Snow in August

3

Father Heaney looked as if he too wished he had stayed in bed. His halo of uncombed gray hair combined with his wild black eyebrows and unshaven chin to create a vision of distraction and carelessness. Only his eyes seemed to belong to the man whose war record made him a hero to Michael and some of the other altar boys. His slits of eyes were more hooded than ever, causing Michael to imagine him posing as a Japanese submarine commander spying for the OSS. This was not too absurd a possibility; they had heard from other priests that Father Heaney had been a chaplain in North Africa and Sicily and Anzio; he had gone into Germany with General Patton. He had not been in the Battle of the Bulge, although when Michael asked him about it, he said, in a tight-lipped way, that he’d known men who died there. In his sermons, or in the mornings in the sacristy, Father Heaney never talked about the war. But Michael was sure the war hung over him like a dark cloud; after all, less than two years ago, he was giving the last rites to dying soldiers.

To be sure, Father Heaney’s silences were not confined to the war. He was silent about most things. In the mornings before mass, he seldom said anything to the altar boys, but on this morning he was more silent than ever. He grunted when he saw Michael arrive breathlessly at ten after eight. He grunted at Michael’s apologies. Then he grunted and motioned with his head for the boy to precede him out to the altar.

The priest’s style was to say the mass very quickly, like a man announcing a horse race, and the other altar boys always joked that he was in a hurry to get back to his bottle. Michael had never seen him drinking, or even smelled whiskey seeping from his pores, but on this arctic morning, Father Heaney’s impatient, hurtling style hadn’t changed. He raced through the mass in the cold, empty church while Michael tried valiantly to keep pace. Usually there were two altar boys, but Michael’s partner had been defeated by the blizzard, and Michael made all the Latin responses himself. At one point, Father Heaney cut Michael off in midsentence; at another, he completely dropped a long piece of Latin. It was as if even the words of the ancient ritual were more than he wanted to say. Michael moved the heavy leather-bound missal from one side of the altar to the other. He did what he was supposed to do with wine and cruets. As the priest mumbled before the tabernacle, with a plaster statue of the bleeding Christ above him, Michael tried to pray for his father in his Belgian grave and the souls in Purgatory and the starving people in Europe and Japan. But only the impulse rose in his breast; the actual words of prayers did not follow. Father Heaney wouldn’t let them, driven as he was to cross the finish line. The priest blessed the great dark space of the church and skipped the sermon, while far above, the steeple of Sacred Heart of Jesus R.C. Church shuddered and creaked under the assault of the wind.

Then Michael remembered the injured tone of the bearded man’s voice: that please. And he decided that the rabbi had been desperate. That he needed Michael to turn on those lights or he would suffer for the rest of the day. There was raw pain in his voice. Not pain that had to do with the light switch. Some other kind of pain. Coming from that man. That rabbi. That Jew.

Then he heard a phrase: Domine non sum dignus…

And a whisper from Father Heaney: “Pay attention, boy. We’ve got two customers.”

They had reached the moment when the priest hands out Holy Communion, and somehow, from the vast wind-creaking darkness, two old women in black clothes had made their separate ways to the rail of the altar. Michael quickly lifted the gold dish called the paten and followed Father Heaney to the railing and the kneeling women, wondering: How did they get here? Did they walk through this blizzard that knocked me flat? Did someone drive them in a car? Maybe they live here. Mumbling Latin, his left hand holding the gold chalice known as the ciborium, Father Heaney deposited a host upon each outstretched tongue, while Michael held the paten under their chins. This was so that no fragment of the host, which had been transformed into the body of Jesus Christ during the Consecration, would fall upon the polished floor.

The first woman’s eyes were wide and glassy, like the eyes of a zombie from a movie. The other closed her eyes tight, as if fearful of gazing too brazenly at the divine white wafer. The second one had a mole on her chin, with white hairs sprouting as if from the eye of a potato. They each took the host the same way: the lips closing over it, but the mouth stretched high and taut to form a closed little fleshy cave. To chew the host, after all, was to chew Jesus. Bowing in piety and gratitude, they rose and went back to the dark pews to pray until the host softened and they could swallow.

Then Michael knelt on the altar, and Father Heaney placed a host on his tongue too. Michael squinted but didn’t shut his eyes. He saw that the priest’s thick fingers were yellow from cigarettes. And he remembered the rabbi’s dirty fingernails. And thought: Maybe the pipes in the synagogue have frozen and burst, like the drains at the armory, and there isn’t any water. Maybe he’s not permitted to wash his hands. Like he wasn’t permitted to turn on the lights. But helping the man had to be what the catechism listed as a corporal work of mercy, right? Even if he was a rabbi. A Jew. That still must count. You were supposed to help the needy. The poor. The sick. The man looked poor, didn’t he? And he needed someone to turn on the lights. For some mysterious reason. Is not permitted…. The mystery of the brief moment in the synagogue grew larger as Michael swallowed his own softened host. The rabbi wasn’t Svengali. He wasn’t Fagin. But he was strange and mysterious, like someone from a book, a bearded guardian of secrets. And Michael thought: I want to find out those secrets.

Finally the mass ended. Father Heaney muttered Ite, missa est, and Michael answered Deo gratias, and the priest strode off the altar, with Michael behind him. In the sacristy, with its marble counter and ceramic sink, Father Heaney began removing his garments: the chasuble and stole, the maniple and cincture, the amice and alb. Under all of these, the priest was wearing a tan turtleneck sweater and black trousers. His black shoes were stained from dried rock salt. He sighed, took a pack of Camels from his trouser pocket, and struck a wooden match on the sole of his shoe to light up. He inhaled deeply. The smell of the cigarette filled the air.

“Thanks, young man,” he said, his eyes moving under the hooded lids. “And, hey: How in the hell did you make it here this morning anyway?”

“I walked, Father.”

The priest inhaled deeply, then made a perfect O with the exhaled smoke.

“You walked, huh? How many blocks?”

“Eight.”

“No wonder you were late,” he said, his black eyebrows rising. “Well, you can offer it up to the souls in Purgatory.”

“I did, Father. During the prayers.”

“I hope you included me,” the priest said, without smiling. And then grabbed his army overcoat and walked out to cross the snow-packed yard to the rectory.

Michael’s duties were not finished. This was the last mass of the day, and so he went back to the altar to extinguish the two candles with a long-handled device the altar boys had named the “holy snuffer.” The old women were gone. They seemed to have ascended into the darkness like the waxy smoke from the candles after he capped them with the brass bell at the end of the snuffer. For a moment, staring into the darkness, he imagined the rafters full of smoky old women with hair sprouting from their chins. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Whispering in Italian and Polish and Latin about dead husbands and dead children. Like angels grown old but not allowed to die. He could smell them: the odor of candles.

Quickly, Michael came down off the altar, genuflected, and returned to the empty sacristy. He pulled the surplice over his head, hung the cassock in the closet, and changed into his street clothes. Before leaving, he flipped the switches of the altar lights, peering out to be sure he had turned them all off. Then, from the dark upper reaches of the church, he could hear the moaning of the wind. And through the wind, a voice.

Please, it said.

Please to help.