Gospel (72 page)

No.

No, that was a moment of weakness. I am being tempted by devils again. But God help me, look at this countryside. To go down and up the next mountain ahead will take the afternoon, in this heat, and what will be left of me? I could fall and twist my ankle, lie there and rot until the end of my life. The other direction is the same. I'm not even sure if this so-called trail I'm on is a trail or just the natural clearing across the top of this ridge. I'm too old for this kind of thing—maybe this comic death scene will be related in the Scholarly Register, that is, if I were still important enough to be listed in it. I'll be lucky to make the
Chicago Sun-Times
obituary page in fine print.

He arbitrarily decided on the right fork and began his descent into the valley.

I should have never left the Jesuits, O'Hanrahan thought. I should have parked myself in Jerusalem or Loyola at New Orleans and got tenure and kept out of the middle-class wife-and-family business. That would have been a hard decision to make in Eisenhower's America but I could have spared myself a lot of problems.

(And spared the woman you married.)

My life, thought O'Hanrahan, has been a series of choices in which I outsmarted myself: when I was 23 and about to be one of the youngest Jesuit Ph.D.'s I told myself it was unimportant and went instead to American University in Beirut to see if I could work on ancient finds. Having been brought onto the Dead Sea Scroll team when I was 24, by the time I was 27 I had been offered positions, grants, opportunities to associate my name throughout history to these documents … and nawwww, I rejected that, just so much
vanitas,
academic vainglory, all garbage. No, Father O'Hanrahan wanted to see
real
life, do something visceral and meaningful. Plunge his hands into third-world soil! Rescue the untouchables from the Indian streets. What pretensions!

(You were never more noble, Patrick. Never was your heart so full of charity for your fellow man.)

And so it was off to Korea in 1952, attached to the chaplaincy. What I knew of war, O'Hanrahan recalled, I knew from newsreels during World War II and black-and-white
Life
magazine pictures. But Korea was in lurid, nauseating color. A parade of dead were brought before me for last rites and often a final comforting word, which I was quite good at. The first week of duty was gut-wrenching but rewarding. But then there was a second week, and a third, and the dying and dead and maimed-for-life kept coming and kept asking larger questions—

(But you gave them answers.)

Yes! Thoughtless, memorized anodynes to death and loss, second-rate platitudes fresh from the Hackmeisters of the Church. Do you think I couldn't see it in their eyes? They came to me for justification … and I mouthed talk of Jesus and a Cross and something that happened a very very long time ago to people they didn't know. The only Transfiguration one boy knew was five fingers miraculously now an unsightly stump, hastily sewn up and patched in ten minutes so we could get another rearranged collection of human parts to the operating table. The young Polish Catholic kid who wanted a last Communion. Out of wine, out of grape juice, we made do with red dye and sugared water, blessed it, consecrated it, and gave it to him to sip desperately. It is His blood, okay? But what need had we of anyone's blood, summer 1952, the Iron Triangle, 38th parallel, day 36 of fighting. Blood, O Son of Man, we had in big supply there.

Then passed the sixth week, the seventh week.

Was it possible even carnage and human destruction could get tedious after a while? You want miracles? The perverse suspension of physical laws on the battlefield was more miraculous than all the legends of the saints combined: the guy who had been shot three times, one bullet after the other lined up end to end in the entry wound. The guy who had a .22 bullet crack his teeth but do no more damage than that … and then weeks later, he was back, having deflected a
second
bullet with his teeth. “Keep smiling, Johnny!” everyone joked. Who could believe these things?

(But some of those were Our miracles.)

And conversely there was the guy who got gangrene from a botched ingrown toenail do-it-yourself job and died. The corporal who drank so much Korean moonshine his last night of duty that he died from an alcoholic coma. The Turkish soldier who, upon hearing the full extent of his groin wound, calmly took out his combat knife and cut his own throat, as neatly as if it were a slice of melon.

I saw it all, God, I really did.

And, O'Hanrahan reasoned, if one reflected for a moment, one realized that one maybe gave some shard of comfort but mostly you were an impotence, a hindrance between a man and his death, a Soviet-style bureaucrat with papers and holy water and crosses and scriptures, cluttering up inevitable destiny.

