Uncross My Heart Read online

  “Well, nice you admit it. I’m on the faculty at Claridge and would like you to come to campus as my guest and learn a bit more about the seminary.”

  “Dr. Hightower must have put you up to this.”

  “He did.”

  “Nice you admit it,” she echoed me. “And the tour is to do what precisely?”

  “Offer you a fuller appreciation of the positive aspects of Claridge. I’ll have to hunt some up between now and then.”

  “But your true mission is to shut down my scurrilous scribbling.”

  I remained silent. “You’re an academic, you say?”

  “I am.”

  “If I decide to come, I should speak with one of the clerics on campus—”

  “I’m also an ordained priest.” I envisioned her pausing to suppress a smile. I filled the silence. “Next Monday at ten, would that work?”

  “Let me check my schedule.” A clicking of computer keys.

  “Yes, Perfect. So do people call you Father?” The tone was slightly mocking.

  “Only if I’ve slept with their mother.”

  A pause. “See you Monday.” She sounded amused as she hung up.

  Chapter Two

  The rock driveway scattered stones as we flew down its winding contours to the gray-and-white clapboard cottage at road’s end. Ketch jumped over the top of the car door and was on the front porch before I had turned off the ignition. His enthusiasm at being home always made me smile.

  I balanced books and papers in my left hand as I pulled the key out of the lock and pushed the door open with the toe of my shoe, revealing the irregular woodwork of the hundred-year-old farmhouse.

  An old oxen-harness mirror dangled from a large hook on the wall over a leather couch. The side table, consisting of a metal-strapped barrel, sat next to the large tartan-plaid doggie bed whose soft, circular surface lay next to the fireplace and was Ketch’s first stop—or flop—after getting inside.

  Given to me when my mother died, my grandmother’s original homestead was my haven when I was young and now my home, with its wraparound screened porch, huge country kitchen with tall window-paned dish cabinets, wide wooden countertops, and an ancient but excellent gas stove. The old farm was beautiful in its simplicity, an elusive commodity these days. Having loved it as a child, I wasn’t letting go now even though I had to drive an hour to and from my work.I was about to exit through the squeaky screen door down the steps to the lopsided wooden horse gate to greet my two old trail horses when the phone rang. The voice on the line belonged to Sylvia Slaughter, the new neighbor to the north who’d recently moved from the city to the country, buying the Browns’ farm after Mr. Brown died.

  “I’m so glad you’re home. Ralph is away on business and there’s something loose in my kitchen. At first I thought it was a snake, which completely freaked me out. Now I don’t know. I hate to ask, but…”

  Like any new country people, she and her husband were alarmed over things most folks out here had learned to handle decades ago. Sylvia’s voice was calm, but her words sounded urgent. “Could you just come over and…if it’s a rat or a possum I’ll just die.”

  “Okay, give me a few minutes.” I hung up and dashed to the bedroom, changed into a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt, and threw on some ankle-high boots. Not certain what Sylvia would have available to assist in the search, I grabbed a flashlight, walking stick, and a towel.

  The first item was to find it, the second to fend it off, and the third to subdue it so we could get it out of the kitchen.

  I left the lightly snoring Ketch to guard the unlocked door as I traipsed across the open field toward the back side of Sylvia’s brick farmhouse. Having walked these fields for many years, I thought nothing of striding across twenty acres in the near dark.

  She was standing on the porch with a drink in her hand, which she set on the porch rail as I climbed the two-by-six wooden steps, and she held the door for me, saying how grateful she was to see me.

  Her curly auburn hair was a bit damp, as if she’d just showered, or perhaps she was in a nervous sweat over the animal intruder. She wore short-shorts and a yellow V-neck golf tee, despite the cool night air, and a lot of jewelry, broadcasting with her plunging neckline that she wasn’t suited to a rural environment. Her presence made me long for Mrs. Brown, Brownie as we called her, a squat, heavyset woman who could beat a snake to death with a rolling pin.

