is what you said after they dug it out.”
“I still think that’s the most pain I’ve ever been in,” he laughed.
“Shooting yourself, or when they dug it out?”
“Let’s just say the experience as a whole.” CJ shook his head. “I can’t believe you remember that.”
“One seldom forgets teaching moments,” Julie said. “After watching you do that, I can say that I was never tempted to shoot myself in the foot.”
“At least something good came out of it, then,” CJ said.
Julie smiled at that, but the expression didn’t last long. A gust of cold wind whipped around them, and she folded her arms, looked down at her boots. Then she looked up at CJ. “I’m going to miss him.”
CJ didn’t answer right away except to give a thoughtful nod. From what he’d been able to gather from listening to the family conversation over the last two days, it was quite possible the only two people who would miss the old man were standing outside the funeral home in the cold, listening to the start of the organ music through the closed door.
“I will too,” he answered.
When they went back inside, it was to find that everyone else had taken their seats and the priest looked ready to begin. So when CJ and Julie walked past Father Tom to get to their spots in the second and third pews, CJ knew how it must have looked. Julie had a spot on the end, next to her husband, while CJ had to work his way past several family members to take his place next to his brother, which in itself was an awkward arrangement. But it was either that spot or several rows farther back, where his mother sat, and he suspected the town already had enough gossip fodder, not to mention that he’d walked in late with a woman he used to date, and who was now married to his cousin.
As Father Tom began the mass, CJ tried to ignore the feeling of hundreds of eyes on the back of his head. Instead he tried to concentrate on Father Tom, which was something of a necessity anyway. It had been so long since he’d set foot in a Catholic church that he couldn’t remember all of the audience participation parts—when to stand, when to kneel, what to say in response to Father Tom’s words. Most of it was there in his brain, packed away like winter clothes in summer, only he couldn’t recall any of it quickly enough to keep in time with most everyone else. He realized, when he was the only one who responded to some part of the liturgy by kneeling while everyone else sat, that he’d retained virtually nothing from his days as an altar boy. So he was relieved when Father Tom started into his sermon, even though that meant having to listen to the man talk.
Father Tom had been a priest at St. Anthony’s ever since CJ could remember. Even then he’d seemed old, although he couldn’t have been more than thirty-five when CJ was in middle school. He’d been an altar boy for Father Tom, as well as for Father Paul, the younger priest who was now a bishop in Arizona. And, listening to the sermon now, CJ remembered why mass had seemed so interminable back then. To say that he was a poor public speaker would have been the height of generosity. The fact was that his voice had the sound of sandpaper doing a slow drag across rusted metal.
It was a voice that had, ironically, probably prompted more sin than repentance. For all of the altar boys forced to take their cues from Father Tom, the voice became something one could not simply ignore, a luxury afforded to the people in the pews. With all of the tasks the boy had to perform, he couldn’t risk dozing off and missing the ringing of a bell, or the dousing of a candle. Yet it was such an insufferable voice that more than one boy had found their irritation turning to anger the longer the priest talked. This emotion, depending on the boy, and the number of masses with which they assisted, was easily nudged toward mischief, a planning of some recompense against the offending priest—a man whose only crime was to share the Good News with an instrument ill-suited to the task. Over the decades, Father Tom had suffered through his share of indignities, committed at the hands of his black- and white-clad helpers,