The Chaplain’s Visit

The first visit was on a Tuesday and was a routine call.

Pat had two on his list that afternoon, the second out past Black Mountain, and he meant to be brief at the first house because the December roads above 2500 feet were dicey after four. He parked behind a small white rental car and went up the steps with the small green New Testament in his coat pocket that he had carried since 1968, and which he no longer opened in front of anyone, because it embarrassed him, but which he carried anyway, because not carrying it would have embarrassed him more.

The nurse who came to the door was Denise Yarborough, whom he had known on three previous cases. She nodded him in without speaking. He had learned long ago that a nurse who does not speak at the door is telling you, before you have crossed the threshold, what kind of house this is.

The house was quiet. There was lavender in the air and under the lavender the other smell, which a man in his line of work came to recognize and to not enjoy. A daughter sat at the kitchen table with a mug of tea between her hands, her hair pulled back, her eyes with the particular flatness of someone who has been awake for most of two nights. Pat introduced himself. She said her name was Marina. She said her father had not asked for a chaplain but had not objected when Denise had mentioned that one came around, and so here Pat was. She said it with a small dry smile that he liked.

He said, I’m here at his pleasure and yours. If he sleeps through me that’s fine. If you’d rather I came back another time that’s fine.

She said, come in. Please.

Eric Hauschild was seventy-eight and had been a math teacher for forty-one years. He was thinner than the photograph on the bookshelf in the hall, which was always the case. He was awake. His eyes followed Pat into the room with a clarity Pat had not expected.

Pat sat in the chair Marina had pulled up for him. He did not lead with God. He had learned in the seventies not to lead with God; by the time he retired from the Navy in 2012 he had learned to lead with the weather, or the room, or the cat, if there was a cat. There was no cat. He led with the pines, and with the light, which was the light a Carolina December gives you for about ninety minutes a day if you are lucky and which Pat had loved his whole life without saying so.

Eric said, that light is the thing.

Pat said, yes.

Eric said, I taught geometry. I used to tell them about parallel lines. The light coming through pines is the closest thing in the natural world to a working demonstration. Your eye keeps wanting them to meet.

Pat said, they do meet, the way you tell it.

Eric smiled. He said, only if you stand far enough back.

They talked for twenty minutes. Pat asked about the school. Eric told him about a student in 1987 who had come to the proof of the irrationality of the square root of two on his own and who had cried at the board. Pat said he had cried at a hymn once in a chapel in Subic Bay and that he understood the principle. Eric laughed, which cost him, and the laugh turned into a small bad cough, and Denise came in, and Pat stood.

He said, may I come back on Friday.

Eric said, yes. Come back Friday.

In the hall Marina walked him to the door. She said, thank you. He doesn’t talk to me like that. I mean — he does. But not like that.

Pat said, he’s been a teacher a long time. He talks to anyone who’ll sit in the chair.

She said, I’m sitting in the chair.

Pat said, I know. He’ll talk to you too. He’s getting there. He surprised himself saying it. It was the kind of thing he did not, ordinarily, say. But he had thought, watching Eric watch the light, that the man was on his way to something and the daughter was the destination.

He drove out past Black Mountain and saw his second patient and got home at seven and did not think about Eric Hauschild again until Friday morning, when he checked his list and remembered the pines.

The second visit was the one he could not, afterward, drive away from.

He came at three. Denise let him in and said, he’s been waiting for you, which usually meant the patient had mentioned the chaplain once that morning. Marina was not in the kitchen. Denise said she was walking on the road; she had been at the bedside thirty hours and Denise had ordered her out.

Pat went into the bedroom alone.

Eric was propped a little higher than on Tuesday. His eyes were closed but he was not asleep. He said, Father. Sit down.

Pat sat down. He was not, strictly, a Father any longer — he had not had a parish since 1979, and he had let his faculties lapse in a way that was complicated and that he did not, at eighty-three, see any reason to repair. But he had stopped correcting the dying about it a long time ago. The dying called you what they needed to call you. That was theology enough for him most days.

