The Holdout

By Gracjan Kraszewski

The story is told through the first person viewpoint of Rhett Lawson, an ex-NFL player finishing up graduate school. Rhett is a sincere Catholic although obsessed with women and sex and finds himself often trapped in “the torpor.” His two main companions are his friends Brent (an atheist) and David (an Evangelical Protestant). The three have wide-ranging discussions on various topics throughout the narrative. Additionally, issues of race (Rhett is white, his aunt Shelby, a central figure to the story, is black), the nature of contemporary academia, and commentary on life in twenty-first century Mississippi (something largely unplumbed in comparison to the plethora of works that have tackled the Civil War South of the 1860s or the Civil Rights Era South of the 1960s) underpin the story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adelaide Books Publishers
• Release date: Aug 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781953510129

Gracjan Kraszewski

Gracjan Kraszewski’s fiction has appeared in Eclectica Magazine, Wilderness House Literary Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, PILGRIM, The Southern Distinctive, Five on the Fifth, and on The Short Humour Site; academic articles in Religious and Sacred Poetry, North Alabama Historical Review, The Polish Review and Idaho Magazine. Holder of a PhD in history, currently teaching at a university in the Midwest (in the history dept). Fluent in Polish, conversational in Czech and French. A translation (Polish & English) for author Aleksandra Ziółkowska-Boehm subsequently became Chapter One of her book The Polish Experience through World War II: A Better Day Has Not Come (Lanham, MD, 2013) Played baseball in college, professionally in Europe, and for the Polish National team.

Book preview

THE HOLDOUT

THE HOLDOUT

A Novel By

Gracjan Kraszewski

Adelaide Books

New York / Lisbon

2018

THE HOLDOUT

a novel

by Gracjan Kraszewski

Copyright © 2018 by Gracjan Kraszewski

Cover design © 2018 Adelaide Books

Published by Adelaide Books, New York / Lisbon

adelaidebooks.org

Editor-in-Chief

Stevan V. Nikolic

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except

in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For any information, please address Adelaide Books

at [e-mail]

or write to:

Adelaide Books

244 Fifth Ave. Suite D27

New York, NY, 10001

ISBN13: 978-1-953510-12-9

A Fall Semester in the South;

probably sometime around the year 2015

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

About the Author

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The book is a work of fiction. With the exception of celebrities, everyone in this novel is fictional. Rhett Lawson is not based on someone. His family members are not based on anyone real; neither are his friends, love interests, the members of Mississippi State’s history department, the priest and parishioners of St. Joseph’s and anyone else in this book. If, while reading, you think to yourself, Hey, that character seems to be me; or, I know her, that’s So and So I recommend you immediately put down the book and take a long, cold shower and remember that you are not as important as you think you are. A cold shower does wonders for megalomania.

Gracjan Kraszewski

CHAPTER ONE

Southern women are gorgeous. In front of me, no more than five feet away, is another example confirming this absolute truth. She seems to be about five foot nine. She has wavy auburn hair that falls in curls over her shoulders. Strong shoulders. She is well built, thin and fit like an athlete. She is probably a volleyball player. The girl looks like she can jump. The way she moves, back and forth between the cream container to the packets of sugar and Splenda, is hypnotic. Each time she stirs her coffee I take a sip of mine and it becomes more delicious the longer I watch her. I—

Dumbass, Brent says, slapping me on the chin with the back of his hand. My teeth click on impact. Will that work or no?

My trance is broken. But she is gone.

What?

Two weekends from now, Brent says, the coast. I’ll pick you up. We can take my car down.

Yeah, I say. Yeah, that sounds great. I take a swig of my coffee. I stare at the logo printed onto the cylindrical sleeve encasing my drink: Strange Brew Coffeehouse. I have been living in Starkville, Mississippi for almost five years now. Five years in this Northeast Mississippi town less than a half hour from the Alabama border and seemingly five hours to anywhere interesting; New Orleans, Atlanta, Nashville, Little Rock. Does Little Rock count, as interesting? Is Arkansas interesting?

