The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics) (37 page)

“Better go with you,” the pastor said, feeling his throat.

Father Fabre nodded. This was what he’d had in mind all the time. While the pastor was inside his room looking for his collar (always a chance of meeting a parishioner on the stairs), Father Fabre relaxed and fell to congratulating himself. He had been tough and it had worked. The other thing had proved a waste of time.

After a bit, though, Father Fabre took another view of the situation, knowing as he did so that it was the right one, that the door hadn’t just happened to shut after the pastor, that the man wasn’t coming out. Oh, that was it. The pastor had won again. He was safe in his room again, secure in the knowledge that his curate wouldn’t knock and start up the whole business again, not for a while anyway.

Father Fabre went away. Going downstairs, he told himself that though he had lost, he had extended the pastor as never before, and would get the best of him yet.

Father Fabre sensed John, the janitor, before he saw him sitting in the dark under the staircase, at one of his stations. He might be found in this rather episcopal chair, which was also a hall-tree, or on a box in the furnace room, or in the choir loft behind the organ, or in the visiting priest’s confessional. There were probably other places which Father Fabre didn’t know about. John moved around a lot, foxlike, killing time.

Father Fabre switched on the light. John pulled himself together and managed a smile, his glasses as always frosted over with dust so that he seemed to be watching you through basement windows.

“John, you know that lock on the door to the church basement?”

John nodded.

“It’s not much of a lock. Think we can open it?”

John frowned.

“A tap on the side?”

John shook his head.

“No?”

“Sorry, Father.”

“So.” Father Fabre turned away.

“Will you need a hammer, Father?”

“Don’t think I’ll need one. Sure you won’t come along?”

“Awful busy, Father.” But John found time to get up and accompany Father Fabre to the iron staircase that led to the church basement. There they parted. Father Fabre snapped the light switch on the wall. He wasn’t surprised when nothing happened. He left the door open for light. A half flight down, pausing, he hearkened to John’s distant footsteps, rapidly climbing, and then he went winding down into the gloom. At the bottom he seated himself on a step and waited.

Soon he heard a slight noise above. Rounding the last turn, descending into view, was the pastor. “Oh, there you are,” said Father Fabre, rising.

The pastor voiced no complaint—and why should he? He’d lost a trick, but Father Fabre had taken it honorably, according to the rules, in a manner worthy of the pastor himself.

Father Fabre was up on his toes, straining to see.

The pastor was fooling with something inside the fuse box on the wall, standing up to it, his back almost a shield against Father Fabre’s eyes. Overhead a bulb lit up. So that was it, thought Father Fabre, coming down to earth—and to think that he’d always blamed the wiring for the way some of the lights didn’t work around the church and rectory, recommending a general checkup, prophesying death by conflagration to the pastor. Father Fabre, rising again, saw the pastor screw in another fuse where none had been before. That would be the one controlling the basement lights.

The pastor dealt next with the door, dropping into a crouch to dial the lock.

Father Fabre leaned forward like an umpire for the pitch, but saw at once that it would be impossible to lift the combination. He scraped his foot in disgust, grinding a bit of fallen plaster. The pastor’s fingers tumbled together. He seemed to be listening. After a moment, he began to dial again, apparently having to start all over.

“There,” he said finally. He removed the lock, threw open the door, but before he went in, he stepped over to the fuse box. The overhead light went out. Father Fabre entered the basement, where he had been only once before, and not very far inside then. The pastor secured the door behind them. From a convenient clothes tree he removed a black cap and put it on—protection against the dust? Father Fabre hadn’t realized that the pastor, who now looked like a burglar in an insurance ad, cared. The pastor glanced at him. Quickly Father Fabre looked away. He gazed around him in silence.

It was impossible to decide what it all meant. In the clothes tree alone, Father Fabre noted a cartridge belt, a canteen stenciled with the letters U.S., a pair of snowshoes, an old bicycle tire of wrinkled red rubber, a beekeeper’s veil. One of Father Fabre’s first services to the pastor had been to help John carry two workbenches into the basement. At that time he had thought the pastor must have plans for a school in which manual training would be taught. Now he felt that the pastor had no plans at all for any of the furniture and junk. A few of the unemployed statues when seen at a distance, those with their arms extended, appeared to be trying to get the place straightened up, carrying things, but on closer examination they, too, proved to be preoccupied with a higher kind of order, and carrying crosiers.

