The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival (2 page)

Luckily, the seminary doesn’t just toss you into the world without a lot of practice, and the words coming out of my mouth are holy, sanctified, and expected.

“Bless and approve our offering. Make it acceptable to You, an offering in Spirit and Truth.” (And please, God, forgive me for my wandering mind and for Your sake, my sake, the congregation’s sake, get me back on track here. Have that little white bird of yours flit back down here and roost in my head.)

But the truth is, once I lose the path, it’s hard to regain. While my mouth keeps motoring along, my mind wanders.

The church building itself doesn’t help. Of all the churches in all the towns in Louisiana. I was hoping for a cathedral; I got stuck with a gussied-up bingo hall, one of those unfortunate low-ceilinged ’60s constructions. The heavy timber beams bracing the roof are the only things even remotely “majestic” about it. Threadbare carpeting covers creaky wooden floorboards. The Way of the Cross marches down either wall in simple formation. There they are, the last, most painful hours of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ done up in fourteen plastic “sculptures” all made in Taiwan.

Near the main entry is the church’s namesake, St. Pete, concrete done up in paint, his eyes directed woefully toward the scrawny but suitably gruesome crucifix suspended by wire directly above me.

“Let it become for us the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, Your own Son, our Lord,” I say.

St. Pete’s eyes bug me. Too much like an understudy watching the lead actor onstage, mesmerized by his idol but hoping for a tragic accident all the same. I’m tempted at times to wheel that statue of St. Pete out to the front of the church, where an older version of himself, this one done in white plaster, is nailed to an upside-down cross. That’ll show him. But who knows? Maybe he’d be glad to see it. Maybe it would tickle him to know that when we were kids we were convinced the upside-down crucifix was the welcome shingle for a satanic cult. But I doubt it. St. Peter never struck me as the type to have much of a sense of humor.

To my right and facing the gathered flock is Mother Mary. Now, her, I like. She’s the one truly beautiful thing in the church. Carved out of cedar and stained rather than painted, she still manages to be more realistic than the rest of the lot—like her husband shoved off in the corner, an afterthought done up in faux marble and chipped paint. In the right light, Mary outshines the tabernacle, which comes as no surprise. I’m not going to admit this sort of thing to some born-again Pentecostal, but in these rural parishes, Mary carries the load. In her simplicity, she sits above that enigmatic Trinity of her Son, His Father, and that little white bird—or whatever it is people imagine the Holy Ghost to be. I spent kindergarten through twelfth grade at a Catholic school, went to seminary to become a priest, and I still have problems wrapping my mind around the Holy Trinity. But everyone understands a mother’s capacity for love and forgiveness—and her power over her child.

Mr. Boudreaux burps again, and the Smith boys look at each other, eyes wide and betraying thoughts of strangling their daddy while he sleeps. Divorcing their mother was one thing. Dragging them to this place is unforgivable.

Mr. Devillier, one pew in front of Mr. Boudreaux and three people over, jams his pinky into his ear and gives it a good shake before pulling it out and studying his fingernail.

“Take this, all of you, and eat it,” I say.

So much for the miracle of Transubstantiation.

I wrap up the Eucharistic Prayer, lead the flock through the Lord’s Prayer, and make it to the Breaking of the Bread with no incident.

“This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” I say. I hold up the jumbo wafer for all to see. “Happy are those who are called to His supper.”

“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you,” they all reply like good little lambs. “But only say the word and I shall be healed.”

I break the wafer into the platter that holds the smaller, uniform ones I’ll administer during Holy Communion. I chew and swallow my piece and I feel a calm working through me. I wouldn’t expect some random heathen or some Bible-thumping Tammy Faye to believe or understand. A runner, maybe. I’ve heard of runner’s high and that’s how I try to describe it, although I’ve never run anywhere near far enough to experience anything more than runner’s aches, runner’s cramps, and runner’s vomiting. But whatever it is, it’s working. I can feel I’m slipping back into my zone, my plane of worship.

