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

After Mr Cormack had summoned an ambulance, he called his old pastor, Father O’Hannon, of St Clara’s, Minneapolis (of which Sherwood, our town, was gradually becoming a suburb), and asked him to be at the hospital, in case Father Malt should be in danger of death and in need of extreme unction. “The assistant here, Father Burner, isn’t around. His car’s gone from the garage, and there’s no telling when that one’ll be back,” said Mr Cormack, sounding lonesome for his old parish. At St Clara’s, he’d evidently been on more intimate terms with the priests. His last words to Father O’Hannon, “We could sure use someone like you out here,” gave me the idea that he had gone fishing for Father Burner’s favor but had caught one of the white whale’s flukes. Now, like so many of us, he dreamed of getting even someday. I could only wish him luck as he left the rectory.

I watched at the window facing upon the tragedy, enduring the cold draft there for Father Malt’s sake, until the ambulance came. Then I retired to the parlor register and soon fell asleep — not without a prayer for Father Malt and many more for myself. With Father Burner running the rectory, it was going to be a hard, hard, and possibly fatal winter for me.

The ironic part was that Father Burner and I, bad as he was, had a lot in common. We disliked the same people (Mr Keller, for instance), we disliked the same dishes (those suited to Father Malt’s dentures), but, alas, we also disliked each other. This fault originated in Father Burner’s raw envy of me — which, however, I could understand. Father Malt didn’t improve matters when he referred to me before visitors, in Father Burner’s presence, as the assistant. I was realist enough not to hope for peace between us assistants as long as Father Malt lived. But it did seem a shame that there was no way of letting Father Burner know I was prepared — if and when his position improved — to be his friend and favorite, although not necessarily in that order. (For some reason, I seem to make a better favorite than friend.) As it was Father Burner’s misfortune to remain a curate too long, it was mine to know that my life of privilege — my preferred place at table, for example — appeared to operate at the expense of his rights and might be the cause of my ultimate undoing. It was no good wishing, as I sometimes did, that Father Malt were younger — he was eighty-one — or that I were older, that we two could pass on together when the time came.

Along toward midnight, waking, I heard Father Burner’s car pull into the driveway. A moment later the front porch cracked under his heavy step. He entered the rectory, galoshes and all, and, as was his custom, proceeded to foul his own nest wherever he went, upstairs and down. Finally, after looking, as he always did, for the telephone messages that seemingly never came, or, as he imagined, never got taken down, he went out on the front porch and brought in more snow and the evening paper. He sat reading in the parlor — it was then midnight — still in his dripping galoshes, still in perfect ignorance of what had befallen Father Malt and me. Before he arrived, the telephone had been ringing at half-hour intervals — obviously the hospital, or one of the ushers, trying to reach him. The next time, I knew, it would toll for me.

Although I could see no way to avoid my fate, I did see the folly of waiting up for it. I left the parlor to Father Burner and went to the kitchen, where I guessed he would look last for me, if he knew anything of my habits, for I seldom entered there and never stayed long. Mrs Wynn, the housekeeper, loosely speaking, was no admirer of mine, nor I of her womanly disorder.

I concealed myself in a basket of clean, or at least freshly laundered, clothes, and presently, despite everything, I slept.

Early the following day, when Father Burner came downstairs, he had evidently heard the news, but he was late for his Mass, as usual, and had time for only one wild try at me with his foot. However, around noon, when he returned from the hospital, he paused only to phone the chancery to say that Father Malt had a fractured hip and was listed as “critical” and promptly chased me from the front of the house to the kitchen. He’d caught me in the act of exercising my claws on his new briefcase, which lay on the hall chair. The briefcase was a present to himself at Christmas — no one else thought quite so much of him — but he hadn’t been able to find a real use for it and I think it piqued him to see that I had.

“I want that black devil kept out of my sight,” he told Mrs Wynn, before whom he was careful to watch his language.

That afternoon I heard him telling Father Ed Desmond, his friend from Minneapolis, who’d dropped by, that he favored the wholesale excommunication of household pets from homes and particularly from rectories. He mentioned me in the same breath with certain parrots and hamsters he was familiar with. Although he was speaking on the subject of clutter, he said nothing about model railroads, Father Desmond’s little vice, or about photography, his own. The term “household pet” struck me as a double-barreled euphemism, unpetted as I was and denied the freedom of the house.

And still, since I’d expected to be kicked out into the weather, and possibly not to get that far alive, I counted my deportation to the kitchen as a blessing — a temporary one, however. I had no reason to believe that Father Burner’s feeling about me had changed. I looked for something new in persecutions. When nothing happened, I looked all the harder.

I spent my days in the kitchen with Mrs Wynn, sleeping when I could, just hanging around in her way when I couldn’t. If I wearied of that, as I inevitably did, I descended into the cellar. The cellar smelled of things too various — laundry, coal, developing fluid, and mice — and the unseemly noise of the home-canned goods digesting on the shelves, which another might never notice, reached and offended my ears. After an hour down there, where the floor was cold to my feet, I was ready to return to the kitchen and Mrs Wynn.

Mrs Wynn had troubles of her own — her husband hit the jar — but they did nothing to Christianize her attitude toward me. She fed me scraps, and kicked me around, not hard but regularly, in the course of her work. I expected little from her, however. She was another in the long tradition of unjust stewards.

Father Burner’s relatively civil conduct was harder to comprehend. One afternoon, rising from sleep and finding the kitchen door propped open, I forgot myself and strolled into the parlor, into his very presence. He was reading Church Property Administration , a magazine I hadn’t seen in the house before. Having successfully got that far out of line — as far as the middle of the room — I decided to keep going. As if by chance, I came to my favorite register, where, after looking about to estimate the shortest distance between me and any suitable places of refuge in the room, I collapsed around the heat. There was still no intimation of treachery — only peace surpassing all understanding, only the rush of warmth from the register, the winds of winter outside, and the occasional click and whisper of a page turning in Church Property Administration .

Not caring to push my luck, wishing to come and doze another day, wanting merely to establish a precedent, I got up and strolled back into the kitchen — to think. I threw out the possibility that Father Burner had suffered a lapse of memory, had forgotten the restriction placed on my movements. I conceived the idea that he’d lost, or was losing, his mind, and then, grudgingly, I gave up the idea. He was not trying to ignore me. He was ignoring me without trying. I’d been doing the same thing to people for years, but I’d never dreamed that one of them would do it to me.