Chapter 17
Do you really think…that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to.
From his childhood in Charleston, Joseph knew he must remove his soutane when he left Catholic Europe.
For the first time in nearly a decade, he wore only a black woolen coat, waistcoat, and trousers over his shirt and drawers.
He felt lighter but practically naked, like a knight deprived of his armor.
Until Joseph’s hair grew out, his hat would cover his tonsure—that too was abandoned in hostile countries.
The true badge of a Priest was his conduct, not his dress.
Joseph soon learned the new pitch of American persecution toward the true Church.
In Charlestown, Massachusetts, Protestant citizens believed nuns were being held against their will, or at least the mob used this fiction as their excuse.
Fifty men dressed like Indians rampaged through the Ursuline Convent and school, setting it alight.
The nuns and their pupils fled in terror.
Firemen were called, but some joined the mob, and the others simply watched the convent burn.
Thirteen rioters were arrested, but all were acquitted or pardoned to applause in the courtroom.
Four Ursulines had just arrived in Joseph’s Charleston to set up a girls’ school.
The Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy had established themselves five years before.
Perhaps Bishop England had invited these holy women in order to ease the loss of his own sister Joanna to stranger’s fever.
His Lordship had retained Castalio, a quiet negro about thirty years of age, who served as his valet and also as coachman when the Bishop toured his diocese.
Father McEncroe had returned to Ireland to recover his health.
Their church on Hasell Street had taken the name St. Mary’s.
But His Lordship had given Joseph’s family permission to attend Mass at St. Finbar’s Cathedral now, since Joseph would be serving there.
He suspected this decision had been painful for his mother and grandmother.
Even if it was the cathedral, St. Finbar’s lacked the pedigree of St. Mary’s.
Most of its congregation was lower-class Irish instead of upper-class French.
The changes Joseph noticed most keenly were those in his own family.
His black-haired nephew, David, was already learning to read.
Cathy and her husband had also welcomed a daughter named Sophie.
Peregrine McAllister had grown up in the Scottish Highlands and spoke with a brogue, but his love for his wife and children came through clearly.
Joseph decided to forgive Perry for compromising his sister, though the Scotsman had little to offer her.
For now, he worked as a carpenter. Cathy was learning how to cook and clean from Agathe and May.
When the McAllisters moved out to Missouri, they would begin a very different life.
Cathy understood that wives must submit to their husbands.
But she did not always obey with Christian fortitude.
Sometimes she snapped like a cornered animal.
When Joseph found an opportunity to speak to his sister alone, it was wash day. Cathy was in the yard, her sleeves rolled up and her hands submerged in a tub.
“Perry is good to you, isn’t he, Cathy?” Joseph asked.
“Of course,” she answered without looking up. She seemed to be scrubbing one of Sophie’s diapers. “Most women would count themselves lucky to have such a husband.”
“You don’t?”
Cathy dropped the diaper. Soap splashed on her pinafore. “Do you think this is what I dreamt about when I was a girl?” She thrust her fists toward him, glaring at Joseph over her inflamed hands. “Do you think I want to be a drudge on some farm?”
Joseph hesitated. “I think Perry would remain in Charleston if you asked him to.”
“He would hate it.” Cathy snatched up the diaper again. “Soon enough, he would hate me. He longs for the wilds, my Peregrine. He longs to see what’s over the next hill. His parents named him well. I knew that when I married him.”
Then why had she—
“I dreamt of marrying a prince once, or at least a gentleman.” Cathy threw the diaper into another laundry tub. “But a gentleman wants a lady at his side, not a woman like me. My choices were a man of Perry’s class or life as a spinster.”
She might have become a nun.
“Did I understand the implications of my choice when I was sixteen?” Cathy continued, half to herself.
“Of course I didn’t. But I’ve made my bed, and now I must lie in it.
” With a wooden paddle, she fetched a chemise from a third laundry tub.
“Or should I say: Papa’s father made my bed for me, when he went after his mulatresse.
I am the granddaughter of a slave, so I must work like one. ”
Hélène also rejected a religious life. She often aided the Sisters of Mercy in their labors with orphans and invalids, so their mother urged her to take vows.
