This is one of several excerpts of a novel titled Common Decency, located in the sand hills of western Nebraska.

And this is Imogene’s mother, Maureen O’Malley:

    “Well, Rosa hated me from the beginning, and that’s all there was to that.  All the time acting like she was just helping out, just being a good neighbor, well what she really wanted was my kids, at least that oldest one anyway.  And don’t think I didn’t know why, I just didn’t know what to do about it, and after a while I didn’t care.  That country takes it out of you, takes the caring right out of you.  It got so I used to think about the war as a happy time and peace as a misery, that’s how bad it was.  I used to hope they’d activate the armed forces again just so’s Bart ‘n me’d have to go back to Connecticut and I’d have to go back to singing in that little club where I met him.  People used to say I sounded like Judy Garland, but I didn’t, it was just something nice of them to say.  I didn’t look anything like her, and sure, I got to drinking a little out there in that empty country, but Bart was worse’n me, a lot worse’n me.  My mother said he was no good, but all I saw at the time was that uniform and that cute way he grinned.  I didn’t see the bottle, didn’t see it all the way out on the train to Omaha.”

    “I just thought it was clever of him to make a party out of that whole long trip.  But then on the bus north to the sand hills, it was like the hangover set in.  I’d never been west before that.  I never knew there was country where it never rained, never grew anything but sand grass, just baked and blew like that.  No towns to speak of except little one-horse burgs a hundred miles apart where the bus stopped -- maybe one bar on the street, and me and Bart just staring out the windows.  Then the bus finally came to the dinkiest town of them all and Bart said this is where we get off. I couldn’t believe it.  Maybe six houses and a building that was a grocery store and a house all in one and across the street a bar and a hotel up above, if you could call that place a hotel, and Bart says this is where we get off?   This is home, he said.  Ma lives over there.  And he started walking on ahead of me in that wind, the wind blowing like a hurricane, dust and sand up in my face, tearing off my hat and my feather boa first thing. He just goes on ahead to the middle one of those six houses, which I saw was a school house from the bell on top, and he walks on in like he owns the place and there is his Ma. Doesn’t even get up to greet him, or me.  Just sits there with this sour look on her face and says so, you’re back. 

    “And that was it.  No coffee, no tea, no come on in and sit down and let me get to know you.  Acted like she never even saw me.  Room full of kids so I guess school was more important.  Bart, he just turns around and walks out. And so did I.”

    “And so there we stand in the middle of that dirt street with our suitcases and him drunk, which I can see why by now.  He goes straight into the bar and calls up what he says is an old friend of his from before, a man by the name of Mason Johnson, and says he’d come to get us.  I am amazed there is even a telephone at that point.  I didn’t know then who this Mason Johnson would turn out to be. I was just glad there was somebody, glad to at least be back in a bar with a bathroom.          

    “And finally this big guy comes in, tall and great-looking, could of played football maybe back a few years, has this grin on his face and this cowboy hat, and you just know he belongs in that country.  Not us, just him. I’m already wanting to jump up into his arms, but can’t do more than shake his hand and try not to cy.  He gets us into his pick-up truck, me in the middle of course, to take us out to that awful place where we were going to have to live and I try to keep my dress which was already ruined from all that dust from getting worse ruined by the gearshift in that truck. They weren’t saying much that I had to hear so I kept looking out at all those dunes with grass on ‘em and thinking it was the moon we were on, that people couldn’t live in a place like this with no trees, no houses, just that raw-looking grass everywhere.  It was just miles and miles of fences and this long trail road we were on.  I remember thinking it wasn’t real, that I was going to go crazy if it took an hour just to get to the house, and then the house itself – well it was full of mouse manure and leftover grain from them using it for storage, and dust was all over.”

    “I just saw this blue water lake out in the pasture and I headed straight for that at a dead run, clothes and all, and dived in.  Maybe I thought I was going to drown myself, I don’t know.  But you should of heard Mason Johnson laugh.  Bart stayed on the porch like he could care less but that big guy followed me out there and stood like a man should stand and grinned at me swimming around in circles in the water. Then he waded in and hauled me out like I was so much kindling wood.  It didn’t matter who was married to who or if it was the wrong thing to do, it was just that he was the only thing in that whole empty country that made any kind of sense to me. 

