Father Sweet

by J. J. Martin

  My breathing was hard, but I managed to deflect him. “There are no grizzlies anywhere near here and you know it.”

  “Well, maybe it was a black bear. Common as raccoons this time of year.”

  “Shut up,” I grunted. And punched his shoulder.

  It was enough. My goat was got and the game ended. “Guess I’ll use the time to get ahead of you in Hardy Boys,” he said. “You’re not taking a book, eh?”

  “No,” I said, not yet knowing the value of burying your nose in a book on a long trip.

  “Wish I got invited,” Jamie said.

  I looked at him. “Me, too,” I said.

  Our parents had made clear over the course of our young lives that I was the golden son, and he was the spare. The lesser spare.

  With care, I holstered Dad’s sharp hatchet, protected by a leather guard, into the side of my pack.

  “Wow, you’re taking the hatchet. Does Dad know?” Jamie said.

  “Dad’s a pot with the lid on too tight,” I said, very quietly.

  For twenty minutes I waited on the floor by the front door, slumped on my backpack. If I was going off to war — I imagined — I would be smoking.

  Dad came to peer out the front door window. I hoisted myself vertical.

  “What’s this?” he said, pulling the hatchet out of its holster.

  “For firewood.”

  “You know I don’t like you using this without my supervision.”

  “I’ll be careful. I promise.”

  “If it’s important, Father will have one.” He placed it on the sideboard next to the mail basket, laying it down like a grenade that might explode if mishandled.

  I frowned at it.

  Dad checked his watch. He was meant to be at work in Ottawa, but was waiting to see us off.

  “I need to make a call,” he said, and left me alone at the front door, giving me opportunity to fiddle with my pack and provisions a bit more.

  Finally, Father Sweet’s navy Beetle of pre-Beatle vintage pulled up, fifteen minutes late. The windows were wound down and he flapped his hand at us, flashing a grin as wide as the windshield.

  “Look here, this is important,” Mum said, grabbing my shoulders. “Say your prayers.”

  “I don’t want to hear when you get back you were difficult,” Dad said, raising an eyebrow and a finger at me. “Just listen to Father. Do what he says. Don’t cause problems.”

  No one clutched at my sleeve as I marched out and the screen door slammed. I put my pack under the Beetle’s hood and climbed in.

  “Be good!” my mother called.

  “We will,” Father Sweet replied, backing out.

  “I was talking to him!” She laughed. “Don’t let him give you any guff.”

  13

  “What is the message of Christ?” Father Sweet asked me, keeping his gaze on the road ahead. We weren’t even on the highway yet, having just driven past the penitentiary outside Blackburn.

  I regarded him from the side of my eyes. I expected he would ask me these sorts of things during our entire trip, and then report back the results to my parents.

  “Like, be good?” I replied. “And share and stuff.”

  “There can be only one answer.” He laughed, shaking his head. “It is love. Simply love!”

  “Yah, well, of course. Yes.”

  What made my parents — actually, all the Catholic parents in Blackburn — hold Father Sweet in such esteem?

  I was twelve, and the world was an incomprehensible morass of mystical, adult secrets. Somewhere shadowy, I sensed, the many things adults didn’t discuss freely were being whispered about away from my ears.

  So-and-so did something unspeakable. Did you hear what she is doing now? I heard that he’s a mm-hm. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a problem with you-know-what.

  This wasn’t true, of course. Whenever children like me asked questions or asked for clarity, I saw evidence of this secret world, written on the irritated faces adults displayed as you were told to never mind. The truth was, no one talked to us, so we had to figure it out by eavesdropping, smiling stupidly and trying to suss out what they wanted us to say so they could leave us alone.

  If there was one thing I did understand, though, it was that we were Christians. And to be a Christian is to believe that the world you see is not the true world. Even as a twelve-year-old, I knew there was what you could figure out from what you saw, and the interpretation the adults wanted. I was immersed in a big charade. The true world thrived invisibly all around me, foaming with terrific power. Agents of evil posed in friendly guises. Ghosts floated behind my back. My thoughts were broadcast to angels and demons. I was never alone, I was observed at all times, and my thoughts notated and reported up to Jesus or the Heavenly Father. Although I might not see any consequence of any action or thought, it was there nonetheless. Like an oil stain on a dress shirt. Fortunately, it can be taken out when laundry’s done for your soul during the sacrament of reconciliation, which we did weekly as a family.

