The Digger's Rest (14 page)

He found his way back to the priest’s office
not long afterwards, notwithstanding the fact that all the
corridors looked exactly alike. When he went in, Sister Helene was
at a filing cabinet with her back to him. He cleared his throat
politely to get her attention. She turned around. “Dr. Bramson,
twice in one day. This is a surprise,” she said, the dimples in her
cheeks showing as she smiled.

“
Yes, Sister. I was wondering if Father
Perez had finished with his appointment yet.”

“
Why yes; he has. Would you like to see
him again?”

“
Yes, please, if it wouldn’t be too
much trouble,” he said, feeling more humbled by their sacrifices
every moment he spent in their collective presence.

Sister Helene went to the main office door,
knocked lightly then went in. Father Perez was on the phone. She
motioned with her hand and spoke softly, “Dr. Bramson is here to
see you again.”

Father Perez just waved his hand to her
indicating that she should bring him in. Sister Helene turned
around and with the same hand motion waved at him to come in as
Father Perez was hanging up the phone. “Well, Dr. Bramson. I take
it you saw Simon?” the priest asked, clearly already knowing the
answer.

Mitch didn’t bother to say ‘yes.’ He just cut
to the chase. “Why didn’t you and Sister Mary tell me about his
leg?” he said, holding his hands out in bewilderment.

“
Would it have made any difference,
Doctor?” the priest asked, the intensity Mitch had seen earlier
came back into his eyes.

Mitch let his head hang and shook his head.
“No. Of course not. None at all.”

“
The doctors’ reports when he was
brought in said that it was broken severely before he was old
enough to walk, and wasn’t attended. It healed badly and didn’t
grow properly,” the priest said. “But please sit down, Doctor. I
just got off the phone with Sister Akelo at the infirmary. He’s
awake and he’s fine. Just a little egg on the back of his head.”
Mitch breathed a sigh of relief as he flopped back down in the same
chair he’d vacated earlier.

“
So what is it you wanted to see me
about, Doctor?” the priest asked calmly. Mitch took a deep breath
and let it out slowly, taking a few seconds to choose his words
carefully before speaking.

“
Well Father…” he started, but Father
Perez interrupted him before he could finish.

“
Are you a Catholic, Dr.
Bramson?”

Mitch thought the question odd, but not odd
enough to make an issue of it. He simply answered, “No.”

“
Then there’s no real need for you to
call me Father. I’m a modern priest not all that caught up in
formalities. We’re close in age and both educated men. Under the
circumstances, I think you can call me Javier,” Father Perez said
with an almost friendly shine in his eyes and tone in his voice.
Mitch pointed to his own chest and simply said, “Mitch.”

“
Okay, Mitch, now what did you want to
talk about?” Javier asked patiently, putting his hands together,
interlocking his fingers and holding them to his mouth giving him a
pensive, thoughtful look

“
Well…Javier, I wanted to ask about
Simon’s future,” he said quietly.

“
That’s a difficult question to
answer…Mitch. He’ll age out of the system a few weeks after
graduation and be on his own. I was thinking that I’d try to get
him to come into the priesthood, but quite honestly I think it
would be a waste for him. Not that the church doesn’t need priests,
particularly down here; it’s just that with Simon’s academic
capabilities…” and he trailed off. “The only other option is for
him to get a job as soon as possible and maybe take some courses
locally at night, but I think we’d both agree that would also be a
waste and Holy Family has only so many resources and we need them
for the other children in our care.” He paused, holding up his
hands with a shrug. “But I don’t mind telling you that I worry
terribly about Simon being put out on his own in the world. All of
us here at the home do. Simon is not really…of the world, if you
understand what I’m saying,” Javier said, the intensity in his eyes
giving Mitch his opening, or maybe leading him to it. Either way he
took it.

“
That’s what I wanted to talk to you
about,” Mitch jumped in. “I’d like to ask your permission to…let me
help him, get him through school and take care of him,” he said
choking with emotion, struggling not to burst into tears before
another grown man but knowing that somewhere along the line he was
going to lose the battle. The priest’s eyes lit up but his facial
expression remained calm, mask-like. A moment of silence passed
before anyone spoke again, and it was Mitch. “You don’t seem
surprised by that,” he said as a statement rather than a
question.

