The Complete Stories (57 page)

When they sat on the porch in the morning, his mother felt that some of the time she should talk about subjects that were of interest to him. The third morning she started in on his writing. “When you get well,” she said, “I think it would be nice if you wrote a book about down here. We need another good book like
Gone With the Wind.
”

He could feel the muscles in his stomach begin to tighten.

“Put the war in it,” she advised. “That always makes a long book.”

He put his head back gently as if he were afraid it would crack. After a moment he said, “I am not going to write any book.”

“Well,” she said, “if you don't feel like writing a book, you could just write poems. They're nice.” She realized that what he needed was someone intellectual to talk to, but Mary George was the only intellectual she knew and he would not talk to her. She had thought of Mr. Bush, the retired Methodist minister, but she had not brought this up. Now she decided to hazard it. “I think I'll ask Dr. Bush to come to see you,” she said, raising Mr. Bush's rank. “You'd enjoy him. He collects rare coins.”

She was not prepared for the reaction she got. He began to shake all over and give loud spasmodic laughs. He seemed about to choke. After a minute he subsided into a cough. “If you think I need spiritual aid to die,” he said, “you're quite mistaken. And certainly not from that ass Bush. My God!”

“I didn't mean that at all,” she said. “He has coins dating from the time of Cleopatra.”

“Well if you ask him here, I'll tell him to go to hell,” he said. “Bush! That beats all!”

“I'm glad something amuses you,” she said acidly.

For a time they sat there in silence. Then his mother looked up. He was sitting forward again and smiling at her. His face was brightening more and more as if he had just had an idea that was brilliant. She stared at him. “I'll tell you who I want to come,” he said. For the first time since he had come home, his expression was pleasant; though there was also, she thought, a kind of crafty look about him.

“Who do you want to come?” she asked suspiciously.

“I want a priest,” he announced.

“A priest?” his mother said in an uncomprehending voice.

“Preferably a Jesuit,” he said, brightening more and more. “Yes, by all means a Jesuit. They have them in the city. You can call up and get me one.”

“What is the matter with you?” his mother asked.

“Most of them are very well-educated,” he said, “but Jesuits are foolproof. A Jesuit would be able to discuss something besides the weather.” Already, remembering Ignatius Vogle, S.J., he could picture the priest. This one would be a trifle more worldly perhaps, a trifle more cynical. Protected by their ancient institution, priests could afford to be cynical, to play both ends against the middle. He would talk to a man of culture before he died—even in this desert! Furthermore, nothing would irritate his mother so much. He could not understand why he had not thought of this sooner.

“You're not a member of that church,” Mrs. Fox said shortly. “It's twenty miles away. They wouldn't send one.” She hoped that this would end the matter.

He sat back absorbed in the idea, determined to force her to make the call since she always did what he wanted if he kept at her. “I'm dying,” he said, “and I haven't asked you to do but one thing and you refuse me that.”

“You are
NOT
dying.”

“When you realize it,” he said, “it'll be too late.”

There was another unpleasant silence. Presently his mother said, “Nowadays doctors don't
let
young people die. They give them some of these new medicines.” She began shaking her foot with a nerve-rattling assurance. “People just don't die like they used to,” she said.

“Mother,” he said, “you ought to be prepared. I think even Block knows and hasn't told you yet.” Block, after the first visit, had come in grimly every time, without his jokes and funny faces, and had taken his blood in silence, his nickel-colored eyes unfriendly. He was, by definition, the enemy of death and he looked now as if he knew he was battling the real thing. He had said he wouldn't prescribe until he knew what was wrong and Asbury had laughed in his face. “Mother,” he said, “I
AM
going to die,” and he tried to make each word like a hammer blow on top of her head.

She paled slightly but she did not blink. “Do you think for one minute,” she said angrily, “that I intend to sit here and let you die?” Her eyes were as hard as two old mountain ranges seen in the distance. He felt the first distinct stroke of doubt.

“Do you?” she asked fiercely.

“I don't think you have anything to do with it,” he said in a shaken voice.

“Humph,” she said and got up and left the porch as if she could not stand to be around such stupidity an instant longer.

Forgetting the Jesuit, he went rapidly over his symptoms: his fever had increased, interspersed by chills; he barely had the energy to drag himself out on the porch; food was abhorrent to him; and Block had not been able to give her the least satisfaction. Even as he sat there, he felt the beginning of a new chill, as if death were already playfully rattling his bones. He pulled the afghan off his feet and put it around his shoulders and made his way unsteadily up the stairs to bed.

He continued to grow worse. In the next few days he became so much weaker and badgered her so constantly about the Jesuit that finally in desperation she decided to humor his foolishness. She made the call, explaining in a chilly voice that her son was ill, perhaps a little out of his head, and wished to speak to a priest. While she made the call, Asbury hung over the banisters, barefooted, with the afghan around him, and listened. When she hung up he called down to know when the priest was coming.

“Tomorrow sometime,” his mother said irritably.

He could tell by the fact that she made the call that her assurance was beginning to shatter. Whenever she let Block in or out, there was much whispering in the downstairs hall. That evening, he heard her and Mary George talking in low voices in the parlor. He thought he heard his name and he got up and tiptoed into the hall and down the first three steps until he could hear the voices distinctly.

“I had to call that priest,” his mother was saying. “I'm afraid this is serious. I thought it was just a nervous breakdown but now I think it's something real. Doctor Block thinks it's something real too and whatever it is is worse because he's so run-down.”

“Grow up, Mamma,” Mary George said, “I've told you and I tell you again: what's wrong with him is purely psychosomatic.” There was nothing she was not an expert on.

“No,” his mother said, “it's a real disease. The doctor says so.” He thought he detected a crack in her voice.

“Block is an idiot,” Mary George said. “You've got to face the facts: Asbury can't write so he gets sick. He's going to be an invalid instead of an artist. Do you know what he needs?”

“No,” his mother said.

“Two or three shock treatments,” Mary George said. “Get that artist business out of his head once and for all.”

His mother gave a little cry and he grasped the banister.

“Mark my words,” his sister continued, “all he's going to be around here for the next fifty years is a decoration.”

He went back to bed. In a sense she was right. He had failed his god, Art, but he had been a faithful servant and Art was sending him Death. He had seen this from the first with a kind of mystical clarity. He went to sleep thinking of the peaceful spot in the family burying ground where he would soon lie, and after a while he saw that his body was being borne slowly toward it while his mother and Mary George watched without interest from their chairs on the porch. As the bier was carried across the dam, they could look up and see the procession reflected upside down in the pond. A lean dark figure in a Roman collar followed it. He had a mysteriously saturnine face in which there was a subtle blend of asceticism and corruption. Asbury was laid in a shallow grave on the hillside and the indistinct mourners, after standing in silence for a while, spread out over the darkening green. The Jesuit retired to a spot beneath a dead tree to smoke and meditate. The moon came up and Asbury was aware of a presence bending over him and a gentle warmth on his cold face. He knew that this was Art come to wake him and he sat up and opened his eyes. Across the hill all the lights were on in his mother's house. The black pond was speckled with little nickel-colored stars. The Jesuit had disappeared. All around him the cows were spread out grazing in the moonlight and one large white one, violently spotted, was softly licking his head as if it were a block of salt. He awoke with a shudder and discovered that his bed was soaking from a night sweat and as he sat shivering in the dark, he realized that the end was not many days distant. He gazed down into the crater of death and fell back dizzy on his pillow.

The next day his mother noted something almost ethereal about his ravaged face. He looked like one of those dying children who must have Christmas early. He sat up in the bed and directed the rearrangement of several chairs and had her remove a picture of a maiden chained to a rock for he knew it would make the Jesuit smile. He had the comfortable rocker taken away and when he finished, the room with its severe wall stains had a certain cell-like quality. He felt it would be attractive to the visitor.

All morning he waited, looking irritably up at the ceiling where the bird with the icicle in its beak seemed poised and waiting too; but the priest did not arrive until late in the afternoon. As soon as his mother opened the door, a loud unintelligible voice began to boom in the downstairs hall. Asbury's heart beat wildly. In a second there was a heavy creaking on the stairs. Then almost at once his mother, her expression constrained, came in followed by a massive old man who plowed straight across the room, picked up a chair by the side of the bed and put it under himself.

“I'm Father Finn—from Purrgatory,” he said in a hearty voice. He had a large red face, a stiff brush of gray hair and was blind in one eye, but the good eye, blue and clear, was focused sharply on Asbury. There was a grease spot on his vest. “So you want to talk to a priest?” he said. “Very wise. None of us knows the hour Our Blessed Lord may call us.” Then he cocked his good eye up at Asbury's mother and said, “Thank you, you may leave us now.”

Mrs. Fox stiffened and did not budge.

“I'd like to talk to Father Finn alone,” Asbury said, feeling suddenly that here he had an ally, although he had not expected a priest like this one. His mother gave him a disgusted look and left the room. He knew she would go no farther than just outside the door.

“It's so nice to have you come,” Asbury said. “This place is incredibly dreary. There's no one here an intelligent person can talk to. I wonder what you think of Joyce, Father?”

The priest lifted his chair and pushed closer. “You'll have to shout,” he said. “Blind in one eye and deaf in one ear.”

“What do you think of Joyce?” Asbury said louder.

“Joyce? Joyce who?” asked the priest.

“James Joyce,” Asbury said and laughed.

The priest brushed his huge hand in the air as if he were bothered by gnats. “I haven't met him,” he said. “Now. Do you say your morning and night prayers?”

Asbury appeared confused. “Joyce was a great writer,” he murmured, forgetting to shout.

“You don't eh?” said the priest. “Well you will never learn to be good unless you pray regularly. You cannot love Jesus unless you speak to Him.”

“The myth of the dying god has always fascinated me,” Asbury shouted, but the priest did not appear to catch it.

“Do you have trouble with purity?” he demanded, and as Asbury paled, he went on without waiting for an answer. “We all do but you must pray to the Holy Ghost for it. Mind, heart and body. Nothing is overcome without prayer. Pray with your family. Do you pray with your family?”

“God forbid,” Asbury murmured. “My mother doesn't have time to pray and my sister is an atheist,” he shouted.

“A shame!” said the priest. “Then you must pray for them.”

“The artist prays by creating,” Asbury ventured.

“Not enough!” snapped the priest. “If you do not pray daily, you are neglecting your immortal soul. Do you know your catechism?”

“Certainly not,” Asbury muttered.

“Who made you?” the priest asked in a martial tone.

“Different people believe different things about that,” Asbury said.

“God made you,” the priest said shortly. “Who is God?”

“God is an idea created by man,” Asbury said, feeling that he was getting into stride, that two could play at this.

“God is a spirit infinitely perfect,” the priest said. “You are a very ignorant boy. Why did God make you?”

“God didn't.…”

“God made you to know Him, to love Him, to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him in the next!” the old priest said in a battering voice. “If you don't apply yourself to the catechism how do you expect to know how to save your immortal soul?”

Asbury saw he had made a mistake and that it was time to get rid of the old fool. “Listen,” he said, “I'm not a Roman.”

“A poor excuse for not saying your prayers!” the old man snorted.

Asbury slumped slightly in the bed. “I'm dying,” he shouted.

“But you're not dead yet!” said the priest, “and how do you expect to meet God face to face when you've never spoken to Him? How do you expect to get what you don't ask for? God does not send the Holy Ghost to those who don't ask for Him. Ask Him to send the Holy Ghost.”

“The Holy Ghost?” Asbury said.

“Are you so ignorant you've never heard of the Holy Ghost?” the priest asked.