Songs in Ordinary Time Read online

  “You know I don’t think she ever had one single moment, or accomplishment, or person in her whole life to be proud of until I went into the seminary. Right away I knew it was different for me than for the others, but I kept fooling myself. I kept thinking somewhere along the line I’m going to change, I’m going to find exactly what God wants me to do. I thought it would come like wisdom, you know, this enlightenment like a tongue of fire over my head. I waited for it. I actually did.” He laughed and she felt a little better. He chewed and talked and gestured with his fork, all at the same time. He really had terrible manners, but at least his mood was improving. Maybe he just needed a chance to talk about himself.

  “My first parish was in this little mill town in upstate New York. I said Mass, I did the novenas, the evening catechism classes, I visited the hospital and the nursing homes, I went by the parish school once a week. And still I had all this free time, all this energy, so I asked the principal for a group of troubled kids maybe I could help. I took them on hikes and picnics and played ball with them. They were always at my door. Winter came and there was this one kid, this runt named Radlette, who was wearing sweaters because he didn’t have a jacket. So I bought him one, fleece-lined with a hood and buckles all over the place. No other kid had a better jacket, let me tell you, than Radlette had. The other kids picked on him for it. Radlette’s mother told me to mind my own business, that she could get her kid a jacket, which I guess caused trouble with her and her husband, because one night he got drunk and said he’d punch me out if I ever laid another queer hand on his kid. Pretty soon Radlette wouldn’t even look at me, his life had become so miserable. Next thing I know, my pastor’s accusing me of buying the jacket with the priests’ birthday party money. It was gone from the jar, twenty-five dollars. I was transferred. I couldn’t figure out how one kind act could brand me a pervert and a thief. This must be it, I told myself. God’s testing you, that’s all. He’s getting you ready for that tongue of fire. Later, that pastor wrote and said they’d found the birthday money, after all. I was exonerated. At least I wasn’t a thief.”

  Again his laughter rang with bitterness. Each piece of steak seemed to take longer to chew.

  “My next assignment was the Bronx, in a crummy, beat-up, lousy neighborhood like the one I grew up in. Only worse. All the kids were Radlettes. Most of the young priests in that parish hated it. Not me. I was so happy I thought I was going to cry that first day. It felt like I was trembling all over. I thought, This is why the crazy Radlette thing happened. This is what God wants.

  “I got right to work. I got stores to donate their day-old bread and bruised fruit to the needy, and I delivered a lot of it myself. I wrote to some seminary buddies in rich parishes and had their parishioners send their old clothes and shoes to our parish. The rectory basement started looking like Macy’s, people going through the bundles and trying things on. But that’s where the trouble started. They said it was in direct competition with the Bishop’s relief fund, that I had no business running my own clothing drive without going through the proper channels. I was told to submit my requests in writing on the proper forms directly to the Chancellery officials. So I did, but all I got back were these polite notes saying how the needs of our parish would be met as soon as other parishes ahead of us on the list had gotten their share. I tried to accept that. I’ll be patient, I told myself. Then a letter comes saying there’d been an earthquake in South America somewhere and all the clothes had to be shipped there. My parish would be on next year’s list. And would we, by the way, take up a special collection that Sunday for the suffering disaster victims in Bolivia. Okay, I said to myself. I even read the letter at one of the Masses.”

  He had stopped eating.

  “Then winter came. An awful winter. People were heating their tenements with their oven doors opened twenty-four hours a day, because the landlords kept the building thermostats locked at sixty degrees.” He leaned over the table and looked at her. She swallowed hard.

  “There was this one woman,” he said, his voice falling to a whisper. “She wasn’t much older than you, with two babies. She came to me crying. She showed me her gas bill. Sixty dollars for one month! I told her I’d get the money for her somehow. While I was begging around from people I knew, the gas company shut her off. Her three-month-old baby got pneumonia and died. Sure, she should have gone to Welfare. Sure, she should have taken the baby to the hospital whether she had the money or not. But she was one of those that just didn’t know how to make things happen. She went crazy and she tried to drown the other baby, so they put her away and sent the baby to a foster home.” He rubbed his face in his hands.

