The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics) (38 page)

Father Fabre pulled up short. “
Thanks
,” he said, and began to climb the stairs. The hospital was only a few blocks away, but it hadn’t occurred to him that he might have walked there. He was losing every trick. Earlier he had imagined the pastor driving him to the hospital, and the scene there when they arrived—how it would be when the pastor’s indifference to his curate’s leg became apparent to the doctors and nurses, causing their hearts to harden against him. But all this the pastor had doubtless foreseen, and that was why he wasn’t going along. The man was afraid of public opinion.

At the hospital, however, they only laughed when Father Fabre told them what had happened to him, and when, after they had taken the bullet out, he asked if they had to report the matter to the police. Just laughed at him. Only a flesh wound, they said. They didn’t even want him to keep off the leg. It had been a mistake for him to ask. Laughed. Told him just to change his sock. But he arranged for the pastor to get the bill. And, on leaving, although he knew nothing would come of it, he said, “I thought you were required by law to report
all
gunshot cases.”

When he returned to the rectory, the pastor and John were talking softly in the upstairs hall. They said nothing to him, which he thought strange, and so he said nothing to them. He was lucky, he guessed, that they hadn’t laughed. He limped into his room, doubting whether John had even been told, and closed the door with a little bang. He turned and stood still. Then, after a few moments in which he realized why the pastor and John were in the hall, he limped over to the window—to the old mohair chair.

Ruefully, he recalled his false praise of the chair. How it had cost him! For the pastor had taken him at his word. After the shooting accident, the pastor must have been in no mood to give Father Fabre a table in which he seemed only half interested. Nothing would do then but that the wounded curate be compensated with the object of his only enthusiasm in the basement. No one knew better than the pastor where soft living could land a young priest, and yet there it was—luxury itself, procured by the pastor and dragged upstairs by his agent and now awaiting his curate’s pleasure. And to think it might have been the maple table!

They clearly hadn’t done a thing to the chair. The dust was all there, every grain intact. They were waiting for him, the pastor and John, waiting to see him sitting in it. He thought of disappointing them, of holing up as the pastor had earlier. But he just couldn’t contend with the man anymore that day. He didn’t know how he’d ever be able to thank them, John for carrying it up from the basement, the pastor for the thing itself, but he limped over to the door to let them in. Oh, it was a losing game.

I WAS WAITING in the lobby, sitting in a fairly clean overshoe, out of the draft and near a radiator, dozing, when the monthly meeting of the ushers ended and the men began to drift up from the church basement. Once a meeting got under way, the majority of the ushers, as well as Father Malt, their old pastor, liked to wind it up and break for the rectory, for pinochle and beer. Father Malt, seeing me, called “Fritz!” and I came, crossing in front of Mr Cormack, the new man, who muttered “Bad luck!” and blessed himself. I hadn’t thought much about him before, but this little action suggested to me that his eyes were failing or that he was paranoidal, for, though a black cat, I have a redeeming band of white at my throat.

While I waited for the ushers to put their hats and coats on, I thought I saw their souls reflected in their mufflers, in those warm, unauthentic plaids and soiled white rayons and nylons, a few with fringe work, some worn as chokers in the nifty, or
haute
-California, manner, and some tucked in between coat and vest in a way that may be native to our part of Minnesota.

Father Malt and I went out the door together. Going barefooted, as nature intended, I was warned of the old ice beneath the new-fallen snow. Father Malt, however, in shoes and overshoes, walked blindly, and slipped and fell.

When several ushers took hold of Father Malt, Mr Keller, the head usher, a druggist and a friend of physicians, spoke with authority. “Don’t move him! That’s the worst thing you can do! Call an ambulance!”

Three ushers thought to cover Father Malt with their overcoats (three others, too late with theirs, held them in their hands), and everyone just stood and stared, as I did, at the old priest, my friend and protector, lying under the mound of overcoats, with the indifferent snow settling down as upon a new grave. I began to feel the cold in my bones and to think that I should certainly perish if I were locked out on such a night. I heard Mr Keller ordering Mr Cormack to the rectory to phone for an ambulance. Reluctantly—not through any deficiency in my sorrow—I left the scene of the accident, crossed the snowy lawn, and entered the rectory with Mr Cormack.

