Bishop's Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

The odours of my childhood. The Third World reek. Woodsmoke and kerosene. DDT. Boiled tea and old clothing. Rot.

    The door to the kitchen was unlocked and it swung wide to reveal a sterile interior. White walls. A tile floor of alternating white and black squares. A silver Saviour hung on a black cross above a doorway to the interior of the house. A pantry door, nibbled at the corners by mice. An unturned calendar, January 1991. More than three years old. I tore it down.

    I stood still there in the chilly kitchen for what seemed like a long time, trying to warm the moment by thinking of the place as home, but there was no comfort in the memory. I felt the presence of all the solitary men who stood like this before my time, staring into a lonely future. Probably kneeling to acknowledge acceptance of their fate.

    I knelt.

    Jesus. I didn’t ask for this, but help me make the most of it.

    I sought the worn wooden prayer beads in my jacket pocket.

    tegucigalpa’s airport is dingy, full of sullen men with guns. weary inspectors deferring to my collar. alfonso was waiting. had a little paper sign with something like my name in heavy ink. FR. MACKASGAL.

    I peer into the gloom of what will be my study. The other peril, I tell myself, is silence. I was so accustomed to the sounds of other people’s lives around me at the university. The old priests coughing and shuffling in nearby rooms, awaiting their eternal rewards. Squealing, slamming doors. Students rampaging in and out. Incessant booming stereos. Traffic passing endlessly on West Street. No more of that. Silence now. I must consider this a welcome change. Learn to work with silence. The silence can become a passageway to better places.

    Up a creaky stairway. This must be the bishop’s room, I thought as I peered into a large dark space. Every glebe house has a special guest room for the bishop. There was a faint smell of clammy wallpaper. I could see the dim shape of a bed and a dresser with a large water jug and wash basin. I could feel the dampness of disuse. I walked toward a slash of light and pulled back drapes, exposed a window. There were clumps of dead flies between the panes of glass. The sun was beginning to press weakly against the filmy sky. Small fishing boats dotted the choppy grey sea. Inside the room, the anemic light revealed the face of a sallow Jesus on the wall. On another wall, the Blessed Virgin, a hand raised in salutation, a child with a dead man’s face in the crook of her left arm.

    I lit a candle on the bedside table, hoping to defeat the smell of loneliness. Opened a sticky drawer. More dead flies.

    A smaller bedroom along the hall. Bathroom. A second large bedroom. Closet door ajar, metal coat hangers entangled. A faded Blue Boy print on one wall and another crucifix above the naked bed.

    Back downstairs, in the study, I found a large safe, pointlessly locked; the combination was taped to the outside of the door. It was full of ledgers. Records of births and baptisms, marriages and deaths. Parish finances. And photographs of old men in black suits and liturgical vestments.

    You had no goddamned business spying …

    I study a stern, anonymous face above the Roman collar. Pious, slightly arrogant. He is wearing a hat even though he’s obviously indoors. Concealing baldness? A hint of hidden vanity? Was he one of those whose secret weakness undermined the Rock as nothing had before?

    Maybe they were classmates, he and Father Roddie. They’d have known each other. Old men, presumed exempted from temptations of the flesh.

    I closed the safe.

    I don’t belong here.

    But this is the priesthood. This is what you’re for.

    But that’s not why I’m here.

    There was a radio on the desk. I switched it on. The house filled up with mournful country music. I unpacked the few photographs that I’d brought from my rooms at the university. One I’ve carried with me everywhere. There are two men in uniform, one of them my father, and a