  Here’s how I viewed the world. A flock of spirits followed me like birds scavenging, waiting for me to drop a crumb of sin. In the dark, in my bedroom late at night, I might even speak to one of them, and perhaps might chance to glimpse something if I was truly unlucky. So I’d pull up the covers and shut my eyes so that I couldn’t see the forms swarming over me.

  Occult spirits and universal evil were real fears. That, and bears. So, ghosts and bears. In religion class or Father Sweet’s homilies, how to conquer fear was a very real skill I figured the Church could teach me.

  In such times as you are afraid, Father Sweet would tell us, one only need pray and ask for intercession and the hand of God — a huge, ghostly hand, I imagined — would intercede. If you deserved it. The whole thing gave me little comfort.

  Father Sweet’s baritone voice and weird enunciation was hypnotizing. Imagine a Victorian time traveller forever befuddled and amazed by the wondrous modernity of the twentieth century; that’s how he spoke. He pronounced “thermometer” as two hyphenated words sounding like “thermal-meter.” He carefully spoke all three letters “S” in “issues.” He used words like “forfend” in sentences, and would angrily correct you on the difference between further and farther. Boys were nervous to open their mouths.

  In a way no one else did, he formalized our names. If you were Tony, Doug, or Chris, you became Anthony, Douglas, and Christopher to him; pronounced with great elocution. Sometimes you might even become French or Italian. I remember Chris Becker turned into “Christophe” that way. He let Christophe’s name luxuriate on his tongue, but he disliked the boy himself, considering him a brute. I can’t recall, however, him ever calling any of the girls by name. He just nodded at them, or pointed.

  Often, you could spot a mess of boys’ bikes piled in front of the rectory, a red townhouse close to the school where he lived alone. They came because he always had plenty of candy and pop.

  My own initial visit to the rectory occurred when my mother dropped me there for an altar boy pizza party. One car after the next, parents drove their sons to the rectory and left them.

  The pizza was cold, but it was from Wong’s, the best pizza in Blackburn, and its doughy, cheesy skin was worth eating, even hours old. I kept to the back of the dozen other acolytes. Danny Lemieux was the lead altar server and got pride of place for everything. Father Sweet’s hand never seemed to leave his neck.

  In the rectory, you saw how different Father Sweet was from the rest of Blackburn Hamlet’s folks. In addition to his parish duties, he was a composer, with pieces in the latest Catholic Book of Worship. A harp, a flute, a piano, an organ, an oboe — he had them all in his music room. The whole house smelled of the tobacco that he smoked in his cherrywood pipe; it was cluttered with musty books, published in a variety of languages, stacked in every room and overflowing shelves. The dim rooms were decorated with Renaissance prints, Orthodox icons, rococo lamps, and pictures of Greek pottery. It felt like a cross between a
dusty flea market and a fancy salon.

  His upstairs bedroom itself was austere as a monastic cell, with a cot, wooden chair, and cross. Down the hall was the guest room. Its walls were papered in red velvet and the queen-sized bed was covered with an expensive-looking quilt. He lay down on the bed next to a big teddy bear he introduced as “Aloysius.”

  I was told by Rocky Robicheau that these sorts of tours of his lair were frequent. “Anytime you want to come here,” said Rocky, “he’ll give you donuts. At any hour.”

  After we had pizza, he read aloud stories from a writer named Chaucer that he claimed was English, although we didn’t understand. But we laughed anyway because — clearly — he meant them to be funny, and maybe even a little naughty. Surrounded by altar servers at his feet, Father laughed himself silly.

  “So, did he talk to you?” Mum asked me when I finally came home after walking in the dark.

  “No,” I said. “I ate three slices of Wong’s pepperoni.”

