Father McNamee has done so much for Mom and me over the years. “God sent him to us,” she used to say about Father McNamee. “Father McNamee was truly called.”
A few years ago, I finally confessed the sin of masturbation to Father McNamee, and he didn’t make me feel shameful about it. He whispered through the confession screen, “God will send you a wife one day, Bartholomew. I am sure of it.”
Shortly after that, The Girlbrarian started working at the library, and I have often wondered if this was God’s work. Again, we are reminded of Jung’s Synchronicity. Unus mundus.
Now I pray to God and ask for the courage needed to speak to The Girlbrarian, who always seems to glow in the library the way Mary glows in the stained glass window whenever the sun shines into Saint Gabriel’s.
But courage never comes.
I pray for words, and those evaporate instantly whenever I see The Girlbrarian at the library and get so hot, it’s like my brain is boiling in my skull.
Perhaps the you-me of pretending would have a better shot, but the thing is, I want The Girlbrarian to fall in love with Bartholomew Neil and not us, Richard Gere. You would win her over with a flash of your smile or a wink—it would be so easy for you. I want to win her affection, but my ways are slower.
From what I have been reading about Buddhism, this desire is what keeps me trapped far away from enlightenment. But then I remind myself that you have a wife, and if Richard Gere the great Buddhist and friend of the Dalai Lama can have such desires, it must be okay for me too. Right?
When this past Saturday’s Mass was over, Father Hachette would not let me speak with Father McNamee, nor would he let me into the priests’ chambers. “Pray for Father McNamee, Bartholomew. The best thing you can do is pray. Petition the Lord,” Father Hachette kept saying over and over as he reached up and patted my chest like he would pat a large pet—perhaps a Great Dane. “Just calm down,” he kept saying. “Let’s remain calm. All of us—one and all.”
Maybe I was more upset than I realized. Although the angry man in my stomach was not trying to destroy my internal organs. It was a different sort of upset. I have a tendency to get agitated when I worry. Regardless, Father Hachette looked scared. People are often afraid of me when I get agitated or angry. But I’ve never, ever hurt anyone—even in school when people used to shove me and call me a retard.
(The worst day of my life turned into one of the best experiences I ever had in high school, but taken as a whole, it made me feel very much like a retard. This beautiful girl named Tara Wilson came to my locker and in this very sexy voice she asked me to go down into the high school basement during lunch period. I knew this was where students went to have sex during school, and I was excited that one of the most popular girls in my class wanted to take me there. I also knew it was a trick. The angry man in my stomach was cursing and kicking and stomping and telling me not to fall for it. Don’t be their retard! the little angry man yelled. But I knew it was my only chance with Tara Wilson, and it was just too nice to pretend that she wanted to take me down into the high school basement, even though she looked so nervous and was sweating in December, so the pretending was extra hard. She even held my hand as we walked down the steps, which was wonderful. That brief minute of hand-holding was probably the best part of high school for me. And I still think about Tara Wilson—the way she used to poof her bangs up with hair spray, the three gold rope chains she wore around her neck and the gold dog tag that read T-A-R-A and had a small diamond chip on the lower right corner, how she smoked Marlboro Reds like a movie star on the corner after school, and how she’d throw her head back and blow the smoke straight up at the clouds as she laughed—like a wonderful beautiful kind of smokestack—with her cigarette resting in the crook of a peace sign. Even though she tricked me, I still like her very much to this day and hope that she has a nice family somewhere and is doing well. I hope Tara Wilson is happy. When we made it down into the basement, Tara led me to a dark corner. There were a dozen or so classmates down there—all boys. They circled me and started chanting, “Retard! Retard! Retard!” Before I knew what was happening so many hands were on me, and then I was alone in a dark supply closet and couldn’t get out or see anything. I screamed and banged on the door for hours, but no one came. Eventually, I pretended I was in my bed at home sleeping soundly and dreaming up this awful nightmare. I pretended I would wake up soon, Mom would make breakfast, and that helped for a time. Then the angry man in my stomach became furious, kicking and screaming and commanding me to escape, so I tried to knock down the door with my shoulder, but it felt like trying to move a mountain with my mind—my biceps started to ache and swell—and I eventually slid down into the darkness, wondering if I would die down there. I prayed, asking God to save me, but no one came. The cold set in. I spent the night there shivering on the concrete and Mom worried terribly, even calling the police. When I had given up entirely, the light rushed in and blinded me. “Oh my God. Are you okay?” I heard. It was Tara. And it was the next day, before anyone had arrived at our high school. She handed me a bottle of water and a bag of homemade chocolate chip cookies. I drank the water immediately because I was so thirsty. “I’m sorry,” she said. “They made me do it.” My eyes adjusted to the light. Her makeup was running down her face, and she looked so apologetic and wretched that I forgave her right away. She told me that this classmate named Carl Lenihan had taken off her clothes when she was passed out drunk at a party, and then he took pictures of her. He was making her do things for him, using the pictures as blackmail. She begged me not to tell anyone that she had let me out. She was crying hysterically as she explained all of this, waving her hands around in the air, saying she thought I might have died from the furnace fumes and she was waiting outside the high school doors when the janitors arrived to open up for the day, and she was so glad I was okay—alive. But then—out of the blue—Tara Wilson did the strangest thing. She hugged me for a long time and cried into my shirt, saying she was sorry so many times. She cried and trembled so hard I thought she was going to die. I didn’t know whether she wanted me to hug her back or not, so I just stood there. Then she pulled my head down, kissed my cheek, and ran up the stairs and out of the high school basement. She never spoke to me ever again. When I’d pass her in the hallways, she would look the other way. And I never told anyone that I spent the night in the dark, cold supply closet in my high school’s basement. I don’t know why. I didn’t pretend that it never happened or was only a dream. I kept it to myself. You, Richard Gere, are the first person I have ever told. I told Mom I spent the night behind the art museum looking at the river flow—that the flowing water had hypnotized me and I had forgotten about time. I don’t think she believed me, but she didn’t call me a liar either, which I appreciated. She just looked into my eyes for a long time and then dropped it. Mom understood that it was better to let some things alone. Words could be used as weapons that do too much damage. All of the popular boys in my high school class called me “Tara” or “Closet Boy” until I graduated. Sometimes they called me “Tara’s retard.” And Tara never acknowledged me ever again. This is when I learned that nice people sometimes felt they had to pretend to be mean and awful. Since Tara, I’ve seen many people pretending to be rude and cruel and thoughtless. Have you noticed this too, Richard Gere? People choosing to pretend for evil rather than good? I don’t understand why people do this, but I understand that most choose the way of Tara, and this has often confused me.)
