FICTION

The Waters of Tribulation

by Richard A. Infante

"Where you goin'?" Phil asked, threading his fishing rod through the random thicket.

"Just up here a ways; c'mon," John, the younger one, said and kept stomping through the tall, wet brush. "There's a way down to that pool on the other side of that big stump up there."

"We shoulda got a boat and went up Twin Lakes," Phil said, pushing aside the branches of a thornberry bush snapping back at him in John's wake.

They had been fishing together the past couple years since that first spring in the seminary. But Phil had never worked this stretch of Patch water, as the locals called the little stream running by the fifty houses and mobile homes that comprised the Patch. They could hear the stream babbling and tried to hush their clumsy steps along the sodden bank.

"Is that Elmer? John, is that Elmer?" Phil pointed to an old house across the gravel road where a man and a young woman seemed to be arguing; they could hear the strained pitch of their voices but not many words.

"Hunh?"

Phil pointed to the rickety frame house, again. The woman's arms waved wildly on the porch. They watched as the man threw his hands down in disgust and turned away from her.

"That is Elmer," John said. "That's his car."

They both stood quietly for awhile in the tall weeds along the bank of the creek, waiting for the other one to say something. The car sped away and the woman stormed into the house, the screen door banging shut behind her.

"Who's the woman?" John asked.

"Doesn't his sister live around here?" Phil asked.

"Maybe that was his little sister," John said. "The one with the kids."

"Hope so," Phil said and turned down the bank toward the creek.

"Hope he ain't fishing without a license," John said and chuckled with the veiled reference to their celibate life that the seminarians often tease about.

"I got my license last week," Phil said only half hearing the younger man and missing the joke altogether.

So, the two men spent their morning in the dark, swirling currents of the Patch creek, knee high in the swift, muddy waters. John, in his mid-twenties, worked the stream more vigorously while Philip, in his early thirties, seemed content to let his bait do most of the work. They fished in silence for a couple hours without so much as a bite, losing worms more than catching fish in the fast, swollen stream until the grey southwestern Pennsylvania sky showered yet another deluge of cold, spring rain.

By the time they scrambled back to the car, they were soaking wet. They threw their gear in the trunk. The rain pounded on the car as it splashed along the asphalt roads.

When they got back to Saint Vincent's, the rain had slowed to a drizzle. A few hooded monks and the tall, stately rector were crossing the parking lot after noon prayer.

"There's the man," John said, motioning toward the rector. "He'll be archabbot someday."

"He'll be bishop," Phil said.

They took their hip boots off and splashed toward Leander Hall, their residence the past few years. They sat on the top step of the huge porch, under the Roman arches, looking out across the pond and the wet fields to the mountain ridge at the horizon.

"You two get skunked again?" Elmer slapped his friends on their backs with his heavy hands. "Glad I wasn't counting on trout for lunch."

"The water was too fast and muddy," Phil said.

"It's been raining too much lately," John said. "The stream's too high."

"Ah-hunh," Elmer said with an exaggerated nod of his head. He sat down between them. "Sure, sure it was."

"Wise guy," John said and winked at Phil. "All you caught was an earful this morning."

"What?" Elmer asked.

"We saw you down there in the Patch bottoms," John said with that mischievous grin. "You and some woman were squabbling on the porch."

"That's my baby sister, you knuckleheads," Elmer said. His face grew ashen and sober.

"Ah-hunh," John mocked him.

"Sure, sure it was," Phil teased.

"I'm worried sick about her," Elmer said.

"What's wrong, Elm?" Phil asked, his tone concerned and drawn now.

"Ah, it's the guy she married." Elmer shook his head. "I never liked him from the get go. Thinks he's better than us because he's from the city - kinda like you, Phil."

"Thanks, Elm," Phil said and rolled his dark eyes.

John muffled his laughter. "There's no guile in that Israelite."

"He left her for good and she's stuck renting that big old house in the Patch with the kids." Elmer's broad face grew more grave. "I've been trying to fix a few things for her here and there - like this morning, I was puttying around the kitchen windows where the water's been leaking through."

Phil and John sat listening to their friend's lament.

"So I told her she should think about moving back with our mother and brother on the farm and she hit the roof," Elmer continued. The more he talked, the more his thick hands waved out in front of him and his voice became shrill with exasperation. Mom's been watching the kids in the daytime anyhow while Noel's at work. She could save some money if she lived at home but she keeps thinking Mr. Wonderful is coming back. He ain't coming back. He was cheatin' on her even before they were married."

"Sounds like she's got some problems," Phil said.

