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.
