The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival (12 page)

I don’t say anything.

“So what? Now that I’ve made my little break, you guys talk me back into the fold. Things are forgiven. We reach an understanding. Feel better because we’re all human, because even the best of priests have their weaknesses, need to get drunk, need to get laid?”

“Something like that. Yes,” I say, almost embarrassed. That is what I’m saying, right? That is what I was sent here to do.

“Unless it has to do with money, right?” Mark counters. He’s whispering, but the anger is evident. “We wasted no time in shunting David off for skimming money off the top. I tell you about that one? If they could have crucified him, they would have. But a little sex is okay as long as no one knows about it. Hell, feel up your altar boys—or girls.” He shoots me a look. “Do that and they’ll bend over backward to cover for you. Fucking another person is okay, but fucking the Church isn’t.” He stops and lights another cigarette. “Can I get another fucking beer over here!” he yells.

I light yet another cigarette. I have no idea what to do with myself. I’m afraid that if I don’t keep my hands occupied I’ll punch Mark in the face. We can’t afford to think this way. It’s like Miss Rita leaving the home for a weekend, only to realize how depressing it is when she gets back to it. We spend so much time squashing our urges that being celibate becomes second nature. Almost. But start tiptoeing across the line and it isn’t long before biology reasserts itself, reminds you just what kind of freakish existence you’re living. Quite frankly, I don’t need this.

“I have another question for you, Steve,” Mark begins after getting his beer. “Why here? How did you find me so easily? Why do none of these people seem surprised to see you here? And your lecture. You’re talking about sex, yes. But you seem to have very little to say about my choice of partners.”

“Listen, Mark. We’ve all been through it.”

Mark turns to me. I can feel my cheeks flushing in the dark of the bar.

“You?”

It was nothing. Most people wouldn’t even count it, but…But what? I freeze for a bit. “You know how hard it is to escape seminary clean,” is all I can think to say. My voice drops to just above a whisper. “You know that.”

Mark almost sputters when he speaks again. “Are we broken, Steve? What the hell’s wrong with us? You make it sound…I don’t know…almost natural. Tell me. Do we come in twisted up like this or does the system twist us into deviants?” The desperation in his voice is growing and he’s beginning to speak louder. “Are we all faggots and pedophiles when we come into the priesthood or is it just something about putting on the robe, strapping on that collar, sitting in those little dark booths listening to other people’s sins—”

“Damn it, you know better than that,” I cut in, my voice rising now, smoke spilling out of my mouth and nostrils. “Yeah, okay, you’re right. A lot of confused and repressed people join the priesthood. They have urges. But you know what? We…they deal with them, goddamn it, and they still manage to do good work.”

Mark interrupts. “Oh yeah, we’re all fucking saints, aren’t we? Because we wear black and wear a collar and say Mass and don’t get laid most of the time. That makes us special, makes us any less sinful?”

“No,” I say firmly, regaining control of my voice. “It’s still a sin. It is still wrong in the eyes of the Church. But it’s something we have to deal with on a personal level. We are all born with sin, Mark. And you know we have counseling for this sort of thing. Yes, you’ll have your transgressions. Yes, sometimes you will feel guilt, overwhelming amounts of guilt. For your own actions.” I pause. “And for standing up in public and saying that what all these people…” I motion to the people around us. “That what all these people do every day, how they choose to live their lives. That that’s all wrong. Hell, Mark, you don’t even have to believe that. This is a job. And the good we do far outweighs the damage. Don’t look at it as you being unable to live a life of God just because you’ve got this weakness.”

“Weakness,” Mark says with a chuckle. “Sin. Good versus bad.” The anger is gone from his voice now. He’s almost on the point of crying. “You’re missing the point. God, you’re missing the point by a mile. You think this is a mere matter of conscience? Yeah, sometimes I feel guilty about these urges I have, guilty about supporting a faith that says men will burn in hell for loving each other. But you know what? I think I could live with that.”

I look at him. “Then what is it, Mark? I don’t understand.”

