by J. J. Martin
“Okay.”
“You understand, of course?”
“Oh, sure.” I nodded.
He seemed relieved, as if he’d been waiting to get it out. “Do you know, I could tell you were different — special — the moment we met?”
I bit the side of my cheek. The song finished.
“What musical band was that?” he asked.
“Journey, I think. Sounds like it.”
“The Journey,” he cooed. “How appropriate. I must learn more about contemporary things. The Journey. The Pilgrim Church. Why, you’ve just given me my next homily, my boy!”
“Oh, okay.”
“All our efforts are vanity. Except the effort to be the pilgrim, to resume the walk with God in concert with the Church. The sacred journey. The Good Shepherd is such a merciful king. We must only follow. It is only by the grace of God, by the sacraments of His Church that the soul is saved, reconciled with Him. One is unable to save oneself, you know.”
“You can’t save yourself?” I tried my best to sound intellectual, despite feeling exhausted by the conversation.
“No. Of course not. Yet through baptism, reconciliation, Eucharist, you are saved,” he said, slapping my leg.
“Well, that’s good.”
The hilly farmland gave way to black pine and beech forest.
“You know, this reminds me of the landscapes of Fra Angelico. Are you familiar with his works?”
“Who?” I said. “What?”
“Oh, my dear boy!” He threw his head back and laughed at my lack of knowledge.
This time his hand didn’t so much slap my leg as gently land on it, and rest there.
15
Leaving the car unlocked a kilometre back and sweating under the packs and bags, Father Sweet led me past a bend of the Picanoc River onto a shady bluff, ten feet above the water.
On the only patch with enough sun to sustain healthy grass, he flopped down to catch his breath while I surveyed a few steps into the bush. It was dark and carpeted with needles. There was a firepit, bits of plastic and beer cans, obviously a popular spot for teen campers. The forest curled around the grassy patch, providing a fair shelter from the wind. I decided where to pitch the tent.
“Good flat spot,” I said, heading down to fill my canteen from the river. I looked across. The opposite bank was dark with sloped rock that would break your neck in a slip.
“How lush. How Arcadian,” Father Sweet said, inhaling a squeaky sniff though his nostrils. “We are as far westerly as one can be east of Eden, my lad. Whereby Eden itself must be Pembroke, eh!” The next major town two hours west was Pembroke.
“Guess so.”
I stepped several paces toward the bush to pee on some ivy, and was startled when he crept up silently, to stand shoulder to shoulder with me.
“Time to unbung the ale, eh? Good idea.” He pulled out his hairy plug and peed right into my stream.
I looked away.
Nestled in the shady grass, I spotted something dead. Was it the flattened and baked-out carcass of a deer mouse or chipmunk, drained and mummified in the sun? Impossible to tell. Only a wart of fur and a stub of tail remained. And what I took for a little face and little head — its mouth — were actually some kind of deformation on its back. Like seeing a face in the clouds or the moon.
“Did you bring a hatchet, Father?” I asked.
“No, my boy, why?”
I chewed my cheek.
Plenty of dead trees, so maybe it won’t be such a big deal, I thought. A few good kicks.
I knocked down a deadwood six-footer with a hard punt, and it broke into two uneven logs. Piece of cake.
Father Sweet’s eyes widened. He perched his fingers over his breastbone. “Oh my,” he said. “Straight out of Kipling! You are a wild boy.”
“Let’s see that tent,” I said.
He fumbled with a grey canvas sleeve, dumping the poorly stored innards.
It was an army-surplus two-man pup tent, mottled as an oyster and smelling like a hospital laundry bin. That brand-new, orange acrylic one I left at home was a plush Cadillac compared to this.
“Look, there’s a rip here.” I took a deep, dissatisfied breath. “Oh, man. And it hasn’t got a floor.”
He rummaged in another bag and, with a shrug, presented me two rumpled oilskins that appeared not to have been oiled since the Korean War. Floor and rain tarp.
“This is your tent?”