  There seemed to be silence at every booth and table.

  “That’s awful. At least there’s nothing like that here,” she said, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

  “That’s when I took my first real look at the polite and pious and obedient Father Joseph Gannon. I started visiting every apartment in the neighborhood. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, it didn’t matter. It took me two weeks. And what I saw made up my mind for me. I knew if I did nothing but pray for these people and go through the charade of proper channels, then I was no better than their landlords.

  “I mimeographed leaflets, calling for a rent strike until the thermostats were turned up, until the broken windows were replaced, until the holes in the roof and the walls were patched. A lot of the landlords, the big ones, the ones who had five or six or ten of these hovels, reacted by turning the thermostats down even lower. So I went out and got blankets. I asked for blankets everywhere, from stores, the Salvation Army, Goodwill, hospitals, my fellow seminarians again. Even my own rectory. I took every extra blanket and tablecloth I could get my hands on, even old drapes from the attic. Word got around and three other priests joined me and a nun. We set up a kind of relief station in the parish hall. We passed out I don’t know how many blankets. We had soup and coffee for them when they came, and cookies for the kids. We wrote letters to the papers. It looked like a couple of the smaller landlords were coming around. But then three of the biggest landlords, and two of them were Catholics, went to my Bishop with checks in hand. They convinced him I was disturbed, the nun was a Communist, and the other priests were drunks.

  “I was put in a hospital in New Mexico for a month.” He looked at her. “I wasn’t there a month, Alice, but a whole year. They said I had a nervous breakdown. I don’t remember much of it besides crying a lot.” He sighed. “I certainly did cry. I stayed in one little room and wouldn’t go outside for months. I never saw the sun or the rain. I didn’t want to know anything.”

  She moved the peas around on her plate, remembering Marlin and his breathy questions and her father pressing the flat white box into her hand and her mother’s bitter laughter at such a gift for their only daughter, their firstborn child, whose conception had seeded a marriage and disaster.

  “I wanted to tell you,” he said. “I thought you should know.”

  She nodded.

  “Can’t you say anything?”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Why was he doing this? Why here, with all these people around?

  “I don’t want you to be sorry,” he said irritably. “I want you to understand.”

  “I understand,” she said, as cautiously as if she were extricating the very bottom piece from a jumble of pickup sticks, because, as always, to blink or take a breath might bring her father lurching through that door, might fill this quiet place with her mother’s prayerful entreaties that were as bitter as curses, “Sweet Jesus, help me. I beg you, please, please help me!” Didn’t he know how fragile it all was, how precarious the balance?

  “You see, it wasn’t Radlette or rent strikes or blankets I needed, Alice, it was you! I love you!” he said fiercely.

  “Shh.” She stiffened and did not dare look away from his rough face that glowed with sweat.

  “This is what God wanted for me. I know that now. Love!”

  The waitress was coming.


  “Aren’t you going to finish?” Alice tried to ask, but he kept on talking.

  “All this time I thought I’d lost my faith….”

  “Excuse me,” the waitress said with a toothy grin. She reached for Alice’s plate and asked if they were done.

  “No!” Joe said so sharply that the woman’s hand jerked back.

  Alice’s face reddened, and she stared miserably at her plate as the waitress moved to the next booth. She could feel them all turning, looking, listening.

  “But now, now I realize that my faith has become a wholeness. It’s a unity of mind and soul. And flesh,” he said, taking her hand in both of his. “I finally feel like a real priest!”

  On their way down to Hankham, Mississippi, a hose blew in the old green station wagon. They taped it up, but they had to keep putting water into the radiator every couple of hours. A nice white lady gave them two one-gallon mayonnaise jars from back of her hotdog stand. Luther kept them filled with water, their sloshing almost unbearable for Montague, whose own plumbing was so bad Luther had to stop about every half hour so the old man could pee. Like all their troubles past and to come, this, too, settled into the flux, fueling the rhythm, so that the minute the car pulled over, the old man would open the door, turn a ways and relieve himself into the dusty road weeds. The old man said he wished there was some kind of internal replenishment between his output and the leaky radiator, and Luther said maybe he could fix it so the old man could piss straight into the radiator hose from the front seat. Replenishment—that was one of Montague’s favorite words: to put back what had been taken out. Replenishment. It played through his thoughts night and day like the fragment of an ancient hymn. Replenishment. It was a hunger beyond flesh. Replenishment. He had not eaten a meal or slept a moment since they’d lost Earlie. Not once. Oh, his eyes might close, but he was painfully, doggedly awake.

