Thursday, November 7, 2013
Book Group
I may never get the stuff I've written under either the title Farther Along, or as my friend Ann suggests, the title: Tend the fire, tell the story, pass the wine in any shape to show to a publisher. But I am so humbled and delighted to have shared some of it with people I deeply respect and profoundly love. I'm not even sure they know how much I love them and it doesn't matter, really, if they do. What matters is that I do.
I thought I'd pass along one of the chapters they read, the one they read tonight, in fact.
Some
People (ii)
LITTLE SAINT JASON
When I was at St.
Paul’s in New Haven, one of my neighbors stopped me on the street
and asked, “Do you do baptisms?” She and her husband lived in a
handsome brownstone on the park—they were a “Yale couple”, she
was Vice-President of something and he was a professor of economics.
They were the ultimate “yuppies”—a term that still meant
something in the 80’s. She was tall, immaculately dressed for
success and quite beautiful, blonde and willowy. But she wore her
hair pulled back severely and horned rimmed glasses she may or may
not have needed. (I met several women who worked in big jobs for Yale
who wore clear glass in unflattering frames. One actually told me it
was to tell people, “I may be pretty, but I’m smart….”) She
was wearing a pale gray, pinstripe suit and a pink blouse buttoned to
the neck with one of those floppy little ties that are bow-ties on
estrogen. But her shoes, I remember noticing (she was beautiful,
after all!) were extremely high heels with almost no visible means of
keeping them on her feet. Really sexy, out of character shoes....She
hadn’t given in to the corporate image ultimately…her shoes were
fiercely feminine.
I allowed that I
had been known to “do” baptisms from time to time and she invited
me to come ‘around to our house tonight for a drink…5:30 suit
you?'
I was fascinated. I
knew Donna and her husband, Phil, from the park. Our daughter was
about their son’s age—5 maybe—and they sometimes chased each
other in the park while everyone around Wooster Square let their dogs
off lead to run and poop. But I’d never been invited to their house
before. I could hardly wait.
When we’d settled
in with our drinks (scotch for Phil, a Manhattan for Donna and white
wine for me) I was offered hors devours more exotic than either of
them should have time to make before my arrival and we did Wooster
Square small talk. Phil, even taller than Donna and nearly as good
looking, was a New Haven clone of “Mr. Chips”—casually elegant
and tweedy and yet a little awkward all at the same time. He
obviously needed his glasses—in fact had two pair with those bands
that hold them like long necklaces around your neck. One for distance
and one for reading, I imagined, wondering if it were vanity or drama
that prevented him from just getting bifocals—but then, I’m
always hard on people who ‘come from money’. There house made no
secret that one—perhaps both of them—came from money. Everything
was understated but expensive from the rugs to the lamps to the
properly worn leather couch and chairs to the antique table I sat my
glass on and then picked up in horror and looked around for a
coaster.
“Go ahead and set
it there,” Donna said. “It was my grandmother’s so it’s
really old.” The people who come from “real money” are casual
about such things, those who got rich on their own are much less
relaxed about glass rings on a table worth thousands. After some
small talk about the weather (a pleasant September, better than last
year) and the neighborhood (“did you know the Mason’s moved to
Europe—Mark’s doing a post-doc in France”) we finally got down
to business.
“We don’t come
to church,” Phil began, showing his humility, “but we are
Episcopalians….We were married in the Cathedral in Chicago. And
both our parents are serious Episcopalians and they’re all coming
out for Thanksgiving….”
Little
Jason hadn’t been baptized (“our fault,” Donna said,
“totally”—as if it could have been Jason’s fault or the fault
of Sarah, their AKC standard poodle) and there was going to be hell
to pay to Grand-pop and Grand-mom and Granny and Gramps come turkey
day. Before they began to grovel, which they would have, I told them
I’d be delighted to baptize Jason, which I was. And we started
talking about dates and times, settling on the Sunday after
Thanksgiving when the grandparents on both sides could be there. All
I asked them to do was come to church a few times, just so they’d
be familiar with the racially and socially diverse parish of St.
Paul’s and to let me talk with them…and Jason…about baptism for
a few hours soon.
They
were overjoyed, called Jason down with his nanny, a 20 something au
per from France who was teaching Jason French as well as looking
after him and taking some classes from Yale on their dime. (I thought
I had maybe underestimated the money they came from!) I knew Jason of
course, and he knew me as “Mimi’s dad” and we talked briefly
about coming to church and talking about baptism. Later mom and dad
and Jason spent several hours with me. Phil, of course, and Donna to
only a slightly lesser degree, knew the ins and outs of liturgy and
church history and the rich myriad of symbols that made up baptism.
Jason asked some of those classic kid questions: “will the water be
cold or hot?” “Will I have to say anything?” “Will Jesus be
there?”
I
told them, at some point, that baptism, to my theology, was admission
to communion and Jason should receive communion with them on his
baptismal day. Donna was a bit horrified: “But he isn’t old
enough to ‘understand’ it,” she said. I thought for a moment
and replied, “If ‘understanding’ it is a prerequisite, then I
shouldn’t receive it either….” It was a hard sell but Jason won
the day: “I want to, Mommy,” he said to Donna and the deal was
made.
True
to their word, Donna, Phil and Jason became fixtures on the third row
near the pulpit. From time to time Brigitte would come with them and
all of them fit in just fine—a little better dressed than most, but
open and friendly and involved. During that time I came, once more,
face to face with my devotion to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation
that “the rich are not like you and me.” I’ve never quite felt
comfortable around the moneyed of the world—certainly both a
character flaw and a disadvantage for rapid advancement in the
Episcopal Church! Donna and Phil were ‘just like me’—we had
many of the same interests and opinions. And Jason was ‘just a kid’
dressed in clothes from Barney’s instead of Sears. I came to like
them a lot, which prepared me to like their parents as well. Jason’s
two grandfathers were cut from the same mold—successful, keen and
most likely ruthless Mid-Western business men who never the less
possessed the shy, inviting charm of people from the center of the
country. The grandmothers were different—Donna’s mom was an older
version of her: stylish, lovely, cultured. But Phil’s mother was
like someone Garrison Keeler would make up and put in Lake Woebegone.
She was a tad over-weight with a broad, smiling face, gray hair in a
bun and simple clothing. She would have been very comfortable in an
apron puttering around the house.
They
were all delighted that Jason, as his paternal grandmother put it,
“was finally getting dunked.” And on the day of the baptism they
were all radiant and joyful. The baptism went fine—Jason answered
loudly when I asked him if he desired to be baptized and stepped up
on the little stool I’d dug out to lean his head over the font with
perfect grace. But the real grace came when the family, led by Jason,
came up to receive communion. Jason received the wafer and carefully,
precisely dipped it half-way into the wine before consuming it. Then
he said, “thank you” to the chalicist and started back to his
seat between the lines of people waiting for the rail.
