“What an enigma, Will. We of the Church should be examples for others on how to get along.”
“Has anyone told Father Vittorini that? Let’s face it, the Italians are the Rotary of the Church. You couldn’t have trusted one of them to stay sober during the Last Supper.”
“I wonder if we Irish could?” mused Father Kelly.
“We’d wait until it was over, at least!”
“Well, now, are we priests or barbers? Do we stand here splitting hairs, or do we shave Vittorini close with his own razor? William, have you no plan?”
“Perhaps to call in a Baptist to mediate.”
“Be off with your Baptist! Have you researched the encyclical?”
“The encyclical?”
“Have you let grass grow since breakfast between your toes? You have! Let’s read that space-travel edict! Memorize it, get it pat, then counterattack the rocket man in his own territory! This way, to the library. What is it the youngsters cry these days? Five, four, three, two, one, blast off?”
“Or the rough equivalent.”
“Well, say the rough equivalent, then, man. And follow me!”
They met Pastor Sheldon, going into the library as he was coming out.
“It’s no use,” said the pastor, smiling, as he examined the fever in their faces. “You won’t find it in there.”
“Won’t find what in there?” Father Brian saw the pastor looking at the letter which was still glued to his fingers, and hid it away, fast. “Won’t find what, sir?”
“A rocket ship is a trifle too large for our small quarters,” said the pastor in a poor try at the enigmatic.
“Has the Italian bent your ear, then?” cried Father Kelly in dismay.
“No, but echoes have a way of ricocheting about the place. I came to do some checking myself.”
“Then,” gasped Brian with relief, “you’re on our side?”
Pastor Sheldon’s eyes became somewhat sad. “Is there a side to this, Fathers?”
They all moved into the little library room, where Father Brian and Father Kelly sat uncomfortably on the edges of the hard chairs. Pastor Sheldon remained standing, watchful of their discomfort.
“Now. Why are you afraid of Father Vittorini?”
“Afraid?” Father Brian seemed surprised at the word and cried softly, “It’s more like angry.”
“One leads to the other,” admitted Kelly. He continued, “You see, Pastor, it’s mostly a small town in Tuscany shunting stones at Meynooth, which is, as you know, a few miles out from Dublin.”
“I’m Irish,” said the pastor, patiently.
“So you are, Pastor, and all the more reason we can’t figure your great calm in this disaster,” said Father Brian.
“I’m California Irish,” said the pastor.
He let this sink in. When it had gone to the bottom, Father Brian groaned miserably. “Ah. We forgot.”
And he looked at the pastor and saw there the recent dark, the tan complexion of one who walked with his face like a sunflower to the sky, even here in Chicago, taking what little light and heat he could to sustain his color and being. Here stood a man with the figure, still, of a badminton and tennis player under his tunic, and with the firm lean hands of the handball expert. In the pulpit, by the look of his arms moving in the air, you could see him swimming under warm California skies.
Father Kelly let forth one sound of laughter.
“Oh, the gentle ironies, the simple fates. Father Brian, here is our Baptist!”
“Baptist?” asked Pastor Sheldon.
“No offense, Pastor, but we were off to find a mediator, and here you are, an Irishman from California, who has known the wintry blows of Illinois so short a time, you’ve still the look of rolled lawns and January sunburn. We, we were born and raised as lumps in Cork and Kilcock, Pastor. Twenty years in Hollywood would not thaw us out. And now, well, they do say, don’t they, that California is much …” here he paused, “like Italy?”
“I see where you’re driving,” mumbled Father Brian.
Pastor Sheldon nodded, his face both warm and gently sad. “My blood is like your own. But the climate I was shaped in is like Rome’s. So you see, Father Brian, when I asked are there any sides, I spoke from my heart.”
“Irish yet not Irish,” mourned Father Brian. “Almost but not quite Italian. Oh, the world’s played tricks with our flesh.”
“Only if we let it, William, Patrick.”
