The Father Pat Stories Read online

  The father Pat Stories

  Patrick Gossage

  The father Pat Stories

  A Good Man’s Adventures with God, Women,

  Politics, the World, the Flesh and Even the Devil

  Patrick Gossage

  Copyright © Patrick Gossage 1997

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Simon & Pierre Publishing Company Ltd. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Reprography Collective.

  Simon & Pierre

  A Member of the Dundurn Group

  Publisher: Anthony Hawke

  Editor: Nigel Wood

  Designer: Sebastian Vasile

  Printer: Best Book Manufacturers

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Gossage, Patrick

  The Father Pat Stories

  ISBN 0-88924-275-5

  I. Title

  PS8563.083694F37 1997 C813.54 C97-990064-3

  PR9199.3.G67F37 1997

  1 2 3 4 5 NW 01 00 99 98 97

  The publisher wishes to acknowledge the generous assistance of the Canada Council, the Book Publishing Industry Development Program of the Department of Canadian Heritage, and the Ontario Arts Council.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Printed on recycled paper.

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  Contents

  Preface

  The Canoe Perspective

  Paddy, Deirdre and the Dump

  A Little Late Redemption

  A Threat to the Prime Minister

  Thanksgiving

  Three Women

  The Ridgewood Mall Miracle

  The Devices and Desires of Our Own Hearts

  Epilogue

  Preface

  Nothing can cure the soul but the senses,

  just as nothing can cure the sense but the soul.

  Oscar Wilde

  MY FATHER, A man marked by his years away from home serving his country in the Second World War, once told me that sex (or women), politics and religion were topics banished from mess room conversation in the army. Too controversial, too liable to heat up divisive emotions among men bonded in a common cause. Whether or not this was true, the same subjects were more or less banished from dinner table conversation in my family while I was struggling to come of age of in the fifties, effectively banished too from much intelligent scrutiny in the environment in which we were all supposed to grow up.

  So it’s only appropriate that my first foray into fiction should be about all three — or four subjects, depending on how you want to count — and the adventures of an Anglican priest trying to cope with a world in which sex, women and politics have become the common currency, and religion, which was supposed to provide the framework, the blueprint by which we could all cope, is definitely not. Any relationship between the soul and the senses is, in fact, moot since the soul is assumed to be an artifact of another age entirely. I don’t believe it is.

  The Father Pat Stories are a series of yarns about a good man, and therefore, of necessity, about his friendships and expressions of different kinds of love and the solitude of contemplating life from another perspective. I realize even the notion of a good person is vaguely gooey, and a good man of God potentially even more sticky in this era of some very bad priests and sometimes frightening television evangelism. And the premise that a Father Pat might actually go well beyond administering the holy mysteries and actually attract to him people in need of help, encouragement and advice may not mesh with much current reality. But I did know priests like Father Pat when I was growing up, and I did attend seminary for a year. So, while I know better than most how much of the western world is lost to traditional Christianity or to anything but the most blatant spiritual concerns, I hope my very human Father Pat could, perhaps even does exist as a contemporary witness both to applied and relevant faith, and to good men of any faith.

  I myself was brought up an Anglican, and whether you are Church of England, Anglican or Episcopal or know these various labels, you will recognize in Father Pat that middle of the road, compliant Protestantism that retains much of its Catholic heritage, ceremony, and historic depth. Father Pat is non denominational in his behaviour, but by convenience is therefore a priest in and of the church of my upbringing.

  I hope all readers who have thought about religion of any stripe at all, or who have a developed moral sense and know the location where the soul meets the senses, will find in him the contradictions, pain and occasional triumphs any good person must experience in this trackless contemporary world.

  This book is dedicated to my family, to my wife, daughter and stepson, two brothers, and mother who are justifiably concerned about my plowing up for public view a field cultivated, often in secrecy, over a now longish lifetime.

  PG

  King City, Ontario

  Maui, Hawaii and Pine, Colorado 1994-6

  The Canoe Perspective

  A COOL MORNING IN early spring. White Lake was deserted, a motionless sheet of shimmering silver, ringed by a young forest just awakening. The low sun refracted off the water into Father Pat Cheyne’s unshaven face each time his paddle entered the liquid mirror, as he pulled and turned the blade along the gunwale of his old red cedar strip canoe. Pat squinted down at this brilliant display, then just before starting the next stroke, paused the paddle horizontally and let a few drops of water cascade off the blade, joining the end of the paddle with the lake in a cascade of light.

  Tuesday. The middle-aged Anglican priest was taking a day off after an intense week, and had driven up alone from Ridgewood to the family cottage the night before with his dog, Paddy, who was braced in the front of the canoe, sniffing the wind, question mark tail stiffly at attention. Father Pat was paddling from a kneeling position. The position was not an unfamiliar one, but the craft’s cedar ribs, clenched to its thin floor slats by a thousand tiny copper nails, dug into his knees. The lonely discomfort reminded the priest of Saint Francis of Assisi in his mountain retreat where he too meditated in nature for hours, kneeling deliberately on the hard stony ground. The lake-dotted northern forest was not mountainous Umbria, and Father Pat was anything but disengaged from the world. But he shared with St. Francis an unfashionable awe for the natural order and lack of pretension more suitable to the monastic spiritualism of Assisi than to the sanctified materialism of urban North America. The slightly pudgy priest was in bare feet that cool morning, not a pretty sight. But a devout young Pat Cheyne refused to wear shoes at the cottage, secretly emulating Christ who he imagined suffering the same stubbed toes and gashed soles on the stony paths of Galilee.

