Ash Wednesday by Ethan Hawke

Author:Ethan Hawke
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781400040117
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2002-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

FATHER MATTHEW

The door was open, but I knocked anyway. You gotta knock.

My intended course of action was to have Father Matthew marry us. He was the priest who’d confirmed me and definitely the holiest guy I’d ever come across. The last time I saw him was when he buried my old man, which everyone appreciated. Suicide makes a lot of folks uneasy. He had a stern serious face, but you could make him laugh, no problem—make a fart noise in your armpit and he’d bust a gut. He was our youth group leader, and he let us get away with smoking and all kinds of nutsy behavior as long as we were respectful of one another. Christy wasn’t Catholic but she was OK with the idea of him marrying us. Her only condition was we had to have the service at night, with lighted candles, but I figured Father Matthew would be hip to that.

I went to visit the old priest in the church offices, which were directly underneath the main chapel. The cold, wet-stone smell of that church basement brought back ten thousand memories. I stood in the hallway outside his office, noticing how little had changed. His room was open and airy, with sunlight pouring in the one small high window. It was the kind of room where you can see lint and junk sprinkling the shafts of light like stardust. You felt awkward or clumsy if you moved too quickly. There were books everywhere, books stacked on top of books, ledgers piled in one corner you could tell were forty or fifty years old. Old mail was piled here and there, and Father Matthew was sitting at his heavy wooden desk staring up into space.

He was still as big as I remembered. Some things get smaller as you get older, like the hill on Pecan Avenue where I grew up. I remember struggling to ride my bike up to the top, but now when I drive by it’s hardly a hill at all, more like an incline. But the old priest sat there, twisting his head around like he was looking for something on the ceiling, and his shoulders and arms were just as mammoth as I had remembered. Father Matthew Allen was probably six feet six inches tall. The palms of his hands were bigger than my face. I’m not joking, he was, like, a first-growth human being.

“Come on in,” he said loudly, in a raspy Boston accent. We were in southern Ohio, and I bet this guy hadn’t been back to Massachusetts for fifty years, but he still sounded like Robert Kennedy.

I went in. There was a thick oval rug in the center of the floor that was coiled in ropelike spirals going down smaller and smaller to the middle. That rug was older than anybody living in my family. It was gnarly and covered with foreign-looking hairs. I stepped on it and stood in front of him. When I was thirteen I thought he was ninety, so I had no idea what his age was now, but he was damn old.

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