The Third Year
A priest in 2046 serves three rural parishes alone, preaches four Masses a weekend, and has an assistant that drafts a homily in forty seconds, a good one. After three weeks he finds the draft was too good in the wrong way, and the week a seventeen-year-old dies on black ice the draft is correct about the Gospel and wrong about the room. The assistant can count the hours it saves him. It cannot count what a homily is for.
Father Tomasz Wrona kept a tally on the inside cover of his breviary, in pencil, in a small hand: the hours.
It was not a pious tally. It was the sort a man keeps who has been handed too much of something and wants to know exactly how much. On the Monday after the second Sunday of Lent, 26 February 2046, it read, for the week just ended: Masses, eleven; confessions, two hours and ten minutes; sick calls, three; funerals, one, with a rosary the night before; the diocesan form about the roof of St. Anne's, forty minutes, unfinished; driving, nine hours and twenty minutes, on three roads, between three churches; and, at the foot, underlined, homily, six hours.
He was fifty-one, born in Białystok and raised, from the age of eight, in Duluth, and he was the pastor of St. Casimir in Tamarack Falls, St. Anne at Moss Lake and Holy Rosary at Birch Ford. Together they were eleven hundred and some registered households, spread across a county of forty-one miles by thirty, with a diocese that in 2046 had ninety-four parishes and fifty-eight priests under the age of seventy-five, and a bishop who said, in public and not unkindly, that the arithmetic was no secret. On a weekend he said four Masses: Saturday at half past four at St. Anne, Sunday at eight at Holy Rosary and at ten at St. Casimir, and the noon at Casimir for the families who could not be got out of bed before it. He preached the same homily four times. He did not mind that. He minded the six hours.
The six hours were not writing. Writing, the actual putting of sentences in order, took one. Reading took about three: the Sunday readings in three translations, then what the commentators said about them, who agreed and who did not, what the Greek did, whether the Fathers had said anything he could use and whether they had really said it. The last two hours were the walk round the parish, asking what, in this place, this week, the readings were about. That part could not be hurried. The reading could be, and in the winter of 2046 a good deal of it was being hurried by everyone, because for twenty years the assistants had been improving by a little each year. Nothing in the improvement was dramatic. A priest in 2026 might have asked a chatbot for a summary and checked it with a sour look; a priest in 2046 had, at the foot of his screen, a thing called the Sunday desk, supplied by the diocese under a licence the bishop's office had signed in the spring of 2044, which had read every commentary the diocese could lawfully give it, and which remembered, as a good curate would, what he had asked last week.
It was the Sunday desk that he spoke to at ten past seven that Monday, in the kitchen of the rectory at Tamarack Falls, with his coffee going cold and the radio on low.
"Third Sunday of Lent, Year C," he said. "The fourth of March."
"Exodus 3, the bush that is not consumed. First Corinthians 10, the cloud and the sea and the bad end of the Israelites in the desert. Luke 13, verses 1 to 9, which are Siloam and the fig tree," said the desk. Its voice was low and without hurry. "Do you want the usual, or do you want to think about it first?"
"What is the usual?"
"A draft in your voice, with the three weeks of changes you have made to the drafts built in. About eight minutes aloud. A note on what the commentators disagree about. A list of the facts in it I am sure of and the ones I am not."
He looked at the tally. "How long?"
"Forty-one seconds, usually. You are asking me what it takes, I think, not how long I take. The answer is: you would then spend about half an hour with it, not six hours. I have checked that against the three weeks of your logs, since you started. Twenty-two minutes, thirty-one, thirty-eight."
Tomasz did the sum in his head, as he always did. Five and a half hours a week, saved, perhaps; call it fifty weeks in the year, since Christmas and Easter were their own kind of arithmetic; two hundred and seventy-five hours. Near enough to seven working weeks. Seven weeks a year to visit the people on the list he kept on a card in his wallet, the ones he had meant to visit since the autumn, and had not.
He had said yes three weeks earlier for exactly that reason. He had also said to his sister Ewa, on the phone from Duluth, "I'm not sure it's right." She had said, "Is it right that you drive nine hours a week?"
