In God's House (37 page)

“For a long time I’ve wanted to talk to you about my involvement.”

“We don’t have to talk about that. I figure you got your own reasons for what you are doing. They might be good reasons. They might be bad reasons. But they are your reasons. I suspect you are not a Catholic anymore and I don’t care. Probably a lot of younger folks are going to stop going to Mass for a whole lot of reasons. Maybe it’s the right thing for people to do.”

“I worried, I really worried what you might be thinking or feeling about me representing Father Dubois.”

“There’s nothing to worry over, son. I’m proud of you. I love you. I just want you to be a good father to Shelby, Jake and Sasha, especially now that your marriage busted. As good as you can be. It’s the only thing that matters. This business with the Church – it’s terrible, but it seems to be all true. They let this man wear that collar and sexually go after little kids for all these years. Whatever happens to them ought to happen to them. You just do what’s right.”

I slowly shook my head. “The steeples… huh.”

“That’s it, son. They put a church in every hamlet. They sent in an educated priest, God’s agent, keeper of all the secrets. That’s how they got the power and held the power. But today lots of people are educated. Not so many will go into a box and tell a man their sins, not many pay attention to what they say about birth control or anything else. And no decent person is going to allow themselves to be lorded over by sanctimonious priests and bishops whose own sins are worse than their own.”

It was like a weight lifted. The affirmation was the strongest I’d ever received from my father. That afternoon we played his favorite game, Horseshoes, until dark, and then I took him to dinner at an old seafood place he loved.

When the waitress put the salad before us, he bowed his head, made the sign of the cross and whispered a prayer of grace. Then he winked at me. “The rituals, son. I like the rituals.”

Kate pulled into the drive at The Palms just after lunchtime on Easter Sunday. Old Seamus Chattelrault was standing by the last palm tree. Sasha bolted out of the car, kissed him on the cheek, and exclaimed, “Gotta go see Rags, Grandman,” then skipped off to see her grandpa’s sheepdog.

The old man embraced Kate. “Ya know, I’m always sorry for your troubles, lass. The very idea of you and Ren divorcing makes me sad. You and my boy, Ren, got two of the best hearts I know. You gave your kids good hearts too. You always bringing Sasha by is something I appreciate. She’s a dear one, like her mom. And Shelby and Jake pull up in that jeep for a root beer almost weekly, telling me they’re just checking up on their Ol’ Gent. They’re good kids, all three of them.”

Kate smiled. “We’re all going to be okay. The kids are good kids. I tell ya, Seamus, either Shelby’s a good boy or if he’s doing bad things, he’s too smart to get caught. Jake’s too wild to care if he gets caught. But Sash… I could use some help there, I think.”

“What’s going on with my angel?”

“Right, she’s an angel all right. Just yesterday I got a visit from a neighbor down the road in the country. Nice man named Maurice. He’s got two girls about Sasha’s age, the only kids she has to play with. I don’t know their religion, but those little girls can only go in our swimming pool with their dresses on and only if the boys aren’t home. They go to some church all the
time. Couple times a week, all day Saturday. Maurice was really upset.”

“With Sasha?”

“Worried about Sasha’s salvation. He said that he’s asked her to go to church with his family a lot of times and she’s always said no. Yesterday morning, he said he told Sasha, ‘Honey, if you don’t go to church, you can’t go to heaven.’ You know what Sasha told him?”

The old man shook his head.

“Sasha said, ‘It’s okay. I wanta go to hell, so I can be with my daddy.’”

The old man laughed. “That belligerence is her Cajun blood talking, but the flair for the dramatic – that’s her Irish blood.”

He motioned for Kate to take a place on the bench and he sat next to her. “We’re a confused bunch, cross-blooded – Irish and French. When I’m troubled I talk my father’s French, and when I’m joshing I sound like my ancestors from Dublin. Ever tell you how my Irish people got mixed up with the Acadian descendants?”

She shook her head.

He winked. “You know your ancestors and my papa’s people were French exiles run out of Acadie in Nova Scotia by the Brits. My mother’s Irish people were immigrants who had been run to Connemara by the Brits before they immigrated to the United States. Both these peoples were on the run from the Brits. People on the run are different from people who have places. You’re a music person – ya know why Cajuns and the Irish didn’t produce great piano composers? You can’t run with a piano on your back.”

Kate smiled.

“Napoleon Bonaparte sold a slab of land cheap to Thomas Jefferson and what is now Louisiana was part of that parcel. Ten years later there was a war between America and Britain. A bunch of Irish immigrants signed on to fight the Brits, wanting to kill as many John Bulls as they could. They ended up in New Orleans with General Andrew Jackson’s troops that were joined up by the
pirate Jean Lafitte’s cannoneer, a fellow named Dominique, and the Brits turned and ran back down the Mississippi.”

