Father Sweet

by J. J. Martin

  “They’re just living their lives,” I said, regarding the flies. “They don’t mean to bug us.”

  Father Sweet hung his paw on my shoulder.

  “Here we are, foot-stuck by sin on this mundane institute, Earth. How sweet to slip that bond and soar higher, higher, higher. Nearer to God.”

  Here was another of his spiritual lessons. Train the mind to observe what was around us, but then make a correct interpretation. Describe the true, invisible world. Sensible enough for him.

  Father Sweet knit some new idea in his mind. I could tell because he asked me, “Have you read Rousseau?”

  “I know a kid named Chris Rousseau.”

  “Oh, my dear, dear boy! You are a delightful hoot!”

  I wondered why he found it delightful to make me feel like an idiot.

  “Nature is evidence of the Lord, but it is also opposed to us. It is a land where our least civilized impulses can take hold. Consider Eden. We two must be an ark within Nature. That is what the Church gives us — a vessel where we can be right with the Lord while adrift in a sinful world. We can be in the world but not of it. This is what a Catholic education provides you. Do you understand?”

  “You betcha,” I said, turning my attention to something practical. “I’m going down to the creek.”

  “Before you go,” he said, “tell me a bit about your mother.”

  Odd question, I thought, but he’s the boss.

  “She and my dad have been married a long time,” I said. “My dad works at Indian Affairs.”

  “I know that. But tell me about her.”

  I pictured my mother, thin and scrawny, her chin jutting out and her steel hair dry and dropping cigarette ashes. Her neck as long as my forearm as she waves my brother and I away so she can light up a smoke and talk on the phone without our hearing.

  “Like what?”

  “For example, let’s say, what is she most afraid of. I ask as her parish priest, you understand.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. She never seemed afraid to me. But I had seen her angry plenty of times, usually when Jamie or I had done something wrong. She got a run in her nylons once because of the zipper from my parka. She told me she’d never been more humiliated in her life. “Being embarrassed, I guess.”

  He seemed pleased with this answer and began humming to himself.

  17

  Later, we fished in the river. Father Sweet sang and carried on, unable to keep quiet.

  “Sing with me. Surely you know the refrain?”

  “I don’t.”

  “It’s Handel! What the devil are they teaching you in that infernal school?”

  I tried to think. “Like Handel and Gretel?” I asked. He laughed, but I meant it. When I thought of school, I thought of math. Learning geography. Learning French.

  In my pocket I had a pack of Thrills gum and I gave him two pieces, hoping it would silence the singing.

  It reduced him to humming while he chewed.

  “Mm! Delicious,” he said.

  I shushed him.

  He tried to reset his hook, but cringed and fussed.

  “I will weep!” he said.

  “What?”

  He held a worm in his palm. He’d lost the last one I put on without catching a fish. Father Sweet, I learned, could not bear to hook worms. “They are skin! Too fleshy.” He shivered.

  I baited his hook, but he caught nothing, anyway.

  Eventually the fish nibbled and I landed three small crappies for dinner.

  “Do you want to clean them?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  He shook his head and shuffled away.

  “Father, make a basket of your shirt like an apron,” I said. “Could you go out and collect sumac leaves? Like those there. A big bunch.”

  I picked at my thumbnail as I watched him go off, singing his Handel and Gretel and ripping sumac from branches.

  He returned with some twiggy sumac in his “apron.” While handing it over he came close and breathed through his nostrils onto my face. I pruned the sumac to only the tender bits.

  “The fruit of the vine is worthless without the work of human hands,” he said.

  I cleaned the fish into filets for the pot — two for him, one for me. I seasoned them with a bit of garlic mustard weed. Meanwhile, using some wild raspberries and the sumac, I steeped a lemonade in the Coke bottle. Then I got him to find and wash bulrush roots to roast in the fire.

  My stomach groaned.

  “It’s funny what hunger does, eh?” I said.

  “How so?”

  “It’s a pretty lousy dinner, but it smells to me like Thanksgiving.”

  “In the priesthood we fast often. Prepare yourself!”