The pastor came away from a rack containing billiard cues, ski poles, and guns.

“Here,” he said, handing an air rifle to Father Fabre.

Father Fabre accepted the gun, tipped it, listening to the BB shot bowling up and down inside. “What’s this for?”

“Rats.”

“Couldn’t kill a rat with this, could I?”

“Could.”

But Father Fabre noticed that the pastor was arming himself with a .22 rifle. “What’s that?” he asked covetously.

“This gun’s not accurate,” said the pastor. “From a shooting gallery.”

“What’s wrong with trapping ’em?”

“Too smart.”

“How about poison?”

“Die in the walls.”

The pastor moved off, bearing his gun in the way that was supposed to assure safety.

Father Fabre held his gun the same way and followed the pastor. He could feel the debris closing in, growing up behind him. The path ahead appeared clear only when he looked to either side. He trailed a finger in the dust on a table top, revealing the grain. He stopped. The wood was maple, he thought, maple oiled and aged to the color of saddle leather. There were little niches designed to hold glasses. The table was round, a whist table, it might be, and apparently sound. Here was a noble piece of furniture that would do wonders for his room. It could be used for his purposes, and more. That might be the trouble with it. The pastor was strong for temperance. It might not be enough for Father Fabre to deplore the little niches.

“Oh, Father.”

The pastor retraced his steps.

“This might do,” Father Fabre said grudgingly, careful not to betray a real desire. There was an awful glazed green urn thing in the middle of the table which Father Fabre feared would leave scratches or a ring. A thing like that, which might have spent its best days in a hotel, by the elevators, belonged on the floor. Father Fabre wanted to remove it from the table, but he controlled himself.

“Don’t move,” said the pastor. “Spider.”

Father Fabre held still while the pastor brushed it off his back. “Thanks.” Father Fabre relaxed and gazed upon the table again. He had to have it. He would have it.

But the pastor was moving on.

Father Fabre followed in his steps, having decided to say nothing just then, needing more time to think. The important thing was not to seem eager. “It isn’t always what we want that’s best for us,” the pastor had said more than once. He loved to speak of Phil Mooney—a classmate of Father Fabre’s—who had been offered a year of free study at a major secular university, but who had been refused permission by the bishop. Young Mooney, as the pastor said, had taken it so well . . . “This—how about this?” said Father Fabre. He had stopped before a nightstand, a little tall for typing. “I could saw the legs off some.”

The pastor, who had paused, now went ahead again, faster.

Father Fabre lifted his gun and followed again, wondering if he’d abused the man’s sensibilities, some article of the accumulator’s creed. He saw a piano stool well suited to his strategy. This he could give up with good grace. “Now here’s something,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind having this.” He sounded as though he thought he could get it too.

The pastor glanced back and shook his head. “Belongs upstairs.”

“Oh, I see,” said Father Fabre submissively. There was no piano in the rectory, unless that, too, was in the pastor’s room.

The pastor, obviously pleased with his curate’s different tone, stopped to explain. “A lot of this will go upstairs when we’re through remodeling.”

Father Fabre forgot himself. “
Remodeling?
” he said, and tried to get the pastor to look him in the eye.

The pastor turned away.

Father Fabre, who was suddenly seeing his error, began to reflect upon it. There was no material evidence of remodeling, it was true, but he had impugned the pastor’s good intentions. Was there a pastor worth his salt who didn’t have improvements in mind, contractors and costs on the brain?

They moved deeper into the interior. Above them the jungle joined itself in places now. Father Fabre passed under the full length of a ski without taking notice of it until confronted by its triangular head, arching down at him. He shied away. Suddenly the pastor stopped. Father Fabre pulled up short, cradling his gun, which he’d been using as a cane. Something coiled on the trail?

