Chapter 13

    Four years later, at the same time of year, Toby was back in the Kootenays. This time he did not fly, nor did he travel on someone else's budget. He came by boat and by bus, not for the sake of a story, but in hopes of getting a job teaching English at the little university. He was not successful with the job prospect, but he did see Hastings for a few hours, and thus took in a nice eyeful of the town that had raised his wife. Then he had a pleasant afternoon ride back to Vancouver through the sunny, open, fields of northern Washington State as far as the Okanagan, feeling quite sad and disappointed that he had not been hired, and wondering why he had failed, after Providence seemed to have so clearly set him  up to make the journey.
  
    How regularly, he pondered, did God throw bloody great logs at the propeller of the West Coast's principal passenger ship, laying her up in the Prince Rupert dock, taking nine hours to replace the propeller shaft? Or did they simply straighten it? The technicalities didn't matter, what mattered was that the ship got knocked off her schedule substantially enough to enable Toby to telephone the university president with his intention and arrange for a replacement to take over his job in the Broughton Harbour post office for a couple of days. Then he and a pregnant Jelena caught the boat after supper and headed for Vancouver, sliding along over calm seas, through the evening rain. They were both very merry. Jelena wasn't teaching anymore, so they could call it a holiday. Her mother had been delighted to hear that they were coming, and with Toby in the interior for a full day she could have her oldest to herself. Losing Jelena to a marriage, and then having that marriage move away, had not been easy for her. On the other hand, living regularly within handy reach of a mystic would not be easy for her either.
  
    The boat was by no means full. In fact the only other passengers he was ever to remember were rather highly placed. The Anglican clergyman from their own Broughton Harbour, the provincial minister of education and his wife, and, as it would turn out, his future employer, the parish priest of one of the nearest major towns to the north. In spite of having already taught two weeks of elementary school, and substituting at the high school level occasionally, Toby was still thinking he would be happiest at the college level. He did miss from time to time the campus that had been his home for six years. But there was no real game plan for life in all this: he simply went from day to day, with his studies centred around Thomas Aquinas and John of the Cross, learning more folk songs and writing from to time, and also learning to endure increasing assaults on his peace of mind in the eye of an uncertain future. He had little understanding of the degree to which God liked to use him simply to go about challenging the complacent, and I don't mean to use that word in the sense that Francis de Sales does.
 
     But on that boat trip he also got a lesson on how other souls had a similar capacity, as he watched the priest zero in on the education minister. Toby was not eavesdropping, so he only learned later what the subject matter was: the priest was bluntly lobbying the minister on the subject of public money for Catholic schools and the injustice of double taxation. The conversation was all very well mannered, of course, but Toby had no doubt about the intensity and determination of the priest's address. He also had no idea whatsoever that the man was only months away from being his employer, for all that his own pastor had been intimating at regular intervals that he and Jelena would find no better place to do the will of God than the pulp town two hundred miles to the north. Living one day at a time, primarily as a contemplative, left him with all sorts of certainty about the past - except the certainty of being able to write accurately about it - but with nothing of the sort for the future.
 
     He was, however, struck by the priest's forthrightness with the cabinet minister. The cleric obviously knew how to seize the moment in a good cause. The priest was a big man, with a very square-shouldered look about him. Toby had met him before, of course, in the autumn, when as Dean of the North Coast he had come down to Broughton Harbour with a mission preacher, an Augustinian father from the priory in the Delta. But it was then the prior, a European, that Toby had been fascinated by and got on with so well, for they had talked vigourously of theology and the saints, and the prior had told him his own story of a priest professor with certain gifts of spiritual discernment. They had laughed a good deal, and teased each other over their professional attachments, Toby lobbying for his Aquinas, the prior for his Augustine, with an Augustinian legend thrown in that pointed the finger at the Dominicans. Something about a poltergeist in a monastery that had changed hands in the Counter-Reformation.
  
    The priest had also told Toby a discernment story, as if in his Old World trained ways in ascetic and mystical theology he had realized that Toby was no ordinary Catholic. Ordinary Catholics did not spend their hard-earned money on a complete Summa, nor study John of the Cross as naturally as small boys read comic books. Or perhaps he had talked with Toby's own Broughton Harbour pastor, also a European, a German, who, unlike the Canadian clergy, simply accepted that Toby was a mystic.
 
     "When I was in the seminary in Louvain," he said, "We had a professor of Trinitarian Theology who was known for his skill in reading the spiritual value of something, and he had an interesting way of demonstrating this to the students."
  
    Toby grinned from ear to ear. He no more doubted the priest than he had doubted the story of Padre Pio appearing at eight thousand feet to redirect an American bombing squadron. The Augustinian knew he had an appreciative audience.
 