Twelfth week, fifth month, almost a year.

The resentment began to build. After the first young man, his life spilling from innumerable shrapnel wounds, disintegrated before me I thought: well, of course all this religion-hooey is complete crap. Good on paper, but you can't take Christianity on the road. You need a suburb for this delightful we're-all-going-to-heaven parlor game, but “Excuse me, kid, I know the lower part of your body has been shot off and we're out of morphine but, more important, are your impure thoughts washed clean by the Blood of the Lamb because Jesus sits on the right hand of His Father” doesn't play so well.

“Heh-heh,” O'Hanrahan announced out loud, “I've got you voices on the run now, don't I? What have You to say for yourselves when the subject of war and bodily pain comes up? This paradise You've made for Man!”

There was a Turkish battalion mowed down by the Chinese—Allah help me! A Persian brigade of wounded came in, a Zoroastrian among them—what of the eternal fire? No need to talk to the Jewish guy from New York with T-minus-five minutes left on this earth, his people gave up on Heaven some time ago. And as for the Lithuanian guy from Cleveland with bad English, clutching his Bible, kissing my Cross feverishly, craving absolution for—what? nineteen years of uncommitted sin?—feeling his body fail inside him, more than once did I feel like saying: oh
please,
have some dignity!

(So you doubted. Doubt is healthy. Jesus doubted from the Cross. Mohammed got discouraged, Moses disobedient, the Kings of Israel forgot about Us entirely. Do you not think We doubt sometimes? The worth of keeping the whole thing going? Where there is consciousness, divine or human, there is doubt. It is by doubt We know that We believe, but also that We think at all, that We are not stones, inanimate, content. If Humankind only knew how The Creator shared its doubts and discouragements!)

Unforgettable images returned. The Hispanic boy blown to bits, one eye closed by a wound, a good Catholic from New Mexico, begging him for a cure—a miracle, anything is possible, isn't it, chaplain? I believe in my heart if you lay your hands on me … And Patrick did as requested as the boy screamed and writhed his way out of this world in the course of the next hour, convinced his pain was his deliverance. Indelible, that. Almost as unforgettable as the Laughing Guy, as O'Hanrahan remembered him. This fellow was so relieved to be alive; he talked for a half-hour about what he would do upon getting back home to the United States, he showed photographs, he joked that his injury, a leg wound, had been his ticket out of the Punchbowl. And how when O'Hanrahan returned with coffee for them both, now laughing as well, the soldier looked up uneasily and said, “Something's weird, Father.” And as O'Hanrahan sat down and adjusted himself and tore little packets of sugar into his coffee, the boy died. Just like that. And O'Hanrahan talked for a good minute or two before realizing it himself. He just tired from all the strain …

But it was Death, quietly efficient! How true to the old salve, it can be
just
like going to sleep: there one moment, gone the next, no tearing of the ether, no thunderclap from the heavens.

(Such death is a blessing, don't you think?)

Easy for You to say! O'Hanrahan wiped the sweat from his brow, gritty with the dust, scratching his forehead. So this is what I was brought out here for: to have my life pass before my eyes? A little
divertissement
of the All-Powerful, like Job's leprosy, like Jonah's misadventure with the leviathan—let this be a lesson to all who hear. If you see the burning bush, run from it! Turn away, for your very life! Get behind me, Yahweh!

(You haven't enjoyed Our little time in the wilderness?)

“You don't know when to leave well enough alone, do You?” O'Hanrahan cried out, screamed for relief and exhaustion and because he didn't have the energy to smash anything. He picked up a rock and hurled it hard as he could at the sky, hysterically laughing at himself while he was doing it.

I know what You Bastards want! You want me brought low, on my knees! You want me to pray my way out of this! You can taunt me with all the voices, all the memories You got in store, because this is one man who has known You and
turned away,
who finds Your Omnipotence braggadocio, Your Omniscience dubious, Your Holiness in bad taste.

(Very well. But why is it that you've never stopped believing in God? Most people who lose their faith, say We don't exist. You, perversely, say We exist but that you don't like Us. Reconcile yourself, My son: We are God and you are Human and you don't have many options.)

Ha!