After Mr Cormack had summoned an ambulance, he called his old pastor, Father O’Hannon, of St Clara’s, Minneapolis (of which Sherwood, our town, was gradually becoming a suburb), and asked him to be at the hospital, in case Father Malt should be in danger of death and in need of extreme unction. “The assistant here, Father Burner, isn’t around. His car’s gone from the garage, and there’s no telling when that one’ll be back,” said Mr Cormack, sounding lonesome for his old parish. At St Clara’s, he’d evidently been on more intimate terms with the priests. His last words to Father O’Hannon, “We could sure use someone like you out here,” gave me the idea that he had gone fishing for Father Burner’s favor but had caught one of the white whale’s flukes. Now, like so many of us, he dreamed of getting even someday. I could only wish him luck as he left the rectory.

I watched at the window facing upon the tragedy, enduring the cold draft there for Father Malt’s sake, until the ambulance came. Then I retired to the parlor register and soon fell asleep—not without a prayer for Father Malt and many more for myself. With Father Burner running the rectory, it was going to be a hard, hard, and possibly fatal winter for me.

The ironic part was that Father Burner and I, bad as he was, had a lot in common. We disliked the same people (Mr Keller, for instance), we disliked the same dishes (those suited to Father Malt’s dentures), but, alas, we also disliked each other. This fault originated in Father Burner’s raw envy of me—which, however, I could understand. Father Malt didn’t improve matters when he referred to me before visitors, in Father Burner’s presence, as
the
assistant. I was realist enough not to hope for peace between us assistants as long as Father Malt lived. But it did seem a shame that there was no way of letting Father Burner know I was prepared—if and when his position improved—to be his friend and favorite, although not necessarily in that order. (For some reason, I seem to make a better favorite than friend.) As it was Father Burner’s misfortune to remain a curate too long, it was mine to know that my life of privilege—my preferred place at table, for example—appeared to operate at the expense of his rights and might be the cause of my ultimate undoing. It was no good wishing, as I sometimes did, that Father Malt were younger—he was eighty-one—or that I were older, that we two could pass on together when the time came.

Along toward midnight, waking, I heard Father Burner’s car pull into the driveway. A moment later the front porch cracked under his heavy step. He entered the rectory, galoshes and all, and, as was his custom, proceeded to foul his own nest wherever he went, upstairs and down. Finally, after looking, as he always did, for the telephone messages that seemingly never came, or, as he imagined, never got taken down, he went out on the front porch and brought in more snow and the evening paper. He sat reading in the parlor—it was then midnight—still in his dripping galoshes, still in perfect ignorance of what had befallen Father Malt
and
me. Before he arrived, the telephone had been ringing at half-hour intervals—obviously the hospital, or one of the ushers, trying to reach him. The next time, I knew, it would toll for me.

Although I could see no way to avoid my fate, I did see the folly of waiting up for it. I left the parlor to Father Burner and went to the kitchen, where I guessed he would look last for me, if he knew anything of my habits, for I seldom entered there and never stayed long. Mrs Wynn, the housekeeper, loosely speaking, was no admirer of mine, nor I of her womanly disorder.

I concealed myself in a basket of clean, or at least freshly laundered, clothes, and presently, despite everything, I slept.

Early the following day, when Father Burner came downstairs, he had evidently heard the news, but he was late for his Mass, as usual, and had time for only one wild try at me with his foot. However, around noon, when he returned from the hospital, he paused only to phone the chancery to say that Father Malt had a fractured hip and was listed as “critical” and promptly chased me from the front of the house to the kitchen. He’d caught me in the act of exercising my claws on his new briefcase, which lay on the hall chair. The briefcase was a present to himself at Christmas—no one else thought quite so much of him—but he hadn’t been able to find a real use for it and I think it piqued him to see that I had.

“I want that black devil kept out of my sight,” he told Mrs Wynn, before whom he was careful to watch his language.

