Soap Birds

Pete Prokesch

I was probably the first pot head priest in St. Luke's congregation. I mean, staying celibate was tricky enough. Even confessions made me horny. Rich housewives venting about sexless marriages. Impure thoughts about their plumber or their kid's SAT tutor. Still, I felt solace that the women in the congregation were as lonely as me.

I always dreamed of being a carpenter. Like my brother John. Or Jesus. My brother had a small construction company in town. Built-in cabinets. Crown molding. Oak casings for false beams. That sort of thing. It felt too late in life to learn a trade. Besides, who would do business with a fifty year old ex-priest? Felt like you were cheating on God.

So I kept up my sermons and whittled soap at night. I’d sit in the rectory at the foot of my bed with my switch blade and carve clean white bars into swans. Or penguins. Storks. Any type of bird, really. I stashed the soap birds in a shoebox under my bed. In the morning I’d sweep the shavings off the pine floor and mass them into a waxy ball. Then I'd melt the ball over a Bic lighter. I wanted to let it burn my skin but I never did and it made little white puddles on the floor.

After a few weeks it felt wrong trapping the birds in that box under my bed. Soap or not, I never felt good about birds in a cage. So I’d wake up before dawn on Tuesdays and leave the shoebox of soap birds in front of the homeless shelter by St. Jude’s Park. I labeled it "donated soap."

The box was always gone the next day when I went for my morning walk. My mind swimming with thirty milligrams of edible weed. I imagined dirty homeless men, cooked on meth, rubbing the soap over dulled scars and faded tattoos while the hot water in the shelter showers hissed. I loved the idea of my soap birds cleansing filthy skin. I made my delivery at dawn every Tuesday morning and never said a word.

I held open confessions every Tuesday afternoon. The same day I’d deliver the birds. I knew it was Deborah McCarthy every time by her earthy scent. She taught gardening at Roosevelt Junior High and never wore perfume. Or deodorant. It was that smell of fresh earth that set her apart from the rich women in the congregation. She came to confession every Tuesday at three thirty after she got out of school. She never seemed in a rush to get home to Mr. McCarthy. I’d smell the soil through the black screen of the confession booth and she’d clear her throat and begin.

Mrs. McCarthy’s voice always trembled at first, as if she committed a murder. Or syphoned her teacher's salary into an offshore account. Then I’d hear about a minor breech of patience with a rude middle school boy. Yanking a healthy kale by the root instead of harvesting its leaves. Eating an earthworm to impress his friends. She’d confess her thoughts of smacking the boy. Leaving him in as much pain as the worm or the kale.

Her husky voice was my muse. While she spoke, I imagined the wing angle of my next soap bird. She’d sigh in relief at the end and I’d give her five Hail Marys to recite at the altar of the church.

“I’ve had unfaithful thoughts, Father,” she said one cold and sunny autumn afternoon and exhaled again in relief. “My mind is unclean.”

I adjusted my collar and cleared my throat as the gummy kicked in and the black veil of the screen between us seemed like a theater curtain. I waited for what prompted her benign ideation of violence. A crushed ladybug? The improper pruning of a tomato? If only I could lift the black
screen. If only she could see me while she talked. Stare into my bloodshot eyes. Know that I'm as scared and confused as the rest.

“Unpure thoughts are God’s way to test us,” I said. “It’s in choosing right from wrong that we discover our faith.” I imagined the type of bird I’d carve that night. Maybe a flamingo. I’d use a white bar of coconut soap and soak it in mashed berries and let it turn pink. Maybe Mrs.
McCarthy grew berries in her garden. I’d ask her after I assigned the Hail Marys.

But then I heard Mrs. McCarthy clear her throat deeper than usual and her bench creaked as she rose. She swung open the wood door to the booth and a moment later the door to my side swung open and my eyes felt raw in the light. She shut the door and sat down next to me in the dark. Her legs pressed against my black robe.

“Mrs. McCarthy,” I said. But my voice sounded feeble and weak.

I heard her rustle through her purse, then the crinkle of plastic, the flick of a lighter, and the smell of cigarette smoke. The gummy had fully kicked in at this point and I struggled to peel my lips of my chalky dry gums.

“Look father,” she continued. “I know you walk around here high out of your skull. And I don’t blame you for it. I can’t imagine the type of—restraint you must employ. Preaching to these phonies and fakes.”

“Mrs. McCarthy,” I said again. By now she had slipped her cigarette between my fingers and I found myself inhaling deep and exhaling a clean funnel of smoke that vanished through the black screen.

“My husband is a fake. And he won’t even fuck me, Father,” she said and pulled the cigarette out of my hand and placed it back in her mouth. She held it in her teeth as she rummaged for something in her purse. “Do you know what that’s like? You’ve chosen this life of solitude. But you’re married to God. I feel hopeless. Like I’m stuck in purgatory.”

