Welding with Children (6 page)

“Father, Mrs. Mamie had the right-of-way.” Vic pointed to the stop sign behind the priest's steaming car.

“I am dreadfully sorry,” Father Ledet said. “I was going to the hospital to administer the Anointing of the Sick, and I guess my mind was on that.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Barrilleaux cried. “Who's that ill?”

“Mrs. Arceneaux's husband.”

Another cruiser pulled up, its lights sparking up the evening. Mrs. Barrilleaux pointed at it. “Vic, can you take him to the hospital and let this other policeman write the report? I know Mrs. Arceneaux's husband, and he needs a priest bad.”

Vic looked down at his shoe. He wasn't supposed to do anything like that. “You want to go on to the hospital and then I can bring you back here, Father?”

“Mamie's the one who should go to the hospital.”

“Shoo.” She waved her good hand at him. “I can hear the ambulance coming now. Go on; I'm not dying.”

Vic could see a slight trembling in Mamie's silver-laced curls. He put a hand on the priest's arm. “Okay, Father?”

“Okay.”

They got into the cruiser and immediately Vic smelled the priest's breath. He drove under the tunnel of oak trees that was Nadine Avenue and actually bit his tongue to keep from asking the inevitable question. When they were in sight of the hospital, Patrolman Garafola could no longer stop himself. “Father, did you have anything to drink today?”

The priest looked at him and blanched. “Why do you ask?”

“It's on your breath. Whiskey.”

“Brandy,” the priest corrected. “Yes, I had some brandy after supper.”

“How much?”

“Not too much. Well, here we are.” Father Ledet got out before the patrol car had completely stopped. Vic radioed his location, parked, and went into the modern lobby to find a soft chair.

*   *   *

The priest knew the way to Clyde Arceneaux's room. When he pushed open the door, he saw the old man in his bed, a few strands of smoky hair swept back, his false teeth out, his tobacco-parched tongue wiggling in his mouth like a parrot's. Up close, Father Ledet could hear the hiss of the oxygen through the nose dispenser strapped to the old man's face. He felt his deepest sorrow for the respiratory patients.

“Clyde?”

Mr. Arceneaux opened one eye and looked at the priest's shirt. “The buzzards is circlin',” he rasped.

“How're you feeling?”

“Ah, Padre, I got a elephant standing on my chest.” He spoke slowly, more like an air leak than a voice. “Doris, she stepped out a minute to eat.” He motioned with his eyes toward the door, and Father Ledet looked at Clyde's hands, which were bound with dark veins flowing under skin as thin as cigarette paper.

“Is there something you'd like to talk about?” The priest heard the faint sound of a siren and wondered if gentle Mrs. Barrilleaux was being brought in to have her arm set.

“I don't need the holy oil no more. You can't grease me so I can slide into heaven.” Clyde ate a bite of air. “I got to go to confession.”

The priest nodded, removed a broad ribbonlike vestment from his pocket, kissed it, and hung it around his neck. Mr. Arceneaux couldn't remember the last time he'd been to confession, but he knew that Kennedy had been President then, because it was during the Cuban missile crisis, when he thought for sure a nuclear strike was coming. He began telling his sins, starting with missing Mass “damn near seven hundred fifty times.” Father Ledet was happy that Clyde Arceneaux was coming to God for forgiveness, and in a very detailed way, which showed, after all, a healthy conscience. At one point, the old man stopped and began to store up air for what the priest thought would be a new push through his errors, but when he began speaking again, it was to ask a question.

“Sure enough, you think there's a hell?”

Father Ledet knew he had to be careful. Sometimes saving a soul was like catching a dragonfly. You couldn't blunder up to it and trap it with a swipe of the hand. “There's a lot of talk of it in the Bible,” he said.

“It's for punishment?”

“That's what it's for.”

“But what good would the punishment do?”

The priest sat down. The room did a quarter turn to the left and then stopped. “I don't think hell is about rehabilitation. It's about what someone might deserve.” He put his hand over his eyes and squeezed them for a moment. “But you shouldn't worry about that, Clyde, because you're getting the forgiveness you need.”

Mr. Arceneaux looked at the ceiling, the corners of his flaccid mouth turning down. “I don't know. There's one thing I ain't told you yet.”

“Well, it's now or never.” The priest was instantly sorry for saying this, and Clyde gave him a questioning look before glancing down at his purple feet.

“I can't hold just one thing back? I'd hate like hell to tell anybody this.”

“Clyde, it's God listening, not me.”

“Can I just think it to God? I mean, I told you the other stuff. Even about the midget woman.”

“If it's a serious sin, you've got to tell me about it. You can generalize a bit.”

“This is some of that punishment we were talkin' about earlier. It's what I deserve.”

“Let's have it.”

“I stole Nelson Lodrigue's car.”

Something clicked in the priest's brain. He remembered this himself. Nelson Lodrigue owned an old Toronado, which he parked next to the ditch in front of his house. The car had a huge eight-cylinder engine and no muffler, and every morning at six sharp Nelson would crank the thing up and race the engine, waking most of his neighbors and all the dogs for blocks around. He did this for over a year, to keep the battery charged, he'd said. When it disappeared, Nelson put a big ad in the paper offering a fifty-dollar reward for information, but no one came forward. The men in the Knights of Columbus talked of it for weeks.

“That was about ten years ago, wasn't it? And isn't Nelson a friend of yours?” Nelson was another Sunday-morning lingerer on the church steps.

Mr. Arceneaux swallowed hard several times and waited a moment, storing up air. “Father, honest to God, I ain't never stole nothin' before. My daddy told me thievin' is the worst thing a man can do. I hated to take Nelson's hot rod, but I was fixin' to have a nervous breakdown from lack of sleep.”

The priest nodded. “It's good to get these things off your chest. Is there anything else?”

Mr. Arceneaux shook his head. “I think we hit the high points. Man, I'm ashamed of that last one.”

The priest gave him absolution and a small penance.

Clyde tried to smile, his dark tongue tasting the air. “‘Ten Hail Marys? That's a bargain, Father.”

“If you want to do more, you could call Nelson and tell him what you did.”

The old man thought for just a second. “I'll stick with them little prayers for now.” Father Ledet got out his missal and read aloud over Mr. Arceneaux until his words were interrupted by a gentle snoring.

*   *   *

Vic sat in the lobby, waiting for the priest to come down. It had been twenty minutes, and he knew the priest's blood-alcohol level was ready to peak. He took off his uniform hat and began twirling it in front of him. He wondered what good it would do to charge the priest with drunken driving. Priests had to drink wine every day, and they liked the taste in the evening, too. A ticket wouldn't change his mind about drinking for long. On the other hand, Father Ledet had ruined Mrs. Barrilleaux's sedan, which for twenty years she had maintained as if it were a child.

A few minutes earlier, Vic had walked down the corridor and peeked into the room where they were treating her. He hadn't let her see him, and he studied her face. Now he sat and twirled his hat, thinking. It would be painful for the priest to have his name in the paper attached to a DWI charge, but it would make him understand the seriousness of what he had done. Patrolman Garafola dealt with too many people who did not understand the seriousness of what they were doing.

The priest came into the lobby and the young policeman stood up. “Father, we'll have to take a ride to the station.”

“What?”

“I want to run a Breathalyzer test on you.”

Father Ledet straightened up, stepped close, and put an arm around the man's shoulders. “Oh, come on. What good would that do?”

The patrolman started to speak, but then he motioned for the priest to follow him. “Let me show you something.”

“Where are we going?”

“I want you to see this.” They walked down the hall and through double doors to a triage area for emergency cases. There was a narrow window in a wall, and the policeman told the priest to look through it. An oxygen bottle and gauges partially blocked the view. Inside, Mrs. Barrilleaux sat on an examining table, a blue knot swelling in her upper arm. One doctor was pulling back on her shoulder while another twisted her elbow. On the table was a large, menacing syringe, and Mrs. Barrilleaux was crying, without expression, great patient tears. “Take a long look,” Vic said, “and when you get enough, come on with me.” The priest turned away from the glass and followed.

