Agnes and I sat in silence for a while and then I got up to leave.
“Jesse,” he said, “I have some papers that need to be in the mail tomorrow. Could you mail them for me?
“Sure,” I said, “I’m going to the hardware store for Bouncer tomorrow. I’ll drop them off at the Post Office.”
The next morning, Agnes looked anxiously at me as I hung my work robe on the hook next to the side door and put on my jacket.
“Can you take this to the Post Office?” he asked, pushing the envelopes toward me.
“Yes, of course,” I said with a little annoyance in my voice.
“They’re very important letters,” he said.
“Does this have anything to do with Sparky’s money?” I asked.
Agnes’ head flicked back as if I’d just popped him on the jaw. But he recovered quickly and looked down on the floor.
“I cannot answer you,” said Agnes. “Just trust me this time.”
Of course I looked at the envelopes once I got in the SUV. I justified my curiosity by telling myself I was his abbot. There were four, two quite thick. One was addressed to a solicitor in Fermoy, another to a local bank in Saugerties, the third to St. Anne in Fermoy and the fourth to what appeared to be a local attorney’s office. I have since been accused of opening the letters, reading and resealing them. But I did not do that. I came close to doing so, but for reasons I’ll never understand, in fact I decided to trust Agnes one more time.
As the letters dropped from my fingers into the mail box outside the Post Office, I remember thinking: I can probably go inside and beg for them back, citing one reason or another, and then read them. But I decided not to. And I’ve since been told the Post Office workers would have never given them back to me.
I have not told my Brothers about Sparky’s money. They would tear the monastery apart looking for it. I somehow doubt it’s here. I don’t even know if it really exists. Besides, it would not be a fortune in this day and age and I need to think about how we would use it. Maybe we should indeed give it all to the poor. We are, after all, mendicant monks, sworn to a vow of poverty. Of course we do need a roof over our heads. But maybe there’s only a few hundred dollars left.
I sat with Agnes and again couldn't find words. A contemplative should be used to that, but I felt I should say something. How does one comfort another for whom one has little esteem? In my years as a monk I had sat with a dying brother on occasion. But Agnes was not in the throes of agony yet and I could not bring myself to feel sorry for him.
"Jesse," he said, "you don't have to sit with me."
I had found him after supper in the living room sitting on the piano bench. I settled into a nearby chair without saying anything. He had been reading his breviary, but put it down to speak to me, softly closing the leather cover and laying the book down next to him on the upholstered bench.
"I thought I'd just ... sit with you," I said.
"I appreciate it ... my Abbot," he said, and smiled.
"Thanks to you," I replied.
"You need to be responsible," he said. "You can't just retire. What if Christ had decided to retire just before Golgotha?"
"I'm tired of being responsible," I said.
"Really? I can't imagine why. You haven't done anything worthwhile since you left Africa, from what I've heard," he said
"That's rather insulting, Agnes," I said. "And from a man who came here to live a lie."
"Mea culpa, but at the moment I wasn't thinking of my own transgressions," he said.
"Perhaps you should, this close to death," I said.
"You're not tremendously farther away," he replied. "But Jesse, let's not have a joust. I have apologized for my behavior."
I said nothing.
"I am worried about you, that is all," he continued.
"Jesse, do you have the key for the lower storage room in the cellar?" Agnes asked while taking me aside after breakfast. He did not want to break the silence in front of the others before supper.
"Do you mean the room just past the print shop on the right?" I asked. "I haven't been in there in years and didn't know it was locked."
"Yes," he replied,"I had Bouncer put a lock on the door last year when I stored my trunk in there. I was ... ah ... afraid the men who service our furnace might stumble in there. Or other tradesmen."
"I didn't know, Agnes. About the lock or your trunk," I said.
These monks from Fermoy are strange contemplatives, I thought. They smoke, wear rather fine robes and now I learn they travel with steamer trunks! Most of my colleagues travel with paper shopping bags.
"I suppose we can manage to get you into the room," I said.
"Oh, I hope so," he said. "I have important documents in there."
It's strange having Agnes back. No one wants to speak to him. I don't think they hold anything against him, but no one knows quite what to say to him. I wasn't surprised by this behavior, but when a week went by and he continued to be seemingly shunned, I began to question the brothers individually.
"How do you feel about Agnes coming back?" I asked Bouncer.
"OK with me," he said, "not that you brought it before us for our opinion."
"The hospital needed an immediate answer and I wasn't about to turn down a brother, our former abbot," I said.
"Like I said, OK with me," he replied.
"Why doesn't anyone speak to him?" I asked.
"Look, Jesse," he said, "It's difficult. What do you say to a former abbot who's come back disgraced?"
On the other hand, Micky was lucky Dad missed his shootout with Mr. Murray, the mailman. In his grey Postal Service uniform, the big Irishman soon tired of serving as a regular target for Micky. Mr. Murray was also running out of G-Rated curses and he had raised the bar to just below four letter words, rebuking Micky with Biblical denouncements such as, “you little son of perdition.” Micky repeated many of these and even called Mom a Daughter of Darkness the night she sent him to bed early for refusing to stop shooting at our canary. On a Saturday morning when my brother sprang out from the bushes shooting and hollering, “Die, you whited sepulchre of a storm trooper!” Mr. Murray had had enough. He reached into his mail bag, pulled out a starter pistol loaded with real blanks and shot Micky at point blank range. The shots were incredibly louder than those from a mere cap pistol. Micky twirled around twice and fell to the ground, playing dead in case Mr. Murray wanted to finish the job. Then the boy burst into tears as Mom came running out of the house to find her youngest son shot by a government servant.
“Are you all right?” she screamed at Micky.
“So far,” he whimpered as he sat in the dirt feeling all over himself for bullet holes.
Mom was livid and the postman was apologetic, but the starter pistol served its purpose. With Micky neutralized, the U.S. Mail courier was no longer stayed from the swift completion of his appointed rounds. Mom hid the cap pistol where she thought Micky would never find it. She probably should have driven a stake through it and buried it.
“Why do you carry a gun all the time, Micky,” I asked him as we helped with the dishes that night. “What are you afraid of?”
“Jack booted storm troopers,” he said.
“Micky, that was back in the War, and in another country,” I said. “You don’t even know what jack boots are, anyway.”
“No,” he replied, “but Uncle Harry got punched by a trooper last New Years.”
“Uncle Harry was drunk,” I said, “and that was a STATE trooper.” He appeared unconvinced.
When I began to notice a certain swagger creep back into his eight year old demeanor, I assumed he had found the gun in whatever secret place my mother had hidden it. I didn’t want to inquire and then have to squeal on him, however. I remembered from my younger days that a boy forms a special bond with his cap pistol, but I had to admit Micky’s attachment to his Riverboat Gambler Derringer seemed obsessive. And the recent incidents of gunplay were worrisome. Shooting up a church offended only God, who I always figured had a sense of humor, but if for some reason Micky carried his cap pistol into a bank, he might get himself into real trouble. As it turned out, on the following Sunday afternoon Micky got all of us in a lot of trouble.
We were out for a ride on a lazy Sunday Afternoon Car Trip To Nowhere. It was a beautiful fall day in October and Indian Summer had brought a break in the cool temperatures normal for that time of year. Dad rode in the copilot’s seat and allowed me to drive the old Ford as long as I heeded his commands as soon as they were issued. All the windows were rolled down to catch the warm afternoon breezes and my left arm hung out the driver’s window in a hallmark teenage style designed to impress any young woman who might be seriously lacking discernment. (Who knew there were so many!) Micky squirmed around in the back seat while Mom smoked a Chesterfield and happily hummed a tune to herself, pleased to be out of the house for a ramble of an hour or so through the countryside. A great idea occurred to me and I suddenly wanted to know how many seconds it would take for the Ford to accelerate from zero to sixty miles per hour. Every teenage boy in America has conducted that experiment on his family car and I was no exception. When there were no cars up ahead, I hit the brakes and brought us to an abrupt halt in the middle of the highway, stopping quickly before the traffic behind us caught up. As I slammed on the brakes, Mom and Micky lifted off the back seat like a pair of seagulls and began to fly forward. In that exact instant, I kicked the accelerator all the way to the floor and we were whipped backwards and flattened against our seats as if blasted off in a rocket ship.
Mom’s head snapped to the rear. She disappeared in my rear view mirror, leaving a puff of cigarette smoke where her face had been. Micky said he was elated to find himself weightless for 2 seconds, just like an astronaut. Had I not been driving, Dad would have swatted me. Shaking his finger at me, he missed what was brewing behind us. Micky was first to sound the alarm as a red light began flashing in our back window.
“Oh, dear,” said my mother, “it’s a trooper!”
It occurred to me that “policeman” might have been a less incendiary description of the fellow now after us.
“Pull over,” said my father, “you’re about to get your first ticket.”
“For what?” I asked innocently.
“How about a dumb, stupid stunt?” he replied.
“I think he just wants to pass me,” I said hopefully.
“He would have done that by now,” said my father. “Pull this car over NOW!”
I drove off the highway into a small rest area and the pursuing cop parked to my left across the narrow lane of macadam. New York State Troopers are often quite impressive in their dark grey uniforms and this fellow fit the role magnificently. Seemingly ten feet tall and square jawed, he exited his door and walked around the front of the police cruiser, then marched over to greet us with his hands poised just above his hips. John Wayne could not have done it better.
From behind me in the back seat I heard a metallic clink and my heart stopped.
“Micky!” I shouted, “don’t ….”
But it was too late. He was already firing at the trooper. Bang, bang, bang … in rapid succession Micky pulled the trigger of his cap pistol. “Take that, trooper, you sodomite son of a harlot!” he bellowed. “Here’s some lead from Uncle Harry!”
The trooper dropped to the ground on one knee and pulled his service revolver from its holster. It was just like in the movies, but I lost sight of him as I quickly slid down to the floor of the old Ford, hoping against hope the door would stop any bullets coming my way at almost twice the speed of sound.
I don’t remember what Dad did immediately, but Mom grabbed Micky around his neck in an arm-lock and pulled him down on her lap.
When the shooting stopped, I was still slumped down near the pedals on the floor. To this day, I have never forgotten the sight of my father getting out of the car with his hands up, trying to explain to the trooper what had just happened.
Lucky for us, the State Policeman never fired his weapon. He quickly recognized his nemesis was no more than a eight year old with a cap pistol. But even if the trooper had put only one shot over our heads, charges may have resulted along with a tremendous amount of paperwork and lawyers and defense fees. The only costs that day were the Trooper’s pride and all of our near heart attacks. And that’s not counting my father’s underwear. We did have to endure a very stern lecture from Trooper McAllister, which he bellowed out once and then a second time as he continued to let off a lot of steam. Then he gave a great sigh, got back in his cruiser and left. He’d been tremendously upset to think he could have killed an entire family, but was now relieved to be ending his shift without having executed anyone.
Dad took the pistol and with all his might threw it into a neighboring field. Micky wisely remained subdued and quiet. I suggested we all calm down by going for ice cream. Maybe Dad would like to buy. But my father said we were going directly home and I was not welcome to drive. It seemed unfair I should be punished when it was Micky who had probably committed a felony. Mom asked, “What’s a sodomite?” Dad looked at Micky and the boy shrugged his shoulders.
We all piled back into the Ford with Dad behind the wheel and Mom lit another cigarette in the back seat. My father pulled the car onto the roadway and came to a dead stop.
“You time it,” he said to me. “I bet I can get this Ford from zero to sixty in under eight seconds.”
He stomped on the accelerator and Mom again flew backward. Micky stopped crying and seemed to forget about his lost firearm. But he knew where to buy another, as we would discover in a few weeks on Christmas Eve at Midnight Mass.
Since Agnes was younger than me, I can't tell you precisely why he reminded me of my father. A certain same Irish-ness showed on their features, but the personalities and quirks of each man were quite different. While Agnes always appeared to be hard nosed with a firmly set jaw, my father had a certain look of wonder in his eye and in fact he was perenneially enthusiastic in his pursuit of life. Maybe their mutual religiosity related them. They were alike and they were different at the same time.
Dad had children, of course, and I suppose that tempers a man and prepares him for a few surprises. With children, my brothers tell me, you loosen up or become psychotic. And of course, not all of my father's sons were as perfect as yours truly. My little brother was quite a handful. Every time I think of him, the smell of gunpowder comes to mind.
It's the same smell from a freshly fired roll of caps in a silver toy pistol. The kids on my street didn't exactly play cowboys and Indians. We just liked to shoot at each other. I always wondered how the "nice" kids in our school's Boy Scout troop used cap guns. You know, the kids whose uniforms were more than just the shirt and neckerchief, but included the pants, spats, the special belt and buckle and an overseas cap neatly folded over their belt. I'll bet those boys played cowboys and Indians in a responsible manner. I imagine each side would later put down its weapons, shake hands and come up on the veranda to share a pitcher of Kool Aid. I'm sure a "Jolly Good Show, old boy" was heard in their conversation. "Old Meltzer really took your measure today, Franklin." But I knew very few boys in our neighborhood who might pass for gentlemen. Such well behaved children lived elsewhere in the city or on television shows that my parents liked to watch, or in some kind of parallel universe populated by angelic little darlings who probably didn’t even play with guns.
But a typical young gunslinger on our block would have been my little brother Micky. In 1959 when I was sixteen, he was eight years old and, when he wasn’t holstered up with two six-shooters hanging on his hips, he carried a small derringer cap pistol in his pocket wherever he went. Unfortunately, he had a habit of pulling it out and firing off a few rounds at the most inappropriate times. He almost turned our baby cousin’s baptism ceremony into chaos when a kid from school he didn’t like showed up at the church. Micky jumped up in the pew and cussed the kid out with G-rated invective from a favorite cowboy movie … something about a lily livered polecat, I think. Micky had the derringer half out of his pocket when Dad quietly disabled his gun arm with a pincer-like grip that left him with a sore elbow for the rest of the day. Too bad my father had not been present to save a quartet of Gospel Witnesses on our front porch the previous week.
I stood in the Rhinecliff Station the next morning, not in any better mood than the day I dropped Agnes off, thinking he was on his way back to Ireland. Late the previous afternoon, I received a call from Agnes' discharge planner. When she realized we were a group of destitute monks, the woman became very helpful and made arrangements for local nurse care, supplies and Medicaid releases. I was to later hear from a Medicaid worker who was also quite helpful. My pickup of Agnes was simple, because the hospital's services staff got Agnes to Penn Station in a cab. All I had to do was get off the train and wait for him at one of the 34th Street Exits.
We found a food bar and ordered coffee while we waited for a train going north.
"I've had Bouncer scour the house and remove any alcohol," I told Agnes.
"It won't be a problem," he replied. "I'll never touch the stuff again at this point."
I'd heard my Uncle Harrry say the same each time his drinking took him to desperation. He believed it. The rest of us believed what we saw each time he fell off the wagon.
"Can I ask you what all the subterfuge was about? Going home to help your dead brother?" I asked.
"I wanted a drink. I hadn't had one in over a year," he said.
"You could have had one in Saugerties, for crying out loud," I said.
"No, I mean I wanted to get absolutely stone dead shitfaced and stay that way for at least a month," he said. "Of course, I thought I just wanted one or two drinks," Agnes continued, "and it never occurred to my alcoholic mind at the time that a man doesn't launch a trip across the ocean and resurrect his dead brother as the reason ... all for one drink. But such is my insanity."
All around us commuters scurried by as if they had just done something important or were about to. Agnes looked more than haggard. He looked quite sick.
"How long before our train leaves?" he asked.
"I'm afraid it'll be another three hours ... not till four o'clock."
"I don't know if I can make it," he said.
"If you can walk outside with me, we'll get a cab to Grand Central and catch a Metro to Poughkeepsie. They leave on the hour. I'll call Cat and have him come there to get us."
Agnes leaned heavily on me as we crossed the station. For some reason, that's the memory I have him now.
I was coming in the back door of the Chapter House when Cat ran up to me and said I had a call on the old kitchen wall phone.
"It sounds like Agnes," Cat said.
It was indeed Agnes.
"Hello, Jesse," he said a weak voice. "I asked to speak with the abbot and I'm pleased to find it's you."
"I'm not pleased," I said, "but how are you and where are you?"
"I'm in Sloan Kettering in Manhattan. I ... I'm sick," he said.
"Well, I'm sorry Agnes. How bad is it?" It's not that I was stunned. I just could not think of anything to say.
"I'm dying, Jesse. I have cancer of the prostate."
"Did they say how long?" I asked. That may seem insensitive, but it was the first thought that occurred to me.
"Months," he said. "Maybe more. But I'm a late stage alcoholic. I may die of that first, who knows?"
"What can I do, Agnes? I'll come down to see you."
"I want you to bring me home, Jesse," he said.
"To Ireland?" I asked.
"No, to West Saugerties. Fermoy doesn't want me. I've asked."
"Saint Anne refused to take you in? A Brother?" I said.
"There's a long history between us," he said.
After I hung up with Agnes I called Fermoy, but M&M would not allow me to speak with Saint Anne.
"What the hell are you people thinking over there?" I all but shouted. "Why won't you take in Agnes? You're trying to kick us out of here and at the same time you expect we'll take in a sick monk?"
"We didn't ask you to shelter Agnes," said M&M.
"Well, you certainly know it's the only other place he can go!" I said.
"I can't continue this conversation, Brother Jessica. Our lawyers have advised against us speaking with you."
"Why?" I asked.
"We're opposing litigants," M&M replied.
"You're fucking idiots," I said and slammed down the phone.
There are a number of small informal restaurants in the village of Saugerties. Most are sandwiched in between antique shops and used clothing stores, the latter not the type for poor people. I met Sally and we turned down Partition Street to search for a place to have coffee.
We found a tiny lunch room a few doors from the corner and settled ourselves in a booth, propping our elbows on a table that had come to town in a time machine from the 1950's, its yellow surface evidently designed to cheer up citizens from a half century ago by diluting their fear of an Atomic Bomb falling out of the blue sky on a perfectly lovely afternoon. A sunny disposition is always the best way to approach the end.
I began our conversation lightly and we noted our impressions of the weather until a waitress found her way to us. With all the surrounding décor dating to the 1950’s, I might have expected a woman in a white uniform with a tiny cap perched on her head and an order pad in her hand.
But here before us was a young girl with an impatient frown across her face. She wore a sweatshirt with probably nothing underneath and jeans that just about came up over her hips, leaving a wide belt of bare skin. She took our order for coffee and a slice of pie for me and without a word of acknowledgment walked away as I wondered how far the tattoo on the small of her back descended down her backside. I may be a monk, but I’m observant.
The teenager soon returned with our coffee, but no pie. I let her go without inquiring after my dessert, deciding to leave the situation up to God. He might decide I needed to skip sweets. I could overrule him and get up and ask for the pie. Of course, it's entirely possible that God couldn't care less about what I eat, but I like to involve the Almighty so I can blame him later if necessary.
"I never asked you about your car accident,” Sally said. “How do you feel?"
“Don’t you eternals know everything and have no need to ask?” I said.
Sally glanced at me with bit of annoyance across her face, but said nothing.
“Have you been walking in the woods lately?” I said.
She looked down at her coffee cup for a long while and didn’t answer me. I began to think she had found something floating in her coffee.
“Who are you, Jesse?” she asked.
“Who am I? I’m just a poor old monk,” I said. “The real question is Who are you?”
“How did you just appear in the woods like that?” she asked, her eyes coming up from the cup and now looking directly into mine.
“Wait a second,” I said. “Just wait a second ….”
“One minute I’m walking on the trail and I pass a moldy old tree stump,” she continued, “and then I turn around and you’re sitting on it. Just like that.”
“It won’t work, Sally,” I said. “This is probably some technique they taught you in angel school …”
“Stop it!” she almost shouted, slamming her hand down on the table with such force that the older couple across the aisle looked our way. We stared at our individual cups of coffee and said nothing for a moment.
Finally, I said, “It was a picnic table.”
“What was a picnic table?” she said.
“It wasn’t a stump,” I said, “It was a ….”
“They were stumps,” she said with deliberateness.
“Why did you kiss me?” I asked.
“It’s complicated,” she said.
“Not a good answer,” I replied. “That’s what Eve said when Adam asked her about the apple.”
“There was no apple,” she said.”
“You were probably there,” I said. “flirting with the serpent. How old do angels get to be, anyway?”
Sally resumed staring deeply into her coffee and now I wondered if orders from heaven were appearing down there in the cup.
“You knew my birth name,” I said.
“You knew everything about me,” she said, “that time in high school when I ….” She stopped abruptly.”
There you go with Angel Tricks 101 again,” I said. “Are you going to admit you’re my Guardian Angel?”
She looked up at me quickly as though the message in the coffee cup had surprised her. But just as quickly her face relaxed into a knowing scowl and she shook her head as if to agree with her last thought.
Sally sat back with a bemused look in her eye and didn’t answer. Then she looked down at the table again and said, “Jesse, we’re not …. “ and again she stopped abruptly. I hate it when women do that.
“We’re not getting anywhere … “ I began to say, but Sally stood abruptly, leaned over and once again kissed me on the lips, twirled around and left the restaurant.
She was right about there being no apple. Genesis says only the two were not to eat of the tree in the middle of the Garden. The fruit isn’t specified. Guess that was covered in her basic Angel coursework.
As I walked back to the SUV, I realized I already missed her. I took that to mean somewhere inside me was a sad awareness that I wouldn’t see her again.
The next day I was even more confused. I was not really sure things happened that day in the woods as I remembered them. I tossed and turned at night, going over all the details of our conversation and recalling as much detail as possible from the day in the woods. The answer surely was in one detail or another, if only I could find a key to unlock the puzzle.
I was reminded of the Ogalala Sioux Black Elk, an old Indian made famous in the 1930’s in a book in which the author took a lot of liberties when quoting the old warrior who had been at Little Big Horn, he said. Black Elk put it this way when he would tell a story or parable: “"This is the way it happened. Or maybe it didn't, but it could have. And besides, this is what carries the truth." Maybe the details weren’t important.
I sat up in bed in the middle of the night, struck by the realization that for the past hour I had lain there seeing Sally and myself on that golden afternoon in the woods … on two stumps! I couldn’t bring back the mental picture I’d had for so long of us at a moldy old picnic table. And I was dead sure the stumps were correct. Why had I thought we were at a picnic table?
As for staying in touch with her customers, Sally did not impress me in her role of guardian angel or real estate agent. I don’t know how long it was after she visited the monastery that she called to ask for the deed, which sent me down to talk to Lance. And while it’s true I told her we were no longer for sale, I thought she might just call to check in from time to time. For some reason, I didn’t think she was using angelic powers for that task. A month or so after Lance told me how he came to own his property, I decided to call Sally. I wanted to know who she was.
I sat by the phone and felt as I did over fifty years ago when I called a girl to ask for my first date. Butterflies fluttered around in my stomach and I had to will my left hand to pick up the phone and my right hand to start punching in Sally’s telephone number.
“We need to talk,” I said when she came on the line.
“Brother Jesse,” she said, “how are you? I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch with you.”
“Not a very good guardian angel, are you?”
I was sorry as soon as it passed my lips, but it just came out.
The comment was met by silence.
“Sally,” I said, getting right to it, “can I meet you somewhere so we can talk?”
The silence continued, then she said, “Sure, I guess. Anything to be of help. I’ll be in Saugerties tomorrow. I’ll meet you at the bookstore.”
I have to hand it to Sparky, nee John Henry O’Brien, and I can’t say I’m all that surprised. That he was his own man I have no doubt in my mind, but to brazenly lie to the leaders of his Order and essentially steal a part of their property … that left me very surprised. I never sensed a crooked bone in his body. He must have come to a decision to risk his soul in order to have Our Lady’s Monastery at West Saugerties do some good in the only way he could effect, by giving away a piece of it for the poor. Our secretarial work for scholars did not impress Sparky at all. He implied that to me often. And that was the reason why he insisted we spend more time in prayer than in so-called practical pursuits. He cared for our souls and he may have been one of the few placed above me who did. When he found a chance to rip off his order for a quarter of a million dollars and give it to the poor, he seized it … if that’s what he did. If he did anything else with the money, it would have been as Lance suspects, to save the money for us Brothers, wherever he put it. In either case, Sparky had more self-assurance than I would ever possess. I don’t think I would be able to make such a decision. I have never had that much courage.