“
That’s because I’m not,” the priest
said calmly, his eyes sparkling, “…not at all actually.” Mitch was
stumped and his expression must have shown it. The priest spoke
again, taking his hands down away from his mouth.

“
I’m not a stupid man, Mitch, and in my
business you get to know people, know things about them…in a very
short time. I read your Time article before you came to give your
lecture. I’ve also seen some of your…tabloid photos,” the priest
said, smiling wryly to himself before going on. “A man like you,
with your life, career and high profile just doesn’t drop whatever
he’s doing to come down to skid row on Christmas Eve to see a poor
kid who wrote him a letter unless he has a spark of God in his
heart. And I don’t necessarily mean a Catholic God, either. Like I
said, I’m a modern priest and I don’t believe for a minute that our
Catholic God is the only version of God available. I saw it in you
when you came the first time to give your lecture, then again
today. I was sure of it when you still asked to see Simon after
Sister Mary told you of his troubles, when, quite honestly, almost
anyone else would have bolted through the door.” Mitch shook his
head and let it hang low, his hair hiding his face.

“
I’m not sure I can still believe in
God, Javier, in any version available. And even if I did, I’ve been
a terrible sinner of excess in my life, drugs, alcohol, sex…so I’m
not all that convinced that any version would have me.”

“
Nonsense, my son. If you were the kind
of sinner you believe yourself to be, you would have thrown that
letter in the trash without a thought, but you didn’t. I believe
God brought you here today to save Simon, whether you believe that
or not, and you did what he wanted. The God I believe in treats
sins of the flesh like criminal courts treat traffic tickets. The
true measure of God in man is doing exactly what you did today,
coming here to meet a hopelessly lost, crippled boy, abused and
discarded by a world that never wanted him, who naïvely reached out
to a giant, expecting nothing…but you reached back. That makes all
the difference in the world. Now you’re offering him a life in the
light instead of leaving him the darkness. That is God on earth,
Mitch,” the priest said as he got up, taking a handful of tissues
from the box on his desk and handing them to Mitch. The battle was
lost.

“
What kind of…monster could hurt such a
sweet kid that way?…I don’t understand.”

“
Without monsters, Mitch, there can be
no heroes. Without demons, there can be no angels. Your coming here
proves that,” the priest said, putting his arm around
him.

After Mitch had a few minutes to pull himself
together, he got down to business, first by writing a check for a
thousand dollars and giving it to the priest. “If you would,
Javier, please open an account for him to make sure he has
everything he needs until graduation, clothes, books anything he
needs, especially vitamins. I’ll make arrangements for the same
amount to be deposited in the account every month until then.” That
did surprise the priest. “I’ll have an application for Columbia
sent over as soon as possible. We need to get it filed…like
yesterday. I’ll pull whatever strings I have to so we can get it
done. It’s my school and I have some friends who have some friends,
so consider it a done deal. In the meantime we need to get on the
ball with filing for scholarships and whatever grants we can still
get. I’ll take care of whatever shortfall there may be and all his
personal expenses myself to make sure he’s well taken care of. Then
when he graduates I’ll get him job at the Museum,” he said, getting
up to leave, winded and drained. “But I’d better go now,
Father—Javier.”

Father Perez walked around his desk and
stopped him. Putting the palm of his hand over Mitch’s heart, the
priest looked deep inside him. “You’ll always have a home here with
us, Mitchell, Catholic or not,” he said and smiled. “God bless you,
my son, and thank you.” Before Mitch closed the door, he turned
back long enough to see Father Perez reach for the tissue box once
again and heard him whisper into the air, “Thy will be done…”

When he got out to the sidewalk, it was
snowing again, a curtain of big, fluffy white flakes. He held his
face up to let the cold crystals land on it, cooling him from the
heat of the emotional upheaval he’d just gone through, letting it
all sink in, the boy, his past and…his future. Other than for his
work, he’d never taken responsibility for anything in his life. But
he guessed it was time he learned now. He’d follow Jack’s example;
that would be the key. He would do for Simon what Jack had done for
him all these years.

He looked down again and, through the blanket
of falling snow saw a singular blinking red neon light across the
street, “Pizza, Pizza, Pizza.” He followed it and went in. “I’d
like to order twenty pizzas for delivery,” he said to the
dark-haired Italian looking guy dressed in restaurant whites. “Mix
‘em up with all the toppings, and plenty of them.” The pizza man
took out a pad and began nodding and writing. “And twenty bottles
of soda too, mix ‘em up…What do you have for desserts?” Mitch
asked, just letting the words roll out of him.

“
Ice cream, gelato, some cinnamon knots
and special Christmas cannolis. I have about twenty of those left,”
the man in whites answered. “Okay, I’ll take one carton of
chocolate ice cream and one vanilla. . .and whatever cinnamon knots
and cannolis you have left, and send it all over to the kids’ home
at the church across the street.” The man in white kept writing,
nodding and smiling, probably thinking this guy must be out of his
tree. “I want you to feed those kids over there, okay? And I do get
a good price for bulk on Christmas Eve, eh, paisan?” Mitch asked
with more than a hint of force. “Call your mother and ask her what
she thinks about it,” Mitch said to him, knowing in advance what
Mama would have him do when he saw the big, gaudy gold crucifix
mixing with the thick black hair on his chest.

“
I don’t have to…” the man in white
said, giving Mitch a huge smile and shaking his head. “I grew up
going to Holy Family Church. I know all about those kids and
exactly what to do.”

“
Good man!” Mitch said, handing his
credit card over to him, “…and please call Father Perez and tell
him it’s on its way, courtesy of Mitchell Bramson.”

The man in whites took the card and went over
to the register and started ringing. A few minutes later he came
back and handed Mitch the receipt to sign. Mitch looked at the
receipt and smiled, the man had indeed done him right and he
signed. He looked up to the man in white again. “…and I’ll come
back every year from now on to do the same thing. I want those kids
to have a Christmas party on me…every year.” The man in white put
out his hand for Mitch to shake. Mitch took it and shook it
hard.

“
Merry Christmas to you, Mr. Bramson,”
the man in white said to him in Italian.

“
Merry Christmas to you, too,” Mitch
responded in Italian himself.

“
Whenever you come in just ask for
Giosua, Giosua Tintoretto. That’s me. I’ll take good care of you,”
he said tapping his finger to his own chest proudly

“
Thank you, Giosua, I will,” Mitch
said, waving as he headed back out the door to feel more of that
cold snow on his face. And he kept that promise, visiting Giosua
every year since then on Christmas Eve and receiving a card from
Father Perez, every year, with the handwritten note, “You’ll always
have a home here with us, Mitchell, Catholic or not.”

From Giosua’s pizza shop he just started
walking and kept walking. The cold felt so good to him he never
wanted it to stop. It wasn’t long before he’d reached the East
Village again and saw a dive bar with a sad looking wreath tied up
with a faded red ribbon in the window.

The door opened and a bearded man dressed in
biker leathers with the Harley Davidson insignia on the back of his
jacket came out came out with a stumbling, frowsy haired,
mini-skirted blond on his arm. He heard his mother’s voice come
singing behind them through the door from the jukebox inside and he
started to cry. “I did it, Ma,” he said out loud to himself,
looking up to the snowy sky, then went inside to lose himself for a
while.

He hit every bar in his path from there on,
losing count somewhere after about ten; having completely lost
track of time but knowing that whatever time it was it was late. He
ended up outside Jack’s townhouse practically crawling on his hands
and knees up the steps, fumbling clumsily to find the key Jack had
given him long ago exactly for that purpose, and went inside. The
last thing he remembered was flopping himself down on Jack’s living
room sofa, bending over to take off his boots, then… darkness. He
was gone.