Empire Falls

and good, but old Father Tom, gone balmy as a magpie, was still more priestly than all the young ones put together, and he’d never once in all the years she’d worked for him felt compelled to lay a hand on a single one of her pots.
    “I think that’s Mr. Roby who just pulled in,” Mrs. Walsh observed from where she stood at her sink.
    “How about his father? Is Max with him?”
    “Just Mr. Miles. And all he’s doing is sitting there.”
    In the kitchen doorway Father Mark smiled, his first of the day. He could guess what his friend was doing. He was looking up at the unpainted steeple, wondering what cruel code embedded in his genes prevented him from climbing ladders like normal human beings.
    “Well, you’ve been waiting for him,” the housekeeper said. “Are you going to tell him?”
    Ah, Mrs. Walsh , Father Mark wanted to say. There is much to learn from you . She was no great thinker, Mrs. Walsh, but she did like to get things resolved, and you had to admire that. Find out. Do it. Don’t turn it around in your hand to examine its many facets. The problem with the contemplative life was that there was no end to contemplation, no fixed time limit after which thought had to be transformed into action. Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband.
    Mrs. Walsh was right. The present circumstance needed to be dealt with, and what’s more, it needed to be dealt with by Father Mark, who’d wasted too much time already. The title of the feverish sermon he’d given at the early Mass that morning had been “When God Retreats.” He had composed it partly in the car last night on the way home from the coast, and partly during a sleepless night, and partly in the pulpit as he delivered it. It had not gone as badly as he’d feared it might, and his intention had been to repeat “When God Retreats” at the late Mass, but when he returned to the rectory between services he discovered that Father Tom was gone.
    Actually, Mrs. Walsh had discovered the old priest’s disappearance when she arrived shortly after eight-thirty, by which time Father Tom was usually up and anxious to be fed. On Sundays Mrs. Walsh made him French toast. Then, after the old man’s chin began to glisten with maple syrup, she set about preparing the noon meal for the two of them, usually a ham or a roast chicken or, as today, a New England pot roast, a task made no easier by having a sticky, senile priest underfoot. True, she preferred the crazy old priest to the sane young one, but Father Tom did bear more or less constant watching, especially when Father Mark wasn’t around. That was one thing the young priest was good for, she had to admit. On Sundays, knowing the other one was across the lawn giving his lame sermons, Father Tom could get mischievous. One morning when he came into her kitchen, Mrs. Walsh had caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye without noticing anything amiss. When she served him his French toast, she did think something was odd about the way he regarded her, as if he was relishing some joke that had escaped her. But Mrs. Walsh found this highly unlikely, she herself being a perfectly sane fifty-three-year-old married woman and the old father being pretty much completely batshit.
    Still, since there was nothing in the world Mrs. Walsh despised more than a joke she might be the butt of, she’d stopped dressing her chicken to eyeball him sitting there at the table. He was dressed in a freshly laundered, standard priest-issue, short-sleeved black shirt with a starched white collar, and his usually unruly white hair had been brushed flat. She even noticed that his shoes had been spit-shined and his black linen socks were a match. If a joke was hidden anywhere on Father Tom’s person she couldn’t locate it, so she returned to cramming handfuls of stuffing into her roasting chicken. Only when the old father rose from the table and brought his plate over to the drainboard—for him an uncharacteristically helpful gesture—did she see that he was wearing no trousers. So today when she’d entered the rectory and the old father wasn’t in immediate evidence, she went looking for him, suspicious that more mischief was afoot.
    His bedroom door was shut, and when Mrs. Walsh knocked, calling his name and demanding that he open up or else she’d fetch the young one, she half expected a