Coldwater Revenge, James Ross [books for 9th graders txt] 📗

bass had fanned their spring nests some months ago. “This is where your dad and I learned to dive. Monsignor De DiMaggio stood in that water with one arm out stretched. Your dad and I would run down the dock and jump over his arm. Then he’d back up and we’d do it again. After a couple of steps back, the only way to get over his arm was head first. Your dad did it before me.”

Luke smiled.

Father Gauss had arrived a half dozen years after that long ago diving lesson. Without a vowel on either end of his surname, he was received with caution by congregation and fellow clergy alike. It didn’t help that he was a thin, chain-smoking, Vatican-trained intellectual with little tolerance for superstition masquerading as theology. Rumor had it that he had been dismissed from his previous post for insubordination.

Like everyone else, Tom had found the new priest a little strange and even somewhat intimidating—especially when he seemed to take a personal interest in Tom’s academic and social development. Tom had been one of those boys who refuse to accept the Darwinian pecking order of the schoolyard, where older boys monopolize the only basket with an unbent rim and bully the younger kids away from the flat, shady spot near the Monsignor’s garage that was the only decent spot for flipping baseball cards. The result was more than the customary number of schoolyard fights. Long stretches of effortless B’s, randomly broken with inexplicable D’s, were equally maddening to the black-robed nuns who ran the school; and Tom’s was a regular presence on the hardwood bench outside the principal’s office. But all that ended with the arrival of Father Gauss. Sister Judith, Principal for Life of Our Lady of The Lake School, simply handed Tom over to a higher power.

If Tom did poorly on a test, Sister Judith sent him to the rectory to review it with the new priest. Any nonsense in the schoolyard and she sent him straight to the rectory, where the new priest would have him sweep the parking lot after school, write an essay and then walk home. Nor did the special attention end when Tom left for the local public high school a few years later. Every few months, Father Gauss would invite him to stop by the rectory and give him a book he thought Tom should read, or invite him to see a play or classical music concert in the city. Over time, Tom came to appreciate the priest’s thoughtful reflections on the world around him and to enjoy his company. Father Gauss was a genuine intellectual, the first and only in Tom’s life until he entered the orbit of the Pearce family a few years later.

It never occurred to Tom to ask what Father Gauss might be getting out of the association, as his mother once did, in a strained and convoluted conversation with the priest one Sunday after Mass when Tom was thirteen. Tom got the story from his mother’s friend, Dorothy Ryan, years later.

One of the truths of parochial education, Gauss had told Tom’s mother, was that the curriculum was designed to impart basic academic and religious ABCs to the student of average intelligence. For someone as bright as her son, the glacial pace and lack of substance could be suffocating. The sad result, was that once out of the church’s academic classrooms, many of the brighter students abandoned the church itself. What he was trying to do, Gauss explained, was expose her son to a world of ideas and culture that might compete for his attention with the sex, drugs and other temptations he would soon encounter in the larger world. The same had been done for him when he was Tom’s age, and it had made an important and timely difference.

Mary undoubtedly felt she had little choice but to accept the priest’s explanation and, if true, to be grateful. But she had heard the unkind rumors, and she kept a close watch.

Luke broke into Tom’s nostalgic reverie by waving his fishing pole at a rowboat coming around the point. A hollow faced man with thin white hair sat in the middle of the boat, pulling on sun bleached oars. A solemn-faced passenger sat in the back, staring fixedly toward Pocket Island. Sensing that an intrusion might not be welcome, Tom hustled Luke up to the church and waited on the steps. From there, they could see the boat pull alongside the dock, and a slim youth with wispy sideburns jump out and stride up the hill. When the boy disappeared behind the school, Tom and Luke walked back to the dock and Tom introduced his newest friend to his oldest.

“Hello,” said the priest. “Are you a fisherman, too? Should we see if they’re biting?” Luke nodded sharply. “Thanks for making yourself scarce, Tommy. Some of my penitents are shy about being seen.”

“It might be easier if you saw them in the rectory.”

“That wouldn’t be wise in some cases. Besides, water seems to have a soothing effect on troubled minds. The stubborn ones have no choice but to sit still and listen to what I have to say, unless they want to swim home.”

The priest surrendered the oars and took the slat bench in the stern. Luke sat beside him and let the fishing lure skip behind the boat.

“So how’s your soul, Tommy?”

Tom laughed. “Restless. Though I’ve just been told it’s supposed to be.” He recounted his recent conversation with Susan Pearce and her new twist on Darwin’s old theory.

“I’ve heard that one before,” said the priest. “But it really doesn’t get at the heart of things, does it? Misses it entirely, if you ask me.”

“Go on,” said Tom, pulling at the oars. “I can’t escape.”

“All right, then. The theory, if I understand it correctly, is that temptation is nothing more than the normal operation of healthy brain chemistry.”

“So I’m told.”

“And I say, so what? It’s still temptation. We still have free will to fight