    “I’m sorry if this sounds bad.  I’m sorry I basically abandoned my oldest daughter out there and let his mother Rosa Johnson raise her, but that’s what they acted like they wanted.  I’m sorry if I let Bart O’Malley ruin my life.  But that’s what I did.  I used to think where I’d have been otherwise, singing on some stage in New York, probably married to a musician, which is what I should’ve done.  But there I was out in those dunes, burning to a crisp, making moral mistakes left and right and generally going crazy.  And all Bart could think of to do was beat me for it, like it was my fault he brought me to that place, like it was my fault he didn’t know what to do with it or how to fix fence or raise cattle, like it was my fault all he could do was rent out his land to Mason Johnson all those years and then spend every dime of what he got paid for it down at Willy Bell’s Bar.  Like that was my fault.”

FICTION, AS IT HELPS TO SAVE YOU

     It helps that God’s gift to me is the joyful work of writing. I am in fact instructed by the Church to write the story of how a journalist moves from that most secular of all possible professions into a life of prayer as a third order Carmelite nun. And so here I am, by way of voice type dictation, working on the reformatted autobiography, inserting new memories of the old days that have been called to the surface by this attention, fitting in old poetry and fiction to augment the explanations of how and why things went as they did -- not necessarily in that order.

   It’s good to be making use of what I’ve written in such a practical fashion toward the good and wholesome purpose of telling the story of my vocation, without blame. In fact, Books Without Blame is the working title of the five and possibly six volume set, the first of which is subtitled Just Words On A Page (in deference to my late husband’s assessment of my chosen lifework). The next five include, in addition to short stories, excerpts of the journalism I wrote for 35 years and the fiction, plus a volume of photographs produced at stops along the way. It begins to seem not only possible, but essential, at least to me.

   And so, here are the first in the fictional series, a geographically correct short story, Paulo, with another such, titled Josiah. 

The Story of Paulo

Where I came from was country like desert, dunes grassed over since the Pleistocene Epoque, where people who knew each other traveled in caravans, two or three cars at a time. That was how I met Paulo. He was someone invited along by someone I knew one summer in a pilgrimage across the plains toward the dot on the map which was my hometown.

He was good-looking, idle and apparently directionless in that first glance, with no reason for being there. I was going home for reasons of family necessity but he had no stated purpose for such a rigorous trip to a place most anyone else would have thought of as nowhere. He might even have said nowhere had seemed like a good idea at the time.

A few days later I was back in town from my ancestral countryside and I saw Paulo walking hand-in-hand down the street with a woman I had known since high school, a shopkeeper now.  I could see she had decided to give him everything she had in this life. I asked if he knew what he was doing, in a town as small as this one, but he simply shrugged, there in his pale blue suit, his blonde hair perfectly combed, and said he didn’t mind.

Whatever happened, he was amenable. Any invitation was acceptable. If she wished to marry him he could go along with that. He had no other plans. I saw that a person as beautiful as Paulo was had become accustomed to trust in the benefits of happenstance.

When I saw them again at the wedding, she was radiant and adoring; he was adored. She had made all the arrangements; he had accepted them -- the white suit, the ring, the ceremony, the feast, the house, the honeymoon, the love and pride she felt in him. All of this was evident though none of it appeared to have changed him nor made him a visibly deeper or more thoughtful man. None of it seemed to have aroused in him the need for something more, different or of his own definition.

Perhaps he’d had no needs that had ever gone unfulfilled, and so no knowledge of the necessity of design. He simply stood and was beautiful, tall and handsome with sociable grace, or sat and was beautiful, with his air of careless freedom. He made conversation with those who approached him, simple chat about the weather or the prices, the kind to put others at ease, or he stood attentively beside the shopkeeper and helped to cut the cake. He was precisely where she wished him to be, his obedience effortless. He felt no cause to look around and study faces or situations, no reason to assay prospects or dangers, no benefit in strategy, no need to think of the future nor to remember the past.

How many others had there been, I wondered, like this eager happy woman? How long would it be until he heard some new invitation and wandered off at that suggestion just as easily? How long before the shopkeeper tired of the constant need of supervision and stepped aside from him a little, wishing once more for the answering friction of a blessed reciprocity?