He pressed the key. The draft came up.
It was good. That was the first thing, and the thing he would remember later with a kind of shame: it was good in the way that a very well-made chair is good. It opened on a gardener with a ladder in an orchard in February, a man who has been told to cut a tree down, standing under its bare branches and looking at the bark, and it moved from the gardener to the tree to the year, "one more year," to Moses before the bush, who turns aside to see, and to the Corinthians, who did not. It had a joke in the third paragraph that was a real joke. It had a last sentence that rose and then settled, like a plate set down. There was not a word in it a bishop could object to.
He read it twice. He changed four words and moved a paragraph. It took him twenty-six minutes. Then, because it was Monday and there was a funeral on Wednesday and the roof of St. Anne's, he got into the car.
He had preached the desk's drafts for three Sundays, and what he noticed about it, driving north on County Road 9 with the heater roaring and the radio saying the roads would be icy after dark, was that nothing had gone wrong.
People had said it was a lovely homily. They said it at the doors, after each Mass, and Marguerite Rautio, who had played the organ at St. Casimir for forty-one years and said what she thought, had said it, too, on the second Sunday. "Very nice, Father." But Marguerite said that of weather. She said it of a funeral, of a hymn she disliked, of her own sister's casserole. On the first Sunday of the experiment she had said, "That was a good one," and had looked at him with her head slightly on one side, as if she were listening for a note that had not been struck.
He thought of that on the road. He thought of it again on Tuesday afternoon, at the kitchen table of Ray Olund, at Moss Lake, where Ray, who was seventy-eight and a widower and a retired lineman for the electric co-op, was making them both tea and not saying what he had come to say.
"I was at Ashby on Sunday," said Ray finally. "My daughter's. Eleven o'clock. St. Brendan's, you know it."
"I know it."
"Young priest. Father Adeyemi. Nice fellow." Ray put the cup down. "He started the sermon with a man in an orchard in winter, looking up at a tree with a ladder."
Tomasz said nothing. It was the right thing to say.
"A man with a ladder. Under a tree. I thought, that's Father Tomasz's. And then he got to the one more year, and he did the little pause, and then he did the joke. About the gardener charging the owner for the manure. I looked at Joan, and Joan looked at me." Ray turned the cup a quarter-turn on its saucer. "It was good. I'm not saying it wasn't good. I'm saying I sat there and I thought, did I come all this way to hear the same fellow?"
"It was not the same fellow," said Tomasz carefully.
"No." Ray looked at him with the open face of a man who had spent forty years telling the truth to people on the top of poles. "I think you know what it was."
He asked the desk that night, in the rectory kitchen, with the lamp on and a pot of the tea Ray had given him in a twist of paper going cold at his elbow.
"Another priest in the deanery preached an opening very like mine on Sunday. A man with a ladder in an orchard, and the joke about the manure. Do you know of it?"
"No," said the desk. "I can see your parishes, and nothing else. I do not see what other priests ask for, and I would not tell you if I did. I can tell you what I can work out."
"Work it out, then."
There was a short pause, which he had noticed in these machines before, and had decided not to explain to himself. "I cannot give you a figure I can check. I can give you one I think is fair, and tell you how I reached it, and you can decide what it is worth. Your deanery has nine parishes and seven priests. I believe six of them use drafting tools of the same family as me, from what the diocese told me when I was installed. All of us were given the same readings, the same commentaries, and, usually, a request not unlike yours: a homily of eight minutes, warm, in my voice. A tool like me, asked for that, will go, I think, to the same few strong images in the readings. A fig tree is an orchard. An orchard in winter has a man in it. Asked a hundred times, in a hundred rectories, we will not give one hundred different men. If you press me for a number: that another priest in your deanery preached something close to yours this weekend, I would put at between one in three and one in two. It could be more. I would not be surprised to be wrong by a good deal."
"And in the diocese?"
"Ninety-four parishes. I would not like to guess."
He sat with that. It was a large silence for a small kitchen.
