Father Neil's Monkeyshines Page 11

“Jonathan,” he said, “is leaving us, after all.”

  “So the bishop’s giving him a parish of his own. He’ll do well wherever he’s sent.”

  He shook his head. “Go see him for yourself, lad.”

  Jonathan was packing. He greeted me with his usual friendly smile. “I’m so sorry, Neil, I’m quitting.”

  It was one shock after another.

  “Quitting? But you gave up everything to become a priest.”

  “When Madeline died—” His gesture indicated that no loss could be compared with that.

  It was foolish of me but I felt aggrieved, even in some measure betrayed. Only now did I realize how much I hero-worshipped him.

  “After converting a crowd of Anglicans, you are becoming one of them again.”

  He sat me down on the bed beside him.

  “No, Neil. I seem to be in no-man’s land at present.”

  He must have thought I deserved a fuller explanation.

  “What did I expect from the Catholic Church?” he asked.

  “Not an easy life, Jonathan.”

  He smiled. “No. Nor authority or even forgiveness. Having felt Christ’s love, I’ve never felt insecure.”

  “A deeper faith in God?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “and what did I receive? Words. The truth about God with far too many brushstrokes.” He shrugged. “You know me as well as anyone, Neil. What moves me is the mystery of things, what cannot be said but only hinted at. God is too big to play word games over him.”

  I bowed my head; I understood, partly at least.

  “A few days ago, Neil, I went to see Josie Baxter’s mother. Dr. Daley told me she was suffering from severe depressive illness, brought on by being deprived of the sacraments and her little girl’s worsening health. I felt so sorry for her, Neil. I offered to bring her Holy Communion.” He gazed directly into my eyes. “That was wrong of me, wasn’t it?”

  “Not right,” I agreed.

  “She thanked me but refused my offer. She knew I had no right to make it and she didn’t want to involve me in her wrongdoing. She said when she married her George outside the Church to make some sort of life for herself and Josie, she knew what she was doing. She realized she would be barred from Our Lord in Holy Communion all her life, unless her beloved George died before she did when she would no longer want to go to Communion anyway. She doesn’t think Jesus would have treated her like that but—”

  “She’s a loyal Catholic,” I said defiantly.

  “Exactly, Neil, and I can’t tell you how much I respect you all for it. You made me realize there is no place for me in the Catholic priesthood. I could never come up to your standards. Father Duddleswell was quite right about me, you see. A square peg.”

  What I could not be sure of then or later was whether Father D had merely anticipated Jonathan’s inevitable departure or caused it by his reckless conservatism.

  “You and your loyal parish priest find obedience easy, Neil. I never did. I mean no disrespect. Catholicism depends on devoted priests like you, and what a wonderful vocation you have. This is merely a comment on my own unruly self.”

  Mrs. Pring was sorry to see him leave but maintained she saw it coming from the first day. Father D was sorry, too. He had his own reasons for thinking Jonathan’s departure was inevitable.

  I alone felt his going as a source of grief that would never leave me. On the other hand, the memory of his kindness, generosity, and unbounded tolerance has stayed with me throughout my life and influenced all my major decisions.

  I don’t think I will ever meet a more honorable or truthful person. Whatever it cost him, he always acted according to his conscience. Such a one finds it hard to impossible to toe the party line, whether in business, the military, politics, or the Church. Such was his integrity, he often thought less highly of himself than of people who disagreed with him.

  A van came for his few belongings. His atheist daughter collected him by car. She, better than anyone, understood her father and passed no judgment on him because he’d never passed judgment on her or anyone else.

  I was thinking, How can any religion afford to exclude such a noble human being?

  He left arm in arm with Rebecca. As I waved to him, I could not help admiring him and thinking, “Jonathan, my friend, my dear friend, you are a very lucky man.”

  6. A Man Has His Pride

  “Tubman’s the name, Father. Barney Tubman.”

  I took the horn-like hand he held out to me. My fingers were ground together in the strength of his shake.

