5. I FIND FATHER PLACIDE in the rectory of St. Michael’s. Mrs. Saia, the housekeeper, lets me in. It is his living quarters, but the living room looks like an untidy business office. There are desks, file cabinets, typewriters, a photocopier, a computer, stacks of bulletins and collection envelopes, and a coin-counting machine.

A man dressed in a business suit, probably a deacon, is seated at a desk in the hall sorting out different-colored cards. He greets me amiably. I try to remember his name.

St. Michael himself is still there, a three-foot bronze archangel brandishing a loose sword, bent at the tip, which I used to fiddle with while attending meetings of the St. Vincent de Paul Society years ago. The sword got lost. They must have found it. I seem to remember that—

Father Placide is nowhere to be seen. The next room, connected by an arched doorway, is a kind of parlor furnished with old-fashioned mohair sofas. Half a dozen women are sitting there. It is some kind of meeting, perhaps the altar society, perhaps the Blue Army, perhaps the Legion of Mary. I recognize three of them: Mrs. Saia, a plump, cheerful, middle-aged woman with perfect dark satiny skin; Mrs. Ernestine Kelly, wife of councilman Jack Kelly, an old fisherman friend of mine and sometime barmate at the Little Napoleon, a very pretty grayhaired woman with a solemn, even sad, expression, whom one thinks of as pious in the old sense, who still observes the old Catholic devotions, still makes First Fridays, sends vials of Lourdes water to sick friends, and from time to time mails me a holy card with a saint’s picture and always the same note: Praying for you and your intentions, on which occasions I always wonder what she is praying for, my doing time in Alabama? mine and Jack’s drinking? my loss of faith? Ellen’s neglect of me for duplicate bridge? And Jan Greene, a youngish, intense blade of a brunette, ex-New Orleanian, wife of a gynecologist colleague and an old-style Catholic who wants to rescue the Church from its messing in politics and revolution, from nutty nuns and ex-nuns, from antipapal priests and malignant heterodox Dutch theologians, and so revive the best of the old Church, that is, orthodox theology, without its pious excesses, meaning Ernestine’s holy pictures and First Fridays.

The women see me and give me guarded greetings, with half nods, smiling. They can’t decide how disgraced I am, so charitably give me the benefit of the doubt.

Perhaps Father Placide is at the meeting, but no, here he comes breezing in behind me. He greets me cordially, paying no attention to the meeting.

Father is a thin, young, pale, harassed priest. Except for his black dickey with clerical collar attached, which he wears over a T-shirt, he looks like an overworked intern. His face has a greenish pallor and the speckling of a stubble, the look of a man who has forgotten to shave. There is a rash where the collar irritates his neck.

Though I hardly know him, he greets me as warmly as if I were a faithful parishioner, but it may be that he is too harried to remember. He takes the easy confidential tone of one professional consulting another: Look, Dr. More, we have a little problem here—

We are sitting side by side at a broad table holding the coin counter and covered by papers and cloth coin bags. He speaks easily, alternately rubbing and widening his eyes like a surgeon who has finished a six-hour operation and has flopped in a chair to discuss the case.

The women in the parlor resume their meeting.

The case is Father Smith. He, Father Placide, has his troubles. The main trouble is that the pastor, Monsignor Schleifkopf, has departed, returned to the Midwest, some say to join the conservative schismatics in Cicero, some say to join the liberal Dutch schismatics in South Bend. St. Michael’s Church here is still Roman Catholic; that is, it still recognizes the authority of the pope as the lawful successor to St. Peter. Young Father Placide was left with the burden of running the parish until a replacement could be found. This would not have been a problem since the other assistant, Father Smith, though not a young man, was a vigorous one. And he seemed well when he came back from Alabama, no longer a boozer. Between the two of them they could and did take up the slack. Father Smith ran the hospice out by the fire tower and the little mission “under the hill” and helped out at St. Michael’s with Masses, meetings, confessions, CYO, and such. Now, it seems, Father Smith has conked out, leaving Placide holding the bag.

