"My Lord,
Every day, every minute of my life I have served You. I have never doubted. In all my life I have followed Your law. In return, You have answered my prayers.
Today I implore You, in Your kindness, to spare young Joe Abbott. His family is poor. He is their only consolation.
Of course his father Tim drinks a bit too much, a bit too often. He gets angry when he does so but that is only the addiction talking. He is a slave, my Lord, a slave of alcohol.
You always had a good ear for the slaves.
His mother Sophie believes in You. You know how few people truly believe in You. Sophie, like me, has never doubted. For her my Lord, for her, I implore You, spare the life of her young son. Spare the life of Joe Abbott".
The priest was kneeling in his bedroom. He should not have been praying here. He should have gone to the Lord's house, the adjacent church. But this was the core of winter, the church was freezing and dark. There was no money to pay for the heating. There was no money to pay for the light. There was not even enough money to replace the candles.
Where he was praying, he kept telling himself, did not really matter. He knew that if he prayed from the bottom of a pure heart, the Lord would hear him. Besides, his bedroom was a decent place. From the praying chair he looked around him.
With its walls painted in a uniform brown, its dark stone floor, its unique window, the bedroom was monastic. The only luxury was a small wooden bedside table, his share of their mother's inheritance. He had covered the fine marquetry with a long, pale green cotton cloth. On it was a boxwood sprig and a silver dish of holy water which surface was shivering softly.
The bedroom rested in complete silence, the sound of the main road muffled by the distance and the almost closed window. A mural lamp, its glass shade deafened with a dark cloth, provided a weak gleam, leaving most of the room in the dark.
This, he felt, was appropriate for prayer. This... bareness, this nakedness, this soft silence. There was nothing to distract him from his own thoughts, all turned towards the Lord. Sometimes, on nights like this, he could feel His breath entering the room.
There was a scratching noise behind him. The cat was getting hungry. This spoiled the serenity of the moment. Why did the animal always have to be hungry at the wrong moment, right now, during his evening prayers? With the day over, his poor and sick all in bed, any preparation for the mass done, his mind was at peace, his soul rested and unhindered, this was the best moment. His prayers were always the purest and the strongest at night.
He had had the cat for many years. It used to belong to his sister. One day, just after leaving her husband, she had brought it to the priory. "This is only temporary", she had said. "I am between houses at the moment, I can't carry her around, the poor thing is stressed enough as it is. Can you keep her for a few weeks? I'll have her back as soon as I can."
She never came back. A few weeks later she had met a man from Rio, fallen in love, left her job and taken the first plane for Brazil where she had "started on a new life". "What new life?" he thought. "The Lord gives us one life. Only one. No matter how often it breaks, how often we mend it, it is always the same life."
He didn't approve of her sister. For what he knew of them, he didn't approve of Brazilians either. He didn't approve of divorces, or pets. They were nothing but self-indulgence and distraction.
He hadn't seen her in twelve years. The cat was getting old. So was he. Soon it would die.
The scratching noise came back, a bit louder, a bit longer. The priest sighed. Was it only him, or did all this scratching start a bit earlier every day too? The quicker he responded, the more he gave it, the greedier the animal became. It seemed insatiable.
"Perhaps I should just wait. Let it scratch. Feed it every day at exactly the same time and ignore its little theatre. Perhaps that would teach it discipline."
But he could not pray with the scratching noise. There was no way around it: for the sake of young Joe Abbott, he had to feed the beast.
The priest winced as he stood up. His joints were hurting. This was why he prayed from home these days. Poor empty churches were no good for arthritis. He started towards the kitchen, his walk heavy with age, his feet dragging a bit, the thick rubber sole of his black shoes snapping on the floor joints. He hoped he had a tin left of that chicken liver cat food the grocer gave him. If not, the cat and him would have to share his diner: two slices of cured ham, some beans and a salad. Neither of them could digest bread any more.