I reach for the wine chalice, bring it to my lips, and,
bam!
I’ve lost it again.

Grape juice! Son of a bitch!

It’s all I can do not to wince. I never did like grape juice. Vile, nasty, sickly sweet purple scourge of the fruit-juice set. Yes. I know. By this point in the ceremony, it’s supposed to be the blood of Jesus, and the flavor shouldn’t matter.

But still.

I shoot a glance over the chalice rim at Denise Fontenot, standing there decked out in the white robes that belong on a nice, obedient, unscented altar boy.

She’s the one, the thorn in my side. The very picture of innocence if she weren’t Satan incarnate. I swear she was watching me for a reaction just now. There’s no other explanation. She had to have switched it purposely. Or else she somehow, impossibly, after being told twice before, confused my cardboard box of Franzia with one of the plastic bottles of grape juice that dear departed Father Carrier left behind.

I suffer through the rest of the grape juice. It’s not even good grape juice—if there is such a thing. It’s that Sam’s Choice garbage from Walmart. I shudder to think where Walmart gets its grapes.

Bad wine I can stomach. I belonged to a group in seminary who theorized that Transubstantiation was all the more miraculous if you had to turn really cheap wine into the Blood of Christ. One guy, who was probably a self-flagellating Calvinist in a previous life, planned to torture himself weekly with Thunderbird (Fortified by Christ!) even if it did render him blind within a year. Grape juice was the last resort of recovering alcoholics, God have mercy on their souls.

As I wipe the rim of the chalice, I look over at Denise again. Is that a smirk? I look over at the other altar girl, Maggie Deshotel, for some sort of comparison. But as usual, she simply seems sleepy. I worry that one of these days she’s going to pitch right over, split her head open, and I’ll have little-girl blood pooling all over the sacred altar of Jesus. I look back at Denise, who seems very pleased with herself.

Denise has been acting a little weird lately. Squirrely, maybe? Or kittenish? Is that the word I don’t want to acknowledge? She’s been bumping into me on the altar. Her palms have been a little clammy, her grip a little too firm, a little too slow on the release during the Sign of Peace. Or maybe I’ve just lost my mind. Maybe I’m just imagining these things.

I manage to conclude Mass without verbalizing anything I’m actually thinking. I hate to run things on autopilot, but at the moment I’m more than thankful for the ability. I follow the two girls down the aisle and through the front doors. Denise hugs me around the waist—a new development—says “Bye, Father Steve,” and runs off with Maggie.

I make my usual round of handshakes, hugs, and headpats. The old men say little. A handshake and maybe a “How you, Father?” or a “Comment c
va?” before going to their trucks and Suburbans, where they stand around talking the serious business of farming, hunting, and dirty jokes. Their wives stay behind, clucking with each other and fighting for my attention.

This is a fine art, this making old women happy, playing to their individual egos without permanently offending the rest of the gaggle. In a way, I’m their rock star, they are my groupies.

Tonight, I have to thank Miss Robichaux for the pork roast she dropped off this afternoon. While I’m doing this, I notice Denise and Maggie, now in jeans and baby tees, being chased through the parking lot by Sammy Guidry, a gangly boy still at an age where he hasn’t figured out why he’s been chasing girls his whole life, an age where he wouldn’t know what to do with one if he caught one. Both of the girls are laughing, their cheeks red. I’m watching this action over Miss Robichaux’s head when Denise looks directly at me.

“I’ll tell you a secret, Miss Robichaux,” I say, returning my eyes to hers, stage-whispering loud enough for her friends to hear. “That was the best—and I mean the best—piece of pig I ever had in my life. And don’t you go repeating that anywhere near Opelousas, because my mama’d like to kill me if she heard me saying that.”

Miss Robichaux blushes and giggles. Even through the Avon base she has caked on, her cheeks turn the same gaudy red she’s died her hair. It’s the same look Mawmaw wore to church when she was alive—Louisiana old lady.

