3 THE FUNERAL

A priest has serious issues with a corpse

Sophia Stone would have preferred to be anywhere but where she was. But life doesn’t always ensure our comfort or that we are in the kind of warm and pleasant place we’d choose.

Not that the church was cold or its ambience unpleasant because the heating was most certainly turned on despite it being a warm day in the world outside, and the light from the stained glass windows was almost spiritual. But Mildred O’Donnelly had passed away and it was her funeral that all the fuss was about and why Sophia was sitting on a hard wooden pew.

The funeral was to be conducted in the local Catholic church, but Mildred, despite her Irish antecedents, had been no catholic. But being married to one was all that had been necessary for the service to be arranged, hymns chosen and eulogies penned.

Even Sophia felt a bit like an interloper despite the fact that Mildred had been a dear friend, maybe her only friend. Sophia was no lover of gods or churches.

They had met way back at University and had immediately become two halves of something bigger than either of them. Sophie had been the shy one, the pretty girl who spurned the attention of boys whilst Mildred had been the outgoing one who had hopped into bed with as many boys as wanted to join her between the sheets, and at all times of the day or night, too. Mildred hadn’t been choosy about anything but the decency of the boys she managed to coax into her fragrant boudoir, and she had never let her exploits get in the way of earning a good degree.

Despite popular opinions to the contrary she didn’t have one moment to spare for the wrong sort of man. To her, morality was easy to define and it had very little to do with sex but rather a lot to do with a good heart, which is why, when it came time to marry someone she had married a schoolmaster who taught religion and games at the local comprehensive. And being both serious in a religious intellectual way and outgoing in a physical way, he had been perfect for her and they had got on fine until her death a week earlier.

But that marriage had taught her two things. Firstly, it confirmed that there most certainly, and she was one hundred percent sure of this, had never been a Creator except for, and she was just as sure of this, her wonderful husband who did all manner of creative things with her, in bed and out of it, and not one of his versatile caresses conflicted in his mind with the God he lauded in bis prayers.

But Mildred had died and there were some who said that it was a punishment for what were looked on by right-wing hypocrites as loose morals, though the woman had never had an immoral thought, not by her own pretty high standards in which the physical joys of marriage didn’t enter into the morality argument. What had killed her had nothing to do with her morality, loose or otherwise, but a drunken driver late at night on the street where she lived.

Sophia had maintained the friendship, though on a rather sporadic basis in that they laughed together when their paths collided and merely remembered past times in lonely solitude when they didn’t. Sophia spent most of her days creating and Mildred had an inevitable family, which was her own creation.

“Hitch up, Sophe...”

That was Jonathan, Mildred’s much better half (the deceased’s opinion), and he wanted to sit next to Sophia even though she really wanted to sit on her own and remember that past as a salutation to her deceased friend.

“Jonathan,” acknowledged Sophia, and she moved along the pew, making room for him.

“I’m really glad you could make it,” he whispered to her after he did little odd things like genuflecting and crossing himself and bobbing down onto his knees and back up again.

“I was devastated,” replied Sophie, “she was the best friend a woman could have.”

“She always loved you.”

“And I loved her.”

“She read all your books, you know. She always said that your loving came from your heart. She said it was special and anyone who experienced it would know properly how a person feels when his or her world is in balance. Yet you never married...”

How can I tell him that I’ve never even been kissed? How can I explain about the purity and innocence of imagined love?

“I’ve never met the right man,” she murmured. It was a cliché, but it worked.

“Mildred always said...” He paused, and when she glanced up there was the beginning of tears in his eyes. “She always said that you knew more about love than anyone… She envied you, she really did.”

“It was me who envied her!” responded Sophia, smiling, “because she understood loving and lovers more than anyone I ever met.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do now she’s gone,” he confessed, “I could strangle the drunk who took her away from me. I’d hang for him, I really would.”

“It was dreadful.” What else could she say without getting maudlin? What other truth could she utter in the solemn half-light of a sacred building.

But she was saved from needing to find a more meaningful reply by the start of the funeral service.

She looked up, and gasped.

The priest in his pristine robes was the man who had struggled with his debit card only last week, and he was scowling.

Oo0oo

Father Samuel Tinder looked at his reflection in the mirror, preparing himself to be inspected by his congregation.

He had a funeral to conduct, and as was his wont he’d done a little research on the life of the deceased and been deeply troubled by what he had discovered.

The fact that she obviously had no particular faith troubled him. It was bound to because he, himself, couldn’t begin to understand where faith went when men and even women were faithless. How could they exist without reference to the almighty truths in the holy books? Surely that was what life was about, obedience and a deep and almost uncontrollable belief in the power of the love of God and the might of the Creation? But that wasn’t the worst thing, not by far. Someone, admittedly a female but an ever-so regular member of his congregation, had implied via the gift of winks and nudges as well as a handful of well-chosen words that the deceased had lived the least moral of lives.

She had, he was led to believe, lain with more men than this particular teller of the tales’d had hot dinners. She was, in short, a harlot or the worst and most prolific kind, and the fact that she had five children and goodness-knows how many grandchildren at her age must be proof of that.

Further research confirmed his worst fears. He was expected to pray this sinner, this worst of sinners, to Heaven and into the arms of a Lord who would hate him for doing it. It would probably involve his own condemnation to the depths of Satan’s Hell when his time was up. He, who lived as perfect a life as possible when one is surrounded by all the evils of creation, would go to Hell and blister in its eternal fires.

He only had one choice, as he saw things and bearing in mind what he knew.

And when he stood in front of his congregation he did the impossible. Or if not impossible, virtually unknown.

“The woman in this casket is not one of ours, and she has not lived a virtuous life but been the most profligate of harlots,” he pronounced in a loud, clear voice. “You must take her from this place and find another. I cannot in all conscience convey her soul to my Heaven!”

There was a shocked silence. One old woman didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, to applaud or keep her own counsel. The sudden outburst of sobs from the husband of the deceased sounded loud round the church, echoing off stone walls and gathering in a rumble of sound as if ready to shake the building to its foundations.

He knew the weeping man, of course he did. Moral guide to the sinners at the local comprehensive school and confirmed Christian. What he did not know was that the same good man was husband to the sinner he refused to inter and consequently he was confused by so much sanctimonious sadness.

He stared into the congregation, at the shocked crowd and the wailing man. But it wasn’t him but the woman helping him that made the Priest stand stock still.

It was the female good Samaritan who had helped him with his bank card in the Supermarket, and she wasn’t smiling.

She was quite clearly furious, and he didn’t know what at.

© Peter Rogerson 09.1.19