As he was opening the tin, the thought of Joe Abbott caught up with him. What a nice kid he was. It had pained the priest, tonight, to see his poor, ten-year-old body sink into sickness, his tanned, smooth skin getting pale and gritty, his thick slick black shiny hair becoming thin and dry like withered weed. Joe had not been able to get up. Tuberculosis was ripping his chest, fever was shaking his body and putting a constant wet brightness in his black eyes. Young Joe was looking somewhere else already, seeing other things. He had become a ghost even for his mother. She looked so scared all the time, so vulnerable. She couldn't eat. She was so thin, as if about to snap.
The cat was rubbing madly against his leg: "Yeah yeah yeah, it's coming you old fool. Covering my trousers with your hair will never bring it quicker, you know. Don't you know that? Don't you learn anything?"
"Talking to it doesn't make any difference either", he thought, as he was walking back to his bedroom. "The cat doesn't understand me. Or does not believe me."
He played for a moment with this idea. "Maybe it knows, after all. Maybe rubbing itself against my leg makes it feel good. Maybe it knows how annoying I find it and does it for that precise reason."
They had been living with each other for all these years, and yet they could not possibly understand each other. "We are just living side my side", he thought, "each of us isolated in our own perception of the world."
Such was the way of life. Take young Abbot: he was watching him wither, fade from this world, step into the other. "I am a priest, I am supposed to know about all this, about death, the transition of death, life after death. Yet I cannot, not one single second, understand what he is going through."
There was no communicating, with anybody, but the Lord. There was only prayer. Prayer worked. He had seen evidence of it, repeatedly. How many times had he prayed for the sick and seen then rise again? Ten times maybe, maybe more?
When the telephone rang ten minutes later, the priest had returned to his duties. His body was arched against the kneeling chair, his heavy breathing covering any other noise in the bedroom. The ring startled him. He got up, walked around the bed, picked the receiver. He sat heavily on the bed, letting all his body go. He brought the receiver to his hear, knowing already.
Tim Abbott's voice was drowned in tears. He was calling to inform the priest that his son had passed away.
As the priest hung up, the cat started scratching again. Its food bowl was empty. It was looking at the priest. There was expectation in its eyes.
The priest picked it in his arms, opened the back door and put it gently outside.
The cat jumped on the window sill and started waiting.
Every day, every minute of my life I have served You. I have never doubted. In all my life I have followed Your law. In return, You have answered my prayers.
Today I implore You, in Your kindness, to spare young Joe Abbott. His family is poor. He is their only consolation.
Of course his father Tim drinks a bit too much, a bit too often. He gets angry when he does so but that is only the addiction talking. He is a slave, my Lord, a slave of alcohol.
You always had a good ear for the slaves.
His mother Sophie believes in You. You know how few people truly believe in You. Sophie, like me, has never doubted. For her my Lord, for her, I implore You, spare the life of her young son. Spare the life of Joe Abbott".
The priest was kneeling in his bedroom. He should not have been praying here. He should have gone to the Lord's house, the adjacent church. But this was the core of winter, the church was freezing and dark. There was no money to pay for the heating. There was no money to pay for the light. There was not even enough money to replace the candles.
Where he was praying, he kept telling himself, did not really matter. He knew that if he prayed from the bottom of a pure heart, the Lord would hear him. Besides, his bedroom was a decent place. From the praying chair he looked around him.
With its walls painted in a uniform brown, its dark stone floor, its unique window, the bedroom was monastic. The only luxury was a small wooden bedside table, his share of their mother's inheritance. He had covered the fine marquetry with a long, pale green cotton cloth. On it was a boxwood sprig and a silver dish of holy water which surface was shivering softly.
The bedroom rested in complete silence, the sound of the main road muffled by the distance and the almost closed window. A mural lamp, its glass shade deafened with a dark cloth, provided a weak gleam, leaving most of the room in the dark.
This, he felt, was appropriate for prayer. This... bareness, this nakedness, this soft silence. There was nothing to distract him from his own thoughts, all turned towards the Lord. Sometimes, on nights like this, he could feel His breath entering the room.
There was a scratching noise behind him. The cat was getting hungry. This spoiled the serenity of the moment. Why did the animal always have to be hungry at the wrong moment, right now, during his evening prayers? With the day over, his poor and sick all in bed, any preparation for the mass done, his mind was at peace, his soul rested and unhindered, this was the best moment. His prayers were always the purest and the strongest at night.
