The Judgment (39 page)

The man who called himself a tramp took the five and the ten I offered him with a nod and reluctant thanks. “I’ll be on my way,” he said. He left us, marching down the path in the direction opposite the way we had come, toward the highway.

Father Chuck stuck his head inside the door to the cabin, looked around, and shut it tightly behind him. “I ought to get a padlock for that,” he said. Then we started back toward the rectory.

“How was it in there?” I asked.

“Neat as a pin. He’d swept the place out and straightened up.”

“Did you notice his clothes were clean, too?”

“I did, yes.”

We walked along in silence until at last we emerged from the woods.

“Independent cuss, wasn’t he?” remarked Father Chuck as we were crossing the church parking lot.

“He certainly was.”

“You know, I kind of envy him.”

By the time we got back to the rectory, I’d lost my fighting edge and would gladly have put off the great debate until another day or let it go completely. Yet Father Chuck clearly expected us to proceed according to plan. He unlocked the front door and gestured me inside. I remembered the way as he led me down the long hall, past the rooms that smelled of furniture wax. The place seemed even emptier than it had when I first visited him. I wondered why.

“You really are all alone here, aren’t you?”

“Oh yes, as I think I told you before, a housekeeper comes in a couple of times a week. A good thing she does, too, because I’m by nature a pretty messy guy.”

“Do your own cooking, laundry, everything?”

“That’s right. Why do you ask?”

“Not much fun, is it?”

He laughed that laugh of his again. “I get your point, Charley. We’re both a couple of old bachelors, aren’t we? Yes, well, I’ve been at it longer than you, though. How many times have you been married, Charley?”

We’d entered “his” room, an amazing place—a kind of combination den, trophy room, and office with deer heads, shotguns, and rifles on the wall; a huge, wild-eyed muskie seemed to snarl at me from the far side next to a window. Father Chuck leaned the shotgun in one corner near the desk. Then he unloaded his pockets, tossing out four shotgun shells on the desktop.

“What was that you asked?” I said. “How many times? Too many, Father, take it from me.”

“Let’s just take it from that point, Charley. Sit down, please.”

He pointed to an old-fashioned, three-cushioned couch in the middle of the room and took a place opposite me in an overstuffed easy chair, pulling it closer to the sofa.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“I mean, look at your own life,” he said. “Your answer indicates that you’ve been married a number of times. Unhappily. Your appearance at that fascinating meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous tells me that you’ve had a lot of tension in your life. Misery, too. Wouldn’t you have preferred to have done without all that?”

“I don’t quite follow you, Father. Do you mean what I think you mean?”

“Charley, your soul, every soul, yearns for God, yearns to go to heaven. Why stop it? Why impede it on its way?”

“I can think of one objection to that,” I said, “one that could be made within your own frame of reference. Not all of us may be ready for that journey that you’ve described. Father, I’m not sure I believe in good but I know I believe in evil. And so it follows that I’m not sure I believe in heaven, but I know I believe in hell. Our souls may yearn for heaven, but they fear hell.”

He raised his arms above him and cupped his hands.

These were preaching gestures. They reminded me of my youth.

“Charley, we cannot fear God. Think of His infinite mercy. Think of Jesus.”

“That’s probably easier for you to do than for me. Look, Father Chuck, for most of us, at least for a lot of us, the second half of our lives is nothing more or less than an opportunity to undo the damage we did in the first half, or to try to make up for it in some way. Surely you’re not advocating suicide.”

“Oh, Charley, Charley, you don’t understand.”

“No, I probably don’t,” I answered, wanting this whole discussion to be over and done with. I wasn’t even sure he knew what he was saying.

Suddenly he smiled and leaned forward. Maybe he was winding down, maybe he was going to lighten up a little bit.

“By the way, I know I can’t offer you anything alcoholic, but I’m sure I’ve got some ginger ale somewhere. Would you like some?”

“Sure,” I said, relieved that he was sensitive enough this time not to drink in front of me. Generally, I don’t mind at all. It’s no problem when Sue has wine when we’re together, but for whatever reason, it did make me nervous when Father Chuck started knocking the stuff back in front of me.

He found some soda and ice in his liquor cabinet, poured two glasses, and brought mine over. Was it my imagination or did I detect a whiff of Scotch on his breath? I wondered if he’d been drinking before I arrived.

“You know, you and Sue have a lot in common,” he resumed, as though he and I had been talking about her all along.

“How’s that?”

“You both get awfully close to sin in your separate lines of work, all kinds of sin—theft, violence of all kinds, rape, the whole ugly list you can pull from the docket of any police station in the country. They’re not just crimes,
Charley; they’re sins. Sue, it seems to me, has kept herself remarkably free of contamination by all of the ugliness she deals with day to day. I say it’s remarkable because what she handles regularly are sex crimes, the worst of all. She told me about one of her cases involving a grandmother and her grandson that was just beyond belief. Yet it happened, right here in Kerry County. But she keeps her feet on the ground, Sue does, keeps the Catholic values she was brought up with. She’s quite a gal.

“But you, Charley, in your line of work, you get even closer to sin. You have to defend these people, or you’ve chosen to. I keep up with things. I read the newspapers. I know that you’ve defended murderers, thieves of all kinds. Why, right now you’ve got a case in Detroit involving the theft of something over a million dollars—by a policeman!”

“I never discuss my cases,” I said firmly.

“There’s not much to discuss, is there? How you can bring yourself to associate with these people, much less defend them, I don’t understand. But, in the words of Our Lord, ‘Judge not, that we be not judged.’ Fair enough. I withhold judgment. But since you are even closer to sin than Sue, you run an even greater danger of being tainted by it. Whether you have or haven’t been tainted is a question only you can answer. I must say, however, that your problem with alcohol indicates some difficulty of that kind.”

What about
your
problem with alcohol? I thought, remembering how his breath smelled. “Father Albertus, I think you’ve gotten a long way from the subject at hand.”

“And what is that?”

“I believe that you were about to tell me that I’m so close to sin, I’m becoming sullied by it. Or maybe you were about to say that I’m beyond redemption.”

“Oh, Charley, really? Do you think I would say that?”

I didn’t know the answer to that one, and frankly, I was feeling as though I didn’t know the answer to anything at all. It wasn’t even clear to me why I was here, ríe
had invited me to meet with him for what he thought was going to be an intellectual debate, but this was turning into a kind of diatribe. While I respected him and certainly did not .doubt his intelligence, I was getting confused.

Maybe by being in this rectory with him I was remembering how it was when I was a boy, my mother and father taking me to church during a time when I looked at the world through innocent eyes. Maybe the chaos was finally getting to me, the violence, the corruption, the deaths, my own search for a solid center.

And then suddenly the picture came into my mind: Catherine Quigley in the snow, her sweet, sleeping face visible through the clear plastic. She looked just like an angel. I kept trying to shut the picture down, but it was like a videotape playing over and over again and I couldn’t stop it.

Finally, I completely lost it right on that couch with all those silent deer faces staring down at me. I began crying, unable to help myself, unable to push Father Chuck away from me when he tried to offer comfort. Maybe he was right: Pd been too close for too long to all of the ugliness.

“It’s okay, Charley,” he said, his voice quietly soothing. “Some things aren’t easily understood, are they?”

He went on, muttering phrases that were meant to be consoling. I didn’t have the strength to ask him to stop. All I could do was cry for that poor little girl in the snow.

S
o I lost the debate, such as it was, by default. Failure to perform. I stumbled out of the rectory, eyes puffy, nose running, my voice diminished to little more than a hoarse whisper. Yet I wasn’t ashamed. As I drove through the dark back to Pickeral Point, it occurred to me that my response to that little girl’s death, and the deaths of the other two children, was more genuine than anything Father Chuck had to say.

His reaction to my sudden breakdown was interesting. Once I had calmed down a bit and begun to get myself under control, he gave me a fatherly pat on the back, went to his L-shaped desk and typewriter stand, and returned with a tissue.

“I’ll tell you, Charley,” he said then. “It wasn’t much more than a couple of weeks ago that I sat right here and did just what you’re doing now. My nephew died in terrible circumstances. My sister’s boy. He was the closest I ever had to a son. So I understand better than you think.”

