but sometimes them union agitators come down here and try to fire up the Mexicans and nigras and shut down the harvest, and I’m supposed to see that nobody like that gets a free run around here. Now, like that Mexican woman up there on the porch. Her husband run off two weeks ago and she’s got five kids in there. She can’t afford to miss a day’s work because some union man won’t let her get into the field.”
We talked politely, on and on, while Rie loaded the Cadillac full of children and two huge Negro women. Well, we have a barbecue planned at the church today. I don’t think that would bother the soda-pop people. Why don’t you have a fresh cigar? Like I don’t have nothing against any religion or group of people, but there’s a priest down there that’s preaching commonism or something at the Mexicans, and it’s going to come to a lot of broken heads and people without no paychecks. I can tell you that for a fact, by God. It ain’t any skin off my ass, I got that trailer and a salary whether they work or not, but I don’t like to see them lose their jobs and get kicked out of their cabins because they listen to people that steals their money in union dues while the citrus burns on the tree. Now, that ain’t right. I have a little Jack Daniel’s in a flask. Would you like a ditch and another cigar before we leave?… No, sir, I’m working right now, but tonight when you come back, drop up to the trailer and I’ll buy you a shot with a couple of cold ones behind it… Thank you. I’m looking forward to it… Yes, sir. You come back, hear?
I drove back out the barbed-wire gate and headed down the road past the rows of identical cabins with their shimmering tin roofs. The dust rolled away behind me.
“You ought to do public relations for us, you con man,” Rie said, and smiled at me over the heads of the children sitting between us.
The Catholic church was made of white stucco and surrounded by oak and chinaberry trees. Pickup trucks and junker cars were parked in the side yard, and Negro, Mexican, and a few white families sat on folding metal chairs with paper plates of barbecued chicken in their laps. Their clothes were sun-faded and starched by hand, and many of the women wore flower-patterned dresses that were sewn from feed sacks. A priest in shirt sleeves was turning chickens on the barbecue grill while the Negro from the union headquarters pulled bottles of beer out of a garbage can filled with cracked ice. I parked the car in the shade of a post oak, and the children raced off across the lawn and started throwing chinaberries at each other. In minutes their washed overalls and checkered shirts were stained with the white, sticky milk from the berries.
“Come on. I want you to meet this wild priest,” Rie said.
“I never got along with the clergy.”
“Wait till you catch this guy. He’s no ordinary priest.”
“Let’s pass.”
“Hack, your prejudices are burning through your face.”
“It’s my Baptist background. You can never tell when the Antichrist from Rome is going to sail his submarine across the Atlantic and dock in DeWitt County.”
“Good God,” she said.
“You never went to church in a large tent with a sawdust floor.”
“With a box of snakes at the front of the aisle.”
“There you go,” I said.
“Wow. What an out-of-sight place to come from.” She took my hand and walked with me across the lawn toward the barbecue pit.
Two Mexican men sat on a table behind the priest and the Negro, playing mariachi guitars with steel picks on their fingers. They looked like brothers with their flat, Indian faces and straw hats slanted over their eyes. The steel picks glinted in the sun as their fingers rolled across the strings.
“What do you say, whiskey brother?” the Negro said. His eyes were red with either a hangover or the beginnings of a new drunk, and his breath was heavy with alcohol and snuff. He popped the cap off a sweating bottle of Lone Star and handed it to me. The foam slipped down the side over my hand.
“I guess I have a couple of shots in the car if the smoke gets too much for you,” I said. Then it struck me, as I looked at his cannonball head and remembered the humiliation I had seen in his face the other night, that I had never learned his name.
“I’m cool today, brother,” he said. “Saturday’s for drinking, and Sunday you catch all kinds of sunshine with these church people.”
The priest looked like a longshoreman. His thick arms were covered with black hair, and he had a broad Irish face with a nose like Babe Ruth’s and a wide neck and powerful shoulders under his white shirt. His black eyes were quick, and when Rie introduced us I had the feeling that he had done many other things before he had become a priest.
“You handled Art’s appeal, didn’t you?” he said.
“Yes, I did.” I took a cigar from my pocket and peeled off the wrapper.
“His family appreciated it a great deal. The rest of us did, too.”
“I knew him in the service,” I said.
“He told me. I saw him before he was sent to prison.”
I chewed off the tip of my cigar and looked away at the line of battered cars and trucks gleaming in the sunlight. Overhead, two blue jays were fighting in the chinaberry tree. Every clergyman has to be so goddamn frank, I thought.
“Have you been here very long, Father?”
“Three months, but I’m being transferred to Salt Lake in September.”
“He’s the church’s favorite Ping-Pong ball,” Rie said, and laughed. “He’s had five parishes in six years. Kicked out of New Orleans, Compton, California, the Pima reservation in Arizona, and now he’s going to turn the Mormons on. I bet those guys will be a real riot.”
“You’re not improving my image, Rie.”
“Listen. This was the guy that took black children through those lines of screaming women and thugs when the elementary schools were integrated in New Orleans. He dumped a cop on his ass in the school doorway and said mass in a Negro church the same day in Plaquemines Parish while the Klan burned crosses on the front lawn.”
“Rie’s given to hyperbole sometimes, Mr. Holland.”
“No, I’m afraid she’s pretty exact most of the time, Father,” I said.
“Well, at least it wasn’t that dramatic. A little pushing and shoving and a few truck drivers sitting on the curb with more Irish in them than they deserve.”
He filled two paper plates with chicken, rice dressing, and garlic bread, and handed them to us. There were small scars around his knuckles, and his wrists and forearms were as thick and hard as cordwood. He smelled of hickory smoke from the fire, and his balding head glistened with perspiration in the broken shade. Rie was right — he wasn’t an ordinary man. I remembered the television newsreels about the priest and ex — paratrooper chaplain who had led terrified Negro children from the buses through the spittle and curses in front of an elementary school in New Orleans in 1961. I also recalled the one short film clip that showed him backing down four large men who had poured beer on the children as they walked up the school steps.
We sat in the shade and ate from our paper plates and drank bottles of Lone Star while the guitar players picked and sang their songs about infidelity, their love for peasant girls in hot Mexican villages, and Villa’s raid on a train loaded with
“Go ahead and boil them cabbages down,” Rie said.
I couldn’t be profane in front of the priest.
“I never play too well sober. Wrong mental atmosphere for hillbilly guitar pickers,” I said.
“Will you go ahead?” she said. Her eyes took on that wonderful brightness they had when she was extremely happy.