  Barney was walking his dog, Hairy Harry, a big Afghan hound, in the park. The contrast between them was striking. The dog was tall, lean, hungry looking. The owner was small, squat, and well fleshed out. He had on a black oilskin cap, and there was a brass ring in his left ear.

  These were early days. I had not yet encountered all the “characters” at St. Jude’s. I was wary, usually with reason.

  “I was once a priest meself, Father,” Barney said confidentially. He kissed my hand and the dog followed suit. “But you know how it is, in spring a young man’s fancy and all that.”

  I gulped and muttered something about knowing only too well.

  “Sowed my wild oats, oh yes,” he said in a gravelly voice. “And didn’t I get a wonderful harvest? See you, Father.”

  The dog dragged him away before I could question him further.

  Barney turned to look over his shoulder and gave out a big, vibrant laugh.

  “Barney Tubman a priest?”

  Father Duddleswell and his buddy Dr. Daley laughed almost as gustily as Barney.

  Barney was the biggest fibber in town. He was also to occasion a flaming row between Father Duddleswell and me, but that was some time in the future. For the moment, fresh as I was from the “priest factory,” I accepted with good grace that I’d had my long legs considerably extended.

  Mention of Barney unblocked a flood of wartime memories in the presbytery. In this instance, Dr. Daley started it, as he poured himself a whiskey.

  The day war was declared in 1939, Father D had just started to say mass when the air-raid siren wailed. It was only testing but the public didn’t know that. They thought the Germans would be flying over and dropping bombs any minute. He insisted that his congregation ran for safety while he continued celebrating mass alone.

  The only nearby shelter was a manhole in front of the church. The faithful climbed down it and the last of them drew the cover across with such a clang Father D was convinced the first bomb had dropped outside his front door.

  Mrs. Pring had also stayed in the danger zone to answer the responses of the mass. She said Father D completed the mass in seven minutes flat. According to her, he was turning around for Dominus vobiscum (the Lord be with you) like a whirling dervish.

  As soon as he finished saying mass, he disrobed and followed the congregation down the manhole.

  Billy Buzzle, our bookie neighbor, came home from his club. He hadn’t heard the BBC news. Hell, he thought, it’s gone quiet all of a sudden.

  He was prepared for the war. He had picked up his free gas mask and bought a whistle, a torch, and a rattle. He now used his rattle to attract attention.

  There was panic below ground. Father D began machine-gunning his parishioners with absolutions of all their sins. This made things worse. It convinced everyone the rattle signaled a gas attack and none of them had their gas masks with them.

  Barney Tubman’s story was far more dramatic. He used to sleep upstairs even during the Blitz of 1941 when there were plenty of underground shelters available.

  One night, around 2:00 a.m., a blast bomb dropped on the builders’ yard across the road from him. It demolished the yard and knocked down the front of Barney’s house. The roof was more or less intact, but otherwise his bedroom was left open to the sky.

&nbs
p; Paint from the builders’ yard shot up in a riot of colors, splattering his bedroom. A pickax was hurled in the air and the sharp end dug into the plaster over Barney’s bed.

  Daylight came. Police and ARP wardens were on the scene. Several people had been killed, and many others were likely to be trapped under the rubble. Seeing the state of his house, neighbors presumed they’d seen the last of dear old Barney.

  A couple of policemen were pointing to where Barney’s bedroom wall used to be when Barney himself crawled out of bed like a worm from an apple, yawned, and lazily touched his toes.

  He must have had a few jars too many before retiring. He didn’t hear a thing. Only now did it hit him that an important part of his house was missing.

  Seeing Barney appear like Lazarus from the dead, a crowd gathered. His bedroom resembled the set of a play. Barney, like an actor on the stage, took a bow and those below clapped a great performance.

  His place, or what was left of it, survived, surrounded by mostly vacant lots.

  Barney was ridiculously proud of his house. First, it was something of a miracle.

  “This house used to be terraced and now it’s detached,” he told me as he gestured at the cratered land around him. “I’ve got three acres of land an’ all. Look at it.”