I’ve been to Strange Brew countless times. It’s not just a coffeeshop. It’s a gas station, too. It’s on the corner of the worst street in town, Highway 12. And by worst I mean the busiest, the one where people are most likely to drive lie dey have sits chickens in da pass-gers seat, bunch a milt bottles clangin’ round back an’deys-y’eyes blindfolded shut, as Wyatt Pervis—local (unofficial) street corner philosopher and prodigious drinker, expert at brown-bagging drinks undercover into dry events and establishments hidden from the peoples’ prying eyes—once told me. I think Wyatt gets more of a thrill from his secret missions than from the rotgut moonshine he convinces himself is standard fare. I tried a shot once and, for a fleeting moment, understood the nuances of string theory while fending off the tangerine colored crabs that had materialized on my pants and were scurrying up to my bellybutton.

Getting in and out of Strangebrew is a nightmare. Horrible location. Horrible idea to put a gas station out front, extra profits be damned. But the coffee is very good.

Yeah, I say again, putting my cup down. Is David coming?

I don’t know, Brent says, ask him when he gets back from the dungcloset. I don’t get that guy. Every time we go someplace, he has to go. He’s like my sister’s toddler, overdosing on snacks.

Yeah.

I guess it all depends on Martha anyhow, he says, making a whipping motion with his hand as he speaks in a high-pitched, faux-feminine voice. Dayyyvid. Dayyyvid. I need you to come trim my toenails for me. No, not like that you pansy. Bite them off!

I laugh. David is back.

Guh-eyes, he says, leaning back in his chair. He squeezes our shoulders. I juss wanna say how lucky I am, I mean, how blessed we are that we’re friends, yu-know?

David has a big grin on his face. When he smiles he bares all of his teeth. Dj’all know it’s been zactly two years since we met in that rec-center basketball league? Two years to the very day. Isin that somethin? He puts his hands up and shakes his head side to side, still smiling, fixed with the expression of a man who just found out he had been chosen employee of the month for the tenth month in a row and while he wanted people to think he didn’t care, he did, in fact, care; very much.

Why do you remember stuff like that? Brent asks.

What, David asks. What d-you mean? This is, this is great. Us, y’know, we’re like great friends now an-en’all started two years’go.

Are you coming with us to the coast? Next Saturday, Brent says.

The smile returns to David’s face. Uh, yeah. I think that’ll wurr, yeah sounds great.

I check my phone. It’s 4:07. St. Joseph’s has confession at 4:30 on Tuesdays. I don’t know why on Tuesdays. It makes more sense to have it on Saturday like most parishes do. Or, on Sundays before Mass, that would be even better.

Alright. See y’all next Saturday.

Why are you leaving already? Brent asks. We just got here.

I gotta go.

Confession, Brent says, pointing his finger at me, right? Holy shit! Why do you even bother?

I sigh. How many times have we had this conversation?

I still don’t get it.

What?

Sin, Brent says. I don’t get why you get so hung up on that. It doesn’t exist.

Really? I say, sitting back down. Chesterton said original sin was the easiest Christian doctrine to prove. Just look around.

Chesterton’s a douche, Brent replies, and that’s bullshit.

I don’t think so, I say, look at you. You’re handsome. You’re crazy intelligent. You’re what, not even thirty years old, and on a tenure track with two books published. You’ve got a great professional reputation. Your students treat you like a movie star. And look at you. You’re pissed off all the time. And why? Nothing good is ever good enough. You’re tainted, we all are. It’s why you can’t appreciate anything properly but walk around bitching and moaning about stuff that always ends up being completely irrelevant anyways. Why?

Bullshit my tainted ass, Brent says. And don’t lecture me like I’m a little bitch.

You’re more of a basic bitch, I say to Brent. Itsy-bitsy spider, running both my hands—fingers style d'araignée, movements incroyablement rapide—up his back and unto a double (but light) pop on the head, baby back bitch.

David laughs. Brent gives each of us the finger.

David is older than Brent and me. He is nearly forty; married with five children. He works in the Golden Triangle as a contractor. David is a good guy and dependable friend, the kind of guy who would get up a 2:26 in the morning in the dead of winter and drive three miles in a sleeting rainstorm on dirt roads, still in his pajamas (or most likely shirtless and wearing nothing but a pair of hole ridden underwear), just to help you relight the pilot light on your heater.

