Embracing Darkness (9 page)

Father Poole backed up to his bed, lay down holding his forehead, and then decided to go down into the kitchen for some ice. He didn’t think that the aspirin he had packed in his suitcase would do any good unless he developed a headache. For now he was more concerned with the bump he was starting to feel in the center of his forehead. He walked to his door, opened it slowly, and then stopped as soon as he heard it creak.

He waited, peeking through the small crack. The bathroom light down the hall was on, and the door appeared to be open. Father Poole could tell that the door had to be fully ajar since the light emanating from the bathroom was substantial. Seeing no shadow there, he assumed that it had been left on simply as a night light.
What
a
waste
of
electricity
, the priest thought.
I’ll
have
to
talk
to
Sister
Ignatius
about
this
in
the
morning
.

He now swung the door open, unconcerned about waking anybody because he knew Argyle Hobbs lived downtown and, as for Mrs. Keats,
if
the
Wright
Brothers
crashed
their
plane
here,
she
wouldn’t
even
know
. As soon as Father Poole thought this, he was ashamed. He truly liked Mrs. Keats and felt nothing but sympathy and compassion for her. He would add that cruel thought to the others he’d have to confess.

As for Sister Ignatius, Father Poole wouldn’t mind waking
her
up. However, he did wonder about something, and he should have inquired earlier. It would be completely improper for a priest to sleep under the same roof as a nun, or any woman for that matter. And here he was with a staff of three people, two of whom were women. Where were they sleeping? Father Poole felt it necessary to find out and soon. Depending on the outcome of his investigation, he might have to leave St. Andrew’s rectory.

Father Poole spent the next fifteen minutes knocking on every bedroom door in the rectory. When there was no response, he jiggled the doorknobs to see whether they were locked. Not one was. So he opened them all, turned on each light to make sure the bedroom was empty, and closed the doors. Around the seventh room Father Poole began to wonder again why they had built such an enormous rectory for so small a church. It almost seemed to him as though nothing made any sense. When he came to the last door, he held his breath as he jiggled the handle. It opened as easily as the others had, and like all the others, including his own, squeaked terribly. This room too was empty.

By now it was 3:00 in the morning, and Father Poole was starting to feel the effects of sleeplessness. He found himself standing absentmindedly in the hallway on the first floor. With the stairs in back of him, the dining room to his right and the parlor to his left, the priest yawned deeply and put his arms up to stretch. As he did so, his raised hands collided with the low-hanging chandelier. He gave it such a knock that its diamond-shaped glass pendants clanked together, making a loud chorus of jingles that sounded like bottles violently clashing. Two years’ worth of dust simultaneously rained down upon the upturned face of the unlucky priest as he tried to steady the swaying chandelier in the dark.

Some of the dust got into his eyes, some into his mouth, and some even up his nostrils. He brought his hands down quickly and brushed off whatever he could. Father Poole then went over to the front door, opened it, and walked out onto the porch. It felt cooler in the rectory’s hallway than it did outside. The air was still and humid. Walking carefully down the wooden steps that surprisingly did not creak, he stood about ten feet away on the lawn and admired the sky, where the stars shone with startling clarity.

His attention was quickly drawn to a path between the end of the lawn and the bushes in front of the rectory. Intrigued, Father Poole decided to follow it. As he looked up from the path, Poole saw the small house owned by Old Man Benson. Thirty feet from the house, the priest noticed not only that the porch light was still on but also that a dark figure was rocking back and forth on the left side. It was too far away to tell exactly who it was, although Father Poole would have bet that it was the one person who, as he already knew, lived in there.

His hope for an early meeting with this neighbor was realized when he heard the figure yell, “Fancy a smoke, do ya?”

The priest walked hastily up the path to the front porch of Mr. Benjamin Benson.

NINE
Ben Benson
 

“Don’t know if ya heard me. I asked if ya wanted a smoke.” Mr. Benson’s words sounded in the thick, humid air, a cloud of smoke surrounding him like a white silhouette against the yellow glow of his porch light. In front of the porch was a white sign with black painted letters that read “BENSON.”

Father Poole saw this and asked, “Mr. Benson, I presume?”

Benson took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled. “Yep! That’s me. Ain’t had no one else livin’ up here in… Je-ody! Longer than I care to remember.”

The priest didn’t know what to say to this. It seemed a sad existence to him, living alone on the top of a hill with no one to talk to. “So you live alone?” Father Poole asked.

“No man comes out his home at three in the mornin’ just to look up at the stahs,” the old man said, as if ignoring the priest’s question. Benson’s melodic New England accent reminded Father Poole of his paternal grandfather.

“No, thank you,” the priest replied in delayed response to Benson’s original overture. “I don’t smoke.”

Mr. Benson looked the other way, his cigarette clamped tightly between his yellow teeth. “Warm night, ain’t it?” the old-timer commented.

“Yes,” Father Poole began as he cleared his throat. “It is. I would ask whether it’s always this hot in Holly this time of year, but I came here from Exeter and… .”

Benson shot him a friendly look and said, “It’s different up on the hill.” The old man continued, “Everything is different on the hill. Hell, we don’t even have the same water as the rest of the town. Theirs comes from a natural source, I’m sure; ours comes from charity. Once a week, every Wednesday in fact, Eugene Simmons and his two young boys, I think eleven and thirteen, come up with their buckets. They fill the two copper reservoirs, one behind my house and the other on the side of your rectory. That way we have runnin’ water like the rest of society. Eugene’s pa, Xavier Simmons, and I go back a ways. He used to do it for me as a favor, seein’ as how I’m all alone and cahn’t rightly get my own water up here. Yep! Nice o’ his boy to continue the favor for me. I throw their dad a couple o’ bucks every now and again. He says he don’t want it, Eugene that is, so I give it to his sons. They even help out A’gyle Hobbs an’ bring water up for the rectory. Your Father Carroll never appreciated the ha’d work those two boys do. He’d tell them that God would reward them in heaven for their efforts!”

The priest nodded in response to Mr. Benson, who had put out his cigarette and begun lighting a fresh one. “Well, sir. Since our water comes from the same charitable source,” Father Poole began, “I’ll be happy to split the cost with you.”

“I already told you he don’t accept no money,” Benson snapped but in a playful way. “I just give his two sons a few bucks, and that seems to keep everyone happy. No need to fix somethin’ that ain’t broke!” He flicked a short ash from his cigarette and put the butt back in his mouth. He did this so quickly that Father Poole thought for a moment that the old man might just swallow it. “C’mon up here, Father, an’ sit with me a while.”

Feeling a sudden urge to go back inside and up to bed, Father Poole said apologetically, “Thank you all the same, but… .” He rotated his upper torso toward the rectory as he tried to think of something to say.

The old man suddenly added, “You ain’t tired. You wouldn’t be out here for no clear reason then. Nope! Tonight you’re like I am every night. Cahn’t sleep a wink, and you’re out here in the hope that you can keep your sanity, starin’ at somethin’ other than your bedroom ceiling. Now come on up here and pull up a chair.” He leaned forward and smiled amicably. “We’ll become better acquainted.”

It then dawned on Father Poole.
Why
not?
I
am
going
crazy
just
staring
up
at
my
ceiling
, he thought to himself and began to climb the stairs, which to his delight creaked just as much as the rectory’s.

He sat to the left of Mr. Benson in a wooden chair considerably smaller than the old rocking chair on which Benson was seated. Father Poole’s chair seemed as though it was made for a child. Feeling his hips become wedged, he tried shifting a bit, sitting on his right buttock and crossing his left leg over his right, but that only made it worse. He then tried several times in vain to have his forearms support most of his weight by leaning them on the chair’s arms. This was only a temporary fix, and he found himself growing uncomfortable every twenty seconds after shifting into a new position.

Mr. Benson said, “The name’s Ben Benson. Oldest fah’t up here on Holly Hill, probably in all o’ south’n New Hampshire for that matter.”

He put his cigarette into his mouth and extended his right hand to the priest, who was trying desperately to conceal his discomfort in the tiny chair. Father Poole saw Ben’s hand, laughed uneasily, and tried to determine if he could hold on to the chair so that he could shake the old man’s hand, which now hung motionless in front of him.

“Nice to meet you, Ben! I’m Father Phineas Poole.”

The two released each other’s hand, and Benson brought his to the ever present cigarette, taking one last drag and then putting it out. Instead of exhaling the smoke first and then speaking, he simply allowed the smoke to drift out on its own as he spoke.

“Yep! I know who you ah’r already. I spoke with A’gyle Hobbs earlier this week. Said they’d all be expectin’ the new priest any day from over Exeter way. St. Luke’s was it?”

Phineas lost track of the conversation, watching in bewilderment as Ben Benson lit another cigarette. “What was that?” Father Poole asked quickly, snapping out of his daze. “St. Luke’s. Oh, yes! Yes, indeed! I was a priest there for five years.” Then he motioned with his chin toward St. Andrew’s. “But now I have my very own parish.”

Ben was still facing the church but never took his eyes off the priest. “Yep!” he said. “You sure do. I ain’t no Catholic myself, but if I was to be one, it’d sure be convenient getting to church services on Sundays. I’m over eighty years old, an’ I ain’t been to church since the year the Titanic sank. Let’s see, that’d be… oh, what? Thirteen years now?”

Father Poole thought that unfortunate, since he himself had rarely missed a Sunday Mass. Even as a young boy, growing up with one parent who was a Catholic and the other who was an atheist, he could remember missing church only five times: two Sundays in a row for chicken pox and three Sundays for measles.

“Yep!” Benson continued. “Your own parish.” Then he nonchalantly added, “I’d be gettin’ my house in order if I was you, Father.”

The priest’s brow buckled. He paused for a second or two, trying to find some way to respond. “What do you mean?” Father Poole finally said.

Benson just grunted and took another puff of his cigarette. “You got a history here. Je-ody, if you ain’t got yourself a little history!”

Poole at first had no idea what the old man was driving at, but he then realized what the man presumably had in mind. “Oh, you mean Sister Ignatius, don’t you?” Father Poole replied.

Again the old man grunted. “Yep! Sister Ignatius. That crippled woman in the kitchen. Even your ol’ pastor, that Father what’s-his-name again?”

“Uh, Father Carroll.”

“Yeah,” Ben shouted. “That’s the fella, that’s the fella. Names go outta my head just as easy as they come into it. Yep! Unfriendly sort, he was. Think
he
was the reason why no one comes to your church? Sweaty, sloppy, belchin’. Stuttered like a frightened child havin’ to fess up somethin’ he done wrong.” Ben paused, inhaled, and then continued. “Yep! Fine piece o’ work everyone be at that there church o’ yours. It
is
yours now, you know. You’re the one in cha’ge now, my friend. Just make sure you watch out for that nun in there.”

Father Poole frowned at Benson. “Why? What has she done?” he asked, afraid to hear the answer.

“She’s hot an’ cold, that one is. You notice yet how she is? One minute she’s up, another she’s in yer face somethin’ fierce. Je-ody! That Sister there’s a cause for concern, she is! Must be her
addiction
. Yep! I’ll be willin’ to bet the shiny nickel in my pocket that there’s the reason.”

Father Poole’s eyes widened. “What do you mean,
addiction
?” the priest interrupted. “You mean, like an addiction to morphine?”

Benson laughed quietly under his breath and continued, “Yeah, that’s what I mean alright.
That
sort of addiction. However, nothin’ as fancy as morphine.”

There was silence for about half a minute before the priest’s curiosity reached a boiling point. He wanted to know more; he
needed
to know more. “An addiction to
what
, Mr. Benson?” said Father Poole finally.

Benson said flatly, “Glue. She likes to sniff glue. Oh, not the paste that kids use in grammar school. I mean your thick, brown, stinky kind. You know the one, I reckon. It looks just like maple syrup. Yep! You can easily mistake that stuff for maple syrup. I wager a whole bunch o’ people who stock that glue in their homes would accidentally poison themselves if it wasn’t for the smell.”

Then it dawned on Father Poole.
The
smell
, he thought.
THE
SMELL!