiancée Norma and their three-month old daughter, Stephanie. Brent finally got in touch with me a little after the New Year. He called me and told me that as the clock struck midnight and he heard Auld Lang Syne he knew, for some reason, and who knows why, that abortion was exactly what he had always thought it was. What’s the connection between Auld Lang Syne and pro-life, or between the song and babies, etcetera? No idea. None, I think. Just one of those weird things, thank God. But Brent told me that he knew then and there and while he hadn’t tried to persuade Norma to have an abortion like he told me he would on Thanksgiving Day, he certainly wouldn’t be considering that an option any more.

  Not that it would matter, Brent told me. Norma is a Southern Baptist, a staunchly pro-life Southern Baptist, and she would be having none of that kind of talk anyways. Brent engaged seems to be some kind of joke. Is he putting me on? Few people have trashed the institution of marriage like him. Congratulations on your little slip of paper he told me when he landed in Idaho. A slip of paper, that’s what marriage is for Brent, a nice, quaint, pointless ceremony. He says all these things and Southern Baptist fiancée aside he’s still a militant atheist, he says. Brent claims marriage is a joke but I’ve seen the way he is with Norma, I’ve seen how tender and loving he is to Stephanie, and I’ll tell you I don’t believe him at all.

  Shannon called me out of the blue on January 7th. More than a month was required for the fallout to settle from Thanksgiving. Then it was time to move on. C’mon, it wasn’t that bad, Thanksgiving with Shannon, it wasn’t that big of a deal, nothing two adults can’t put behind them. Who am I kidding? It was awful. It was horrifyingly awkward. What with the bed-breaking proposal, the Egyptian honeycomb, and all the kissing cousin business. But, nonetheless, we got over it. We talked on the phone. We went out for coffee. We’ve become something neither of us had been to each other our whole lives, you know, considering our mutual infatuation with one another: cousins, just cousins.

  Shannon is finally like a sister to me. She’s in a good place and I’m very happy for her. No more dating SEC quarterbacks or slick Southern gent’men. Shannon is dating a man from Reform, Alabama, not too far from Columbus, and she is very happy, she says. It’s been the best relationship of her life, she says, and for the first time in her life she can actually see herself married sometime in the future.

  Dawson is back from the river; his red colored, cold water-burned skin still dripping wet. He puts an icy hand on the back of my shoulder. Ooo! the sensation startles me out of my thoughts.

  “We’re gonna play football down by the river, you in?” he asks me.

  “We” is my bachelor party collective gathered here at the cabin. I’m having my bachelor party at the same place Bat and I will honeymoon. Kind of weird? I don’t know, maybe. It is Idaho.

  We here includes me, Konrad, A.C., Dawson, Parker, Austin, Brent, David, Antoine, and Gary. The girls— Shannon, Dawson’s wife Lucy, Gary wife’s Melanie, Norma, Martha, Colby (Konrad’s girlfriend), and Carmen (A.C.’s girlfriend)—are doing something for Bat back in Boise. This is the first time I have met Colby and Carmen. Both are amazing girls. Colby ,does somekind of analytical work, like Konrad, and is somewhere from New England, Vermont or New Hampshire, I think. Konrad and Colby met in D.C. sometime ago. Carmen is a student at Montana State in Bozeman. She’s from northern California, from a family of vintners. Both Colby and Carmen are beautiful, charming, and intelligent. Good fits for my loco-handsome, super genius, model brothers.

  The parties before the wedding are grouped between the old and the young. Uwe, my father, and Bill, are having a miniature Lawson brother family reunion along with my Uncles Przemek (my mom’s brother) and Jurek who have come over from Poland, and Bat’s dad Rusty and his brothers. My mom is hanging out with Bat’s mom Sheri, Shelby, and her sister Iwona (Jurek’s wife), along with Przemek’s wife Kasia who is her sister in law. Those family members who haven’t been able to come have sent gifts and well-wishes.

  While the young men are at the Cabin and the young women in Boise, and the older men and old men in Nampa
with the older women and old women, these groups will all get together for the rehearsal dinner in two days.

  Football by the river seems like a bad idea. Yes, I’ll sign up for getting tackled on train tracks. It’s not just the nearby train tracks but the river that makes a pick-up football game seem challenging. Like all things like this it ends up being tons of fun. We keep playing until it gets dark. Dawson who is a horrible basketball player, ends up being a not half-bad quarterback. He did grow up in Tuscaloosa and in Tuscaloosa it’s illegal for young boys not to be able to throw a football. Can’t throw it a minimum of forty yards in the air by the time you turn eighteen? Oh, you don’t want to know what happens in that scenario. Preacher’s got a cannon, can sling’it lil’ bit.