He
stopped beside the first person he passed and said, politely, “I
just got the Body of Christ.” That person nodded slightly but tried
to remain solemn, just the way we should be on the way to the
greatest party ever thrown! So, Jason was a little louder with the
next person and louder still with the one after that. By then, the
lack of response began to confuse and annoy him and he started
pulling on pants legs and skirts: “I just got the Body of Christ!”
he said to each person he passed. Donna’s father got to him first
and picked him up, looking back embarrassingly at me. Jason was
trying to get free from his grandfather’s embrace…there were lots
more people to tell about what had just occurred.
I
stopped the service right there, asking the organist to stop playing
and pointing to Jason in the arms of his grandfather.
“Do
you hear what he’s telling you?” I said, softly. “Can you begin
to understand what waits for you up here? Jason understands and he’s
telling you to run to this table because the mystery and wonder here
is more than you imagine…more than you can imagine….”
For
months after that, I was told, people going back from communion would
lean over and whisper to their friends, “Guess what I just got?”
And for a while the spirit of Jason’s understanding astonished us
all.
(I
had wondered if having Jason ‘dunked’ would be the end of the
family’s church going. I wouldn’t have been upset if it had,
since the sacrament was valid and real and ‘objective’. But they
kept coming for a few months until Donna was offered a position in
the President’s office at Northwestern and Phil was asked to teach
at the University of Chicago. The jobs were so good they were leaving
at the end of first semester. I was sad to see them go, but it gave
me a little rush to know that someone had used Yale as a ‘stepping
stone’ to what they really wanted!
I
went down the day they moved and watched the movers carefully empty
the house of beautiful, valuable things. Donna, so unlike her, was
dressed in faded jeans and one of Phil’s J. Crew white shirts. Her
hair was a mess and she had on neither makeup nor glasses. She hugged
me and told me I could find Phil and Jason and the dog and the nanny
over in the park. Before I went to say good-bye to them, she said,
“did we tell you that Jason’s favorite game now is playing
priest? He baptizes G. I. Joe daily and gives us communion ever so
often. He wears one of Phil’s tee-shirts and puts one of his ties
around his neck. It’s really very sweet.” She said it was ‘sweet’
but she looked worried.
“It’s
just a phase,” I told her, “like me.”
“You’re
in a ‘phase’?” asked, smiling.
“Yeal,”
I said, “but mine came late and has stayed for a while.”
Then
I went to find my friends and say goodbye.)
BUTTERFLY (God bless him…)
I’ve changed
people’s names up to now, but there is no way to do that with
Butterfly. I considered calling him “Moth” or “Bumblebee” or
“Hummingbird”, but none of those or any other would do justice to
who and what he was. He was Butterfly—I’ll change his ‘real’
name to Michael Caruso from what it was…but that (or his ‘real’
name) does not do him justice. He was Butterfly. He signed his ‘art
work’ Papillon, which was his misspelling of the
French for Butterfly—“Papillion”. So even he couldn’t come up
with a name that worked besides the one he was: Butterfly.
He was 6’6”
tall and probably weighed 150 pounds—10 pounds of which was the
jewelry he wore around his neck and in his ears. He told me he had a
total of 27 earrings, 13 on the right ear and 14 on the left. I never
counted, I simply took his word for it. And most of the earrings were
of—you guessed it—butterflies. He also wore dozens of ring
bracelets on each arm and a ring on every finger of both hands,
including his thumb. And bling around his neck before ‘bling’ was
the word for it—countless chains and necklaces. And all of that,
like his earrings, had a definite theme: butterflies. I cannot
imagine where he found so much bad jewelry with butterflies on it. I
know he didn’t buy it on E-Bay since he had neither a computer nor
money. But over the years of his life, he had found all this stuff
and covered himself with it. There is a scene in a novel by George
MacDonald, a writer who was a friend of C. S. Lewis and Tolkien,
where a character is completely enveloped by a flock (is that the
right term?) of Monarch butterflies. Every inch of his body is, for a
moment or two, covered by butterflies. I’m sorry I never found that
passage and shared it with the Papillion I knew. He would have danced
around the room—all arms and legs and jewelry—with delight and
wonder just reading about an event like that. He WAS Butterfly.
He was long since a
character around down-town Waterbury before I arrived. Eccentric
doesn’t do the job in describing him. Neither does odd, odd-ball,
unconventional, unusual, peculiar, strange or weird, which were the
synonyms my computer’s thesaurus gave me for ‘eccentric’. I
won’t even bother going to Roget’s. Every word there will apply
but not describe. He usually wore a Mohawk which revealed a huge gash
on the back of his head.
“Where’d you
get that scar, Butterfly?” I asked.
“When I was in
prison,” he said, “I sort of incited a riot.”
“Where were you
in prison?”
“Cal-i-for-ni-a.
‘California there I was, til I got arrested by the fuzz….’
He danced around my office where we were talking.
“What were you in
prison for?”
“Weed, Reefer.
Possession is the devil’s workshop….” He showed my how to
inhale and hold it while offering me his imaginary joint. The ones
he’s had earlier weren’t imaginary. I could smell it across the
room.
“That’s ‘an
idle mind’,” I told him.
“What is?” He
continued smoking his non-existence marijuana.
“And idle mind is
the devil’s workshop….”
“I had one
of them too,” he cackled, moving again. He was hopelessly ADD, he
couldn’t sit still for a minute. “It was the 60’s, man….”
“How long did you
serve?” I asked.
“Eight years.”
I was astonished.
“Eight years for possession of marijuana? In California? In the
60’s? Everyone would have been in prision….”
Butterfly smiled at
me and shook his head, “I possessed 50 acres,” he said.
And he was as
flamboyantly homosexual as anyone I ever met. Gay and lesbian folks I
knew gave him wide berth. He wore skin tight clothes, his shirt open
to the navel (“so you can see my jewelry,” he told me when I
asked him why he didn’t button his shirt at least a little) and
always had glitter all over his face and head and chest. He wore lots
of eyeliner and mascara but drew the line at lip-stick. “Only
faggots wear lipstick,” he told me once, letting me in on his
make-up philosophy, “and I’m not a faggot—I’m a god-damn
screaming queer….”
Did I leave out the
tattoos? Dozens and dozens of tattoos on every part of his body you
could see—and during the summer, when he wore short shorts, there
was lots of skin to see. Most all of them were, you probably guessed,
butterflies. When I asked him why he became “Butterfly” he grew
serious for one of the few times I knew him and started talking in a
soft, almost dreamy voice, unlike his usually rapid staccato
falsetto. “When I was a boy,” he told me, “I knew ‘something
was wrong’ with me. Everyone said it when they thought I couldn’t
hear them. I was strange and freakish and didn’t do well in school
and didn’t have any friends. I used to wonder what I’d ‘rather’
be than me. Then one day, I watched a butterfly out in the yard for
about an hour. It didn’t go in a straight line. It was so
beautiful. It could flit and it could soar. After a while it came and
landed on my face and it’s little feet were sticky and so tiny,
like eyelashes. I was in love.”
