The Cure (4 page)

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

S
ITTING IN THE LAST ROW
with her back to the wall as usual, Willa Newdale watched the man step into church and knew right off who he was. He walked in like he owned the joint, head up, full of himself, his condition obvious to her practiced eye: not sloppy drunk but in his cups for certain and trying hard to cover. He took a seat in a pew a few rows up. She said a little prayer inside her head, asking God to keep him out of trouble because if he caused a commotion they would look to her to handle things, and she must not be noticed.

Her prayer done, she opened her eyes in time to see Dylan enter with his new deckhand close behind. She was glad that was working out. Jim-Jim was a good old soul, and he deserved the job.

Dylan glanced her way and smiled. She nodded. It was good to see the lobsterman here, good to see him bringing his new hand to the Lord’s house, even if it did mean she would be out of part-time work. She looked down at the ugly old fingers clasped together in her lap, worn and scarred from labor at the shelter and out on Dylan’s boat. She shivered. She stomped her feet a little, the wool of her long skirt scratchy against her unshaven legs. Why did they have to keep this church so cold? She knew for a fact the furnace was serviceable. She could smell it plain as day. All they had to do was turn it up, but every year was just the same, sitting there with freezing feet in spite of two pairs of socks and a sensible pair of Rockport shoes.

One thing was certain: It wouldn’t be getting warmer for a while. Coming on time for long johns. Should have worn them today, in fact. Would’ve taken care of the scratchy wool against her legs. There was no other solution, really, since she had just the one winter skirt, and it made no sense to buy another— not when Sunday mornings were the only time all week she would risk dressing fancy.

It wasn’t just that she needed a low profile. She disliked jewelry for the most part, and makeup and hairdos and skirts and anything else that called attention. Her one and only concession to fashion was the bone-and-palm-nut necklace with the wooden cross, which she always wore underneath her blouse. When you wore old work clothes all week, dress clothes were pretentious—maybe not outright vanity, but unnatural for certain. She was probably not alone in this belief. Dylan didn’t wear a tie, for example. Neither did most of the other lobstermen, though a few of the women seemed to have a different pretty dress for every Sunday of the year. But Willa Newdale did believe in looking decent for the Lord’s day, so there she was in one of her two skirts, with cold feet, itchy legs, and her back to the wall as usual.

Reverend Henry stepped up behind the podium and asked them all to stand. Willa noticed the drunk man wobble just a little on his way up to his feet. O Lord, she prayed again. Please don’t. What if he passes out, or goes to chummin’? She tried not to imagine the contents of his stomach on the back of Emily Weatherspoon, who was standing just in front of him, tried not to think about the outrage, the disapproving stares as she went up to help him, which of course she would. She wished there was a way to get him out right now, before he drew attention to himself, and to her. She should have seen this coming. There were just too many of them now, and more arriving every day. Her fault, of course. She had to stop, that was all there was to it. She had to stop before it spread too far.

She thought about Steve and Hope, sitting in her office, wanting to talk about all these homeless people from away, and that fella dying in the laundry. What if his heart hadn’t picked that moment to stop beating? What if they had gone on with their questions and asked her something direct, something she couldn’t avoid, something she would have to answer, one way or another? Would she have lied to those good people? Hating the thought of that, she felt her breath come fast and shallow. She told herself to calm down. It would be all right, somehow. It had always been all right before.

But Willa Newdale knew it was too late already.

Behind the podium Henry called out a number, and everyone flipped through their hymnals, including Willa. Then the organ started playing and she stopped looking for the hymn. It was going to be “Take My Life and Let It Be,” a good old song she remembered well from back before her troubles.

She tried to sing, and thought about the words, and wanted them to be the truth. She wanted to be consecrated, had given nearly everything for that—her past, her career, her name—but still she stood there breathing way too fast and shallow, and no matter how many times she told herself it would be all right, the pounding of her heart was certain proof that giving nearly everything was not giving near enough.

The singing concluded. Henry made announcements and they passed the basket. It reached her. She hesitated. After this, there would be no turning back. Her hand shook as she dropped her offering in and passed it on.

