Free The Business of Naming Things by Michael Coffey

“We’ll be late.”
    For what? she should have asked. What would Father Paul say to that? Put that into words, Brother Hopkins. “Wreck of the Deutschland.” Okay: Sister, a sister calling / A master, her master and mine!— / And the inboard seas run swirling and hawling . . .
    Five nuns drown. For a great poem.
    They got in the old Packard, the best this parish could do, though how Father Paul had coveted that Fairlane Bob Guerin dangled on Palm Sunday. One day maybe—if monsignor could see to the minuscule down payment and not insist on another auctioneer in his rolling hurdy-gurdy voice—on church grounds!—selling old doors and rotted window frames for the “pastoral car fund.” Gawd .
    The Packard was deep like a carriage, or like that rickety gondola at the county fair. And no radio—a relief today. Allthe talk of Dallas and the president dead and Johnson shot too? Could that be true?
    â€œMargaret, please calm down.” She was shaking. Her small nose pinkened, her cheeks rashed.
    She simply could not speak and did not want to speak, and, after a while, cruising along the river, Father Paul thought this is what life among the Carmelites must be like, and then he changed his mind—silence was fine—by the time they reached the new freeway south. It had been a nice day, but now the sky was glowering and early dark was beginning to sift in. A cover.
    They made a funny couple . . . if someone knew, but no one did. Father Paul longed for it all to be known, though: his need for immersion in another person, his mingling there, and how good it was for his soul and for his fellowship, meeting the secular halfway; how good it was for his health and strength, so necessary to serving his flock; the Jack LaLanne “Trimnastics” his weekday secret, exercising with his prie-dieu, his little hobbyhorse; did he want it to be known, his trouble with sanctity? All in God’s eyes. Did God know? Father Paul often wondered why he still lived.
    They weren’t a funny couple.
    â€œJustice was done.” He said this to her, meant to console. Not a single car on the road.
    This elicited a measure of conversation—a derisive sound, not a snort, but something issued from deep within Margaret that she then squelched, angrily, resignedly, a punch pulled. She’s better than that. He went on. “I’m not sure I agree with Kennedy’s politics,” he said, trying on casual.
    â€œHe’s dead,” said Margaret.
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œ Agreed , then. Not agree . You the writer.”
    â€œThat was mean,” she added. He could not see her in the backseat, but he could hear her crying.
    W HERE DID IT ALL BEGIN ? In the beginning.
    Paul Connolly, the elder of two children born to John and Joyce (Dugan) Connolly, a star athlete and student in an old mill town, received the call one day in the spring of his junior year. By then, his father had long been dead—a steam joint blew on a dryer at the mill when Paul was eight—a brutal scalding. The mortician replaced Paul Connolly Sr.’s eyes with glass. Paul Junior became his mother’s partner, the ardent scholar athlete and Boy Scout. His future, to that point, had been set—or assumed: he would attend Normal School in the county seat; he would be a teacher—perhaps English and gym—and he’d hunt and fish and read Life and Time and probably marry Jill Chilton, with whom he’d attended two proms. Paul himself assumed that intimacy with a female would begin and end with Jill Chilton, though it had not begun. They would consummate their union, perhaps in a small hotel in Montreal or in Niagara Falls, and have children. But on a cold April Saturday morning—it would have been his father’s birthday—Paul worked his tackle in the Black River, just like his father had shown him, when a shadow fell across him, and then fell across the sun. He thought