“Hell, Steve, I don’t know if I understand. I feel like every day I spend in the Church, some little part of me breaks. Like this loneliness…I don’t know how to say it.” He pauses and looks at me. “It’s like this loneliness is accumulating, getting more and more unbearable every day.” He pauses and throws back the shot of tequila that had appeared at his elbow. “I don’t want to be like my uncle’s cat, Steve. That cat lived his entire life in that fucking apartment and he lived a long, long time. And all he ever had was that sweater. His little transgression was the sweater. And lately…every time I jerk off, every time I even consider another person as simply a release, a transgression, I think of that damn cat.” I notice his eyes watering now, his Adam’s apple working up and down. “Damn it, I don’t want to be that cat. I don’t want to get more and more twisted. I don’t want this loneliness building up day after day after day, driving me crazy until I come to in the rectory one rainy morning and find myself humping an altar boy.”

He stops and turns back to the bar, makes a slight motion with his hand. Yet another beer and shot are produced. I stare at him, unable to say anything. The image of the cat comes clearly to my mind now.

“Steve,” Mark says.

“What?” I turn to the bar and peer into the mirror behind the bottles. Another Jack appears in front of me.

“Say something,” Mark says. “Please.”

I try to look at him, but can’t. I came in here to save him and now I can’t even look at him. I hate us both right now. I finish the Jack in two quick swallows and throw money on the bar. The air conditioner kicks on again, sending the smoke swirling around the room.

“Steve,” Mark says, reaching toward me.

A shudder goes through my body and I force myself from the stool and toward the door. As I walk by his table, the little orange man who’d bought me the drink wiggles his fingers in a good-bye gesture. I ignore him and push the door open, squinting against the light.

Christmas morning finds me not on the altar of St. Pete’s standing in front of a hundred somber white faces, but in a pew at Zion Baptist Church surrounded by the shouting faithful and their even louder clothes. Who knew that a woman would wear a purple dress and gold shoes for something other than an LSU game? I’m hemmed in by Miss Rita, sitting in the aisle to my left, and Vicky to my right. Vicky, the only other white person in the church, looks slightly amused.

This isn’t exactly how I pictured Christmas morning, but pain in the ass that it is, I’m happy to take my mind off that little scene with Mark. I’d managed to get back to St. Pete’s and cram in a nap and shower before the Christmas Eve children’s Mass. I don’t know that the nap helped any as I felt hungover and I was practically sweating whiskey. “Something smells funny,” Denise kept saying. “Yall smell that?” The other altar girl, Maggie, shot me a look. “It smells like my daddy when he’s about to yell at me.”

Father Sibille, bringing joy into the lives of his parishioners!

Miss Rita, though? This morning, Miss Rita is beaming, pleased as punch with her Christmas gift.

Every year, she demands something slightly absurd—sometimes something small and inconsequential, sometimes something ridiculous and extravagant. Every year she gets what she wants.

Last year, it was a bright orange Mr. T T-shirt. Mr. T’s Mohawk was made of some sort of puffy material. Under his face were the words
I Pity the Fool
. The only other thing she asked for was a matching battery-powered key chain that repeated Mr. T’s most famous phrases. For the whole week of my visit from seminary I couldn’t utter more than two sentences without hearing the phrase “Quit yo jibba-jabba” coming from the key chain and accompanied by Miss Rita laughing so hard she’d almost slide out of her wheelchair.

Three years ago, she requested a handheld GPS unit.

“For what?” I asked. “You’re in a chair in a nursing home. You can barely read and I don’t think you can even see the numbers on a screen like that.”

“You sure know how to make an old lady feel good about herself,” she told me.

“But what do you need a GPS for?”

“Just in case,” she said. “You never know.”

Of course I bought the thing. After it was out of the box and powered up, she thrust it at me. “Tell me where we at.”

“We’re in your room.”

“Don’t make me get out of this chair. Tell me what that GPS says.”

“Fine.” I read off the longitude and latitude numbers. Then I showed her the map.

“Ain’t that something,” she said. “Now show me where your mawmaw’s house was.”

This year, I wasn’t going to let her catch me off guard. While I should have been planning for the festival, I pored through catalogs trying to guess which absurdity she would wish for. A robotic monkey head? A seven-foot-wide Thomas Kinkaid painting? A two-man tent? An English saddle?

But no. Nothing that easy.

“I want you to come to church with me Christmas morning,” she said.

“What? I can’t do that.”