She had no moxie; it was just that simple. All those years, and still she couldn’t make herself stand up and say “All right, you son of the devil, come and get me if you can.” And if she couldn’t do that, she ought to stop. Or else she ought to go. Because backing into it this way was worse than hiding. At least up to now she had been an honest coward. But if you did a frightening thing without thinking much about it, if you just let it happen, then you were still a coward, but you were a liar too. Imagine if she did not come out of hiding exactly, but also did not stop; imagine if she did that and survived anyway. It wasn’t likely, but just say things went that way. If all was well and she somehow survived to look back later, would she have a right to pride? She would not. That belonged to people who made their choice flat out, who did what was right no matter who might be watching, and said “Here I stand.”

She saw Bill Hightower spot the drunk, her great disappointment. Her heart began to race again as the usher went to stand in the aisle beside the poor man. From the stiffness in the old Pharisee’s back, the way he held his shoulders, she could see he was getting angry. What was that fool of a drunk doing up there? Please, God, don’t let him make Bill Hightower mad. You know how I dislike that man. You know I can’t just sit here and let him disrespect that guy, and you know that’s just what he will do, given half a chance. Please don’t make me stand up here in front of everyone. You know I need to keep a low profile. You know I do, and you know why I do, so please. . . .

The lanky usher bent down over the homeless man like a spider over a fly. Willa Newdale held her breath. She thought her heart would come out through her rib cage. But then Bill Hightower stood up straight again and she remembered to exhale. He was just doing his job as an usher was all, just passing the collection basket.

Willa let herself smile just a little.

If he only knew
.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

T
HE SOUR-LOOKING USHER
by the door nearly blocked his way, but clean clothes and regular showers got Riley Keep inside. Also, he had not yet reached the stage when his efforts at uprightness became stiffly transparent, when he held his head too high and forgot to bend his knees. No one here could possibly see him for what he was. Not yet. So, hiding the proof required to bar him from God’s house, Riley approached with the fluidity and grace of the apparition that he was.

The pews inside were mostly full, everybody dressed in Sunday best, some of the ladies even wearing hats. They had always been a conservative bunch, these Dublin Congregationalists, and yet a fertile field for abolition and suffrage. Riley believed that was why his wife had loved them so. She got to wear nice things, the rules were clear, and all was clean and orderly, although the mind was unconstrained. Being an obvious exception to all this, Riley’s confidence abandoned him in the face of it. Instead of marching boldly along the aisle as planned—the prodigal returning—he took a seat at the first open pew a few rows up, hoping his entry had been barely noticed.

The organist held forth with a hymn as familiar as the seasons and just as old. A hundred voices joined, albeit faintly. The sun shone through the old stained glass, and Riley’s gratitude to God evaporated in the subtle scent of heating oil and a sudden burning realization that his ex-wife and his daughter might be here.

Three years drunk out on the streets was long enough to build a little universe. In rare moments of sobriety, as he huddled under bridges or falsely pledged to work for food at busy intersections, Riley had often thought of his wife and daughter, refashioning them into something he could bear, reducing them into an image cobbled together in haphazard fashion, pliable in faulty memory and comfortably unconnected to the facts. Although he had not come to church expecting a challenge to the petty way he had installed them in his visceral world, that familiar lofty space, the firmness of the pew, the smells and sounds and dimly recognized people in the sanctuary conspired to face him squarely with the fact that somewhere his ex-wife and child remained in total independence of his fantasies.

Nothing of consequence outside of Riley Keep had truly changed despite his efforts to deny it. His family might actually be there, in the flesh. They were certainly somewhere, not just inside his head but out beyond him somewhere, seeing real things and breathing true air, possibly just a few pews up ahead of him right then, singing ancient hymns. This was obvious of course, yet to know it in a rush after forgetting for so long—to unwittingly come so close to the truth of his living family after years of fantasy—was terrifying.

Riley Keep had entered sacred space with grand plans of thanking God for gaining whiskey, only to receive the crushing weight of vast forgotten loss.

Of course Riley knew the way to bear that burden, and as if in miraculous endorsement of his method an offering basket was passed to him. He stared at the contents. One-dollar bills, and tens and twenties, and small white envelopes with the name of the church preprinted on the outside. He knew the envelopes contained the real money, perhaps as much as a hundred dollars each. He lifted one. To hold so much was a heady business, enough to drive away all thought of his ex-family’s exterior existence. Here were paper metaphors for many bottles of his method. Enough excellent corked Scotch to last a week. Enough to send his flesh-and-blood losses back into his head where they belonged, so everyone could be more comfortable.

Riley dipped his hand into the basket, slipping spread fingers through the bills and envelopes, like a pirate sifting treasure. Should he limit this to just a little? Or, being near the door, should he run away with everything? It did not cross his mind to simply pass the basket until the watchful usher stepped too close. With the tall man looming at his elbow Riley had no choice. He passed the basket on.

