he served as a reliable source of strength for others. I wasn’t a member
of his church, but I knew his parishioners had long adored him.
Lately, things hadn’t gone well for Father Tom, and he himself hadn’t
been well. His sister, Laura, had been my mother’s colleague and friend.
Tom is devoted to her and has not seen her for more than a year.
There is reason to believe that Laura is far along in her becoming,
profoundly changed, and is being held in The Hole, at Wyvern, where she
is an object of intense study.
“Four of those here are Catholic, ” he said. “Members of my flock.
Their souls were in my hands. My hands. The others are Lutheran,
Methodist . One is Jewish. Two were atheists until … recently.
All their souls mine to save. Mine to lose.” He was talking rapidly,
nervously, as if he were aware of a bomb clock relentlessly ticking
toward detonation, eager to confess before being obliterated. “Two of
them, a misguided young couple, had absorbed incoherent fragments of the
spiritual beliefs of half a dozen American Indian tribes, twisting
everything in ways the Indians would never have understood. These two,
they believed in such a mess of things, such a jumble, they worshipped
the buffalo, river spirits, earth spirits, the corn plant. Do I belong
in an age where people worship buffalo and corn? I’m lost here. Do you
understand? Do you? ”
“Yes, ” Bobby said, having followed us into the room. “Don’t worry,
Father Eliot, we understand.” The priest was wearing a loose cloth
gardening glove on his left hand.
As he continued to speak, he worried ceaselessly at the glove with his
right hand, plucking at the cuff, tugging at the fingers, as if the fit
was not comfortable. “I didn’t give them extreme unction, last rites,
didn’t give them the last rites, ” he said, voice rising toward a
hysterical pitch and pace, “because they were suicides, but maybe I
should have given unction, maybe I should have, compassion over
doctrine, because all I did for them … the only thing I did for these
poor tortured people was give comfort, the comfort of words, nothing but
empty words, so I don’t know whether their souls were lost because of me
or in spite of me.” A month ago, the night my father died, I experienced
a strange and unsettling encounter with Father Tom Eliot, of which I’ve
written in a previous volume of this journal.
He’d been even less in control of his emotions on that cruel night than
he was here in the Stanwyk mausoleum, and I had suspected he was
becoming, though by the end of our encounter, he had seemed to be racked
not by anything uncanny but rather by a heart-crushing anguish for his
missing sister and by his own spiritual despair.
Now, as then, I searched for unnatural yellow radiance in his eyes, but
saw none.
The cartoon colors from the television patterned his face, so I seemed
to be looking at him through a constantly changing stained-glass window
depicting distorted animal shapes rather than saints. This inadequate
and peculiar light flickered in his eyes, as well, but it couldn’t have
concealed more than the faintest and the most transient glimmer of
animal eye shine.
Still worrying at the glove, his voice as tight with stress as power
lines taut and singing in a storm wind, sweat shining on his face,
Father Tom said, “They had a way out, even if it was the wrong way, even
if it was the worst sin, but I can’t take their way, I’m too scared,
because there’s the soul to think about, there’s always the immortal
soul, and I believe in the soul more than in release from suffering, so
there’s no way out for me now. I have damning thoughts.
Terrible thoughts. Dreams.
Dreams full of blood. In the dreams, I feed on beating hearts, chew at
the throats of women, and rape … rape small children, and then I wake
up sickened but also, but also, also I wake up thrilled, and there’s no
way out for me.” Suddenly he stripped the glove off his left hand. The