  The top story had been pulled down for safety’s sake; the sides had been plugged and a corrugated iron roof spread over all. The final effect was of a primitive cottage on the moon.

  Barney had done his best to improve appearances. Ivy covered the walls. He had made tubs for the biggest geraniums I’ve ever seen and there was trelliswork over the front door with climbing roses entwined in it.

  The “garden” was a mass of flowers, and he had a patch of land in which he grew fruit and vegetables.

  He kept chickens, too. Once, I came across an aged hen sitting uncomfortably on what, Barney showed me, was a china egg.

  “Just to keep the old thing, happy,” he said. “That’s all she’s got.”

  It wasn’t a bad image of Barney. His substitute for a house wasn’t much either, but it was all he had.

  Barney, a widower, was a truck driver long retired. He was a nominal Catholic, so I was charged with getting him to return to his duties.

  One day, he asked my opinion of his chestnut tree. Because of its surroundings it was rather less than ordinary.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “Not nice, Father. Special.” Seeing me floundering, he explained. “It’s special ’cause it’s mine, see.” He smacked me on the back and emitted a laugh that was also special because it was his own.

  Barney was something of a poet.

  “When the swifts come back,” he said, “and the house martins, when I hear the first larks nesting in the rubble and soaring overhead it brings tears to me eyes.”

  Instead of tears, he produced that marvelous laugh of appreciation at the world’s wonders that shook the ceiling like a low-flying buzz bomb.

  “Careful, Barney,” I said, “you’ll bring the whole place down.”

  “Even Adolf couldn’t do that,” he said as he tugged on the brass ring in his ear. “No, he damn well couldn’t.”

  Barney had two daughters. Mabel I never met. He didn’t think much of her. According to him, Mabel was a proper nose-in-the air. She’d married a plumber and got notions. She acted, he said, “like she was the Queen of Sheba.” In a word, “she always does the right and proper thing, Father. I love her but I can’t stand her.”

  Not so Liz. Liz, unmarried with three teenage boys, was a straightforward doughnut of a woman, big, soft, and sugary.

  “Our Liz,” he said, “has no exhibitions.”

  He presumably meant “inhibitions” because Father D’s chief complaint against her was that she exhibited too much.

  The first time I met her at Barney’s place, she planted a big, wet kiss on my cheek and nearly squeezed me to death. It was like being wrapped around with two hot water bottles. After what seemed an hour, she held me at arm’s length, saying, “If I was only ten years younger, oh, boy.”

  Fortunately, she didn’t elaborate on what she might have done to me, but it would’ve been touch and go whether I survived.

  Liz, though a spinster, referred to herself as an honorable widow. The father of her youngest, a married man, had passed on. She spoke of having “bucketfuls of amori” (love, I presume) to go around, and her offspring were “bairns of love and lust.”

  Barney used to whisper, “It’s not her fault, Father. Men find her irresistible. That poor girl needs broken glass cemented on her shoulder blades to keep the men off.”

  My experience taught me that she took a lot of stopping.

  I liked Liz immensely, even if I had to be discreet in showing it. Nothing bothered her, not even the beginnings of whiskers on her chin, a marble nose, and eyes like watermelon seeds. I also appreciated her directness.

  “Do you believe in God?” I asked her.

  “Bits of him, Father.”

  “Which bits, Liz?”

  “Oh, the loverly motherly bits. Mind you,” she said, giving me a progress report, “he’s not very popular in the Buildings.” The Buildings were the council flats where she lived. “He let those Jerry planes smash all our bleddy winders.”

  Liz had what she called “a sweet tooth for life,” and her juice-filled face conveyed it in a good-natured way to everyone she met. She always looked as if she were being tickled all over by invisible hands.

  She made me laugh when she first introduced me to her three sons, all muscly like wrestlers, with, “Father Boyd, I want you to meet my Three Little Sins.”

  Barney was fond of those boys. “Liz were a wicked wench, I know,” he confided in me, “but didn’t she do me proud?”