As the money it contained was borne away and the promise of good whiskey became merely hypothetical, Riley Keep emerged briefly from the power that had nearly driven him to steal these people’s tithes. He remembered where he was and why he had come. He remembered who he had once been. He sat empty-handed as a man stood up to preach. Ignoring his words, Riley thought of sunrises on the Atlantic and the harbor at the center of his hometown and bridal gowns and belated christenings in this very space where he was sitting, and he thought about the fact that he could go from mourning for his friend and longing for his wife and child to lusting for good whiskey in the time it took to sing a hymn. What kind of man could do a thing like that? It was an old question with an answer he knew well. The answer was the reason people would not meet his eyes, the reason sunrises made him angry, the reason he had stayed away from Dublin all this time. The real question, the one he couldn’t answer, was why he had returned.

He thought about his answered prayer, that excellent bottle of Scotch.

He thought about the message on a lobsterman’s bumper.

Jesus Loves You
.

If that were true it would have been a kinder thing to leave him with no conscience, no remorse, no empathy at all. Yet here he sat in Dublin, having braved the deadly cold for the sake of someone else, to no avail. When would he learn his sacrifices were unacceptable? Why could he not simply be a drunk, a thief, a loathsome man who had abandoned wife and child for alcohol? Why could he not settle for the numbing anesthesia of all that? If he couldn’t care about himself, why must he care for anything at all?

And yet, God help him, care he did.

The fella finished preaching, and someone passed the Communion platter to Riley Keep. The tray held many tiny glasses shaped like thimbles. Riley remembered how it was: little glasses filled with grape juice around the outside of the tray and red wine in the center for the purists. His eyes welled at the thought of Brice, who was beyond all this. He thought of his wife and daughter, possibly right there in that meetinghouse, a few rows up, facing forward and well beyond the sight of a man with such weak vision. They might be holding little thimbles full of wine like these, contemplating lofty matters, preparing to commit themselves to something greater than themselves. And knowing that—even knowing that—still he dreamed of something good to drink.

How he hated himself. How he longed to dream of other things, or failing that, to dream of nothing. But he had prayed that prayer a thousand times without results, except to learn that no one gets to choose his dreams.

Riley thought about his wife’s and daughter’s minds on lofty matters and knew he could not join them, but against his will they had one thing in common. Right here in his hands, like them he held a thing much greater than himself.

Riley took a thimbleful of wine and drank it without pause. Then he took another, and drank it too. He took a third, a fourth, a fifth . . . he would have drunk it all had not the outraged usher in the aisle seized the platter and his feeble upper arm and pulled him to his feet and pushed him through the doors and on across the vestibule, and out the building and down the steps to shove him sprawling to the sidewalk.

Riley rose without a pause and charged across the street into the little park where the answer to his first prayer in many years lay waiting for him in the bushes. He searched the hedge, and after one long frantic moment when he thought it had been stolen, Riley found the bottle. He removed the cap and drank a burning drink and settled down into the writhing oaken roots again with the blood of Christ and good Scotch mixed together in his belly, thinking, thank God, thank God, thank God for something good to drink.

In a little while the church doors opened, and he watched as fuzzy people started coming down the steps. It was too far away, and he was far too richly blessed with whiskey to see the congregation clearly. Might two of them be his wife and child? Might they see him there, in his native element? Had they witnessed his ignoble ejection?

It did not matter.

Riley only knew he had returned to fail them at the first temptation, as always. Beneath the well-known rafters of that church the truth had overwhelmed him, unavoidable. They said some people hit a bottom and then they turned and found themselves, but clearly he was bottomless.

He closed his eyes and waited for the pleasant sounds of Christian greetings to disperse. Eventually the silence of a Sunday afternoon in Dublin settled in. Three filthy strangers approached him, hungry eyes on his bottle. Snarling, he waved them away. An hour or two later some pathetic woman came and meekly asked him for a drink. In reply he curled himself around his golden blessing, shielding it as he took another sip, husbanding the Scotch, tragically aware that it would soon be empty of its beauty.