“Mmm!”
To earn my camping badge I had learned to make shelter from less, I reminded myself. The air smelled like wheat. There would be no rain. Nevertheless, I used my heel to cut a drain around the tent edge. My Scout knife made short work of paring some younger juniper boughs I cross-laid for a cushion under the oilskin. The trick is to get them thin before they’ve grown too woody. Usually just a hand-length of tip. You put them in a cross-hatch pattern and it feels a lot softer than ground. Soon the tent was going up.
“Look at you! What a marvel,” Father said, admiring my productivity, and sighing at me. He hovered close and smacked his lips searching for a topic. “What are you now? Lead altar server?”
“Just Acolyte Two,” I said, hoping he’d stop talking when he realized my low, half-hearted rank as an altar boy.
“That’s right,” he said slowly, frowning. He looked at his boots. “It’s Daniel Lemieux, isn’t it, who’s lead. How could I forget?”
Father Sweet plonked himself down, appearing troubled.
Fortunately, the tent poles were all there, but three spikes were gone. I needed something else, so I replaced them with hand-whittled hardwood stakes and rocks. There was plenty of rope for the tarp.
He lowered his voice to ask whether I had a close relationship with Danny Lemieux. “Do you talk?”
“Not really,” I said, picturing quiet Danny, two years older than me. He played Bantam hockey, I played Peewee. “Other than us both being altar servers, I don’t know him well.”
“So, you haven’t talked with him. Not recently.”
“Nope.”
At this, Father Sweet smiled wide and folded his arms proudly.
“Do you know the history of the altar boy?” He stroked his whiskers. “No? It’s one of the most imperative relationships in Christendom, you know. More important, really, than husband and wife. Why? Because it breeds the ministries of Christ himself.”
“Okay.”
“It emerged from the tradition of Hellenistic apprenticeships, you see. A family would give their son into the propriety of a master. That was a more enlightened day. It is a relationship closer than that of a father to a son, or husband and wife. The master has the responsibility to lovingly nurture vocation and bring the boy into the priesthood. Adelphopoiesis for our unique bonds. My own initiation came from my mentor — and later, first parish priest — the Monsignor Aloysius Gast.” He sighed dreamily. “Oh! The highs. Oh! The lows. How little I appreciated him then. But how I miss him now.”
I nodded and kept to my whittling. He stared.
“The closest a man and a boy could become,” he said slowly, leaning toward me. “Entwined souls. Flesh, sanctified by vow.”
My breathing accelerated.
“You hear me?” he asked.
I decided it must be a test of some kind, like in religion class when he asks abstract questions for which none of us are stupid enough to raise our hands. So, he randomly picks someone. It’s always the wrong answer, and then he illustrates the catechism in a completely baffling way. What to say? What did he mean?
Father Sweet looked through his eyebrows at me. “You know, there is a difference between useful information and useless,” he said. “The useful allows man to see his place in the universe. To fit right with the plan of God. For example, Christ’s understanding of human need. Christ became man, knowing all our torturous desires. And our pleasures. Now Christ’s passions are inside good Christians. All other information has little productive value.”
I surveye
d my work; the campsite’s soft grass and sweet-smelling trees, where his stained tent poked above the earth like a cancerous cyst. Without my knowledge of Scoutcraft, we wouldn’t have a chance of shelter.
“Tent’s done,” I announced in a drab voice, hoping he would be satisfied and shift the subject.
“Our home!” he cried.
He jumped in eagerly and patted the oilskin next to him. “Let’s test it out.”
I had a thumbnail I bit too close, and I wedged another fingernail under it. After a good, nervous pinch, I cautiously crawled alongside.
Father Sweet’s breath smelled like eggs and wet ash. It was intimate and quiet under the tent.
“You know,” he said leaning close to me and meeting my eyes with his, “for boys who show their grit, Acolyte One is in the offing.”
He waited for that to sink in.
“Where is the food?” I asked.
“I’ve got a full sack.”
I backed out. “Let’s inventory.”
