The Old Priest

Upstairs Room

T h e O l d P r i e s t 95 Upstairs Room I ’D BEEN GONE THREE DAYS, SHACKED IN WEST AtlanticCitywithabad-temperedcocktailwaitressnamed Irene Smith, but Irene Smith was not entirely the point of it, as Irene herself eventually learned. I called and said I was coming back to pick up my things. “I’ll fall on bended knee when you arrive,” she said to me over the phone. I came up the stairs and stood for a moment inside the door of her sitting room. It’s a spare room we fixed with a TV and a beat-up love seat, plus a pair of old highboys I had pulled the drawers out of and set up as bookcases for her romance novels, whichshereadsbythebushelbasketfuls.Ihadfoundthem,the highboys, on my way to the job one Monday morning. Somebody had thrown them out in the rain, the two of them, where they would get picked up by the trash men. I loaded them into the back of the pickup and threw a tarp over them, worked my shift, dried them off with rags in the garage after supper. When I looked up she was standing inside the door with that plastic rain hat of hers tied loose around her hair. She had cleaned up and done the dishes and then come out after me with two bottles of Pabst and a bowl filled up with potato chips. It was green Depression glass, the bowl, and I had found it at a sidewalk sale on my way to do a job on a yard for some guy named MacCaulley. 95 A n t h o n y Wa l l a c e 96 I should explain that on weekends I do landscaping work to supplement my regular job of auto mechanic for a fat guy named Sims. Well, I was doing this guy MacCaulley’s yard, and the mower broke down on me. I hit a pine cone and there was a screeching noise, followed by a sheet of blue smoke, and then she died on me, right then and there. I use junk mowers picked up out of the Shopper’s Guide and out of the trash, too. They almost all of them have those two-stroke Briggs and Stratton engines in them, and they’re easy to work on. I get a few months’ work out of the thing and it’s practically free, if you don’t count my time working on it, which I don’t. It’s my time and I can spend it however I want, and besides that I like it, taking something somebody else thinks is useless and getting some use out of it. So I had to break her down right there on the spot and she was spent, the whole thing, melted down.I had another mower on the truck of course, and after a while MacCaulley came out. He said, “How about fixing that thing on your own time? You got another mower on the truck.” So I told him, “Come to that, how about getting yourself a man who charges you twenty-five a week and then beats you for fertilizer and lime he never uses on top of that?” MacCaulley went back in the house and shut the door behind him. This was right after I came back from there. The bowl cost twenty-five cents, and I’d brought it in while she was out of the house over at her mother’s place. I put it on that little gate-leg table the previous owners of the house had left in back of the garage. I filled the bowl with tap water, then went out back and picked two daisies. I remember I stood over the small bed by the back steps trying to decide if I should pick one or two of them, trying to think of how big the bowl was, how many petals I’d need and all like that. Finally I picked two, just to be on 97 Up s t a i r s R o o m the safe side. I sprinkled the petals on the surface of the water inside the green glass bowl. I wanted to get it exactly right, and when I finished it looked like one of those Japanese paintings, you know, the odd patterns running here and there. I stood...