I sat in his
silence, fascinated and not a little moved by his story. After a few
moments he leaped up from the couch where he was sitting and started
dancing around my office. “It’s the flitting part I like
best!”
A remarkable thing
was how many people were genuinely fond of Butterfly. There was
something childlike below the weirdness—something playful and
touching and inviting. The two women who ran the Council of
Churches—a tough old swamp Yankee and the sweet, rural wife of the
American Baptist minister in town both adored him. So did the
nun—street smart and savvy—who was the director of the social
service agency housed across the street from St. John’s in the
First Congregational Church. So did most of the members of the
parish—he actually was a communicant though his attention deficit
kept him from sitting through a whole service. The oddest couple of
his relationships was with Allie, a conservative Republican in her
early 30’s who was a member of the American Rifle Association and
carried a little snub-nose 38 in her purse at all times. Allie and
Butterfly were always talking after church and one day, when Allie
had told me she was pregnant, Butterfly came running up to me with
her in tow. He embraced her—she was short and her head barely
reached his nipples, which of course you could see because his shirt
was unbuttoned—“Allie’s got a bun in the oven!” Butterfly
announced loudly. “I’m going to be a fairy god-mother….”
They looked at each other with genuine devotion and then he pressed
her face against his bling.
It’s not that
Butterfly wasn’t a problem. He was stoned entirely too much and so
promiscuous that it made my eyes ache. I actually feared for him
because he’d take about any man he found home. And he had a temper.
His primary adversary was Justine, the local shopping cart lady, who
hung out at most of the downtown churches the way Butterfly did.
She’s a whole story in herself, but they were like the proverbial
oil and water. I’d throw both of them off the property for a day or
two with regularity. They couldn’t be near each other without
fighting about something. Once, during a Tuesday morning Eucharist
with the Clericus group, I heard them out in the hall way screaming
like banshees at each other with remarkable combinations of
profanity. I was half way through the prayer of consecration, but the
din was so disturbing that I thought one of them might kill the
other. To tell the truth, at that moment, I wished they were the
gingham dog and calico cat and would simply tear each other to
pieces.
I took off the
stole I was wearing, dropped it around one of the other priest’s
neck and went to scold the children. I was on them like stink
on…well, you know. I got between them and screamed them into
silence. “Why has God sent the two of you to me?” I yelled. They
looked at me as if I were an alien from a distant galaxy. Then I
banished them from the building for two days and went back to receive
the sacrament I had only half-blessed.
But the real
story—the story that intrigues, delights and haunts me to this
day—was Butterfly and Millicent. Millicent was an elderly woman who
lived in one of the less fancy “rest homes” that dot any city the
size of Waterbury. We, somehow, as a culture, have to warehouse the
elderly to keep them safe from others and themselves. Some ‘homes’
do it with a modicum of grace and care, in spite of crushing numbers
and limited resources, but most don’t. Millicent’s ‘rest home’
was in the latter category. Once I met her, I visited her with some
regularity, especially after Butterfly’s murder. And it was
Butterfly who introduced us.
I pulled into the
parking lot and noticed that Butterfly and an elderly woman who was
dressed rather stylishly—1950’s stylishly, but stylishly none the
less—were standing on the street near the entrance to the parking
lot. I got out of my car and went to say hello. Butterfly was puffing
as hard as he could on a joint while Millicent waited for him to
finish toking up. Butterfly, always the gentleman, said, holding his
breath, “Millicent, this is Fr. Jim. Jim this is Millicent
Randolph.” That was quite a feat to say on an inhale and Millicent
and I shook hands.
“Butterfly has
told me about you,” she said, in an accent that hinted of Back Bay
Boston. “He’s taking me to the A.A. meeting in your church this
morning.”
I turned and saw
Butterfly knock the ash off his joint and eat what was left.
“You’re going
to an A.A. meeting?” I asked him with as much judgment as I could
muster.
He swallowed and
smiled. “It’s ‘Alcoholics Anonymous,” he said, taking
Millicent’s thin arm and leading her a bit unstably toward the
church door.
Over time I
learned a great deal about Millicent. She actually was an
aristocrat of sorts—not from Boston but Manhattan, though she’d
gone to school at Vassar and picked up a Boston accent and a Boston
Brahman to boot. They lived in Greenwich, summered on Nantucket and
had a ‘little place’ in Miami Beach. But one of their perfect
three children was murdered while attending Columbia—he was 19—and
Millicent fell completely, totally, absolutely apart. By the time her
therapy and her taste for scotch and her profound depression began to
lift, even a bit, her husband had divorced her, her daughters given
up on her, her friends abandoned her and her own family disowned her.
She finally encountered her Higher Power in the basement of an
Episcopal Church somewhere in south-west Connecticut and dragged
herself back to ‘who she’d been’ (“though stronger”, she
told me) but by then her body had betrayed her as well. And having
used up all her own money, she’d ended up, through a social worker
at a rehab center in Fairfield County, at the ‘rest home’ in
Waterbury.
“I was in a fog,”
she told me, long after that meeting on West Main Street while
Butterfly fortified himself for the A.A. meeting, “that lasted
almost 15 years.” Her son had been one of those ‘oops’ children
when she was 36 and her daughters were 11 and 9. So the fog set in
when she was 54 and didn’t lift until she was 69 going on 85,
penniless, forsaken, extremely ill.
“How did you meet
Butterfly?” I asked her shortly after meeting her. She was sitting
in the church, waiting for Butterfly to smoke some dope before
walking her the three blocks back to the home.
She smiled and
looked her age instead of a decade older. “He volunteers at the
home,” she told me. He picks up people’s prescriptions from the
drug store and goes to get folks some fast food when they want it and
brings around newspapers each morning.
I shook my head.
Like a diamond, Butterfly had many facets.
She took a deep
breath. “This church is very beautiful,” she said. “Butterfly
told me to ask you if you’d do my funeral here when the time
comes?”
I nodded and
mumbled, “of course.”
Then she continued,
“He wants to be buried from here too. He told me. Don’t forget
since I doubt he’s told you.”
Nodding more I told
her I wouldn’t forget. But then, in the end, I after all, I had to
scramble hard to keep my promise.