“Aw, now, Father. You stop that,” she says, and makes a show of slapping my chest, a bit of the teenager she once was apparent in that gesture.

After the crowd departs, I stand alone in the parking lot watching the sun set over the graveyard, a small intimate plot just to the west of the church. Only a few of its bodies are shelved aboveground. The land here is high enough, the water table low enough, that we don’t have to worry about flash floods filling the graves and squirting fifty-year-old caskets out of the ground like watermelon seeds from the mouths of children.

This has become common practice for me, standing here after Saturday evening Mass, watching the sun set through the moss-draped live oaks, painting the headstones a soft salmon color.

A car pulls into the lot behind me. I don’t turn to face it. I know it will stop five inches from me. I can feel the heat of its grill on the back of my legs. When the door opens, I hear the distinctive
bling-blong, bling-blong
of a mid-’90s Buick.

“Hey, Vick,” I say as she slides up next to me. She hands me a lit cigarette.

I give her a once-over before turning back to watch the sunset. She’s wearing jeans and an unbuttoned man’s jacket over a white tee. Her blond hair just barely reaches her shoulders and her dark skin looks good in the dying light. She’s a smidge taller than me, but I don’t hold it against her.

“What’s on the agenda tonight?” she asks.

“Just a silent moment of reflection.”

“Mass a bit of a distraction?”

I don’t know how she does this. I’ve known her for only three months, but she seems to have the ability to read me like a book, a book not all that complex or layered, a catalog maybe.

“Denise give you grape juice again?” is her follow-up question.

“Yup.”

“I told you to throw it all out.”

We watch the top edge of the sun slip below the horizon.

“She hugged me tonight.”

This, Vicky finds hilarious.

“Don’t know what we’re going to do with you, Padre.” She likes to do that, use cute little priest names for me. She’s a little over-comfortable around priests, probably because she’s the daughter of the last one who worked here.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around that one. Vicky’s my age. We’d heard rumors of her existence over in Opelousas when I was a kid. But rumors are a dime a dozen the world over and go at an even cheaper rate down in these parts. It’s one thing to hear a rumor, another to meet one.

It’s her old man I replaced, so she’s been helpful, my own Encyclopedia Grand Prairieca, Chamber of Commerce, and default St. Pete’s church lady.

But she can also be a big pain in the ass.

“I told you not to try getting altar boys,” she says, pulling a beer out of her jacket pocket and offering it to me. “Daddy didn’t use any.”

“I figured Father Carrier didn’t use altar boys because he saw it as an unnecessary luxury.”

“Daddy? Ha.”

Daddy. The word didn’t sound right coming out of her mouth. It sounded like the wrong answer to a bad brain teaser. What can always be a father but never a daddy? A priest. Then Paul Carrier went and screwed everything up (not that he was the first by any stretch of the imagination). When I heard Vicky say Daddy, I imagined some sort of reverse virgin birth, something out of Greek mythology. Father Carrier still full of youth, but lonely in his marriage to Christ, shuffling to the tabernacle on Sunday morning wondering if he can stand an entire lifetime in this profession. He opens the tabernacle door and, lo, within is a girl child, cooing and giggling at him. Of course, that’s not the way it happened at all; Father Carrier preferred to conceive his child the old-fashioned way.

“Daddy,” she was saying. “He might have said something like that. But he would have had seven or eight of them little bastards up there at one time if he could have found them. Hell, this was the same man who replaced the priest’s chair with a La-Z-Boy.”

“Why didn’t he use girls?”

“I think Daddy had enough on his hands with me. Also, it’s just not a bright idea to put pubescent girls in the same room with a horny old goat.”

“Now, just a minute,” I protest.

“Simmer down, sailor,” she says, laughing again. “I was talking about Daddy. Then again, them little girls running around that altar seem to get your blood boiling.” Her hands are in her pockets now. She rolls up onto her toes, then back to her heels a couple of times. It’s sort of a mannish gesture, one that says, “Yes, my boy, I know you’re in a pickle and I’m just pleased as I can be about the whole thing.”