“Doctor,” says the priest, his hollow white eyes not quite focused, “I can’t do it all. We’ve been promised a pastor this month. We were promised a pastor last month and the month before. It would be very helpful if Father Smith would help out here. I understand y’all are old friends, so I was wondering if you might see him, talk to him, give him—ah—whatever therapy he might need, tell him I need him. The deacons here, they’re fine, they’re doing a tremendous job, but they can’t do Masses, confessions, funerals, weddings, and suchlike. Doc, I’m going to tell you something, listen: I’ll serve the good Lord and His people as long as I can, but, Doc, I’m going to tell you, they ’bout to run this little priest into the ground.”

“What’s wrong with Father Smith? Has he started drinking?”

“No.” Father Placide gives a great shrug, holds it, looks right and left. “Who knows? He says he’d like nothing better than to help out but he can’t.”

“Why can’t he?”

“I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t know.”

“Is he sick?”

“Not that I know of. Not in the usual sense. Maybe in your sense.” He taps his temple. “That’s why I need you to talk to him.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’m not quite sure. Father Smith is a remarkable man, a gifted priest, as you well know. He’s always been a role model for me. In fact, he’s gotten me past some bad moments. But—” Again he shrugs and falls silent.

“I don’t think I understand what the problem is,” I say, wondering whether we’re supposed to be out of earshot of the women and whether they’re waiting for Father Placide. But he speaks in an ordinary voice and pays no attention to the women or to the deacon in the hall.

“Look, Doctor, you’re an old friend of Father Smith’s, right?”

“Right.”

“You know that for years he has lived out in the woods at the hospice near the fire tower and that he has never given up his part-time job as fire watcher for the forestry service.”

“Yes.”

“Not that I don’t sympathize with him. I mean, how would you like to live here? Ainh?” He opens his hands to the cluttered office and the oval print of the Sacred Heart with a dried-up palm frond stuck behind it.

“Not much.”

“Look, Doc,” says the priest, rubbing both eyes with the heels of his hands. “Look, I’m not the best and the brightest. I finished in the bottom third of my seminary class. I don’t know whether Father Smith is a nut or a genius, or whether he has some special religious calling. It’s out of my league, but I can tell you this, Doc, I need help. Me, I’m not going to be much help to the Lord if they have to peel me off the wall and carry me off, ainh Doc?”

Father Placide talks in an easy colloquial style, hardly distinguishable from any other U.S. priest or minister, except that now and then one hears a trace of his French Cajun origins. It is when he shrugs and cocks a merry eye, hollow but nonetheless merry, and says ainh? ainh? His three is just noticeably t’ree.

“I understand, Father. What do you want me to do?”

“I ask you, my friend, to speak to Father Smith, persuade him to come down and help me out. For just a few weeks.”

“Come down?”

“From the fire tower.”

“In a manner of speaking, you mean.”

“Not in a manner of speaking, cher. He won’t come down.”

“Won’t come down from what?”

“From the fire tower.”

“Literally?”

“Literally. He has a man bring up his groceries and empty his camp toilet.”

“How long has he been up there?”

“Three weeks. Since the hospice was closed.”

“Why was the hospice closed?”

A shrug. “The government. You know, they cut Medicare for hospices but not for Qualitarian centers.”

“Then is he staying up there as a kind of protest?”

A big French shrug, eyes going left, then right. “Who knows? Maybe, but it’s more than that.”

“How do you mean?”

“He told me that he had—ah—discovered a mathematical proof of what God’s will is, that is, what we must do in these dangerous times.”

“I see.”

“Now, he may be right. It’s out of my league. Me, I’m a very ordinary guy and have to baptize babies and run the school and suchlike. I’d like to preach the good news of the Lord, but it seems like I don’t have the time. Ask him if he can take off a little time from saving the world to help one po’ li’l priest.”

“All right, Father.”

“One more little thing—” He is shuffling papers on the table.

“Yes?”

“I’m supposed to be organizing an ecumenical meeting here—” He sighs. One more thing to do. “I got to find five of our laymen who are willing to—Would you be interested?”

“No, thanks.”

“Okeydoke,” says the priest absently, unoffended, shuffling more papers. Is he looking for something else I can do? I get up.