“You didn't have to show me that.”

“I didn't?”

“That woman is the nicest, the best cook, the best—”

“Come on, Father,” Vic said, pushing open the door to the parking lot. “I've got a lot of writing to do.”

*   *   *

Father Ledet's blood-alcohol content was well over the legal limit, so the patrolman wrote him a ticket for DWI, to which he added running a stop sign and causing an accident with bodily injury. The traffic court suspended his license, and since he had banged up the Lincoln before, his insurance company dropped his coverage as soon as their computers picked up the offenses. A week after the accident, he came into the rectory hall drinking a glass of tap water, which beaded on his tongue like a nasty oil. The phone rang and the glass jumped in his fingers. It was Mrs. Arceneaux again, who told him she'd been arguing with her husband, who wanted to tell her brother Nelson Lodrigue that he had stolen his car ten years before. “Why'd you tell him to talk to Nelson about the stealing business? It's got him all upset.”

The priest did not understand. “What would be the harm in him telling Nelson the truth?”

“Aw, no, Father. Clyde's got so little oxygen in his brain, he's not thinking straight. He can't tell Nelson what he did. I don't want him to die with everyone in the neighborhood thinking he's a thief. And Nelson … well, I love my brother, but if he found out my husband stole his old bomb, he'd make Clyde's last days hell. He's just like that, you know?”

“I see. Is there something I can do?” He put down the glass of water on the little phone table next to a small white statue of the Blessed Virgin.

“If you would talk to Clyde and let him know it's okay to die without telling Nelson about the car, I'd appreciate it. He already confessed everything anyway, right?”

The priest looked down the hall toward the patio, longing for the openness. “I can't discuss specific matters of confession.”

“I know. That's why I gave you all the details again.”

“All right, I'll call. Is he awake now?”

“He's here at home. We got him a crank-up bed and a oxygen machine, and a nurse sits with him at night. I'll put him on.”

Father Ledet leaned against the wall and stared at a crucifix, wondering what Christ had done to deserve his punishment. When he heard the hiss of Clyde Arceneaux's mask come out of the phone, he began to tell him what he should hear, that he was forgiven in God's eyes, that if he wanted to make restitution, he could give something to the poor, or figure out how to leave his brother-in-law something. He hung up and sniffed the waxed smell of the rectory, thinking of the sweet, musky brandy in the kitchen cupboard, and immediately he went to find the young priest upstairs to discuss the new Mass schedule.

*   *   *

On Saturday afternoon, Father Ledet was nodding off in the confessional when a woman entered and began to make her confession. After she'd mentioned one or two venial sins, she addressed him through the screen. “Father, it's Doris Arceneaux, Clyde's wife.”

The priest yawned. “How is Clyde?”

“You remember the car business? Well, something new has come up,” she whispered. “Clyde always told me he and the Scadlock kid towed the car off with a rope, and when they got it downtown behind the seawall, they pushed it overboard into the bay.”

“Yes?”

“There's a new wrinkle.”

He put down his missal and removed his glasses to rub his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“Clyde just told me he stored the car. Been paying thirty-five dollars a month to keep it in a little closed bin down at the U-Haul place for the past ten years.” She whispered louder: “I don't know how he kept that from me. Makes me wonder about a few other things.”

The priest's eyebrows went up. “Now he can give it back, or you can give it back when your husband passes away.” As soon as he'd said this, he knew it wouldn't work. It was too logical. If nothing else, his years in the confessional had taught him that people did not run their lives by reason much of the time, but by some little inferior motion of the spirit, some pride, some desire that defied the simple beauty of doing the sensible thing.

Mrs. Arceneaux protested that the secret had to be kept. “There's only one way to get Nelson his car back like Clyde wants.”

The priest sighed. “How is that?”

Mrs. Arceneaux began to fidget in the dark box. “Well, you the only one besides me who knows what happened. Clyde says the car will still run. He cranks it up once every three weeks so it keeps its battery hot.”

The priest put his head down. “And?”

“And you could get up early and drive it back to Nelson's and park it where it was the night Clyde stole it.”