Both men started a bit at the sound of their Christian names.
“You still haven’t answered: Why are you afraid?”
Father Brian watched his hands fumble like two bewildered wrestlers for a moment. “Why, it’s because just when we get things settled on Earth, just when it looks like victory’s in sight, the Church on a good footing, along comes Father Vittorini—”
“Forgive me, Father,” said the pastor. “Along comes reality. Along comes space, time, entropy, progress, along come a million things, always. Father Vittorini didn’t invent space travel.”
“No, but he makes a good thing of it. With him ‘everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.’ Well, no matter. I’ll stash my shillelagh if he’ll put away his rockets.”
“No, let’s leave them out in the open,” replied the pastor. “Best not to hide violence or special forms of travel. Best to work with them. Why don’t we climb in that rocket, Father, and learn from it?”
“Learn what? That most of the things we’ve taught in the past on Earth don’t fit out there on Mars or Venus or wherever in hell Vittorini would push us? Drive Adam and Eve out of some new Garden, on Jupiter, with our very own rocket fires? Or worse, find there’s no Eden, no Adam, no Eve, no damned Apple nor Serpent, no Fall, no Original Sin, no Annunciation, no Birth, no Son, you go on with the list, no nothing at all! on one blasted world tailing another? Is that what we must learn, Pastor?”
“If need be, yes,” said Pastor Sheldon. “It’s the Lord’s space and the Lord’s worlds in space, Father. We must not try to take our cathedrals with us, when all we need is an overnight case. The Church can be packed in a box no larger than is needed for the articles of the Mass, as much as these hands can carry. Allow Father Vittorini this, the people of the southern climes learned long ago to build in wax which melts and takes its shape in harmony with the motion and need of man. William, William, if you insist on building in hard ice, it will shatter when we break the sound barrier or melt and leave you nothing in the fire of the rocket blast.”
“That,” said Father Brian, “is a hard thing to learn at fifty years, Pastor.”
“But learn, I know you will,” said the pastor, touching his shoulder. “I set you a task: to make peace with the Italian priest. Find some way tonight for a meeting of minds. Sweat at it, Father. And, first off, since our library is meager, hunt for and find the space encyclical, so we’ll know what we’re yelling about.”
A moment later the pastor was gone.
Father Brian listened to the dying sound of those swift feet—as if a white ball were flying high in the sweet blue air and the pastor were hurrying in for a fine volley.
“Irish but not Irish,” he said. “Almost but not quite Italian. And now what are we, Patrick?”
“I begin to wonder,” was the reply.
And they went away to a larger library wherein might be hid the grander thoughts of a Pope on a bigger space.
A long while after supper that night, in fact almost at bedtime, Father Kelly, sent on his mission, moved about the rectory tapping on doors and whispering.
Shortly before ten o’clock, Father Vittorini came down the stairs and gasped with surprise.
Father Brian, at the unused fireplace, warming himself at the small gas heater which stood on the hearth, did not turn for a moment.
A space had been cleared and the brute television set moved forward into a circle of four chairs, amongst which stood two small taborettes on which stood two bottles and four glasses. Father Brian had done it all, allowing
Kelly to do nothing. Now he turned, for Kelly and Pastor Sheldon were arriving.
The pastor stood in the entryway and surveyed the room. “Splendid.” He paused and added, “I think. Let me see now …” He read the label on one bottle. “Father Vittorini is to sit here.”
“By the Irish Moss?” asked Vittorini.
“The same,” said Father Brian.
Vittorini, much pleased, sat.
“And the rest of us will sit by the Lachryma Christi, I take it?” said the pastor.
“An Italian drink, Pastor.”
“I think I’ve heard of it,” said the pastor, and sat.
“Here.” Father Brian hurried over and, without looking at Vittorini, poured his glass a good way up with the Moss. “An Irish transfusion.”
