The Father Pat Stories Read online

  “There he is! That you Pat? What in god’s name are you doing?” His father’s voice boomed across the water like a drill sergeant’s. “Want me to come out in the motor boat?” Pat caught the glint of a glass in his hand. His mother Grace was hanging on his arm, and Gus Seaforth had come down for the show as well.

  “No. Please. I’m fine,” Pat sputtered as he splashed across two huge rocks and swam the last few yards pulling the canoe by its painter with a free hand. “I’m fine. I don’t want to bother you.”

  “Well that’s a heck of a wind that came up and you had me and your mother worried sick, worried sick,” his father added for emphasis. “Poor show, old boy, poor show!”

  “Well I’m sorry I worried you sick,” Pat puffed as he pulled himself dripping on to the dock. He had been feeling that he had had a revelation as well as accomplishing something on his own in the last hour or so. But that was his concern, definitely not theirs. “I’d better go and change. My canoe’s alright if you’re worried about that.” And he turned and ran up to the house tears flooding his eyes.

  He slammed the door shut to his tiny upstairs room, and without turning on the light, shed his clothes in a pool of water, and buried himself in his pillow. He sobbed and sobbed. Nobody came to comfort him. Nobody would or wanted to share what had really happened — which to Pat for that time was everything. “Oh, leave him alone,” he heard his father saying to his mother. “It will teach him a lesson. I don’t know what’s the matter with that boy. Peter would never take off like that.” Indeed Peter was smugly sitting with a book enjoying the scene.

  The next morning broke clear and calm. The house was still. Pat crept by the open door to his parent’s front bedroom and could hear his father’s heavy breathing. He went out the side, making sure to hold the clicker so it wouldn’t make any noise as he carefully shut the screen door.

  His spirits rose as he skipped down the path through the cedars and on to the weathered dock still cool with dew to his bare feet. He looked at his beloved canoe overturned on the wharf. It had a long gash in the canvas. He hoped it wouldn’t leak — that would cause another fuss. A light mist was rising off the lake and low grey clouds were scudded by revealing orange tinged billows of white in the west and glimpses of blue and intermittent shots of brilliant morning sunlight streaked through the trees behind him. It would be a fine day. Pat righted the canoe, and positioned it on the roller at the end of the dock. He lifted the bow and pushed the craft delicately down until the stern broke the water, then let the canoe’s own weight carry it until its full sixteen feet slipped into the waiting lake with a satisfying splurck. Holding on to the painter he pulled the canoe silently around parallel to the side of the dock. Empty it rode on the water like a leaf, he thought. Grabbing his favourite paddle from the rack, he got in, kneeling gingerly on the ribs with his rump hooked on the front seat, positioning the boat stern first as he had been taught when paddling alone. Pushing off on the bottom with his paddle in the shallow water beside the dock, he immediately sensed a new and fuller freedom for now only the second time. Indeed he now knew he had the perfect vehicle for leaving his cares on shore.

  “Hear you got shipwrecked last night, you nut!” His friend Jeff was fishing off his dock as Pat rounded the point. News traveled fast in the small summer community.

  “No — I got back — by myself …” Pat said. Not worth explaining what really happened. Jeff, of all people, wouldn’t understand. He paddled faster. “See ya later.”

  Thirty-five years later, on a morning as full of mystery and promise, Father Pat’s paddle was still fueling his own peculiar theology. This morning brought a new consideration. Driving in, he had passed the cairn in the village marking the passage this way of the French explorer Samuel de Champlain in the seventeenth century. He now imagined the exhilaration, the sensation of unfettered freedom the coureurs de bois felt as they set out each season from the New France. Their grand birch bark canoes and their adventures on the continent-wide network of forest waterways Champlain first explored. Father Pat’s canoeing experiences may have yearly only lasted hours rather than months, but they contained the same elements of escape, non conformity and connection with totally different and deeper realities. The soul and the senses both satisfied as the paddle sang its own rhythmic song.

