Empire Falls by Richard Russo Page B

center of the table.
    “Well, it doesn’t look like I’m painting anything today,” he said, sliding out of the booth. Somehow the plate of cookies was empty, and Miles could feel the last of them lodged uncomfortably in his gullet.
    Together, the two men went out onto the porch, where they stood listening to the rain.
    “How many more days do you have on the north face?” Father Mark asked, contemplating the church.
    “A couple,” Miles said. “Maybe tomorrow and the next day if the weather clears.”
    “You really should stop right there,” Father Mark advised. “I’ve been hearing more rumblings from the diocese. We may be out of business before long. I suspect poor Tom’s the only thing that’s saved us until now.”
    For more than a year now, rumors had persisted that St. Catherine’s Parish would be combined with Sacred Heart, on the other side of town. Empire Falls, once sufficiently endowed with Catholics to support both, had been losing religious enthusiasm along with its population. Now the only reason for two parishes was simply that Sacré Coeur, as Sacred Heart was still known to most of its French Canadian parishioners, required a French-speaking pastor. Otherwise, the parishes could’ve been combined years ago. Father Mark suspected that Sacré Coeur would be the survivor and that he would be shipped elsewhere. He didn’t speak French, whereas Father Tibideaux was bilingual.
    What hadn’t been resolved was what to do with Father Tom. While there were homes for elderly, retired priests, especially for those in ill health, his dementia, which vacillated between the obscene and the downright blasphemous, made the diocese cautious about placing him among elderly but otherwise normal clergymen, most of whom had served too long and too well to have their faith tested further in their final years by a senile old man whose favorite word was “peckerhead.” Besides, Father Mark was able to handle the old priest, who had lived in St. Cat’s rectory for forty years and was comfortable there. In a sense it was his house, just as he maintained. Also, there were words worse than “peckerhead,” and if the diocese tried moving Father Tom he might start using them. Hearing him carry on had already converted several of St. Catherine’s Catholics, some to Episcopalianism, a few others to fearful agnosticism, and the bishop didn’t want to risk his contaminating other priests. No, the diocese seemed to believe that they had the Father Tom situation under control, and until recently they’d shown no inclination to break containment.
    “Have you gotten any sense of where you might be assigned?” Miles asked.
    “Not really,” Father Mark said. “I suspect they’re not through punishing me, though.” He had a doctorate in Judaism, and the perfect position for him would be at the Newman Center of a college or university. That was the sort of post he’d held in Massachusetts before he made the mistake of joining a group of protesters who climbed the fence of a New Hampshire military installation and got arrested for whacking away at the impervious shell of a nuclear sub with ball peen hammers—an act that Father Mark had considered symbolic but that the base commander, a literalist, had interpreted as an act of sabotage and treason. Not that this protest had been Father Mark’s only offense. In addition to teaching and pastoring at the university’s Newman Center, Father Mark had also hosted a Sunday evening radio show, during which he had drawn his bishop’s ire by counseling loving monogamy for a young male caller “regardless of the boy’s sexual orientation” and further advising him to trust God’s infinite understanding and mercy. Apparently, what happened to young, overeducated, rumored-to-be-gay priests who’d landed cushy campus gigs and doled out liberal advice was that they got packed off to Empire Falls, Maine, probably in hopes that God would freeze their errant peckers off.
    “I