Butterfly and
Millicent became an ‘item’. He began to bring her to church—she’d
grown up High Church at St. Thomas’ in New York City and had to get
used to our less formal ways. But she always had something insightful
to say about the sermon and Butterfly, flitting around, unable to sit
still, would make sure he was there to help her up to communion. She
became the den-mother of a quite unruly A.A. meeting. Most of the
people who came were court ordered and just wanted their paper
signed. But she adopted them all—having only dead and estranged
children of her own—and kept a discipline and insured that the
crowd noise at the break was at a minimum. And Butterfly saw to her
every need and every whim (though Millicent didn’t have many
‘whims’ any more—she was down to ‘needs’ and nothing else).
I feel like the
author of John’s Gospel: “there are many more stories about
Butterfly than are written here….” Just a couple left.
One day, the week
before he was murdered, Butterfly simply opened the door of my office
and came in. I was with a woman who believed her child was on drugs
and her husband was having an affair. I was looking through my
Rolodex to find the numbers of a psychologist and a drug hot-line for
her to call. I had been present to her pain but she needed a real
‘professional’. She was sitting on the couch, wiping her eyes,
when Butterfly butted in, waving a piece of paper and shouting, “I
passed! I passed! I don’t have AIDS!”
The woman jumped
and looked horrified that such a creature had intruded on her pain
and suffering with such a message. Butterfly didn’t ‘work’ for
the uninitiated. His charm was an acquired taste. I threw him
unceremoniously out of my office and told him to wait on me in the
library downstairs. He turned, just like a 10 year old showing you
their report card and being rejected, would have turned. He shut the
door softly behind himself and I started writing phone numbers on the
back of my calling card.
I was furious with
him. When I went into the library he was sitting working on one of
his ‘art works’. What he did was trace characters like Mickey
Mouse and Donald Duck and then surround them with leaves and flowers
and rainbows and stars and color them in with Crayons and glue stick
them to a piece of cardboard. He always signed them “Papillon”
(sic) and gave them to people as if they were Picassos or Rembrandts,
which, in the last analysis, they were. I’m looking at one he did
for my wife as I write this. I keep it near the desk where I work.
Her name, BERN is outlined in green, colored yellow and the two
little balloons in the B are hearts colored red. Practically everyone
I knew in those days had a Papillon original and most people
kept them somewhere in sight.
But I wasn’t
thinking of that the last afternoon I ever saw him. I was thinking of
how inappropriate and intrusive he had been, how he had crossed a
line and shattered a boundary, how he had fucked up big-time.
“Aren’t you
happy I don’t have AIDS?” he asked, as if nothing had happened 10
minutes before, as innocent as a child…which was the truth.
“I’m very happy
for you,” I said, trying not to let my anger show, “and for
me…since I’ll have you around to drive me crazy for a long time.”
He laughed at that, but I continued, doing my lamentable duty as the
“authority” in his life, trying to do “what was best for him”,
wanting to “teach him a lesson.”
“Butterfly, you
can’t come barging into my office whenever you want,” I said,
watching him flinch and twitch, wanting to get up and move but
knowing I would disapprove. “You really fucked up today. You’re
banned from the church for four days.”
He was about to
burst into tears, as he sometimes did. But when he wiped his face
with his forearm, he was reminded that he was wearing a black leather
jacket, some sizes too large. Then he smiled and got up, coming over
to show me the jacket.
“It’s my new
boyfriend’s,” he told me, “isn’t it delicious.”
“Where’d you
meet this new boyfriend,” I asked, touching the leather. It was
delicious. I wished I had one.
“Library Park,”
he said, dancing away, his head leaned back, a child with a new
crush. “He’s from Brooklyn. Just got into town last night. I got
the test for him. He’s really fab-u-lous….”
“He’s really
big,” I said, referring to the jacket.
“Oh, I’ll find
that out tonight!” Butterfly said, moving toward the door, swishing
as hard as a skinny, 6’5” man could swish. “I’ll let you
know.” Then he stopped and counted on his fingers. “This is
Tuesday,” he told me, “four days will be Sunday. See you then….”
Then he was gone.
“Be careful,
Butterfly,” I called after him. But I don’t think he heard me.
And I didn’t see him Sunday because on Saturday night at some time,
his new boyfriend stabbed him to death with the large pair of
scissors Butterfly had to cut the cardboard so he could glue stick
his art work to it.
And Sunday was Palm
Sunday, the first day of the octave that includes Holy Week and
Easter—the holiest week of the Christian Year. A police officer who
knew Butterfly (didn’t they all?) came by the church about 9 a.m.,
after the early service, to find me and tell me that Butterfly had
been murdered and the murderer was in custody.
I found words in
spite of my shock and horror and gathering shame about my last
encounter with my friend. “Why did he kill him? Do you know?”
The police officer
looked back through his little notebook. “One of the detectives
told me it had something to do with Butterfly wearing his leather
jacket without asking….”
*****
Everything got very
confusing after that. Holy Week at St. John’s was filled with
mourning and passion—not just for our Lord, but for our dear
friend, Butterfly. Everything was suffused with his murder. Every
homily for 7 days mentioned him. I’m sure it was his ‘corpus’
and not Jesus’ that people saw on the cross that year. But his
corpse was up in Farmington, at the State Police Forensic lab. I can
only wonder what the technicians and pathologists thought of
Butterfly’s body—the piercings, the Mohawk, the tattoos, his
great height and tiny weight. The scar and metal plate in his head
from a prison riot in California decades ago. And the stab wounds,
examined, excised, analyzed three ways to Palm Sunday—did they find
‘trace evidence’ of cardboard in the wound from the scissors?
What did they make of that?
I couldn’t get a
straight answer from the police or the coroner or the prosecuting
attorneys office about where Butterfly’s body was or when it could
be buried. I burned up the phone lines days past Easter and got
nothing helpful back. But I must have been on a lot of those pink
“Someone called when you were out” slips, because a local
mortician called me to let me know he had Butterfly’s murdered and
filleted body and was going to bury him—via his brother’s
instructions (His Brother—I had no idea Butterfly had family!) in a
pauper’s grave on Friday morning at 9 a.m. I wasn’t familiar with
the particular cemetery so the funeral director promised me he’s
have someone meet me at the gate at 8:55 a.m. to bring me to the
grave. I was there at 8:40, coffee and newspaper to fill the time. At
9 a.m. I started driving around the huge cemetery and saw no one,
anywhere. I went to the office that was just opening. I told my story
and the cemetery director, a huge Irish man with Spencer Tracy
eyebrows and a whisky voice explained to me that contrary to cemetery
rules, the grave had been opened the previous afternoon and the
funeral director had disposed of the body at 8 a.m. and paid a
half-hour of overtime to have the grave filled before 9.
I was so beside
myself that Spencer Tracy drove me out to Butterfly’s newly filled
grave and I sobbed the burial office over it. On the way back to his
office, I asked the cemetery director why, o why, would the mortician
have misled me so?
He waited until he
got back to the office and we were out of his car to answer. “This
was a ‘state burial’,” he told me. “I would venture that
paying overtime to have the grave filled was less expensive than a
real coffin.”
The concept of a
‘real coffin’ had never occurred to me. What would an ‘unreal
coffin’ be?
“He was buried in
a very large cardboard box,” the man told me, very aware of how
upset I was, “that’s my best guess….And he didn’t want you to
see that….”
“He was my
friend…,” I said, about to start blabbering.
The man rubbed his
thumb against his forefinger and said, sadly, I think, “not to the
funeral director.”
When I was back to
the church I called a funeral director I trusted implicitly and
blabbered out the story. “He didn’t break any laws,” he
told me, “but he lied to a priest and was certainly unethical. You
could call the State Board about him. Lots of paperwork, not much
results. I don’t know what to tell you—he was a bad man….But
then, I knew that….”
I called the
funeral director who had planted poor Butterfly without my presence.
“I told you 8 a.m.,” he said, butter not only not melting in his
mouth but becoming chilled. “And he was just a bum.” I hung up.
All else was futile. Before I hung up I did get a phone number in
Rhode Island for Butterfly’s brother and told him I was planning a
memorial service the Wednesday of the next week and invited him to
come. He was startled and stunned. “Will anyone come?” he asked.
“Oh, my goodness,
yes,” I told him. I’m not sure he believed me but, God bless his
heart, he did come.
Three hundred
people showed up for Butterfly’s memorial service. No kidding,
three hundred people showed up. Instead of a homily, there was a
microphone down in the center aisle and people were invited to speak.
I lost count at 19 because Justine, Butterfly’s nemesis, came to
the microphone and said, in the 5 year old language she has, “I
love Butterfly. Fly, Butterfly.” Then she kissed her hand and blew
it toward the ceiling of the church. (She also rambled on in ways no
one understood for a few more minutes before I went down and stopped
her gently.) Butterfly’s brother, who obviously remembered the
little boy who had no friends and was weird and got put in prison and
beaten there, but didn’t know—had no way to imagine—that his
brother was so profoundly loved dissolved into tears and sobs to the
extent that I considered calling 911.
It was Millicent
who spoke last. After she spoke there was nothing else to say.
Something like this was her eulogy for Butterfly: “He became my
son—not the son I lost, but the son I never deserved. No one—no
one—ever cared for me with more compassion and love and joy that
Butterfly. He was a good boy—the best boy ever. I’m not sure how
to live without him….”
After talking to
his brother at the reception that people had organized in the
library—though the library was too small and the food ran out, but
the people in the soup kitchen brought in more and more and more
because they loved Butterfly too—I took Justine to Butterfly’s
grave. Butterfly’s brother told me over and over, “I never knew,
I couldn’t have imagined….” He was referring to the love he had
witnessed for his deranged, odd, weird, eccentric, crazy brother. Who
could have known? Who could have imagined?
I have a dog—well,
not actually a ‘dog’ because he’s a Puli—who is hell on
wheels to ride in a car with. Unless I strap him down with this
gadget I bought at a pet store, he is all over me: barking at the key
until I turn it, barking at the gear shift until I engage it, barking
at the gas petal until I push it. Then he puts his paw on my arm, as
if to direct me where to go—one of his walking places or another. I
actually believe he could drive if his legs could reach the brake and
he had a thumb to turn the key and change the gears. Well, that was a
dim reflection of what it was like to take Justine the 12 miles or so
to Butterfly’s grave. At that point in her life—and she’s
exactly my age—she was much like a child raised by wolves in
France. Since then a couple in the parish have unofficially adopted
her and tamed her (to some extent) and transformed her into something
rare and wondrous. That’s a story in itself. But on the day of
Butterfly’s memorial service, she was like a Puli in my front seat.
I belted her in but she kept yelling and reaching over to touch the
windshield wipers and the steering wheel and the gear shift. And
because there are so many graveyards in a place like Connecticut, she
kept seeing them and hollering, “Butterfly? Butterfly?”
Once we got there
and I showed her where he was buried, she wept and mumbled something
that must have been ‘good-bye’ and was calmer on the way home.
(A few months
later I was sitting by Millicent’s death bed. One of her daughters
was there and the other was flying in from Oregon the next day. She
would have her funeral at St. John’s but the daughters would take
her ashes back to Greenwich to bury beside their father, who, rich as
Midas, had thrown an embolism two years before and passed through
that wondrous, mysterious, terrifying door. After Butterfly’s
death, Millicent had called her daughters and, since grace abounds
when you least expect it, they had ‘come home’ to their mother.
Some sad stories have happy endings, thank the Lord.
I had given
communion to Millicent and her daughter—no wine for Millicent, she
was through with Demon Rum in all its manifestations. And, with
Millicent’s permission, I had said the prayers for the dying.
“Surely I am,” she told me when I hesitantly asked, “why not?”
I was thinking it might be time for me to leave when Millicent’s
daughter took my hand and her mother’s and said, in that
upper-class accent she shared with Millicent, “Jim, you must tell
me about Butterfly, my mother’s son by another mother.”
I smiled that
she knew enough street language to say it that way. The afternoon was
just beginning. I had nothing but time.
“You better
get a chair,” I told her, “this might take a while.”
Millicent was
drifting off to sleep as I began, but her daughter was on the edge of
her chair, drinking it all in.
Sometimes you
get lucky and things turn out like that….)
COLONEL TED AND THE
GANG
Colonel Ted wasn’t
the first person I met at St. James in Charleston—he was the
second. The first person was an elderly, gangly black man with the
improbable name of Israel Goldman. When Bern and I got off the plane
in Charleston, there he was waiting at the gate. He introduced
himself and added, “it always throws people who’ve never met me
when I show up for an appointment.” He was soft spoken and polite,
telling Bern she looked ‘radiant’ rather than mentioning she was
obviously pregnant and not mentioning the length of my hair or my
full beard. Though I objected, he insisted on carrying the one bag
we’d brought for a two day visit, though he was probably 75. He
walked slowly, as many tall, thin men seem to do.
“Colonel Ted will
meet us at the door with his car,” he told us, “he didn’t want
you to have to walk far.” Then, with a twinkle in his eye, he
added, “and besides, Ted really resents having to pay for parking.”
Israel carried his
hat in his hand until we were outside and then placed it jauntily on
his head. He was wearing what seemed to be a hand-tailored suit, a
blindingly white shirt and school tie of some kind. “Grambling,”
he said suddenly, “my alma mater.” I nodded and smiled. “I
saw you looking at it, wondering,” he added. I nodded some more,
wondering if he could read minds. “Here’s the Colonel,” Israel
said, smiling, “probably burned up more gas than the parking meter
would have been.”