“Why not? You shamed of me?”

“It’s Christmas morning. I’m a priest,” I stammered. “It’s—it’s. It’s Christmas.”

“Boy, I know you got that old Cajun priest doing a French Mass at eight thirty.”

“How do you find these things out?”

“Don’t you worry yourself about my business.”

“Your business?”

She changed the subject. “It ain’t going to kill you to come to early service with me. You can drop me to Teddy’s house afterward, be back in Grand Prairie in time for your other Mass.”

How convenient. “Wouldn’t you rather have an iPhone?” I asked.

“An iPhone? What the hell I’m gonna do with an iPhone?”

“What the hell do you do with a GPS?”

“I get plenty use out of that GPS. I never get lost going to the community room. Besides, I don’t see what the big deal is.”

“I don’t know,” I whined. “I’m a white Catholic priest. Don’t know if I want to start off Christmas morning in a Baptist church hearing about the white devil.”

“Please,” she said. “They ain’t going on about white devils in that church.” She paused. “Not on Christmas, anyway.”

“Ugh.”

“Look, boy. It ain’t that much to ask. Just come to church with me. One time. Could be my last Christmas, you know.”

She had me there.

“Okay. Fine. I’ll go to church with you. Anything else you want? A pogo stick? A pool table?”

She smiled. “Now that you mention it, there is one more thing.”

Then she demanded I bring Vicky. After five minutes of arguing, she really laid it on, said it was the dying wish of an old woman on her last Christmas on earth. Hadn’t she helped to raise me since I was a child? After a century of hard living, it would do her heart good to see me with a woman just once.

“Even if it is just pretend,” she threw in.

After I finally agreed to ask Vicky, Miss Rita insisted I call her right then and there to get an answer.

“If she says no, tell her I got stage-ten cancer.”

“There’s no such thing!”

“You ain’t a doctor. Now shut up and call that girl.”

Thankfully, Vicky agreed immediately.

This morning, when we drove up to Easy Time, Timeka told us Miss Rita was in her room dressed and ready to go. “She’s been up since five this morning,” she said as she let us into Miss Rita’s room.

“I couldn’t wait to see my Christmas present,” she said without a trace of embarrassment. “Now get over here, girl, so I can get a look at you.”

“Hi, Miss Rita,” Vicky said, offering her a hand. “I’m thrilled to meet at least one other person trying to knock some sense into Father Steve’s head.”

Miss Rita laughed. “I must not be doing a good job if he’s still dressing up in that monkey suit with a pretty girl like you running loose back there.”

“Okay. Let’s go,” I said, but otherwise kept my mouth shut. To open it would have been to invite more scorn from both of them. They did well enough without my help.

“You never told me she was pretty,” Miss Rita said as I pushed her chair. “And that dress. That’s something else.”

Indeed, the dress was something else. Vicky is a jeans-and-shirt sort of woman, so seeing her in a dress—even a conservative navy blue knee-length one with a white collar—had thrown me for a loop. It clung to her in places that I typically tried not to notice.

“Pretty cold out today, Vicky,” I said. “Sure you don’t want to button up your coat?”

She and Miss Rita looked at each other and laughed.

Now here we stand in Zion. So far, the minister hasn’t launched into a white-devil tirade and people have quit staring at us. Once the service started, there just wasn’t time for it, what with the call-and-response prayers, the singing, the shouting. It makes my parishioners look like a bunch of tree sloths who’d gotten into the Ambien. So no time for staring. No time for reflection or contemplation, either. Maybe they think enough during the week.

It is Christmas, after all, why not really celebrate the coming of Baby Jesus? He’s the savior, right? Makes more sense to sing and shout and dance than to choke on incense for an hour while murmuring through the liturgy. Not that I plan on making any changes to today’s services back at St. Pete’s.

Miss Rita elbows me in the hip, motions me to lean in.

“Get your head out of the clouds,” she says. “Quit thinking and sing.”

She grabs my hand, lifts it and hers over her head, and sings a few lines in a high, off-key voice. She stops, yanks me down again. “Sing, I said. And grab that girl’s hand.”

“Miss Rita.”

“Don’t Miss Rita me. And don’t make me tell you again.”

She raises our hands over her head and starts singing.