The St. Michael Poker & Drinking Club Read online

  Contents

  St. Michael Poker & Drinking Club

  Copyright © 2019 Ned Randle. All rights reserved.

  Dedication

  Quote

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  St. Michael Poker & Drinking Club

  Ned Randle

  Regal House Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 Ned Randle. All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Regal House Publishing, LLC

  Raleigh, NC 27612

  All rights reserved

  ISBN -13 (paperback): 9781646030033

  ISBN -13 (epub): 9781646030309

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941543

  All efforts were made to determine the copyright holders and obtain their permissions in any circumstance where copyrighted material was used. The publisher apologizes if any errors were made during this process, or if any omissions occurred. If noted, please contact the publisher and all efforts will be made to incorporate permissions in future editions.

  Interior and cover design by Lafayette & Greene

  lafayetteandgreene.com

  Cover images © by Sergio Foto, Alenkadr, and AR Images/Shutterstock

  Regal House Publishing, LLC

  https://regalhousepublishing.com

  The following is a work of fiction created by the author. All names, individuals, characters, places, items, brands, events, etc. were either the product of the author or were used fictitiously. Any name, place, event, person, brand, or item, current or past, is entirely coincidental.

  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, without the prior permission of Regal House Publishing.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  For my wife, who maintains the faith.

  Quote

  The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them: and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.

  - Isaiah 35:1

  Chapter One

  When Father Thomas Abernathy, pastor of St. Michael Catholic Church, found the cat dead in the alley, he sat on gravel and cinders amid the trash cans and wept. As a lifelong believer in signs, he looked up and asked God, “What sign is this?”

  The loneliness of his office had been weighing on him when he first found the cat, alive in the rectory garage in late winter, mewling and hissing. The cat was lodged behind the vertical rungs of a wooden extension ladder lying prone along the west wall, and Father Tom thought the animal looked like a forlorn convict, which made him chuckle. As he considered the cat’s position, he figured it got into the garage, perhaps as refuge from the cold wind, and hunkered down behind the ladder, not imprisoned, but feeling it sanctuary. Or perhaps the cat chased a mouse or a rat into the garage; the olio of stinking garbage cans along the alley was sure to attract game for an intrepid hunter. In either event, the cat may have appreciated the asylum provided by the sturdy building and the protection of the heavy rungs and decided to remain as a squatter. And why not his garage? It was old but serviceable, cluttered but cozy, sized to fit one vehicle, with a cranky overhead door and a single utility door which, due to settling, defined a capacious gap of about three inches between the bottom edge and the sill. Father Tom surmised the gap was the point of entry.

  At their first meeting, Father Tom let the cat be, huddled behind the ladder, wary and skittish, as he slowly backed his automobile out of the garage. Thereafter, he’d look for the cat each time he entered the garage, and when he saw it, found a measure of spiritual awe in the fact the animal settled in his garage out of all the garages along the alley. He knew something of cats and liked them; his mother always had one or two around the place, ostensibly to keep her gardening shed free of mice but more likely because she appreciated the feigned affection and disingenuous displays of dependence they showed her. He admired their capricious independence, which compounded the pleasure he took from the cat choosing his garage in which to settle.

  After about a week, he realized the cat was in his garage to stay, and he was very careful moving his car in and out lest he harm the fuzzy incomer who appeared to present no harm to him or his garage. After days of skulking behind the ladder, the cat finally made its way out of the garage, and the first time Father Tom saw it in sunlight he chuckled, as he often did at his own irreverent jokes: a mackerel tabby had decided to impose itself on a Catholic priest.

  Nonetheless, the appearance of the stray was a godsend, Father Tom accepted, which offered him companionship and diversion and an object for his storehouse of moldering affection. The priest built trust between the cat and himself by setting small portions of food and drink just inside the utility door, while the cat crouched cautiously along the wall. Slowly, the cat acceded and would greet him at the door to accept his morning offerings. After a couple more weeks, the cat permitted Father Tom to cradle him in the crook of his arm and scratch his neck and feed him chunks of oily sardines out of the can.

  As their friendship and trust grew, Father Tom allowed the cat access to the rectory at night, where it would curl around his ankles while he sat at his large mahogany desk, sparsely decorated with a desk lamp, a framed photograph of his mother, and a small statue of the Virgin Mary, writing his homily. As the arrangement progressed, Father Tom would read aloud to the cat to test the sound of his words and elicit an objective reaction, which generally was a generous yawn disclosing a bright pink tongue and needle-like teeth, which the priest accepted as biting criticism.

