“Don’t go on my account, Father,” I say, noticing no other penitents.
“No?” Sighing, he sits down again.
“I’m sorry, Father, but you could not give me the sacrament of penance. One of the elements is missing.”
“Which element?”
“Contrition. To say nothing of firm purpose of amendment.”
“I understand. I’ll pray for you.”
“Good.”
“Um, pray for me.”
“I haven’t prayed much lately. But excuse me, Father.”
“Yes?”
“I thought you wanted to see me about something.”
“See you? Oh yes. Right. It occurred to me the other day,” says the priest, working his expansion band around his wide hairy wrist (a Spanish athlete’s futbol wrist), “that it would be a good idea for you to move out of your house.”
I look at him curiously. “Why should I do that?”
“I am not at liberty to tell you why.”
“You mean someone told you something under the seal of the confessional?”
“I am just telling you that it would be better for you to leave. Now. Today.”
“Is something going to happen, Father?”
The priest shrugs.
“Father, if my life is in danger, I think you’re obliged to tell me.”
“You should move. Say, why don’t you move down here with me? You know, it’s quite cool down here.” He nods toward the restored slave quarters, a long brick row house already engulfed by creeper and swamp cyrilla.
“But, Father—”
He rises. His parishioners are arriving. They’re an odd lot, a remnant of a remnant, bits and pieces, leftovers, like the strays and stragglers after a battle. I know most of them. They recognize me and so signify by noncommittal nods. Am I one of them?
They are:
Three old-style Roman Catholics, the sort who are going to stick with the Roman Pope no matter what — let’s hear it for the Pope! — Knights-of-Columbus types, Seven-Up Holy-Name Prudential Western-Auto types, and their wives, good solid chicken-gumbo and altar-society ladies.
A scoffing Irish behaviorist, the sort in whom irony is so piled up on irony, jokes so encrusted on jokes, winks and nudges and in-jokes so convoluted, that anticlericism has become anti-anticlerical, gone so far out that it has come back in as clericism and comes down on the side of Rome where he started.
An old scold, a seventy-year-old lady sacristan, the sort who’s been lurking in the shadows of the tabernacle since the prophetess Anna.
A love couple from the swamp, dressed in rags and sea-shells, who, having lived a free life, chanted mantras, smoked Choctaw cannab, lain together dreaming in the gold-green world, conceived and bore children, dwelled in a salt mine — chanced one day upon a Confederate Bible, read it as if it had never been read before, the wildest un-likeliest doctrine imaginable, believed it, decided to be married and baptized their children.
An ordinary Knothead couple recently transferred from Jackson, he the new manager of Friendly Finance, they having inquired after the whereabouts of the local Catholic church and being directed here, perhaps as a joke, and now standing around, eyes rolled up in their eyebrows, wondering: could this be the right church, a tin-roofed hut in a briar patch? They’re in the wrong place.
Two freejacks, light-skinned sloe-eyed men of color, also called “Creoles” by other Negroes but generally called freejacks ever since their ancestors were freed by Andy Jackson for services rendered in the Battle of New Orleans.
Two nuns who refused either to get married, quit, or teach in all-white Knothead schools and so have no place to go.
Three seminarians, two lusty white fellows, lusty Notre Dame types, the sort who run up and down basketball courts swinging sweaty Our Lady medals, and one graceful black youth, face set in a conventional piety, who reminds me of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, the Jesuit boy-saint who was reputed never to have entertained an impure thought.
Two secretaries from the Center, you know the sort, good Catholic girls thirty-one or — two and not exactly gorgeous, one dumpy and pudding-faced, the other an Olive Oyl.
Everyone stands around at sixes and sevens, eyeing each other and wondering if he’s in the right place. The love couple look at the K.C. types swinging their fists into their hands. The Friendly Finance couple look at the free-jacks and wonder if they are black or white.
Father Rinaldo Smith sighs and mounts the steps. The others follow silently.
“You coming, Tom?” he asks.
“Not today.”
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a good old bell to summon the faithful and ring the angelus?”
“Yes. I believe I know where a good old plantation bell might be found.”
“Grand.”
In my “enclosed patio.”
I decide to skip the fish fry and spend the afternoon sipping toddies and reading Stedmann’s account of Verdun.
At six o’clock on the morning of May 23, 1916, the French Thirty-fourth Infantry attacked the fort at Douaumont. The Germans had 2,200 artillery pieces, of which 1,730 were heavy. The French division advanced to the fort, losing four out of five men. The survivors reached the roof of the fort but could not get in. They were soon killed by artillery.
The slaughter at Verdun was an improvement over the nineteenth century, in which, for example, Grant lost 8,000 men, mostly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants named Smith, Jones, and Robinson, in forty minutes at Cold Harbor to Lee’s army, also mainly Anglo-Saxon, white, and Protestant, named Smith, Jones, Robinson, and Armstrong.
Here’s the riddle. Father Smith speaks of life. Life is better than death. Frenchmen and Germans now choose life. Frenchmen and Germans at Verdun in 1916 chose death, 500,000 of them. The question is, who has life, the Frenchman now who chooses life and will die for nothing or the Frenchman then who chose to die, for what? I forget.
Or a Pennsylvanian. This afternoon during the assault on Fort Douaumont, I heard a sportscaster listing the football powers of the coming season. Number one on his list were the Nittany Lions of Penn State. I do not care to hear about the Nittany Lions. But what would it be like to live in Pennsylvania and every day of your life hear sports-casters speak of the prospects of the Nittany Lions?
With my lapsometer I can measure the index of life, life in death and death in life. It is possible, I suspect, to be dying and alive at Verdun and alive and dying as a booster of the Nittany Lions.
An example of life in death: for fifty years following the Battle of Verdun, French and German veterans used to return every summer to seek out the trench where they spent the summer of 1916. Why did they choose the very domicile of death? Was there life here? Afterwards they would sit for hours in a café on the Sacred Way.
But I must prove my case. I must be present with my lapsometer in circumstances where the dying are alive and the living are dead. Observe, measure, verify: here’s the business of the scientist.
Outside my “enclosed patio” the weeds are sprouting through the black pebbles Doris brought back from Mexico. Virginia creeper has taken the $500 lead statue of Saint Francis she ordered from Hammacher-Schlemmer. The birdbath and feeder Saint Francis holds are empty. Tough titty for the titmice.
Sunday night: awake till 5 a.m. Reading Stedmann on Verdun, listening to a screech owl crying like a baby in the swamp, assaulted by succubi, night exaltations, morning terror, and nameless longings; sipped twelve toddies.