The biggest
Cadillac I’d ever seen pulled up to the curb and Colonel Ted
exploded from the driver’s seat, moving quickly around the car to
shake my hand and hug Bern. If Israel was laid-back and
non-demonstrative, the Colonel was an extreme in the other way. He
talked fast, moved fast and was about the size of three Michelin
tires with thin legs in Bermuda shorts and a bowling ball shaped
head. They were Mutt and Jeff, Abbot and Costello, Laurel and Hardy,
except they were African Americans. Israel’s skin was the color of
coffee with cream and Ted’s was a light tan. I had grown up in a
culture where all “Negroes” supposed looked alike because white
people didn’t see them very well. But two men couldn’t have been
more dissimilar in appearance and demeanor than the two they sent to
pick us up for my “interview” at St. James.
It was an
“interview” rather than an interview because I was convinced
nothing would come of it. We’d spend a few hours with the members
of the parish and sleep in a motel and then fly back home after
attending church on Sunday and I would have fulfilled my promise to
Bishop Atkinson. I was in the last couple of months at Virginia
Seminary and had been offered a job as an assistant at a wonderful
church in Chicago, which I wanted to accept. I called Bishop Atkinson
to tell him the good news and after a half-hearted congratulations
and an awkward silence, he told me that Bishop Campbell wouldn’t
release me to leave the diocese. Had I paid close enough attention, I
would have known that a seminarian ‘belonged’ to the diocese and
bishop who had sponsored them in seminary. Had I been a little more
astute about the ways of the church, I would have realized I should
have called Bishop Campbell—the diocesan bishop—rather than the
bishop coadjutor. Had I understood the ‘politics’ of such things
in even a cursory way, I would have had the Bishop of Chicago call
the Bishop of West Virginia to negotiate my release from my
commitment to go and waltz with the diocese that brung me to
the dance. But, of course, all those things were news to me. I
thought I was a free agent rather than an indentured servant.
I handled it badly
by getting angry with Bishop Atkinson (what is it they always do
to the messengers?) and complained bitterly about not being
allowed to do what I wanted. He listened patiently and promised to
call me back right away. When he did, he had a deal—interview for
one job in West Virginia and if I didn’t like it, he’d pull in
all his chits and free me up to go to Chicago. So Bern and I flew to
Charleston at St. James’ expense to do a little ‘play acting’
and say “thanks but no thanks” and begin our lives in the Windy
City. On the way back to Alexandria, somewhere over Maryland at
30,000 feet, Bern said, “You’re going to say ‘yes’ aren’t
you?” And I answered, “I’m afraid I am….”
That was because of
Colonel Ted and the gang at St. James. They were people of such
remarkable character that I simply wanted to be among them for a
while. And, I must admit, I was fascinated by the profound paradoxes
of the parish.
Ted drove down the
long hill from the airport into the bowels of Charleston. I’d been
there many times but I was surprised at how thrilled I was to the
golden dome of the state capital shining in the late April sunlight,
skeptic that I am about feelings of nostalgia, especially for ‘home’.
Bern
told one of our friends the other day that she thought I could live
anywhere. I had mentioned that Bern’s brother was going to move to
Morgantown, West Virginia, where the three of us had gone to college.
I’d said out loud that I would consider moving to Morgantown.
“Oh,
you couldn’t live there now,” our friend suggested.
That’s
when Bern said, “Jim could live anywhere.”
“He
couldn’t live in Mississippi, I’d bet,” our friend said. “Oh
yes, he could,” Bern replied. He ran through a list of places he
and Bern could never live and she assured him about each
suggestion that, “Jim could live there.” All this was terribly
awkward since I was sitting with them on our deck, all of us drinking
coffee, but they talked about me as if I were away—living in
Mississippi, perhaps. The truth was, she was right.
“So he’d find
something to like about anywhere he was?” our friend asked.
“No, that’s not
it,” Bern told him, “he would end up ‘liking it’ without any
reasons, ‘liking it’ just because he was there. In fact, he
wouldn’t even need to ‘like it’, just him being there would be
enough.”
“That’s really
strange,” our friend observed.
“Isn’t it?”
Bern replied.
“More coffee?”
I asked, just to see if I was really there. They both said they would
like another cup and I went off to make it.
It’s not like me
to get attached to places or things. And I’m pretty
satisfied wherever I am and with whatever I’ve got. So, seeing the
gold dome of the capitol of West Virginia moved my heart, but not
much more than seeing anything beautiful anywhere would. “Home”,
for me, is truly where the heart is.
Ted and Israel and
the two of us had lunch at a Shoney’s restaurant next to the motel
where we’d be sleeping. Colonel Ted talked non-stop and Israel
laughed ironically at some of the Colonel's unconscious mild
profanities. Ted was called 'the Colonel' because he was one. He had
beenn one of the highest ranking African-Americans in World War II.
Of course, back then, he would have been called a 'Negro'. Ted never
objected to that discription and few of the older members of St.
James Church objected either. It was a generational thing for
them—maybe, having grown up in the world they grew up in, “Negro”
was a huge step up from 'colored' or worse. After 20 years as a
soldier, Ted started working for the U.S. Postal Service, or whatever
it was called back in the 50's. He worked there long enough to get a
pension and finished his working life with the Veterans
Adminstration. He was the only person I ever met who had three
federal pensions.
Ted was the Senior
Warden when I arrived. He'd been Senior Warden (the highest lay
office in an Episcopal Church) for years before that. A small church
like St. James hangs onto good people in high office. Ted, like
several of the older members of St. James, was extremly light
skinned. He once told me that 'back in the day'--before
integration—he always carried a turban in his trunk so that when he
and Susan wanted to stop for the night in the southern states they
were assured a room. He'd put on his turban and speak broken English
and registered without a problem. I remember asking him what he felt
about having to do that. He drew a serious look on his broad face and
said, “it was embarrassing, in a way....But lots better than
sleeping in the car!” Then he laughed. Ted laughed a lot. He was a
gentle, large, round man—about 5'10 and at least 270 pounds. His
mouth was almost always twisted into a crooked grin He had seen
enough of life and pain to know the best defense was a good offense.
So, he spread laughter wherever he went.
Even though I'd
grown up in a town that was half African-American, I didn't know much
at all about Black folks—none of us White folks really do. And so
Ted and the gang were my kind, patient, good-humored professors in
the study of race. Ted more than anyone. For example, I remember that
Ted and I were on the way to lunch at the Charleston VFW when the
Veteran's Day Parade passed by. Ted and I stopped and watched it—him
waving at some of the Vets as they passed by. When the parade had
ended, he taught me a great lesson.
“You know one
thing that makes us different, Jim?” he said. I must have shaken my
head because he continued...though Ted didn't need response to keep
talking. “When you watch a parade you can decide if you like the
next band when you hear them coming around the corner. I have to wait
until they are in view. If I see some black kids in the band, then I
can enjoy the music.”