  The sheer continuity of the canoe on White Lake and thousands and thousands like it in the northern woodlands invariably seized Father Pat’s imagination as he glided on his familiar pre-breakfast water route south past the small public park into Indian Bay, west into the lake, under the overhanging cedar boughs of tiny Back Island and tight along the sheer pre-Cambrian cliffs of the undeveloped south shore to where the lake started to bend then straight east across the open water back to Whitehaven. No sudden high wind like the one that had so formed him as a thirteen-year-old. That morning the lake hosted elegantly the timeless act of a man skimming its surface in a canoe, barely marking the gloss of its finish, borrowing its support, being borne so perfectly, so gently on its achingly perfect luminescent surface. The lake was so still and reflected the shore and sky so immaculately that Father Pat felt he was dipping his paddle into the sky, that he was riding upside down on a magically inverted image of the rolling green of the shoreline and the intense blue of Heaven, posed simultaneously above and under him.

  He imagined Champlain, the deeply religious French nobleman crossing White Lake with native guides in a flotilla of birch bark canoes over three hundred and fifty years ago. Could Champlain not have been moved to awe by this meeting of heaven and earth, Pat wondered. And the natives themselves who had invented the canoe and paddled these lakes for countless thousands of years — surely their investment of spirituality into every living thing in the forests that walled their water routes was related to the canoeist’s unique perspective. The lake fully retained this power to move, to provide a numinous experience for anyone who ventured out in the water craft most perfectly engineered and created to travel its waters. Here I am again, Father Pat thought, celebrating the eternity of sky and lake.

  The Champlain cairn in the village had been put up by John Eldridge Booth whose company clear cut the area only a century before. The lumber baron had, at least, a sense of the history he was destroying, Pat thought. The huge pines that once glowered over the lake’s shores had been cut, squared, floated off to Montreal and shipped to England or south to the United States in the timber boom that swept millions and millions of acres of virgin northern forest to the ground in less than fifty years. Native encampments were replaced in a generation by Victorian summer houses with wide airy verandahs and cool paneled sitting rooms. The dark, foreboding forest glades that once guarded the interior were replaced by inviting patches of lawn, and cheery second growth birch, oak, elm, and cedar. Standing like military visitors regimentally straight in the more civilized woods, a few white pines struggled to reassert their dominance after their devastating rout. Alone, only the clear freshwater lake itself, gouged out by the receding glaciers hundreds of thousands of years ago, abided — unfazed and unchanged — its shape, depth and integrity intact, passively and patiently watching while the environment that contained it was, in a half minute of its aeons of existence, altered forever.

  In deference, Father Pat paddled so as to disturb the lake as little as possible. He had long ago mastered a J stroke that was almost as silent as the still sleeping cottage community. He was so much at one with the lake that he approached within a few feet of the lake’s permanent loon family before the ancient birds miraculously pushed the air from their feathers and dove free for minutes at a time, resurfacing a hundred yards ahead. That morning he was early enough to see the whole family of five ahead of him, loudly gossiping about that day’s fishing before they awkwardly flew off in two separate groups to different parts of the lake.

  Father Pat built a minor theology around the lake and his canoe. It was an unfailing reference point for his life, and became, in the end, a metaphor for his attempt to
keep problems on shore where he could observe them calmly with perspective — the canoe perspective — he liked to think. It was his soul’s own private source of serenity. It was his exclusive experience — to be shared with nobody else.

  By contrast, his summer friends Jeff and Stevey were among many of his generation who discovered more normal romantic uses of a canoe in an era before young people had access to automobiles for pubescent explorations. Jeff made the first awkward attempt. He dumped and had to swim back fully clothed with a canoe full of water after an awkward lunge at Stevey the summer after Pat’s near canoe wreck. Stevey’s cottage had the only real sand beach and swimming and gamboling about in the water became a daily event for the three chums. Jeff was unable to accept that Stevey found him gawky and was more interested in older men — like the golf pro. But he still harboured a secret lust for the compact young brunette. They were paddling decorously, her facing forward in the bow and he in the stern, when, overcome with desire he stumbled forward to grab her around her waist from behind. He was strongly pushed away — “What the shit are you doing?” Stevey yelled as Jeff flopped to the side of the canoe and overturned it. “It was better than a cold shower,” Jeff knowingly told Pat after the incident.