  “So, he didn’t talk to you.” Her voice had a sting of disappointment in it. “But you liked the pizza.”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Boys.”

  14

  The car stank of oil. Father Sweet was unable to shift it smoothly, so the ride lurched forward and back, side to side. Nauseating. For him, driving appeared to be a chaotic, random effort. Again, he appeared to be a time traveller befuddled by modern technology. He maniacally pulled levers, steered and pumped pedals, like Wile E. Coyote operating a contraption. Moreover, without his Roman collar he looked like a kook. Instead of his suit jacket he wore a frayed woollen duffel coat in yellow-and-brown plaid. And — incredibly — jeans.

  “Aren’t they ‘cool’?” he asked, pointing at the stovepipe, handmade denims he wore. They had patches. Deliberately. As if part of the style. “The nuns made them for me!”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I know a place up the Gatineau near Moose Lake,” said Father Sweet. I’d never seen him so excited.

  “Is that near Maniwaki?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “I know a cool guy from Maniwaki.”

  He handed me a paper bag of foiled chocolate eggs left over from last Easter. “Eat as many as you like,” he said. “It’s just us boys!”

  He was taking me out of our province and into Quebec. The nearest bridge was in downtown Ottawa, and we had to drive through the massive construction projects under way in the city. Everywhere you looked, old buildings were being demolished in favour of big, new concrete offices and apartment blocks.

  Now, as Father Sweet and I drove, the city looked like a war zone. The construction was impossible to ignore, and Father Sweet brought it up.

  “I am learning about modern things. I love the purity of the modern ethos,” he said.

  The word modern made me think of sci-fi, and I tried to conceive a way to talk about Space: 1999.

  “Do you know you are the first generation born since Vatican II?”

  I actually did know this, because our teachers reminded us on a regular basis. We were, they told us, the first generation of our renewed religion. Not just renewed; it was a new religion, practically.

  “Yah, for sure.”

  “Vatican II was a modernist conference.”

  Again, I pictured Moonbase Alpha. Priests wandering around on Moonbase Alpha. In school and church, although Vatican II was mentioned often, no one had ever explained to me what it actually was, and it felt too late to ask now.

  “Now with our pastoral flock married to the liberties of today, just think of the flood of new Catholics who will enter the Church. It is extraordinary.”

  I leaned over to get a better look. Yes, his own words seemed to be moving him to tears.

  “Consider Lower Town,” he said.

  “Lower Town?”

  “Yes! That Catholic, French neighbourhood right over there.” He gestured. “All those terrible old homes, destroyed and replaced with straight lines of modern townhouses. Simple and egalitarian. Like a monastery! Families now live in a modern, clean religious community and look to the Church for guidance.”

  Amidst the new townhouse terraces, a lonely spire from the original French church remained in a no man’s land of construction pits and dirt.

  “See?” said Father. “So orderly. And there is the church, anchoring tradition.”

  “Blackburn Hamlet is modern,” I said, not quite knowing what the point was, but assuming our house was not much older than me, and we were talking about houses.

  Father Sweet waved his hand in dismissal. “Blackburn still has too much of an old-town style with curved roads. No, the strong, parish community of Lower Town with a priest as head of a regimented community gives us the best glimpse of a Vatican II future.”

  “Okay.”

  “The Church will even regain ground in Quebec. You’ll see!” He took a deep breath. “Yes, my boy, these are good days. The Church has found a way to bring all our glorious traditions to a wider contemporary sphere. And you are at the vanguard! A modern man!”

  “You bet.”

  We crossed into Quebec at the Alexandra Bridge, passing Samuel de Champlain’s monument, with the Native guide squatting under his boots.

  “Ah, Champlain,” cooed Father Sweet. “Bringing the light of God’s civilization to the savages. His voyage not unlike our own. But for the canoe. I should’ve thought of that. You’ll be the bare-skinned Indian scout!” He laughed.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “How are the chocolates? Here, let me have one. Are you thirsty?”

  He handed me a big bottle of Coke.

  “I’m not allowed Coke.”

  “Heaven forfend! Have you had it before?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, between us boys, I won’t tell,” he whispered.

  The Coke was warm. Lips quivering and puckering, he slurped the bottle without wiping after I’d had a sip. He tooted the horn for no other clear reason than he wanted to make noise and let out a cheer.

  “Hooray!” he cried.

  We hit the country roads. He clicked on the radio.

  “We can listen to whatever you want! What music do you enjoy? I bet it’s rock-and-roll.”

  He found a station.

  “How about this? Do you like this?”

  He tried to groove to the song, but its rhythm was plainly alien to him. He listened to the lyrics — hard to hear — but something about sliding through life, a sink, and people needing time to think.

  “Hm. Is this a song about Protestants?”

  “Protestants?” I replied. I had never considered that pop songs could be about anything.

  “Silly, isn’t it?” he said. “People needing a minute or two to think. That’s the difference between us and Protestants. And Jews, frankly. They reserve private judgment, but not us.”

  “What’s that mean?” Did my Jewish friend, David Lozinski, have private appointments with a court judge?

  “Admonish the sinner and instruct the ignorant. The thread of the Christ God weaving through the line of Peter to today’s Church. Take comfort, judgments have been made for you! You can have faith in God without judgment yourself. You know how to stop sin. You need only relax and act, to follow God. Simple trust in the Church. Such a gift. Oh, such a mercy. Something you have, that they have not. It is to pity.”

  “Are you talking about Protestants? Or Jewish people?”

  “Yes. These are people with a broken outlook on life. It is because of the source, you see. Sin becomes instant and chronic because they stop to think ad excogitandum relativismi. Not for us the ‘slip and slide through life.’ We walk confidently with God. If you place the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the font of life, then all is correct on your path.”

  I sat for a bit trying to gain my bearings in this bizarre discussion, searching for something to add to the conversation. It was exhausting.

  “What exactly is a font?” I asked f
inally, feigning interest.

  “A spring, a source. A fountain.”

  I envisioned a heart as a grotesquely messy fountain and nodded grimly.

  “Indeed. It is in baptism that one’s new life begins. The infant is a shadow, polluted and unrighteous. But full of potential. Even its senses are dulled. Imagine a man enshrouded like Lazarus. He cannot truly hear the birdsong, cannot truly, truly feel the touch of his brother, or his words of love. The paschal sacrifice gave us the gift of everlasting life, enabling the flesh of the body. It starts at the baptismal font. That is why we baptize the young, you see? Why wait for new life to begin? The Lord teaches us to love this potential. Love the sinner.”

  He grew excited and kicked his feet a little.

  “Oh! That blessed, perfect age of innocence, between infancy and the brutish rout of manhood! These other people are merely shadows, but they have potential,” he said, raising a finger. “It is not us, as people, but God himself passing through us, like blood. Lust, covetousness, the usual thought-infectious demons are our greatest enemies. It was so in the Garden, when the first of God’s people were children, pure in their intercourse. They had no lust. With lust we become venial. If veniality is averted, well, it is holy, holy, holy. All pure love is good. You wouldn’t want to be a shadow, eh?”

  “No,” I replied confidently, as if I had followed anything he said.

  He smiled widely and nodded. He took a deep breath and sighed.

  “I thought not. I knew it. Meditate on how lucky we are to be citizens of the City of God. The world is becoming darker, with the Soviet Union and its iron drapery. The frivolousness of television comedies. The sexual flagrancy of Women’s Lib. But it is not real, it is not this.” He seized my hand. “And there is God, and our glorious traditions, their sublime mélange of the Hebrew and the Hellenic. Perfect love, in the highest form of our brotherhood. When we fail, and become artless and lustful, where is God?” He moaned, letting go my hand. “Well, thank God for sacramental reconciliation, and mercy. The body can fight the soul, or be a vessel of love for union with another, under the ancient methods of the Church. It is then that the flesh becomes perfectly sanctified. Lust is the enemy. The body’s perversion. We must tame the temple of the soul — our bodies — so two souls can become one. You see? Only we know we walk in righteousness, the brotherhood of man. Very simple. The roots of our tradition, where all is correct, only man and his missteps, riddled with sin.”