But Paulo was glorious as he stood there that day in the summer sunshine, his hair gleaming gold in his white suit beside her. He had no curiosity about her nor the people of that town, or at least none that I could see; he was simply there in our tiny enclave of residence surrounded by its vast pastureland because he happened not to be someplace else. On the one hand he was detached from materialism or considerations of provision for the physical; on the other he was offering little beyond his simple form of service. Paulo did not look or see beyond himself.

I was fascinated. I was, or thought I was, the opposite, purposeful at identifying and satisfying my needs. I’d had no time to simply coast, no opportunity to let others lead the way and remembered no instance in my known human existence when anything was that effortless. But now I wondered, what might have happened if I’d eased back a little on that racing throttle and waited, if I’d taken more time and proceeded as Paulo did, with no sense of living at stake? What would have happened if I had proceeded with no grand plan, accepting and following; would I break apart, would I have disintegrated as I so feared or found myself trapped, stranded or in trouble? I imagined, even if I could not imagine it, that Paulo had never been so afraid, nor even mildly inconvenienced.

I finally asked him: Paulo, how do you do it? I watched him smile and glance around at the racks of fine clothes in his wife’s shop and when he shrugged and looked at me with those clear blue eyes I saw that he knew precisely what I meant.

I suppose I’ve had good teachers he said smoothly, turning to his wife at the register, who heard him and smiled back with deep appreciation. She went on taking money from her customer and then looked at me and winked.

I mean about pressure, I persisted, including her in the question; how do you never seem to feel any pressure? He laughed and it was an easy, genteel laugh, full of merriment and good manners, and his wife studied him, as attracted as she had been the first day she had seen him.

You can’t be like him, she said to me; he’s one-of-a-kind, a finished soul, you might say.

The next time I saw him, a few months later, he went to stand at the window of the store, hands in his pockets. It was a slow day for business and his wife had gone to the bank. He was wearing a powder blue cardigan over his shirt in that cool, air-conditioned place. I had seen golf clubs behind the counter. He had a natural gift for the sport, she had told me; he had a natural gift for all sports.

He was Paulo.

You have to not care, he said quietly to me; you have to simply accept.

But Paulo, I said; what if it’s not what you want?

It always is, he said, turning to look at me with those quiet blue eyes.

And I said oh sure, for you it is.

For you too, he answered.

He seemed so quiet that day, so like a spirit that I could not continue my questions and left to contemplate what he had said. I heard from others around town that his wife had been pregnant, but had miscarried. Paulo had gone with her to a grief group, but no one had seen him grieve. I went back then and took him a gift, nothing grand, just a small crucifix. I put it into his hand one afternoon as his wife sat nearby sewing up a hem for a customer. She was bent over her work, though she had given me a quick smile of welcome. Paulo studied the cross for some minutes, turning it over, warming it with his heartbeat, making me wish I could have given him more for that simple thank you.

If I had asked him to come with me, to visit the grave of my husband, he would have done so. He would have let me tell him about the love and the loss and the heartache; he would have listened, would have heard and would have waited. But I didn’t say the words, so he didn’t make the gesture, and the next time I was home, again for the holidays, he was gone.

His wife just shrugged and gave me a sad smile. She said it was probably for the best. He was probably bored with her anyway and with the forsaken nature of our largely abandoned little town. She said he was too handsome for her anyway, and what could she do to entertain a man like him after the new had worn off?

I wanted to wail at her, to shout how wrong she was to have so misjudged Paulo, to have ever let him go, but I said nothing, having been as willing as she was to be so pessimistic. I knew that her words had been my words when I had first seen him. I had assumed he would leave at the first invitation just as he had come, and so had she, and so he had.

If she had assumed he would stay, he’d have done that too.

If I’d said how I wanted him to be there for me as my friend, my brother and my teacher about life, he’d have smiled and said all right. And he’d have done that. But we assumed we meant nothing and because of that we meant nothing. Because we let him go, Paulo left.

I had learned, though it was the hard way, and too late, that we might well have asked for a great deal more. We had let go an Angel.