Tumbleweeds (34 page)

“TD, can you tell us how you feel?”

“About what?”

“Uh, about the score.” (Losing or winning.)

“No. Can you?”

“On that last play, TD, what was going through your mind?”

“Beats the hell out of me. What was going through yours?”

In spite of herself, Cathy chuckled.

Another part described his freewheeling lifestyle, love of sailing, and penchant for brunette models. It had detailed features of his $5 million condominium in Carlsbad, located thirty-five miles north of San Diego, among the most expensive places to live in the United States. Her son had read of Trey’s three sailboats and multiple cars and seen pictures of him in the company of an assortment of beautiful women. She’d discovered the magazine when the café had begun to afford an increase in their standard of living, but Will could not help but compare his father’s affluence to the years of his mother’s financial struggles when he’d wake in the night to find her worrying over the ledgers at the kitchen table. Out-of-pocket expenses for his great-grandmother’s medicine, car repairs, a new roof for the house, and renovations to Bennie’s left little room for bikes at Christmas and trips to Disneyland.

And Cathy was sure he had not missed Trey’s preference for tall women. She’d felt a maternal tightening of her chest. How could Will not feel resentment toward a father who favored arm candy in such contrast to his mother and who was earning millions while she’d labored to make ends meet?

She’d wondered if Will had paid much attention to the rest of the article that depicted Trey as “a heads and tails kind of guy.” Cool thinking, total self-control, and exemplary conduct described him on the field. “Off the gridiron,” the reporter wrote, “he could rival the back end of your most cantankerous farm animal.” However, from a long observation of Trey Don Hall, the writer stated, he had gotten the impression that the San Diego quarterback had gotten tired of his fame, riches, and women but never his game. “On the football field you see a person. Off, you see a persona. It’s like he’s posing for the
cover of a glossy, glamorous, in-your-face magazine—
this is what it’s like to be me, folks!
—about as real a portrait of himself as a woman wearing makeup. One wonders how authentically the Armani suits, Berluti shoes, and diamond-studded Rolex project the image of a man relishing a full and happy life.”

Cathy had remembered John’s words: “He’ll never know anything is missing in his life until he has it all…”

She had slipped the magazine back in place and never mentioned it. Afterwards she’d regretted allowing the chance to slide by that might have gotten Will to open up about his father. There had not come another opportunity to penetrate her son’s obstinate silence on the subject of Trey Don Hall.

The flight attendant came down the aisle for one last pass to collect trash. She was young and pretty and gave Will a special smile. Turning painfully to check if his seat belt was fastened, Cathy caught an amused grin from Ron Turner in the seat beside him, a pleasant sight for a change. Coach Turner hadn’t had much to smile about since his team won the state championship. He’d taken the death of his daughter terribly hard the following fall, and within a few years his wife had died from the heart disease she’d battled for years. His coaching duties began to suffer, and after a number of losing seasons he’d been forced to retire rather than be let go. Loss of income was no problem, but his sense of personal failure and disappointment with life showed in his sour demeanor and devitalized posture. This trip to New Orleans to celebrate the ordination of his favorite player to the priesthood might be just what the coach needed to restart his engines.

John was waiting for them in the reception area as they deplaned. His tall figure was easy to spot in the crowd awaiting arrivals, and Cathy’s heartbeat stopped when, for the first time, she saw him dressed in the black suit and shirt and Roman collar of his calling.

“Oh, my goodness,” Mabel said in an awed whisper. Loaded with
bags, they all stopped several feet short of him, halted by his priestly beauty.

Cathy laughed teasingly. “We don’t know whether to genuflect or throw our arms around you,” she said.

John’s grin broadened, lighting his deep brown eyes. “Hugs will do. Welcome to N’orlins, y’all.” He and Cathy embraced, holding each other without speaking for an exclusive, personal moment before John hugged Emma and Mabel and shook hands with Ron and Father Richard, whom he’d asked to “vest” him at his ordination. Will stood silently behind the group to wait his turn, looking shy and wary of John as if he’d suddenly become a stranger.

“Hello, Will,” John said in a quieter octave.

Will seemed not to see his extended hand. “What do I call you?” he asked, shooting an uncertain glance at his mother.

“What you’ve always called me—John.”

“Not Father?”

“Only if you want to. And only after my ordination.”

“Father. I want to call you that,” Will said, his voice catching, and without another word flew into John’s arms.

T
HE
M
OST
H
OLY
N
AME
of Jesus Catholic Church was an imposing neo-Gothic structure erected in 1918 and inspired by the Canterbury Cathedral in Kent, England. Cathy believed the altar one of the most impressive things she’d ever seen—which wasn’t saying much for someone who had hardly been outside Kersey, Texas, since she was eleven years old, she allowed wryly. Still, the most jaded world traveler would appreciate the ornate sculpture of the pure white marble communion table. John had told her the stone had been chosen by the primary benefactor of the church to represent sugar in honor of his family’s sugar-planting heritage. Surrounded by such gold and red opulence, Cathy imagined Father Richard must think the place a cathedral compared to his modest church back home. Hanging
conspicuously from the altar rail was the white stole that he would later place over John’s shoulders.

She heard a growing swell of voices behind her, a testament to the regard in which John was held. They belonged to his Loyola classmates and professors, scholastics and novices, members of the clergy, parishioners, his students, and their parents. There would be the homeless among them, sitting beside the sheltered; the unwashed, sharing a pew with the freshly showered. They would all come, his spiritual director had told her last evening at a small gathering in John’s honor. John had touched many in all walks of life. He was beloved. “He’s a very gifted scholar,” the director said, “but it’s not academics he’s known by, but his ability to relate to people, to connect with them, whether they’re student or faculty, clergy or laity, lowly or exalted. He has the touch.” With the exception of Father Richard, who would be participating in the processional, the contingent from the Panhandle occupied the first row on the right side of the aisle. Cathy would have liked to sneak a glance at the filling church for someone in particular, but her neck was too sore to make the effort.

