Free The Business of Naming Things by Michael Coffey Page A

it was a bird of prey, an osprey intent on him. He staggered on the riverbank, cold, frightened. Maybe I am epileptic, he thought, like Ronnie Gonyea, whom he’d seen ride out a fit sitting in his truck, his head flailing up and down in silence—then everything began to rush at him, and then he was in the river. It was high and fast. Paul rose to the surface, but his waders became snagged in branches at the bottom. He was held therein the current, the water to his chin and then higher. Only the flat of his face was out of the water, a floating mask staring at the swirling gray above, the small gnats a fresh hatch to outlive him, and he prayed for his soul. For minutes. If he tried to move, he pulled himself under. Then he tried to pull himself under, to free himself from the swollen waders or break off tree branches, but his hands were numb. He surrendered to this entrapment. He stared downstream, only his nose and brow above water, not daring to open his mouth to shout. He thought, I will drown. He thought, I will die in a river. That is appropriate. And then the sun opened a hole in the cloud, making him blink, and the river shifted beneath him. He spilled into a pool downstream, his gullied waders pulling him onto a shallow sandbar, where he gathered himself, and walked out, saying, “Your will, not mine.”
    That was 1950. It came out of the blue, literally—the clearing sky—but in other respects it was no surprise, at least to Paul. He’d suffered a period of near-fanatical (but private) devotion to prayer, secretly saying grace before and after every meal (sometimes every course; for a while—one Lent—after every swallow); his evening prayers, too, were forced to be completely imagined in every word—no thoughtless, rote recitation for Paul: Each word of each prayer had to be visualized as both word and a corresponding image (“fruit of thy womb, Jesus” was a high-wire construction involving an apple where something else should be).
    His still-grieving mother welcomed his vocation, as if she deserved it. They were good Irish Catholics, after all; it was a fine tradition to give one son to the Church, even if your only son. Fortunately, his sister, Sarah, could bear the grandchildren. Father Paul would baptize them.
    Girlfriend Jill (“A.F.A.” she had written in his yearbookunder her own picture) eased her way out of Paul’s future—a combination of Paul treating her, on a hammock, to a deadly disquisition on Teilhard de Chardin, and then the late-closing suitor with a milk route and a sporty, black, two-door Studebaker, Gordy Gregory, who won her heart. So the four-star athlete and smart boy left for the Korean War, a stint, however, cut short (a misunderstanding in the PX; discharge); then a B.A. in philosophy from the University of the State of New York and a certificate in philosophy from Wadhams Hall College, a seminary up on the St. Lawrence River. On his ordination day in 1958, he took his mother and sister to see a dam come down—what was called “inundation day” for the valley, which would see ten villages sacrificed in the name of progress. He had changed out of the cream and gold of the ceremony into the simple black cassock and black biretta he favored like a boy might. He was severe; his mother, in a feathered hat, dotty; his sister, hatless, and in a bright green suit rather too jaunty for the setting. They saw the explosion at the dam, and then heard it; and then saw the slow hemorrhage of dark water flood the countryside.
    â€œA big day,” Paul said to his stricken mother.
    â€œWhat are you talking about?”
    â€œThe river is too shallow,” said Paul.
    â€œToo shallow for what?” asked his mother. “For drowning?”
    Paul swallowed hard. “For tankers. They’re going to build locks.”
    â€œFor what?”
    â€œOne needs to get from here to there, all over. Cargo,