  Pat learnt early that for him romance and canoes don’t mix — with the same summer girl now fully matured a couple of years later. Pat was having, for those years, a serious fling with Stevey. For one memorable summer the intense sixteen-year old Pat suited Stevey’s needs. One particularly romantic moon-drenched evening he broke down and invited her on a paddle. He thought she should feel privileged to be the first human being to come on one of his intense evening canoe outings. He surmised that if she was interested in him, as she apparently was allowing him to kiss her exhaustingly nearly every day, then she too would perhaps sense the serenity he found between the lake and darkening sky. Serenity became a favourite word of his in those days — he heard two nuns on the bus to school one day talking about how serene their Mother Superior was. This vision of calm inner power appealed to him.

  Stevey was anything but serene. She talked on about the new golf pro — this one had not just put his arms around her from the back, but the “dick”, as she called him, had brushed his hands against her breasts. “He was so damned forward. He was trying to feel me up — you’d never do a thing like that, Pat … but he is cute,” she said wickedly. She talked about her boredom as a boarder in her new private school, about her period, and how awful she felt. Pat was finding his role of being a good listener in this setting difficult as her words seemed to shatter, even defile his treasured stillness.

  Pat could indeed feel something stirring as he looked down at her sitting facing him on the floor of the canoe, her legs nearly touching him, and her firm breasts showing nicely under a tight blue ribbed turtle neck. He had caught a forbidden peek at those breasts a year before while he was leaning over her applying sun tan lotion to her back and she had the straps of her bathing suit loosely down over her shoulders — a moment of a different sort. But obviously those yearnings were and must be separate from what he then felt were higher contemplation’s. They must be separate, he thought, because attractive as she was, she was definitely undoing the magic, shattering the spell Pat usually felt on his paddles. Pat swore to never ever take a woman in his canoe again.

  Father Pat liked to think with a smile, as he had more seriously as a boy, of the absurdity and incongruity of making love in a canoe — the enormous technical hurdles that would have to be overcome for a successful horizontal clinch and penetration. The missionary position was the only one Pat knew of as a boy, and even that only theoretically. How could two people even fit under the centre thwart — the narrow bar that spanned the middle of the canoe. Wouldn’t they get hopelessly wedged, even immobilized? What a fate! Canoes were by nature highly unstable and tippy — moving around in one had to be accomplished with the greatest care or in the water you’d be. The first rule never stand up in a canoe had been drummed into him by his father when he was first allowed to paddle out alone. How could you get up, contemplate your sweetheart lying on the bottom of the canoe and position yourself over her? You would have to keep your hands on the gunwales for stability as you carefully lowered yourself on to the promised land. How could you? It would be like doing a pushup from the edges into a pit a couple of feet deep! Even if you managed to get on top of your quarry wedged under the gunwale, legs apart and hanging awkwardly over the sides, how could you safely roll about to make it work?

  Pat knew lovemaking required a lot of rolling about — from time to time he heard the squeaks and thumpings from his parent’s room. Stevey had knowingly assured him that was what was happening. Pat could hardly contemplate such a thing in the canoe. Grunting, panting, puffing and noisily flopping about seemed necessary accompaniments of lovemaking. How disgusting in a sophisticated craft engineered by the natives centuries before for balance and silence, a craft which was the perfect marriage of form and function, of light weight and strength.

  Father Pat paused and let the canoe float on in absolute silence. He remembered thinking for a second with Stevey that night of the logistics of even trying to kiss her. He could still see her as she tucked her carefully tanned legs under her and babbled on. Not only couldn’t be done, but shouldn’t be done. How could his father call lovemaking in a canoe a “quintessential” experience? It seemed even more ridiculous when he thought of the faded photo of his dad and Violet, arm in arm in their Victorian bathing costumes. Imagine wrestling Violet out of her elaborate bloomers! Ugh!