  His overall attitude to possessions did have a flavour of denial. The only object Father Pat would go to any lengths to preserve was this worn red canoe he had been given as a boy. Certainly not the watch he was wearing — the cheapest digital available from a discount store, or anything else he owned. As a boy, Pat had turned to th
e church and to the connected ritual of solitary canoeing because he felt apart, and wanted to show he was apart from his parent’s summer life — which he considered shallow, indulgent, even callous pursuits he was able to observe most closely, day after day, during family holidays.

  Father Pat savoured those deciding years as he edged along the shore. They were the immediate post-war years when his dashing father, Captain Murray Cheyne — jet black hair slicked back severely — was home from serving “overseas”. He bought for his young family — his wife Grace, Pat and his younger brother Peter — the ramshackle white frame cottage flatly called Whitehaven on the same lake he had come to as a noisy adolescent. The row of forty or so irregularly-spaced cottages was built in the twenties by a like-minded group of city businessmen. The community, called Sutton Beach, included Rockdale, the imposing stone and timbered summer house owned by the Seaforths, rich city neighbours of Pat’s father. They had a rambunctious son Gus about the same age as Murray, and a daughter Violet, a year younger. They invited Murray up as a boy and introduced him to the lake. They were horrified when eventually Murray, a “merchant’s son”, took a fancy to Violet and started disappearing for hours on end with her down the lake in their canoe.

  Now the master of Whitehaven, Murray Cheyne claimed loudly to know the lake’s every shoal and rock. To have won every cup in the annual regatta on the lake which included acclaimed victories in the most muscular of canoe sports, “tilting,” a sort of medieval jousting where opponents stand precariously on the gunwales of two canoes maneuvered by strong sternsmen, and try and knock each other into the water with boxing gloves on the end of long poles. A constant stream of hard drinking guests — mostly veterans like himself, including Gus Seaforth, would lounge on Whitehaven’s broad screened-in verandah and roar with mirth as the Captain’s spirited conversation reached its usual climax with a hooting rendition of how as a twenty-year-old “on this very lake” he had tried to make love to Violet in a canoe. “The quintessential Canadian experience — but I failed … that time … all a question of a shrinking Violet!” he would declaim with a knowing wink as his wife Grace ran for refuge in the kitchen.

  On one such night, as darkness slowly gathered over the lake, an annoyed and prudish Pat, now thirteen, tiptoed to the dock and launched his beloved cedar strip canoe. Boisterous and hard boiled as his newly-discovered father was, he had presented Pat with the red canoe on his ninth birthday.

  “Maybe this’ll make a man of you,” Murray had said as he showed Pat the gift lazily floating by the dock. But it didn’t — or at least not in the way Murray Cheyne intended.

  Pat remembered being considered by all a sensitive preteen. Scrawny for his age, given to moods, even sulking, he had been coddled by his mother during the long years of his father’s absence fighting the Germans. When his father finally blew back into their life, he was a stranger, and his mother, trying desperately to readjust to having a domineering man around again was rapidly becoming one too — at least to Pat. His summer chum Jeff was better adjusted to the changing temperatures of his own newly reunited family. His father seemed more thoughtful to Pat, and spent more time with Jeff than Murray Cheyne did with his sons.

  Pat took going to church very seriously — even in the summer. At the cottage, when the Cheynes broke the Sunday-to-church rule, Pat insisted that his mother drive him every Sunday morning to the tiny local Anglican church, a perfect stone replica of a British village chapel built by John Eldridge Booth, a lumber baron, in loving memory of his youngest son who had drowned in the lake. Pat sometimes thought about leaving this world in a similar way as he prayed beside his restless mother.

  That evening, as he often did when the insensitivity of adult behavior became intolerable, Pat set out in his canoe. Jeff would be playing an intense game of canasta with his parents, and his other summer chum, Stevey, a precocious tomboy given to shocking everyone by swearing publicly, would be curled up in a big chair reading a Nancy Drew book, preparing for her own life of anticipated romantic adventure. The three were a close summer trio, but while Pat found their company infinitely preferable to being the quiet one in a rowdy family, he was painfully aware that they too already moved in their own spheres and that he was somehow apart from them. That the competitive nature of children coming into puberty was increasingly exclusive and excluding. Pat sensed that it was deeper than his virtual indifference to the sport of the moment, which that summer was golf. Stevey had a crush on the eighteen-year-old golf pro and was taking lessons almost every day.