Ted was correct,
although it came like a bolt of lightening to me. I could
appreciate the music before I saw the band. Liberal that I am, I
thought it was open-minded of me not to care about the racial makeup
of the band. I attempted to tell him that—but for Ted it was a
more complicated, marrow the bone issue. “Thought like a White
Man,”
he said, then laughed.
One thing I know for certain—something I learned from Ted and the
Gang at St. James—no Black priest in a White congregation would
have experienced the love and acceptance, patience and support I
received from them. When my pregnant wife and I arrived at St. James,
we made up 2/3 of the White membership of the parish. The other White
member was married to a Black man. She was, by the way, the house
cleaner for several of the Black members. Don't tell me Irony doesn't
reign on earth....
Our family—both our children were born in Charleston—were
accepted completely into the 'family' of St. James. I never ate in an
many parishioner's homes in the other two parishes I served combined.
We were wined and dined. And, to be honest, we had much more in
common with most of the people at St. James—education, culture,
tastes, opinions—than we didn't have in common. The one thing we
did not share was race—skin color.
It's astonishing how skin color so dominates the psyches of people
around the globe. My son has been to Taiwan a few times with his
wife's Taiwanese parents. He tells me that island has some of the
most beautiful beaches he's ever seen and that almost everyone on
them are tourists. The Taiwanese middle and upper class carry
umbrella in the sun. Lighter skin is valued. And consider the geishas
of Japan: they powder their faces to typing paper white and are
considered the embodiment of beauty and sensuality. The Hispanic
congregation of St. John's in Waterbury are divided by many
distinctions—nation of origin, accent, class, education—but many
of them told me over the years that lighter skinned folks had
advantages. Ironically enough, it seems only Caucasions seem to value
darker skin. Until the last decade or so of skin-cancer fear, many
white people tried to see how tan they could get in the summer. And
even now, in the Era of Sun Block, there are products to artificially
give your skin a brown glow. Blacks have a different view of skin
color than White folks.
I learned, in my Black Studies with Ted, the saying aboout skin
color among many African-Americans of a certain age and culture. “If
you're light,” it goes, “your're alright. If you're brown, stick
around. If you're black, stay back.” The “Black is Beautiful”
movement changed that for younger African-Americans, yet, as I
learned from Professor Ted, skin color is an essential part of
describing a Black person to another Black person who hasn't met
them. There is as wide a range of distinctions in coloration to some
blacks as there are Eskimo words for snow.
One distinction Ted taught me well is the distinction between
'African-Americans' and 'African-Africans'. Mind you, his opinions
may have said more about his age and class than about what all Black
people think of Africans. It came about when, for the third time, the
Bishop had called me to see if someone at St. James would like to
host a visiting African priest and his wife. The third time was the
last straw for Ted.
“Tell him 'no!',” Ted told me, clearly exasperated by the
request. “Nobody here wants to have Africans in their home....And
when you tell the bishop that, remember to ask him for a damn Range
Rover for St. James.”
Something I have found interesting about the Episcopal Church is how
enamored we often are with African Anglicans. When I was a priest in
West Virginia, some thirty years ago now, the struggling Diocese
would go head over heels about a Bishop from Tanganyika but did next
to nothing to involve African-Americans in the power structure of the
church. That really burned the older members of St. James, especially
after some deep pocket people around the state gave an African
visitor a Land Rover the same year some mission church grants were
reduced.
So I called the Bishop and suggested that there must be some White
folks who would enjoy the exotic pleasure of hosting an African
family for a week or two. The Bishop—a sweet and good man—was
shocked that not all Black people would be ecstatic to have a chance
to talk with someone from their Motherland. I patiently explained,
using Ted's logic if not his profanities, that many of the folks at
St. James found the African clerics arrogant and dismissive since
their families had never been slaves in America. I also told him that
families of the members of St. James had been in this country longer
than the Irish side of my mother's family and that very few
African-Americans, descended as they were from slaves, had no idea
what part of Africa their ancestors came from. “Besides,” I
relayed from Ted, giving him credit for this insight, “Africans
don't understand our culture and smell funny.”
The Bishop was silent for a long time. He might have been
considering what people would think of him if he dared comment on the
odor of an African visitor. He thought, as Ted had taught me, 'just
like a White Man.”
Just before we hung up, I made the request for a Range Rover,
thinking he would be amused. I don't think he was.
Ted taught me many things. He taught me 'tolerance' wasn't the great
and noble idea most White people thought it was.
“If
you say you 'tolerate' me,” he said slowly, trying to get around my
White-Think, “the implication is that tolerance is a choice you're
making and you can take that choice back if you decide to.
'Tolerance' leaves White people in the dominant, oppressive
position.” He waited until he decided I had somewhat dimly
understood that subtlety before continuing. “Negroes...Black
folk...don't want racial 'tolerance', we want equality.”
The little town where I grew up—Anawalt, WestVirginia—is in the
southern most county of the state. Anawalt was roughly 50% Black. Yet
I knew only a few of the Black people's names and some of the elders
of their community called me 'Mister Jimmy'. There was no bad blood,
for the most part, between the races. But we went to different
schools and different churches and different beer joints. The Black
folk were 'tolerated', and, in many ways appreciated for not making
more demands—but there was no thought that they were equal. We had
'racial harmony', not 'racial equality'.Even when things appear to be
just and fair, it is often the 'justice' and 'fairness' granted by
the dominant and oppressive group.
Even today, I fear—God bless Ted's soul—even today.
(At the 2009 General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Anaheim,
there were changes made to the calendar of feasts. One of the new
commemorations was to honor the poet Langston Hughes and the writer,
W.E.B. Du Bois. In one of the collects written for that Holy Day the
term “Black folks” appeared.
Some
White-Thinking deputies rose to amend the collect to say
“African-American people” instead of “Black folks”. Never
mind that DuBois' seminal work is called The
Soul of Black Folks
and never mind that “Black folks” is a term Black Folks use. To
be politically correct, these White folks were trying to change the
very language of the people being honored. It was a half-hour of
madness...nobody listening to the string of Black deputies who rose
to explain the reality and how it would be an offense to change
'Black folks'. Black folks couldn't even call themselves what they
wanted unless White folks approved! Somewhere in that I heard Ted
laughing and Israel chuckling and Harris fairly screaming with
irony.)
Harris,
by the way, was a vice-President of West Virginia State College, a
historically Black college pretty much ruined by integration and
white commuter students. Harris was a devout Episcopalian who would
give me tips on liturgical details. Many Black Episcopal Churches are
quite high-church...St. James was Anglo-Catholic as long as they
could attract Black priests. But economics caught up with them and
most every priest in the Diocese was White and attended Virginia
Seminary, the Evil Twin of Anglo-Catholicism. I was the 3rd
White priest after an 80 year run of Black priests and I had attended
Virginia Seminary!
