Bad God

Bad God

Water is life and Boudoin Becnel knew it. It’s a concept that microbiologists swoon over, Baptists harmonize on, conservationists lecture about, farmers fret and fume in the face of, but Boudoin Becnel knew it. 

He was simple enough, but that much he knew: Knew it with the raw practicality of a fourth generation shrimper, knew it as clearly as anything within his elementary reasoning, knew it as transparently as he knew that the scriptures were genuine, that the Catholic Church was bedrock and that God was seated in heaven.

On his deathbed, the engineer may regret not having written any novels and the novelist may regret not having built any bridges, but Boudoin Becnel expected no regrets. He fully understood that water was everything, alpha and omega, and that death would be nothing more than another boundless sea below an amaranthine sunset into which he’d trawl away forever.

Then came the storms.

The first hit in mid-August the year Claitor turned ten, howling and growling up from the western tip of Cuba and lambasting the coast from Gautier to Pass Christian. By the time that it had passed, his trailer was blasted from its pilings, his 1999 Toyota Corolla flooded beyond salvage and his wife of thirteen years, Louise Angelique, drowned in the surge. His faith was dampened but not swamped. For a long time, he went to church every day, praying for confidence and courage and crossing himself at the stoup near the door, begging God's protection over Claitor and repeating the prayer he’d heard since childhood: "Sprinkle him with water, O Lord; he will be cleansed; Thou shalt wash him and he will be made whiter than snow."

For a while after the storm, Claitor and him lived in a tarpaulin tent on a wet concrete dock along the Gulfport International Seaway, listening to Christian radio on their little Sangean CC radio, cooking over burning logs on a piece of sheet metal and saying the rosary before they slept. Pretty women came by with potluck every day; Red Cross volunteers offered to help with relocation, Coast Guard reservists took up a collection, but Boudoin politely declined all succor. He preferred to remain self-sufficient near the salty, coffee-colored water where he could watch over Claitor and Scoot—the whitewashed, red-hulled fifty-foot shrimp boat which had been in his family for twenty-five years and was, in fact, the last substantial thing in the world that he owned.  

In time, Claitor and him tired of damp dock living and moved aboard the boat, where they otter-trawled the flat ocean and steamy estuaries all night and half the day, sometimes avoiding the shrimp sheds altogether and selling the catch right off the boat—$2.00 a pound for small shrimp, two fifty for large—coming ashore only for church or to buy ice and provisions and batteries for the radio, and once in a while, to see a movie at DesAuteles Country Store.

The second storm happened in September the year Claitor turned twelve. Water is life and Boudoin Becnel harbored a waterman’s severe reverence for the most primal of elements. And regarding what he did that day, he knew better. He could smell water and know when the weather would change; he could smell water and know where the shellfish would be in any given cycle. But the boat wanted overhauling and he needed to pay for it and he became reckless. Earlier that week he’d fished grounds near the Chandeleurs and taken four hundred pounds of prime quality shrimp and the same in by-catch, but later in the week the hauls began to dwindle. On Thursday, he took only forty shrimp. He ignored signs so blatant that they might have been written in flames in the sky overhead and on Friday, he moved wide offshore to federal waters, beyond the dead zone created by the polluted rivers. Miles out, he encountered vessels heading the opposite direction whose skippers hollered out to him, but they were Vietnamese and he hollered back that he didn’t understand them. 

He knew better, and Claitor knew better, but Claitor was twelve and already an able deckhand, so he did not second guess his captain nor question his authority. By the time they noted the flocks of seabirds rushing north, it was too late; a roll of livid clouds appeared on the southern horizon and came on with startling conviction. To Boudoin and his son, it was as if roiling Revelations angels had poured all their vials upon the earth at once, and the seas rose up and snatched the boat from the water and hammered it down again. The wind hit forty knots, then fifty. Seas grew to twenty feet with bigger waves mixed in and darkness came on and Boudoin couldn’t see what was coming so he stayed focused on the candle-lit compass and throttled up whenever they went off course. With every wave concussion they could feel the impact reverberate through the hull. They had no GPS or radar; nothing electronic on board but a two-way marine band and the wind was making so much noise that Claitor could not transmit nor hear weather reports; the wind was so loud for so long that he began to hear sounds inside it; tinkling, whistling, celestial, enraptured voices that were to him like snow-white fire and seemed to say, “Protégez celui qui est au service de Dieu, ayez pitié de celui qui se bat—Protect that which is in the service of God; have pity on he who fights.”

And as Claitor saw it, the voices did some good: The rudder and the steering held and the rebuilt Detroit 8V71 kept running; the weather calmed a bit and they might have made it, but there was a gigantic rogue wave that had remained behind and when it hit it lifted Scoot up so high that both Boudoin and Claitor could feel her hang upright for an instant, suspended as if on the tip of a grand finger; then the finger evaporated and the boat collapsed into the swell and capsized and the pilothouse was smashed and flooded and Boudoin grappled for a gasoline can as he went over the side. He held tight to the can and swam for two miles through terrible surf, through ferocious breakers and strong cold currents and finally straggled ashore in an isolated, murky, primeval marsh and, though he looked a long, long time among the mangroves and leafless oaks half-submerged in sinking mud, he could not find a trace of his boat or his son. 

Throughout those cold forlorn hours, Boudoin submitted to some serious self-examination. In the end, he concluded that, when reduced to its essence, his thirty-six years had been lived in satisfactory awareness of God’s presence; that he’d been guided by the Holy Spirit—and that thus far, he had not had much return on his investment. 

And it occurred to him that within this, the most dire of tests, he might have some chips to cash in. 

He could not read more than a handful of words, but he was an uncompromising churchgoer and could hear God’s voice speaking through the Writ, including Matthew 21:22: "And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive," and John 15:7: "If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be given you.”

And it wasn’t long before he came to understand where the power to find Claitor—the gentle son, the beautiful blonde boy with an angelic countenance and pear-smooth face, his companion in all things in life he valued—would emanate.

He walked twenty-two miles barefoot back to the shrimp camp and went directly to St. Anton’s Catholic Church and spoke to Father Jack Laroma. Laroma, though Boudoin’s age, was a father surrogate and the local ranking authority. Soon, word was out and helpful neighbors from all around, oil rig workers, crawfish trappers, motorcycle gangs, catfishers, commercial crabbers, alligator skinners, bousillage sculptors, oystermen, food stamp crackers who had never worked a day in their lives, folk-chemists who made methamphetamine in the trunks of their jalopies, went off in patracks and Softails and drug cars with cranked-up audio speakers to continue the search for the boat and the boy.

But Boudoin did not. He would not leave the church. In fact, from the moment he passed through the cypress doors of St. Anton’s, an otherworldly calm had settled over him and now he became poised and focused; he pulled a baseball cap low on his face and slipped prostrate to the altar steps where he began to pray in a low inflectionless purr. Such a Niagara of words was itself unusual for Boudoin who, whether jovial or melancholy, acrimonious (rare), tipsy (rarer still) or within the throes of any sort of passion whatsoever, was not a voluble man. Father Laroma—called Papa Jack by nearly everyone in the parish—believed that the young shrimper was suffering from shock and mental paralysis and tried to lead him from the altar to a cot in the small room annexed to the sanctuary. But Boudoin was not about to be led. He’d become, in his mind, an immoveable rock along the Glory Road, saying, “Naw, Papa Jack; this here altar is a beautiful island of peace where I will stay put and sit and pray at Jesus' feet.”  

So, with some misgiving, Laroma blessed him and left him where he was and went to the coast to help the watermen and bikers and the drug makers look for the boy.

In the hours that followed, steadfast serenity encompassed Boudoin; his thoughts were captive to inspirations of hope and the conviction of justice; the church was still and holy and he adopted strange composures as though he had been purified irrevocably by his rabid baptism in the raging waters of the Gulf.

Boyzie McKay was also a man of strange composures. He walked with an awkward, effeminate sashay, the result of an arthritic hip and a useless right arm. He had a bloodless look; his skin was the color of clams. His expressions were flat and his eyes were as dull as ball-bearings. He had a thick waist, droopy shoulders, a coarse complexion, fatty jowls and always appeared to be in the middle of a bad dream.

He’d retired from the sheriff’s department twenty years earlier and tried his hand at farming—then given his hand to farming when, bailing water from a feed mixer one morning the machinery kicked on and caught his sleeve in rotating blades. He received a hefty insurance settlement and he never had to work again, so he spent his time reading random library books and shooting the breeze at various substations, playing cards with the deputies.

He was a joke among them; a lonely, directionless, crippled, jug-eared screwball who wore a porkpie hat and fell asleep for no particular reason, often in the middle of a hand of whist. They called him Rubber Duck after the old trucker’s song because he monitored CB broadcasts every morning before he left the house, and when they had something particularly delicate or distasteful to do, they often assigned it to Rubber Duck.

Four days after Boudoin’s storm, one of those unpleasant situations came up.

The search for the boy and the boat by the good people of St. Anton’s had gone for nothing, and though they covered many miles of shoreline, in gradations, it fizzled out. The searchers drifted back to daily life; businesses, pickup jobs or sloth, depending. The Coast Guard continued to look. But Boudoin didn’t care: he’d seen a vision of his son’s salvation and believed that it would come from no earthly effort. Throughout these long hours he had remained on the altar, leaving only to use the toilet near the cot room, murmuring his litany of prayers, even through Sunday’s mass where he huddled in the corner by the credence table, a portrait of pious confidence and shimmery holiness that broke the hearts of many that saw him—single women especially—who could well imagine, by then, how things would turn out.

When Rubber Duck came padding up the seashell walk toward the church at six o’clock on Monday morning, Papa Jack knew that the news would not be good. Had it been, the sheriff would have come himself to claim the bragging rights.

Papa Jack met Rubber Duck at the chapel entrance and cautioned him to keep his voice down. The story unfolded in Duck’s morose and languid drawl: It seemed that a muddy, moldy, splintered, red-hulled wreck had turned up a hundred eighteen miles to the east near a town called Fruge, thrown some distance inland by the surge. A partial boy corpse had been tangled up in green fish net, bent—not the right way—in half. It was Claitor, no question. Duck was laconic and graphic; the boy’s death had been brutal.  Wild animals had eaten parts of him. The corpse was a good seventy-two hours past expiration date. Duck did not relish such details, but he had a lawman’s acclimatization to horror stories and told things the way they were. Papa Jack winced and grew faint and begged him please—please—to speak softly, but it was too late: The morning was mellow and the church was still and holy and every word that Duck had said had drifted in to Boudoin.

But when Papa Jack went carefully to administer to Boudoin’s grief, he found, to his great surprise, very little evidence of any. Despite having heard each abominable detail of Claitor’s death, Boudoin seemed to be in the throes of some ethereal ecstasy; he was on the altar with his eyes closed, beatific, bolt upright, arms outstretched, palms flat; his face, unshaven, smiling and burnished with radiance. His blonde hair was limp and long and dirty, and standing erect upon the altar—Papa Jack’s altar—he formed an image that was to the pastor ineffably repulsive. Papa Jack realized suddenly that he was afraid to go near him, and that he had no words of comfort for him that were genuine in any case, and these were emotions that shook Papa Jack to his very underpinnings.

However, in the hours that followed there was comfort enough for Boudoin and it was real enough; many hugs and sincere condolences from the communion, many assurances that Claitor had gone straight to Heaven with a contract in his hand—as these simple people said whenever children died. Boudoin appeared unmoved by the attention, neither inspired nor distressed, but he asked the most accommodating among the mourners—simple, pretty, available young women in housecoats and broadcloth slips—to bring him empty burlap sacks from oyster farms which he wrapped around his body despite the blistery heat. He stood at the pulpit—Papa Jack’s pulpit—and to those who came to listen, he quoted Psalm 35: “I put on sackcloth and humbled myself with fasting when my prayers returned to me unanswered.”

As for the fasting, it was noted that Boudoin was well into that already. He had not been seen to eat anything in four days, and now it was the mission of his grief-stricken admirers to cajole him with every manner of tempting treat, wiener sandwiches, fried turkey, fish stew, stuffed eggs, ginger cakes and mounds of steaming cracklins which they brought in Tupperware and tinfoil, all of which he turned away with what was, by now, his peculiar and personal smile, both sardonic and saintly. “Naw,” he announced, “I am on this mount with God, you bet, anchored to my Bible, and I will live right and clean and want nothing but His mighty presence.”

Papa Jack understood that there were psychological aberrations at work—the potential for long-term trouble—but was at a loss as to how to handle it. He came to Boudoin in the middle of the night when everyone else had gone home, carrying a gallon of sweet tea and a plate of pain patates that Miz Peppa, the rectory housekeeper, had made. When Boudoin fluffed him off, Papa Jack grew childish and petty, demanding to know why a man—even a grieving man—would dare go so many days without nourishment.

“Why, Papa Jack,” said Boudoin, his attitude nearly patronizing, “I been drinking from that baptismal basin there. Surely holy water can keep a man through any sort of trial; surely he won’t need no nourishment beyond water blessed with your own solemn prayers, water begging God’s grace on him that uses it. Christ of Nazareth himself, he’s go full forty days and forty nights in the desert without any food, no?”

“Boudoin,” said Papa Jack in as gentle a tone as he could muster, hoping his voice did not display the outrage coursing through his body: “However much you suffer now, you would not in faith compare yourself—your pain—to that of God?”

Suddenly, Boudoin drew himself up to full height, his face twisted into a parody of sanctity, his lean figure trembling: 

“God?” he spat. “He so love the world that He sacrifice his only son; yeah, Papa Jack? Well, okay, then; that big bad cocksucker ain’t got nothing over me no more, no way.” 

He turned to the massive crucifix that hung above the tabernacle and made an obscene gesture at it and said, “We’s on equal ground now, motherfucker. You and me, both.”

Then, like a spent squall, Boudoin’s temper lightened and his scowl relaxed, even as the echoes of profanities bounced among the pews. 

“We’s even,” he said simply, with unexpurgated conviction.

And no matter what Papa Jack, shocked to his pith, promised or suggested or threatened, Boudoin would not leave the altar.

So Papa Jack performed the ritual blessing and made some more holy water and replenished the baptismal—his baptismal.

What else was he going to do?—after all, Papa Jack was another fellow of strange composures. He had but two interests, the clerical state and the bayou, and he could occasionally be spied enjoying both as he stood in the belfry in his vestments and shot geese as they sailed low above the salt marshes beyond the churchyard. Like Boudoin, he believed with all his soul in the moral code handed down through centuries and saw them applied practically, in the backyard of life, a world away from the councils of Rome. He’d grown up in the squalid projects of Shreveport, where an interest in matters of faith was somewhat rare. He’d entered Notre Dame Seminary at fourteen through the auspices of a patron priest, and found closeness to God through the roots of orthodoxy; he was a big barrel-chested kid, but preferred the solitude of the seminary fringes, the trees and gardens, to the competitive high jinx of his comrades. The kids of Notre Dame, for the most part, were sports freaks who wanted to become priests, but he was a miniature priest all the way through. To this day he shied from confrontation and displayed blinding deference to (and terror of) authority—mostly because of the brutal adolescence he’d spent with a booze-soused father. 

In technical terms he was a pussy, which is one of the reason he picked on geese.

On Wednesday, they held a wake for Claitor where tremendous quantities of food was consumed by the poor country people who attended; they sat on copings and tomb steps among the skittery lizards, and afterward there was a funeral mass inside the church. Boudoin remained on the altar through everything, sitting calmly on Papa Jack’s bench. He had by then shed his sack cloth for a long white linen shift sewed for him at his request by Hillary Ince, a young widow whose husband had driven his crop duster into a high tension line the previous January. 

Papa Jack, aware of where the congregation’s focus lay—not on him, the celebrant, but on the mournful apparition on the bench—grew unaccountably self-conscious and delivered an awkward, mumbly sermon on the vagaries of weather and an equally clumsy eulogy.

In the middle of it, Boudoin rose and nudged the pastor from his pulpit. In contrast to Papa Jack’s maundering and discombobulated prattle, Boudoin’s voice was strong—his eyes glittered wet with intensity and evident sincerity; his days without food seemed to have sharpened his senses, and by his measured tones, he sounded alert and eminently sane:

“Always he is fooled himself, that Papa Jack. This sad thing today, this was no accident from the Gulf, no kinda way. God tests sometimes. He tested that fellow Job and Abraham with his son on the stone on Moriah and Moses way up there on Sinai mountain and now he test Boudoin Becnel right here on St. Anton altar. But I will not bite that bait, me. God take my boy Claitor and my Louise Angelique; He take down my camp, take my Scoot and all my livelihood. I say anyway, blessed be the name of Jehovah. I come into this world with nothing and I will leave that same way: In the white light of Christ. You watch close now; I stand full forty days and forty nights right here on this altar and prove to God that no test too tough for this ol’ boy; God can bring down all His might down on my head and I will not sin, but fall on the ground and worship. Forty days I stand here, and I take no food in all that time, you wait and see; only holy water I drink, and God will see to it that I don’t need no more than that in my belly until my test is through. Water is life, no? Our catechisms teach us. God love that Job and that Abraham and that Moses and now we gonna prove how much God love this ol’ waterman too. ”

Of course, most of the congregation had never before heard such a passionate diatribe within those cypress walls; Papa Jack’s homilies tended to be wan and forgettable on the best of days, and now, where Papa Jack hoped that the wisest among them would recognize the pathology that had overtaken Boudoin and caused the outburst, the opposite came to be: They were awed to silence and introspection and ultimately, wholeheartedly supported him; they knew the catechisms to which Boudoin had referred, that the blessing of the water insured that whoever used it would have health of soul and body; they had perfect faith that God would preserve the young shrimper who had already lost so much, even as they themselves might lose as much tomorrow or the next day or the next and could only hope that they would face their test with souls so enlightened.

Boudoin went to the basin and drank, deeply, with relish, and loudly smacked his lips.

And they cheered him, the pretty widows and sonless spinsters and dopey unmarried teenage girls in particular; with neither trailer nor trawler, they saw no reason for him to leave the church, which must look after her destitute in such circumstances, and if he would not come home with them—he wouldn’t—then as far as they were concerned, he should stay exactly where he was.

So Papa Jack took the spineless route and called Sheriff Eacups and asked that Boudoin be forcibly removed from the altar—his altar—and if necessary, be transported to the LSU Mental Health Center. He himself would sign committal papers in the absence of kin. Plainly, threats to starve himself to death—what mortal man could go so long without eating?—constituted a danger to himself. 

Papa Jack explained the problem to Eacups, and afterward repaired to the rectory, chafing at his failures and feeling dark and weird and unspeakably filthy.

When Rubber Duck, not Eacups, came draggling up the seashells at six o’clock the following morning, Papa Jack knew that he was in for another bad day. This time, he led the big-bellied, sleepy-looking, jug-eared flake away from the church and to the cemetery; a place where they would not be overheard.

As was his custom, Papa Jack paused by the graveyard gate, knelt in the dewy dirt, crossed himself and murmured a psalm. Duck stood back, grandstanding patience, fingering his porkpie hat with his good hand as he watched the early rising lizards dart among the crevices of the tombs. Local lore had it that dried, pulverized and sprinkled on a potential suitor, marriage would inevitably follow. 

He said, in his funny nasal tone, “That’s okay Father, you’re in your zone. Do what you need to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Your zone; your pocket. Go ahead. Me, I don’t swing with all that Vatican…” Duck weighed the propriety of cursing before the churchman as he mimicked the sign of the cross. “…nonsense. I’m Presbyterian.”

Duck drawled on: “Now, Father, on your shrimper, this is how the situation comes out. It’s ticklish. These are superstitious people down here in the tail end of the world—you know that by now even though you from way up north in Shreveport. Down here, not one cajun in a hundred gonna let a little baby look in a mirror, not one in a thousand gonna kill a spider without getting goose pimples.”  His voice was maddeningly blasé and dribbled like syrup from a ladle. “Me, I don’t believe that mumbo jumbo; I’m a Presbyterian.”

“There’s a point behind all this, I’m thinking?” Papa Jack frowned.

“Well, here’s how it is: Not one in a million will arrest a man in church.”

It was the age old custom of sanctuary and a line that no one locally would cross.

No use arguing; the matter was sealed—you’d sooner get a man—even a duly elected sheriff or a deputy—to sleep with moonlight in his face or go hunting on a Friday night than to take down a prisoner on consecrated ground. They’d discussed the matter over oyster sandwiches and a hand of Georgia skin at the DeRoyan substation and Ramona, the dispatcher and the oldest person present, reminded them of Barker Oestreich, maverick undersheriff of St. Bernard parish who back in ‘82 had handcuffed a Negro during Sunday service at Bibleway Missionary, and that afterward, the Negro was acquitted and Oestreich was killed in a freak car crash.

Nothing more needed to be said, and anyway, had there been, Papa Jack was not the man to say it.

Now, it was Papa Jack’s habit to say a conventual mass every weekday morning at eight-thirty, and most these were celebrated before a handful of very old or very sick people, desperate junkies on the downside of a bender or fishermen’s wives whose husbands had been gone too long at sea or at the BacTrac Lounge. 

That morning, the one after Claitor’s funeral, the pews were busy. There was every manner of local and a few folks who weren’t even Catholic. News of Boudoin’s water fast spread like all news spread in the parish; swiftly and geometrically. Most of the gathered were there not for reasons of faith or duty, but from blunt curiosity. The bulk were women; men were shrimping, crabbing, hung over or beginning to feel the first green pangs over the regard being paid to the fierce, feral, fanatical young shrimper in his linen shift—though they were too mindful of potential supernatural consequences to admit it. 

Meanwhile, Boudoin remained on Papa Jack’s altar, an image of presence and grace. His boosters no longer brought food—it was sacrilege to interfere with a hallowed fast, they were certain of that—but they brought little gris gris amulets instead: Red flannel squares with duck’s feet attached, shriveled up frogs, wads of hair, lucky beans, pieces of hummingbird, love oil—lots of love oil. It made Papa Jack physically ill to see such heathen garbage littering the floor behind the communion rail, but he was political enough to let matters alone while he muddled over the elevating crisis.

For two days, he muddled. And three times, replaced the holy water in the baptismal basin. Boudoin had now been more than a week without food, and though evidence might be seen in his gaunt, sunken-eyed appearance, he remained expansive, energetic and vocal, nudging Papa Jack from the pulpit after each short, miserable sermon and imparting the personal wisdoms that were occurring to him each hour as his mind drifted deeper into the strange watches of starvation. Those who knew him believed that he must have been possessed by otherworldly intellects; never had he been known to have opinions on any subject beyond shrimp cycles and boat maintenance. Now, he spoke of spiritual epidemics, of new ecumenical compasses, of the Holy Trinity appearing as three suns in the hazy afternoon outside the window; he claimed regular nighttime conversations with Zephyr, the Angel of Light and also with his grandmother, who had hung herself in a chicken coop before he was even born. Surely, they whispered among themselves, this beaten young male had been kissed by the Spirit’s tongue—chosen, even. Every day, the eight-thirty grew more popular, and by Sunday, so many folks came to get a glimpse of Boudoin and to hear his words—the wilder and more psycho-holy the better—that they overflowed the place and had to dangle from the old slave’s gallery or listen from the anteroom. 

Papa Jack was reduced, effectively, to the status of an acolyte.

Monday morning, by first light, the pastor knew what he had to do, and immediately too, no matter how little stomach he had for doing it. An appointment to see the oncologist when the armpit lump can no longer be ignored? Descending to the cellar, nose clothespinned, to locate whatever it is that died down there? Telling fundamentalist, Bible-thumping folks that you prefer the company of your own sex?  Papa Jack’s sudden mission was worse than any of that, at least to his own reckoning: He went to see the Big ‘V’.

Skipping the eighty-thirty—let Boudoin handle it, he huffed—he slipped into his rusting Jetta and headed up to the secretariat in Pointe Carré, where Bishop Ammie Villababous—the Big ‘V’ to the more jocular priests of the parish—held court in his grand but foul-smelling office. 

Villababous was domineering and idiotically old, simultaneously weighted and exalted by the strangest composures of all. He viewed his world with inflexible cynicism; he hated life, his vocation, Mather Halko (his Vicar General), the entire Ecumenical system (which he looked upon—rightly—as a racket), everything in God’s creation but God Himself and the grim power that he, as the highest-ranking hierarch in the diocese, had wielded for almost half a century. Papa Jack was so terrified of him that he generally needed to use the bathroom twice between his car and an audience, but this time, he was certain that the overbearing, mummified cleric would not suffer some eccentric shrimper to usurp the Church’s authority. He was certain that Big ‘V’ would see Boudoin Becnel—as Papa Jack was beginning to—as the Antichrist.

Antichrist was a hefty accusation to be sure—borderline whackadoodle even—but Papa Jack might have been forgiven, trembling as he was beneath the onslaught of personal storms, as violent, in their way, as Boudoin’s tempetes. And like Boudoin, he should have known better.

As he warbled out the tale, the vulpine, ill-tempered old troll, melting like the Oz witch inside his dalmatic, glared across his mahogany desk through cold cobalt discs. Beneath, his lips were drawn back in a grimace, his teeth were dry and schoolbus color, his face a dull cyanotic purple. He was only five foot two but had a stagy presence that made him seem large and powerful, even seated. Charles Manson casts a similar spell, it is said.

The office was a reflection of the person; above the cherry credenza hung a lithograph of Jesus trashing the Jerusalem temple in which it looked like the Savior had just poked out a moneychanger’s eye. A palatial Venetian walnut bookcase on heavy gilt feet stood near, filled with dusty collectables, everything pre-Vatican II and associated with death and penance. The desk itself was littered with scapulars and rosaries, a golden ciborium and a grab bag of antique Holy cards depicting Jesus cursing the fig tree, dogs licking the plague sores of St. Roch and St. Agatha carrying her severed breasts on a plate.

It was intended as a stolid and pious war room; it came off as a twisted, hyper-Catholic e-Bay auction.

As for the Boudoin saga, Papa Jack displayed customary naiveté in assuming that Villababous was not already acquainted with the situation. The bishop’s scout network had eyes and ears throughout the parish, and nothing of this magnitude, including St. Anton’s remarkable increase in attendance and the associated heft of the collection plate, would have escaped his notice. Big V’s initial impulse was to shake his head in bemusement: If this niggling podunk bush-league priest had a problem with extra parishioners, no matter the reason, he was pitching for the wrong team. A bother? The bishop knew from bother. The chancery was a nest of bother, elephantine bother, multimillion dollar civil-lawsuit victim-settlement bother which had long since reached critical mass. And as such, Villababous needed profitable Masses critically. Like the Mafia families of old, the entire archdiocese was laying low, obfuscating, dodging grand jury subpoenas, veiling itself in secrecy, forming conspiracies and fronting denials. ‘Going to the mattress’ was what the New York Families had called it in their glory days, though in this case it was a grossly ironic misnomer.

But the offerings? Five hundred dollars on a Tuesday? There was another hour of high-priced council in the can. Big V folded spindly fingers beneath a sharp, bird-bone chin and interrupted Papa Jack mid-whine. “Look’a, who all is blessing the holy water that your young fella is drinking?” 

“I am, your excellency.”

“Soc au' lait, Laroma, wake up here: you don’t have a problem, you have a solution.” The bishop’s accent was textbook yatspeak, pure Ninth Ward, oddly Brooklynesque. “Don’t you have faith in the validity of your own sacred business?” He pronounced it ‘bid-ness’. “Don’t you believe in God’s undying mercy?” It came out ‘Gawd’ and ‘moicy’.

“You think God will not preserve a fellow demonstrating that kind of holiness?”  ‘Presoive.’

Papa Jack began, quietly, to swallow oxygen. “I… do, your eminence.”

“Then why don’t you think your boy’s gonna pull it off?”

Papa Jack exhaled in staccato puffs, unable to muster response.

Truth was, Villababous was several laps ahead of him. What a PR coup for the Church if the young shrimper survived forty days on nothing but holy water; proof positive in the mystical efficacy of the sacraments, the omnipotence of God and the cosmopolitan capacity of the Catholic Church. Just what the battle-scarred denomination needed, along with a boatload of new recruits. God would get the credit, the institution would get the converts and the diocese would get the manna. Win, win and win. It should be a slam-dunk, too: At the bishop’s request, Mather Halko had done a deep-dive on the internet and found any number of fasting fools who had made it forty days without food; in fact, forty days was the watermark—no pun—for making your point. Hadn’t that shuckin’ and jivin’ buffoon Dick Gregory gone eighty-one days on nothing but distilled water? Granted, he’d probably snuck a couple of Big Macs along the way, but come on! Ghandi had survived any number of fasts, and he was a scrawny little wog to begin with. Even that Sinn Fein neo-com Bobbie Sands had lasted sixty-six food-free days, and Villababous had his doubts about the physical mettle of the those pugnacious, potato-popping sots under the best of circumstances. For a healthy young coonass in the prime of life, forty days on a holy water diet should be—again, no pun—a piece of cake.

“Sheesh, I reckon your boy’s got more faith in y’all than y’all got in y’all,” said Villababous. “Sounds like the sheep is rousting an indolent shepherd to the task. The boy’s en d'oeuil, isn’t he? Didn’t he just lose his wife and son? You supposed to be a wellspring of solace and hope down there in the swamp, tending to the bereaved, not condemning ‘em. Why y’all behaving like a whinging, sniveling, inefficient female? Case you haven’t noticed, we are dealing with a certain leadership crisis right now. We trying to stave off The Last Hour. We trying to save the Holy Garden from ultimate inundation; we in the process of ripping out all corrupt and impure weeds. You a weed or a okra down there in the ooze, Laroma?”

The question was such a non sequitur that Papa Jack believed he was about to faint. His voice shot up an octave and dropped off in decibels. “An okra, your grace.” 

All the obvious and irrefutable points which his soul had screamed out on the depressing drive up to Point Carré gagged like sudden bile in his throat: Points like, ‘This is… testing God, your holiness! It’s a scam! I saw Becnel flip the Lamb the bird! Look at him up there in his stupid shift and scraggly goatee; why, it makes him look like—well, everybody knows who it makes him look like—for the love of Mike, why doesn’t he shave at least? It’s not like he’s short of water. And all those drooling, lovesick white trash bimbettes? Swooning at his insane drivel? He’s becoming an idol up there! Baal dipped in fish smell! 

The Last Hour? Like Christ in the desert, Papa Jack was sorely tempted: He wanted to bellow out 1 John, Chapter 2 , verses eighteen and nineteen: "It is the Last Hour; and just as you heard that Antichrist is coming, even now many Antichrists have arisen; from this we know that it is the Last Hour.”

But, alas, no outburst. Papa Jack sat shuddering, mute, purse-lipped, defeated. Confrontation was not among his core competencies. Villababous flicked a dismissive wrist at him and began to play with his knuckle-busting Episcopal ring. His hands were yellowed and waxy with fingers that tapered like candles.

“Anything more, Priest?”

Papa Jack sighed. “Nothing, your beatitude.”

“Mais. If you gonna serve the altar, you betta learn to live by the altar. You go back to your wet little quarter and keep on consecrating that holy water, give your boy much as he wants; it’s free, ain’t it?” The way the bishop pronounced quarter and water, they rhymed. “Y’all in charge of your own patch of the truck garden down there in the squish, Laroma, so go and tend it like a good little dirt farmer and stop being such a jackass.’

So, Papa Jack returned to his Jetta, and from there to the church, beet red, short of breath, clammy with sweat, broiling with self-disgust. He considered going over Villababous’ head, to the Archbishop, the Cardinal, to the Holy See and the Pope himself if necessary; but he was fairly sure that such a stunt would land him a custom gig in some AIDS-ridden corner of Liberia. In short, he was catching on, and this time he knew better.

…Unlike the flocks of doomed Canadian geese which came in later that day, low and vulnerable above the salt marshes—his salt marshes—opposite St. Anton’s belfry.

It was a small drama played out in obscure and squalid badlands, a jerkwater fish camp considered by the world at large—with some justification—to be culturally and economically stagnant. For the most part, for a while, Boudoin’s mission was ignored. A handful of two-bit, two-name Christian radio stations, Grace Life 89.5 and Faith Talk FM, sent him well-wishes via shows like Unshackled Prayers and White Dove Fellowship and on Thursday, WUSA-TV, Channel 7 claimed they were going to send a crew down to interview Boudoin, but they never showed up. 

The locals tended to be humble people with almost prehistoric consciences and they continued to assemble throughout that week, discharging prayers and supplications and gallons of perspiration—the tri-parish was in the clutches of a heat wave and the clot of fevered flesh and andouille exhalations drove the temperature within the church beyond one hundred thirty degrees.

Meanwhile, Papa Jack did his best to be an okra. He tried to make his homilies more user friendly. He studied the inspirational discourses of Martin Luther King. He mentioned congregants by name and anointed the visibly screwed-upped with revived vigor when they came up for communion. He forgave sins by the barge-load and he drew out demons of every ilk, from Ya-Ya Hebert’s postpartum blues to Rodrigue Vegas’s impulse to expose himself inside DesAuteles Country Store. Mrs. Schmidling, who had chronic fatigue syndrome, came to mass in a stretcher and received more than her customary allotment of fraternal attention. Royce Angellette tottered up to the rail with a long-suffering, care-giving niece and both got a cross-shaped smudge of sacramental oil on their foreheads. PooChoo Bouzigard, palpitating and tooth-grinding his way through a crack-induced morning-after, got a superlative dose of Extreme Unction just in case.

Throughout it all, Boudoin wore what Papa Jack considered an obsequious smirk, but what the crowd saw as an alabaster glow of spirituality. Two weeks into starvation, Boudoin’s steel-blue eyes retained the luster of polished pearls and his gaze bounced around the room like a scavenger fly. He’d eased off on his sermonizing, feeling, it seemed, less bombastic as the days wore on—that and the fact that he’d sort of exhausted his roster of off-the-wall topics, which he’d recalled near verbatim (it turned out) from his favorite Faith Talk program, Unraveling the New World Order. Still, he managed to steal the pastoral show by rising at intervals from the sedilia, strolling leisurely to the baptismal and declaring in an authoritative key, ”Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst,” or “The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life,” then swigging down long, noisy mouthfuls. 

In the quiet watches of the morning, he’d been doing some prolonged soul searching and discovered an intrinsic grasp of Barnum & Bailey-ology; he knew who the crowd had come to see and he gave them what they wanted. 

Afterward, he deigned to touch anyone who requested it, and to hear them tell it, that did more for the myriad illneses than a drum of Papa Jack’s brow grease. But Papa Jack didn’t hear them tell it; mostly when the services were done he could be found around back with a socket wrench, trying to repair the church’s half-assed air conditioning.

So it went until Saturday, when everything exploded in an apocalyptic whump.

During the five o’clock vigil mass, with the torrid temple bursting at its cypress seams, twelve-year-old Viola Schmidling (who’d found a rare, private prayer pocket beneath a three-foot Immaculate Heart of Mary statue) was heard to shriek at a pitch so impassioned and that it raised neck hairs on everyone in the place. There was a rush to her side, and a moment later, near pandemonium: undeniably, the cheapish plaster Virgin was weeping goopy rust-colored slime, and likewise, the immaculate chunk of heart-shaped glass between her breasts was hemorrhaging something red and nasty looking.

Papa Jack did a double take, and whatever limited attention span he’d commanded via the Gospel evaporated: Something tangible like a bleeding Madonna had far more star power than words. 

Even Boudoin was forgotten in that glorified moment. The awestruck faithful descended on the statue and took it up in their arms like an MVP at the end of a football game, removed it (over pastorly protest) from St. Anton and as an apostolate, paraded it through the crooked, hen-scratched, dumpy little roads of the parish. They carried it beneath the Picayune billboard, past the Pelican Shopette and Washeteria and the sagging Southend homes with ragged LSU banners on doors with holes kicked in them, among the abandoned storefronts with rusty corrugated roofs and moss growing beneath pink stucco, past great old Northend plantation homes ringed with concertina wire. And along the way, there was much hullabaloo. These simple people, who were frequently sad and wet and off-kilter, were more than pleased to refer to a chain of Saturday night optimism so long that no historian could trace its beginning, celebrating wildly with orisons and canticles and Hurricane Malt Liquor at a dollar ten for a forty-ouncer.

Only Papa Jack and Boudoin remained behind in the chapel, and for a brief moment they were again sober and brooding brethren as they had been in the years before the storm. 

Then Papa Jack hustled up Miz Peppa to help defuse the joy and annihilate the hope and debunk the miracle while Boudoin racked his brain to come up with some way, some angle, some cheesy fete of three-ring legerdemain through which he could regain the moment—his moment—from this unwelcome plaster poseur.

As a professional courtesy, Papa Jack described the phenomenon via voicemail to the Big V, off at some Episcopal credo convention in South Beach, then had Miz Peppa pull files from the office record cabinet. She soon found the one he was after, a receipt from the Catholic Heritage Store, and after series of late night phone calls and an hour’s worth of runaround, he tracked down the shop’s proprietor and was informed sheepishly that the adhesive used to affix Mary’s glass eyes and Immaculate Heart was prone to melt when exposed to excessive heat—obviously, it wasn’t the first call like this he’d received from some spoilsport priest. Papa Jack rubbed his hands in satisfaction.

That morning, in the wee hours, with the utmost stealth and reverence, the statue was returned to its place, taped with petitions and dollar bills and strung out in mardi gras beads. Papa Jack heard the rattle; he was awake in the rectory, wordsmithing the exposé he would deliver at the start of Sunday’s mass.  

A gentle, intricately orchestrated, supremely nimble exposé it would have to be too, for Papa Jack understood correctly that he was alone on the front line in a siege with charlatans, bearing the chalice through a greenhorn congregation—and that the situation had gone from silly game to blood sport. To recoup the position of alpha male would be a tiptoe through the minefields. 

The following morning, his carefully composed monologue found many extra ears; word of the blessed bloodletting had soused the tri-parish and overflowed it; folks were arriving steadily, setting up tents and shrines and lawn chairs, and now there was media among them. This time, WUSA-TV actually showed up, bearing not gifts, but Nikons and Betacams and handheld tape recorders.

Papa Jack began the service by invoking Acts 5:38-39: "Leave them alone, for if this plan and work of theirs is a man-made thing, it will disappear; but if it comes from God, you cannot possibly defeat them.” 

He spoke with compassion for the hoodwinked and soon-to-be crestfallen devotees and with much regard for the mysterious, inexplicable ways of the Spirit, and ultimately, he lauded the superiority of good old American craftsmanship, since the shoddy, glue-challenged icon happened to have been made in Korea. He raised his pitch and shared the conversation he’d had with the Catholic Heritage knucklehead the night before and puffed up with a little pride at his prudent investigation. He approached the voiding Virgin and seemed almost gleeful in demonstrating that the blood was nothing more than store-bought pyrotechnics—in a grotesque (and, many thought, unnecessary) gesture, he proceeded to pluck out Mary’s two eyes and yank free her Immaculate Heart. 

The mutilation was followed by a collective gasp of horror, which a moment later changed to whoops of astonishment —heads and camcorders turned from Papa Jack and back to the altar, where Boudoin now stood forth with wide arms, slowly unfolding his hands to display a gush of warm blood that spilled from wounds in his palm; more blood was soaking through his linen shroud above his heart and from his bare feet, although you had to crane your neck to see that part. 

And it was the real deal, too, by the look of it. 

The statue hoax was shrugged off and editors were consulted and it turned out that this was, in the whole history of the Catholic church, the first stigmata ever filmed as it happened. Awestruck faces pressed against the window glass and rattled rosary beads and holy medallions. Everyone jammed in closer, and those who came with chronic diseases made cheap attempts to jump the line. Meanwhile, Papa Jack deflated, sinking into the bluest funk of his life. He gasped for air, thinking he might be suffocating. He felt like his head was being compressed in a cross-slide vise; he realized that he had no weapon in his arsenal to combat such lame-brained credulity. He despised himself for thinking of his congregation as textbook inbred hicks, but that’s exactly how he thought of them. What’s next; Mother Teresa’s face on a sticky bun? Jesus in a screen door dent? There was no reason to even consider celebrating the rest of Mass, nor any way for him to wedge through the hot-blooded horde even if he thought of one.

Miz Peppa (Pepper DeMarc to Social Security administrators) was the rectory housekeeper, a thick-thighed, practical, slightly stooped and determinedly fearless woman whose composures were perfectly normal.  She always dressed like she was in church—which, as it happened, she was. Matronly and middle-aged, she was the end product of precise affection, an only child who’d been treated as her parents’ pride and idol, not just another link in the food chain. She’d come up on strict golden rules, then been blessed for thirty-six years with a hardworking and cheerful husband, and after he passed, she’d carried on living with a determined and positive heart.  She was adept at everything to do with a household, from cooking to scrubbing to laundering to mending, accomplishing all with an enthusiasm born of deeply industrious traditions. 

But she truly ascended her glory throne when she found herself in a situation that needed someone of firm morals and unyielding foresight to take charge. With Papa Jack cowering in the rectory and a phalanx of faithful descending from the north as rabid as Sherman’s army, she seized the reins of St. Anton with single-minded spunk.

Through the first of that week, professional pilgrims began to find the murky bayou chapel—folks with handmade necklaces commemorating various places where saints had appeared and Polaroid scrapbooks of sites where paranormal phenomena once occurred, some recognizing each other, saying stuff like, “Weren’t you at Medjugorje in ’98?” and “Don’t I remember you from Fatima? How is the endometriosis—or was it myocitis?” 

Miz Peppa conducted impromptu interrogations with a businesslike demeanor and hustled them, along with their tri-parish compatriots, to areas set aside for various motivations—‘remission of accumulated sin’ over here by the wheelchair ramp, ‘desiring a more benign afterlife’ over there by the storage shed, and specific blessings for personal calamities in pockets near the choir alcove. She divvied the sick into categories: ‘Terminal’ and ‘non-terminal’ and ‘likely possessed by demons’. She enlisted a committed cadre of friends and relatives to help arrange stalls for the local entrepreneurs who came in to cater to the physical needs of the penitential, and even managed to disband a gang peddling White Mule by the glass. Miz Peppa was no stranger to such devout crowds; as a young woman she’d worked the old-time bush meetings where hundreds would show up on a Saturday evening to hear the Louisiana Cyclone or Silver-Tongued Bliss rail against intemperance or harlotry or man’s inhumanity to man. Whether or not she actually believed in Boudoin’s ecstasy was immaterial; she knew him as a young man of Christian character, with gentle disposition and manners, and understood that he’d discovered, in the midst of misfortune, a rare talent: That of gaining souls for Christ. With Papa Jack out of commission, she exercised the same charisma she had as a barefoot child when she’d walked faithfully about the tri-parish with a subscription list, soliciting aid to build the Rock of Ages Church. The Holy Spirit may have had control of the house, but as for the pilgrim posse, it was all about Pepper DeMarc.

She had a couple of nephews who looked like gangbanging thugs, even dressed in high-gorge four-button Adolfo church suits—and they, under the ever-vigilant eyes of Aunt Peppa, were engaged to snake through the crowds and accept donations. 

Within the sanctuary, Boudoin seemed placid, satisfied to find his flock not only returned, but increased. He sat in idle splendor, somewhat baffled by the gold rush of strangers but perfectly willing to see his message spread as far as it might go. Safe to suggest that there were few, at this point, who understood the magnitude of that message.

The following day, Papa Jack put in three cameos; two to replenish the water—the faithful were filling thermoses and hippie wine pouches from the stoups and had even begun to sell Dixie cupfuls along the nearby highways for three dollars each—and one to make a statement to the press which had been dictated to him over the phone by Villababous as he boarded a plane to a Bishop’s retreat in Palm Springs. 

Papa Jack stood on the church porch beside an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts and announced the official position on Boudoin Becnel’s so-called stigmata, which was, in short, not to lend diocesan imprimatur to anything without a detailed Vatican inquiry. The words were couched and careful, voicing reason and restraint, skeptical while acknowledging that the origin of the whole teetering Catholic establishment was in designs of supernatural agency.

“To believe in God is to believe in miracles,” was how the Big V had tempered the disclaimer (no sense in scaring anybody off), “…and we certainly believe in God.” 

It would have been a pretty effective press conference too, except that Papa Jack had been dipping into the sacramental wine and stood unsteadily in the turbulent sunlight, cheeks splotched with pinkish welts, eyes misted over and voice thick and slurred, twitching his way through the technical aspects of miracle affirmation. “…decisions about what is Divine intervention are made by separate bodies of scientists and theologians… who must submit their findings first to the College of Cardinals… then to the Pope himself….”

Follow-up questions were a drunken disaster and journalists found better fodder in the raw sound outside the church and talking to the wild-eyed believers looking for their Get Out Of Hell Free cards.  

Of course, the true prize was Boudoin, but he was getting past the point of useable sound bites; he was fading in increments, his voice growing noticeably weaker and his comments rambling, incoherent and half-audible. All he could offer were rusty Bible verses, and when they asked him to explain his fast he murmured, “Way I come up, if you don’t work, you don’t eat. And me, I got no work no more.” 

Cameras whirred and correspondents scribbled anyway, and afterward, they got supplementary scoops from the locals, jotting down Boudoin’s morose history. The stigmata did not reappear—miracles were fickle and didn’t happen when they weren’t needed, evidently—so that angle evaporated. 

Soon afterward, the dailies and bloids filed their stories—one with a telephoto shot of Boudoin’s leaky hands under the painful headline ‘Palm Sunday?’—and the news crews packed up and moved on to fires and cop chases and drug busts.

Meanwhile, Miz Peppa stood by, steadfastly and reverently supporting the cause, utterly convinced that the Lord would see Boudoin Becnel through his ordeal and reward his penitence tenfold—that’s how cocksure she was of her creed. Still, she knew that there were tough days ahead, and from the moment she slipped the crown of St. Anton over her sensible bob, she took it as her foremost duty to become Boudoin’s protector, to nurture his spirit and become a patient ally; all the things that Papa Jack should have done. She called him ‘Tee Boo’ as a mother might, and saw that his linen was clean, that his baptismal filled with holy water, that he had Bactine for his stigmata.  She looked deeply into his cavernous blue eyes and decided that he needed less veneration and more repose, and arranged for the supplicants to enter the church in three rounds of one hour each, sickest first, beginning at eight in the morning. Then, at eleven sharp, she announced that Boudoin required time to commune with the Almighty and cleared the place, sweeping out the pilgrims like so much house dust. Her massive nephews in their Sunday finest, raising eyebrows and flexing biceps at reluctant hangers on, didn’t hurt the process. From his niche of notoriety, Boudoin had developed a bureaucratic shell.

There was, however one fellow whom the shell suffered to remain behind. With ravenous pilgrims outside the cypress door, ripping up souvenir chunks of sod, surreptitiously pocketing pieces of the porch railing and scratching at the window panes, Miz Peppa had no objection to the presence of a lawman, even one who was retired, narcoleptic and one-armed.

Since he’d first shambled up the seashell walk at St. Anton, the twin breakdowns of Boudoin and Papa Jack had become for Rubber Duck a matter of indescribable fascination, far better than the random conversations he overheard on his citizen’s band radio in the morning. So this became his hobby—eavesdropping upon these two imploding souls—and as a dedicated alumnus of the sheriff’s office, he knew his duty to see the matter through to the end. And not just as an observer, either. Some personality traits do not fade with age, and as an adult, as a young boy, Duck was the one shaking up the jar of captured bugs whenever they stopped fighting.

He’d sequestered himself in a rear pew, splayed out in a near-obscene position, jaws wide, legs spread, feet going two different directions, one moment snoring and drooling onto his untucked cotton shirt, the next, on hyper-alert. He stared Boudoin down with a sort of perplexed curiosity. It had been two decades since he’d investigated anything professionally, but he’d not set aside his personal credos. For one thing, unlike the rubes he’d worked with, who generally couldn’t see the patient for the pathology, he never underestimated his quarry. He allowed that Boudoin might own a degree of moral complexity—an innate, backwoods sophistication— and that clearly, behind the desperation and ascetic piety was no small level of consumer savvy. 

For Duck, it made the situation all the more interesting; a New York Times crossword instead of the one in the back of TV Guide. As a rule, he made a concentrated effort to avoid conclusions born of common sense. Common sense was the enemy of police work and he’d explain it if you asked: “Many a promising lead is missed by a nagging voice that says, ‘But that makes no sense…’”  

He adjusted his scrotum, stood, hiked up his stretch waist trousers and limped to the first row of pews.

“Turned sixty-three last September,” he said to Boudoin, who looked up briefly from his water trough. “Want a tip, son? Don’t never do that.” He rambled on, wading through easy small talk: “You ain’t been sleeping much, have you? Tough way to go. Me, I got the opposite problem, I can’t seem to stop. It’s my blood sugar; I fall asleep all the damn time, just like that.” He snapped his fingers to indicate how quickly he could fall asleep. “You know what Sartre figured? He figured that Hell’s a place where you have no eyelids—where you’re always awake…”

He lit up his favorite stogie, a Vieux Carré rolled on Decatur Street, and never mind that he was in church. That was part of the deal with Duck—he liked his cigars and everybody around him just had to deal with it. “No, s’pose you all wouldn’t know that. Say, how’s the water?” 

Boudoin lowered an eyebrow and watched Duck guardedly. Within the near-empty church, he’d lost his Messianic stage persona and seemed vague and detached in his campy outfit. Duck continued, and what he said sounded arbitrary, trilling and circuitous, riffs on a theme: “…Since I got my arm chawed up—last time I let my guard down, tell you that for nothing—I’ve had lots of time to think. Well, you see I got a weak bladder, so last night I’m thinking about pissing, and from pissing I’m thinking about water. And what I’m thinking is, water never really goes away, does it? The stuff you drink, you piddle it down the drain, out it goes and evaporates, makes clouds, comes back again when it rains, goes back to the rivers, back to Lake Ponchartrain, back to Taum Sauk reservoir and we drink it all over again…”

“So what?” Boudoin replied.

“Well, so what is, that means every drop of water you take in, you and me both, probably’s been taken in before by somebody else. Could be dozens, hell, hundreds of people, all through history.”  

“What about it?” Boudoin said testily, but this time glancing at the baptismal, at the silvery surface of the holy water glittering in diffused sunlight.

“So, call me crazy, but how can that happen without any consequence? May sound nuts, but what if a little mortal essence gets tangled up with that water on its way down, fuses with the molecules like some goddamn Discovery Channel bamboozle, and when you drink it, somebody else’s stuff sticks with you, at least for a while, until you piss it out again? What if you spend your whole life absorbing chunks of somebody else? How’d that change you as a person? All my career I seen good guys go bad for no reason, bad guys go good. That might just explain it.” 

Boudoin didn’t watch a lot of Discovery Channel, but it sounded plausible. Duck went on, “Now me, I don’t know much about the miracle circuit, got to admit—hell, I’m Presbyterian—but you, maybe you just happen to have been drinking water once drunk by our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and maybe a little bit of Him got lodged inside you, velcroed to your DNA, your soul, maybe you underwent some magical reconstruction, and that’s why your hands started bleeding all the sudden...”

Despite Duck’s show of fog, he had an eagle eye for forensics, and he was sharp enough to have worked out Boudoin’s parlor trick the first time he noticed the water glass missing from the bathroom; no doubt Boudoin had stuck a broken shard purposely into his palm—but that wasn’t his point. It was the beginning of some synaptic chemistry between Boudoin and him, and naturally, that was the point.

Through the rest of that afternoon, as the shadow perspectives grew long and the lemony light faded, Duck remained in the church and babbled on. He’d fall asleep for five minutes or so, limp to the toilet six times an hour, and in between, ramble through desultory monologues about parish cold cases, about philosophy and literature, about humanity’s most peculiar belief systems. 

He’d read tons about world religion, and when it came to Islam he said: “You know the Bible story about Abraham climbing the mountain to kill his son? The Koran tells the exact same story, only along the way, according to the Muslims, the devil shows up and says, ‘What kind of God do you worship anyway, boy? What kind of God would have you commit such an act of pure senseless barbarity? What kind of God would have a fellow kill his own son? And you know what Abraham does? Does he listen to the logic? Even stop and think about it for half a second? Hell no, he throws a handful of stones at the devil to make him shut up. And it works! All the devil’s trying to do is talk Abraham out of killing his own son. Lord almighty. And all it takes is a handful of stones to scare away the Prince of Darkness and that goddamn Jew goes on ahead, perfectly willing to stick a knife in his own kid…”

Duck shook his head at the absurdity of Abraham’s loyalty, and soon afterward rose with an effort and headed for the door while Boudoin’s narrowed gaze followed him in a fixity of purpose.

The jar was sufficiently shaken. Next morning, the waterman appeared before his disciples glittery-eyed, as though on some manic high. His resolution was awesome; that was the general consensus of those who’d known him before his fast began. He passed between terms of lethargy and energy, expansiveness and silence, preening and passivity, and all the while, pale and handsome beneath meshes of golden hair, he tugged the heartstrings of those came to gape and wonder and try to sop up a little grace. There was some disappointment—no fresh blood, although major scabs counted for something—but he maintained their attention with theatrics no less impressive than Shamu flopping out of the tank and onto the edge of the stage, ingesting great juicy mouthfuls of holy water, pronouncing, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again: but who ever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst," while proselytes oohed and ahhed in orchestrated amazement like it was a Fourth of July fireworks display. Some of his less savory contemporaries, with expertise in such matters, vouched that they’d teach him how to mainline holy water if he grew too weak to swallow it; others wore t-shirts with calendars on them, crossing off days of Boudoin’s fast, twenty-odd and going strong. They murmured ‘Amen’ and ‘Gimme witness’ whenever he recited scripture. No one seemed to notice that he was no longer citing verse and chapter, but was quoting Jesus Christ as though the words were his own.

Well, not quite no one. As a puffy, pasty, spectral figure slipping through the group with a five gallon Rubbermaid cooler, refilling the basin and the stoups beneath the melancholy gaze of the murdered prophet, Papa Jack did.

And that evening, in his sulky study in the rectory, feeling withered and ancient, he came to grasp the significance of Boudoin Becnel’s charade. It came to him not as a deluge, but in insidious, slinking trickles. He’d already seen the rage behind the rapture, and now—late in the game but incontestably—he came to understand what role he must play. A final confrontation? He tried to avoid the melodrama, but nevertheless, he slacked off on the chardonnay and referred to his Bible—one of the last times in his life that he’d do so—devouring passages about the Great Tribulation, about the Parousia and the gathering of the Elect, and in the end, like Elisha, he called down fire from heaven to screw himself up to the task.

Very, very late, he slipped into the church—who’s church?—to find a likewise sleepless Boudoin on the altar swaying like a metronome, his attitude miles removed from the serene one he played out during the daylight. By Papa Jack’s account, with no adoring eyes upon him, no moonstruck groupies or shekel-shedding petitioners, there was pure corruption in the air. Papa Jack had dressed in full liturgical garb, alb to chasuble—spiritual armor—and now, in his best Father Karras baritone, he bellowed, “I intrude.” 

Despite the heat, the church felt damp and mortally cold.  As the echo died, Papa Jack squared up and faced down the fragile, starving man who looked back him with hostile indifference. 

“Always you intrude, Papa Jack.”

So that’s the way it was? Papa Jack’s voice rang out again: “If you wonder why, it’s because I have come to reclaim what’s mine.” He forced a grim, cinematic smile, but the searing conviction behind his words was as real as anything he’d ever conjured up. “You will get thee behind me, Boudoin. And all your gutter tramps and trailer-trash crackpots outside, they will pick up their crap and clear off at first light. Let ‘em go party at Lourdes. You understand me? Here at St. Anton’s, we don’t draw circles in the dirt and tell God to dance. We don’t demand proof as a condition of our belief. We have faith, that’s the foundation of two thousand years of Christianity. If Jesus Christ Himself drops down from the clouds on a roller coaster and lands in the middle of the Piggly Wiggly parking lot and announces, “Hey, you dipshits, it’s all for real,” there’s not a person on earth who’s gonna fail to accept the Word, to straighten up, to testify. But you know what? They’ll all have the conviction, but not one of ‘em will have any faith.”

He was briefly, entirely, lost within his own spiel. Self confident with his life’s work for the first time in… well, ever.

Confrontation? Not nearly so rough as he’d imagined. So long as the opponent remained fragile and meek, it was actually kind of fun. Explosively enlightening. Pow! He’d have to save a barrel for Villababous when he dialed him up tomorrow.

“I have spoiled you here, Boudoin Becnel,” he brayed. “Given you rope, but I won’t let you hang yourself. Because that’s the shell game, right? Suicide by starvation? You die, and prove to all these poor souls that there is no God to save your sorry ass. Well, I’m sorry, St. Boudoin, but you’re busted. I know you poked those ridiculous holes in your hand yourself, even if they don’t. And now you’re finished. That’s an official ecclesiastical declaration. This has gone on long enough. This stupid fast ends tonight.”

Boudoin’s voice was deep and low and wet with irony. He pointed to the crucifix and replied, “And it will, Papa Jack. Mon dieu, sure as I stand beneath that piece of wood, it will end tonight.”

Somewhat appeased, Papa Jack allowed a break in his righteous tide. He became a priest again: “Now, I can’t grudge you your grief for Claitor, Boudoin, you know that; we all loved him. We’ll work it through. His death is inexpressibly awful and I pray for him every day …”

And with that, he knew he’d gone too far. Saw it at once.  Boudoin’s cheeks turned slowly scarlet and he pushed himself away from the communion rail with arms as thin as a spider. He sucked air into his lungs and shouted, “You don’t know jack shit about my son; you dare not speak his fucking name again.”

Boudoin loped across the altar to the baptismal basin where, in a long, steady, horse-like performance, he swallowed the entire content. His eyes were stoic with determination as he snarled, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man's foes will be those of his own household…"   

Boudoin yanked the crucifix from it’s hook on the wall and howling, hurled it across the pews and through the stained glass window—of course, those penitent campers on the lawn, wakened by the clatter, took it for mystical phenomena, a clear message from heaven that mankind must change his reprobate ways.

Boudoin couldn’t care less what they thought. “You know what kind of God makes a man sacrifice his own son, Papa Jack?”

Papa Jack was in full-bore shock, unable to react—he hemmed and hawed and inhaled deleriously. His mental mercury was dropping precipitously. His chin was beginning to tremble. Finally, hoarsely, he whispered, “What kind of God is that, Boudoin?”

The shrimper choked it out softly with a final discharge of agony:  “A bad one.” 

And having finished with that, and with everything else on the planet, Boudoin sank onto the sedilia in a swoon of revulsion and a shortly afterward realized his most abstract ambition. 

Papa Jack approached him gingerly and within a very few minutes recognized that he was dead.

The coroner put it succinctly: “Hyponatremia. Water intoxication.” He was a beetling little fellow with an obnoxious overbite. “You see it mostly in endurance athletes. They know all about dehydration, but if there’s anything more dangerous than not enough water, it’s too much water. It dilutes the body's salts, and when the blood has too little sodium, brain cells absorb all the extra liquid and swell and push against the skull until the runner—in this case the dieter—goes into a coma and dies.”

Dieter? Soc au' lait. And screw the marathon runners, those skinny self-absorbed time-wasters. The real danger, as Bishop Villababous saw it, was that the faithful would blame God for this mismanaged disaster, think that He didn’t have ‘the stuff’ to save this coonass; that holy water had no spiritual function after all. As a sacrament, that would pretty much blow baptism out of the tub. No pun. What a mess. He wordsmithed a carefully convoluted spin, blaming Boudoin’s polluted soul, the faked stigmata, his raging ego, the Jesus suit, on the very sacrilegious nature of the experiment itself, and he dictated it to Papa Jack from the spa at the Palm Springs Hyatt. 

And Papa Jack had no sooner punched the last period than he flushed the whole thing down the rectory toilet. When he appeared before the cameras and tape recorders on St. Anton’s stoop later in the afternoon he was dressed not in vestments but in Wrangler khakis and a Banlon club shirt that read ‘Waterfowl Madness: There Is No Cure’ and the words of the press release, neither couched nor careful, were entirely his own: 

“Well, if it is any consolation to you gullible zealots,” he said, “Boudoin Becnel did not overdose on holy water. You understand, I never supported this farce from the beginning. I saw it for the hustle it was. So, it’s pretty simple. After the first couple of days, I stopped blessing the water I brought him. Never told a soul. Why should I? Just took it right out of the spigot out back of the chapel, five gallons at a time. You all may have thought he was drinking holy water, but it was nothing but good old tri-parish hose water that killed Boudoin Becnel. You do anything with that bit of information you want…

“I was told, over and over again, it is a good thing that’s happening down here. People finally have hope. They believe again, folks who haven’t been inside a church in decades are coming every day, convinced of the potency of God’s miracle. But you can see now, there was no miracle at all. Nothing but a poor pissed-off shrimper who thought he could dupe God while he was duping you all. So what’s that mean? You people gonna go back to Sunday morning hangovers and hair-of-the-dog, lose all your new-found hope, your resurrected faith? Well, if that’s all that was holding it together, it had no basis to begin with, and without basis, it was gonna evaporate like dew on a corrugated roof anyway. 

“You want a paranormal manifestation? Watch how the colors change in the storm clouds over the Gulf when the sun goes down. You want a miracle? Don’t wait for your statues to bleed. Don’t depend on holy water to sanctify your life. Don’t look at your screen doors for images, don’t count on sticky buns, bowls of spaghetti to salvage your life. You want to see a miracle? Go look into the faces of your children when they’re sleeping...”

Papa Jack resigned his priesthood the following morning, fairly confident he’d be getting the boot soon enough anyway, fully confident that for him, the decision was the only one possible. He’d only told part of the truth at the press conference, and the part he’d left out was pretty earth-shaking, at least to himself and his personal dogma: He knew that Boudoin was going to die whether he drank holy water or not. That there was nothing in that mystical, sacred, venerable fluid capable of saving him. How did he know it? No rational way to calculate it, but he knew it for certain, knew it with the raw practicality of a child-abuse survivor, knew it as clearly as anything within his sophisticated epistemological reasoning, knew it as transparently as he knew that the scriptures were scribed by mortal fingers, that the Catholic Church was a dark, conspiratorial, feudal beast and that if there was a God seated in heaven, He’d long since ceased bothering over the sick affairs of men. 

As for blessing Boudoin’s holy water, it wasn’t that he didn’t do it. He couldn’t. 

He was packing up the last of his boxes when Rubber Duck lumbered into the rectory.

Papa Jack heaved a sigh when he saw him standing there and fingering the rim of his porkpie hat. “What? You’re gonna tell me not to leave town until you get to the bottom of Boudoin’s death?” 

“Why?” asked Duck. “You kill him?”

“No, of course not.” 

“Naw,” Duck said. “He drank himself to death; happens all the time to these crazy rednecks, just usually not quite this way.” He looked like a demented Oliver Hardy when he grinned. “Where you going to anyway?”

“Who knows? To participate in life I guess. Probably get married. Hell, yeah. I’m thirty-six years old and it occurred to me this morning: I’ve never had a single genuine adult experience.”

“Trust me; genuine adult experiences ain’t what they cracked up to be.”

“I’ll risk it.”

 “Anything I can do to help?

Papa Jack’s smile was almost painful. “Say a prayer for me.”

“Ah. No, I can’t.”

“Why not, Duck? I thought you were a Presbyterian.”

“Yeah,” he said with his tang and slow molasses drawl, his voice stained with unexpected melancholy: “But I don’t believe their bullshit either.”

They buried Boudoin above ground in the sort of sarcophagus considered a picturesque photo-op throughout the Delta country. People are interred that way because the region is below sea level and the water table is so high that coffins don’t stay buried—they bubble to the surface with every flood, resulting in some horrific Freddy Krueger moments.

Even so, afterward, during storms especially, the water would creep up the sides of Boudoin’s tomb, rising inexorably, looking for pores, leaking in, soaking through, squishing between cracks, saturating his sad, useless, decrepit bones for as long as they remained intact.