“Do I know you?” asked Scanlon in a hoarse voice.
Leonard froze. “I help you sometimes, Father. I’m Kevin.”
“What were you doing there?”
“It’s Advent. I lit the candles as you asked.”
“I don’t see their light.”
“In the Rectory. These are your private quarters. You were asleep. I came to tell you I was leaving.”
Leonard’s eyes never left the old man, as he pushed the drawer shut with his leg. It stuck half way again.
“Won’t you sit with me?”
“I only have a few minutes more. My parents will be worried.”
He eased onto the edge of the old man’s bed, beside his knees.
Scanlon’s eyes gleamed with tears. His fingers felt hot against the back of Leonard’s hand. “I’m dying, Kevin. I have no one.”
“You have God.”
“Small consolation now. I pray, but I don’t hear that echo I used to. It was a whisper that I knew was Him. I knew it as I know you now.” Scanlon rolled on to his back and smiled at him. “You were always my favourite. I remember watching you fly down the ice with the puck, at the Memorial Arena. You played centre.”
“Left wing. Leonard Jimmy played centre.”
“Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in years. Leonard Jimmy. He’d be about 18 now.”
“The NHL scouts are chasing him. Don’t think it will amount to much.”
“You’ve got to have hope, Kevin. He’s our good friend. He could dance with the puck like no one else.”
“They called him the next Ray Ferraro.”
“Most goals in a single season, I hear.”
“Killer wrist shot.”
“I begged his mother to enroll him in figure skating with Jerry Knox. I paid for those lessons.”
“You did?” Leonard’s mother had never mentioned that Scanlon had paid for his figure skating.
“After his father died, I took him under my wing. He is a special boy.” He looked out the window at the lights of the building opposite. “Is he in the Rectory?”
“Leonard? He went home.”
“I’m sorry, Kevin. All this talk of Leonard, when you’ve been so kind to me.” His hand came to rest on Leonard’s thigh.
“I have to be going, Father. My parents —”
“I can drive you home, Kevin. I’ll call your parents. Here tell me about your plans over Christmas.”
The nurse came in. Visiting hours were over.
Leonard’s arms and legs felt impossibly heavy. He struggled to stand up. “I have to go, sir.”
“I’m dying, Kevin. Please stay.” Leonard stepped back and Scanlon raked the nurse with a frightened look. His voice rose. “Tell him I’m dying, Sister Eva. He has to stay. He has to.”
“Mister Scanlon, it’s alright. You get a little agitated at night. It’s normal.”
Scanlon started to wail and beat the mattress with his hands. “They’ve forsaken me. All of them. Leonard, Brian, Michael, Paul — now Kevin. Everything I did for them. Everything I did. I’m alone.”
The nurse looked at Leonard. “Please go”
Leonard called his mother late the next morning, when he knew she would have finished her bath and made herself up for a suitor that never came.
“Do you have a nice hotel?” she asked.
“I’m sleeping in the car. On a back street.”
“Why don’t you get a hotel?”
He explained that he had sixty dollars left until his disability cheque came next week, enough to get the car most of the way home with what gas he still had in the tank. He lied that he was eating the groceries he’d bought for her.
“The mushroom soup, too?”
“It’s good on the crispbread.”
He had the page from Scanlon’s notebook in his hand. March 12th, 1994. Scanlon had been in prison for four years. He’d confessed everything to the prison chaplain. There were eight names. Brian, Michael, Paul, Grant, Mark, Robert, Richard and Kevin. Leonard’s name wasn’t there, but his memory was. He knew three of the boys. They’d all gone to school at St. Mary’s and played hockey with him from Junior Pee Wee to the Cranbrook Colts. Scanlon had written below their names God has forgiven me for them.
“After dad died, why didn’t you know what was going on?” He’d blurted out the question without thinking. “I’m sorry.”
She wheezed gently. “You can’t help it, everything that happened to you. He was a priest. He was nice to you, you know? I’d lost my husband. And I liked Valium quite a bit.”
“You could’ve stopped taking it.”
Her silence went on so long, Leonard watched a traffic light turn from red to green.
“Roger is coming for Christmas,” she finally said. “He’s a warrant officer now.”
Leonard folded up the page from Scanlon’s notebook into a square no bigger than a postage stamp and stuffed it deep in his coat pocket. Scanlon was seated at the window. His breakfast tray sat untouched beside him. The curtain between Scanlon’s half of the small room and Mr. Dhillon’s had been pulled back and the blanket and sheet on the younger man’s bed had been neatly folded over to one side as if Mr. Dhillon had stepped out for a moment.
“Leonard, isn’t it?” asked Scanlon, though he hadn’t turned to look at him. “I saw your reflection in the window. You were here two days ago. I asked the nurse to let me know if any visitors had signed my journal. There was just you. I don’t think we will ever forget each other.
“Mister Dhillon died last night.”
“Is that why you haven’t eaten?”
“I haven’t eaten because the food here is worse than prison.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I gave him last rites.”
“Who?”
“The man in the bed —” He shook his hand at the empty bed.
“Dhillon.”
“He started to breath so terribly. To gasp. The internist — confound I forget his name — the short one with the beard at the Cranbrook Hospital — what’s his name?”
Leonard shook his head.
“He called it agonal breathing. And then the choking. The death rattle. Because saliva accumulates in the throat. He couldn’t swallow anymore. When patients breathed like that, they’d call me — Father Scanlon.”
“Dhillon wasn’t Catholic.”
“It was four in the morning. There was no one else. Do you know what that means, Leonard? You’re near death and you know it. You know it in your heart and you’re afraid. You look around your room for a kind face and there’s no one else. Your family has abandoned you. Or you have no family. All your friends are long dead. I was the last person sixty-four people in the Extended Care facility ever saw. It’s in my notebook, their names. All of them.
“I said what I could remember. To Dhillon. Of the Last Rites.”
“I remember the second Sunday of Advent in 1978. December 10th. It was minus sixteen.”
“Oh?”
“My father had been dead for three months.”
“Heart attack?”
“I told you two days ago. Cancer.”
“I helped you, Leonard.”
“You told my mother what I needed was a caring hand and structure. You took me to my hockey practices and my games. Three four times a week. Friday nights some of the other boys and I came over to the Rectory and you bought us pizza. Weekends you took us to Jimsmith Lake to skate and play hockey. The beginning of November, you drove me all the way to Fernie, because there was a 50% sale on a pair of Bauer Junior Supreme skates. My toes bled in my old ones. They were too small. Afterwards in your car I put on the new skates. I was so happy. My father would never have done that. Let him get a paper route and get his own skates, he’d say. You patted me on the head. Let’s go try those skates, you said. You drove to Tie Lake just off the highway and we skated for an hour. In the car, you patted me on my leg. Your hand stayed for a little longer than usual and you said, ‘How would like to help me in the church. You can be my new acolyte.’ How could I say no? My father was dead.”
2 Comments
Powerful stuff! A thoughtful perspective on a challenging topic.
Really love this story! It took me back to the Catholic school I went to as a kid, the priest there… oh man!