Any Bitter Thing by Monica Wood Read Free Book Online Page B

incense and suffused with the most exquisite joy and submission. At the reception they pressed upon him like so many uncles and aunties, balancing tea cakes and punch as they pinched his hands and patted his back, wishing him well on his first assignment as a prison chaplain and hoping aloud to get him back as their own pastor. That wish came true—it was his wish, too—but he’d become a man in the meantime, to no one’s notice. Even when officiating at a wedding, or following a slow-moving casket out of the church into a bright cold day, he felt their sticky indulgence: Don’t worry, Mikey, you’re doing great. And people do improve.
    That was then. With a child in the house he can no longer be their child, thank the Lord. They look at him differently now. Askance. He senses their discomfort—at a parish-council meeting, say, or during a homily in which he invokes one of Lizzy’s childhood milestones. He’s good at reading faces: They doubt his commitment.
    They think: That kid takes too much time.
    They think: How does he give her a bath?
    They think: At least there’s a woman in the house.
    But Mrs. Hanson keeps so busy. She is pleasant enough, attentive toward Lizzy but not especially affectionate, closer to General MacArthur than the Mary Poppins he might have wished for. Surely Lizzy must find comfort in her cushiony figure, her graying hair, her female presence in these bachelor rooms. Mrs. Hanson drubs Lizzy’s hands every afternoon beforeshe leaves, scuffing under the nails as if sending him a message. Lizzy seems not to mind being tended like livestock, and he cannot help but believe Mrs. Hanson knows something he doesn’t. Everyone else seems to.
    Lizzy and Mariette have lined up all of his shoes on the coffee table. The girls are four years old, it’s a snow-gray afternoon, and they’ve transformed his parlor into a make-believe shoe store. Mariette plays the salesman, Lizzy the customer. She follows Mariette’s instructions, tying the laces over and over—a triumph he mentioned just last Sunday as a metaphor for perfecting the act of prayer. His oratory is a vanity he fights to control. He registers with glee the upturned faces, the unswerving eyes, none of the rustling or coughing that accompanies Joe Poulin’s tone-deaf bromides or Stan Leary’s syntactical rotaries and culde-sacs. St. Catherine’s, across the river, is a two-man parish with a school and convent and a spired church made of fieldstone and blue glass, yet he has spotted some crossovers slipping into his pews on Sunday. No matter the few (unimportant, he hopes) misgivings about his loyalties, when he preaches people sit enthralled. He brings God to them in his own best way—through his vanity, truth be told—and they cannot resist. He would gladly have become an actor, had God asked.
    But God asked no such thing. A scent wafts into the house through an ill-fitting window, a weak premonition of spring whose origins he can’t guess; it brings back his boyhood in a sudden rush: the high Masses, the silent adults, the quilted fields and golden haystacks, the surging, suggestive seasons. He knew nothing of men and women. He witnessed the workhorses, the dogs in the lane, a pair of doves on the weathervane, and wondered about the world of the body, that strangest manifestation of God’s glory. He discovered his body in secret, marveling at its shudders and heat, peeking sidelong at the girls in the school-house, throat afire.
    Of course he did. He was a boy. But he found something more powerful than the body’s wonders, something more marvelous and astounding.
    God called him.
    It happened in the north field, just after planting, the red furrows with their promise of potatoes, his uncle’s tractor at the far end, parked beside the lilacs. The sky, starched flat and white as a pillowcase, thrilled him. He looked into it and found the face of God bearing down. Like St. Paul being knocked off his horse, he fell to his knees, crying