But the youth goggled and closed his eyes, giving no sign of having heard. Sutter took his pulse and stepped back.
“If you have any business with him, Father,” he said dryly, “I think you’d better conduct it now.”
The priest nodded and leaned on the bed, supporting himself on his heavy freckled fists. He looked not at Jamie but sideways at the wall.
“Son, can you hear me?”—addressing the wall. The engineer perceived that at last the priest had found familiar territory. He knew what he was doing.
But Jamie made no reply.
“Son, can you hear me?” the priest repeated without embarrassment, examining a brown stain on the wall and not troubling to give his voice a different inflection.
Jamie nodded and appeared to say something. The engineer moved a step closer, cocking his good ear but keeping his arms folded as the sign of his discretion.
“Son, I am a Catholic priest,” said Father Boomer, studying the yellow hairs on his fist. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” said Jamie aloud. He nodded rapidly.
“I have been asked by your sister to administer to you the sacrament of baptism. Do you wish to receive it?”
The engineer frowned. Wasn’t the priest putting it a bit formally?
“Val,” whispered Jamie, goggling at the engineer.
“That’s right,” said the engineer, nodding. “I called her as you asked me to.”
Jamie looked at the priest.
“Son,” said the priest. “Do you accept the truths of religion?”
Jamie moved his lips.
“What?” asked the priest, bending lower.
“Excuse me, Father,” said the sentient engineer. “He said ‘what.’”
“Oh,” said the priest and turned both fists out and opened the palms. “Do you accept the truth that God exists and that He made you and loves you and that He made the world so that you might enjoy its beauty and that He himself is your final end and happiness, that He loved you so much that He sent His only Son to die for you and to found His Holy Catholic Church so that you may enter heaven and there see God face to face and be happy with Him forever.”
Without raising his eyes, the engineer could see the curled-up toe of Sutter’s ThomMcAn shoe turning to and fro on the radiator trademark.
“Is that true?” said Jamie clearly, opening his eyes and goggling. To the engineer’s dismay, the youth turned to him.
The engineer cleared his throat and opened his mouth to say something when, fortunately for him, Jamie’s bruised eyes went weaving around to the priest. He said something to the priest which the latter did not understand.
The priest looked up to the engineer.
“He wants to know, ah, why,” said the engineer.
“Why what?”
“Why should he believe that.”
The priest leaned hard on his fists. “It is true because God Himself revealed it as the truth.”
Again the youth’s lips moved and again the priest turned to the interpreter.
“He asked how, meaning how does he know that?”
The priest sighed. “If it were not true,” he said to Jamie, “then I would not be here. That is why I am here, to tell you.”
Jamie, who had looked across to the engineer (Christ, don’t look at me!), pulled down the corners of his mouth in what the engineer perceived unerringly to be a sort of ironic acknowledgment.
“Do you understand me, son?” said the priest in the same voice.
There was no answer. Outside in the night the engineer saw a Holsum bread truck pass under the street light
“Do you accept these truths?”
After a silence the priest, who was still propped on his fists and looking sideways like a storekeeper, said, “If you do not now believe these truths, it is for me to ask you whether you wish to believe them and whether you now ask for the faith to believe them.”
Jamie’s eyes were fixed on the engineer, but the irony was shot through with the first glint of delirium. He nodded to the engineer.
The engineer sighed and, feeling freer, looked up. Sutter hung fire, his chin on his knuckles, his eyes half-closed and gleaming like a Buddha’s.
Jamie opened his mouth, it seemed, to say something bright and audible, but his tongue thickened and came out. He shuddered violently. Sutter came to the bedside. He held the youth’s wrist and, unbuttoning the pajamas, laid an ear to the bony chest. He straightened and made a sign to the priest, who took from his pocket a folded purple ribbon which he slung around his neck in a gesture that struck the engineer as oddly graceless and perfunctory.
“What’s his name?” the priest asked no one in particular.
“Jamison MacKenzie Vaught,” said Sutter.
“Jamison MacKenzie Vaught,” said the priest, his fists spread wide. “What do you ask of the Church of God? Say Faith.”
Jamie said something.
“What does Faith bring you to? Say Life Everlasting.”
Jamie’s lips moved.
The priest took the bent sucking tube from Jamie’s water glass. “Go fill that over there.”
“Yes sir,” said the engineer. But surely it was to be expected that the priest have a kit of some sort, at least a suitable vessel. He half filled the clouded plastic glass.
As he returned with the water, Jamie’s bowels opened again with the spent schleppen sound of an old man’s sphincter. The engineer went to get the bedpan. Jamie tried to lift his head.
“No no,” said Sutter impatiently, and coming quickly across simply bound the dying youth to the bed by folding the counterpane into a strap and pressing it against his chest. “Get on with it, Father,” he said angrily.
The priest took the plastic glass. “I baptize you in the name of the Father—” He poured a trickle of water into the peninsula of fried dusty hair. “And of the Son—” He poured a little more. “And of the Holy Ghost.” He poured the rest.
The three men watched as the water ran down the youth’s bruised forehead. It was dammed a moment by the thick Vaught eyebrows, flowed through and pooled around the little red carbuncle in the corner of his eye.
The priest bent lower still, storekeeper over his counter, and took the narrow waxy hand between his big ruddy American League paws. “Son,” he said in the same flat mercantile voice, looking first at the brown stain on the wall and then down at the dying youth. “Today I promise you that you will be with our Blessed Lord and Savior and that you will see him face to face and see his mother, Our Lady, see them as you are seeing me. Do you hear me?”
The four white vermiform fingers stirred against the big thumb, swollen with blood (did they, thumb and fingers, belong to the same species?).
“Then I ask you to pray to them for me and for your brother here and for your friend who loves you.”
The fingers stirred again.
Presently the priest straightened and turned to the engineer as blank-eyed as if he had never laid eyes on him before.
“Did you hear him? He said something. What did he say?”
The engineer, who did not know how he knew, was not even sure he had heard Jamie or had tuned him in in some other fashion, cleared his throat.
“He said, ‘Don’t let me go.’” When the priest looked puzzled, the engineer nodded to the bed and added: “He means his hand, the hand there.”
“I won’t let you go,” the priest said. As he waited he curled his lip absently against his teeth in a workaday five-o’clock-in-the-afternoon expression.
After several minutes Sutter let go the sheet which he still held as a strap across Jamie.
“All right, Father,” said Sutter in an irritable voice when the priest didn’t move. “On the way out, would you send in the nurse and the resident?”