  I nodded, noting that — somehow — he was suggesting a career direction. My vocation. Is this the reason my parents wanted me out here with him? Is that what I’m meant to become?

  “This filet looks delicious!” he said. “We are fishermen. And fishers of men!”

  I had poached the fish. As I was about to put it onto some birchbark, a small amount of saliva squirted out his mouth onto my arm.

  I wiped it off.

  Before sunset, I set the rabbit trap. My Sucrets tin had just enough twine for a tiny noose.

  “We’ll see if this works.”

  Silently, I wondered what I would do. Cleaning a fish is one thing, snapping a rabbit’s neck is quite another.

  “This will catch a hare?” he said, puffing an incredulous scoff. “It appears too simple. Doesn’t one need more cunning and trickery?”

  “It comes in here and it’s snared there. That’s it.”

  “I would have assumed more of a labyrinth was required to set a trap.” He contemplated me. “Something clever. This is … snatching a running rabbit straight from the twigs!”

  “Pretty much.”

  I walked back to the campsite.

  He invited me to say vespers with him, but I told him I couldn’t, saying I needed to prep the campsite for nighttime.

  As dusk turned purple, and with the coals still red, I made a sandwich of the fire logs, hoping to keep the fire going overnight. Good old Scoutcraft and something Mike Racine showed us on one of his visits. I put two thigh-thick, long logs in the pit and used green sticks thick as Scout staves to brace the sandwich from falling sideways. The filling was twigs. Jamming three embers into the sandwich, it smoldered and started soon after he finished his prayers.

  The bulrushes were fibrous, and I picked threads out of my teeth while I puttered around.

  He washed the fish smell out of the pot, filled it with water, and put it on the fire.

  “Something for you,” he said.

  At the boil, he added Camp Coffee syrup from his sticky bottle, poured the mixture in my canteen cup, and prodded me to drink.

  “I don’t like it,” I said.

  “Pish. You haven’t tried it!”

  “I have. My granddad drinks that.”

  “Drink it, please.”

  If he loves it so much, why no cup for him? Was this another test? I hated Camp Coffee. Why drink it now, anyway?

  “You drink it,” I said. “I’m not thirsty.”

  “It’s for you. A special drink for you.”

  I poked the fire. “I like Postum,” I said.

  This appeared surprising to him and he was lost for words. His mouth opened and closed.

  “Postum again,” he finally muttered.

  I listened to him breathing and whispering to himself under his breath. The cup cooled, undrunk. Frustrated, he splashed it out, then spent minutes contemplating the bottle, tilting it and shaking it, giving it a whiff, muttering. We watched the fire.

  After full dark, the air chilled significantly. With a long sigh, he pulled out his Hours Liturgy to recite compline, so I took this as my cue.

  “Been a long day. I’m ready for bed,” I said.

  On hearing this, he finished his compline prayers in a rush with his eyes wide and peering at me obviousl
y as I puttered around.

  He clapped and rubbed his hands. “Yes! Let’s hit the hay!”

  I was exhausted, but I was not keen to be alone in the tent, again, with Father. I hoped he’d be quiet.

  He wriggled into the tent and tied its ribbons shut, wheezing urgently. By flashlight, I watched him squeeze out of his clothes in acts of excited gymnastics. He stripped down to peculiar grey underwear resembling a girdle.

  “I shall zip our sleeping bags together!” he said.

  “No, thanks,” I said, and turned out the flashlight.

  The dark became visible through my remaining senses. Sounds of fabric on skin, muffled under canvas. Gross smells of sweat and soil, spiked with juniper. The heavy manoeuvring I felt against my leg.

  “Let us caucus for warmth!” he said.

  “It’s plenty warm in here.”

  He groaned.

  I turned my back to him. I remained fully clothed. I burrowed deeper into my down bag and set my face deep into the base angles of the tent. A canvas pocket of air was all I had, stinky with earth and oilskin.

  He breathed through his mouth, and the only sound was his shivering breath and dry swallowing. The sound of panting and licking lips filled the tent.