Who did these people think I was, other than a lonely stoner in a priest’s garbs? I felt no less married to God than I did to the glass chamber of my bong. An outcast who’s greatest joy was getting high and whittling bars of soap into animals at night. A crude desire to wash another man's skin.

“I carve soap at night,” I said. It felt like the first real thing I’d spoken in months.

“Soap?” she said. She stopped rummaging and the confessional door crept open, as if nudged by a ghost. The sun had sunk in the sky and shone through the stained glass, painting pinks and purples on the wooden pews.

“Soap,” I repeated. “I get high at night and whittle little birds with a knife.”

I coughed as the confessional booth filled with tobacco smoke. Then Mrs. McCarthy stood and yanked my hand and we stepped into the chapel. The church was empty but I lit some frankincense anyway to hide the smell of cigarettes. . On the stained-glass window near the altar, I eyed a white dove resting on the shoulder of St. Francis.

“Can you show me?” she said. "Can you show me your birds?"

She looked desperate as tears welled in her eyes. I noticed the feint blond hairs on her upper lip. Speckled with dirt from the school garden. She felt the presence of my eyes and licked her lips clean and swallowed the soil. She squeezed my hand in a rhythmic pulse and I smelled the earth on her skin. I nodded and swung open the heavy doors of the chapel and climbed the steel stairs to the rectory.

I simmered a can of split pea soup on the stove in my rectory room, poured us each a bowl and dusted the soup with black pepper. We sat at my round kitchen table with the scratched surface and we sipped our soup in silence. Mrs. McCarthy pursed her lips and blew on the bowl of soup, sending the tiniest ripples across the pool of green. I noticed these tiny details when I was high. And the sounds were amplified — just our grunts and breathing and the clank of the spoons against the rim of the bowl. I finished first and rose and heated water on the stove for coffee. I had passed the peak from my gummy and I felt the tide of my busy mind recede.

“Why birds?” she asked as she rose with her empty bowl and stacked it on the mass of crusty plates piled in the sink.

“I like the thought of someone washing themselves with my work,” I said. I pictured the blank stares of businessmen and executives like Mr. McCarthy in the pews at Sunday mass. Itching to crack a beer for the Patriots game. “I leave the birds at St. Jude’s shelter where the meth heads stay.”

“Hmm,” she said. She sat on the edge of my twin bed and fingered the button on her flannel shirt.

“If you want I can show you.”

She scooted over and made room for me on my bed.

I sat next to her on the edge of the bed and the cheap church mattress sunk under our combined weight. I scoured my mind for the last time I washed my sheets, but these days the weed made it hard to pull details from the fog.

I reached down and slid the shoebox out from under my bed. I raised the lid and exposed the little soap birds. I handed her a dove carved from a bar of coconut soap and she traced her finger over the texture of feathers on the spread wings. Then she closed her eyes and inhaled the fragrance and let herself fall back onto my sheets. I reached under the bed again and wrapped my fingers around the barrel of a bong; I packed the bowl with weed from a small orange pill bottle in my pocket.

Mrs. McCarthy sat up and found the lighter from her purse. I handed her the bong and she bubbled the water and blew a clean stream of smoke into the sunlight pouring in through the stained-glass windows.

“It’s beautiful,” she said after she coughed. “The stained glass.” Her eyes softened and she tucked a wisp of brown hair behind her sunburnt ear.

I frowned at the window. “Sometimes I’d prefer a clear view,” I said. She handed me the bong. I reached back into the box and handed her a  raven.

“Black soap,” she said. “Seems dirty almost. Like it’d be impossible to get clean.”

“Oh, I just rub it with charcoal,” I said. “A natural exfoliant.”

She examined the black remnants on her skin. She dragged her finger across the raven and she leaned toward me and drew the faintest black mark on my brow between my eyes.

I touched the birds wings and did the same to her.

"Confessions better this way," she said. "Reciprocal."

She was quiet and traced her finger over the finely carved feet of the bird. “Hey," she said, suddenly plucked from thought. "Have you thought of starting a business?”

I shook my head, bent over the bong and milked the chamber. Mrs. McCarthy lit a cigarette then stood up and walked to the boiling water on the stove. She scooped coffee from a red plastic Folgers carton into the French press. Then she poured the hot water over the coffee and stirred until a pleasing brown foam formed on the surface.

I helped myself to a third bong hit and coughed a cloud of smoke and squinted to make out the shape of a tree through the distortion of the stained glass.

“My students and I,” she said from across the room. “We run a stand at the Farmers’ Market with our produce from the school garden. I could sell your soap. You can keep the money. I won't tell a soul.”

I thought about sweeping the shavings off the floor in the morning. How satisfying it would feel to let all that hot  soap burn on my skin. How filthy my body felt compared to the clean  wings of the bird.