His brow knotted and he followed me, silently handing over a bag.
The “full sack” previously held Cavendish potatoes. I reached in to pull out a box of Red Rose tea, pipe tobacco, a box of Kraft Dinner, two cans of Heinz beans, some cracked hard-boiled eggs in a paper bag, three hot dog wieners in an open wrapper, and a sticky, half-full bottle of Camp Coffee. At the bottom was an aluminum pot.
“This is it?”
“Of course! And where we lack, we shall eat off the land, like coureurs de bois fed by God’s natural bounty! Or, we can see it as a fast. Which only increases our righteousness.”
“I’ll start a fire. We can eat the hot dogs and eggs now before they smell up and attract a bear.”
“Pshaw. We’d hear such a beast coming. Besides, it would make for some good fun chasing it away!”
“Bears don’t make noise when they’re foraging. You can’t fight them off without a gun if they plan to eat you. We haven’t even got a hatchet. Have you got a gun?”
“Of course not!”
“Well, then.”
“You seem to know your bears.”
I wanted to change the subject. “Any good Scout would.”
“Your face changes when that word is spoken.” He nodded. “Bear.”
I rustled in my own pack and found only emergency rations: two granola bars, a squashed Dairy Milk, four raisin boxes, three pepperettes, and a can of water so old it was in Imperial measure.
“I didn’t bring a rod and reel. You?” I asked.
He stared blankly.
“I’ll make a couple rods after lunch,” I said. Scoutcraft would help us extend this lousy supply of food.
While he said his midday prayers, I examined the logs I kicked over. There was no easy way to split them into decent firewood without a hatchet.
Father Sweet removed and kissed his prayer shawl.
I looked him in the eye. “No hatchet, right?”
He shook his head and I took a deep breath.
From deep in my pack, I pulled out the smuggled hatchet I had taken from home. The very one Dad had forbidden me to bring.
“But you’ve got one,” Father said. “How confusing!”
I chipped into the first dry log and said nothing. Brandishing the hatchet out in the open made the hairs on my neck stick up.
“I will help,” said Father Sweet. He strode over and hefted the new log. “I imagine you wish to divide it longitudinally.”
“Yep.”
He propped it up. As I fumbled to get him to hold it properly so I could nick it, the head of the hatchet grazed his bare forearm. He startled. Suddenly, he pulled back his hand, and the bit edge made a long shallow cut in his skin.
He collapsed like I’d punched him in the head and fell back on his ass. “Blood!” he cried. “Blood! Blood!”
“Oh shit!” I cried, and dropped the hatchet, barely missing my own foot.
I seized his arm on the wound and pressured it shut. “Hold this,” I said. “I need to get a bandage.”
“Oh, my dear boy. I can’t, I can’t,” he whimpered.
“Look away,” I said, then guided his hand over the cut and got him to squeeze it. It was not deep — more of a scrape — but it was wet and he shivered and moaned at the feel.
I fetched some gauze from my St. John’s kit. After a rinse from the canteen and a few minutes of pressure, it was clotted. Not bad at all.
However, I started to shake.
In a wimpy voice, I reasoned with him while I wrapped his arm in gauze. “Not so bad, is it? Doesn’t look so bad to me. Just a scrape.”
He wouldn’t look at me.
“Listen, no need to tell my dad about this,” I said finally. “I mean, don’t tell my dad.”
“Your father?” he whispered, turning to face me, a minor smile emerging. “Why is that?”
“Well, it’s the hatchet. See, I’m not supposed to have it.”
There was a pause that felt like an hour. Whenever I imagined my father, I saw heavy black eyebrows that converged like two knives pointing in my face. I believed the sharp hatchet, about which I already felt guilty, would cut the rope at my lynching.
“You naughty little boy,” Father said in a sensual, quiet growl. He pulled my chin up with his other hand and gazed deeply into my eyes. “Secrets, eh?”
“Guess so,” I replied, looking away.
