Priests

Priests

Father Joe lit up another stogy. He wasn't your typical priest; no, he'd been married and a shopkeeper up north, somewhere. But his wife had died and he had turned, searching, to the church.

I liked his cigar.

The stink of it reminded me of sitting with my grandfather. It made him someone I could talk to, not like the career clergy, the ones who'd been priests inside since the sixth grade.

I should be a priest, I was told, a priest.

Even my unbeliever father thought so. You're too unworldly. The Church will take care of you.

I knew better. I knew long before the other boys my age. Old Father Joe listened and may even have understood, beneath an ancient banyan in the church yard.

He'd never become a member of the priests' club — always an assistant at some small parish or another, where the children loved him and the adults wondered just what the bishop had foisted on them this time.

He rose from the bench beside me to hop-scotch on the sidewalk with girls who could have been his granddaughters if God hadn't played the old switch game with him.

Sometimes, I feel like lighting up a cigar just in memory of Father Joe, let some of that familiar incense rise.

You know, I gave them up a while back.

Stephen Brooke ©2004

appeared in “Retellings” chapbook