Works and Days

Chapter Eighteen

Consummatum Est

1

When Patricia Lewis opened the door, her cousin Catherine screamed in her face, Patti screamed back and the two women threw their arms around each other.

“Oh, my God, it’s been so long!” Catherine declared. “I don’t even think I’ve been to this house before.”

“Where’s Maureen?”

“Being slow as usual. She and Pierce and the girls are on their way. Jinny just gets bigger and bigger every day and Anne never stops talking.”

But while Catherine was talking, her husband and her sons, Ryan and Jayson came in.

“Well the Family Laujinesse!” Thom greeted them, coming down the stairs.

“Thom!” the Gus Laujinesse hooted.

“Russell, come down and see your cousins!” Thom shouted up the stairs.

“Damn,” Thom reached up and thumped Ryan on the shoulder, “you’re gigantic. You got Russ’s hair, and Jay, you look just like my son…”

Frank and Sara arrived less than an hour later in their Wagoneer, followed by the red headed Daniel and his children.

“See,” Daniel, a ridiculously tall, pale man whose forty-five years had left only a few curls of red hair on his head said, shaking Russell by the shoulder and pinching his cousin Anne in a way that her face showed she did not appreciate, “there are more red headed McLarchlahns.”

“Lewises,” Thom corrected.

“Sure,” Daniel shrugged.

“I’m a red head,” Frank protested beside Sara.

“You’re a baldhead, old man,” Daniel declared.

Frank ignored his cousin, and confided in Thom, “You know that painting I did of you at Christmas? I sold it to the nicest people.”

“Nice little South Bend couple?”

“Yes,” Frank looked amazed. “How’d you know?”

“Oh—my—God!” they heard a loud rich voice piercing the crowd, “This house is so filled with McLlarchlahns I can hardly get through.”

“Aunt Kristin!” Russell greeted his oldest pregnant aunt. As Patti and Thom came to greet her, they noticed that even six months pregnant, she still had her gold brown hair combed to perfection and stood in stilettos that could double as switchblades.

“Where the hell is Jackie?” Kristin demanded beside Reese.

“At her apartment,” Thom replied in a voice that said she should have known better.

“Oh,” said Kristin. She turned to Reese Keillor. “Honey, would you stay here while I go over to see Jaclyn?”

“I’d feel better if I drove.”

“Oh honey,” Kristin looked down at her husband, and ran a sympathetic hand over his buzzed head, “don’t be silly.”

Then she was gone.

“You still can’t tell her anything,” Reese said, shrugging as his wife sailed regally through the crowded living room.

“Women,” Thom began, and his wife hit him in the back of the head.

“I’m nervous as hell, and I want a cigarette.”

“Jaclyn, you’re pregnant,” Kristin reininded her, “so that’s out, and you have no reason to be nervous.”

“Mom smoked through all of her pregnancies.”

“And look at how we turned out. Now, tell me what I can do for you. Your big sister’s here.”

“Tell me everything’s going to be alright.”

“Jackie, everything is going to be alright. I promise.”

Jackie looked at Kristin, and then suddenly she burst into tears.”

“Jackie!” Kristin began uncertainly, teetering in her hells to the sofa to sit beside her sister. “Jaclyn.”

“No, it’s just you’re such a good big sister!”

“Why thank you—”

Jackie threw her arms around her older and equally prenant sister.

“I love you so much! I’m sorry for telling everyone you’re a bitch.”

“Well,” Chayne said, “that happened.”

He lay on his back, looking at the ceiling, and Rob lay naked on his side next to him.

“I didn’t expect it to happen,” Chayne said. “At least… I didn’t expect it to happen so soon.”

“Neither did I,” Rob said. “But it did, and I’m glad.”

“You are?”

“Yeah,” Rob said to a surprised Chayne. “I’m really…. I… I wanted this to happen for a moment.”

“How much of a moment,” Chayne turned to him so that the two of the mfaced each other, propped up on their elbows.

“Since I came into this house.”