The doorbell rings. Mrs. Saia starts out from the meeting. Father Placide jumps up. “I’ll get it, Sarah! Hold the fort.” I think he is avoiding the meeting.

While Father Placide is gone, I am wondering how best to get out of here. The front door is blocked by the deacon, who likes to talk. I find myself remembering that during the race riots here years ago I once escaped through the ducts of the air-conditioning system. Now I remember. I used St. Michael’s sword to unscrew the Phillips screws of the intake grille of the air-conditioner—to escape during the riots.

One of the ladies is saying, “—and I heard that he wouldn’t even come down when he had a heart attack and wouldn’t let anybody come up to treat him except Dr. Gottlieb. And the only reason he let him come up was that he, Father Smith, had converted to the Jewish religion.”

“Oh no,” says Mrs. Saia sharply. “He’s peculiar, but he wouldn’t do that. I know him well—after all, he lived here. Peculiar, yes. Why, you wouldn’t believe—”

Ernestine Kelly breaks in with her low-pitched but querulous voice. I can see her sweet, sad face. “I don’t know about that, but I can tell you this on good authority because I know the people it happened to. Both desperate cases. One had a tumor of the womb which was diagnosed as malignant. The other, a close friend of mine, had a son working for Texaco who fell off a rig during a hurricane. After three days the Coast Guard gave up on him. Both of these people had the same impulse the same night, the exact same time, to get up and go for help from Father Smith. They did. Of course they couldn’t get up the tower, so they both wrote their intentions on notes and pinned the notes to the steps of the tower. The very next day the first person’s tumor had gone down—the doctors could not find a trace of it—and the other person’s son was found clinging to a board—for three days and three nights.”

Jan Greene snorts. “For God’s sake. Like Jonah. I mean, really. Has it ever occurred to anybody that he might be up there for a much simpler, more obvious reason?” Her voice is impatient, even ill-tempered. I can see her lean forward in her chair, eyes flashing, face thrusting like a blade.

Silence, then Ernestine Kelly’s injured voice: “Are you suggesting miracles cannot occur?”

“I am not. But why not look for simpler explanations?”

“Hmph. Such as.”

“Such as the tumor was a fibroid and went down spontaneously—they often do. The boy’s life was preserved because he hung on to the raft or whatever. And Father Smith could be staying up there for the oldest reason in the world.”

The other women wait. Finally someone says, “What’s that?”

“He could be doing vicarious penance for the awful state of the world. It is, after all, good Catholic practice,” says Jan sarcastically. “The Carmelites and the Desert Fathers have been doing it for centuries. This really slays me. Here we are on the very brink of World War Three, on the brink of destruction, and nobody gives it a second thought. Well, maybe somebody is. After all, how do you think the siege of Poitiers was lifted? How do you think Lucca was saved from the Black Plague in the fourteenth century?”

Hm. Poitiers? Lucca? Nobody knows how they were saved. The Desert Fathers. The other ladies are floored. But not for long. “I still say—” tolls Ernestine, her voice a soft little bell.

Father Placide is back. “Sorry, Doc. Another dharma bum. Trying to get out to California. Looking for a handout. One more thing, Doc—”

“Look, Father,” I say, lowering my voice, “I think those ladies are waiting for you to run the meeting. Hadn’t you better—”

Father Placide laughs. “You kidding, cher?” For once he does lean close and almost whisper. “Me run that gang? I don’t tell them. They tell me.”

“Well—” I stand up. “I have to see Father Smith.”

“Good luck, ma fren,” says Father Placide, shaking hands, hollow-eyed but merry. “Tell Simon to phone home.” He laughs. Tired as he is, he doesn’t seem to bear a grudge.

“I will.”

Dan—yes, that’s his name—looks up from his index cards as I pass and addresses not me, it seems, but there’s no one else in the hall.

“Why make it complicated?” he says, not quite to me and not quite as a question. “It’s just a cop-out. There is such a thing. He quit, period. Who wouldn’t like to quit and take to the woods? But somebody has to do the scut work. Some people—” he says vaguely, and goes back to spinning his Rolodex.

“Right,” I say as vaguely as I close the door.