Tucker's Last Stand Read Online Free PDF Page A

he would manage to count out enough nickels and dimes to pay Faraday fifteen, every now and again twenty dollars. Although the elderly priest and the twenty-eight-year-old jack-of-all-trades got on wonderfully well, Fr. Enrique knew that Faraday was looking about, always, for more lucrative work. Far from resenting this, Fr. Enrique kept his own eyes open and it was he who had told Faraday about the opening at the Alamo.
    Fr. Enrique had stopped by the little factory-shop on a summer day to chat with his parishioner, Al Espinoso. Sweating profusely in his Roman collar, the priest had looked wistfully at the idle electric fan behind the counter. Why wasn’t it turned on, on so hot a day? Al Espinoso said it was broken and he hadn’t found anybody who could fix it. Moreover, the only one of his workers who knew anything about electricity had left the factory the week before to join a brother in Houston.
    Fr. Enrique pounced. He would have the fan fixed by a young man of extraordinary talents as a craftsman if Al would agree to interview him for the opening. It was agreed, and the exciting news was given to Faraday that if he landed the job, he would be paid thirty dollars every week. Whereupon Faraday (Fr. Enrique would tell and retell this to young Tucker in the months and years ahead) “took that old fan, it was in pieces in about”—he snapped his fingers—“maybe four minutes, then said, the trouble is in the armature, and in about eighteen more minutes the copper was stretching right from there”—Fr. Enrique pointed to the door into the sacristy—“to the main altar. But five minutes after that , he had it all rewound. Then what really impressed me about your father happened. He said he was ready to take the fan to Señor Espinoso, and I said to him, ‘Faraday, what you mean you ready to take the fan to Señor Espinoso—you don’t even know if it works !’ And he said to me, he said, ‘Father, of course it works. I just fixed it.’ So I said, I said, ‘Now look here, Faraday Montana, you plug that fan into that socket right now and we’ll just see if you fixed it.’ Well, he did that—and the fan began to turn, and in a couple of seconds it was shooting out a fountain of air.
    â€œYou know what your father made me feel like? He made me feel like St. Thomas! You know about Doubting Thomas, yes, Tucker?”
    When he first heard the story at age six Tucker hadn’t read about Thomas, who had doubted the resurrection of Jesus until Jesus asked him to probe His wounds, and then Thomas knew. Because Tucker didn’t know, that first time, about Doubting Thomas, and because he didn’t want to lie to Fr. Enrique or confess his ignorance, he managed to change the subject. As soon as he got home he asked his mother, who told him that when he wanted an answer to a question like that he should consult their little library, in which there were two—not one—copies of the Bible. Tucker, with his mother’s help, found the reference, and afterward it seemed as though a month didn’t go by without Fr. Enrique talking about Faraday’s tragic last afternoon on earth, and about how, just before the end, he had made a Doubting Thomas out of Fr. Enrique.
    His mother took a job as a receptionist-bookkeeper-telephone operator at a small hotel, coming back to the little apartment late at night but always with a fresh book for him from the library. She would stop there on her way to work—the library wouldn’t let children under twelve take books home. When Tucker ran out of reading matter, often on Sunday afternoons, he would leave the apartment and go to the drugstore, which was never closed, and read through one magazine after another. Mr. Eggleston let him do this, but only on the understanding that he would wash his hands at the sink in the back of the drugstore first, so as not to leave any marks on a magazine that