"Okay," I said.

She opened and shut cabinets until she found the cups. She plunged the French press and poured the steaming coffee into identically chipped mugs and placed the cups on the nightstand and sat next to me on the bed. I lit the last of the weed and took an ashy hit from the bong as the sun sank below the trees and the light was weak and beautiful through the stained glass.

Mrs. McCarthy kept coming to confession once a week and lamented about her impure thoughts. She slept in a separate room now from Mr. McCarthy who came back later and later from his law firm's office. She would pleasure herself with produce from the garden, she said. Zucchinis and eggplants and cucumbers. I’d wait for her to tell me who she replaced her husband with in her mind. But the silence would linger and I’d give her three Hail Marys instead of five.

After confession she’d follow me to the rectory, and we'd get high and I’d hand her the box full of birds. I averaged two birds a night at this point and took Sundays off. That made about a dozen birds per week. I checked out a bird identification guide from the public library and advanced to pine warblers and horned owls.

Still, Mrs. McCarthy told me the black ravens were the top sellers. There was something sublime about scrubbing yourself clean with black soap, she’d say. I imagined the men at the shelter, heads pounding from meth and scrubbing themselves with that shitty green liquid from the dispenser. Or bars of cheap Dove. I felt like I was cheating—selling the soap to rich people at a Farmer's Market and taking all the profit.

“You might want to consider a name for your business,” she said. “And maybe even an Instagram account.”

I nodded and picked a crud of soap caught under my thumbnail.

“Artisan soap is big right now,” she said as she lit a cigarette. “Real profit potential. We could take this on the road. We could get away. What do you think?”

I sat there and shook my head all nervous and scribbled down my sermon and crumbled the last of my weed into my bong.

The following Tuesday I sat in the empty booth for an hour waiting for Mrs. McCarthy but she never showed. It was November and overcast and the stained glass looked dull and plain. The next few weeks were the same. I just sat in the dark booth and thought of Mrs. McCarthy and let the weed design birds in my mind.

I carved as many birds as I could in those weeks. I barely slept. Baltimore orioles painted black and orange with charcoal and grated pumpkin. Grackles with alder syrup for the purple hues on the neck. I picked poison berries from behind the church and mashed them with a mortar and pestle and carved cardinals. I never sold them or brought them to the shelter and let them fill the cardboard boxes under my bed until my room was overflowing with soap birds. As if the birds alone would summon Mrs. McCarthy back into my confessional booth.

I didn’t have Mrs. McCarthy’s number or even an email. It would be improper for a priest to keep a married woman’s number in his phone. And I never made my Instagram handle either. I craved one of her Parliament cigarettes, but I feared getting recognized by the teenage clerk at the 7-Eleven in town. I started waking up in the middle of the night and carving more birds.

The next Sunday on a whim I decided to cancel mass. I put on a Red Sox cap and big aviator sunglasses and walked to the Farmer’s Market by the soccer fields at the school. I walked to the last plastic folding table under a pop-up tent weighted down with dumbbell weights and a sign for Roosevelt Junior High.

A bored thirteen year-old girl sat in a fold up chair thumbing her phone and there was a single bird left for sale and I picked up my charcoal raven and touched the tiny tip of its black wings.

"Where's Mrs. McCarthy?" I asked. I made my voice husky and thick.

“She's gone,” the girl said without looking up from her phone. “Our garden is covered
with weeds."

There was no sign of produce on the table. A cold November wind blew through and rustled the hoods of the tents. Then she placed her phone on the table and leaned forward and looked deep into my shaded eyes. “She said her friend makes these birds. Someone she loves.”

Just like that she was gone and back to texting. I gave her ten dollars for the final black bird.

I ate four gummies that night in the rectory and lay back in bed and pictured Mrs. McCarthy far from here. Somewhere under huge skies in Idaho or Wyoming. Or California. Napping under the shade of towering cannabis plants on a farm in Humboldt County. Playing the guitar at night while red eyed hippies trimmed weed into huge cannisters and camped out in tents and collected their cash in the morning. I imagined us making love under the moonlight, my penis a ripe cucumber.

I held a soap  bird and smelled my sheets, unwashed since she left. They still smelled
like soil. I stood up and walked to the bathroom and showered and scrubbed myself with my own soap and watched the charcoal drip down my skin and the black water vanish down the drain. I toweled and changed into my flannel pajamas and cleaned the tower of dishes. After the dishes, I swept the soap shavings into a pile, rolled them into a ball, and squeezed until it became the shape of my fist.

Then I sat on the edge of my bed and flicked a lighter and held the flame to the balled-up shavings and watched the heat melt the mass into a hot liquid. I let the bubbling soap dribble on my skin. The burn felt like sweet relief as I picked up my paper and pen and wrote my final sermon.