“Joe, I understand you have my hair shirt.”
Joe weighed the Rector’s words before replying, “No, Father.”
The Rector smiled. “I’ll try again. Joe, I understand you have the hair shirt I gave Mr Hrdlicka.”
Joe was weighing the Rector’s words when the Rector interrupted. “Yes?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Well, Joe, I want it back.”
Joe was weighing the demand in the light of his circumstances. “Now, Father?”
“You’re wearing it, Joe?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Tomorrow morning, then. Same time, same place.” And the Rector smiled, ending the interview.
Joe rose and left, thinking how well he’d handled himself and that the Rector had probably expected his ownership of the hair shirt, his right to impound it, to be disputed. This was far from Joe’s mind, armed as it was with examples of heroic obedience — the example, say, of St John of the Cross (among mystics one of the all-time greats, perhaps No. 1), who had been jailed by his superiors and fed stinking fish.
That he had been summoned to the Rector’s office was widely known, Joe discovered between classes that morning, though he’d told nobody but Cooney, and he’d asked that Cooney keep to himself what happened at the interview. Evidently Cooney did, for the questions that Joe fielded throughout the day, though probing, were uninformed. Whether he’d been called to Rome to defend himself — that sort of thing — and the usual half-serious references to Manichaeism, Jansenism, “detachismus,” and so on. The hair shirt was mentioned, but not significantly.
As Joe washed it that evening, he speculated on the possibility of keeping the hand-over to the Rector a secret from everybody else (except Cooney), at least until such time as the event would have lost its news value. Wouldn’t that — keeping it a secret — be best for all concerned? “Hair shirt? Oh, I no longer wear it, and haven’t for some months now. I’m just like you now, Deadass.”
The next morning, at the same time, same place, Joe dutifully appeared with the hair shirt (concealed in a plastic bag) and then learned that the Rector had suffered a heart attack in the night and was in the hospital. Saying a prayer for the Rector, Joe returned to his room with the hair shirt and, leaving it in the bag, put it in the bottom drawer of his dresser, where he’d once kept some of his attachments — peanuts, popcorn, candy, cigars, cigarettes — and then he visited the chapel, as was his practice nowadays before going to his first class.
Between classes he read the notice on the bulletin board stating that prayers were requested for the Rector, who, if all went well, would be back at the seminary “soon”—which Joe interpreted to mean weeks. Saying another prayer for the Rector, Joe dashed up to his room, and shortly thereafter dashed down to his next class, itching again, wearing the hair shirt.
Early that evening the news broke — Cooney told Mooney, and Mooney broke it — that the Rector had on the morning of the night he was stricken ordered Joe, under pain of sin, to forswear and deliver up the hair shirt. This was substantially true, but Joe toned it down for his visitors. He had a number of them later that evening after the news broke — the last being Mooney, who had been avoiding Joe ever since he apostatized from the little band.
“Oh, to think that the Rector wanted you to give it back!” Mooney said. “And now! Joe, are you wearing it now?”
“For the time being, yes.”
“Keep it on, Joe. Don’t take it off.”
“At night I have to. I have to wash it.”
“Joe, I wouldn’t.”
“I would, Chuck.”
“But Joe—for the Rector!”
Earlier visitors had made it clear to Joe that they were no less wary than before of his hard-core spirituality but now considered him deserving of some sympathy, which Joe had assumed was all anybody had in mind where he and the hair shirt were concerned, when along comes Mooney with this crazy — what if it spread? — this superstitious idea that the Rector’s life might depend on Joe’s wearing the hair shirt.
“So I wouldn’t, Joe. Oh, to think!”
“Don’t,” said Joe, silencing Mooney, and went down to the chapel, where, for a change, he was not alone. Evidently Cooney was still suffering from “bursitis of both knees,” for he was absent, but there were quite a few others on hand that evening — a dozen or so, among them Rooney and Mooney.
Joe was the last man to leave the chapel that evening, the only one to stay very long. So it seemed that the others had only dropped in to say a few prayers for the Rector, and what Joe had feared, after hearing what he had from Mooney, that clunkhead — that the little holiness movement had revived and was drawing its strength from his not taking off the hair shirt — was not the case, thank God.
Joe washed it that night, as he would have done in any event, and when asked the next morning by Mooney if he’d slept in it said, “No,” curtly. And likewise when asked the following morning. The next morning he wasn’t asked.
“I hear the Rector’s out of danger,” Mooney said.
“Thank God,” said Joe.
The days passed, and as far as Joe could tell nobody but Mooney, who was now acting as if he hadn’t, had ever expected him to wear the hair shirt constantly for the Rector’s sake. In fact, the hair shirt wasn’t mentioned to Joe these days, even lightly, which was odd. And there was something else odd — easy to detect, hard to define. Joe noticed that certain guys never really looked at him — they looked to one side of him, or over his head, or down, but never in the eye. He went to see Cooney about it.
“Did somebody say something?” Cooney asked.
“No. I wish somebody would.”
“Don’t let it worry you.”
“Then there is something!” said Joe. Even his best friend wouldn’t look him in the eye!
“Joe, there are those…”
“Yes?”
“Who have never approved of you for wearing the hair shirt — for reasons you already know. ‘Singularity’ and so on.”
“Yes? Yes?”
“And now there are those — they’re the same ones, plus quite a few more — who disapprove of you for wearing it. Am I right in thinking you’re wearing it now?”
Joe nodded.
“Well, the idea these guys have is that you were ordered not to wear it, and are therefore in flagrante delicto.”
“Not so!” said Joe, and gave Cooney a true account of the interview, as he had before, and again spoke of his attempt to comply with the Rector’s demand—“request,” he said, was probably a better word for it.
“Look, Joe,” Cooney said. “As far as I’m concerned, you can go right on wearing the hair shirt, although I still say it’s taking an unfair advantage, like wearing brass knuckles. But the idea these guys have — the reason you’re more unpopular these days, and of course the heart attack, coming when it did, is also a factor in that — is that you’re going against the Rector’s intention.”
Joe thought about this for a moment. “I see,” he said, and went away to think some more.
As it happened, he had to think for three days before he arrived at a firm decision. Then he had to wait for Wednesday afternoon to come, and when it did he took a bus downtown. He was carrying the hair shirt in the plastic bag. At the hospital he found the Rector in a private room, in bed with a paperback.