They looked at each other for a time, and then they kissed and Chayne drew Rob to him, their limbs linked and their bodies pressed together and Rob said, “Shouldn’t we get dressed… Is there any time?”

Under him, Chayne held Rob’s shoulders, and then he lowered his hands down his body and firmly grasped his ass as Rob bent down to kiss him.

“We’ve got all the time in the world. We’re not the ones getting married.”

“Okay,” Jaclyn put a hand to her hip. “Where’re the priests?”

“I’ve been looking all over for them,” Denise said. “Come to think of it, I haven’t seen them since last night when they went to the bar.”

“They went to the—” Jackie leapt up, but Kathleen and Kristin sat her back down. They were in the sacristy of Saint Adjeanet’s, overlooking the parking lot to the school.

“Sit down,” Kathleen reprimanded her daughter as she continued straightening her hair, and Kristin adjusted the shoulder of the white dress.

“It’s my wedding day and both our priests are missing—” Jackie began.

“Oh, take a deep breath, Jaclyn,” Kristin told her sister. “Everything’ll turn out fine. The doves are all here. The rice is ready. The weather’s beautiful, the choir even sounds good, and the way I’ve got this dress on you, no one’ll tell that you’re five months pregnant. Or is it six?”

“Kristin,” Kathleen pled in a low voice while Patti came in wearing a rose colored gown like Kristen and Kathleen.

“You know the thing about this wedding is it’s easy enough to find matrons of honor. But a maid?”

“Hell, the bride’s not even a maid,” said Abby, sipping from a gin smelling water bottle, “how can you expect us to be?” and Felice, stubbing out a cigarette cackled and then coughed on smoke as the short, red faced Meg Rice entered.

“I was hoping she’d get lost on the way,” Kathleen whispered in her daughter’s ear.

“Hideeho!” Meg cried, then ran up, heedless of straightening irons and bobby pins to hug Jackie, “You look beautiful Jacks!”

“Jacks?” began Kristin.

“This is such a big day,” Meg went on. “I feel so close to you, Jacks. I feel like we’re related.”

“I feel like I’m still a virgin,” Felice commented.

“Me and Finn just got in, but he might be a little late. He ran into your old boyfriend, Chip. I think they’re having a drink.”

“What?” Kristin’s eyes lit up.

“Oh, yeah,” Meg went on oblivious, smacking her gum.

“On his sister’s wedding day,” Kristin said, “your significant other is carousing with her ex-boyfriend?”

“Yeah,” Meg nodded, grinning. “Cool, isn’t it?”

Before Kristin speak, Kathleen laid a hand on her daughter’s and said, “Honey, let it go, we’ve always known Finn was mildly retarded.”

“All this and we still can’t find a damn priest,” Felice commented from the window, lighting another Newport.

“Can’t find a—” Meg stopped. “You all don’t know where the—”

And then Meg Rice, in her short leather skirt, ran out of the sacristy.

“Where the hell did she go?” Felice demanded.

“Haven’t you guessed?” said Patti. “To find a priest.”

When love is found

and hope comes home,

Sing and be glad,

that two are one,

when love explodes

and fills the sky

Praise God and share

our Maker’s joy!

 

sang the choir.

“Chayne!”

“Chayne!”

To reach beyond

home’s warmth and light

to serve and strive

for truth and right!

“Chayne!” Jewell screamed, running into the choir loft as the whole choir hushed and looked at her.

“What?”

“Geoff and Robert have both disappeared!”

“What?” Chayne turned away from the choir.

“That crazy girl in leather just said that no one can find the priests.”

“Are they still in the Blue Jewel?” Chayne demanded.

“That’s what I was coming to ask you.”

Jewell’s eyes bugged out, and she snapped her fingers before clutching her curly head.

“That’s right!” she said, and then she was gone.

“Denise!” she was shouting as she ran down the aisle crowded with milling people. “Let me into the parish house. I need to make a phone call.”

Then Chayne was with them, followed by Rob, and they were heading out the side of the church.

In the parish house, Jewell stopped shouting into the phone and asked Chayne: “Aren’t you directing a choir?”

“I left them with Russell.”

“You left the with?” Jewell began, then said, “Fuck it.”

Meanwhile they heard Jewell shouting into the cordless:

“You did what? Because he said your mother was—Damnit, Tim! How could you? Well, no I don’t like priests and ordinarily I’d be laughing right with you. I think they could all use a good wheat field. But I told you—I TOLD YOU—that there’s a wedding today, an important wedding and we need them!”

“Wheat field?” Chayne whispered to Denise who shrugged, and then continued staring at Jewell and the cordless.

“So where are they now?”

After a great deal of swearing, Jewell switched off the cordless and told Chayne and Denise.

“Well now comes the awful part,” Chayne said.

“So let me get this straight?” Jackie began, one eyelid twitching, her legs straddling the back of the chair, a cigarette in one hand and a tallboy in the other, “Both priests were last seen in a wheat field roughly an hour outside—north, northwest, northeast—of Grand Rapids?”

Jewell swallowed and nodded.

“Jackie, do you need me?” John demanded from outside the sacristy.

“Stay out!” Jackie barked. “Don’t you know it’s bad luck to see me yet?”

Outside of the sacristy, the large and handsome Ryan Laujinesse tapped John on the back. He stood beside Russell who said, “Uncle John, you need to come out and see something.”

At the front of the church, in black tuxedos, the gawky Daniel McLlarchlahn stood beside Thom, both looking equally horrified.

“What’s up, guys?” John demanded with false cheer.

“Mr. McLlarchlahn?” said a man in a blue jump suit.

“Yes?” John said.

“Could you…? Could you come with me?”

“Alright?” John said, doubtfully.

     “You might want to bring your friends too.”

The man led John, Ryan, Thom, Russell and Daniel to a blue van that read DOVES OF LOVE, and whose back doors were swung open.

“Apparently,” the man was explaining, “my boy left the car on last night in the garage, and we’ll be glad to reimburse you, but the doves won’t be ready today.”

While the man was speaking, John went to the back of the van where Daniel and Thom were already stoically observing seven cages filled with the corpses of dead doves.

To the casual viewer it simply looked like John reached out to hold the hands of his cousin and brother in law, but Russell could see his father’s eyes cross a little at the pressure John dealt his knuckles.

“What now?” John wondered, and as if in answer, their came down Kirkland Street a red Porche honking merrily, and then the car stopped and in beige pants, hemp platforms, yellow halter top, gold bangles and perfectly straightened hair parted on two sides of a perfectly tan face hopped Kim Bayle.

“Happy hitching day, Johnny!” his ex-wife cried, throwing a kiss on his cheek, and then gasping at the dead doves and commenting, “Ain’t that a bitch?”

“Shannon, you look beautiful!” Patti sighed as Chayne entered the sacristy with his old friend and someone who looked like a fat cowboy..

“Right?” Shannon smiled, pleased, “but this isn’t about me. Firstly, Jackie,” she took the beer from the bride’s hand, “That’s has to stop. Secondly. I’ve got a solution to your problem.”

“Cyanide?”

“No,” Shannon chided Jackie. “My uncle.”

“Howdy, ma’am. I’m Rabbi Bubba Goldstein.”

Jackie only stared at the outstretched hand incredulously. Then her mouth twitched. She turned red and threw back her head, bursting into fits of laughter.

“Great! Great!”: she cried. “This is just wooooonderful!” and Jackie kept laughing so hard that Felice whispered to Patti, “What’s your diagnosis, Doc?”

Patti gave no answer.

“Woooooooohooooo!” Jackie cried and threw her veil into the air.

“We’re also missing a bride’s maid,” Patti said.

“What?”

“She’s a Lewis,” Patti said in disgust. “She disappeared with with Jimmy, one of my cousins. I sent Russell looking for them.”

This was when Hannah Decker, wearing her best floral print, walked in and said, “This would probably be a really bad time to tell everyone that the organ just broke down, wouldn’t it?”

At the look on Jaclyn’s face, Patti said to Felice, “Reach into my pocket and take out some Depakote. Give her as much as she needs.”

“Ma’am, would you like water?”

“Rob?” Jackie said. “I’m glad you’re here. What are you doing here?”

“I’m Chayne’s assistant.”

“Do all assistants look like you?” Hannah asked, looking him up and down.

Rob went red, unable to answer and Chayne turned back to Jackie.

“Jaclyn,” Chayne said beside Bubba and Shannon. “I don’t want you to worry about a thing. I’m conducting this—”

“Fiasco.” she sobbed.

“Fiasco is just another word for....” Chayne started.

“Mess,” Jaclyn concluded.

“Well,” said Chayne. “Well, yes. But I promise you: this will be the best Irish Catholic wedding said by a rabbi for a bride five months carrying, that you’ll ever see. I promise!”

“But the doves!” Jackie sobbed.

“The doves are all around us,” Chayne said in a musical and consoling voice. “They’re with Jesus now, looking down from heaven and singing for joy. Rob, tell them about the doves.”

“Doves?”

“You’re a writer….Write… recite.”

And in a panic, but always well dressed, Rob began:

“Doves of love, doves of love

Doves are up and and all above

You are doves, we are doves

We love doves,

doves, doves doves.”

While Rob smiled foolishly, Hannah clapped and cried out, “That was wonderful.”

“You’re just looking at his ass,” Patti murmured.

Hannah kept clapping and said, “I see you noticed, too.”

Russell loved his cousin Jimmy. Too much was happening today for him to remember exactly how they were related, but he thought that Jimmy grandmother was his grandfather’s sister. Jimmy smoked and drank and screwed a lot and never treated him like a kid. When he went hunting for Jimmy and the bride’s maid, another cousin, though not one he knew and not one related to Jimmy, he went looking everywhere he shouldn’t, always the right way to find his cousin.

If it has been any other day, Jimmy would have been sitting in the sanctuary, but the church was filling up, and it was a wedding day, and so Russell found him fucking the bridesmaid in the basement. Jimmy was tall and wiry like a McLlarchlahn, with a long face, serious in its fucking, and a little soul patch and spiky hair and, his trousers about his knees, his jacket neatly hung on a folding chair in the darkened basement reception hall, he was plowing the bridesmaid against the bulletin board, her thighs wrapped about his waist.

“Yeah,” Jimmy encouraged the girl as she whimpered, “Yes, hat’s it, honey, let me hear it.”

As she cried out, he fucked her more, and the louder she was, the harder he fucked her until she began to make hard hit sounds, and he slammed into her over and over and, at last, with a look like he’d been punched, came inside of her, staggering as he ejaculated and she clung to him, moaning.

“That’s a good girl,” Jimmy said, as he lowered her to the floor. “Howbout we both get cleaned up and attend a wedding?”

As she turned to go to the women’s room, Jimmy was pulling himself back into his pants when he turned and saw Russell.

Russell had been waiting for the moment Jimmy went into the bathroom to go back up, and he was so red now he felt his cheeks burning.

“Russ, you little fucking pervert,” Jimmy said.

“I—”

Jimmy put a finger to his lips.

“You’re that age. I would look too. We’re all perverts. Your time’s probably coming soon. They looking for me?”

Before Russell could answer, Jimmy went into the restroom. Russell, not knowing what else to do, followed him. He was pissing at the urinal, and he flushed and then went to the sink. He cranked the paper towel dispenser, ran some water onto the clump of towels, and then with little care, opened his trousers, wiped himself, and then dried, and zipped himself back up. He was slapping water on his face and smoothing his hair and he said, “You got questions, right?”

“I got…” Russell’s mouth was dry.

“I have so many questions.”

“Great,” Jimmy turned to him. He took out two sticks of gum, one for Russell and one for himself.

“We’ll talk after the wedding. At the reception when all the dull shit is going on.”