  I cautiously agreed with him. A case of the wages of sin being life.

  Barney said that Liz’s lads never grew stale on him and one day he planned to leave the house to Tom, the eldest.

  Barney’s great-grandfather had built it; his grandfather and father like himself had been born there, Liz and Mabel, too, and it was in every way precious to him.

  I wondered how he managed to survive in it. In spite of his best DIY efforts, the walls were damp, out of alignment, and beginning to crack and crumble. There was no bathroom, only an exposed outside lavatory, and the surroundings were not inspiring.

  I chanced to drop in on Barney one day when Liz was there. He had built himself a shelf for the kitchen but, after putting on it sauce bottles, various tins, pickle jars, cups, and saucers, there was still plenty of room to spare.

  Liz suggested for a lark that he got himself some books.

  “I’ve heard of them things,” Barney said.

  “Nice colors you can get, too,” I contributed, enjoying the joke.

  “Tell me how I can get some.”

  “Nothing to it, Dad,” said Liz. “There’s a big place in the High Street full of ’em.” She meant the municipal library. “Don’t cost nothing, neither.”

  “Just the job,” Barney said, rubbing his hands. “I’ll pop along and get me some.”

  “They want ’em back, Dad,” Liz warned.

  “What?”

  “You can’t keep ’em. Not forever.”

  “I don’t want ’em forever, do I? Only for a few years.”

  Liz wobbled her head sideways to show that was still too long.

  “Tell me, then,” he demanded.

  Liz wasn’t sure so I said, “Two weeks, Barney.”

  “Why do they bother, then?” Barney said, disgustedly. “What can anyone do with a book in a coupla weeks?” He looked wistfully at the space on his shelf. “Mind you, they’d look swell up there, books would.”

  Edging away from Liz to avoid being rewarded with a bear hug, I promised to accompany Barney to the library. “I’ll sign a form for
him,” I said.

  “I can’t read nor write,” he said, with a loud guffaw. “No one learned me. They tried hard, I give ’em that, but I was too clever for ’em, see?”

  For Barney, illiteracy was an achievement. Like continuing to live in a house that the Luftwaffe did its best to raze to the ground but failed.

  It came out that Barney could count like a banker but not read.

  “At school,” he said, “Miss Withers—oh, she were lovely—she tried to stop me laughing an’ all, but she didn’t manage that, neither.”

  Liz said, “More’s the pity, Pa,” but I said I was glad of it.

  “I went to school for years and years,” Barney reminisced, “right up till I were near twelve. A waste of time, even Miss Withers said that. ‘Tubman,’ she says to me, near pulling me ear off, ‘you’ve wasted my time, your time, an’ everybody else’s time.’ And she congratulated me. She said, ‘If I gave out marks for wasting time, Tubman, you’d come top.’ It was the only thing I was good at.”

  That same afternoon found Barney, me, and Hairy Harry on the steps of the public library. Enrolling an elderly gentleman who is illiterate must be rather rare.

  Unfortunately, the chief librarian was on the front desk. Mrs. Bacon was a real sourpuss. I explained that my friend, Mr. Tubman, wanted to enroll and I would vouch for him.

  She patted her already immaculate hair, black and glossy as patent leather shoes, and gave me an ingratiating smile. She approved of gentlemen of the cloth patronizing her library. Gave it a bit of class.

  Barney managed to whisper in my ear, “Spit image of my Mabel, she is.”

  I filled in Barney’s name and address and engaged Mrs. Bacon in conversation while Barney made his mark in the best tradition of the Wild West.

  “Oh, what is this, then?” Mrs. Bacon said, going over the form. “He has not written his name.”

  “Can’t, darlin’,” Barny said cheerily. “I’ve left me ’ot cross bun.”

  “If he cannot read and write,” Mrs. Bacon said, “what does he want my books for?”

  That got my goat.

  “I beg your pardon, madam,” I said in my most innocent manner. “I cannot have made myself clear. He is not wanting your books. He wants to borrow some of his own. He’s a ratepayer.” At least I hoped he was.