“Allow me.” Vittorini nodded his thanks and arose, in turn, to pour the others’ drinks. “The tears of Christ and the sunlight of Italy,” he said. “And now, before we drink, I have something to say.”
The others waited, looking at him.
“The papal encyclical on space travel,” he said at last, “does not exist.”
“We discovered that,” said Kelly, “a few hours ago.”
“Forgive me, Fathers,” said Vittorini. “I am like the fisherman on the bank who, seeing fish, throws out more bait. I suspected, all along, there was no encyclical. But every time it was brought up, about town, I heard so many priests from Dublin deny it existed, I came to think it must! They would not go check the item, for they feared it existed. I would not, in my pride, do research, for I feared it did not exist. So Roman pride or Cork pride, it’s all the same. I shall go on retreat soon and be silent for a week, Pastor, and do penance.”
“Good, Father, good.” Pastor Sheldon rose. “Now I’ve a small announcement. A new priest arrives here next month. I’ve thought long on it. The man is Italian, born and raised in Montreal.”
Vittorini closed one eye and tried to picture this man to himself.
“If the Church must be all things to all people,” said the pastor, “I am intrigued with the thought of hot blood raised in a cold climate, as this new Italian was, even as I find it fascinating to consider myself, cold blood raised in California. We’ve needed another Italian here to shake things up, and this Latin looks to be the sort will shake even Father Vittorini. Now will someone offer a toast?”
“May I, Pastor?” Father Vittorini rose again, smiling gently, his eyes darkly aglow, looking at this one and now that of the three. He raised his glass. “Somewhere did Blake not speak of the Machineries of Joy? That is, did not God promote environments, then intimidate those Natures by provoking the existence of flesh, toy men and women, such as are we all? And thus happily sent forth, at our best, with good grace and fine wit, on calm noons, in fair climes, are we not God’s Machineries of Joy?”
“If Blake said that,” said Father Brian, “I take it all back. He never lived in Dublin!”
All laughed together.
Vittorini drank the Irish Moss and was duly speechless.
The others drank the Italian wine and grew mellow, and in his mellowness Father Brian cried softly, “Vittorini, now, will you, unholy as it is, tune on the ghost?”
“Channel Nine?”
“Nine it is!”
And while Vittorini dialed the knobs Father Brian mused over his drink, “Did Blake really say that?”
“The fact is, Father,” said Vittorini, bent to the phantoms coming and going on the screen, “he might have, if he’d lived today. I wrote it down myself tonight.”
All watched the Italian with some awe. Then the TV gave a hum and came clear, showing a rocket, a long way off, getting ready.
“The machineries of joy,” said Father Brian. “Is that one of them you’re tuning in? And is that another sitting there, the rocket on its stand?”
“It could be, tonight,” murmured Vittorini. “If the thing goes up, and a man in it, all around the world, and him still alive, and us with him, though we just sit here. That would be joyful indeed.”
The rocket was getting ready, and Father Brian shut his eyes for a moment. Forgive me, Jesus, he thought, forgive an old man his prides, and forgive Vittorini his spites, and help me to understand what I see here tonight, and let me stay awake if need be, in good humor, until dawn, and let the thing go well, going up and coming down, and think of the man in that contraption, Jesus, think of and be with him. And help me, God, when the summer is young, for, sure as fate on Fourth of July evening there will be Vittorini and the kids from around the block, on the rectory lawn, lighting sky-rockets. All them there watching the sky, like the morn of the Redemption, and help me, O Lord, to be as those children before the great night of time and void where you abide. And help me to walk forward, Lord, to light the next rocket Independence Night, and stand with the Latin father, my face suffused with that same look of the delighted child in the face of the burning glories you put near our hand and bid us savor.
He opened his eyes.
Voices from far Canaveral were crying in a wind of time. Strange phantom powers loomed upon the screen. He was drinking the last of the wine when someone touched his elbow gently.
“Father,” said Vittorini, near. “Fasten your seat belt.”
“I will,” said Father Brian. “I will. And many thanks.”