I got up from the couch. It took some effort. Suddenly I felt exhausted.

“I’d better go now,” I said.

“Sure, I understand. And don’t worry about this, Charley. No one should be ashamed to cry.” “I’ll remember that.”

“I’ll pray for you,” he said. “You might try it yourself.” Maybe he was right.

I was still thinking about this when I turned from River Road into the office parking lot. It was empty. The building was dark. As I got out of the car, I took a look at my wristwatch and saw that it was about five-thirty. I’d spent more time at the rectory than I’d have guessed. Taking a moment to lock my car—yes, even here in sleepy old Pickeral Point—I realized how cold my hands were. I wiggled my fingers and rubbed my palms to warm them. During this late-fall, not-quite-winter period, the days were tolerably warm, but nights hit pretty close to freezing and sometimes dropped below. I needed gloves. It so happens that I’m one of these guys who can’t hold on to a pair from one winter to the next. I don’t know what happens to them; they just disappear. I spent a good part of one morning the week before, going through coats, jackets, drawers, and looking on all the closet shelves, trying to find this year’s gloves. All to no avail. I’d have to buy a new pair. Tomorrow, if I could find the time.

Mrs. Fenton would have left at five, or shortly thereafter. I hadn’t returned to do any specific piece of work. No, I’d come back to check my messages. I let myself in and switched on the lights. There was nothing on Mrs. Fenton’s desk, and the red light on the message machine wasn’t blinking, so I went into my office to have a look. Yes, there was a small pile of slips on my desk. I sat: down and shuffled through them. And yes, here was one from Tolliver. Dammit! I wish I’d been here when it had come in.

I was consoling myself when Mrs. Fenton’s phone rang in the outer office. I picked up immediately at my desk and found my own voice reeling off a message to the caller, urging him (or her) to leave a communication at the sound of the tone, and promising that it would be answered at
the earliest possible opportunity. Mrs. Fenton had the machine set to pick up on the first ring.

All I could do was shout encouragement into the receiver: “Hang on, hang on. There’s somebody here. I’m here.”

At last my recorded voice fell silent. “This is Charles Sloan,” I said, doing all I could to recover my dignity following my desperate pleas with the party at the other end of the line not to hang up. But as it turned out, the call was worth all my pleading.

“Oh, now I don’t know. I wasn’ callin’ for no
Charles
Sloan. I was hopin’ to talk to Charley. You got him around there someplace?”

It was a small voice, and it was weaker by far than the one I remembered from years before, but it was unmistakably that of Ismail Carter.

“Ismail! Is that you? This is Charley, all right. How you doing?”

“I’m doin’ fine, but I had the idea you might be tryin’ to get hold of me.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Yes, I have.”

“Well, that’s a coincidence, ain’t it? ‘Cause I been tryin’ to get you. Called a couple of times, but I got discouraged talkin’ to that secretary of yours. She got a constipation problem, or something?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“It took me some time to find out exactly where you are. Pickeral Point? Way up in the Thumb someplace, isn’t it?”

“Just near the bottom, almost to Port Huron.”

“I thought you were true-blue to old Detroit. Last man I’d ever tag for a white flight.”

“It’s a long, sad story, Ismail, but it’s got a fairly happy ending to it.”

“Hmmm,” he said, just like that, then paused. I couldn’t tell whether he was giving thought to what he might say next, or gathering strength to say it. “Well, I’ll
tell you, Charley, I think we better get together pretty soon to talk things over.”

“What kind of things?”

“Oh, don’t get cute now. I think you figured out we have a mutual interest in a certain case you are handlin’ now.”

“I don’t know what your interest is in it, but I’d be more than happy to find out.”

“Maybe you will and maybe you won’t, but I think we better talk.” He gave me the address of a convalescent hospital on Jefferson, not far from where I’d rendezvoused with Conroy and Tolliver only a few nights before. I’d passed the place three or four times in the past couple of weeks.

“What time do you want me to come by tomorrow, Ismail?”

“No time. I’m due for an examination tomorrow, and it generally takes me a couple of days to recover from their exams. Make it Saturday, in the afternoon. Saturday’s my best visiting day.”