That afternoon I heard him telling Father Ed Desmond, his friend from Minneapolis, who’d dropped by, that he favored the wholesale excommunication of household pets from homes and particularly from rectories. He mentioned me in the same breath with certain parrots and hamsters he was familiar with. Although he was speaking on the subject of clutter, he said nothing about model railroads, Father Desmond’s little vice, or about photography, his own. The term “household pet” struck me as a double-barreled euphemism, unpetted as I was and denied the freedom of the house.

And still, since I’d expected to be kicked out into the weather, and possibly not to get that far alive, I counted my deportation to the kitchen as a blessing—a temporary one, however. I had no reason to believe that Father Burner’s feeling about me had changed. I looked for something new in persecutions. When nothing happened, I looked all the harder.

I spent my days in the kitchen with Mrs Wynn, sleeping when I could, just hanging around in her way when I couldn’t. If I wearied of that, as I inevitably did, I descended into the cellar. The cellar smelled of things too various—laundry, coal, developing fluid, and mice—and the unseemly noise of the home-canned goods digesting on the shelves, which another might never notice, reached and offended my ears. After an hour down there, where the floor was cold to my feet, I was ready to return to the kitchen and Mrs Wynn.

Mrs Wynn had troubles of her own—her husband hit the jar—but they did nothing to Christianize her attitude toward me. She fed me scraps, and kicked me around, not hard but regularly, in the course of her work. I expected little from her, however. She was another in the long tradition of unjust stewards.

Father Burner’s relatively civil conduct was harder to comprehend. One afternoon, rising from sleep and finding the kitchen door propped open, I forgot myself and strolled into the parlor, into his very presence. He was reading
Church Property Administration
, a magazine I hadn’t seen in the house before. Having successfully got that far out of line—as far as the middle of the room—I decided to keep going. As if by chance, I came to my favorite register, where, after looking about to estimate the shortest distance between me and any suitable places of refuge in the room, I collapsed around the heat. There was still no intimation of treachery—only peace surpassing all understanding, only the rush of warmth from the register, the winds of winter outside, and the occasional click and whisper of a page turning in
Church Property Administration
.

Not caring to push my luck, wishing to come and doze another day, wanting merely to establish a precedent, I got up and strolled back into the kitchen—to think. I threw out the possibility that Father Burner had suffered a lapse of memory, had forgotten the restriction placed on my movements. I conceived the idea that he’d lost, or was losing, his mind, and then, grudgingly, I gave up the idea. He was not trying to ignore me. He was ignoring me without trying. I’d been doing the same thing to people for years, but I’d never dreamed that one of them would do it to me.

From that day on, I moved freely about the house, as I had in Father Malt’s time, and Mrs Wynn, to add to the mystery, made no effort to keep me with her in the kitchen. I was thus in a position to observe other lapses or inconsistencies in Father Burner. Formerly, he’d liked to have lights burning all over the house. Now that he was paying the bill, the place was often shrouded in darkness. He threw out the tattered rugs at the front and back doors and bought rubber mats—at a saving, evidently, for although one mat bore the initial “B,” the other had an “R,” which stood for nobody but may have been the closest thing he could get to go with the “B.” I noticed, too, that he took off his galoshes before entering the house, as though it were no longer just church property but home to him.

I noticed that he was going out less with his camera, and to the hospital more, not just to visit Father Malt, to whom he’d never had much to say, but to visit the sick in general.

In former times, he had been loath to go near the hospital during the day, and at night, before he’d leave his bed to make a sick call, there had had to be infallible proof that a patient was in danger of death. It had been something awful to hear him on the line with the hospital in the wee hours, haggling, asking if maybe they weren’t a little free and easy with their designation “critical,” as, indeed, I believe some of them liked to be. He’d tried to get them to change a patient’s “critical” to “fair” (which meant he could forget about that one), and acted as though there were some therapeutic power about the word, if the hospital could just be persuaded to make use of it. Father Malt, with his hearing aid off, was virtually deaf, Mrs Wynn roomed down the street, and so I had been the one to suffer. “Oh, go on, go on,” I’d wanted to say. “Go on over there, or don’t go—but hang up! Some of us want to sleep!” There were nights when I’d hardly sleep a wink—unlike Father Burner, who, even if he
did
go to the hospital, would come bumbling back and drop off with his clothes on.