O'Hanrahan at the bottom of the valley chose the trail to the left and began plodding up it with renewed energy. He mumbled, I'll take Hell with the libertines, drunkards, freethinkers. Lunch with the Renaissance popes, dinner at Mallatesta's, beer later on with Nietzsche, then stop by the palace at Julian the Apostate's for Roman orgies!

(There is a Hell. Every holy personage from the most liberal to the most severe, Jesus or Mohammed, told Humankind there is a Hell and there is still this fond fantasy that it doesn't exist. Well, it's not Our beloved Dante's vision, exactly, but not any more nice, We assure you. Certainly, We have mercy on most poor souls and the majority of mislived lives, but it is entirely possible nonetheless to end up in Hell and you really wouldn't like it, Patrick.)

Hey, don't wear me out with this. I've seen Hell. Right here on this earth. Right in my own house, looking across the dinnertable at me.

(Beatrice, your wife. She brought on most of her problems herself, but you committed many sins of the spirit—the only kind that matter, frankly—and soured her on living. No amount of charity you have ever had has balanced the zest and passion by which you determined to make her miserable, make her pay for not being your ideal.)

My ideal? Petty, bickering, shriveled up with ill-will, irritating, complaining, whining, malicious, hyperreligious old killjoy, uniting the worst of Irish prudery and self-righteousness with the worst of Womankind. It was she who made me unhappy every day we were married!

(I see We're going to have to bring it back fresh to you:)

O'Hanrahan nearly stopped in his path. She was so pale, even after seven months in Korea. So soft-spoken and docile. Not exactly kind, not exactly possessed of the soothing motherly qualities you want in a Sister of Charity if you're a wounded soldier, but her timidity passed as calmness to those who wanted to see it that way. Twenty years old, shy and hard to engage in conversation, she had been an orphan raised by the Josephine Sisters, and from there she worked part-time for her keep in a St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen for the needy, before embracing sisterhood as a vocation herself.

No, wait a minute, Beatrice Helena McDidon wasn't really an orphan, that's right … she had been the last of thirteen children and the father, an Irish sot, had abandoned the family, and social workers decided that the children should be split up, the youngest to be put in orphanages. The nuns had been quite clear about it with Beatrice: your mother gave you up. The compensation: it must have been God's will that you become a sister like ourselves.

“Beatrice,” O'Hanrahan said aloud.

Father O'Hanrahan went behind her back to learn who she was when he first saw her. It was at a mass. She had just arrived from a posting in Japan. She had dark brown hair, straight and pulled back, pale skin with freckles, tiny hands—she was porcelain, she was breakable. And that attracted O'Hanrahan, the twenty-seven-year-old man who had never known a woman. There was a woman who might understand, who might forgive my fumblings, who would revere my learning, whom I would impress and dominate—no, not in some boorish macho way, but …

(In what way then?)

But as a mentor. I could teach her, Paula to my Jerome, if you will, I could liberate her from the Roman Catholic abyss. I could show her what to read, show her how to think, save her from old-maidhood, from becoming like my own sister Catherine O'Hanrahan, that slow steeping in gall and vinegar that embalmed the Irish female heart …

(That was not really love, though, was it?)

Yes, it was! For me! For a man who had lived out of a book, who was more current with Tertullian and Justin Martyr than how to ask a woman to have a cocktail, to dance at the canteen? I flirted with her, I taunted Beatrice with apostasies, I sat and drank endless cups of bad army coffee with her in 1952, that endless hot, muggy summer of dirt and insects and slow death for the wounded. She'd sit in the canteen and I played the reckless, dashing Jesuit, dangerously modern, ridiculing Pius XII, calling him a war criminal, challenging all established precedents.

(Beatrice quietly defended her sisterhood, but all the while she was undermined. No man, Patrick, had ever taken the time to talk to her, to choose her for anything warm and human. She would go to bed each night, restless in the heat, sighing loudly until told to shush by the other sisters.)

Indeed, the Mother Superior pulled her aside and sternly wanted to know if she and that rascal O'Hanrahan were involved in something vow-breaking and illicit. O'Hanrahan recalled that once the idea of love had presented itself and attained the dazzle of the forbidden, it was only a matter of time. And he was there proffering temptation: