He had always liked this hour when the world slowed down and he could claim a slender window of it for himself. Even as a boy he’d looked forward to this time. School would be over and homework could be put off until later in the evening. His mother would be busy in the kitchen preparing dinner, his father not yet home from work. His brother, Joe, would be off somewhere with a posse of friends, playing baseball or shooting hoops, depending on the season, or hanging out at the home of his current girlfriend. Cecelia would be occupied too, playing jacks with her friend May or jumping rope, always with an intense concentration that to this day he associated with his sister. Unlike his siblings, he would not seek company but would slip away to a corner of the laundry room where he could read undisturbed, enveloped by the lingering smell of laundry detergent and wet cotton spinning in the dryer, and enjoy the quiet pleasures of solitude, as he did even now.
Often these days he changed into gardening clothes and donned gloves to tend to the ferns and hostas that lined the walk in the shady section or to take up a trowel and rough the ground around the bed of daylilies that edged the front path, a narrow strip that received direct sun. The garden was not overly large and required little care: the plucking of weeds from the border beds and crushed clamshell paths, the cutting back of shoots that sprang up at the base of the lilacs, the dividing of an overgrown hosta that threatened to choke adjacent plants, chores of basic maintenance he relished in spite of the way his energy seemed to wane lately and despite the disapproval of Lena MacDougall, the president of the Rosary Society, who hinted that weeding was beneath his station.
“We have a gardener for that, Father,” she said the first time she spied him on his knees in the lily bed, her lips pursed thin. “You shouldn’t be doing it.”
“Laborare est orare,” he replied. Work is prayer. He’d spoken to her of how such work could uplift one and, if done consciously, celebrate existence and contain the teachings of life, but she had not been swayed by this philosophy. She believed his work should stay inside church walls and not involve dirt beneath his fingernails and had even complained to Father Burns that it reflected poorly on Holy Apostles to have Father Gervase doing the job that was the responsibility of the hired gardener.
“After all, we are not First Baptist,” she had reproved, “and we mustn’t act like it.”
A sigh escaped the priest’s lips as he thought of Lena, who believed her duties involved policing the parish and enforcing her personal standards of behavior. And didn’t she have a bee in her bonnet about the weekend janitor. “There is something off about that man,” she’d said. “I just don’t trust him.” And just last month she’d created a stir about Miriam Endelheim coming to pray in the sanctuary. “She has her own synagogue,” she’d complained. “Why does she have to come here?”
At that moment, the priest had found himself praying for the virtues of patience and acceptance. “Mrs. Endelheim has a special affection for the Blessed Virgin. She likes to sit with her,” he’d explained, then added, smiling, “Don’t forget, Mary was the original Jewish mother.” His attempt at humor had fallen flat as it often did with her. And his explanation for Miriam Endelheim’s presence in the sanctuary hadn’t satisfied Lena any more than his equating manual work with prayer had. Father Gervase rarely allowed himself the luxury of disliking people, but Lena reminded him of a creature of prey. But in spite of her sniffing disapproval, Mr. Jervis was still employed to clean the sanctuary and chapel, Mrs. Endelheim continued her regular visits to the Virgin Mary, and he went on working in the garden.
The love and pull of the land was bred in his genes, handed down from his paternal grandfather, a Wisconsin apple farmer. Throughout his teen years he’d helped in the summer orchards. Autumns, during the harvest, he operated one of the farm’s cider presses, an old John Deere machine that clattered and whirred as the air filled with the heady scent of apple mash and the buzz of intoxicated yellow jackets. He had loved his hours at the farm, certainly some of the happiest of his childhood, and imagined a future spent there. But occupations, like geography, called to one, and another life outside Wisconsin awaited him. Still, had he not entered the priesthood, he would have been content tilling soil, growing crops. Or reading poetry. Now there was a job that should exist. To spend one’s days in the company of Blake and Dickinson, Yeats and Hopkins, Auden and Milton. To fill one’s mind with their wisdom, the music of their words.
Today he did not weed or rake, but he had brought with him to the garden a volume of Neruda’s poetry. He read only a few lines before setting the book aside. Will Light intruded on his concentration. Since his visit to Will, Father Gervase had replayed their conversation, unable to escape the lingering knowledge of failure, a burden that had not lessened with the passing days but had seemed only to reveal and magnify his previous ineffectiveness and shortcomings, failures that, in the face of Will Light’s grief and anger, festered like splinters beneath flesh. Late in the game, Father Gervase realized that too often he had been tone deaf to the needs of those needing help or comfort. In response to these needs, he had quoted scripture, promoted faith, parroted the words of mystics and saints and popes. Better to have said nothing. Better to have listened. Or simply laid a hand on Will’s shoulder. Better to have handed over an anthology of poems.
On the matter of Will Light, and in spite of Father Gervase’s report, Cardinal Kneeland hadn’t given up. “Perhaps we need to speak to him about the amount of the commission,” the archbishop had said, his mind that of a Medici banker.
“I’m sure that will not make a difference,” he’d replied.
“Well, you have planted the seed,” the archbishop told him. “When you go back, it will have taken root.”