J. Powers - Wheat That Springeth Green

In this manner, his words vaporizing in the icy air, Joe spoke to Mooney, and sometimes to Rooney, on their walks around the seminary grounds, stopping here and there to make a point. His favorite place to stop was a spot from which they could view, across the road, a billboard advertisement showing an amiable old clergyman (obviously Protestant, but no matter) sniffing the air as he passed under a windowsill on which a freshly baked pie was cooling. “There you are,” Joe would say. “That’s how most people see the clergy. And they’re right .”

It seemed to Joe that the billboard, taken with his commentary — he was scathing on the subject of the beery little evenings in the Rector’s study — had a steadying effect on the wavering Mooney, but as time went on it was hard to get Mooney to stop at that spot, and impossible when Rooney was along. In any case, the billboard was changed. And Rooney — saying, “I’m sorry”—resigned from the little band.

The next evening, as Joe was about to leave his room for a siege in the chapel, Mooney dropped in.

“Joe, I’m not cut out for this,” he said. “I just want to be a good priest and maybe work with the poor.”

“Chuck, you can’t give what you haven’t got — even to the poor.”

“Yeah, I know, Joe.”

“So there you are, Chuck. And Thomas Aquinas tells us, Chuck, that ‘to fulfill the duties of Holy Orders, common goodness does not suffice; but excelling goodness is required; that they who receive Orders and are thereby higher in rank than the people may also be higher in holiness.’”

“May?”

“He means ‘must’—you know how cagey he is.”

“Yeah. But I’m not getting anywhere, Joe.”

“Chuck, I’m not getting anywhere. And Cooney — I happen to know he’s not getting anywhere. So there you are.”

“What d’ya mean, ‘So there you are’? Joe, I wish you wouldn’t always say that.”

“We’re all in the same boat, Chuck. That’s what I mean.”

“Joe, maybe we don’t all want to be in the same boat with you. Ever think of that?”

“Rooney, you mean?”

“I mean me . I’ve had it,” said Mooney, and turned away. “I’m sorry.”

“ I’m sorry,” said Joe, sounding smug, but really hurt.

And so the little band was down to two — if that. The next evening, at a lecture in the auditorium, Joe asked during the question period, “Father, how can we make sanctity as attractive as sex to the common man?” (after all, the speaker had quoted Léon Bloy: “There is but one sorrow — not to be a saint”), and Cooney , who was sitting beside Joe, laughed right along with the rest.

Early the next morning Joe was summoned to the Rector’s office, where the tobacco clouds were already building up, churning in the winter sunlight, and the Rector, like a nice old gray devil in his element, head smoking, hand smoking, waved Joe to a chair.

“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.