  The little money they had came from the few Bibles they managed to sell along the way. Luther would wait in the car while Montague shuffled house to house, his soiled satchel bulging with the plastic-sealed Bibles and in his palm Earlie’s worn photograph fondled now to the softness of cloth. “My only living relative,” he would cry before they could shut the door. “I’m a tired and sick old man and ready to die, but I can’t do it alone. I need to be mourned and prayed into heaven, and this is the only one I got to do it, this here handsome young man.”

  Luther said the first thing he was going to do when they found Earlie was beat him to a pulp. Every day the old man had to endure this idiotic reverie, although the closer they got now, the less he minded it. He liked to recall the good times along the way with Luther and Earlie sparring just for the hell of it. He remembered how it made him laugh and how it got on Duvall’s nerves.

  “Gonna twist his arm up tight behind his back,” Luther was muttering. “Gonna say, ‘Why’d you do that? Why’d you dump us like that, Earlie? Tell me now, why?’”

  Montague knew. He knew why, but Luther would scoff, insisting, no, that wasn’t it, if anything a woman’s swelling belly would be enough to keep Earlie from ever going back. But the hunger had grown so strong with the deepening heat that Montague knew, knew that in Hankham they’d find Earlie and Laydee with their newborn child. She’d already missed a month when they left, which was why Earlie had been so quick to jump at Duvall’s offer: all expenses paid and a chance to see the country while he parlayed a small investment (his Army savings, which he’d just handed over to Duvall, not a paper or a note signed) into a sizable nest egg. Montague had begged the boy not to do it, but Earlie was determined. His child wasn’t going to grow up poor as him. This was his big chance and he wasn’t about to turn his back on it, especially when a man of Duvall’s caliber had such faith in him.

  “Why’d you run out on us with Duvall’s money, Earlie! Come on, Earlie!” Luther’s head bobbed over the wheel away from the imagined jabs. “Unh! Unh! Unh! Tell me! Tell me, Earlie!” he grunted, grinning with his vision of revenge.

  Well, well, well, here they finally were, mayonnaise jars sloshing and the hunger boring a hole in Montague’s gut all the way down Hankham’s main street. But Laydee and her family were gone, having moved three times just in the last six months, the problem mostly being work for Laydee’s father and that slew of children wrecking every place they got.

  It took awhile longer, more driving, tracking down relatives, last jobs, with so much sodden tape on the hose Luther had to strip it off and start all over again, and then had come the day at last when here she was, Laydee Dwelley herself, grinning through the rusted screen, with the prettiest baby in her arms, the cream-colored image of its daddy.

  A tiny girl, Laydee had clear skin, big bright eyes, and a soft little nose that squished against Montague’s chest. He hugged her so tight for so long the baby started to cry between them. He let go and she gave a squeal as she looked past him to the young man springing up the steps, and he was grinning, too, as he turned so fast he wobbled dizzily, then grabbed her shoulder to steady himself, but it was Luther. Only Luther. Luther eager for his revenge, if not on Earlie, then on someone. Clearly it was not going to matter. Luther was swearing, and the three of them knew, and it was right then that Montague’s heart started breaking off into chunks that floated through his bloodstream. Even now, weeks later, he could still feel them throbbing throughout his body.

  “He ain’t here,” she said.

  “But he’s coming. He’s coming,” he insisted with the urgency of the wheels that still seemed to be rolling under him. “He started back such a long time ago. Be a month by now. Maybe two.” It was hurt rising, pure hurt like a wall around his brain.

  “End of May,” said Luther. “Beginning of June.”