  I’m standing at the altar and watch Bat make her way down the aisle. She’s wearing a pink and yellow dress, with—…just kidding. What kind of new-age pagans to you take us for? Bat’s wearing a white dress. A lovely, perfect, white dress. She looks as she always does. Beautiful.

  Yesterday was the rehearsal dinner. It was in downtown Nampa at a restaurant called Copper Canyon. Went to confession with Father Will earlier in the day. Bat too. What a feeling! That lightness of having the sludge and the dirt and the cobwebs of sin cleaned out of my soul making it light and ethereal and ready for the thick pouring in of the frothy, buttery, grace. Amen.

  Rehearsal dinner went good. David told me something interesting. You know that day after the Lamorauex’s baby was baptized, when I stayed after and talked with Father Will? David asks me. Sure, I say, not really remembering until my back remembers his son Hunter’s fist slamming into it. It was a great punch. Yes, I remember, I tell him. What he said about baptism really got to me, David says. I got all my family baptized right after that, even the two year old. Convinced my pastor to do it, David tells me. Begged him to do it.

  Well I be dog, I think, smiling and thinking of Marvin Bates back in New Orleans, you gonna become one of those crazy papists I ask him? No. No, Rhett, he tells me. Definitely not. He says definitely not but I’ve caught him reading from two Scott Hahn books since he’s been in Idaho: Reasons to Believe and Rome Sweet Home. Oh, no. This is bad. This is serious. John Henry Cardinal Newman once said that to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant. Well, to be deep in Scott Hahn has virtually the same effect. I have to warn my other Protestant friends. Do not, no matter what you do, ever, read Scott Hahn! Treat him and his work like the plague. David might be a lost cause, those dang papists got that poor man, that poor poor man, but what would happen if Pastor Pillar got infected with the Hahn syndrome? I must warn him.

  Funny thing from the rehearsal dinner. My uncle Jurek turns out to be the Polish version of my uncle Uwe. Both are unassailable fortresses of muted indifference. Both sat at a table together, just the two of them near the end of the night after the wives had congregated elsewhere, and, wouldn’t you know, and I know because I watched them for a while, they got along great! Jurek doesn’t speak English. Uwe doesn’t speak Polish. Like that matters; neither of them speak. They just sat there, cowboy style slumped on chairs with a drink in one hand and a cigar in the other. They smoked right under a “No Smoking” sign. As if either of them cared.

  Bat looks absolutely stunning. Striding up the aisle in the same church where my Grandpa Bernard and Grama Barbara were married many years ago. Old St. Paul’s as it’s called now. Thanks in large part to Father Haasenvogel who raised the funds for a new church to be built out on Roosevelt avenue. The new church is beautiful, no doubt. But I’m glad Bat wanted to get married here, in the church where my Grandpa and Grama were married, God rest their souls, and the church of Bat’s girlhood. The school, St. Paul’s K through 8, is still in operation next door to the old church.

  The wedding Mass is a Mass, after all, and so what could be better for beginning life together as a couple? I don’t know. Nothing, I think. It’s a beautiful Mass. My dad reads the first reading. Bat’s dad the second. Father Haasenvogel gives the homily. It’s not a tear-jerking homily in the least bit and yet my mom and Bat’s mom both cry. Women. Always crying and letting their emotions go haywire. Some things never change. Why can’t women be more like Uwe, walk around with a faceless expression, never tell anyone that they love them, never tell anyone anything at all? You’re right. I’m glad they’re not like that.

  I want you to imagine a three-tiered wedding cake, Father Haasenvogel tells the congregation. Laughs. Ha ha, just like we’ll all be eating soon, he says, laughing. Now he’s using use this analogy, Father Haasenvogel tells us, not just because it’s appropriate for the occasion but because it’s really a good way to look at the Christian life in sum. The bottom layer, the biggest one, is the universal call to holiness that each and every Christian, man woman and child, is called to. We’re all called to holiness, to become saints. The next layer is smaller than the bottom but it is still large. This is one’s vocation. Vocations vary. Some are called to the consecrated religious life others, like Rhett and Beatrice he says pointing to us, are called to marriage. Others still to a single life. Finally, the top layer. It’s the one that gets the most attention, Father Haasenvogel says, the one that gets all the decorations, but it’s the smallest and by far the least important. It’s the one most susceptible to change and fluctuation: one’s career.