David is a very Bible Belt, very evangelical, very non-denominational, Protestant. He’s tall, probably six foot three, with a pale dumpy-pudgy type body and a receding hairline. He has a doughy stomach. He’s kind of flabby in his arms, but he’s not fat.

Brent—who is originally from Michigan, Upper Peninsula— is about six feet tall and slim. He’s actually thin, not slim. His hair is an unruly mass of blonde curls. He has brown eyes and dresses extremely well. Brent has dated at least seventy-five women in the two years that I’ve known him. Maybe only seventy, but no less I’m sure. A new girlfriend every ten days, on average, doesn’t seem to leave a lot of time to meet the family and have that awkward talk with her dad.

Brent is very consistent in that he’s usually in a bad mood. And his happiness is more like gleeful saltiness, seeming to consist more of schadenfreude than mirth. I often think that maybe he just likes to complain, that it’s a comfortable default position. I knew a guy like that back home. He liked to complain so much, and in such a rapid and unintelligible style, that someone nicknamed him Jibber-Jabber. I never did learn his real first name. Jibber-Jabber Jones. Poor guy. Got so angry with the people around him that one day he up and left on a solo expedition to Antarctica. No one’s heard anything since. You’d think the guy would be courteous enough to send a postcard. Then I imagine him complaining about the cost of the stamp, the size of the stamp, the size relative to the cost, that the envelope’s the wrong color.

Can ya tell me one thing though? David asks.

I nod.

Where’s talkin’ to a priest bout your sins in the Bible?

Where is confession in the Bible?

Ya.

It’s in John’s Gospel, somewhere in chapter 20, I say, blanking on the exact verse.

John 20? David asks, making a note in his phone.

I nod. See you guys.~

St. Joseph’s is in a good location. It’s on University drive. University drive is thronged each autumn Saturday with fans treading the primary artery from town to the tailgate tents. The football stadium is only a stone’s throw away. In springtime, during the annual Cotton Arts festival, the road is shut down completely. University drive is in Starkville’s Cotton District, a cozy amalgamation of bars, restaurants, houses and apartments that is the epicenter of Mississippi State student life.

St. Joseph’s is not a beautiful church. I’m not saying it’s ugly. The outside looks okay. Inside, like most so called modern Catholic churches, it is semi-Protestant looking. It’s largely whitewashed, devoid of religious art and iconography because, you know, we can’t be offending the Protestants with all those statues and pictures. It has a circular design because, you know, we’re all equal. We can’t be having any of that pre-Vatican II power dominance thing, those mean priests telling the laity what to do and all.

Natchez’s St. Mary’s Basilica looks as a Catholic church should. It is a Mississippi treasure. As soon as you walk through the doors your eyes begin to worship, drawn reflexively upwards to a high ceiling painted in a striking sky-blue color. Cream-colored columns shoot up to the ceiling and break, like waves, across the middle and back down the other side. The church is designed in the traditional cruciform shape. Dark wooden pews point ahead to a raised altar. There is a communion rail. Icons, statues, and blue stained glass form a resplendent backdrop to the Tabernacle.

In Middle Age Europe, much of the peasantry was illiterate and therefore in need of visual worship aids. I might not be able to read Scripture but I can look at a Nativity scene and begin to grasp the doctrine of the Incarnation. Religious art is a helpmate to worship, just like music. Now the art is gone. The statues are gone. Is there no connection between blank walls and a blank, empty faith? Modern Catholics, me in their number, have been subjected to this imaginative declension like frogs in boiling water, blithely unaware that anything is amiss. Poor bastards.

Excuse, me. Can I help you? The tap on my shoulder startles me. I jump.

I’m sorry, the man says, smiling. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.

I haven’t seen this man before. This priest, he’s wearing his clerical garb. He has close-cropped gray hair and steel wool colored eyes. Otherwise he looks young, not much older than me. His face is warm. His handshake is firm.

Yes, I say. I’m here for confession. Is Father Leo around?

Oh, the priest says. No, Father Leo is gone. He was transferred to Corinth last month. I’m Father Will Taylor.

Nice to meet you, Father. I’m Rhett Lawson.

Are you a student here, Rhett?

Yeah; graduate student.

Father Will smiles. You do look a little old to be an undergraduate.

Yeah, I respond, I’m thirty.

What are you studying?

History, finishing my PhD.

What’s your dissertation topic?

Encephalopathy in Early American Colonists.

Wow, he says, arching back at the waist, hands on his hips. That sounds fascinating. How do you research that? I mean, prior to modern medicine, to modern medical records?

I laugh. You’d be surprised. There’s much more than I originally thought, too.

A medical history; fascinating. Neither of us says anything for a few seconds. Finally he says, If you’d like to come to confession I can see you now.

Yeah, thanks, I say. That would be great.

I had no idea that Father Leo had been transferred. I have been away from Starkville for the past two months. I spend my summers back home in Idaho.

I follow Father Will to the confessional. As we enter he says, I’m going to move confession to Sunday mornings before the 9 AM Mass. I was never a fan of the mid-week confessions.

I smile.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been nine weeks since my last confession…

I confess using bad language, especially when I’m angry, specifying that while I do not take the Lord’s name in vain, I do go pretty hard on most types of profanity. I confess a general lack of humility, the quotidian struggles with pride, the basic, day-to-day type stuff. And then lust. That I lust after women all the time. That anytime I see an attractive woman I immediately imagine myself sleeping with her. That, by the way, I was just doing it today, in Strangebrew.

I finish.

Father Will, whose head had been down, listening, looks up at me.

Let me ask you this: do you act on your lust?

No, I said. I’m waiting for marriage. I don’t do other stuff, you know…my problem is with real women. I want a wife and family and sometimes I think I just need to get married to have the physical outlet. I hear myself clearly in the silence of the confessional. And as I’m speaking I see, in my mind’s eye, a giant, flashing neon sign: JACKASS. This is embarrassing to talk about, even here.

Father Will nods. Well, look, Saint Paul talked about that. Physical attraction is a good thing. Just remember what Our Lord says: any man who lusts after a woman has already committed adultery with her in his heart, and that’s all the same even if you and her are both single. It’s hard, but you have to fight it. God will give you the grace. The fact that you’re here, aware of this struggle, shows that you’re on the right path.

Father Will exhales before continuing. Maybe, try this. The next time you see an attractive woman and you feel lust coming on, say a quick prayer to yourself. Privately. Thank God for that woman’s beauty, that you can appreciate it purely, especially in respect for her dignity as a person. Okay?

I nod.

For your penance, read Psalm 51.

I nod.

Now make your act of contrition.

Father Will grants me absolution. I go to the adoration chapel. I do my penance. I spend some time before the Blessed Sacrament and I am, momentarily, filled with a deep and satisfying peace. It’s always like this after confession. I imagine that the soul looks like a hollow candy cane. When I’m in sin it’s gray, filled with sludge and dirt and cobwebs. The grayness is heavy like recently poured concrete, threatening to set and harden at any moment. Confession is a cleaning agent, the ripping away of all that gray material. My soul becomes sparkling white and ethereal; the light click-clacking of polished tap shoes barely grazing the surface whilst crossing a lake of diaphanous frozen glass. As I sit there—post-cleaning—it’s as if I can feel the grace being poured into me. I imagine that grace, this motive power of all good works, is like frothy, wooden spoon-whipped butter and it’s not simply poured but churned into the soul, topped off at the very brim.

I kneel to offer a final prayer. I leave. I walk down the street for an early dinner. I eat. I go home.

I live in the Cotton District. I am renting a small home at the end of South Nash Street, right where it intersects with Lummus Drive. I chose this home because it looks like it belongs on Rainbow Row in Charleston. The outside is a subdued pink, an almost salmon color. My front door is yellow. Three steps lead up to the front door. Inside, I have a small kitchen with a microwave and a stove, a living room with a pullout couch that doubles as a bed, and a TV. The house’s best feature is a bay window near the front door. It’s especially nice, on a balmy summer night, to sit on the front porch beneath the window and have a beer. When you’ve remembered to ice the beer stein beforehand, and you’re sipping the overflow beer head foam quickly so as to avoid waste on one of these balmy summer nights, right at sunset, it’s tempting to think that it might not ever get better than this. The house is small. It’s what realtors call quaint or cozy.

No sooner do I turn the key than the deep and satisfying feeling is gone. It’s always like this after confession. Maybe it’s because God’s love is so piercing that one can only withstand it momentarily. I get a taste of it and I know it’s all I could ever want, that it’s all that could ever satisfy me, but that ultimately the full measure of this feeling, and really the consistency without the comedown, is not of this world.

Or, on the other hand, maybe I’m like the scores of other lay Catholics who fancy themselves doctrinally and doxologically astute yet, in reality, are theological imbeciles. Who—no matter how wide their smiles, no matter how many slogans they can recite, no matter how many conferences and retreats they’ve attended, and no matter that they’ve just finished that ‘unbelievable’ MIND-BLOWING new Catholic author’s latest book—remain: theological imbeciles.

Whatever it is, I’m now back in the torpor. The torpor is like an eddy, a gyre. It sucks you in, deep. Far into a feeling of depressed meaningless, a draining and numbing sensation that everything means nothing, never meant anything, never will mean anything. A feeling that life is fundamentally absurd and, much worse, bland; screaming profanities into the void unaware that the mute button has been on all along, held down by nothing and no one.

Women can serve as an antidote to the torpor. For who can be in the torpor when on a first date with a pretty girl? All that nervous energy and excitement, she wearing that dress and you, having been given a mandate to look your best, do. There is a catch. Women, the supposed antidote, are at the same time asymptomatic carriers of the torpor disease. When the incubation period ends in a relationship the relationship ends as well. Scores of my relationships have been ended by torpor.

Four months ago I was dating this girl named Kennedy Paxton. She is from Alabama, six years younger than me, with long brown hair and a soft accent. She is a Southern Baptist who acts like an old-school Presbyterian, so old school it’s nearly 200 proof Calvinism. Tsk, tsk, you bad boy, her non-verbal mannerisms would tell me whenever we were out and I’d order a beer. She’d give me this passive-aggressive look of Puritan disapproval, circa 1627, whenever I’d dare be so obviously Roman in her presence.

Kennedy is sweet, sweet as honey and just as translucently golden; beautiful girl, properly gorgeous. Everything about her was interesting. She is studying biology with plans of entering medical school. I loved asking her questions about medicine. It is she, in fact, that is probably one primary muses for my own work. (Well, her and a few well- placed helmet to earhole hits, I should add; me being on the receiving end, I mean). She likes ice cream. Me too. We’d go get ice cream and sit and talk for hours about medicine, Mississippi State sports, and dogs. She is an animal person. So am I. She even liked talking about my dissertation. She wants to become an OB/GYN. She has heterochromaia iridum, interesting down to the finest details.

Then the torpor set in, right in the middle of an ice cream date. Both of us felt it, the slow inevitability similar to one’s immediate apprehension that that first faint stomach pang is but the advance guard of food poisoning and sooner or later you’re going to be throwing up your guts and there’s nothing you can do about it and perhaps it’s just best to go find a toilet now and get the whole nasty business over with rather than unnecessarily dragging it out. You can delay it, but you can’t stop it, and to delay is to perhaps only make matters worse. Kennedy laughed, nervously, trying to keep the torpor at bay. I picked up on her cue and leaned in for a kiss. I had kissed her many times. This time I tasted torpor. It was all over. We made mutual promises to meet up again soon. Tomorrow? No, not then. Maybe next week? Yes, definitely. Or the week after that, no doubt.

I plop down on my couch and stare at the wall. The torpor is really thick. All I can do in these moments is wait out the storm. I grab a rubber ball and begin to throw it off the wall to myself. Thwock…thwock… thwock… thwock… thwock.

I guess taking sex off the table has scuttled a few relationships for me. Women tell me I’m handsome. They like that I’m six feet tall. The like my black hair and they really like that I have blue eyes. They like my build. One girl