When I called Lance and asked him if he was my landlord, he gave a quiet laugh and asked me to walk down the road to see him. I had never been in his house. Walking up the driveway I beheld a lovely large home sided in cedar and sitting on a huge outcropping of rock. On its own plateau, the structure was placed only twenty feet away from the face of the mountain. The giant expanse of glass spanning the entire front wall of the house spoke to at least one purpose of this mountain retreat, to surround one’s self in luxury while enjoying a gorgeous view of the entire valley and the mountains off to the west past Woodstock.
“I don’t own the monastery,” Lance said. “You found a copy of the deed to just the five acres down here on the point” said Lance, after he settled me down in a chair that allowed a panorama of what must be half of creation. “Sparky needed the money and I paid him $250,000.”
This wasn’t the first time I wondered how the heck anyone could have so much money.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Why does St. Anne keep pressuring me to sell what he calls “14 acres” if there’s only nine acres left?”
“He doesn’t know Sparky sold it to me,” Lance replied
“Could Sparky sell it to you? I thought all property was in Fermoy’s name?” I said.
“Not this property. Sparky told me when he accepted the call to lead this monastery, he convinced St. Anne to put the place in the Abbot’s name so he could more easily get a mortgage here if he wanted to borrow money for leverage as he tried to make the place a reasonable property. St.Anne probably agreed because he saw potential in both the monastery grounds and in Sparky, who had turned places around before. Plus, I’d bet St. Anne was worried about liability and figured it would rest squarely on Sparky if he was the owner of record. And of course it would be unheard of for an Abbot to NOT turn over any assets or cash to Fermoy.” Lance said this while giving me a wink. He continued, “No abbot has ever refused. That’s why St. Anne is hysterically upset over your insubordination. He’s afraid you won’t send him any money if the place sells.”
“He’s right,” I said. “I wouldn’t. You’ve been talking to St. Anne. I didn’t know the two of you were friends.”
“He constantly wants to borrow money from me,” said Lance. “But I can’t lend money to someone who doesn’t know how to handle it.”
“And he doesn’t know you bought this property?” I said. “What does he think of your house sitting here on it?”
Lance chuckled. “St. Anne doesn’t know that, either.”
“How the heck did the two of you ever come to know each other?” I asked.
Lance looked away and said, “Oh, you know. International money circles.”
Quite a coincidence, I thought.
“But what did Sparky do with the money?” I asked. “$250,000 dollars?”
“He had a bank account,” said Lance, “and he spent a lot of the money quickly. He told me he went through the entire amount in less than five years.”
“Wine, women and song?” I laughed, hoping against hope that wasn’t true.
“I think you knew your abbot better than that,” said Lance. “Sparky gave it away to missions, local food pantries, things like that.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand?” I marveled at that amount of money.
“That’s what Sparky said,” continued Lance, “but for some reason I didn’t believe him.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Sparky and I used to talk fairly often,” he said. “He came down here for coffee. You abbot was very worried about what would happen to you guys when he died. He knew for a long time about his cancer. Sparky would have put most of that money aside for you Brothers.”
“Where?” I asked.
Lance shrugged his shoulders. “That I don’t know, he said.”
A turkey buzzard landed on the rail outside the sliding doors at one end of the transparent wall of glass. I had never seen one up close. The bird was truly ugly.
“Saint Anne sent Agnes here to get rid of us and sell the monastery,” I said.
“I figured,” said Lance.
“He never did a single thing except list the house with Sally.”
“Sounds like he didn’t care much either way,” said Lance.
“I don’t know what Agnes cared about,” I said. “I wonder if he knew about the $250,000 or what might be left of it.”
“If it exists and if you find it, you could use whatever is left.” said Lance. “Without it, you'll need cash for operating expenses, food … how will you Brothers manage that?”
“We thought of taking in guests,” I said, still harboring a desire for a quick money solution.
“A retreat house!” laughed Lance. “Do you think anyone will want to come to such a run-down place? They might not think it’s safe.”
“I think some people might still consider it very … safe,” I said, a bit indignantly, wondering if I should call Albert back and ask him to take a chance and give us just one more “guest.” But I have to keep myself from jumping for the brass ring of convenience. Harpo is right. We wait on the Lord.