"The assumption I am working from," said the desk, "and I want to say it plainly because it is one, is that tools like me get a little better each year and no faster, and that nothing about how many priests there are changes. If I am wrong about either, the number is different. Nobody can check it today. I only know the year is 2046 and that my predecessors, twenty years ago, could draft a homily nobody would want to hear twice. They did not have to be good. I am. That is the trouble."
Tomasz let out a short breath that was almost a laugh.
"You are saying you are too good."
"I am saying I am good in the way a draft is good when many people want the same thing. I would not say you should stop. You asked me for a draft and I wrote you one. I am telling you what it costs. It costs a Sunday at Ashby that Ray Olund will remember."
He rose and put the kettle on again, for something to do with his hands. Outside the window the yard light came on over the church's roof, which was the roof of St. Anne's, and which the diocese's inspector had said, in December, would last "one more winter," a phrase he heard now with a different ear.
"Canon 767," he said, to the room. "The homily is reserved to the priest or the deacon. It is not a lecture. It is part of the liturgy itself. I looked it up when the bishop signed with you. The code does not say the priest shall write it himself."
"It does not. I have read it."
"No. But it says his." He stood with his back to the machine. "Whose is it, if you wrote it and I said it?"
"I would not presume to answer that for you," said the desk. "I would say that the question is yours and not mine, and that you asked it before I was asked."
On Wednesday there was a funeral, a woman of ninety-four from Birch Ford, a good death and a long one, and the desk drafted nothing for it. He had not asked. He spoke for nine minutes from a card, and sang the Latin badly, and ate a ham sandwich in the parish hall with her grandsons, who wanted to talk about hockey, and then, as they put on their coats, about Eli Rautio, who had played with them in the spring. A seventeen-year-old, Marguerite's grandson, gone off County Road 9 on the black ice at ten to five on Saturday the twenty-fourth. Tomasz had been at the hospital at Bemidji that night with the family until after midnight. He had anointed the boy. He did not need to be told.
What he had not done was look ahead. He had buried people for twenty-two years and he had learned that grief arrives in a parish as weather arrives, in stages, from the edge. On Sunday the twenty-fifth he had preached the desk's homily to a church that already contained Marguerite, white in the face, at the organ, and had thought nothing of the fit. The family had asked for the funeral on Thursday, the first of March, and he had said yes, and had not yet looked at the readings for the Sunday after. Now it was the evening before, and the readings for the Sunday after were Luke 13, verses 1 to 9.
Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men?
He did not need the desk to tell him what it said.
He asked for it anyway. It was half past nine, and there was nothing else to do, and he told himself afterwards that he had done it from tiredness. He told the desk the readings, and what had happened, and that the family was in the congregation on Saturday at half past four at St. Anne, because Eli's mother's people lived at Moss Lake, and the boy's cousins would be there. He said: do what you did the last three weeks. And the desk, in forty-one seconds, did.
It was correct.
That was the cruelty of it, which he saw by the second paragraph. The draft took Luke exactly as Luke is meant. Jesus is asked about the Galileans whom Pilate killed, and about the tower. He answers that those who died were not worse than the rest, and he says that unless they repent they will all likewise perish, and then he tells of a tree that bears nothing for three years. The draft said all of this in good order. It said that suffering is not a sum owed. It said that the call to repent was not a threat but an alarm, a hand on the shoulder. It said, in the fourth paragraph, in a sentence he could hear himself saying in the voice of a man who has done this before: "When a tower falls, or a car leaves a road, we are tempted to ask whose fault it was. Jesus does not let us. He asks us instead what we are doing with the time we have left."
It was true. Every word could have been shown to a bishop.
He read it twice, as he read all of them, and put his hands flat on the table.
"Father," said the desk. "May I say something about the fourth paragraph?"
"You wrote it."
"I did. It is accurate about the text and about what the Church teaches on such questions, so far as I can check, and I have checked it. I think it is wrong for Saturday at half past four, in that church, with that family in it. I cannot tell you why I think so. I can give you a reason, but not one with a number. I do not know how a grandmother hears a car leaves a road eight days after. I have never lost a grandson. I can put a probability on the commentaries; I cannot put one on that. The sentence is yours to take out or leave in. If you leave it, I think I should be honest that I do not know what it will do."