  “You’re wonderful to come over. Brownies?” Sylvia extended a platter, startling me by producing a culinary version of my remembrance.

  “Maybe we should look for your alien intruder first.” She drew back and pointed toward the broom closet. “You’re sure it’s in this closet?”

  “Something’s moving around in there and my dog’s in the bedroom. He’s a city animal and more afraid than I am.”

  I opened the closet door and shined the light inside. Nothing. I poked at the clothes with my walking stick. Nothing. Sylvia peeked in gingerly. “I swear there was something in there.”

  Suddenly a big black blob flew out of the closet right between us. I jumped back, nearly losing my balance, and let out a yelp. She screamed and flung herself on me, clinging and jumping up and down.

  “Ahh, ahh, ahh.” She screamed in rhythm with her feet leaving the ground. I tried to visually track the black creature as she bounced me along with her. I spotted it by the door—a bat.

  Extracting myself from Sylvia, I crept up on its angular backside as it clung to the wall and gave it the gym-towel snap, knocking it to the floor, and before it could gather itself up, I tossed the towel over it.

  While it tried to claw its way out of the maze of terry cloth, I scooped it up and shook it loose out on the porch, where it flew away. I reentered to find Sylvia standing on top of a kitchen chair, her hands clasped tight up against her chest and her face contorted into a little-girl grimace.

  “Done,” I said as she squealed her thank-yous, hopped down, and hugged me again.

  Collecting my tools, I prepared to leave but she thrust the brownie plate in front of me again and begged me to stay a minute longer.

  Never one to pass up chocolate, I took a seat at the kitchen counter, noting Sylvia had torn out my favorite place in the old farmhouse—the built-in pie cabinet that faced a battered old kitchen table where I used to sit and talk to Brownie for hours. In its place, Sylvia and her husband had installed a granite countertop with black leather bar stools.

  Without asking, she poured me a tall glass of wine and pushed it in my direction.

  “Priests drink wine, that much I know.”

  The dry wine chasing the sweet brownies made a rather unpleasant combination, but I smiled and gave her baking an appreciative little toast.She held her own glass up in the air. “Here’s to…not going bats.”

  Her voice held a tinge of sadness, and for a moment I thought I glimpsed a lonely woman most likely as locked away from her dreams as the poor creature we’d just freed. “So, what do priests do in their spare time other than save souls, read boring books, and chase their neighbors’ horrors away?”

  The fascination with women priests was a constant topic at any gathering and barely allowed me to do much more in any new relationship than spend time brushing aside preconceived notions of priests as sanctimonious, saintly, or celibate. I concluded my dissertation on “priests as ordinary people” about the time my wineglass reached empty and realized I was slightly high.

  Sylvia was not without conversation on any topic and rattled on about her life and her husband, and frankly I had tuned out, until the moment I heard her say, “Tell me what you think about late at night when you’re in bed? We all think about things we don’t say. What does a priest dream about?”

  “I’m generally too tired to dream and too dull to remember my dreams even if I had them.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said.

  “Ah, it’s always an issue of nonbelief.”

  Sylvia had inched her bar stool nearer and nearer in
her chatting, shifting fashion. She put her hand with the giant amethyst-ridden finger on my arm, trapping it there, and leaned close to my face.

  “You must tell me one secret before you go.” Her eyes gleamed like a teenage girl’s at a slumber party. When I didn’t answer immediately she quickly added, “No secrets? Not even something from your childhood?” I felt the mood going awry—the way children of dysfunctional families sense danger in a look or a laugh. “Then I need to give you one.”

  Sylvia darted into my face and her lips landed on mine as she kissed me, stunning me and leaving a soft, pleasant sensation. She placed her index finger on my lips as if to seal the secret, letting her finger trail across my mouth as she whispered, “You have now kissed the woman next door. That can be your secret…until you find a better one.”