“Secrets.” He nodded. “We’ve got a little secret, haven’t we?”
I mumbled.
“We’ll have to make sure our adventure here remains sacrosanct.”
“Yes.”
“We wouldn’t want to get in trouble,” he whispered. He released my chin. “I swear secrecy, if you do.”
“Okay.”
“But you must swear that this trip is ours alone. Our secret. All of it.”
“I swear.”
In silence, I assembled a tripod fire and we ate wieners and eggs skewered on green sticks, without talking.
16
After lunch, I cut some larger switches with my Scout knife. I suggested Father Sweet go into the woods and find me old acorns and a tin can. I threaded the string and twisted some tin into little hooks while he propped himself on one shoulder, smoked his pipe, and watched me. The sun got hot. I changed my shirt. He paused to squint at my body, whispering, “Sublime as Elgin marble.”
“Tonight I’ll try making a rabbit trap,” I said. “I’ve never done it, but it’s worth a shot.”
“Truly, an amazing lad.”
“It’s just Scoutcraft.”
“Be prepared,” he said deeply, saluting me with his fingers in the trefoil.
I chuckled.
“Ahhh,” he sighed. “There it is. Oh, you have such a lovely smile, boy. Do you know that?”
“Mm.”
“Let me ask you, do your parents know that? Do they appreciate what a truly, truly extraordinary boy you are? I sense not.”
“Hand me that acorn.”
“Sicut malum inter silvarum sic dilectus meum. As the apple among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved.”
“Okay.”
“Et fructus sit dulcis. And his fruit is sweet. What a fine fruit of the woods you are.”
“Thanks.”
Something whistled in his nose. I saw him trowel a salamander-sized bogie out of his nose with his fingernail and wipe it on a rock.
After a few hours, I had assembled a good campsite, with a circle of rocks around the fire, a well-stacked sixth-of-a-cord of wood, and provisions hanging high off a tree branch. It might be a worthwhile project to lash a latrine, as well, but this was a short trip. I felt productive. I surveyed my work. I had built us a fortress of comfort against the wild.
“I am a man of Nature,” Father Sweet announced, smacking mosquitoes off his arms. “In Nature, man is nurtured by the Lord. Air. Water. The food of the earth. Spirit-warmth and soft grass on which to bed. For us, it is impossible to sin. As in the Garden. Once the Woman gave rise to avarice and lust �
�� that is when the worst of civilization arose. The best of civilization takes us back to the naked, pre-lapsarian beauty of God’s Nature. The worst leads to lust. And the Enemy. One need never worry in Nature. It is simple. We are all innocent children. God takes care of us.”
“I like camping, too,” I said, assuming that was his point.
“Ignorant savages, such as those poor Hurons first discovered by the good men of the Catholic mission, foolishly tried to interpret the cosmos without the light of Jesus. How senseless it must have been for them, bumbling in the wilds, not knowing what the world meant. What incredible mercy came from God, sending the Word of God here, eliminating their chaos. Their relief total. Singing of him wherever they went.”
I shook my head silently, and thought of what Mike had conveyed about observing the natural world. A deep lesson I was continuing to work on.
Movement caught my eye.
A falcon circled overhead. I assumed there must be something worthwhile in our vicinity, like a mouse warren or bunnies. Father Sweet observed me and sidled along.
“Falcon,” I said, noting the wings. “Incredible animal. Look at that.”
“How glorious,” he said. “Do you know why birds fly, my lad?”
“Definitely hunting, that one.”
“The birds fly in praise of God.”
“Right,” I said.
“Who lords over the forest?”
“Isn’t it the Queen?”
“The Queen.” He scoffed. “A few hundred years of law. The sovereignty of the Christ God, though, has been here and will be here forever. You understand?”
“Right. Of course.”
“These insects are vexatious!”
Flies swarmed our heads like electrons. They’d find some shit or a carcass eventually and leave us alone. Mike Racine said that bugs, birds, and trees make life from every little thing we take for granted. Everything connected to everything else.