  “Today he was helping me with my swing and put his arms around me from the back!” she gushed earlier that day. Pat thought she looked cute in her red shorts and neat white blouse. But at thirteen he could not fathom her early obsession with boys. It was a huge leap for him to relate her stirrings with the only real man-woman model he had — the mercurial relationship of his father and mother. Once he saw the neighbour’s stout nineteen-year-old daughter, appropriately named “Manny”, in the back of their tiny vegetable garden, her lips locked for an amazingly long time to those of the marina attendant. Pat was startled by moans and crouched behind some low tangled cedars to take in this rare, inexplicable scene. But, overall, he had little reason to anticipate the sexuality he wrestled with as a middle-aged man. At Church, the images that haunted him were of death, and the crucifixion, and the popular youth fiction, music and teen magazines he knew were wonderfully innocent. The closest Pat had come to being exposed to pornography was a photo of a nude woman looking blandly at the camera as she bent decorously to put her hand in a lake. He found it in his father’s night table in his dressing room under a pile of socks. He wondered why his father hid it there.

  “Well, Dad says I have a natural swing,” Jeff, the lankier of the three, opined as the three of them teed off for a round of golf following Stevey’s lesson. Pat swung three times before he connected ineffectively with the carefully teed up ball and the other two teased him mercilessly for the next nine holes.

  “You need bigger balls — maybe you wouldn’t miss them then,” Jeff poked, setting up Stevey.

  “Would he know what to do with them?” she shot back, pushing her straight black hair out of her eyes.

  The golf game was a truly horrible experience. More fun to go out alone and pick through the scrub bushes and rocks beside the fairways looking for lost balls and sell them to Dad for a nickel each. At least then, you’re accomplishing something, he thought as he nosed the canoe into the water.

  The laughter from the verandah of the Cheyne cottage faded as he paddled straight west out into the lake instead of staying close to the coast as his father called it. White Lake was exceptionally deep, with high rough rocky shores. It was elbow shaped and about ten miles long. The Suttton Beach community ringed the low, more pastoral east shoreline and was exposed to an almost clear five mile west-east blow on occasions when the lake, too, was moody. That night Pat quickly put more and more distance between himself and the shore with all its tangled relations and challenges. The boy tried to think of things “eternal”, and tried to recall encouraging passages from his much thumbed bible. Something about things of the flesh being temporal, and things of the spirit being eternal — but what were “things” of the spirit? Was this star drenched lake an experience of that kind? It was, he decided in a flash, and he started to drink in with his soul the now oily darkness of the lake and the stars close enough to touch. He was the only person on earth. It was like praying with your eyes open. The sensation was entirely new and Father Pat vividly remembered the exhilaration he felt, and the sequence that followed.

  A light breeze came up in the young Pat’s face, and the paddling became harder. One of the problems of being a very light boy trying to handle a craft that had no keel and barely glanced the water’s surface was that the slightest wind made the going very tough. Pat was going to have to turn back. He moved carefully to the exact centre of the canoe to give himself more leverage to bring the craft around. It was now be
ing blown sideways and it took all the strength he could muster with wide arcing strokes to get the canoe facing east so the wind was at his back and he wouldn’t have to fight it and keep it heading more or less home.

  The wind came up quickly and fiercely. Now he was kneeling bolt upright paddling madly. It was taking all he had to keep the bow even at a slight angle to prevent him being blown way down the shore. Pat’s heart was pounding. To be taken a half mile from home, to have to walk to the marina, and phone the community caretaker who had the only telephone on the beach to go and get his father to rescue him would be the ultimate humiliation. He could just hear his father: “Hey soldier, we gotta fatten you up if you’re going to take on this lake alone. No more evening canoe rides for you, skinny …”

  The thought drove him to greater effort. He was gaining on it, but he was being forced away from Whitehaven — there was nothing he could do about it. The shore was now mercifully close, and he realized he was at least a dozen cottages away from home, coming into a small point by a big cedar. With a sickening crunch, the light craft skidded up on a flat rock twenty feet off shore. Good-sized waves were now lashing the shoreline, and it would be impossible to paddle without the canoe being beaten against the rocks. Pat slumped forward in the darkness. How was he going to get the canoe back to his dock? He couldn’t paddle it, and he was too small and slight to pull it up on shore and carry it alone. There was nothing for it but to wade, swim and push the canoe along the beach keeping it from being dashed on the rocks. He knew the shoreline well. He could do it. He flopped into the dark water fully dressed, and the canoe floated off the rock.

  Halfway he rested on Jeff’s dock. He did not call up for help — it would have been easy for the two of them to carry the canoe back, and the good-hearted Jeff would have been happy to help out his friend. No, he would not ask. And, no, he was too proud to pull the canoe up and leave it there. It became Pat alone against nature which had been such a comfort to him such a short time ago. He had been very taken with the courage of Scott of the Antarctic in an old book of heroic engravings in the cottage. Now he was fighting a similar solitary battle. But he was starting to shiver as he waded and stumbled with the canoe in the rough water around Whitehaven’s point of land and saw figures on his dock.