Back at Saint Gabriel’s, I said to Father Hachette, “Will you ask Father McNamee to call me this evening?”
“Sure. Sure,” Father Hachette said. His narrow face was the color of stop signs, and his few wisps of hair were blowing around under the heat vent on the wall. “Just go home and pray. I’ll have Father McNamee call you. Now off you go, Bartholomew. God bless you.”
I didn’t believe Father Hachette would do as I asked, because Father Hachette was not called by God in the same way that Father McNamee was—you can tell by looking
into his eyes and by the fact that he doesn’t help as many people in the church; it’s not that he’s a terrible priest, he’s just not “truly called” like Father McNamee, or at least that’s what Mom always said—but even though I had that warm God-wants-you-to-do-something feeling in my chest, I went home anyway, figuring that Father McNamee would contact me eventually, because he has always been a regular visitor of Mom’s and mine.
When I arrived home, Father McNamee was sitting on the front steps. His white beard looked extra feral and his nose was shiny red. There were two brown paper bags to his left and a pizza to his right.
“Communion,” he said. “Will you break bread with me?”
I nodded, but I did not like the wild look in Father McNamee’s sky-blue eyes, which sucked at me like powerful whirlpools.
Something was off.
If he were a house, one of the windows would have been smashed and the door would have been ajar. It was like he had been broken into and robbed. I wasn’t sure what was missing just yet, and I knew I would eventually have to go inside Father McNamee and take inventory, if that makes any sense. I couldn’t imagine Father McNamee ever hurting me in any way, but I also couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t quite right about him—and that I should be careful. He had been compromised, as they say in spy movies and on TV shows about presidents and prime ministers and secret agents.
We ate and drank in the kitchen.
“The body of Christ,” Father McNamee said when he placed a mushroom slice on my plate.
Father McNamee didn’t take a slice for himself; he only drank his Jameson.
I tried to eat, but I wasn’t very hungry.
I was still trying to figure out what had been stolen from inside Father McNamee.
“The blood of Christ,” he said when he poured a finger of whiskey into my glass. “Drink.”
I took a sip and felt the burn.
He downed his in one gulp and his face reddened immediately.
Mom would have said he “had the blossom.”
“Bartholomew,” Father McNamee said. “Now that I’ve left the church, I need a place to live. I don’t even own the clothes on my back, technically. My rather well-to-do childhood friend is sending money, but it’s not a fortune. If you take me in, I can also offer you my prayers.”
“You’re really leaving the church? You’re really renouncing your vows?”
He nodded and poured more whiskey.
“Why?”
“Exodus.”
“Exodus?”
“Exodus,” he said.
“Like Moses?”
“More like Aaron.”
Mom had read me biblical stories as a child and I had gone to church every week for my entire life, where I often read the Bible, so I knew that Aaron was Moses’s spokesperson when he led the Jews out of Egypt.
“I don’t understand what you’re telling me,” I said.
Father McNamee threw back another three fingers of whiskey and poured himself a fresh glass.
“Do you ever feel as though God speaks to you, Bartholomew?” He searched my eyes until I looked down at my pizza slice. “Has God sent you any messages lately? Do you know what I’m talking about? Are you the answering machine recording God’s voice? Can you advise me? What has God told you lately? Has He sent you any messages at all—for me or otherwise?”
I thought about The Girlbrarian first—and then I thought about you, Richard Gere, and the letter Mom left behind for me. I wondered if your letter could have been a message from God, even though you are a Buddhist. (Mysterious ways.) But I didn’t say anything about you to Father McNamee. I don’t know why. Maybe because he looked like a broken-into house.
