Parishioners and Other Stories

By Joseph Dylan

Tales of the East and West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Aug 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456609825

Book preview

Aleichem

Parishioners

Once a month, the first Tuesday of each month, they met informally, gathering at the home of some member of the group. Originally, there were twelve of them, but cancer claimed one, and two in retirement had moved on to bigger cities. Now, there were nine of them, nine men who had gone to the same church for decades, kneeling and praying next to each other, some of them knowing each other for over twenty or thirty years. They had witnessed the baptisms and confirmations and weddings of each other’s children, and they had attended the funerals of many mutual friends. There was no set purpose of the group. There was no set agenda. They were just old friends getting together for a few drinks and a little conversation.

Outside, in the cold of this wintry December night, the air hung thick and heavy with the temperature well below freezing. Under the startlingly clear skies, the stars shone like dying fires. Tonight, it was John Seymour’s turn to host the gathering. By seven, all had arrived. Inside his house, in the living room, the fireplace glowed with burning pine. It glowed and flickered in the dark room where the nine men all stood around holding their drinks.

–Has anybody heard how Sam Cunningham is doing? It was Ernie Simpson who had spoken.

The oldest member of the group, Simpson was a retired political science teacher. At one time or another, most of the children of the people gathered had taken his course at the local high school. He was a generous man in aspect and appearance, and his suspenders held his pants up his substantial paunch. Unlike the others, he was not drinking any hard liquor; tonight he was drinking a Michelob, and his bottle was nearly empty.

–I heard that he just went in for his third round of chemotherapy, said Seymour.

The only member of the group who was actually born and raised in the small town in Western Colorado, Seymour owned a construction company that had thrived during the up and down years of this boom-and-bust city that was just about halfway between Denver and Salt Lake City. Though he was retired, he kept a hand in with his son in running the business.

–I bumped into his son at City Market, said Jim Tripplehorn. He said that he’s pretty worn out from it, but that he’s doing okay. At least as good as could be expected.

Tripplehorn was a retired accountant, wearing the rimless glasses that had had seen him through many tax returns and more than a few audits. The sweater he wore had leather patches on both elbows where the wool had worn thin.

–What’s his prognosis like, inquired Simpson.

–I don’t think that it’s that good, responded Tom Crawford. I heard that the tumor had pretty well spread throughout his body.

Though a spare man, Crawford still looked like the distinguished lawyer he was in the small community. He was a man with a tendency to speak softly, but not so softly that the others in the room failed to hear him.

–That’s just a shame, added Tripplehorn.

–Yeah, it is, said Frank O’Connoll. I met him the first year I served as county commissioner. We could have used a lot more like him in the community through the years.

O’Connoll took a long pull on his scotch and went over to the credenza where he poured himself another shot. He never ceased to remind the others that he had once served in public office and that they hadn’t.

The flickering light of the fire in the fireplace gave the darkened room an eerie glow. It appeared as though the men were standing about a campfire in the middle of the summer rather than John Seymour’s den in the dead of winter. They all stood about the fire staring into it, for several moments none of them speaking as they tipped their glasses back, draining the alcohol that seemed to warm them, and ward off the cold outside as much as the fire. In the silence of the gathering, all that could be heard was the crackling of the pine logs in the fire place they burned away. Outside, there wasn’t the hint of a wind. Nor was anyone out on the street. Most of the members of the community had elected to stay indoors on this cold December night in the middle of the week.

–Has anyone heard anymore about Tony Dennison? asked Harry Carlyle.

The former owner of the Chevrolet dealership in town, many of the men present had bought vehicles from Carlyle at some point in the past. Carlyle had never run for public office, but he remained active in the Republican Party, and the majority in the group, with the exception of Bradford and Seymour, were Republicans.

–Just what I read in the papers, said Crawford.

–How long has it been since he was the priest at St. Joseph’s? inquired Tripplehorn.

–At least ten years, said Crawford.

–At least fifteen years ago, interjected Stan Peterson. Kyle, my youngest was an altar boy when Dennison was here.

Peterson, a former history professor at the Junior College in town, appeared the most avuncular of the group, wearing a dark, blue cardigan over his oxford cotton shirt.

–That long ago? said Tripplehorn.

–Yeah, that long ago, said Seymour.

–My god, time has flown, responded Tripplehorn.

–It has, added Carlyle.

–How is your son, Kyle? inquired Bill Bradford.

Starting out in the valley in the early fifties as a reporter for the local newspaper, Bill Bradford was now the managing editor and its sole proprietor. Being a newspaper man, he had heard the news first about Dennison. He had, in fact, informed both Seymour and Carlyle about the matter.

–Kyle, replied Peterson, He’s just fine. He’s in his second year at CU. He wants to be a lawyer, just like you, Tom.

Peterson tipped his drink in Crawford’s direction and then took a pull of his scotch in his glass. Seymour put another log on the fire, the sap remaining on the log snapping as it burst into flame.

–Tell Kyle not to waste his time on the law. His mind is too good for it, added Crawford beaming at the others in the group. His mind is too good for it.

–You mean that there’s no more room in the valley for a good lawyer? chided Tripplehorn. Maybe you don’t want the competition.

There was a small murmur as some of the gathering laughed.

–Now, I didn’t say that, chortled Crawford.

–I’ll tell him to keep that in mind, responded Peterson.

–Dennison every approach him? asked O’Connoll.

–If he did, he never said anything.

–Did anyone ever complain about Dennison to anyone? inquired Terry Hendrichs.

The department store that Terry Hendrichs founded on Main Street had long since been eased out of business by the Walmart that went up on the highway.

–Not that anyone’s said, replied Crawford.

Basking in the warmth of the fire in the fireplace, working on their second or third drinks, the gathering hadn’t moved from the living room. Since his wife had died and his children had moved on, Seymour saw to the house himself, spending most of the time in the living room where they all stood now. On the serving trays laid out on the credenza, only a few of the cold cuts and wedges of cheese remained.

–Not a week goes by that you don’t hear about another case, said Simpson, putting another couple of logs into the fireplace. Not a week goes by that there’s not something in the news."

–How much did they settle that one case in Los Angeles for last month? asked Tripplehorn.

–I don’t know about the one case, replied Seymour. I know that they named twenty- two priests in the Los Angeles diocese, though.

–Incredible, snorted Harry Williams.

Harry Williams’ family started City Market, the only supermarket in the small community before the larger chains had moved into the towns of the Western Slope. He was a tall, stooped man who wore horn-rimmed glasses.

–They settled the cases in the Los Angeles diocese for six hundred and sixty million, stated Crawford, who always had his legal facts close at hand.

Crawford stood next to the television, which was turned on to CNN, the sound turned off. Its drowned out picture provided the only other illumination in the darkened room. A couple of the men murmured at the mention of the figure. Hendrichs emitted a low whistle of disbelief.

–I can’t believe that they settled for that much, pronounced Carlyle.

–Believe it, said Crawford. There were over five hundred plaintiffs. Like John said, there were twenty-two priests named in the complaints. Twenty-two or twenty-three. It might even bankrupt the Los Angeles Diocese.

–I can’t believe is that they were all molested, said Carlyle. I mean that seems like just such an unbelievable number. It’s outrageous.

–Well, the one priest confessed to a couple dozen cases, replied Simpson.

–I’m not convinced that they are all telling the truth, stated Carlyle. I mean, it’s just not possible. Spreading his arms as if in disbelief, Carlyle then took another sip of his scotch and water. Some of them don’t seem to have the most reliable character, if you know what I mean.

–In the Los Angeles cases, at least most of them, the church finally acknowledged that it happened, responded Crawford.

–I think a lot of them are just losers, said O’Connoll. A lot of them are just degenerates. That’s all they are.

–You saying they are lying, Frank? inquired Crawford.

–I’m just saying that a lot of them are losers and degenerates.

O’Connoll drank the last of his scotch and water. He went over to the credenza where he poured himself another shot of Johnny Walker. Then, he returned to where he was standing, next to the fire, beside the rest of the gathering.

–It seems to me that they have a legitimate complaint, responded Hendrichs after a few moments. They can’t all be degenerates.

–Yeah, said O’Connoll. But I bet most of them are losers.

–Just be grateful that none of them are your kids, said Seymour.

–What’s that supposed to mean? responded O’Connoll.

–Just what I said: Be glad that none of them were your kids.

O’Connoll started to say something, but then held off, and swallowing, took another pull on his drink.

The gathering lapsed into silence, again. Seymour gazed into the fire. He picked up the poker and nosed two of the logs that had largely burned, closer to each other.

–Did they say anything about the kid who accused Dennison? asked Ted Jones.

Jones ran a drilling supply company in the valley. Like the others, he had survived the hard times in the boom-and-bust town in the middle of nowhere, half way between the two state capitals.

–He’s hardly a kid, said Crawford. The man they convicted is in his mid-twenties. He was busted for selling crack. Hell, they busted him on Coulfax Boulevard in broad daylight trying to sell a couple ounces of it to an undercover cop. Not only that, it wasn’t his first bust. He had one five or six years ago. It was at his sentencing hearing that he brought up his encounter with Dennison. I’m sure he brought it up so that he’d get a little more leniency from the judge when he passed sentence.

–Did it? asked Tripplehorn.

–Did it what? replied Seymour.

–Did it persuade the judge to give him any less time? answered Tripplehorn.

–He got five years hard-time, replied Crawford. You tell me?

It was getting later and most of the men had settled into the chairs of the living room. Simpson stoked the fire, embers flaring to life in the fireplace. Seymour lit a pipe and remained standing next to the fire.

–So it’s true that he left a note? asked Tripplehorn.

–I spoke to Terry Simmonds yesterday, said Crawford. Dennison was a good friend of Simmonds when he was in the valley. He said that he left a long note. It was just like the note he sent the reporter at the Rocky Mountain News confirming the man’s accusations. In the end, he admitted it all...The story in the Rocky Mountain News was quite graphic. It left little to the imagination.

–No it didn’t, said Bradford. I spoke to the editor of the Rocky Mountain News. He’s a friend of mine. He confirmed all of it.

–I never figured Dennison to be the type, said Henry Taylor.

Taylor was a quiet man who had hardly spoken all night. He ran the teachers’ credit union in town. Never one given to stating a political opinion, the rest just presumed he was a Republican like most of the rest in the room.

–It makes you wonder, responded Tripplehorn.

–It sure does, added Bradford.

–Simmonds told me that even the man they convicted expressed his regrets, said Carlyle. He never thought it would come to this.

–Nor did anyone else, said Seymour.

–Maybe Dennison did the honorable thing, then, added Seymour.

–Maybe he did, replied Crawford. Maybe, he did.

By now, they were all standing again. John Seymour’s hand lay braced against the fireplace. They all stood about, again, washing down the last of their drinks, slowly getting ready to leave. They stood watching the embers of the burning logs flaring up and dying out, parishioners one and all.

Zhang Heng

Throughout the week, gray clouds gathered and the rain fell. Falling as a mist on Monday, the rain returned as a drizzle the following day. The rain today tore down in sheets, peppering the sodden streets, flooding the shallow depressions in the asphalt, the rainwater only slowly slipping away down the storm drains that were about to overflow. Taking care that they would not get their feet too wet, reluctant pedestrians tentatively leapt across the rain swollen gutters, All that summer, the weather in Shanghai had been the same: a day or two of sunshine, followed by three to four days of rain. Endless humidity; near endless precipitation. No less than anyone in the city, Zhang Heng was weary of it. From the third floor windows of the International Medical Centre, the private clinic where she worked as a registered nurse, she could see the pedestrians below scampering past in the downpour. They made their way up and down the crowded boulevard underneath their umbrellas looking like lilly pads skimming across a pond. For Zhang Heng, it was sea of humanity, a sea of underlying problems and poverty and misfortune. This was the China she was desperate to leave; this was the China she was desperate to put far, far behind her. For many of the Chinese, it was a time of change, a time of hopefulness, a time of bounty; but for her the future only seemed forlorn.

Of the six nurses who worked full time in the International Medical Center in the Pudong District of Shanghai, Zhang Heng was the only one who was not married. Of the six nurses, she was the only one who hadn’t really settled down and started a family. At twenty-eight, only Li Li was younger than Zhang Heng. Li Li was fresh out of nursing school with no experience overseas like the rest of the nurses at the International Medical Centre. Traditionally, by the time they were in their mid-twenties, most Chinese women were married. Most Chinese women were married and most of them had had the one child the government allowed them under the One-Child Policy. As desperate as she was to get out of China, Zhang Heng was only slightly less desperate to get married, to get married and have a child. Women not much older than her already considered themselves middle-aged spinsters if they had not yet found a husband. So far, for Zhang Heng, marriage just had not been in the cards. It was neither her personality nor her looks. Warm, but more than a little wary of people, Zhang Heng was a woman who seldom quarreled or found fault with anyone. Nor did they easily find fault with her. Her large, luminous, dark eyes, which she highlighted with thick eyeliner, peered out shamelessly above sculpted cheekbones on a face with a flawless, pale complexion. Up until two months ago, she was seeing an engineer. That had lasted over a year. Suddenly, without much explanation, he returned to the woman he had been seeing before he became involved with Zhang Heng. Before him, she there had been a graduate student in history at Peking University whom she expected to marry. That, too, came to an abrupt end that she never fully understood. Following both break-ups, she spent a day or two at home. She stayed in her pajamas and crawled into bed. Pulling up the down comforter over her head, she silently wept until the tears would no longer come. Once they ceased to flow, she never cried over either one of them again. What was over was over. If her colleagues suspected that her personal relationships had run aground on the shoals of life, they would not suspect it from her demeanor, for she kept up with her work as she always had: cheerfully, efficiently, competently.

More than having a husband, more than having a family, Zhang Heng wanted out of the Middle Kingdom. For Zhang Heng, there was no true freedom in China. There was no true promise of happiness, no way to truly be herself. That she had no husband was perhaps fortunate for Zhang Heng, for one would have only tied her down to her homeland. Just where and when she decided on joining the diaspora of China, she didn’t know. Nor did she know how abruptly she had come to the decision. She just knew she did. She wanted this no less than a caged dog wanted out of the confinement of its pen. If she were to reflect upon it, she believed she had nursed this desire ever since she was a girl growing up in Kashgar, in Xinjiang, the westernmost province in China. Born in a small village in Hebei Province in eastern China, her family was physically uprooted during the Cultural Revolution. For a Chinese family at this time, it was not an unusual predicament. Ninety percent of the Chinese who lived in China were Han Chinese. In an attempt to dilute out the minorities that inhabited the hinterlands, the government deported many of the Han Chinese living in the interior to the outlying provinces. One day, when Zhang Heng was a girl no more than five years of age, her father, Zhang Bo, received a notice from the government social bureau informing him that his family was to be resettled in Xinjiang Province. Xinjiang, in the northwest corner of China, was clear across the country from Hebei. With the notice came no specific destination. The People’s Party of the Republic of China just ordered Zhang Bo and his family to report to the social services department in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Province within two weeks. There, he and his family would be informed as to where they were to move. With the note, came passes for the entire family for the train to Urumqi.

Clutching her favorite rag doll in her left hand, as she held her father’s hand in her right, she remembered boarding the dusty, rancid, ancient train that paralleled the Silk Road as it headed west for Xinjiang Province. The railcar was full of similar families being expelled from the heartland of China. Every so often, she remembered her father taking out the letter from the resettlement board and glancing at it as though he hoped he had somehow misread it, somehow there’d been a mistake. Lacking a berth on the train, she nodded off and on in the crook of her father’s arm, as they sat on the foam bench covered in torn, shabby, black vinyl, while the train slowly inched its way across northern China. In front of them, on a similar railcar bench, sat her mother and her older sister, Hui. After a couple of days of circumnavigating the northern stretches of Inner Mongolia and Gansu Province, the train entered the vast arid, rippling plains of Xinjiang Province. Eventually, they arrived in Urumqi. After the train spat them out into the railway terminal, Zhang Heng and her family spent the night in restless sleep on the worn, wooden benches of the lobby of the Social Services Bureau for Xinjiang Province. There, the following day, an official, a middle-aged bureaucrat wearing metal-rimmed glasses that slouched down on his blunt, narrow nose, and a single, white hair protruding from the mole on his bald pate, informed her father that the family was to be resettled on a collective farm outside the city of Kashgar, the western terminus of the Silk Road in China. The official handed her father a document with his chop on it.

There was no more to be said in the matter. It was all official. The chop made it so.

In Kashgar, still clutching the doll in her hand, the family, with their precious few belongings tucked into a couple of pieces of weathered leather luggage, was transferred to a large, blue, flatbed truck. Sitting on their luggage in the back of the truck, they made their way to the collective farm with two other Han Chinese families from Hebei Province that had met a the same fate as her own. The collective farm was an hour outside Kashgar, down a rutted, gravel road. The memory of the jarring truck ride, along with the train journey, were among the memories that stuck with her of the Cultural Revolution. More than these memories, she recalled the few occasions during the Cultural Revolution when the Red Guard confronted her father as he returned from the fields. Making up some excuse or other, they pummeled him, kicking and striking him till he was prostrate on the ground, his nose and mouth bleeding from their blows. The first time, her mother tried to intervene. Members of the Red Guard, no older than teenagers, spat upon her mother and shoved her to the ground. The attacks of the Red Guard were quick, vicious, efficient, and thoroughly humiliating. They were equally as baffling, coming from no undue neglect of the rules or any intransigence on her father’s or her family’s part. But little during the Cultural Revolution little made sense. It made no sense to her parents, their coworkers on the farm, or to the multitudes of the Chinese wherever they lived. It didn’t have to. It just was.

On the collective farm, the seasons came and went by slowly for Heng and her sister, Hui. The summers on the desert could be blazingly hot, heat waves shimmering above the brown and red parched earth; the winters bitterly cold with the cold breath of frigid, Siberian winds seeping through the chinks of the clapboard walls of the modest dormitory where the Party housed her family. While her parents toiled in the fields of wheat and hay and barley, she and her sister attended class in the one large room of the collective farm in the same brick building as the cafeteria. Too young to work alongside their parents, the children of the collective farm were taught to speak and write Mandarin, taught to calculate mathematical problems, taught geography, while at the same time being inculcated into the correct way of political thinking. During the Cultural Revolution, no one was too young not to be imbued with the teachings of the Great Leader.

Then, like a slowly receding tide retreating from the shingle, the Cultural Revolution withdrew. It withdrew and never came back. Having imploded upon itself, the Red Guard, whose sole existence was to carry out the policies of the Cultural Revolution, disbanded. Life returned to some sense of normalcy for her family and the millions of Chinese who had endured the years of turmoil and upheaval. Following its demise, her father petitioned and received permission from the local Party leader of the collective farm to leave if he so desired. For months, her father looked for work elsewhere. Finally, finding a job in a factory that manufactured farming implements in Kashgar, Zhang Bo moved his family to Kashgar where they found a small two-bedroom apartment in the ancient part of the city. Unable to find more gainful employment, her mother took in laundry and labored as a seamstress. In winter sitting by the stove, and in summer sitting by the open door to catch a refreshing breeze, her mother sewed with her needle and thread under the dim light of a sixty watt bulb that dangled from the ceiling. There, in the dim light, her mother slowly stitched together the dresses and blouses for the neighborhood women, who often paid her in live chickens or freshly-laid eggs.

With her father employed at the local factory, it was time for Zhang Heng and Zhang Hui to enter middle school. Holding hands, Heng and Hui, walked the six blocks together to the school. Walking past dilapidated stores with barred windows where groceries or appliances were sold, past outside stalls that sold all manner of trinkets, they encountered all manner of people, including Han and Uighur and other ethnic groups. They encountered the indigent who begged for food or money, and the well-to- do who keenly kept their distance from the rest of the souls upon the street.

If the Cultural Revolution was an astounding change for Zhang Heng and her family, the move into Kashgar proper was no less a revelation. As Han Chinese, they comprised part of the Chinese majority of the Middle Kingdom. But in Kashgar, in western Xinjiang Province, they were simply a minority; in Kashgar, the majority of people were the Uighurs. Praying to a Muslim god, in a country that didn’t officially countenance the notion of a higher being, the Uighurs had different traditions and a way of life that was foreign to Zhang Heng and her family. Shy and reserved, a girl who made few friends on the collective farm with girls her own age, Zhang Heng made even fewer friends among the young Uighur children with whom she attended class. Complaining to her mother that other children didn’t want