J. Powers - The Stories of J.F. Powers

“Sorry it had to happen,” muttered the pastor. Apparently that was going to be all. He was picking up Father Fabre’s gun.

Painfully, Father Fabre began to walk. Sorry! That it had to happen! Anyone else, having fired the shot, would’ve been only too glad to assume the blame. What kind of man was this? This was a man of very few words, as everyone knew, and he had said he was sorry. How sorry then? Sorry enough?

Father Fabre stopped. “How about this?” he said, sounding as if he hadn’t asked about the maple table before. It was a daring maneuver, but he was giving the pastor a chance to reverse himself without losing face, to redeem himself…

The pastor was shaking his head.

Father Fabre lost patience. He’d let the old burglar shoot him down and this was what he got for it. “Why not?” he demanded.

The pastor was looking down, not meeting Father Fabre’s eye. “You don’t have a good easy chair, do you?”

Father Fabre, half turning, saw what the pastor had in mind. There just weren’t any words for the chair. Father Fabre regarded it stoically — the dust lying fallow in the little mohair furrows, the ruptured bottom — and didn’t know what to say. It would be impossible to convey his true feelings to the pastor. The pastor really did think that this was a good easy chair. There was no way to get at the facts with him. But the proper study of curates is pastors. “It’s too good,” Father Fabre said, making the most of his opportunity. “If I ever sat down in a chair like that I might never get up again. No, it’s not for me.”

Oh, the pastor was pleased — the man was literally smiling. Of a self-denying nature himself, famous for it in the diocese, he saw the temptation that such a chair would be to his curate.

“No?” he said, and appeared, besides pleased, relieved.

“No, thanks,” said Father Fabre briskly, and moved on. It might be interesting to see how far he could go with the man — but some other time. His leg seemed to be stiffening.

When they arrived back at the door, the pastor, in a manner that struck Father Fabre as too leisurely under the circumstances, racked the guns, hung up his cap, boxed the dust out of his knees and elbows, all the time gazing back where they’d been — not, Father Fabre thought, with the idea of returning to the rats as soon as he decently could, but with the eyes of a game conservationist looking to the future.

“I was thinking I’d better go to the hospital with this,” said Father Fabre. He felt he ought to tell the pastor that he didn’t intend to let the bullet remain in his leg.

He left the pastor to lock up, and limped out.

“Better take the car,” the pastor called after him.

Father Fabre pulled up short. “ Thanks ,” he said, and began to climb the stairs. The hospital was only a few blocks away, but it hadn’t occurred to him that he might have walked there. He was losing every trick. Earlier he had imagined the pastor driving him to the hospital, and the scene there when they arrived — how it would be when the pastor’s indifference to his curate’s leg became apparent to the doctors and nurses, causing their hearts to harden against him. But all this the pastor had doubtless foreseen, and that was why he wasn’t going along. The man was afraid of public opinion.

At the hospital, however, they only laughed when Father Fabre told them what had happened to him, and when, after they had taken the bullet out, he asked if they had to report the matter to the police. Just laughed at him. Only a flesh wound, they said. They didn’t even want him to keep off the leg. It had been a mistake for him to ask. Laughed. Told him just to change his sock. But he arranged for the pastor to get the bill. And, on leaving, although he knew nothing would come of it, he said, “I thought you were required by law to report all gunshot cases.”

When he returned to the rectory, the pastor and John were talking softly in the upstairs hall. They said nothing to him, which he thought strange, and so he said nothing to them. He was lucky, he guessed, that they hadn’t laughed. He limped into his room, doubting whether John had even been told, and closed the door with a little bang. He turned and stood still. Then, after a few moments in which he realized why the pastor and John were in the hall, he limped over to the window — to the old mohair chair.

Ruefully, he recalled his false praise of the chair. How it had cost him! For the pastor had taken him at his word. After the shooting accident, the pastor must have been in no mood to give Father Fabre a table in which he seemed only half interested. Nothing would do then but that the wounded curate be compensated with the object of his only enthusiasm in the basement. No one knew better than the pastor where soft living could land a young priest, and yet there it was — luxury itself, procured by the pastor and dragged upstairs by his agent and now awaiting his curate’s pleasure. And to think it might have been the maple table!

They clearly hadn’t done a thing to the chair. The dust was all there, every grain intact. They were waiting for him, the pastor and John, waiting to see him sitting in it. He thought of disappointing them, of holing up as the pastor had earlier. But he just couldn’t contend with the man anymore that day. He didn’t know how he’d ever be able to thank them, John for carrying it up from the basement, the pastor for the thing itself, but he limped over to the door to let them in. Oh, it was a losing game.

I WAS WAITING in the lobby, sitting in a fairly clean overshoe, out of the draft and near a radiator, dozing, when the monthly meeting of the ushers ended and the men began to drift up from the church basement. Once a meeting got under way, the majority of the ushers, as well as Father Malt, their old pastor, liked to wind it up and break for the rectory, for pinochle and beer. Father Malt, seeing me, called “Fritz!” and I came, crossing in front of Mr Cormack, the new man, who muttered “Bad luck!” and blessed himself. I hadn’t thought much about him before, but this little action suggested to me that his eyes were failing or that he was paranoidal, for, though a black cat, I have a redeeming band of white at my throat.

While I waited for the ushers to put their hats and coats on, I thought I saw their souls reflected in their mufflers, in those warm, unauthentic plaids and soiled white rayons and nylons, a few with fringe work, some worn as chokers in the nifty, or haute -California, manner, and some tucked in between coat and vest in a way that may be native to our part of Minnesota.

Father Malt and I went out the door together. Going barefooted, as nature intended, I was warned of the old ice beneath the new-fallen snow. Father Malt, however, in shoes and overshoes, walked blindly, and slipped and fell.

When several ushers took hold of Father Malt, Mr Keller, the head usher, a druggist and a friend of physicians, spoke with authority. “Don’t move him! That’s the worst thing you can do! Call an ambulance!”

Three ushers thought to cover Father Malt with their overcoats (three others, too late with theirs, held them in their hands), and everyone just stood and stared, as I did, at the old priest, my friend and protector, lying under the mound of overcoats, with the indifferent snow settling down as upon a new grave. I began to feel the cold in my bones and to think that I should certainly perish if I were locked out on such a night. I heard Mr Keller ordering Mr Cormack to the rectory to phone for an ambulance. Reluctantly — not through any deficiency in my sorrow — I left the scene of the accident, crossed the snowy lawn, and entered the rectory with Mr Cormack.