"That ain't the half of it," Elmer went on, his voice more discouraged with each breath, his head sagging lower and lower. "She's just a kid - like you, Johnny - twenty-three. She's got two children, she works all day, no husband to take care of her and the youngsters. She was always the smart one in the family, my folks' favorite - mine, too. Then she went off and married the first good-lookin' guy that paid some attention to her. I told her to wait awhile, but nobody in the family listens to me, anyhow. They all think I'm wasting my life going back to the seminary after a dozen years."

"Well, you are, but that's beside the point," John teased and drew a friendly swat on the shoulder by Elmer.

"Would you look at that," Phil said in a distracted mutter.

The three men stopped their talking and just watched the colors form out of the moist April air over the empty field a couple hundred yards away. They could see where the colors slowly bowed in an arc rising up above the ridge line, the spectrum of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple bands sharpening in brightness with every passing moment.

"Look at that!" John said in amazement.

The perfect rainbow congealed in a shimmering brilliance under the bright spring sun and then turned down toward the field in an array of colors that dazzled the men. After a few minutes it began to disappear as miraculously as it had first appeared.

"I've never seen a rainbow form like that right in front of my eyes," Phil said.

"You lived in Pittsburgh all your life, what do you expect?" John said. "Now its starting to evaporate - check it out, Elm."

As the rainbow dissipated in the subaqueous sky of the heavy April day, Elmer's eyes filled with tears. With Noel on his mind, the promise and beauty and fragility of it all made his middle-aged heart ache with care. He got up and hurried into Leander Hall.

A couple days later, after noon Mass and lunch, Elmer, Phil, John and the other third-year seminarians were in their scripture class with Fr. Benedict Bonn, O.S.B., a distinguished scholar of national reputation. While Fr. Benedict lectured on the fifth chapter of St. John's gospel, Elmer sat slumped in his chair,

looking out the window at the steady rains pelting the garden beds. He was brooding about his sister, the farm, his leaving the seminary that first time to do mining, the trouble his family had ever since their father died: his cross.

"While there is some confusion over the name of the pool: Bethesda in Hebrew," Fr. Benedict continued in his clear and strong voice at the lectern. "Scholars generally agree that it was distinct from the spring of Siloam which is mentioned in the ninth chapter. In fact, archeological excavations this century have unearthed a pool in Jerusalem with five porticoes."

Across the aisle, John caught Phil's eye with a little nod of his head, and then gestured for him to look at Elmer, who sat in the desk chair directly in front of him, motionless and seemingly disinterested in everything save the rain.

"The Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran also refer to a certain pool near the temple known as the Bethesdatayin," Fr. Benedict explained.

John began to push Elmer's chair leg carefully and slowly with his foot, while Elmer sat oblivious and immobile. Phil put his hand to his head and bent down over his notes to hide his amusement from their professor.

"The confusion between the two pools," Fr. Benedict went on, "arises from the fact that at Siloam there was a spring which, during the rainy season, gushed water throughout the day. This could have been mistaken for the stirring of the pool of Bethesda

since, to both were attributed powers to heal the ill, the blind, the lame and the crippled."

John eventually succeeded in angling Elmer's chair slightly toward the window, accentuating his misdirection, while a few of the other seminarians began to notice Elmer's distraction.

"This stirring or troubling of the waters was believed to caused by an angel of the Lord." Fr. Benedict noticed the men's furtive glances and moved toward Elmer who was still peering out the window. He leaned over him in his ominous black habit. "Rise, take up your pen, and wake up," he said to Elmer, who was startled to attention by the monk's close voice, as well as his classmates, suppressed laughter. "Trying to figure out how Hezekiah dug the curved tunnel from both ends at once, are you Elmer?" Fr. Benedict teased. Everyone was laughing, now.

"Hunh?" Elmer managed to say as his face flushed with embarrassment.

"The stonecutters used the echo of their comrades' voices to guide their labor in the tunnel. The Hebrew inscription from 700 B.C. describing this amazing engineering feat is still legible today," Fr. Benedict continued teasing him. He checked his watch and then turned to the class. "That's enough for this afternoon." As the seminarians hurried out of the room, laughing, Fr. Benedict called out across the huddle of bodies in a low, commanding voice: "John, I'd like to see you a minute, please."