  His fingertips stroked my back, awkward with the angle. I felt his quivering hand trace the outline of my neck, and I flinched. His fingers dipped into the bag and onto my shoulder blades. Every hair on my body prickled up in gooseflesh. Low in his throat, he mewled.

  “Hey,” I said. “Quit it.”

  He grunted. After a moment he withdrew his hand.

  In a whisper, face close to my head, he talked about the sleeping porch at his family’s house, growing up in Cape Breton. He returned from boarding school for summer. Cousins and uncles would all share beds, sleepless in the summer heat. And they would play games under the covers.

  “Would you like to play a game?” he whispered.

  “No. I want to sleep.” My eyes were wide, staring at the black. I breathed the tiny amount of cool air draughting in from the tent edge.

  He continued to mouth-breathe and move his sticky tongue around.

  Outside, there was a hoot.

  “Ooh! Now what’s that?” he said.

  “Owl.”

  He snuggled up to my back.

  “Are you sure? My word! It sounds beastly!”

  I tried worming away, close as I could scrunch under the tent. Any farther and pegs might pull up, sending me to roll right into the open air.

  “Definitely.”

  “Perhaps the owl sees a predator.”

  “You mean like a fox? Or,” I said in a different voice, “you mean like a bear?”

  “Yes, that’s it,” he said. “Heavens. It could be a bear.”

  This wasn’t true, of course. I was rational enough to know. I knew what a bear sounded and smelled like since the day I was born. It was as much in my bones as it was in my occasional nightmares — where it never appeared but snuffed and snorted in the darkness just out of my sight.

  But the way Father Sweet said the word — in a slow, hypnotic drawl — pulled it right from my bad dreams and into the tent; the breath on my neck and warmth of the monster right at my back.

  Ghosts, and bears.

  I froze as he pulled in close. He writhed in a kind of slow dance, giving off heat, breathing on me.

  This went on for a while, but I stayed flinched and crunched up while he mouth-breathed and writhed.

  He became restless. Flopping on his back, his side, his back again, and sighing, as if something was on his mind, but I ignored him. He whispered my name. I still ignored him, pretending to sleep. He stroked my back again, hand trembling.

  He moaned and then held his breath.

  Finally, there was a torrent of activity. He thrashed about, as if beset by itching. He hiccupped. He sounded as though he might sneeze. I thought maybe he was having a seizure or was being stung by fire ants. Before I could ask if he was all right, the behaviour stopped abruptly and he sighed loudly. He settled down and began snoring loud as a bear.

  I remained awake, rolling over in my mind the dozens of unusual sentences he’d spoken to me that day.

  18

  In the black of night, I forgot where I was.

  I awoke with a start. My face was pressed to the ground, smelling grass and cold mud. Behind me droned the grizzly snore of my tentmate. As he snorkeled the air, I recalled my situation with urgent dread. I was in a tent. I was far from home. I was a twelve-year-old boy. I was alone with Father Sweet.

  In silence, I crawled to the flap and undid its ribbons. This old pup tent had no zippers, which was good. I kept it quiet.

  In our little clearing, the semicircle treeline appeared by starlight to be a wall. A black palisade. It stood on guard against my leaving. But the summer night smelled good and fresh. A few deep breaths and I felt a bit better. The cold air fought off the hard lump in my throat.

  Only me, and the forest, which in those days I considered a friend.

  Deep in the sky and spread into the Milky Way was the unpolluted light of our stars, a heavenly river of petrified fireworks. Majestic, kindly, long and uncomplicated as a gravel road.

  One troop meeting last year, Blanter, the Scout leader, brought in an antique navy sextant to show what it could do. He encouraged us to borrow it and learn celestial navigation if we wanted and earn a badge. Imagine that. I looked up to those pinpoints, imagining I could read where I was and where I could go. Incredible. Magical. Instructions from God, truly.

  I looked down. There was Father Sweet’s stained tent, dull and sickening under the starlight.

  Could I just leave? If I were serious, I suppose I could. Simply follow that brook downstream until I came to a town. I could phone home. Maybe Dad would pick me up. But what would they say, my parents? What kind of trouble would I be in? What would Father Sweet tell them? I can’t imagine.

  Dad’s face loomed before me, fist-like, and I shuddered.

  The campfire was down to embers, but I was using one of Mike’s techniques to keep it alive overnight. It seemed to be going okay.

  A gorgeous night-quiet filled the forest. The only sounds came from the Picanoc River burbling away, and the brush of leaves in an overnight breeze.

  My eyes got droopy. I tiptoed back to the tent and into the buzzing of his breath. I might fall asleep again. Maybe.

  I lay on my back, feeling every lump of the hard mud beneath the tarp. The regular tick of a clock did not apply now. Night was an interlude. Somehow, I had placed myself outside my own life. There was what I knew from the past, and now this purgatory. Camping with Father Sweet forever here. I had no sense of a future.

  Father Sweet called this Eden. Or rather, the farthest west, East of Eden, whatever that meant.

  I missed my family. We’re tough, I thought. Serious people. I can do this.

  I thought of the bris we attended last week, and my dad’s anger. Why was he so angry? Like a baptism, Dad said. Something to fix original sin. Except it involved knives, rather than water. And dinks. And blood.

  Inherited sin. Your gift for being born.

  19

  With a heavy arm around me, pinning me, I woke up feeling the various crooks, lumps, and angles of his body poking against my back and bum. He must have farted, because the tent stunk. And it wasn’t the frivolous, amusing fart smell of a kid at a sleepover. This was a serious, deeply unfunny stench.

  The canvas glowed brown in the sunlight. My eyes were dry, like I’d been up all night, instead of awake for my one moment of escape for some fresh air. But I must have slept at some point.

  He groaned.

  I didn’t respond. He groaned louder.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, finally.

  “It’s my infernal back, dear boy. I do not have the lissome spine of youth, as you do.” His eyes glinted at me. “It is stiff. Will you rub it?”

  It was then I realized the fart smell was coming from his mouth. Th
e more he talked, the worse it got.

  “Okay.”

  With great energy and no sign of a stiff back, he unbuttoned his skivvy, peeling it like a banana to his waist, and laid himself out flat. His skin, flabby and tufted with hairs, was cold and damp. I knelt to his side and prodded at his clammy, rubbery back.

  “Lower,” he said, so I moved down. His torso wriggled like a maggot. “Lower.”

  I got up. “I’m going to start the fire.”

  I unzipped the flap, feeling nauseous. The fresh morning air was a cool relief on my face. I shivered in the cold as I went pee.

  Overnight, the campsite itself had remained untouched by critters. Not one ember from the fire was left alive. My log sandwich had burned, snuffed, and failed. So much for the expertise my camping badge had earned me. In the sunlight I collected dry grass and twigs to start again.

  I yawned and it brought no refreshment; my teeth chattered together.

  I checked in on the little rodent carcass. It had been picked apart further by bugs. Or scavengers. Maybe even by its own kind. The body now looked like the head of something larger. It was an illusion, but I perceived now a hollow-eyed face, a ghoul bent on frightening me.

  Father Sweet crawled out slowly, his face crumpled with frustration. He silently pissed into the forest and ripped a big fart.

  He sat on a stump, picking crumbs from his beard and eating them while I lit a new fire.

  “Do you want me to show you how to light a fire?” I asked, feeling that he was grumpy and volatile. “It’s a good practical skill.”

  Shaking his head, he sighed loudly, as he had done last night, the way someone does when they are spoiling for a fight.

  “We had a Native guy come and talk to the troop a few months ago about fire tending. He was awesome.”

  “We must dislodge this,” he said, scowling, waving his hand at me like a magician. “Between us.”

  I stacked logs into a small criss-cross rack. Dislodge what?

  “Did you hear me?”

  I mumbled, shivering again. Avoiding his gaze, I gave the thumbnail a good solid bite that shot a pain deep into my arm.

  “A queer seducer you are indeed, boy.”