  “Stevey, have you ever kissed in a canoe?” Pat heard himself asking her.

  “Yeah, once, with the old golf pro. In our canoe,” she said “It was nice and he was at least not a fumbling idiot like Jeff. He was where you are, looking down at me, and he said, ‘hey, let’s kiss’ and I came to him on my knees. So there we were both on our knees! It was pretty sexy. Yeah.” and she looked at him curiously. But Pat didn’t bite.

  “I don’t know, I don’t think canoes were made for that, if you know what I mean,” Pat said.

  “No I don’t,” Stevey answered coldly and turned away to look towards shore.

  Pat recalled deciding then that his moments on the lake would remain his and his alone for all time. He knew that even from Stevey, despite the physical thrill he felt kissing her, he could get no real response for what was at the centre of his caring. “Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also,” was the biblical admonition Pat thought of most often observing the behaviour of others caught up in acquiring and preening and obsessing with the trivia of life. The thirteen-year-old Pat knew he got an early glimpse of where his treasure was the night when the wind came up, and the experiences in the years that intervened continued to confirm his belief.

  When Pat went to university, he continued to keep his spiritual life to himself through a more mature but equally unsuccessful affair with a young woman, Priscilla, who he met at church. Her family did not have a cottage, and off-season, when Sutton Beach was deserted, he would secretly bring her to sit on the dock in the cool of autumn and talk and talk and talk. But the canoe, like the house, would be put away, virtuously resting for the next season.

  Father Pat’s fragile personality remained very much a product of that shimmering liquid distance between canoe and shore, his ability to survive very much based on the ability he mastered to cope with and exploit solitude. Like many effective leaders and other simply good people, he learnt to give much to others who never knew how little of his real self was being or could be offered. Perhaps, Father Pat would think, it was a rule of life that to give much to others your emotional and spiritual reserves had to be more carefully hoarded and guarded. Later when Father Pat ran for Parliament and became a member under the mysterious and charismatic Prime Minister (himself a considerable canoeist), he advanced such a theory to explain that leader’s alchemic combination of distance and engagement in a regular column he wrote to his constituents in
the weekly paper. He sent it to the PM, and it was returned with an impenetrable marginal scratch “I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about!” Little did any of the dozens of people that Father Pat touched and actually helped in concrete ways over a lifetime know either or suspect what gave the priest strength. It was there to be drawn down, like a spiritual credit with no spending limit.

  FATHER PAT LET the canoe skim dangerously close to a rocky overhang. Looking down, he could see through the transparent water the sheer granite fall away a good thirty feet below the surface. He looked over to the row of cottages. Most would remain abandoned and unopened until the traditional 24th of May long weekend. Alone with their memories like me, Father Pat thought.

  He let his memory dwell on his two chums of thirty-five years ago — how hard it seemed now to see them as they really were. And he wondered if he really knew the two who had since replaced them, Terry, his friend from seminary, and Deirdre Donaldson, a younger unmarried journalist who he had known as a cub reporter at his first parish, then as a good political reporter, source and friend when he was a Member in Ottawa and who now, back in the city he felt very close to indeed. The three had become inseparable in the last few years. They had just been through a ridiculous adventure trying to foil a plot to impose a mega dump on ex-urban Ridgewood. Today was Father Pat’s escape from that strange skullduggery. How different and more complex Deirdre was from Stevey, he thought. And his relationship with Deirdre, the difference between adolescent curiosity and mature respect. Or was it really just a more mature curiosity? He had to admit that he would love to kiss Deirdre, and it would be for the first time just as it had been with Stevey that summer long ago. And Terry, cynical, playful, creative. Apparently totally self-confident. Always up for anything. What a contrast to the lanky, awkward Jeff. Ah, there is a connection, Pat thought. Both would do anything for him. But when you get down to it, he concluded as he neared Sutton Beach, we don’t really know each other that well. No, he thought. Am I really that much closer to Deirdre and Terry than I was to Jeff and Stevey? Could I really tell them the way I really feel? No, probably not. That’s just the way it is.