But Hélène doted on her niece and nephew.
She wanted her own children and husband.
She was eighteen now and pretty, though she had not lost the plumpness of her girlhood.
Upon their reunion, his family had exclaimed about how Joseph’s voice had changed and how tall he’d grown.
He had never seen his mother’s smile last so long.
She remained beautiful, but strands of silver had invaded her golden hair.
She was, after all, a grandmother in her forty-fourth year of life.
His father was two years her senior. Surely by now his lust had cooled.
Still Joseph wondered, worried, and prayed for his mother.
He was grateful when Bishop England suggested Joseph share his own modest residence next to the seminary and cathedral.
Joseph was a new man now, or nearly, and it would be inappropriate for him to remain in his childhood bed as if nothing had changed.
He was no longer a son or a brother, and he could never truly be an uncle.
He was a seminarian, and before the end of the year, he would be a Priest. How much better to share a roof with his spiritual father, the man he wished to resemble.
Henry too had aged almost a decade, so he welcomed Joseph’s help in the garden.
Even in early January, there was a great deal to do on a mild day.
While Henry spread hay over the daffodil bulbs, Joseph harvested spinach from the cold frame, since the black man’s knees bothered him.
Apparently Joseph’s garden gloves, like the rest of his few possessions, were still making their way across the Atlantic.
Henry’s gloves did not fit Joseph, but slicing through spinach stalks was a simple enough task.
His father emerged from the house and watched Joseph for a time. Finally his father asked: “Do you like gardening because it keeps you perpetually on your knees?”
Joseph leaned back down into the frame so he wouldn’t glare at his father and decided not to dignify that with a direct response.
“There’s a long and proud tradition of botanist Priests and Friars.
Men of the cloth have whole genera named after them: Camellia for the Jesuit missionary Georg Joseph Kamel and Plumeria for the Franciscan Charles Plumier.
” Joseph set another handful of leaves in his basket, then stood to take the spinach to Agathe.
“Did you know ‘seminary’ is Latin for ‘seed plot’?”
“Yes. It comes from the same root as ‘semen.’ Will you really be satisfied if the only things you ever plant are flowers and vegetables?”
Agathe disappeared into the kitchen. Joseph was glad she didn’t speak much English. “There is no need to be vulgar.”
“Life is vulgar, Joseph—and sublime.”
That gardenia bush was becoming unwieldy, Joseph decided; it needed pruning. He could make a start, at least, with his knife. Much as he wanted to, Joseph shouldn’t walk away to find the shears while his father was still arguing. But Joseph didn’t have to look at him.
“God gave us bodies as well as souls, Joseph. To reject one of them is to insult Him, not—”
“God gave us bodies, but our sin corrupted them; it divided our natures. Before the Fall—” Joseph looked quickly from the gardenia to Henry, who was rubbing linseed oil into tool handles.
Then he remembered that the black man was also a husband, and that nothing he could say would shock Henry.
Joseph returned his attention to pruning.
“Before the Fall, our souls had mastery over our bodies. Now ‘the law of our members fights with the law of our mind’; they ‘rise up against the soul’s decision in disorderly and ugly movement… Beware, lest that bestial movement—’”
“I don’t want to hear another word from Saint Augustine!
The man was a hypocrite and an idiot!” His father loomed over him.
“Your body is not ‘ugly’ or ‘bestial,’ Joseph! You—and your member—are a miracle and a masterpiece!” Joseph’s father finally paused in order to glance over at the black man.
“You’ll have to pardon us, Henry—I do not mean to imply that you are any less miraculous.
But you are not willfully throwing your life away!
” Joseph felt his father’s eyes again. “At twenty-two years old!”
If his father had been a loving husband, Joseph might have countered: You also made a life-long commitment at twenty-two.
“This order of Subdeacon that happens next month—that’s your Rubicon, isn’t it? That’s when you make some sort of irreversible promise?”
Joseph nodded, kneeling to remove the lower branches of the gardenia. “I will be ‘perpetually bound to the service of God’.”
“And to celibacy.”
“‘Henceforth you must be chaste,’ yes.”