Father Sweet

by J. J. Martin

  Finally, I was at the flat. I lay out on my side, panting into the dust.

  Father Sweet came over with the St. John’s kit and a smile.

  “Now let’s see what all this silly fuss is about,” he said, squatting down.

  I rolled over and he saw the leg.

  “Dear God,” he said, recoiling. “But, your beautiful white skin … and the blood.” Back on his elbows, he stared at me, blank.

  He was unable to bear the blood and searched my face, his mouth opening and closing like a fish.

  My knee joint was locked but I was able to pop it to the side and free it — with great relief — so I could get the knee straight.

  The pain was sharp, and I couldn’t help but cry a little. Again, I swore out loud, right in front of Father Sweet.

  “Christ Jésus,” I said.

  I picked out the bigger bits of dirt from my wounds. There was iodine in the St. John’s kit, and as I dabbed it on, I sobbed openly at the sting. If I had a needle and thread, which I’d lost when the Sucrets tin fell, I would have tried to stitch the wound shut; or at least the part going into my upper thigh, which was bleeding the worst. Instead, I wrapped the cut shut with bandages as best I could. My right leg got the sour end of the deal. I ran out of gauze and just had to leave it. Everything throbbed. It was probably the nettles that made the worst of it.

  I kept my mind focused by doing my best Scoutcraft first aid, which I never thought of as something you did to yourself.

  “Hand me that stick over there. The big one,” I said. “I can’t put weight on this leg.”

  Father Sweet silently brought me the deadwood, not quite as good as a Scout staff, but good enough for a crutch.

  Then he bent and kissed my right leg tenderly, high, near my upper thigh where there weren’t blisters or welts.

  I was sure he was going to cry. “You’ve been disfigured.”

  I scowled at him. He seemed keen to make a speech.

  “This has marked you. A sign of righteousness. An agreement between you and God. The outward sign of what’s written on your heart, spiritually.” His lips trembled, and tears spilled over his eyelids. When he said “agreement” he touched my breastbone. His hands made me very aware of my privates, and his focus on my upper crotch.

  I cried. “Oh, why did we come here?”

  He rubbed his neck. “Well, for you.”

  “Why are we here?”

  All through the gash on my leg throbbed fat pain. “Câlice!” I cried.

  I asked his help to hoist me up, and another câlice slipped from me as I winced from pain.

  “Why do you let us do it?” I asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Swear. In French,” I said. “You and the teachers.”

  He smiled at me in a genuine way that made me nearly forget the past three days. “Isn’t it obvious, my boy?” he said, helping me rise. “It’s because you’re asking God for help. Now why would we stop that?”

  28

  We headed back to camp the long way, the safe way. He only tried to make conversation once. I got the impression he was going to suggest we do something together when we arrived back at the tent, but his voice trailed off.

  At camp, I took the last of the fresh water and washed my leg of the nettles. Relief was temporary. The sting came roaring back.

  I packed, as difficult as it was with my leg. Father Sweet sat on a rock and said his prayers.

  When the tarp came up, and Father Sweet saw the pointed stakes I had laid under the tent floor, he gasped.

  Well, there it is, I thought. Wait until he tells Dad about this.

  Father Sweet merely sat, nodding to himself, frowning.

  “I’m going to bring you home now,” he said. “Home to your mum and dad.”

  I muttered.

  “What’s that, boy?”

  “I cursed. I mean, I said I’m cursed. I’m cursed.” I touched his arm and got blood on his shirt. “Cursed.”

  It was a wordless, radio-less ride back to Blackburn Hamlet.

  29

  Finally, the car passed the penitentiary outside Blackburn Hamlet and we turned onto Tauvette Road, coming nearby the forest Jamie and I loved so much, which caused my breathing to constrict, and I coughed.

  “I don’t know with you,” Father said. “Life’s choice is to listen or ignore God.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Father Sweet pulled into our driveway. Mum was wiping her hands with a dishcloth as she walked out the front door. I saw her face drop from a very high precipice when she noticed Father Sweet’s demeanour.

  “Remember what I said about our deal,” I whispered to Father Sweet, staring at my mother.

  He crossed his heart.

  Immediately, her eyes locked on mine and I got the impression for the first time in my life that my own mother might despise me.

  I hopped on one foot, covered in caked blood.

  Father Sweet helped me by holding my elbow. I sat down on the stoop as he unloaded my pack from under the hood of the car.

  “What happened?” my mother asked him.

  Father Sweet sighed. “Well … it did not go as I had hoped, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh no,” she said.

  My mother stared me down.

  “I need to see a doctor,” I said. “For stitches and a tetanus shot.”

  “Oh, Father, you’ve got blood on your shirt,” she said.

  “He’s quite a handful,” Father Sweet replied, shaking his head.

  “Father, I’m so sorry,” said my mother.

  “Look after that leg, son.” Then, to my mother he said, “He got … a nasty scratch.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Mother. “Thank you.”

  Father Sweet put a hand on my shoulder and lifted my chin. “Don’t give your mother any problems.”

  I looked him in the eye and crossed my heart discreetly, as a challenge. He nodded.

  As my mother glanced at her watch, he climbed back into the Beetle. I entered the house with Mum not far behind.

  “I’m glad to be home,” I said to her. “Where’s Jamie?”

  “Don’t you give me any of that, Mister Troublemaker. Now I’ve got to take you to the clinic and get back before dinner. You stay right here. Don’t you get your bloody mud on my nice carpets.”

  She trotted into the kitchen to retrieve her keys.

  In the letter basket on the sideboard, where Dad had last left the hatchet, I saw an envelope addressed to me. It was an official notice from the Scouts Canada HQ on Baseline Road. Without a word, I placed the hatchet back where Dad had left it, though it was now filthy.

  “Mum … when did this letter come?”

  “Friday. Let’s go.”

  I folded myself into the front passenger seat, keeping my bad leg straight.

  The letter lay across my bloody lap.

  During the drive, Mum asked me no questions about the trip with Father Sweet or how my injury happened.

  We got to the clinic and I decided to open the letter while we waited for the doctor. Better that than sit silently with my mother, who had steam rising from her ears. I felt terrible for putting her out.

  Besides, it was an official letter demanding my attention.

  It was from Mike Racine and was on Scouts Canada letterhead. Mike declared he had moved to Blackburn with his family. He described his long-time involvement in the Scouting movement and how he had started the first Scout troop on the reserve near Maniwaki. Now that he was here, he said, he was interested in sharing community and knowledge with young people. His own son would join our troop.

  Mike had taken a job at Indian Affairs, where my father worked. That was why he had visited us, he was scouting out our troop for himself and his own son. He would be the Troop Leader, and his son would join one of our patrols.

  The land was important to him, Mike wrote. We would spend our time together learning from the land, which is wiser than any one person.

  According to the le
tter, Donny Blanter, our current Scout leader, was moving on and now Mike would be 1st Blackburn Troop’s new scoutmaster. It was my old wish come true.

  The doctor inspected my leg, complimented me on my bandaging. He got to work getting a tray ready to clean and stitch it shut. I leaned back while the doctor stitched, reading Mike’s letter.

  “Many things have inspired me during my life,” he continued, “and I look forward to hearing what has inspired you.”

  Deep excitement bubbled up within me. Here was something different and true that rang out like a horn. Mike was not a confusing person who ambushed us with requests and motives. He was straightforward. The news that he was coming to lead the troop was a wish come true for me. Yet it seemed to be intended for someone who was gone. If it was a bugle, I heard it as if from a vast distance.

  Something had shifted, and had been lost. I told myself it was too late and resolved to resign from Scouts that week.

  “So,” the doctor asked my mother, “how did this happen?”

  Mum replied, with a sigh, merely, “Boys.”

  30

  A week later, Jamie encouraged me to get moving on my leg, but I only wanted to watch old episodes of Gilligan’s Island in the basement on the black-and-white TV. I hobbled around the house while my parents growled at me to stop making it look worse than it was and stop feeling sorry for myself.

  We sat in the back during Mass that Saturday evening. We even left after communion.

  I saw the Lemieux family.

  Our Scout troop met for the first session of the year with Mike Racine as Scout leader. I stayed home instead, and earned a hot reprimand about money, pride, and persistence from my father. I told Jamie to tell them I was quitting Scouts for good.

  Moreover, I told my parents I didn’t want to be an altar boy anymore and said I didn’t care if they hated me for it.

  I discovered that quitting was a simple thing to do. No amount of punishment could make me put on a cassock or do anything again. In a way, it was my true birth.

  It would be the beginning of a cold war in our family.

  “I don’t know what in hell has gotten into you,” my father said. “But I’m this close to giving up.”

  Before October got into full swing, my leg had healed enough for me to venture a bike ride before Dad got home and Mum noticed we were gone. Jamie was eager to finish the roof of the tree fort before winter set in. My brother snuck a bag of our father’s tools from the basement.

  Slowly, we biked to the edge of the greenbelt woods at Tauvette Road.

  There was a tree nursery there next to the bush. I found that I could only stand as far as its first row, on the gravel. The last steps before you left the town and entered the country.

  Jamie motioned to me from a few paces inside the forest, but I could not move.

  “Is it your leg? Can’t you walk?” he asked. And then, as a joke, he said, “You smell a bear?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I couldn’t move.

  Something awful was pulsing through me now.

  Months earlier, I served a funeral Mass for Father Sweet. He delivered a homily that was oddly personal for him and it came to mind.

  “There’s a time to reap and a time to sow,” he had said. “Death comes and we talk about a reaper, reaping our friends and family like wheat. Instead, Christ Jesus talked about shepherds, about fishermen. Our faith is confusing. Why does the shepherd tend his flock? Why do fishers fish? Is it for the good of the sheep? The good of the fish? And then, there is that one solitary lamb, for whom the Good Shepherd will choose to put all at risk, to go to the wilderness to fetch, simply to hold close.

  “Why does the shepherd lay down his life for the very lamb he tends for sustenance?” Father Sweet asked that day. “Isn’t it obvious the answer is for Love?”

  My eyes filled and I shook my head at my brother.

  Jamie walked his bike next to mine and set down the sack of tools with great care, as if any sudden movement could spark a catastrophe in me or an attack.

  “I can’t finish the tree fort,” he said. “Not alone.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Slowly and standing so that he could support me, Jamie hugged me, and I felt my body sag into his arms.

  I breathed deeply, relaxing in the comfort he offered. Brotherly love, truer than any of Father Sweet’s rhetoric.

  Behind Jamie’s back, the life of the forest carried on in the shadows. I felt that we were outside of that, though, both of us floating free, completely outside the world. A few short weeks earlier, the bush had appeared endless to me, but now it only looked dark and closed off.

  part two

  1

  September 2003

  Sometimes, when the light is just right, I see Jamie the way he looked when we were children. He can still seem like my baby brother, whom I adored and protected almost like a parent, and not the man who became the anchor of our family.

  “Here’s a good one,” he said, handing me an old class photo. “My god. What sick social engineering experiment designed those school clothes?”

  Picture day, 1977. All our clothes made of itchy, suffocating polyester: rompers, long lapels, velveteen dresses, bell-bottoms, Tarlek tweeds, mustard turtlenecks. Every head of hair brushed so full of static you’d spark every doorknob. Our smoked-out, coffee-breathed teacher, wall-eyed Mrs. Cattleford, looks on the verge of her own psychological China Syndrome.