The old man clapped his hands. “I can only imagine how it felt for those Irish guys to see Brits on the run. It must have been a great day. General Jackson let some Irish boys out of the army down here in south Louisiana and they took up with Cajun girls and stayed. When Ol’ Andy Jackson got to be president, he rewarded some of his former Irish officers down here with huge tracts of useless land carved out of the Louisiana Purchase. But we made that bad land good. Growing sugar cane, trapping furry animals and all that was a lot easier than pulling potatoes out of the rocky ground back home. The Irish prospered here. Most of my Irish ancestors drank, whiskeyed away their land, gambled it away too. But they stayed on. That’s how your kids got those good Cajun looks and those wild Irish hearts.”

“I wish we had kept the Irish names like yours.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” The old man laughed. “Those names can be twisted up. I was so mischievous as a boy, my mom rarely called me ‘Seamus’. She used to call me ‘Shameonus’.”

Kate gave the ol’ gent a half hug. “It’s a lucky thing our children have your Irish genes, Seamus.”

“Oh, I’d not be thanking the Almighty for that. I know Renon himself has the stuff of some ancestors on the ol’ sod. The whole lot of them ended up doing prison time and fighting till their last breath against the British on the island. The two things they couldn’t abide was wrongdoing and weak whiskey. Their spirit was strong but it consumed all the good in them. Sometimes we have to accept that things are as they are, what they are, and there’s nothing we can do about those things. Ren never accepts anything, always believes he can change everything.”

Kate stood, kissed Seamus’s forehead, and said, “I know what you mean about Ren. The very thing that attracted me to him in the beginning was what made we want to get away from him in the end. That intensity.”

The old man nodded knowingly.

“You enjoy Sasha, Seamus. I’ll come by about dark and bring us all something to eat, okay?”

The old man stood. He put his arms on her shoulders. “I know you can’t be with my boy, Katie. But don’t ever be too far from him.”

Kate nodded.

Seamus found Sasha and Rags sitting under a pecan tree. Sasha had worn the dog out playing chase and Rags was taking a nap.

Her grandpa struggled a little bit to get situated on the ground. “Whew, when you’re my age, ya sit this low and you wonder if you’ll ever get up again.”

Sasha giggled. “Grandman, last year you told me something about this tree and I forgot what you told me.”

“Hell… err, I mean heck.”

“Hell’s okay, Grandman. You can say ‘hell’. But I sure don’t want to go there.”

“Oh, there’s no such thing as hell, Sash. But what I was saying is I don’t know what I told you about the tree. Probably, I told you to watch out for the pecan trees every year. They’re the only trees around here the weather can’t fool. A lot of trees, bushes and flowers get fooled every year by early warm weather – they get new growth and then a big freeze comes and ruins everything. You can trust a pecan tree. When a pecan tree sprouts new leaves, spring is finally here, and not a minute before.”

“That’s good. I like to talk to you, Grandman. I’ll remember to trust pecan trees. But I don’t know exactly what trust means so I sure don’t know what I can trust.”

“Trust is like believing in something. What you believe in. It means the same thing practically.”

“I sure as hell, err heck, don’t believe in or trust this Easter Bunny business any more. I can tell you that.”

“Why, dear?”

“’Cause it doesn’t make any sense. You know… you know… a bunny that brings dyed eggs and hides them in the flower beds around the house. Really!”

The old man smiled.

“Maybe an Easter Chicken, huh, Grandman? That would make more sense, huh? At least it would explain where the eggs come from. I betcha I’m gonna hear a lot of stuff in my life that won’t make sense. Is that the stuff you can’t believe – the stuff that makes no sense?”

“I think that’s a good rule. If something doesn’t make sense to you, then it makes no sense for you to believe in it, Sasha.”

“Does hell make sense? You said there’s no hell. I know a man who lives by our house. He talks about hell all the time.”

“Hell makes no sense. Not if you believe in my God, Sasha. My God is all powerful and all loving and would never create a place like hell.”

“You have your own God?”

“Sure. So do you. You ever look at the stars at night? Think of God like you think of the stars. They are all alike and all different too. There’s billions of stars and billions of Gods, but they are the same, all one, all the same thing. God is like the stars. There’s a God for everyone. And it’s the same God. You will understand one day. This will make sense one day.”

“That’s great. Now I have my own God, Grandman?”

“You sure do. At night when you are in bed, close your eyes and you can talk to your God in your head. It will be just you and your God. You can talk to your God during the day too, anytime you want.”

“Will God answer me?”

“Sure. In a way. Maybe not with a voice you hear, but with signs you will see.”

