Last Notes from Home by Frederick Exley Read Free Book Online

constantly held and puffed at a Canadian nonfilter cigarette whose brand I recognized and knew to be as head-swimmingly strong as those Picayunes the good old boys down in the country-and-western roadhouses of Yazoo County inhale to their toenails. Ms. Robin Glenn and another stewardess were scurrying up and down the aisle with the priest making sure the members of the tour, so rapidly filling the cabin, were settled snugly into their seats, their belts clamped firmly. Although I could not hear what the girls were saying to him, the no smoking light was on, as it always is prior to takeoff, and I was almost certain that on two or three occasions they spoke to him about his smoking. His squinty little BB-blue eyes would widen in hurt apology, with a kind of terrible fury—not really anger, but his movements owned that terrible jerki-ness indicating fury—he would jam the butt into the recessed ashtray of a seat’s armrest and off he’d fly up the aisle, the breathless and intimidated stewardesses right at his erratic heels. The three would thereupon settle in the next members of the tour.
    Almost immediately, and obviously totally unconsciously, the savage little squirt would reach into his pocket, without bringing out the pack, and remove another of those awful Canuck cigarettes, put it into his mouth, light it, and again be bounding up and down the aisle seeing to his flock. In a kind of terrifying way the little padre was rather endearing. There was something so excitable about him, a kind of Jesuitry gone bonkers, I couldn’t help laughing, silently now to appease the old lady, and as much as for any other reason laughed at the poor man’s utter helplessness to comply with the no smoking sign. Far funnier than anything else, when he held his habitual cigarette pursed in his lips, like a delighted child sucking an ice cream soda through a straw and trying to drain the elixir in one extended draught, his cigarette would burn a third of the way down on one voracious drag. As it did so, and he fled airily, with something like hurricane stealth, up and down the aisle, the poor girls stumbling bewilderedly at his frantic heels, the cigarette’s ashes would dribble snowily down his black silken rabat, forming a near-perfect four-inch column of silver gray running vertically from the base of his round collar to the bottom of his rabat and belt. It was rather as if he were from some privileged order of dandies given to designing their own priestly garments. There were three or four other priests, as well as eight or ten nuns and all kinds and shapes of ill-dressed lay people, both men and women, and as the priest ordered all of these about and seated them where he chose, I figured him for a monsignor at the very least, perhaps even a bishop.
    When at length everyone was settled comfy in, a great hush fell over the plane, very amusing in its own way, the curtains separating the first-class and economy sections parted, my broken-legged seatmate came gimping through, and bedlam ensued. Great wild uncontrollable cheers rose up to greet him. Although he was dressed in layman’s clothes, there was something so boundlessly shameless in the tumultuous accord with which he was being hailed by this staid religious group, I thought this preposterously sloppy man might be an archbishop or even a cardinal in mufti. In a grating crescendo these Russkies or Polacks or whatever they were, even the priests and nuns, though these acted somewhat more subdued, kept saluting him over and over again in some strange ritualistic chant which sounded like “Oh Too Me! Oh Too Me!” I could not imagine what this signified and for a time thought it might be some Slavic mystical chant translating as “Oh, come to me!”
    Why I didn’t then and there recognize the object, now proceeding down the aisle toward me, of this inordinate adulation as Irish I shall never know. For despite the farcical smile (so many even white teeth glowing—nay, gleaming