  “There you are, Mr. Serious,” he said, pointing out my pout, bowl-cut, eyebrows pushing down my squint, and, of course, the sienna velour zip-up. “What a fashion show! Meena Thomas, Brian and Briar Birk, Rocky Robicheau, Kevin Nadeau, Lee, Ricky, Tonya, Marc, Terry. Can’t believe I remember these names. They weren’t even in my class.”

  “Chuck it,” I replied. We were filling garbage bags in Dad’s basement.

  “Who’s that one there?”

  “No idea.”

  “Like you don’t remember. You remember every useless triviality.”

  “C’mon, throw it out.”

  “No way!” said Jamie. “I want your niece and nephew to see what a dork you were!”

  “Pretty sure they know that already.”

  “I’m keeping it, then.”

  I returned to stuffing garbage bags. My brother had created a “keep” pile, and he placed my school photo there. I had no “keep” pile. Well, not entirely. I had stored away a few keepsakes at my apartment already, such as the hand drum my dad got at his retirement, and which I believed was precious. Regardless, I was creating far more stuffed bags than Jamie was.

  “If it can’t be sold, and it can’t be given away, it’s garbage,” I said.

  “That which can’t be sold or given away is priceless,” he replied. I was going about this — cleaning out Dad’s house — ruthlessly; it was something to get through, a chore like shovelling dirt. For him, it was all fond reminiscences. “And I don’t buy that you don’t remember. You remember.”

  I remember.

  I picked up a copy of the Catholic Book of Worship. The one with Father Sweet’s English hymns.

  Most things I remember from the old days only became clearer in meaning to me when I grew to be an adult. I might overhear a piece of choral music, or read the classics, or smell certain tobacco smoke. I’d be troubled. Then, a small epiphany.

  Later, I studied Latin during my brief university career, and along came full reminders. Phrases sounded familiar. I heard Father Sweet’s voice and I would have a sharp recollection. I shone a light on whatever remained in my mind. I’d have a flash of recognition.

  I became a decoder of my own memories.

  The first things I decoded were benign. Father Sweet quoted Eusebius in casual conversation with schoolboys. “Never discuss the wicked or their deeds, but follow only in the footsteps of good men,” he said in his best stage voice. I remember the hungry look about him when he was coaching boys’ soccer, prowling the sidelines in long, ugly Bermuda socks. And his overenthusi
astic play-by-play in Latin for chess club, with plenty — perhaps too many — pats and neck rubs while we hunched over the boards.

  He loved us. A love, he assured me, that was pure and lustless. The key, you understand, to why sin didn’t infect any of this. Understanding sin is any child’s main task.

  All of it would go back in the drawer, far back in my head. Slammed shut.

  “Hey,” said Jamie. “I remember this shirt.” He held up a yellow dress shirt. “I can still picture Dad wearing that to work with that powder-blue suit. At the time, I didn’t realize Dad was trying to be stylish. Funny what you remember.”

  It was Dad’s shirt from the day I went on my camping trip with Father Sweet in 1978. Funny what you remember.

  2

  Blackburn Hamlet’s English Catholic parish, the Good Shepherd, finally got its separate church building sometime in the 1980s. The building was a concrete bunker styled like three cinder blocks arranged as a bracket. Was it supposed to look like giant stone hands reaching to engulf you? Who knows. There were no picture windows. Light came in from long glass ribbons at the eighteen-foot ceiling, but the main feature was a breathtaking single blood-red stained-glass window illuminating the nave from behind the altar.

  It was what stood out when I stepped inside the building.

  My sister-in-law Clare, Jamie, and I stood in the sacristy with the local parish priest, a man I was meeting for the first time.

  “Please call me ‘Padre,’” said the priest. “Or Pete. I don’t go for ‘Father this and that.’”

  “Me neither,” I said.

  “Padre,” said Jamie. “Thanks for helping us.” My brother shook his hand with sincerity.

  Padre was a clean-cut man in his late fifties, I’d guess. He had a confident and brisk look about him, like a lawyer late to court. He smelled brightly of aftershave.