  In the ideal situation, Father Haasenvogel says, and here I’ll again use our special couple as an example, both Rhett and Beatrice are called to holiness. That is their most important goal in life; to be holy and help one another be holy. This base of striving for holiness will hopefully inform their vocation as a married couple, as husband and wife, and their striving for holiness through the vocation of marriage will hopefully be manifest in all the facets of their life, their careers included.

  Speaking of careers, what will Bat and I do workwise now as a married couple? Bat has a great job at NNU. She loves her job. I’ve spoken with the history department head and while he liked my area of focus and my CV, he also told me that they wouldn’t be able to hire anyone for at least a year. It would be great to work at NNU with Bat. Have lunch together in downtown Nampa at Messenger Pizza, maybe Flying M for a morning coffee before class. We’ll see.

  For now I’m still looking for work. Bat will soon move into my, now our, house in Boise’s North End after the wedding. Bat decided that she wanted to live in Boise and especially in the North End because that’s been a dream of hers for a long time, even though it means a twenty or thirty minute commute to work each day.

  People keep making fun of us and say that Bat’s going to get pregnant on the wedding night. Fine by us. We already have a boy name picked out that both of us love, if and when we do have a son. Søren or Bjørn. We like those best, but who knows, maybe we’ll end up having all daughters, who knows? Yes, we’ve talked about kids, actually quite a lot in the past months.

  Since we’ll be living in Boise NNU isn’t the only option. I could potentially teach at the College of Western Idaho, the College of Idaho in Caldwell (although that’s a real commute from Boise), an Idaho State branch campus on the side of 1-84, the University of Idaho branch in Boise and perhaps even at my alma mater. I don’t know about the last one, teaching at Boise State. It would be cool but maybe weird as well.

  Why weird? Because I’ll be the former football player turned history professor. I don’t know. It feels weird. Coach Pete came to our wedding. What a class act. He’s now the head coach at the University of Washington (the traitor!) but he still made time to come. He’s a great guy. He didn’t come alone. My old wide receivers coach, Johnny Jackedwire, came too.

  Coach Jackedwire was known by a different name during my tenure at BSU. R.B., which was short for “Rat Bastard.” The nickname was given to him years ago, no one knows by whom, but boy did it fit him. And man, was he ever proud of it. R.B. would covertly follow the receivers around campus, sneak up on us in the Student Union, or while we were studying in the library, to “remind you of the realness of the dai
ly go get it.”

  One time, while I was in the library poring over some calculus homework R.B. snuck up behind me and dumped a 44oz. Big Gulp of icy Mountain Dew, spiked with Red Bull, Mountain Dew Code Red to be precise, on the back of my neck and down my shirt. He started hootin’ and hollerin’, as they say in my now beloved Magnolia State, and yelled to me that “ya gotta keep ya eyes on the realness of the daily grind, Lawson. Gotta get the go getting while it’s still good, you know what I mean!?”

  At the reception last night he was all Jonathan Jackedwire with no Rat Bastard in sight; especially to Bat, what a gentleman, all mannered and polite. I’d love to teach at Boise State. What a dream come true. Maybe if I got a job at Boise State I could even convince Bat to come aboard and leave Nampa behind. But a part of me still thinks it would be weird, working at the school I played football for. And what if Jackedwire reverts back to R.B. when on the BSU campus, like a werewolf before the full moon, and decides to come after me and finds me in a classroom lecturing and pours icy cold Red Bull spiked Mountain Dew Code Red all over me?

  I’m still looking for work now and I’m thinking, in the meantime, maybe, I mean possibly, could I?, should I?… write a novel? I mean, why not? Caucasian Apocalypse is still unpublished…

  I did go on a job interview a few months ago. To Bismarck, North Dakota, to interview for a position in the Catholic Studies department at the University of Mary.

  I applied for the job last fall without giving it a second thought. Three weeks after my application I had a Skype interview and then a month later I had to write an essay responding to the school’s Benedictine mission. The school contacted me in February inviting me for an on-campus interview. I was a finalist for the position. It was exciting enough to have gotten to the final stage of a job search, and not even a PhD at that point. But I was more excited to go to North Dakota. I’m trying to get to all 50 states and North Dakota became number 47.