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By Root 656 0

like peach fuzz growing over his ruddy cheeks. At sixteen Theresa thought he was the most intense person she had ever known, that no one in Prairie Junction could hold a candle to the beauty, the faith, the poetry, of Father Albert. As sponsor of the school yearbook he had students on the roof, hanging upside down to photograph the gargoyles. Theresa, I knew, had worshipped him then, and she had merely loved him seven years later, when he was defrocked for several reasons, not least for passing out subversive literature to students, The Catcher in the Rye, for example, and no doubt most of all because he had been smitten by a confessor, sight unseen. He was fascinated by the nameless, faceless woman’s stories of life with a brute. For weeks he scanned the nave from the pulpit during the 6 A.M. mass. Her voice was low, an excellent thing, he knew, in a woman. He couldn’t have asked for more one Monday morning, when a creature with unnatural blond hair, stiff as bristles, thrust her fragile, gloved hand into his already-in-motion priestly handshake and murmured, “Father Albert.” Four months later Albert left the church in disgrace and a year later his marriage, which had hardly begun, was over. Theresa tended him up to the brink of a nervous breakdown. Afterward, when he was out of the hospital, he went off to Red Wing, Minnesota, to learn how to repair band instruments. Now he was living in Neenah, Wisconsin, working at a music shop repairing valves and worn pads on clarinets and French horns, flutes and tubas.

“I just didn’t have the time or privacy to call him between the hospital and the funeral,” she was saying. “I don’t know how I got through the work of arranging the details, the coffin, my God, the dress, the shoes—my mother was hysterical for all of us, I think. I still feel as if I’m moving, that it will take a long time to come to a complete stop. That’s why I need to visit the pond, to get a grip. Every now and then I’d feel a moment of calm, hovering above the lunacy, as if I was somewhere between Earth and Lizzy. It was so strange, shopping for her, what color would she like, what fabric, as if she was going away to college.”

Imagine Lizzy going to college—for a split second I considered it a possibility in the far-off future, that she might return to go to Vassar or Smith, because a girl, no matter what was hindering her, couldn’t pass up that experience. I needed to leave the orchard and go home to Nellie and Howard. Their censure and good intentions would be easy to suffer compared with this conversation that wasn’t meant for my ears and to which I could offer nothing. She bent down to put her stub in the dirt. “I had to go up there, out the main drag of Neenah to the instrument repair shop.” She lit another and threw the match into the bleached grass. “Alice,” she said, turning and looking at me for the first time, “sometimes I get the queerest feeling. It always lasts for just a minute. It’s—it’s that we are all as expendable as kittens. Do you ever get that?”

I was surprised and then appreciative that she’d directed a question to me and I nodded vigorously.

“God,” she said, shaking her fists, “I really hate that feeling.” She pulled a handkerchief from the pocket that seemed to contain no end of interesting things, and demurely blew her nose. She wasn’t exactly facing me, but she had changed position, her side, instead of her back, to the tree, so that an observer would have had the impression that we were having an interchange. “I went to the repair place, and I stood by the window looking in on Albert in the workroom lumbering around, pawing through the drawers filled with gaskets, you know, parts. He stuck his oily hand into a drawer and pulled out some sort of greasy pipe, turned it over and over, like coons do in the garbage. I kept thinking he was some kind of animal—I couldn’t help it. His red shirt had a white, ‘Albert,’ sewn in cursive on the pocket, like gas-station attendants have. Can you believe it?”

She didn’t wait for me to answer. She had become as extroverted and manic as I had become