Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“It’s what I pray for,” his mother, one eye swollen shut, had wept, and the priest had smiled down at her until she continued. “I pray that he’ll be struck down,” she explained. “Struck down so that he’ll never get up again.”

“Shush, Isobel,” the priest told her. “When such terrible things leave your tongue, they fly directly to God’s ear.”

She had stood then and turned, peering into the darkness of the church for Sully, who had sunk down into his pew. “What difference?” she said. “God isn’t listening.”

His mother had never spoken to the priest again. Nor did she attend his funeral later that year. Not that her absence was missed. People came from all over the state to both the viewing and the Requiem Mass. Sully’s father had gone and taken his sons with him. Sully could still remember how they’d dressed up for the occasion, his father and brother in dark, ill-fitting suits, himself in a white shirt that was too small for him, the collar so tight at the neck that his cheeks and forehead pulsed with warmth. The viewing was held not in a funeral home but rather at the rectory, and the line of the faithful come to pay respects extended down the steps and around the corner and up the street all the way to the church.

The priest had choked to death on a bone. Had anyone been with him, he might have been saved, but he dined alone in the huge rectory dining room which three days later held his coffin. By the time his housekeeper, in the next room, had heard him thrashing in his chair it was too late. By the time she came to his aid, his eyes had already bugged out in stark terror, as if he’d been forced to bear witness to something so ugly that his reason had come unhinged and he had stopped breathing. So, almost, had the housekeeper, so terrifying was the sight.

One must assume that the mortician, a member of the parish, had done his best, but the results were shockingly inadequate, for despite all efforts the dead priest’s expression retained much of the horror present when he was first discovered by the housekeeper. And so many of the faithful were given quite a turn when they saw the priest for the final time in his rich casket. The mortician had worked feverishly on the bugged eyes and contorted features and had managed to mute the expression of abject terror, but the priest still looked anything but confident about meeting his maker, and those who had for years followed his spiritual guidance did not stay long in his presence. The line past the casket moved swiftly, a bottleneck forming only once, when Sully’s father held things up by kneeling to say a prayer, though something about his posture suggested he might be whispering advice to an old friend. For the rest of the mourners, a single stunned glance was sufficient to send them packing into the next room.

Only later, when those who had been at the front of the line compared nervous notes with those who had been nearer the rear, did it become clear that during the viewing, the dead man’s mouth had gradually opened. At first his lips had been clamped tight, forming a white crease, but two hours later, when the last of the faithful had been led, like the blind, out of the dark rectory and into the afternoon sunlight, the mortician had had to go back to work, for the priest’s mouth had opened wide and the last unnerved mourners recalled vividly that the dead man had appeared to be begging them to reach into his throat and remove the bone that had choked him to death two days before.

But what Sully recollected more vividly than the appearance of the dead priest was his own father. Even as a boy, Sully had understood about his father’s ingratiating charm, even about the way it worked. His father was the sort of man people hated to see coming. If they noticed him before he saw them, they’d turn away and their heads would come together to plot escape. Perhaps they’d seen him drunk and belligerent the night before, or maybe he’d actually been in a fight and been thrown out of a bar and they’d tried to help him off the sidewalk, and maybe he’d looked up at them then, bloody-chinned and bleary-eyed, and told them right where they could stuff it. Or maybe they’d just heard a grim story about him. Big Jim had a reputation as a hard man in his own home, this being the euphemism for wife beaters at the time. At any rate, it was frequently within the social context of some prejudice against him that Sully’s father deftly charmed his way into acceptance. Before he was finished, the very people who’d pretended not to see him when he entered the room were slapping him on the back, doubting the truth of the tale they’d heard about him or even the evidence of their own senses, the ones who’d seen his face turn black with rage and red with his own blood. Now they hated to see him go, he was such a good fellow, and their only reservations were that he was a trifle crude and laughed a little too loud.

The day of the viewing, Sully’s father was the only one in the crowded rectory who appeared unfazed by the dead priest’s ghastly appearance, as if, to Big Jim, the priest had always looked this way. After holding up the line so he could pretend to say a prayer and then making his sons do the same at the ornate kneeler, he’d introduced himself and the two boys to the bishop, who had come up from Albany to say tomorrow’s high requiem Mass. Sully noticed that several of the parishioners had kissed the bishop’s ring and was grateful when neither he nor his brother nor his father was required to do so. Indeed, the robed man appeared to take in Sully’s father whole, in a single glance, and he stared a hole right through him.

Before leaving the rectory, Big Jim told Sully and his brother to wait where they were, he’d be back in a minute. In the hallway they saw him lean toward the old woman who had been the dead priest’s housekeeper and ask her something. Flustered, she pointed down the hall. Sully and his brother watched their father start out in the direction the old woman pointed, then dart left unexpectedly and head up the big staircase that led to the rectory’s upper rooms. Sully’s brother grinned at him knowingly.

When their father did not return for what seemed a long time, Sully, nervous, told his brother he had to go. “Bad,” he added, so there’d be no mistake. If it was okay for his father to pee in the dead priest’s house, maybe it would be okay if he did too. He needed to do it, in any case.

Since there was no one to tell them they shouldn’t — indeed, no one seemed to notice — they followed their father upstairs. The upper story of the rectory contained five rooms so lavishly furnished that Sully and his brother were stunned, having never seen anything like it.

They found their father in the priest’s study, just standing in the middle of the book-lined room, taking it all in — the plush leather sofa, the silver-framed pictures hanging from pristine white walls, the huge oak rolltop desk with its brass lamp, the gigantic free-standing globe, the leather-bound books from floor to ceiling, and pervading the room the smells of tobacco and what Sully would later identify as cologne and liqueurs. On the desk’s blotter there lay a gold pen and pencil set, along with a sleek gold letter opener.

Their father seemed neither surprised nor angry to see them, despite the fact that on other occasions he’d been known to strap them for not obeying his orders to stay put. “Not a bad racket, huh?” he said with a sweeping gesture that included not just the priest’s study but the surrounding rooms upstairs and down. “Those nickels and dimes in the collection plate add up, don’t they? All those collections, seven days a week, three on Sundays. You can do all right. See all this? This is what they call a vow of poverty. I bet the bastard was as chaste as he was poor too, what do you think?”