  “He ain’t been here,” she said, her whole face twitching. “I can tell you that.”

  “But the boy said, he said Earlie told him. He knew your name and he knew Hankham, Mississippi,” Montague insisted.

  “The boy lied,” Luther said and kept saying all the long way back, every time he brought it up, puzzling over the particulars of the boy’s tale that day, for instance Earlie’s generosity, especially when it came to kids, and Duvall’s money clip, silver with a fancy D engraved on it. “Now how’d he know, a boy like that, just coming along the street?” Montague would muse in his need to hone it all to a simple and unobscured gleam of light he could keep in the distance. The reply was inevitable, its voice dark and tired. “Duvall told him. He lied for Duvall.”

  “I don’t know, that just don’t add up.”

  “Don’t make me say it, old man. Don’t.”

  Well, it was a long way back. A long way still to go. Always low on money and gas, they were burning oil in a long black tail. Luther scowled over the wheel. Weeping, the old man had collapsed at Laydee’s feet. Certain he was dying, Luther had carried him like a baby into the car. The old man started begging and gasping and then his eyes rolled back to whites, and Luther couldn’t stand it any longer. Yes, yes, he had finally relented. They’d find Earlie.

  “Something must’ve happened, I know that.” Montague sighed. It was as much as he’d admit. He was still not eating or sleeping and now barely taking liquids to cut down on the stops.

  “Yah, something happen, old man. Something evil. Something name Omar Duvall’s what happen.”

  It was that hour late in a summer afternoon when the stillness rose from the tree-lined streets like quiet from a well. It was the time when the calls often came. Her fingertips stained a fragrant green, Jessie Klubock knelt on the thick warm lawn dead-heading orange marigolds. She tossed the faded blossoms into the forsythia, where Harvey wouldn’t see them. The compost pile was in the corner of the yard, and way back there she might not hear the phone ring. The dog was buried next to the compost pile. That poor dumb dog. She didn’t miss him a bit. Of course she’d never admit it to Harvey, but she enjoyed gardening so much more now without the dog slobbering all over her and charging down the driveway, barking whenever anyone came
up the street. And it was such a relief not having to endure Marie Fermoyle’s abuse every time she caught him in her yard. Yard! Jessie had sometimes felt like shouting back; you call that weed-filled, junk-strewn eyesore a yard? The house was a mess with its peeling paint and missing shingles. The garage roof was so sway-backed with rot that Harvey had long ago forbidden Louis to ever go in there. The neighbors were disgusted, and a few had even threatened to speak to Marie Fermoyle. Someone really should, she thought, or, better yet, maybe they could all get together for a community fix-up, like in the old barn-raising days. Harvey had been horrified when she told him this. Marie Fermoyle didn’t want anyone’s help, he said. People should just mind their own business.

  “Well, we could at least offer,” she persisted, aglow with the images of men on ladders scraping and hammering away in the hot sun while the ladies scrubbed windows and planted flowers from their own lovely gardens. “What would be the harm in that?”

  “I couldn’t begin to tell you,” he sighed.

  “That’s what I mean, Harvey! You, of all people! You know what that kind of life is like. How can you not help?”

  “You don’t understand, Jessie. Sometimes the best you can do is to not make things worse,” he said.

  She didn’t understand, but she knew enough to drop it. With him, anyway. That was the difference between them. Life was too short to be passive. She started by calling Cynthia Branch, across the street. The Branches and Marie Fermoyle had not spoken since the night Cyrus fired his rifle into the air to scare off drunken Sam Fermoyle, who was beating on Marie’s front door. When the police came, Marie told them Cyrus had been shooting at her house, and he was charged with discharging a firearm within town limits.

  Jessie had explained to Cynthia what a boost this would give Marie. She said she couldn’t imagine having to do all that Marie did on her own. And it could happen to any one of them. Who knew what the future held? They had to help one another; wasn’t that what life was all about? Especially the women…Then Cynthia interrupted and, choosing her words carefully, said she and Cyrus would be glad to do anything that would improve the bleak view through their picture window.