  I was off the bar stool and standing at attention, my walking stick, flashlight, and towel carried like military issue as I retreated from her house. I thought I heard her chuckling from the porch as I marched back to my barnyard barracks, determined never to step foot in Sylvia’s home again and praying to God she told no one about this evening, and certainly not that I had kissed her, which was often how these stories got turned around. I wished I had someone to share this with—my surprise, my fears, my feelings—but there was no one to confide in, and so I guessed that alone made it a secret. No one to tell.

  Chapter Three

  Saturday morning I lay in bed, Ketch sleeping at the foot, and stared at the farmhouse just in my line of sight across the acres leading to the Browns’ farm, where Sylvia slept and where she had brushed my lips with hers. Nothing, until now, had unearthed the feelings I had long hidden, challenged my decision to end who I was and let the robes forever cover the rest. Sylvia had stirred something in me that threatened to awaken the dead. A longing I suppressed. An intimacy I avoided.

  I contemplated all the religious men who’d flagellated their bodies for thinking of sex, covered their women in tentlike garb to stave off temptation, advocated sex only for procreation. Throughout history, the evils of sex, the preempting of sex, and the anguish over sex had been a male-dominated topic. And now, here I was making it mine—thinking I shouldn’t have thought about Sylvia sexually, should never see her again so I wouldn’t be tempted to think about her. And since we were certainly not going to procreate, sex with her was out of the question.

  Not to mention the fact that she was married, which was on the do-not-do Biblical Top Ten.

  My father’s face came into focus, his dark green suit with the shiny gold buttons bearing an eagle and gold braid on each shoulder and medals on his chest. And I heard him say, “Tradition, duty, honor.”

  Ironically, war and religion relied on the same tenets.

  My cell phone beeped, signaling I had voice mail. I stretched across the white comforter, pressing down its puffy, cloudlike surface, to grab the phone from the bedside table. The message was from Vivienne Wilde, saying we hadn’t selected a meeting place.

  “Let’s plan on finding each other across from that fountain—the one with the gigantic Mother of God. I have no idea what I’ll be wearing but I should be able to spot a woman priest. See you at ten.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. Claridge’s honoring the Blessed Virgin by making her enormous and seating her in the fountain was a bit odd, if I stopped to think about it. I played the message several times, letting Vivienne Wilde’s voice seep into my skin like tanning oil on a blistering day, anointing my soul to keep it from burning. I started to erase her message, then kept it.

  Suddenly, I realized I was going to be late for lunch with my father, and I jumped out of bed and hit the shower. Tardiness was unacceptable.

  * * *

  He stood steel-beam straight, his custom-made suit cut exactly like a military uniform. The only missing elements were the gold braid, row of medals, and the brass nameplate inscribed General Archibald McClellan Westbrooke. His civilian suit was so starched I was betting it could maintain its stiff position independent of human form. My father’s braided hat, a vestige of his long military career, was tucked under his left arm, and he extended his right hand as if hailing a cab, not his daughter.

  I smiled at him and gave him a peck on the cheek and he patted my back lightly, and then, the emotional greetings over, we settled into our routine. Lunch at the Café Creole—red beans and rice, strongly brewed coffee, and our bimonthly update that quickly took on the tone of a military briefing.

  My father dished out battle strategy at every meal as if we were currently under siege and he needed to pass along military survival techniques, his mind moving across the Egyptian desert with Field Marshall Montgomery in victory over the wily German Rommel at El Alamain, then jumping to the Battle of the Bulge and his anger at Eisenhower.

  “Patton didn’t run out of gasoline—a dozen tankers were diverted away from him to the Communications Zone. Eisenhower gave fuel that might have helped him to Montgomery who, despite his 5th Army credentials, was a whiner. Old Blood and Guts Patton was a military man’s man.”

  Next to Patton, father revered George C. Scott because he played Patton, and nowadays, I wasn’t sure my aging parent could tell the difference. When, after years in retirement, Father started carrying his military hat under his arm, I knew the past had gotten mixed up with the present, and I feared for his future.

  He tied military tactics to religious strategy, clearly believing everything in life is how you prepare, attack, and regroup.