He had had the cat for many years. It used to belong to his sister. One day, just after leaving her husband, she had brought it to the priory. "This is only temporary", she had said. "I am between houses at the moment, I can't carry her around, the poor thing is stressed enough as it is. Can you keep her for a few weeks? I'll have her back as soon as I can."
She never came back. A few weeks later she had met a man from Rio, fallen in love, left her job and taken the first plane for Brazil where she had "started on a new life". "What new life?" he thought. "The Lord gives us one life. Only one. No matter how often it breaks, how often we mend it, it is always the same life."
He didn't approve of her sister. For what he knew of them, he didn't approve of Brazilians either. He didn't approve of divorces, or pets. They were nothing but self-indulgence and distraction.
He hadn't seen her in twelve years. The cat was getting old. So was he. Soon it would die.
The scratching noise came back, a bit louder, a bit longer. The priest sighed. Was it only him, or did all this scratching start a bit earlier every day too? The quicker he responded, the more he gave it, the greedier the animal became. It seemed insatiable.
"Perhaps I should just wait. Let it scratch. Feed it every day at exactly the same time and ignore its little theatre. Perhaps that would teach it discipline."
But he could not pray with the scratching noise. There was no way around it: for the sake of young Joe Abbott, he had to feed the beast.
The priest winced as he stood up. His joints were hurting. This was why he prayed from home these days. Poor empty churches were no good for arthritis. He started towards the kitchen, his walk heavy with age, his feet dragging a bit, the thick rubber sole of his black shoes snapping on the floor joints. He hoped he had a tin left of that chicken liver cat food the grocer gave him. If not, the cat and him would have to share his diner: two slices of cured ham, some beans and a salad. Neither of them could digest bread any more.
As he was opening the tin, the thought of Joe Abbott caught up with him. What a nice kid he was. It had pained the priest, tonight, to see his poor, ten-year-old body sink into sickness, his tanned, smooth skin getting pale and gritty, his thick slick black shiny hair becoming thin and dry like withered weed. Joe had not been able to get up. Tuberculosis was ripping his chest, fever was shaking his body and putting a constant wet brightness in his black eyes. Young Joe was looking somewhere else already, seeing other things. He had become a ghost even for his mother. She looked so scared all the time, so vulnerable. She couldn't eat. She was so thin, as if about to snap.
The cat was rubbing madly against his leg: "Yeah yeah yeah, it's coming you old fool. Covering my trousers with your hair will never bring it quicker, you know. Don't you know that? Don't you learn anything?"
"Talking to it doesn't make any difference either", he thought, as he was walking back to his bedroom. "The cat doesn't understand me. Or does not believe me."
He played for a moment with this idea. "Maybe it knows, after all. Maybe rubbing itself against my leg makes it feel good. Maybe it knows how annoying I find it and does it for that precise reason."
They had been living with each other for all these years, and yet they could not possibly understand each other. "We are just living side my side", he thought, "each of us isolated in our own perception of the world."
Such was the way of life. Take young Abbot: he was watching him wither, fade from this world, step into the other. "I am a priest, I am supposed to know about all this, about death, the transition of death, life after death. Yet I cannot, not one single second, understand what he is going through."
There was no communicating, with anybody, but the Lord. There was only prayer. Prayer worked. He had seen evidence of it, repeatedly. How many times had he prayed for the sick and seen then rise again? Ten times maybe, maybe more?
When the telephone rang ten minutes later, the priest had returned to his duties. His body was arched against the kneeling chair, his heavy breathing covering any other noise in the bedroom. The ring startled him. He got up, walked around the bed, picked the receiver. He sat heavily on the bed, letting all his body go. He brought the receiver to his hear, knowing already.
Tim Abbott's voice was drowned in tears. He was calling to inform the priest that his son had passed away.
As the priest hung up, the cat started scratching again. Its food bowl was empty. It was looking at the priest. There was expectation in its eyes.
The priest picked it in his arms, opened the back door and put it gently outside.
The cat jumped on the window sill and started waiting.
