Zerchi hesitated. “Why not Father Selo?”
“I tell ye truthful, yer honor, it’s that the man is an occasion of sin for me. I go meanin’ well for the man, but I look once on his face and forget myself. God love him, but I can’t.”
“If he’s offended you, you’ll have to forgive him.”
“Forgive, that I do, that I do. But at a goodly distance. He’s an occasion of sin for me, I’ll tell, for I go losing my temper with him on sight.”
Zerchi chuckled. “All right, Mrs. Grales I’ll hear your confession, but I’ve got something I have to do first. Meet me in the Lady Chapel in about half an hour. The first booth. Will that be all right?”
“Ay, and bless ye, Father!” She nodded profusely. Abbot Zerchi could have sworn that the Rachel head mirrored the nods, ever so slightly.
He dismissed the thought and walked over to the garage. A postulant brought out the car for him. He climbed in, dialed his destination, and sank back wearily into the cushions while the automatic controls engaged the gears and nosed the car toward the gate. In passing the gate, the abbot saw the girl standing at the roadside. The child was with her. Zerchi jabbed at the CANCEL button. The car stopped. “Waiting,” said the robot controls.
The girl wore a cast that enclosed her hips from the waist to left knee. She was leaning on a pair of crutches and panting at the ground. Somehow she had got out of the guesthouse and through the gate, but she was obviously unable to go any farther. The child was holding on to one of her crutches and staring at the traffic on the highway.
Zerchi opened the ear door and climbed out slowly. She looked up at him, but turned her glance quickly away.
“What are you doing out of bed, child?” he breathed. “You’re not supposed to be up, not with that hip. Just where did you think you were going?”
She shifted her weight, and her face twisted with pain.
“To town,” she said. “I’ve got to go. It’s urgent.”
“Not so urgent that somebody couldn’t go do it for you. I’ll get Brother—”
“No, Father, no! Nobody else can do it for me. I’ve got to go to town.”
She was lying. He felt certain she was lying. “All right, then,” he said. “I’ll take you to town. I’m driving in anyway.
“No! I’ll walk! I’m—” She took a step and gasped. He caught her before she fell.
“Not even with Saint Christopher holding your crutches could you walk to town, child. Come on, now, let’s get you back to bed.”
“I’ve got to get to town, I tell you!” she shrieked angrily.
The child, frightenend by its mother’s anger, began crying monotonously. She tried to calm its fright, but then wilted: “All right, Father. Will you drive me to town?”
“You shouldn’t be going at all.”
“I tell you, I’ve got to go!”
“All right, then. Let’s help you in…the baby… now you.”
The child screamed hysterically when the priest lifted it into the car beside the mother. It clung to her tightly and resumed the monotonous sobbing. Because of the loose moist dressings and the singed hair, the child’s sex was difficult to determine at a glance, but Abbot Zerchi guessed it to be a girl.
He dialed again. The car waited for a break in the traffic, then swerved onto the highway and into the mid-speed lane. Two minutes later, as they approached the Green Star encampment, he dialed for the slowest lane.
Five monks paraded in front of the tent area, in a solemn hooded picket line. They walked to and fro in procession beneath the Mercy Camp sign, but they were careful to stay on the public right-of-way. Their freshly painted signs read:
Zerchi had intended to stop to talk to them, but with the girl in the car be contented himself with watching as they drifted past. With their habits and their hoods and their slow funereal procession, the novices were indeed creating the desired effect. Whether the Green Star would be sufficiently embarrassed to move the camp away from the monastery was doubtful, especially since a small crowd of hecklers, as it had been reported to the abbey, had appeared earlier in the day to shout insults and throw pebbles at the signs carried by the pickets. There were two police cars parked at the side of the highway, and several officers stood nearby to watch with expressionless faces. Since the crowd of hecklers had appeared quite suddenly, and since the police cars had appeared immediately afterwards, and just in time to witness a heckler trying to seize a picket’s sign, and since a Green Star official had thereupon gone huffing off to get a court order, the abbot suspected that the heckling had been as carefully staged as the picketing, to enable the Green Star officer to get his writ. It would probably be granted, but until it was served, Abbot Zerchi meant to leave the novices where they were.
He glanced at the statue which the camp workers had erected near the gate. It caused a wince. He recognized it as one of the composite human images derived from mass psychological testing in which subjects were given sketches and photographs of unknown people and asked such questions as: “Which would you most like to meet?” and “Which do you think would make the best parent?” or “Which would yon want to avoid?” Or “Which do you think is the criminal?” From the photographs selected as the “most” or the “least” in terms of the questions, a series of “average faces,” each to evoke a first-glance personality judgment had been constructed by computer from the mass test results.
This statue, Zerchi was dismayed to notice, bore a marked similarity to some of the most effeminate images by which mediocre, or worse than mediocre, artists had traditionally misrepresented the personality of Christ. The sweet-sick face, blank eyes, simpering lips, and arms spread wide in a gesture of embrace. The hips were broad as a woman’s, and the chest hinted at breasts-unless those were only folds in the cloak. Dear Lord of Golgotha, Abbot Zerchi breathed, is that all the rabble imagine You to be? He could with effort imagine the statue saying: “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” but he could not imagine it saying: “Depart from me into everlasting fire, accursed ones,” or flogging the money-changers out of the Temple. What question, he wondered, had they asked their subjects that conjured in the rabble-mind this composite face? It was only anonymously a christus. The legend on the pedestal said: COMFORT. But surely the Green Star must have seen the resemblance to the traditional pretty christus of poor artists. But they stuck it in the back of a truck with a red flag tied to its great toe, and the intended resemblance would be hard to prove.
The girl had one hand on the door handle; she was eying the car’s controls. Zerchi swiftly dialed FAST LANE. The car shot ahead again. She took her hand from the door.
“Lots of buzzards today,” he said quietly, glancing at the sky out the window.
The girl sat expressionless. He studied her face for a moment. “Are you in pain, daughter?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Offer it to Heaven, child.”
She looked at him coldly. “You think it would please God?”
“If you offer it, yes.”
“I cannot understand a God who is pleased by my baby’s hurting!”
The priest winced. “No, no! It is not the pain that is pleasing to God, child. It is the soul’s endurance in faith and hope and love in spite of bodily afflictions that pleases Heaven. Pain is like negative temptation. God is not pleased by temptations that afflict the flesh; He is pleased when the soul rises above the temptation and says, ‘Go, Satan.’ It’s the same with pain, which is often a temptation to despair, anger, loss of faith—”