“How’s this?” said the pastor. He was trying the drawers of a pitiful old sideboard affair with its mirrors out and handles maimed, a poor, blind thing. “Like this?” he said. He seemed to have no idea what they were searching for.

“I need something to type on,” Father Fabre said bluntly.

The pastor hit the trail again, somehow leaving the impression that Father Fabre was the one who was being difficult.

They continued to the uttermost end of the basement. Here they were confronted by a small mountain of pamphlets. In the bowels of the mountain something moved.

The pastor’s hands shifted on his gun. “They’re in there,” he whispered, and drew back a pace. He waved Father Fabre to one side, raised the gun, and pumped lead into the pamphlets.
Sput-flub. Sput-flub. Sput-spong-spit
.

Father Fabre reached for his left leg, dropped to his knees, his gun clattering down under him. He grabbed up his trouser leg and saw the little hole bleeding in his calf. It hurt, but not as much as he would’ve thought.

The pastor came over to examine the leg. He bent down. “Just a flesh wound,” he said, straightening up. “You’re lucky.”

“
Lucky!
”

“Tire there at the bottom of the pile. Absorbed most of the fire power. Bullet went through and ricocheted. You’re lucky. Here.” The pastor was holding out his hand.

“Oh, no,” said Father Fabre, and lowered his trouser leg over the wound.

The pastor seemed to be surprised that Father Fabre wouldn’t permit him to pinch the bullet out with his dirty fingers.

Father Fabre stood up. The leg held him, but his walking would be affected. He thought he could feel some blood in his sock. “Afraid I’ll have to leave you,” he said. He glanced at the pastor, still seeking sympathy. And there it was, at last, showing in the pastor’s face, some sympathy, and words were on the way—no, caught again in the log jam of the man’s mind and needing a shove if they were to find their way down to the mouth, and so Father Fabre kept on looking at the pastor, shoving . . .

“Sorry it had to happen,” muttered the pastor. Apparently that was going to be all. He was picking up Father Fabre’s gun.

Painfully, Father Fabre began to walk. Sorry! That it
had
to happen! Anyone else, having fired the shot, would’ve been only too glad to assume the blame. What kind of man was this? This was a man of very few words, as everyone knew, and he had said he was sorry. How sorry then? Sorry enough?

Father Fabre stopped. “How about this?” he said, sounding as if he hadn’t asked about the maple table before. It was a daring maneuver, but he was giving the pastor a chance to reverse himself without losing face, to redeem himself . . .

The pastor was shaking his head.

Father Fabre lost patience. He’d let the old burglar shoot him down and this was what he got for it. “Why not?” he demanded.

The pastor was looking down, not meeting Father Fabre’s eye. “You don’t have a good easy chair, do you?”

Father Fabre, half turning, saw what the pastor had in mind. There just weren’t any words for the chair. Father Fabre regarded it stoically—the dust lying fallow in the little mohair furrows, the ruptured bottom—and didn’t know what to say. It would be impossible to convey his true feelings to the pastor. The pastor really did think that this was a good easy chair. There was no way to get at the facts with him. But the proper study of curates is pastors. “It’s
too
good,” Father Fabre said, making the most of his opportunity. “If I ever sat down in a chair like that I might never get up again. No, it’s not for me.”

Oh, the pastor was pleased—the man was literally smiling. Of a self-denying nature himself, famous for it in the diocese, he saw the temptation that such a chair would be to his curate.

“No?” he said, and appeared, besides pleased, relieved.

“No, thanks,” said Father Fabre briskly, and moved on. It might be interesting to see how far he could go with the man—but some other time. His leg seemed to be stiffening.

When they arrived back at the door, the pastor, in a manner that struck Father Fabre as too leisurely under the circumstances, racked the guns, hung up his cap, boxed the dust out of his knees and elbows, all the time gazing back where they’d been—not, Father Fabre thought, with the idea of returning to the rats as soon as he decently could, but with the eyes of a game conservationist looking to the future.

“I was thinking I’d better go to the hospital with this,” said Father Fabre. He felt he ought to tell the pastor that he didn’t intend to let the bullet remain in his leg.

He left the pastor to lock up, and limped out.

“Better take the car,” the pastor called after him.