A door opened and the provincial superior of the New Orleans Province, richly clad in the vestments of his office, took his place by the altar. The choir filed in and stood in their nook at the right side of it, an impressive body in white robes and mantles adorned with a gold cross. The members lifted their maroon music folders as the director stepped to his position, and with the sweep of his hands a chorus of voices lifted in the ancient hymn “Soli Deo Gloria” (Glory to God alone) to the resounding chords of the grand organ. The ordination service had begun.

Cathy glanced at her watch. In two hours, John would be lost to her forever, married to God. From time to time through the years, she had allowed herself to imagine what her life would have been like if she’d accepted John’s proposal the day before he left for Loyola. Of course she did not feel then what she felt now, and in the ceremony
today there would be no moment when the provincial would instruct: “If there be any among you with reason why this man should not be joined in holy matrimony to his God, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

She would hold her peace.

The procession began. The assembly rose. Cathy saw Will’s eyes grow wide. This was his first time to witness such a display of liturgical pomp and splendor. Followed by the bishop, John was the second to the last in line, simply dressed in an alb, a long, white garment representing the baptismal dress of a new Christian who “puts on Christ.” How handsome he was! Cathy had noticed him draw the eyes of women at the airport as he strode along, curiosity in their gazes as to why such a man would willingly remove himself from the pleasures of the flesh that would naturally be his for the taking.

At her pew, John stepped from the line and winked to the group as he took his place beside her until an altar server would come to escort him to the bishop to be ordained. Cathy held the order of the service in her hand, and all through the long reading of the Scriptures, the sermon, and the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed she fought the crazy urge to grab his white-robed arm and cry as she’d wanted to do on her grandmother’s porch that Thanksgiving evening in 1986:
Don’t go, John. Stay and marry me…

Her hold tightened on the program when the altar server, a young man in an alb and white surplice, approached John to lead him to the provincial superior, who would present him to the bishop.
Do not turn and look into my eyes, John. You will see my heartbreak.
He did not. He followed the server without a glance at her or a gentle squeeze of her arm. It was as if he had stepped forth into a new light and left all former things on the pew behind him. Before the bishop, the provincial placed his hand on John’s right shoulder and intoned, “I present for ordination to the ministry of word and sacrament John Robert Caldwell, who has been prepared, examined, and approved
for this ministry and who has been called by the Church to this ministry through the Society of Jesus.”

T
REY HAD EXPECTED
to tear up. He had to fight to keep his eyes dry during intensely emotional moments. Though most times he subdued it, his tendency to cry had a will of its own. Reporters called it an anomaly, since it appeared contrary to his cynical nature. He sat at the far end of a middle row on the right of the church where he had a clear view of the front-row seats and refused to surrender his vantage point, even stand, to accommodate arrivals. They’d had to step over his feet, casting him dark glances, not a flicker of recognition in them. In the off-season, he wore his hair longer. Its length and a month’s growth of beard and tortoiseshell-framed reading glasses were all the disguise he’d needed to grab a flight to New Orleans, rent a car, book a room, and slip into a seat of the Most Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church unrecognized.

His eyes had begun to water when he’d spotted the complement from his hometown spread along the first row—John’s adopted family. His heart had turned a painful somersault at the physical changes in the dauntless Emma, now shrunken and dependent on her cane, and his hero and father figure, Coach Turner, prematurely aged almost beyond recognition. Even his aunt, whom he’d seen at Christmas, seemed frailer, but his greatest shock of feeling came when his gaze landed on the blond head of Cathy Benson. She was seated next to her son, the other side of her presumably reserved for John. The years had strengthened her beauty, but Trey recognized with tender amusement that the straight posture she’d forced on herself since before he met her was unchanged. By now those petite shoulders were so disciplined, they wouldn’t have dared sag.

He had watched her through his glasses, risking she’d feel his watery stare and turn her head. Cathy would not be fooled by his appearance. She had once been able to sense his eyes upon her. Was
she wondering if he was somewhere in the congregation and had her in his line of sight?

During the many points in the program when the assembly was instructed to stand, he was surprised and disappointed that she did not once cast a look over her shoulder searching for a familiar brown head. Her interest was focused on the star of the show, as was Trey’s when his attention wasn’t on Cathy. It wasn’t too hard to reconcile the man in the white robe to the boy of their letter-jacket days. He’d stayed virtually the same—older, of course, seasoned, but he was still John, tower of quiet strength, purposeful, focused, confident, at home with himself and everybody in the universe. So different from the man who watched him now.

The emotional moment arrived that he’d read of and prepared himself for. As the choir began to chant the Litany of the Saints, a beautiful centuries-old prayer, John walked to the center aisle. Trey’s vision blurred as the figure in the white robe lay facedown in front of the altar and stretched out his arms in the form of a cross, a symbol of his submission to God.

Only Trey knew what had brought him there. He hoped it would bring his friend the peace he craved.

Trey steeled himself during the rest of the ceremony but wiped his eyes again when the bishop and the other priests laid their hands on John’s head in a ritual that declared him now one of them, a recipient of the Holy Spirit with the sacred right to pursue his ministry—and which now put him forever beyond his old life’s reclaim. Trey thought the service would never be over, but there was still the stirring vesting rite where Father Richard’s former altar boy knelt before him to accept the stole and chasuble drawn over his head like a knight receiving his battle armor. Not a sound disturbed the hush of the moved congregation. Trey was not so touched. He blamed Father Richard for taking John from the game, playing on his vulnerability that had been as obvious as an open wound after that day in
November. Had John ever confessed his part in it to the good father? he wondered.