  When his evening work was done, Father Tom would treat himself to a glass of wine and the cat to a small dish of whipping cream and when satisfied, the cat would leap onto the priest’s generous lap, and the priest would hold it under its chest and forelegs with one hand and scratch its ears and neck with the other. He delighted in the cat’s purring. Although he knew purring was an understandable anatomical phenomenon, he preferred to think of it as a spiritual manifestation of peace and contentment. It was in this posture, cat in one hand and glass in the other, that Father Tom sipped his evening wine and read his Catechism and Bible before bed.

  Around the time the priest invited the cat into the rectory, he decided it needed a name. One doesn’t usually invite a nameless stranger into his house, he reasoned, so after considering various fashionable and cutesy options, he simply called the cat Tom’s Cat, but referred to him openly only as Cat, not wanting to exhibit airs or a pretense of ownership.

  He’d been mildly concerned when the cat hadn’t bawled at the back door around dinnertime as was its habit, but its habits could be irregular, and he understood cats and appreciated the animal’s
charming aloofness and assumed it had chosen its evening meal from among the vermin of the alley, as he had chosen his own from the array of fast food joints near the church, and he would find his pet when he took his carry-out cartons to the trash cans behind the garage.

  And find him he did. As he sat in the alley at sunset staring at the dead cat, Father Tom could see from the tracks in the cinders and gravel and the condition of the body that Cat had been assaulted by an automobile. The right side of its head was shallowly caved in and bloody. There was a trickle of maroon blood from its nose down its left foreleg and the right eye was cocked and senseless. Father Tom assumed the cat was struck by a car driven by one of his reckless neighbors who often used the alley behind the rectory as a shortcut between Third Street and Garfield Avenue. He’d seen them speed, spinning their tires, sending sprays of cinders and gravel against the garages that lined the alley. He didn’t recognize any of the drivers as parishioners, or spawn of parishioners, but his parish was large, and the young ones rarely attended Mass, and he dolefully accepted that one of his own flock might have killed his cat.

  Father Tom leaned on a trash can and pulled himself up, an exercise that took no mean effort, considering his middle-aged bulk. He brushed the dust off his trousers, took out his handkerchief, dabbed his eyes and wiped away the bead of snot hanging from the tip of his nose. He’d dealt with death—the one undeniable inevitability—many times and would deal with this death as well. He spread out his handkerchief on a garbage can lid and gingerly placed the cat on the cloth. He folded the corners inward, like a crab Rangoon, and shook his head to rid it of the dark-humored reference to cats and Chinese food. He went into the garage and rummaged through his gardening supplies until he found a hand trowel. He went back out and picked up the cat in the kerchief (a cat’s cradle? he mused) and rubbed his left eye on his shoulder to rid himself of the impious play on words as much as the last tear clinging to an eyelash, blurring his vision. He trudged toward his rose garden with the cat swinging in his left hand and the trowel in his right.

  The priest got down on his knees at the border of the garden and used the trowel to scrape away mulch and dig a hole about two feet long, about eight inches wide, and about a foot deep. The grave was within the shade of an old willow tree adjacent the Bourbon roses. Father Tom appreciated the comforting presence of the willow tree which grew in a low spot in the rectory yard where rainwater gathered and provided ample shade for working in the garden in hot weather. He knew willow trees weren’t indigenous to the area and that this particular one was not a voluntary. He figured a prior occupant, perhaps an old priest with a predilection for supple greenery, had planted the tree many years before to shade the back lawn and to sop up the runoff after a good rain. The Bourbon roses were in bloom and had deep pinkish-red petals that emitted a pleasant fragrance he could smell as he dug. As he prepared the grave, he breathed rapidly and deeply through his mouth, not to ingest the sweet air but because digging even in the soft earth of a turned flowerbed made him winded, and he perspired heavily, and his heart pounded, palpable reminders he was woefully out of shape.

  He gently placed the cat in the kerchief in the hole and shoveled dirt over it, patted the dirt smooth. Still on his knees, he straightened his back and looked around the rose garden in the twilight, the scent of the fresh soil stirring his memory of the original planting of the flower bed, which he never considered at that time would become a burial ground for stray cats. When he’d moved into the St. Michael rectory in the autumn ten years earlier, one of the first things he did was till a small patch of yard to make a rose garden adjacent the willow tree. He was a decade younger and not so far removed from his days as a manual laborer, and he worked the ground with a spade until it looked as if it had been tilled with a power tiller. When he finished, his shoulders and back held the satisfying soreness that only a laboring man knows, and that evening, tired and aching, he carried out a kitchen chair and sat next to the garden site, sipped his wine and inhaled the organic smell of the raw soil until it settled in his belly and, along with the red wine and the sunset, filled him with a sense of well-being and wonderment at God’s finest creations.

  The next morning, he drove to a local nursery and bought large plastic bags full of topsoil, compost, organic fertilizer, and landscaping sand, all of which he worked into the tilled earth with a pitchfork until the soil had the familiar texture and fecund odor of his mother’s rose beds, as best he remembered.