One did not find such whiskey every day. It was the finest he had known in three long years out on the street. He would not share it with the strangers crowding round him in the park, but oh, how Riley wished to share it! The thought of three more years without Brice and without another bottle like the one God had given him that day began to weigh as heavily upon him as the weight of all the years that he had stolen from his precious wife and child.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
“The wheel is come full circle.”
Yet it was not Kent or even Lear who spoke that line. No, it was the liar, Edmund. There was no circle. History was the story of a headlong rush in one direction, straight down to the grave.

Riley rose and stumbled farther up the hill, cradling his answered prayer with both arms like it was the baby Jesus, looking for a place to sleep, perhaps forever. Downtown was nearly empty, most of the shops closed for Sunday or the season. He turned into a narrow dead-end alley and nearly fell. He leaned against a garbage bin to take another drink. His was a simple plan. Half a quart of good Scotch whiskey all at once would grant him sweet oblivion. He would drink as quickly as he could, and sleep, and let the cold come have its way, and greet the morning’s sunrise stiff from freezing or from rigor mortis; it did not matter which.

Riley tipped the bottle up and, swallowing, lost his balance and fell down to the bricks. Miraculously, the bottle did not break and not a drop was spilled. The answered prayer made sense to him at last. This was no gift for his trivial enjoyment; it was a final act of mercy, a divine
coup de grâce
. Retrieving the bottle, he crawled across the alley to the wall behind the garbage bin, well out of sight of the street and anyone who might come to try to save him before the cold had settled in.

There against that wall he sat up like a man. He stripped off his coat. On further reflection he removed his shirt and undershirt as well, determined as he was to hasten the effect. With the bare flesh of his back pressed against the alley wall, he thought of Dylan Thomas, Kerouac, Fitzgerald—all great minds gone from alcohol. He was in good company here in this hallowed hall, prostrate before this altar, this back alley, this garbage bin. Again he brought the divine blessing to his lips.

As the bottle tilted, Riley saw an envelope beside him on the bricks. He paused. He picked it up. On it was the name of the church, preprinted. Apparently it had fallen from his pocket when he pulled off his coat. Apparently he had stolen something from the basket after all. He often did such things without remembering.

Two great gifts in one day seemed impossible, so of course the envelope must contain a check, which would be useless to him. But he noticed it was bulky, not light and slender as one would expect. Carefully, he set the Scotch between his legs and peeled away the flap. Inside was not a check, nor cash, but two folded scraps of paper and a little plastic bag containing pure white powder, enough to fill a bottle cap or two.

Could it be cocaine? Heroin? Amphetamines? Riley had never used such things, but his life the last few years had often brought him into contact with drug addicts. Could it be the twisted offering of some such person?

What kind of man put drugs into a church collection envelope? Forgetting how it came to be in his possession, Riley swelled with indignation. This outrage made him want to preach! Then he thought of some befuddled addict taking biblical admonishments literally, tithing ten percent of all the drugs he had, only to have a befuddled drunkard come and steal his profane tithe from the house of God. Rescued from the brink of hypocrisy by that thought, Riley laughed aloud. Who but God could manage such a thing? Who but God could make it work on so many levels? Because of course one couldn’t steal from God, not really, so this was obviously yet another gift from the divine. How merciful of God to grant him laughter in the end.

To prolong the joke, Riley removed the note. Unfolding it he raised the first page close, three inches from his eyes so he could read:

May the Lord forgive me, I should have done this long ago. Whoever opens this, please give it to the pastor. He’ll know what to do. Tell him it will cure alcoholics, and I want everyone to have it. Tell him if they ever drink again, the urge will return stronger than ever. I used to think there was a way to fix that too, but now I know there isn’t. Anyway, this will cure them so long as they never drink another drop
.

Riley read it one more time. Then lifted the second page up to his bloodshot eyes. It seemed to be a list of chemical equations and instructions couched in symbols Riley did not comprehend.

He let the hand that held the note and bag fall onto his lap. Some of the powder spilled out on his trousers. Ignoring it, propped up against the freezing alley wall much as they had found his old friend Brice against the dryer, Riley stared at nothing.

This will cure them.

He thought of all his prayers for strength to stand against the urge. He thought of all the silence in response, and he remembered God had never cared about his tears. Why should he think God might care about his laughter? Losing Brice and visiting the place where he had married and seen his daughter christened had made Riley lose focus. The powder was no gift from heaven. Neither was the Scotch, of course. Those things were mere coincidence, random substances encountered in his headlong rush to death. He had not dared admit the truth in quite a while, but in the hallowed hall of that back alley, beside the altar of the garbage bin, the truth must be confessed.