CHAPEL—5
Nettles has her curtain pinned back on the choir side; an open invitation to visitors. Julius wanders over to her elegant cell and sits in the chair appointed near the opening. She nods hello without looking up.
Nettles has her curtain pinned back on the choir side; an open invitation to visitors. Julius wanders over to her elegant cell and sits in the chair appointed near the opening. She nods hello without looking up.
Short, sunburnt, hair in a kerchief, wearing a blue brocaded caftan, perched on a stool, knitting. Julius watches her. She’s the eldest of their number, as the gray of her hair and the crease of her face will attest, but she holds a vitality that puts the rest of them to shame.
It’s something beyond physical prowess, it’s … presence, Julius supposes. An undefeatable consistency, a diamond sharpness to her particular way of being, which is direct but cheerful, pragmatic, almost hard-nosed, but optimistic.
Her eyes are flint chips. Her machine-mangled hands remain unhidden, and she uses them expressively when she talks without a thought to shame.
Not that she lacks physical skills. She requires almost no sleep, as far as Julius can tell. The last to bed, the first to rise, and it’s impossible to catch her napping.
She begins work in her garden in the deep of night before the night comes, then on through the sunrise and all the way until noon, when she rests.
Amazingly quick with those knitting needles, too; before the accident she could have gutted a live sardine swimming underwater; given her limitations, what she’s doing with yarn is damn near miraculous. Look at her go—even diminished, she could have kept her factory job.
Julius and Nettles sit in the comfortable near-silence. Now he’s here, the priest finds he’s wary of speaking; he needs some time to order his thoughts, and it’s good to sit with a full belly and think, or not think, in her presence.
From across the transept, the juke is playing; Ella Fitzgerald sings the Porgy & Bess songbook in tones like cask-aged single malt… Methuselah lived nine hundred years...and, from the confessional, Tennessee can now be heard.
Even without trying, Julius can still catch some rather predictable words: “pigeon” and “forge” and “Tennessee” and “Tennessee” and “Tennessee”
*…oh he made his home in that fish's ab-do-men”…*
*…oh he made his home in that fish's ab-do-men”…*
"... never go go going back, ever, not never,” the reedy voice of Tennessee rising until you couldn’t help but hear … but Julius stops himself.
He knows with superstitious certainty any breach of previously-established trust—eavesdropping, say, even upon an unaware subject—might work strange alchemy on the Neon Fellowship’s relational structure ...
... kill the trust binding these disparate cells into a unified organism, break down their inexplicable atomy, make their relational gluons less gluey.
Tennessee’s confession holds no variance from the usual incomprehensible patter he’s freely spewed today on the street—but no matter; probity must prevail.
Father Julius holds the concept of confession at arm’s length, considering it presumptive for any to dare hold the keys of penance or reconciliation, even—perhaps especially—a priest.
This from hard experience.
This from hard experience.
Back in his lean-to days, the failed and lonely days when he was still building the Neon singlehanded, when he still felt compelled by the pressure to do traditionally priestly things, he’d installed a real confessional, and had posted hours for any who wished to seek absolution.
He sat each day on the hard bench awaiting customers in vain, passing time by scribbling his memoirs for no audience other than himself, lonely as Gandhi’s barbecue fork.
After a month of this, Julius left the booth for the last time and left the Neon’s worksite, jogging at random until he chanced upon a hardware store. There he purchased an axe ...
... with a heavy head and a sturdy pine handle, returned, hacked the confessional into staves and in the afternoon burned the pieces out on the street, his pamphlets the kindling, and on the blaze he roasted weenies and toasted marshmallows purchased at Ralph’s.
The kids had come first, and then some of the parents, and then the junkies, day-sober, driven mad by the smell of burning pig snout and lips. They were followed by the gangs, the boxcar-bangers, the factory workers coming off shift, assorted riff-raff.
The bluebirds rolled by in their squad car, just once, and Julius had thought the party was over, but the cops apparently decided a bonfire in the middle of a city street wasn't worth cracking the car door over, not in Loony Island, anyway.
He'd burned every one of his fingers on skewers and learned more about those around them and the state of their souls than he'd ever gotten from wearing a groove in the confessional bench.
The other extraordinary thing: members of all the gangs were represented, yet that night no guns were drawn, no fights broke out, and nobody got the old sharpened aluminum ‘howdy’ between the ribs.
Donk’s doing.
Donk’s doing.
Sensing opportunity, Donk had surreptitiously sent over some kegs, extending the party into the night. Julius eventually got into his first organized fight down at the gutted factories. Lured into it by Donk, whose acquaintance he’d just made.
The priest’s opponent was a mean bright-eyed tough named Felix with a snaggletooth and jet-black hair, a nasty fighter with a pot belly of solid muscle and big mitts you could tell would feel like a couple cement watermelons on your jawbone and eye sockets.