  The following spring, after the rose bed cured over the winter, he planted the Bourbons and some Wichurana roses, both hardy plants that thrived despite inattention and bore flowers redolent with rosy fragrances. He also planted Mister Lincoln roses, which produced velvety red flowers and a persistent damask scent. Mister Lincoln roses were his mother’s favorite. He planted each bush evenly spaced apart from adjacent bushes in offset rows, so to the casual observer, his garden appeared orderly but not overly systematized.

  For ten years, his rose garden added balance to his life. His days were filled with the innumerable chafing responsibilities of pastoring a congregation: preparing for and conducting mass; hearing confessions; suffering through tedious committee meetings; counseling drunks and addicts and wayward spouses, and recommending obvious, but ignored, interventions; performing the occasional funeral mass and absolution of the dead; lecturing catechumen; proctoring Pre-Cana sessions, and reassuring the wide-eyed-but-soon-to-be-disillusioned intendeds marriage mirrors the relationship between Christ and his church, hence the forced solemnity of oft-broken vows; attending meetings of the diocesan priests with the bishop; worrying over church finances; supervising the upkeep of the church and rectory properties; and attending to the other items on the never-ending list matters of greater or lesser consequence which required his immediate attention. However, in the evening during amiable weather, he could remove his collar and loosen his belt and visit the rose garden, where he’d crawl among the plants, weeding and pruning, with a glass of wine near his knee. He hand-tilled around the plants, refreshed the mulch and pruned errant shoots to keep a proper distance between the plants, which facilitated airflow and helped retard the blackspot and rust that could tarnish the luster of the leaves.

  He’d methodically inspect the petals for signs of aphids, which would occasionally invade in hoards overnight to gorge themselves on drops of honeydew that oozed from the velvety flowers. Occasionally, he’d spot a thrips, which he picked off the plant and crushed with great satisfaction between his forefinger and thumb. He was not bothered by the incongruity between his beliefs regarding the immortal souls of pets, such as his cat, and soulless bastards such as aphids and thrips. He refused to kill moth or butterfly caterpillars, however, believing their enhanced life cycles—larvae to pupa to butterflies or moths—augured a higher order. Besides, he thought chrysalis a religious term. If he found a caterpillar, he would carefully pick it off his rosebush and relocate it to a willow leaf.

  Early on, he tried to control marauding, low order pests by introducing ladybugs, which have a taste for aphids, but they failed to propagate in his garden and disappeared with the first frost. So he resorted to other means to control the bugs. He refused to use chemical rose dust or sprays, so he mixed up a concoction his mother used comprising orange oil cleaner in water and sprayed the rose bushes. Her mixture appeared to control the insects well enough, but he didn’t like the way orange scent adulterated the fragrances of the roses. He finally settled on another recipe: a half teaspoon of dishwashing soap and a teaspoon of cooking oil in a quart of water, which he sprayed on the plants religiously. At first, he was concerned the scent of the soap would be overpowering, so he spent a half hour at the local Wal-Mart sniffing bottles of dishwashing liquid in his quest to find one with a mild or innocuous odor. In the end, cheap dishwashing soap and Wesson Oil filled the bill. And at the first sign of fungus, he’d add baking soda to the mixture and apply it liberally to the leafy foliage. His homemade treatments
worked well to control the aphids and thrips and fungi and still left the rose petals edible, albeit with a slight soapy flavor if the roses had not been rinsed with a freshening spray before he plucked a petal and tucked it inside his cheek.

  Now, as he looked over the garden ten years after he first put a spade in the soil, he figured he’d planted dozens of rosebushes, but he’d never planted a cat. And kneeling there, dirty and sweaty, he wasn’t quite sure what was proper for his office under the circumstances. He’d often been dogged by theological questions regarding the place of pets on the sliding scale of insentient creatures to domestic animals to human beings. He not only posed questions on the matter to himself over the years; such questions also were raised by parishioners heartbroken by the loss of a family dog or cat. They were profound questions which contemplated the place of all living creatures in God’s world and His plan for salvation and everlasting life. He didn’t blithely dismiss the idea that we had a spiritual duty to creatures other than humans as some priests did. He worried over it. He knew from scripture God gave man dominion over all the beasts of the earth, but for himself, that teaching only begged the question: do we have a responsibility for the disposition of the immortal souls as well as the husbandry of these animals we’ve made our own?

  As he knelt next to the grave, he shook off the imponderables, and satisfied the cat was adequately covered by a layer of dirt, struggled to his feet, tamped the ground with his shoe, wiped the sole on the grass and stood staring down at the small patch of freshly turned earth. After again considering the situation, but without allowing himself to be drawn into a phrenic theological debate, he bowed his head and recited from memory: