The Priest's Madonna Read Online Free Page B

nervously. Michelle and I exchanged an astonished look. We waited for more discussion, but none came, so Michelle picked up her doll, and Claude began once again to bounce his ball. The men smoked in silence until dark, when we retired to bed and Bérenger to his candlelit reading. They did not speak of politics again until the election.

    O N BÉRENGER’S FIRST Sunday in church, the sanctuary was full. Almost the entire village came to Mass that morning—people who hadn’t attended for thirty years were there, pressed against the walls and standing in the entryway. Even my father came. Women forwent their customary cotton shifts and head-scarves for linen dresses and straw hats. Men wore jackets and clean white shirts. Shaved and scrubbed faces arrayed the pews and the back aisle of the tiny church, newly swept and dusted. The sight of so much effort, so much hope and sincerity, made me shy. I met no one’s eyes. We waited amid shifting feet and coughs for Mass to begin.
    Finally, the cantor—M. Lébadou, who was enthusiastic but always off-key—began the introit and Bérenger, dressed in a gold chasuble and bearing the censer, processed up the nave, accompanied by the Baux brothers. He beamed at the crowd, his cheeks flushed with excitement. As he approached the altar, his eyes momentarily lit on me, and I smiled despite my impulses toward discretion—he looked so joyful, so earnest, so handsome. My mother had been lamenting since his arrival how poorly attended Mass was, probably as a way of tempering his hopes. He must have known that people were there mainly to satisfy their curiosity. Still, he preached effusively that day; his voice, a rich baritone like my father’s, rang out with authority and passion. He promised his best efforts as curé for us; he dedicated himself to Rennes-le-Château as shepherd—promised to counsel us, to tend to us when we were sick in body or spirit, to lead us in the virtuous path toward God, and he charged us, for our part, to follow him as a good flock.
    Afterward, people seemed buoyant, chatting happily and watching the children. The Baux boys, wild once again, relieved of their ecclesiastic duties, chased after one of the dogs. Women gossiped. Men lingered and joked, standing near their families.
    Bérenger was ebullient. He knew he’d touched people. Perhaps he believed that he’d come to a faithful village, a place where the Church still held sway over the hearts of the villagers, where his word as God’s mediator would be respected and obeyed. He undertook his primary task—to transform lives into journeys, deaths into homecomings through the administration of the sacraments—with admirable zeal.
    As soon as he arrived in Rennes, he began making pastoral visits. My mother told him which families might be particularly needful—the wives who had lost husbands, the jobless men, the mourning families or those who had newly welcomed a child—and he knocked on their doors right away, without waiting for a request or an invitation. After thirty years of neglect from the previous curé, most people were surprised by Bérenger’s genuine concern for their well-being. When Mme Fauré, a thin and timid woman with nostrils that flared like a horse’s, gave birth to a baby boy, Bérenger went with my mother and me when we brought the egg, bread, and salt and spoke the traditional blessing, “Be good like the bread, full like the egg, and wise like the salt.” A few days later, at the boy’s baptism, Bérenger presented him to the congregation with such jubilation that we broke into applause. When old M. Baudot fell from his roof while trying to repair it and broke his hip, Bérenger sat with him and told him jokes, including a few that involved foolish old men who acted younger than their age. He even visited Mlle Martinez, a Spanish Gypsy who had a shack in the woods several kilometers from the village and lived off the squirrels and porcupines that wandered into her traps,