He sat back in his chair. He closed his eyes. He waited for the thunder. He waited for the fire. He waited for the concussion and the voice that would teach a silly, a strange, a wild and miraculous thing:
How to count back, ever backward … to zero.
The One Who Waits
I live in a well. I live like smoke in the well. Like vapor in a stone throat. I don’t move. I don’t do anything but wait. Overhead I see the cold stars of night and morning, and I see the sun. And sometimes I sing old songs of this world when it was young. How can I tell you what I am when I don’t know? I cannot. I am simply waiting. I am mist and moonlight and memory. I am sad and I am old. Sometimes I fall like rain into the well. Spider webs are startled into forming where my rain falls fast, on the water surface. I wait in cool silence and there will be a day when I no longer wait.
Now it is morning. I hear a great thunder. I smell fire from a distance. I hear a metal crashing. I wait. I listen.
Voices. Far away.
“All right!”
One voice. An alien voice. An alien tongue I cannot know. No word is familiar. I listen.
“Send the men out!”
A crunching in crystal sands.
“Mars! So this is it!”
“Where’s the flag?”
“Here, sir.”
“Good, good.”
The sun is high in the blue sky and its golden rays fill the well and I hang like a flower pollen, invisible and misting in the warm light.
Voices.
“In the name of the Government of Earth, I proclaim this to be the Martian Territory, to be equally divided among the member nations.”
What are they saying? I turn in the sun, like a wheel, invisible and lazy, golden and tireless.
“What’s over here?”
“A well!”
“No!”
“Come on. Yes!”
The approach of warmth. Three objects bend over the well mouth, and my coolness rises to the objects.
“Great!”
“Think it’s good water?”
“We’ll see.”
“Someone get a lab test bottle and a dropline.”
“I will!”
A sound of running. The return.
“Here we are.”
I wait.
“Let it down. Easy.”
Glass shines, above, coming down on a slow line.
The water ripples softly as the glass touches and fills. I rise in the warm air toward the well mouth.
“Here we are. You want to test this water, Regent?”
“Let’s have it.”
“What a beautiful well. Look at that construction. How old you think
it is?”
“God knows. When we landed in that other town yesterday Smith said there hasn’t been life on Mars in ten thousand years.”
“Imagine.”
“How is it, Regent? The water.”
“Pure as silver. Have a glass.”
The sound of water in the hot sunlight. Now I hover like a dust, a cinnamon, upon the soft wind.
“What’s the matter, Jones?”
“I don’t know. Got a terrible headache. All of a sudden.”
“Did you drink the water yet?”
“No, I haven’t. It’s not that. I was just bending over the well and all of a sudden my head split. I feel better now.”
Now I know who I am.
My name is Stephen Leonard Jones and I am twenty-five years old and I have just come in a rocket from a planet called Earth and I am standing with my good friends Regent and Shaw by an old well on the planet Mars.
I look down at my golden fingers, tan and strong. I look at my long legs and at my silver uniform and at my friends.
“What’s wrong, Jones?” they say.
“Nothing,” I say, looking at them. “Nothing at all.”
The food is good. It has been ten thousand years since food. It touches the tongue in a fine way and the wine with the food is warming. I listen to the sound of voices. I make words that I do not understand but somehow understand. I test the air.
“What’s the matter, Jones?”
I tilt this head of mine and rest my hands holding the silver utensils of eating. I feel everything.
“What do you mean?” this voice, this new thing of mine, says.
“You keep breathing funny. Coughing,” says the other man.
I pronounce exactly. “Maybe a little cold coming on.”
“Check with the doc later.”
I nod my head and it is good to nod. It is good to do several things after ten thousand years. It is good to breathe the air and it is good to feel the sun in the flesh deep and going deeper and it is good to feel the structure of ivory, the fine skeleton hidden in the warming flesh, and it is good to hear sounds much clearer and more immediate than they were in the stone deepness of a well. I sit enchanted.