“Is God like a man… like an old, old man or something?”

“I don’t think so, Sasha. I think God’s probably more like a young woman. Something like you. I think girls are better than boys, Sash, and women are better than men. That’s one of the things I think I learned in life. The most important thing that happens in the whole world is giving birth and nurturing young. It’s only females who God lets do those important things. If God
thought men were equal to women, they would be able to do those things too. My God is a woman.”

“So, if girls are better than boys, that means I should be the boss of Jake and Shelby, right? Can I tell them Grandman made me the boss of them? I can, huh?”

The old man laughed. “No, Sash. It’s not about like being the boss of anyone. But don’t ever let anyone tell you that because you are a girl that you are not as good as any boy anywhere, because you are as good, probably better.”

“It’s true, Grandman, really true that nobody, not even bad people… nobody goes to hell?”

“There is no hell, Sasha. It’s just a place preachers made up to scare people into getting them to act the way they want them to act. God is all loving and all powerful. No God with all the power in the universe who is all loving would allow anyone to spend eternity in this place some people call hell. When we die, the same thing happens to all of us. Don’t ever be afraid of God sending you to hell. When your time is over here, your God is going to bring you to be with God forever. You will be with me again. Maybe in heaven we will sit under a pecan tree and wait for spring together. Maybe I will be young and strong enough to run with you and ol’ Rags.”

“But my friend’s father said if we don’t go to church, we go to hell.”

“Sasha, do you know, there are people all over the world who never heard of any kind of church. They live in jungles and they live in peace. Don’t you think they go to heaven?”

Sasha appeared to be thinking. “Sometimes I don’t know what I can believe. I want to believe everything. But this hell thing makes me scared. The Easter Bunny having eggs makes no sense.”

The old man said, “The deal about the Easter Bunny and eggs came to this country with people who came from Germany or maybe it was the Dutch. I don’t know. It had something to do with the Catholic religion in one of those countries. It’s something people have done over and over and when people do something over and over it’s called a tradition.”

“It’s silly.”

“Come on, now, you have to admit to your old grandfather that hunting eggs was a lot of fun when you were little. Now that you are grown up, going to school and everything, you should let your mom keep dying eggs for you, and hiding them… until… until the year she asks you to help paint the eggs. Deal?”

“Deal.”

“You see, angel, there’s all kinds of things in life you are going to run into that don’t make sense… things like the Easter Bunny. And you are going to hear about some bad things like hell that make no sense. The trick in life is to believe in two things… things that make sense… and good things. Believe hard in the good things. Let others believe bad things if they want to. You believe in the good things.”

The old man slowly got up and motioned Sasha to stay put. He walked into the house through a screened door on the porch. When he returned, he was carrying two wrapped packages. The little girl beamed and tore open the first, an antique wicker basket.

“This was my Easter basket when I was a little boy. My mother made it from palm fronds that fell in the drive out front. I guess this is why I want you to let your mom hide eggs for a few more years. I want you to hunt for them and then put them in your old grandpa’s basket. Maybe one day, you’ll give this basket to one of your kids, eh?”

Sasha gave the old man a tight hug. “Can I put Disco Duck in it during the day? He’s my favorite stuffed animal. Disco Duck sleeps with me at night. I can carry him in the basket during the day.”

The old man nodded as he took the second gift and began to slowly unwrap it himself. “This one is fragile, Sash. I want you to be careful with it.” As the gift wrapping fell to the ground, a ball of tissue still covered the gift. He let her separate the layers of tissue.

A highly varnished wooden sculpture lay in Sasha’s hands. It was a delicate, detailed carving of Christ rising, ascending intact, without wounds or other evidence of torture.

“This is rare, darling. It’s very old and really rare. All Christian religions have lots of drawings, paintings, and sculptures of Jesus Christ suffering on the cross. It’s rare to find something showing Jesus Christ rising from the dead with no wounds. Today, Easter, is called Resurrection Sunday in many places in the world. This is the day we remember Jesus rising from the dead. This is an important thing – that Jesus rose again.”

“Unhuh,” Sasha said.

“I want you to always remember that no matter how bad things might seem in life, you have the strength to rise again. Whenever you feel you’ve been knocked down, always remember you can rise again. Remember this. I hope you keep this statue with you always to remind you that he rose from the dead and we can rise from bad times.”

“I will remember. And… and let’s see… what else I gotta remember. I gotta remember to let Mom hide Easter eggs… and what… what else? Oh yeah, I remember. Remember there is no hell. And remember to believe in the good things. Remember to believe in things that make sense.”

“And, sweetheart, remember the pecan tree will tell you when it’s spring.” The old man tussled her hair. “And remember your grandpa always has the chocolate ice cream you love. Want some?”