Eric said, I want to tell you something and I want you to not write it down.

Pat said, I don’t write things down.

Eric said, good. Marina writes things down. I asked her to. I don’t want her to write this part.

Pat said, all right.

Eric was quiet for a while. The light in the bedroom was the color of weak tea, the way it always was at three on a December afternoon, and the dust moved in it slowly, and out the window the pines stood the way pines stood. Pat let the silence be. He had been letting silences be for fifty years.

Eric said, the procedure was always at night.

Pat did not move.

He had been a Navy chaplain in Vietnam-era service and at the Pentagon and at three regional hospitals and a brig in Charleston, and had sat with sailors and marines and their wives for half a century. He had not heard that sentence since the spring of 1971.

He kept his face still. A Jesuit in seminary had told him, if you ever look surprised at a deathbed you will never be told the truth again. Pat had not always managed it. He managed it now.

Eric said, I would wake up and the room was already the other room. The moving wasn’t a thing I remembered, until this week. It’s coming back the way a name comes back. You stop trying and there it is.

Pat said, take your time.

Eric said, every seven years. The body knew. I knew the dates the way you know your wedding anniversary, only I didn’t know I knew. Does that make sense.

Pat said, yes.

Eric said, they would tell you the next one and you would forget who told you.

Pat said nothing. His hands were folded the way he had folded them in a thousand rooms. Inside his chest something he had not felt move in a long time moved.

In the spring of 1971 he had been twenty-nine and three years out of seminary, assigned as a junior chaplain to the naval hospital in San Diego, and in the last forty-eight hours of the life of a seaman first class named Daniel Vasquez — a thin boy from Lubbock, brought in with a fever that turned out not to be the fever they thought it was — Pat had sat in a chair at the bedside and listened to Vasquez talk, on and off between long stretches of sleep, about a series of events Vasquez believed had been happening to him since he was nine. A war was on. The senior chaplain, a Monsignor named Devereux who drank, had told Pat to sit the watch because Vasquez was Catholic on his admission form and because, Devereux said, the kid’s wandering and there’s no family.

Pat had sat the watch. Vasquez had wandered. Vasquez had told him, among other things, in a voice that was not the voice of a frightened boy but the voice of a man finishing a sentence he had been trying to finish his whole life: the work was always after midnight, padre, and the one who brought you back would tell you the next date and by morning the name of who told you was already gone.

That was the sentence Pat had carried for fifty-four years.

He had not written it in the room. He had gone back to his quarters and at four in the morning had taken a yellow legal pad and written down, as exactly as he could remember them, twenty-two sentences Vasquez had spoken over the previous day and night, and had put the pad in a manila envelope, and the envelope in a footlocker, and the footlocker, eventually, in the basement of his small house in west Asheville. He had not opened it since 1974, when he had read it through once in a motel in Norfolk and put it back. He had known where it was every day for fifty-four years.

He looked at Eric Hauschild.

Eric’s eyes were still closed. He was saying, the owl wasn’t an owl. I want to be on the record about that, with somebody. The owl is what got put in the place where the other thing was, so the place wouldn’t be empty and I wouldn’t go looking.

Pat said, I understand.

Eric said, do you.

Pat said, I have heard something like it before. From another man. A long time ago.

Eric opened his eyes. They were pale and very clear and the light from the window was in them. He said, was he a believer.

Pat said, he was a Catholic boy from west Texas. I don’t know what he believed by the end. I know he wanted somebody in the room.

Eric said, I am glad you were in the room.

Pat said, I am glad I was in the room.

There was a long quiet then. Eric breathed. Pat sat. The light moved on the wall by perhaps an inch.

Eric said, did you write down what he said.

Pat said, yes.

Eric said, did anyone read it.

Pat said, no.

Eric said, all right.

He closed his eyes again. He said, I won’t tell you to do anything with it. That’s not my business. I will say — and you will know whether to listen — that my daughter is a serious person, and she is keeping her own record, and she does not yet know what kind of record it is. If you decided to tell her about the Texas boy, she would be a careful steward. That’s all.