     "He asked for a volunteer to take three simple little unblessed medals that he offered. One of them, he said, was to remain unblessed. The second was to be taken to a young American priest they all knew, famous - or infamous - for saying his Mass in fifteen minutes, and the third to an elderly, very pious, priest the students were also familiar with, and of course have these medals blessed. The volunteer was to come early to class the next day and put the three medals on the professor's desk, in plain sight of the class, and the class was to be instructed by the volunteer as to which medal was which in terms of its particular status. When we next assembled, the professor came in a little late, so as to make sure all had gone according to his directions. Then he came to his desk. With all eyes fastened on him, he picked up first the unblessed medal, gave it the most cursory of glances and threw it into the body of students. 'This one is worth nothing,' he said. The second, which the assembly knew had come from the hands of the American priest, he held for a bit, and acknowledged contained an adequate grace, then replaced on the desk. 'So so,' he said. Then he picked up the third medal, held it tenderly, reverently, like Joseph with the Christ child. 'Now this one,' he said. 'This one has a real blessing.'
 
     Toby had made some appreciative comment, and Jelena served the scones for which she was becoming famous within their visitors' circle. They contained flour and all that, but it was the currants and the brown sugar rolled within that made them so desirable. But she too had loved the story, not only for the spark of something above ordinary faith, but also for the memories of the university classroom. Broughton Harbour, with all its charms, was about as radically different an atmosphere as one could find.
 
     It had all been a bit odd, in retrospect, how God had said one thing and then done something else. Standing at the corner of Tenth and Trimble that morning in the early summer of his conversion, Toby had distinctly heard, as he pondered his choice of clergy - the Basilians especially trained to deal with the peculiar angsts of students, or the Redemptorists wired to family, work, and related temptations - "I want you to see what kind of priests ordinary Catholics have to put up with." At the time, he had taken this simply as an application to his career as a writer, but was also a bit surprised at the Almighty's seeming slight of the class you would be most expected to think his favourite.

    And, as he set off to study the priesthood as a novelist all the while he was studying the faith they spoke of, he really had seen little to complain about that wore a collar. The simple fact of their celibacy was refreshing, the obvious dedication, the humility before a young adult soul anxious for the whole truth after an upbringing in the shade of trees of error and inadequacy: all this genuine wool and a wide yard of it was more than enough to overcome the few incidents of misunderstanding that turned up, if only to prove that ordination did not automatically make an intellectual and spiritual superman. It was Christ who was the Superman, with the Mass and the Sacraments to prove it. And yes, the clergy were a sort of supermen too, for in their learning, their devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and, again, their celibacy, they casually, unconsciously, possessed and effused, without conscious exhibition, a masculinity that always had an edge on most other men. Was there in fact any liability greater than the habit of sex, even legitimate sex?
  
    And, before his fateful bus ride into the Kootenays, for his first two years in the Church, the pattern continued, almost without blemish. He knew of only one priest the tiniest bit indiscreet, and that in itself, Toby reflected years later, may have been only because the priest was deliberately indiscreet, choosing to perform his alleged misdemeanour in a social situation in the company of a leading parish lady sure to notify the archbishop, and thus get him a most desirable move out of the parish that was driving him crazy. There were few Catholics in the Broughton Harbour parish, which in itself was remarkably isolated, and possessed of none of the cultural amenities of his native region of Germany. Toby had been happy with him as a parish priest, for the good father accepted the fact that he was a mystic. Toby was blunt in the confessional, and plainly backed up his situation with his studies. When you read Aquinas and John of the Cross as a matter of course, you were either the real thing or a very skillful liar. And being German, the priest had possessed a sensibility for all the fondest trappings of Christmas. With Jelena on the seasonal break from teaching, they had tramped the woods for cedar boughs, and decorated the altar and the church for midnight mass. It was Toby's first as part of the music, and it had a special quality of its own in terms of memory, for Christmas was the one element of religion his parents had honoured. With the new year, the German disappeared, Toby acquired something of an altered view of the clergy, and the replacement showed up. He was Canadian, the son of a dock worker in Vancouver, and someone who had known difficulties with the intellectual demands of seminary studies. But he could easily see that Toby was born to teach, and regularly, although gently enough, pressured him to go up to the little school at Camden Falls. This good Father, who had known nothing but trouble with his theological studies, was astounded at how co-naturally, to use Saint Thomas' own language, Toby browsed the Summa, and how vehemently Toby berated his own high school education for its lack of formal philosophy.

    "I was twenty years old before I knew how to take my own mind seriously. Or rather twenty when I started to take it seriously. What a waste!"
 
     The priest said he thought Toby had quickly made up for lost time.
 
     "But I've yet to get a degree in philosophy. That's why I'm thinking about going to Toronto. To Saint Michael's."
  
    When Toby was in that vein the priest did not talk about Camden Falls. Some things were better left to Providence, which had its own ways of guiding the externals of the spiritual life. But he had rarely met a young couple who  at the same time were so much at home with both faith and a fully comprehended cultural life. The education they possessed between them was already, he was quite sure, something he in his working class background had never seen before. He could not see that Toronto could add anything worth the journey. They should be kept within the province, if he had his way. They both seemed to have so little to learn, and so much to teach. And had there been a monk at the abbey where he had received his priestly education who could sing the chant any better than Toby? Their Easter services, for all that Broughton Harbour was as small a parish as any in the diocese, had simply been wonderful. It was quality that mattered, not quantity. When Toby called the rectory to explain why they would be absent on Sunday, the priest wished him good luck, but in his heart was quite sure that the Interior could not use him as well as the Coast could, nor had it any right to him. Diocesan priests can be as parochial as anyone, especially where talent is concerned.
 
     So there were hugs and kisses all around when they got to Jelena's old home in Vancouver, with all its memories of their first months of knowing each other - and last of their university careers - and then in the afternoon Toby got on the bus.
  
    That was in the days before the new highway over the mountains east of the Boundary country, when the bus that left later in the day was not allowed to cross the American border through the Okanagan, arriving there too late in the evening, so it switch backed on the Canadian side until its tail nearly fell off, but on a moonlight night in the spring, with the moon shining down on the still snow covered mountains, it was a ride worth paying for, even if no job did turn up, and Toby felt quite delighted with the whole adventure. Besides, he had never before been east of Keremeos. They climbed forever, and then, inevitably, they did the opposite. The bus seemed to rocket down the narrow road, and the old lady in the seat behind spent the entire time holding nervously on to the back of Toby's seat. He could not have cared less.

    They stopped at Trail, in full daylight again, and Toby bought a newspaper. If they were going to move here, he thought, he should get a look at local concerns. And on the rest of the run, into Hastings, he was quite overwhelmed with how much space there would be for rambling about, after the confinement of an island of so few square miles. Then there were the fields high up on the hills coming into Hastings, the old, small farms, with the risen sun upon them. Like Switzerland, he thought, and utterly wonderful. Jelena's stories of growing up here had made it all seem like a book of endless characters, and now he was seeing the backdrop. A Catholic university in such a setting was surely a Paradise Regained. Could Providence really be that generous?
 
     In those days, big for bus travel with the railway having closed its passenger service just a few years earlier, the Hastings station also held a restaurant. Toby had a stout breakfast of bacon and eggs at the upstairs counter, then headed virtually kiddy corner to the home of one of Jelena's best school friends, to bring his news and kill some time before his appointment with the university president. He was not due until eleven.
 
     When the time came, Toby wound his way up the hill, heading south-east as he climbed, loving the view of the lake and the loft of the mountains on all four sides of him. What a place to learn! What a place to teach! Who could be unhappy in such a setting?
 
     The president wore the clothes of what to Toby seemed to be a monk, but he was in fact a friar, belonging to one of the dozens of branches of Franciscans, this one founded by a convert from the Anglican persuasion.
  
    He was a little taller than Toby, and striking in an intellectual sort of way, not quite fifty, and his order carried a lot of credit with Toby, because a good friend of his in Vancouver had always spoken so highly of a priest from it that was a friend of his. And Toby's habitual gratitude for the Catholic priesthood at first made him completely open to any virtues this priest/friar might have had. But as they talked - and Toby made it plain to this man of the cloth, this potential spiritual director - that he was a mystic, a Thomist, a Carmelite in spirit - he began to feel that his adventurous effort was getting him nowhere, especially when the priest/president asked him what he knew of John Dewey.

    Toby, fortunately, knew nothing of John Dewey, and was puzzled by the question. But they had talked about Jelena, somehow, and the president said that her degree could make her useful to the university. Toby balked at that, the president said he could not see his way clear to hiring Toby, but he would like to invite him to lunch in the student/faculty cafeteria. After all, he had traveled a considerable distance.
  
    Thus, they went to lunch. It was simple fare, the species of which is well known to university students the world over. Hot dogs, and something besides that suffers for carbohydrates.
Conversation somehow continued, in spite of Toby's disappointment. And then, out of the blue, came a student. A female student. She came from elsewhere in the cafeteria, but she came to murmur something in the ear of the president of the university. She was undoubtedly an attractive young wench. A presentable body, a comely face. And as this whisper took its toll, the friar/president blushed.
  
    Toby by that time had been through a lot of priests. But this was the first time he had ever seen a priest blush.