A few hours later, John and Phil were in the small chapel to join the other seminarians for evening prayer. They were all dressed in their clerical shirts and black pants. Elmer came in late, in the middle of the opening hymn and made a quick sign of the cross before he sat down. By the time he arranged the ribbons in his breviary, the singing was over and the fifty or so men settled down to pray. In a moment, Elmer was caught up in the rhythm of the rolling voices praying the psalms in a recitation born of habit as much as devotion:

"If the Lord had not been on our side, this is Israel's song ..." one side said and completed the strophe before yielding to the other group of seminarians across the chapel:

"Then would the waters have engulfed us,

the torrent gone over us,

Over our head would have swept the raging water ..."

the seminarians prayed in alternation through the psalm to its completion. In the peace and serenity of those familiar, fraternal voices, Elmer's eyes welled up again and he was lost in thoughts about his sister's troubles, about how she had distanced herself

from him ever since he had decided to reenter the seminary a few years ago. She makes me feel like I've abandoned the family, he thought, though he knew he had given the better part of a dozen years of his life to keep their small farm going after their father died and he waited until his younger brother knew enough to take over. I practically raised her after Pop died, he thought. I tried my best.

Then he heard the rector's deep, resonant voice intone the familiar blessing that concluded their prayer and it drew him out of his anxieties, for a moment. The seminarians shuffled out of the chapel but Elmer just slumped down, heavy and still, in the

hard wooden chair and stared intently at the tabernacle housing his Lord.

Later, at supper in their dining hall, John spoke quietly to Phil at the salad bar. Outside the heavy rains pounded the wet garden.

"Did you see Elmer?" John asked.

"No. I think that stuff with his sister got him down," Phil said. "He looks upset."

"Think it'll rain?" Another seminarian approached the two of them at the salad bar.

"If it gets any worse, we better start building an ark," Phil said.

"It's rained for twelve days straight," John said and scooped some beets into his bowl. Phil nodded to John toward the back and the two of them headed for a far table.

The dining hall was filled with about four dozen seminarians and a few of the Benedictine monks that taught them. The warm laughter of the young men and their joking across the tables gave the dimly-lit room an almost palpable conviviality that seemed to

hover over the dozen tables like soft turns of light glimmering with each rising voice. After finishing their meal, John and Phil hurried out of the pleasant comraderie of the dining hall and up the stairs in search of Elmer.

But they could not find Elmer that night. They checked a few places around the seminary and then went to the campus ministry office where Elmer worked with the college students. The two girls in the office hadn't seen him that night either.

"I'll betcha he's down his sister's," Phil said.

"Probably," John said. "We can't bother him there."

"Maybe he's down the gristmill," Phil said.

"He goes there once in a while and helps Brother David grind some flour," John said. "It's worth a shot."

So the two of them gathered a few beers from Phil's refrigerator and got into John's jeep which was parked behind Leander Hall. They drove to the mill, though it was only a couple minutes away, because the incessant spring rains drenched the earth that night as they had for the past two weeks. They parked in front of the gristmill in the rough gravel lot. When they got inside they set the beers down and shook the rain from their clothing and hair.

Then they started laughing at the site of Brother David scampering around with a large pail to catch the steady drops of rain plopping down through the high ceiling.

"Well, don't just stand there! Get one of those buckets and put it under there," Brother David said, pointing to another steady drip splashing off of the old floorboards.

In a few minutes, the three of them had positioned several pails beneath the major leaks.

"Thanks," Brother David, a burley man of thirty with a full, red beard, said with a nod.

"Here," Phil said and handed him a can of Rolling Rock.

John snapped his can open, too. "Was Elmer around tonight?"

"No, I didn't see him," Brother David said. "Something wrong?"

"He's got family problems," Phil said and took a long swallow of beer.

"Who doesn't?" the monk said.

Sitting on the gristmill floor, the three of them talked and drank and talked some more about the guys who had left the past couple years, about the women they had married and their first kids, with the steady plop-plop of the dozen or so buckets catching the leaks, until the conversation came back around to Elmer.

"He's all worried about his sister and her kids," John said.

"You shouldn't have to worry about a pretty woman like that," Brother David said.

"You have to worry about them the most," Phil said.

They whiled away another hour drinking and telling stories about Phil's years on the Pittsburgh fire department and John's spelunking exploits in the Laurel Caverns.

"When it rains, it pours," Brother David said.

"I feel like Noah before the flood," Phil said looking around at the cavernous, creaking, old building.

"Jonah in the belly of the whale," John said and caught a drop of rain in an empty beer can that rang with a piercing ping. The men quieted at the sound, as if it signaled the end of the night,

the end of the beer.

(The Conclusion of the story will be in the next issue of The Catholic Faith.)

Father Richard A. Infante is the Parochial Vicar of St. Bernadette Church in Monroeville, Pennsylvania.