Pat said, thank you.

Eric said, now read me something. Anything. I don’t care what.

Pat took the New Testament out of his pocket and opened it more or less at random — a thing he could do now in a way he could not have done at twenty-nine — and he found himself in the seventh chapter of Luke, at the centurion’s servant, and he read it aloud in a quiet voice. At the verse dic verbo et sanabitur puer meus he paused, because the Latin had come up in his head before the English, and he read it once in the Latin under his breath and then in the English for Eric, who smiled faintly without opening his eyes, the way a man smiles who has spent his life around proofs and recognizes one.

When Pat finished, Eric was asleep.

Pat sat with him another twenty minutes. Then he put the New Testament back in his pocket and went out into the hall.

Denise was at the kitchen table with Marina, who had come back from her walk. Marina looked up.

Pat said, he’s sleeping. We had a long talk. He may not want a chaplain again. That’s all right. Tell him I came.

Marina stood. She said, thank you. She looked at him a moment longer than was usual, and he had the sense she was about to ask him something, and then that she had decided not to. He was grateful for the not.

He went out to his car.

He sat in the driveway for what turned out to be forty minutes.

The light went from weak tea to bruise to nothing, and the pines went from green to black, and the small white rental car beside him went from white to gray to a shape, and a single light came on in the front room of the house. Pat sat with his hands on the wheel and thought about the envelope in the footlocker in the basement of his small house in west Asheville and what he was going to do with it.

He thought about Vasquez, twenty years old, dying of something the hospital had been told to call sepsis and which Pat had never been sure was sepsis, in a ward in San Diego in April of 1971, asking him to listen and not to write it down — and how Pat had written it down at four in the morning and had told no one. Not a confessor. Not Devereux. Not the woman he had almost married in 1983. Not the friend he played chess with on Thursday nights in a coffee shop on Haywood Road.

He had carried it. He had thought, for a long time, that carrying it was the thing he had been given to do — that some records existed so that a man could be the place they were kept, and the keeping was the work, and the not-telling was the keeping.

He thought, sitting in his car, that he had been wrong about that for perhaps thirty of those fifty-four years and right for the other twenty-four, and that he did not, even now, know which twenty-four were which.

He thought about Marina, who was a serious person, and who was keeping her own record, and who did not yet know what kind of record it was.

He thought about whether what he had heard, twice now in fifty-four years, from two men who had never met and lived a continent apart, was a thing the world contained or a thing the dying mind, under pressure, generated — and he stopped himself, because that was not his to decide. The Jesuit had also said: you are not the judge of what they tell you. You are the judge of what to do with having heard it. Pat had forgotten that sentence for a long time and had remembered it now.

He had made his record. The making of it had been the easy part. The hard part, postponed for fifty-four years, was that a record was for somebody. A record kept for no one was a kind of theft from the man it had been made about. He had stolen, in this small way, from Daniel Vasquez of Lubbock, Texas, for fifty-four years, and he did not want, now, to also steal from Eric Hauschild of Concord, North Carolina, and from his daughter, sitting in a lit kitchen behind him keeping her own quiet account.

He would not give the envelope to Marina tonight. He would wait until after the funeral, which would be the following week, and at the reception he would ask her if he might speak with her before she flew back to California, and he would tell her about Vasquez. He would not tell her what to do with the telling. He would give her the envelope, or read her the twenty-two sentences in his own kitchen with the door closed, and then he would leave it with her, the way Vasquez had left it with him, and she could keep it or burn it or do what serious people do, which is the slow patient thing he was no longer young enough to do himself.

That was the decision. It came to him quietly, in the dark, in his car, with his hands on the wheel and the cold beginning to come through the window.

He started the engine. The dashboard lights came up.

He sat another moment. He said, under his breath, Lord have mercy on his soul, which was the word he had given himself permission to use once a day and which he had been saving, today, for this. He put the car in reverse, and he backed out of the driveway of the house at the end of the road that did not go anywhere else, and he drove home along the dark county route under the pines, and he did not look back.