So once Harris asked me politely and with much apology if I would
mind 're-vesting' the altar after the Eucharist. I had no idea what
he was talking about but agreed to do it if I could. It was after a
Sunday service and I had left the chalice and paten on the alter with
the purificator beside them. All Harris wanted me to do was wash the
chalice and reassemble the whole mess with the burse and veil and
whatever that little hard, square thing is called. That was easy.
“I'm on my way to High Church,” I told Harris the next Sunday
after leaving the altar reassembled.
“Not in your lifetime,” he said.
Harris also told me once, “any Black man who isn't a Baptist or a
Methodist has had some White man messing with his religion.”
I thought for a minute. “Your religion would probably be Muslim or
Tribal if the slave traders had never messed with it.”
He smiled at me—he was one of the most charming men I ever
met—“Ted may be wrong about you,” he said, “you don't think
half like a White man.”
Since I was the priest of a Black Church, I was invited to join the
Black Ministerial Group made up of the Black ministers of the
Baptist, Methodist, AME and AME Zion churches. (A White priest of an
Episcopal Church was more welcomed than the self-appointed,
self-ordained Black preachers here and there around Charleston.) So I
joined. They received me graciously and generously. I went to many of
the monthly meetings but skipped the one when they all took a trip to
Cincinnati together to buy suits and, from their jokes the month
before the trip, to drink and smoke a bit.
I told Ted about the trip to Cincinnati that I turned down. Then I
asked him if he thought I should have gone along for solidarity's
sake. He was fairly falling over from laughter.
“Do
you even own
a suit?” he asked, gasping.
It was a Sunday so I looked down at my khaki colored suit and shook
my head.
“No,
Jim,” he said, “I mean a SUIT
like those boys wear every day?”
Black or navy blue or pin-stripped costing over $100. No I didn't.
“You are such a White man,” he said, walking away to tell Israel
or Harris or his wife Susan or Remitha about how I might have gone to
Cincinnati with the Black Ministers to buy suits....He was snorting
with delight.
Susan, by the way, was Ted's life. His Life, capital 'L'. There were
two loves in his life: Susan and St. James. His devotion to both was
beyond question. The way Ted looked at Susan made other women long
for such looks from their husbands. To say he adored her would, I
think, be drastically understating the reality.
Susan was, I believe, a year or two older than Ted (though one
didn't ask such questions in the polite culture of St. James). For
both of them in was a late-life second marriage. Ted never mentioned
his first wife and their divorce. Susan was widowed and her son,
daughter-in-law and two granddaughters lived across the street from
her and Ted. Peter, the son, was devoted to his mother only slightly
less than Ted was. And Ted had a great relationship with the family,
especially the youngest granddaughter, Emily. While her sister was
beautiful and brilliant, Emily was large, plain and moderately
retarded. She did very well in a caring community like St. James or
the town of Institute where so many of the St. James gang lived.
However, I didn't believe she'd ever be able to live on her own. She
and Ted were magic: Emily would start shrieking with joy as soon as
she saw him and his round face would light up. A full bird Colonel
and a gangly, slightly out of control adolescent who would never be
an 'adult' in a full way would play together like children. Ted would
pretend she annoyed him sometimes, but that ruse was easily seen
through.
Susan's son, Peter, was a kind but rather sardonic guy. I would
sometimes get his jokes an hour later. But he was a faithful father
to both is daughters and a doting son to Susan until one day he was
driving from Institute to Charleston on the Interstate, pulled his
car to the breakdown lane and died of a heart attack.
When
I got to Ted and Susan's, I walked into a space of palpable grief.
Susan rose from the chair where she was sitting and said, “Jim, oh
Jim, did they tell you? My baby
died....”
That was the moment that I realized what I should have known all
along: the death of a child is the hardest death to take. It is
monstrous and unnatural, so out of time and space as it should be,
that to lose a 'baby', even one who is 60 years old as Peter was, is
the unkindest cut of them all. That's also the day I recognized that
the role of a priest at the time of death is simply to be present.
There are, really, no words that are adequate, all aphorisms are
devoid of integrity, nothing you can do makes a difference. All a
priest can do is sit quietly and listen to the words and tears of the
living and hold them in your heart and arms. That's what I did most
of the rest of that day for Susan and Peter's little family.
Emily, not quite clear what had happened, was deeply disturbed by
the enormous emotions flowing around her. So Ted took her for a long
walk through the neighborhood, informing people along the way of
Peter's death. By the end of the walk, after circling the campus of
the college, Emily had become to bearer of the bad news. “She'd
stop total strangers,” Ted told me later, “and grab their arms
the way she does and say, 'daddy dead'.” He smiled, shook his head
and pretended a gnat had flown in his eye and he had to get rid of it
with his handkerchief. “It seemed to give her comfort,” he said,
“that's the damnest thing....”
When people die, everyone has a story to tell. Henrich Ibsen said
something like, there is no suffering so great that we cannot bear it
if only we can put it in a story and tell a story about it. Emily's
story was a simple one--'daddy dead'--and it got her through the next
few days with less stress and more hope than any of the rest of us.
Could it have only been a year later when Susan called me in the
early morning, apologized for disturbing me and asked if I could
come. “Ted fell in the bathroom and I can't get him to wake up.”
I called Clara, Peter's widow, and Harris and then rushed to my car.
When I got there, just before the EMTs, Emily met me at the door.
“Ted dead,” is all she said then she grabbed me and almost
squeezed me in two with that wondrous strength so many retarded
people have.
I could hear the ambulance coming in the distance, hurrying to the
scene. They could have saved the siren; the Colonel had left the
house. Ted dead....
The wake was going to be a problem. Neither of the two Black funeral
homes were large enough for the crowds Susan knew to expect. And in
one of those events I can only call 'inspired'--like the Spirit got
entangled in the moment—I said, “Let's do the wake at the
church....”
There was no question about it—it was perfect. Ted could lay in
front of the altar where he often served as a chalicist, in the
parish church he so loved and the ambiance would be already dignified
and somber, unlike the way things get at funeral homes. When Harris
and Scottie and Israel and young Mark, the next generation of
leadership for St. James, heard that the mortician planned to drive
Ted's body back and forth to Charleston between the wake and the
funeral, they took things into their own hands.
So it was that Ted lay in state in that little A-frame church in a
practically deserted part of north Charleston all through the night.
And he was never alone. At first the men were dividing up the shifts,
but the truth be known, I think that most of the stayed the whole
night, sitting with their friend, telling stories about the Colonel,
telling stories to keep away the chill of night and of death. Just as
it should have been, the gang spend the night with Ted. The whole
thing was gentle and sweet and lovey...just the way it should have
been....
(One of the comments tonight was that it was good to read this chapter
so near to All Saints Day. That moved me greatly. Jason and Butterfly
and Ted and the gang as 'the saints of God' works well with me....)
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