“Lefty Beeman. He did time there briefly.”
“Oh. No, none of those. But housekeepers and janitors, or their survivors. Most of the estate went to the Sisters.”
“That’s good. They earned it. Everybody did. I was wondering, though, why me?”
Silence.
“Anything in the will that would explain it?”
“No.”
“Anything you might know that might explain it — me being boy from the parish, maybe?”
“No, not that.”
“He leave Toohey anything?”
“Monsignor? No, Father.”
“That’s good. Look, Father, here’s what I want to know. Did you, by any chance, tell the man I made a contribution to his purse?”
Silence.
“Could he have known?”
Silence.
“I mean, the exact figure?”
Silence. And then, with a rush: “Father, I was new. Nothing — just nothing — was coming in until… he made me tell him—you know how he was…”
“I do, I do, and I don’t blame you, Father. That’s all I wanted to know. Thanks.”
So it was as Joe had thought: he had been paid back at the biblical rate of exchange, a hundredfold. Although the money, in view of its source and its suitability, would have to go into the parish account and thus to ARF, Joe would still profit by it greatly — as his benefactor was now, wherever he might be, in a better position to appreciate. For the rest of the year, if not, alas, for the foreseeable future, Joe and Bill could and would suspend their evening operations with dp’s.
That, then, was the good news in September.
The bad news began on a Sunday with a sermon, the salient parts of which Joe caught while pacing back and forth where once petunias had bloomed…
“The story is told of a certain man punished for working on the Sabbath and other holy days. Which is not to say that circumstances don’t, sometimes, alter cases. Contrary to what the Pharisees of old believed, they having had the nerve to rebuke Our Lord for allowing his hungry disciples to pick corn on the Sabbath. What, replied Our Lord, of David and his men when they were hungry and went into the house of God and ate the holy bread? ‘The Sabbath was made for people, and not people for the Sabbath.’ Be that as it may. A certain man, though repeatedly cautioned by the local clergy, and by his neighbors, against working on the Sabbath and other holy days, persisted in his fell course. And on one such day, going into his vineyard in Cockaigne, or perhaps it was Champagne, in what is now known as France, had scarcely put foot to spade when, lo and behold, his head was twisted around backwards and locked, so to speak, in this ungainly and painful position, so that he was perforce looking out behind him. Something like this, only more so, all the way around. Ouch. Well, my good people, you can imagine the effect of this on the man’s neighbors and their children. To say nothing of his own wife and children. Yes, indeed. Fortunately, the poor man’s repentance was so sincere that he was cured of his affliction in a matter of days. Whereupon he gave public thanks to God and St Avit, the latter a holy abbot who flourished in the sixth century and whose feast day (a holy day of obligation in the region) it was when this occurred — the affliction, not the cure — and who, it was generally believed, had worked both miracles.”
Joe hadn’t thought much of or about the sermon at the time. During the week, though, he heard here and there that the Mall crowd — many of them, of course, parishioners — had taken the sermon as a warning to concerns doing business on Sunday, particularly the Great Badger, since it had been first, and was foremost, in the field locally. Joe, the following Saturday when he met Father Felix’s bus, mentioned the sermon, the flak, and was told, “Flak schmak. Nothing could’ve been further from my mind, Joe, but if the cap fits, I always say, wear it.” Words singularly ill chosen, it seemed to Joe, since the monk, who liked to see the world when away from his monastery, and who, some weeks before, had accompanied Bill on a fast shopping trip for boxer shorts, was now wearing the glossy black straw hat presented to him on that otherwise unmemorable occasion by Dave Brock. But Joe said no more about the sermon, hoping it would die a natural death — which it wouldn’t.
In the week after its delivery its effect on the student body of Joe’s school, now in session again, had been woeful, with kids throwing their necks out of joint all over the place, a girl and three boys requiring medical attention, the former now the envy of all in her cervical collar — Joe was glad the old Duke of Brunswick, with his “Pass that to thy neighbor,” had been visited upon the parish during summer vacation.
The effect of the sermon was still being felt in the second week, Bill and Sister, the school principal, both reporting to Joe that children, more girls than boys, were having nightmares about the man with his head on backward. “That so?” Joe said, sorry to hear it, of course, but not knowing (any more than Bill and Sister) what could be done about it.
On Friday of that week, Bill reported to Joe that a sixth-grade girl, kept after school, had seen the man with his head on backward going, apparently frontward, into the girls’ washroom, but that Sister herself, who had heard the girl’s screams and had been the first one to investigate, had found the washroom unoccupied.
What was called assembly, or even convocation, in some schools was called convention (after the Constitutional Convention) in Joe’s, his first principal (now serving in the navy) having had a fixation on the Constitution, bringing in speaker after speaker to talk about it to grade-schoolers — another example, in Joe’s view, of the U.S. Church’s patriotism, nationalism, inferiority complex. But convention, once a monthly pain in the ass to the student body and faculty, had changed, now booked other attractions — missionaries, magicians, acrobats, dieticians, folks singers.
Some of these were down for September, and since this was the first convention of the year, Joe put in an appearance, arriving late with the idea of leaving early. He’d expected to find the folks in their prewashed, stone-ground overalls, and they were, but he hadn’t expected to find Bill in his, to see and hear him up there on the stage with his guitar, playing and singing along.
While they were doing “Ol’ Man Mose”—not very well, Joe thought, remembering Louis Armstrong’s version — the bad weather, which had been carrying on in the distance for the last hour or so, arrived in a big way with thunder and lightning only seconds apart, but the folks, with presence of mind, kept at it even after the lights went out and a child somewhere in the auditorium, in the sudden dark and confusion, screamed:
“I saw ’im! I saw ’im!”
“Stay in your seats!” Joe heard Bill yell, to no avail. “Pray along with me! Hail Mary, full of grace—”
“Stop!”
Joe, it seemed to him later, had lost by that. Although nobody had been seriously hurt in the exodus from the auditorium, several students were subsequently removed from the school, which might have happened anyway — the nightmares continued — and which in any case made it possible to enroll both Lane children, this matter handled by Bill and Sister. Oddly enough, the child who’d screamed when the lights went out and who was questioned by Sister and Bill, had not seen, she said, the man with his head on backward but ol’ man Mose — a relief, in a way. Joe, of course, had to explain his action to Bill. “I don’t say it was wrong for you to pray, Bill, or for those hillbillies to switch to a hymn. It was just that kids were running for the exits.” “So when you said ‘Stop,’ you meant the kids should, Joe?” To this, after a moment, Joe nodded for Bill’s sake. The truth was, though, Joe had been scandalized that prayer was being offered, and this quite apart from the fact it wasn’t working, as a tranquilizer. Did Bill sense this, consider it precious of Joe in the circumstances, and resent it? Did the nuns? (Certainly one of them did: “I don’t know what Our Lady must think of you, Father.”) It did seem to Joe there was an anti-Joe feeling in the air. He wondered if this might not be one of those times when the wise pastor takes off for a week or two, in the hope of absence making the heart grow fonder, if he can find, but not through the Chancery (“Die”), a replacement. The first one to come to mind — but not the first one called, or the second, or the third — said he just might be able to get away from his monastery for a week. “Or possibly two, Joe.”