Pie Town - Lynne Hinton [89]
Father George stumbled his way through Mass most weeks. He had no real gifts of ministry that Oris could see. He was as awkward with people as he was reading scripture. His prayers were memorized and hardly heartfelt. He couldn’t sing, didn’t lead with much authority. Frankly, Oris didn’t see why the man was in the ministry to begin with. He didn’t seem much like a priest or even a man of faith. And Oris certainly didn’t understand why Father George was needed in Pie Town.
He glanced at himself in the rearview mirror and stared. He was surprised because he saw what he knew Alice saw. He saw how he had participated in the priest’s departure. He hadn’t given George a fair shake. The truth was, nobody in Pie Town had.
Oris had teased Father George about rattlesnakes and yelled at him about his driving. Bernie King had given him a hard time about the skunks and told him he’d never find friends in Pie Town. Fedora Snow worried him to death with church politics, and everybody raised eyebrows about his relationship with that new girl. The town had done a poor job of offering the young man any sense of hospitality, any kind of decent reception upon his arrival or even during his first few weeks, so that if he was hiding something, needing a friend or a confidant, he had certainly been persuaded that he wouldn’t find it in Pie Town.
Oris felt a little guilty. He knew he could have done a better job of welcoming the priest. He knew he had been hard on the man. He had attended only one service. He hadn’t even gone up to the church after the fire to see if the priest needed any clothes or wanted help trying to replace what had been lost. Oris had even thought, as did a few others in town, that Father George might have had something to do with the fire, something to do with Trina, the one everybody believed started the fire.
He rolled down the window a bit to get some fresh air and wondered if the priest knew the girl was pregnant. An old man, Oris was usually one who missed those kinds of things, but he hadn’t missed that one. She came waddling up to his table at the diner, shirt pulled tight across her little bulge of a belly, and even made a comment about how she was surprised that she didn’t get sick being around so much food, how the baby was making her hungry all the time instead. That’s how she said it, “The baby is making me hungry.” Oris had not responded. He was so shocked that the girl was talking so openly about a woman’s way, about an unmarried woman’s way, he had not known how to comment. Nobody else in the diner had spoken a word either. They were still mad at her for burning down the church, they sure weren’t going to congratulate her for giving birth to a baby born out of wedlock.
“Is that who needs the priest?” Oris asked out loud, still not sure. “That girl?” he added.
He turned to look beside him. “It ain’t his, is it?” he asked, and then had to smile because he could feel his dead wife punch him in the ribs.
“Well, even if that baby is his, I can tell you that he doesn’t want anything to do with that girl. That’s been obvious since they drove into town together. He’s scared of her for some reason. There’s either a history there or she reminds him of somebody else. So I doubt I can get him to come back to take care of her. You better give me something more to work with than that.”
Oris thought about the night before and how Alice had spoken to him, pulled him out of sleep and sent him on what was feeling like a wild goose chase, how he had received clarity about who he was supposed to go and find, just not what he was supposed to say when he found him.
It happened just before the break of dawn, when he had been dreaming about a pool of clear blue water, the sun bright and full, the sky cloudless.