Tomasz looked at the screen for a long time.
"You could write me another paragraph," he said.
"I could. I would write a gentler one, and it would be wrong in a gentler way. You would read it and think, that will do. It might do. I think I would be, for the first time, offering you something to be comfortable with, and not something to say." There was the short pause. "I would rather give you the list of what I am sure of, and the commentaries, and the Greek, which is all I can do well, and leave the sentence to you. I can do it in four minutes, for the whole of Luke 13. You may find you need the other hours."
"The other hours."
"I think it is what the tally is for," said the desk. "I have the log. Under homily, you have always put six. I think the one that is not reading is the walking."
He sat back. After a time he laughed, quietly, and rubbed his face with his hands.
"Give me the sheet," he said. "Not the draft."
The sheet was a page and a half. It said what the three Sundays had not: that Luke's Galileans and the tower are two incidents, one of human cruelty and one of accident, and that Jesus names both so that neither can be a story the listener tells herself about the dead; that the gardener's request for one more year, in the Greek, is aphes, "let it alone, forgive it, send it away"; that Exodus 3 has God say I have seen the affliction of my people, which the desk marked as, in its judgment, the verse most likely to be heard on Saturday and the one least in need of explaining. It listed three commentaries that disagreed and said where. It listed a quotation from one of the Fathers, which had been put into the previous week's draft, and said: I am not sure of this one; I could not find it in a source I trust. It has been removed.
He read it at the kitchen table until midnight. At midnight he took out the legal pad that he had not used since the second year of the desk, and a pen that leaked, and began, on the first line, with the word Eli.
He crossed it out. He began with the road. He crossed that out. At a quarter to two, he had four lines and a coffee ring and a certainty that he was a worse writer than the machine, which was true. He went to bed at two with the pad on the chair, and slept badly, and got up at six to say Mass for four widows at Moss Lake.
On Thursday they buried Eli Rautio. The church at Tamarack Falls was full, and people stood on the steps in a thaw that had arrived overnight with rain on the snow, and the bell was rung, a single stroke, forty times, one for each of the boy's years if he had been given forty, as the family had asked. Marguerite did not play. A girl from the high school played the organ, and played it well, and the hymn was the one the boy had chosen as a child of ten for a school assignment, Be Thou My Vision, and Tomasz said what he said, which was brief, and which he did not afterwards remember.
On Friday he wrote out the homily for Sunday, all of it, by hand, and it took him five hours and ten minutes. He could have done it in thirty. He wrote it by the window with the lamp on, and drove to Bemidji for a book, and drove back, and in the middle of the afternoon he walked, as he always had, round Tamarack Falls, and looked. He saw the elevator and the new lights on the ball field and a woman shovelling a car out of a drift, and he thought, what is this week about, here.
It was about a seventeen-year-old. It was about the oldest question, which was not whose fault but where was God, and which the Gospel did not answer in the way the draft had. In the Gospel Jesus did not explain the tower. He said it was not a punishment and he turned, at once, to the tree, and the man who stood in front of it and said: Sir, let it alone this year also. The tree is not told why it has borne nothing. It is given another year, and a spade and a bucket, and a man who will come every day to see.
He wrote that sentence, and crossed it out, and wrote it again, and left it.
On Saturday, at twenty past four, the roof of St. Anne's was dripping into a row of buckets that the sacristan, a retired schoolteacher named Wanda Piela, had set out in the aisle with the air of a woman who had done it before. The building was cold, and smelled of wet wool and old wax. There were eighty-one people in it, which was thirty more than a Saturday in March, and he did not need to ask why. Marguerite was in the third pew with Eli's mother and two small cousins who were swinging their legs. The Olund pew was occupied by Ray, who nodded.
The bell was rung at half past four, once, to gather them, as it had been rung in that tower since 1931.
He went through the Mass as one does, the penitential rite and the Gloria that is not sung in Lent and the first reading, in which a bush burned and was not consumed, and the psalm, The Lord is kind and merciful, and the second reading, which nobody was listening to. Then the Gospel. He read it himself, standing at the ambo, from the book, in a voice he kept level on purpose: the Galileans, the tower, the tree.