  “Your friend Hightower is so progressive the others can’t keep up. He outruns his supply line,” he said, knowing I would understand the military shorthand for getting ahead of what kept you alive.

  “He does seem to be running faster than his funding.” I was constantly amazed that my father knew what was going on at the highest levels at Claridge, but not in his own closet. Perhaps he cared on my behalf, thinking it would please me. In fact, it troubled me that my father thought someone as consummately boring as Hightower was bright or ahead of his time.

  “So tell me about your advancement. Are you making progress?”

  Father sipped his hot coffee and ate with a masculine daintiness born of military manners, lifting his spoon slowly and brandishing his butter knife like a tiny baton.

  I told him I didn’t think Hightower was stepping down anytime soon and, if he did, I was certainly not on the short list for chancellor.

  “Why not? You’re smart, dedicated, and provide just the right blend of progressive conservatism a school like that needs. You’ll be a splendid fit. I’ll be very proud to come to the ceremonies. There’s always a military band and of course a twenty-one-gun salute,” he said, forgetting that we were discussing the seminary and not the military.

  For a moment I envisioned the traditional invocation in the chapel with a marching band and rifles fired through the roof and I smiled, thinking perhaps that’s exactly what was called for…certainly shooting of some sort would ensue if I were ever made chancellor.

  I stared at the strong, square face with the large jawline and resolute stare that seemed to look beyond me to something only he could see, something bigger on a distant shore that required focus, a quality he had less and less of without my mother. A catch in my chest reminded me that a time would come when he wouldn’t be sitting here on Saturday and I would never be able to pass this café without sadness.

  I let a few minutes of silence pass. “You haven’t finished your meal.”

  He seemed startled. “I’m taking my time, as civilized diners are wont to do. You should try it some time.” He recovered nicely, the old gleam back in his eyes as he glanced down at my empty bowl.

  “Apparently no chow at your place.”

  I grinned. “Guilty. Starving and no manners.”

  “Before I forget, there’s a fellow named Emerson, formerly at Claridge—State Department involved in some funny business about his sexual preference. Know anything about him?”

  “I never knew him personally. Wh
y?”

  “Military comrade asked me about him. Gays in positions of power always a dangerous thing.”

  “You know gay men who are stellar military. Your friend Jerry—”

  “A drunken dalliance. He’s dating a wonderful woman now and I think they’re getting married.”

  I nodded pensively, thinking that Jerry was gay as a goose and that I could not imagine him dating a woman.

  “Well,” he pushed his chair back from the table and rose stiffly, “it was good to see you, dear.” He sounded as if he were speaking to someone he knew only casually. “I’ve got to get back. I’m rereading Great Battles of World War II.” With that, he was gone, a wooden soldier carved without knee joints, marching stiffly down the street toward his car, perhaps battles past and present raging in his head.

  I sat down and my body relaxed so noticeably even I wondered why I had been tense. The waiter cleared away lunch debris and offered me more coffee. I decided to stay for a cup and unwind. Flipping open a book I’d brought with me but concealed during my lunch with my father, I intended to stay and bone up on the topic for which I was a panelist at an upcoming religious conference.

  This old text had helped me sort things out about Christianity and Manichaeanism when I was a seminary student. The two sects competed in a medieval membership drive, and the anti-sex Manichaeans drove the Christian church fathers to a more rigid celibacy stance. I glanced down at a passage about St. Augustine, a fallen Manichaean, who led the way—so obsessed with his concubine that he concluded sex was an evil siren that must be ridded from everyone’s life. I closed the book.

  So we are haunted by the sexual demons of the saints.

  A familiar-looking woman made eye contact from across the room and suddenly ran toward me. “Westie, is that you?” Jude Baker was overweight, with a stocky body, short-cropped hair, and no makeup, decked out in dyke-wear—flip-flops, cargo shorts, a black fanny pack, and a statement tee: Clinton Could Get You Pregnant But Bush Will Get You Killed.