“I’ve watched you grow up,” Father McNamee said. “You’ve always been different. And you’ve lived the life of a monk, really. Always at the library reading, studying. Living a quiet, simple existence with your mother, and now . . .”
He looked out the kitchen window for a long time, although there wasn’t anything to see, except the reflection of the ceiling light that looked like an electric moon.
“Your father—he was a religious man. Did your mother tell you that?”
“Yes,” I said. “He was martyred. Killed for the Catholic Church by the Ku Klux Klan.”
“The Ku Klux Klan?” Father McNamee said.
“According to Mom.”
Father McNamee smiled in this very bemused way—almost like he was being tickled.
“What else did she tell you about your father?”
“He was a good man.”
“He was a good man.”
“You knew him?”
Father McNamee nodded solemnly. “He used to confess to me a long time ago. He was deeply religious. Tapped in. God spoke to him. He had visions. His blood runs through your veins.”
“And my mom’s blood too,” I said, although I’m not sure why.
Father McNamee had never spoken to me like this before, even when he was fall-down drunk. But Mom had often spoken of my father’s visions. She once told me that my dad would close his eyes so tightly that all he could see was the color red—and then he would hear the unknowable voices of angels, which he described as the high-pitched noise wind makes when rushing through leafy forests, only more musical and divine—and he could understand the angels.
“She lives on through you,” Father McNamee said. “Your mother. That’s true.”
When it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything else, I said, “Do you really want to live with me?”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“God told me to do something a long time ago, but I’m only getting around to it now. Mostly because God is giving me the silent treatment at the present moment.”
“What?”
“Am I not speaking clearly?”
“No. I mean, yes,” I said. This was a lot to take in. “What exactly did God tell you?”
“‘Defrock yourself and live with Bartholomew Neil.’ Again, it was a long time ago. I think God is mad at me, because I didn’t listen.”
I shook my head. God would never speak to Father McNamee about me. What he said was not true. Father McNamee was just trying to make me feel better. Telling white lies. Pretending. Including me in his calling, because he knew I am not called and felt sorry for me.
“You look surprised, Bartholomew. God speaks to people all throughout the Bible. He’s always talking to people.”
I stared at my mushroom pizza slice and thought about how far Father McNamee had fallen. I began to worry that the squidlike cancer was now attacking his brain too.
“You have nothing to say to me, Bartholomew? No word from God? Nothing?” He looked up at me, raised his whiskey glass, and said, “So?”
“Why would you want to live with me?”
“I think God has a plan for you,” Father McNamee said. “Unfortunately, God no longer speaks to me. So I don’t know what exactly that plan might be. But the good news is that I’m here to help you carry it out, if you’re game.” He took another shot of whiskey and said, “So what’s the plan, Bartholomew?”
I just looked at him.
“You really don’t know, do you?” he said, tilting his head sideways and squinting at me through his bushy white circle of beard and hair. “God hasn’t spoken to you lately?”
“I have no idea.”
“None at all? Not even a suspicion? An inclination? A feeling? Nothing?”
I shook my head and felt embarrassed.
“You’ve heard no calling?”
“Sorry,” I said, because I hadn’t heard anything remotely like a calling.
“Then I guess we wait,” he said. “And I will pray. God may no longer speak to me, but maybe He’s still listening.”
“Forgive me, Father, but are you serious about all of this? This isn’t a joke?”
“No joke,” Father McNamee said.
“Are you really leaving the Catholic Church?”
?
??I have officially defrocked myself. I’m not leaving—I’ve left.”
“Can I still confess my sins to you?”
“Technically, no. Not as a Catholic. But as a man, certainly.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I drank my whiskey.
It burned.
Father McNamee drank half the bottle before he passed out on the couch. I sat in the armchair and studied him. His forearms were thick and he had a great belly, but he was solid all over and not jiggly like a fat man. He was like a potato with a head, arms, and legs. His beard made him look like Santa Claus. And his skin was rough and pocked and used-up raw—like he had lived a hard full life of service, gardening in the vast soil of men, harvesting souls.
Potato skin.
A giant potato.
“Irish,” Mom had often called him. “Father Irish.”
I placed a blanket over Father McNamee, and he began to snore loudly.
Upstairs I wrote as much as I could remember in my notebook, and I wondered if Father McNamee really believed that God had a plan for me now that Mom was gone, or was he only drunk. I stayed up most of the night thinking and wondering.
In the morning I found Father McNamee kneeling in the living room, praying. I didn’t want to interrupt, so I put on coffee and fried eggs in butter and hot sauce. I also sliced and fried a few pieces of scrapple, because it’s good for hangovers. Father McNamee always ate scrapple after a night of drinking Irish whiskey. I know because he had spent many nights on our couch. Mom used to cook scrapple for him.
“Morning, Bartholomew,” he said when he took his place at the kitchen table. “You don’t have to cook for me, you know. But thanks.”
I served breakfast.
We drank our coffee.
The winter birds sang to us.
“Good eggs,” he said.
I nodded.
I wanted to ask him about God’s plan for me, but something held me back.
“So what exactly do you do all day around here, Bartholomew?”
“I often go to the library.”
“What else?”
“I write in my notebook.”