He had limbs like steel rope knotted into extravagant and painful shapes, and most of the wagers were placed in his favor, but Julius made him circle and dance ...
... and, when at last Felix's leather lungs could no longer pay the cardiovascular tax levied against them, the priest had closed in and started working those bright eyes.
He bested Felix late in round five. The boxcar-bangers—a group of old toughs (and alleged firebugs) who lived nearby in a few old boxcars left behind on a stretch of long-abandoned track—crowned him a hero ...
... carried him around on their shoulders, down to their clubhouse, where they plied him with grain whiskey and taught him disgusting and wonderful songs.
The accidental beginning of the Neon Order, because that night Brock, one of the bangers, crashed in the chapel. Julius never asked him to leave.
Even now, that’s the way membership works: Nothing requested, nothing required.
The lack of clear standards for inclusion are, ironically, what has kept their membership so exclusive. Certainly, it keeps the Island’s religious population away.
Most people have no way of dealing with a purely open invitation, and, suspecting some catch, some hidden snag lurking in the river, never dare get their toes wet.
In truth, each of them has discovered something or other to do.
Brother Jack still has trouble believing nothing is required of him—that’s how Monseigneur Ex came to be. Jack is not a man driven by self-mercy, he’s a man driven by self-accountability.
He’d had been foreman on Sister Nettles’ line when she had her accident, and he'd been the one to affix the tourniquets.
Blood everywhere, and, in the blood, lifeless sardines taking one last sanguine swim beside a severed splay of fingers unnaturally liberated from their handsome positions.
Brother Jack still confesses about it some nights, how the whole awful mess was his fault, must have been his fault, it had happened with him in authority, he should have ordered more inspections of the machines, tested the fail-safes with greater diligence …
... his tidal perseverations always bearing him back toward those severed digits among the fish.
Monseigneur Ex doesn’t mind, though; Ex never talks back.
Monseigneur Ex doesn’t mind, though; Ex never talks back.
Ex never tells you to shut up, either, Julius muses. Good news for Tennessee, who’s still going and going and going as Nettles knits, as Ella proclaims the season summertime and the living easy.
Monseigneur Ex holds mute witness, his register counting number by number, recording it all.
They’d installed the first version of Monseigneur Ex a few months after the confessional-kindling weenie roast.
Jack had insisted on having some form of confessional, confession being (as he saw it) necessary to absolution, but Julius had refused adamantly to have anything to do with the role of Father Confessor.
“Not anymore,” he told Jack. “It might be somebody else’s place, but it’s not mine.”
Jack scowled. “That’s not much help. Ain’t you a priest?”
“So they say.”
“Well, I need *something.*”
“Well, holy shit, Jack, I’ll think on it—how’d that be?”
Jack scowled. “That’s not much help. Ain’t you a priest?”
“So they say.”
“Well, I need *something.*”
“Well, holy shit, Jack, I’ll think on it—how’d that be?”
And he had thought on it. Soon after, in the choir of his ‘cathedral,’ Julius began construction on a new confessional more suited to his hands-off missional strategy, made of high plywood planks.
Inside, a plush couch. Facing the couch, a mirror, behind which lay a hollow. In this hollow, a cassette tape whirred on continuous loop, five hours’ worth of tape writing and overwriting and overwriting itself in perpetuity. A sturdy door locked from the inside.
“Get in there, face the mirror, and talk,” Julius said to Jack. “Anything you say will be recorded and then obliterated, which is exactly how I’d like you to think about it.
You’ll be talking to one of two individuals who can absolve you for anything in this old world, and you’ll be staring at the second.”
An hour later, Jack had emerged from the box’s inaugural confession and given the priest a single terse nod, Brother Jack’s version of eloquence—*That’ll do.*
This had been years ago, when it was only him and Brock, and Jack, and Nettles with massive gauze golf balls still bandaging her hands. Since then, the booth has become an unofficial member of their coterie.
After years of worn and snapped audio tape, frustrating replacements of huge spools, and plenty of cursing, Julius had called the techs in to set them up with electronic data recording.
They’d even blessed the confessional with a name: Monseigneur Ex-Position—because, as Julius had so frequently averred, confession was his position no longer.
Each of them had at least occasionally spent time unburdening sin, crime, and foible to Monseigneur Ex, who took it all down without comment and then, as a function of his programming, deleted it.
On Nettles’ wall, a cuckoo clock strikes the time. Julius opens his eyes and wonders idly if he’s been snoring.
Ella’s taking five; Louis Armstrong is singing now, advising that a woman is a sometime thing. Nettles noticing him stir, puts her knitting away, her face a complex map of perplexity and amusement and concern.
“So,” she says. “You showed up hours earlier, wandered in looking like you’d seen a ghost or killed a man, and then fell asleep, still sitting up, half into the night. When are you going to tell me all about your interesting day?”
• • •
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