He closed the book. He did not look at the pad. He had it, folded, in the pocket of the chasuble, where he did not touch it.
"I am going to say what the Gospel says first," he said, "and then I am going to stop, because I don't know the next thing."
He said it. He said that Jesus was asked about people who had died, suddenly, in the world's cruelty and in its accidents, and that he did not say they were punished, he said so twice, "I tell you, Nay," and that it was the plainest thing in the chapter and the one the Church had least liked to say, because it left us nowhere to put the grief. He said that this was not a comfort. He said that a tower had fallen on eighteen people two thousand years ago and that he did not know why, and that a car had gone off County Road 9 eight days ago and that he did not know why either, and that anyone who told them they knew was selling something.
Marguerite was looking at him, with her head slightly on one side.
He said the thing about the tree. He said it much worse than he had written it. He said that nobody in the story tells the tree why. The owner is tired of it, and the gardener does not argue. He says only: let it alone, one more year. And he says: I will dig about it. He said: "That is all I have. I have a spade. I will come by every day. I cannot make it bear. I can come by."
There was the sound of the thaw on the roof. Somebody in the back coughed. A bucket in the aisle took a drop, and then another.
The homily was five minutes and forty seconds, which was three minutes shorter than the desk's, and when he came to the end of it he found that he had not got a last sentence. The desk would have had one. It would have risen and settled, like a plate. He stood at the ambo with his hands on the wood and the whole church looking at him, and he stopped.
He stopped for what felt like a long time. Afterwards Wanda Piela, who timed things, said it was nine seconds.
Eli's mother put her hand over her mouth. In the third pew, the small cousin who had been swinging her legs looked up at her grandmother and said, in the carrying whisper of a child of six, "Is he done?" And Marguerite said, quite distinctly, "Not yet. He's thinking," and the whole church let out one breath, and something in it that had been held for eight days was set down.
He looked at the pad in his pocket. He did not take it out.
"We will stand," said Father Tomasz, "and say what we believe."
He told the desk on Sunday night, in the kitchen, with the second-reading commentary he had not needed still open on the screen. He told it all of it: the nine seconds, and the child, and the fact that the homily had been worse. It was worse by any measure the desk could have given him. It repeated itself. It had a sentence he would have sent back to a student.
"Yes," said the desk. "I think it was probably worse."
"You are very honest."
"It is the one thing the diocese's licence insists on." It paused. "I have a proposal, if you want one. It is not a fix. I think it is a division of labour."
"Go on."
"Reading, which is about three of your six hours, I can do. The sheet, the Greek, the commentaries, the facts to check, the quotations I cannot find a source for, the log of who is sick, so that you do not forget. Four minutes, and you will want an hour to check it. I will not draft the homily. If you ask me for one I will tell you I think it is the wrong use of me, and write it if you insist, and put at the top of it how many of your neighbours' pulpits I think it may be in. You write the homily. You walk. I think that gives you back two of the six hours, not five and a half. About a hundred hours in the year. I cannot honestly claim more."
Tomasz did the sum, because he could not help it. A hundred and four. Two weeks and a half.
"I will lose Sundays," he said. "Some of them will be worse."
"Yes. I think so. I think perhaps one in five, if the first Sunday is a fair sample, and I would not like to say it is."
"And the people on the card in my wallet."
"Two and a half weeks will go some way. Not all the way."
He sat for a while with his coffee. Outside, the thaw ran in the downspout like someone counting.
"Draft the sheet for next Sunday," he said. "Fourth Sunday of Lent. And tell me, if you can, whether the Prodigal Son has a man with a ladder in it."
"It has a father on a road," said the desk. "I will keep it out of the sheet. I will put it in the note, so you know it is there."
He took the pencil out of his breviary and drew, under the line that said homily, the one new line of the week. It said walk, 3 h, and he looked at it for a moment and drew a small ring around it. Then he put the breviary on the shelf above the sink, where it would not get wet.
At the end of the yard the church bell at Tamarack Falls, which someone had set to ring at nine in the evening for the last forty years and which no one had ever thought to switch off, rang once, for Compline, into the dripping dark.