Father Bernie and Cheese Louise
by Robert J. Marton
Two or three days a week Father Bernie took a stroll through Mayefield, down the tree lined streets of his youth, usually quiet in the middle of the day.
Across the street from the church was Bernie’s alma mater, St. Louise Catholic High School. St. Louise was a nondescript boxy brick structure, built originally as the county’s first public high school, and purchased by the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus, a teaching order, in the 1940’s. It had an interesting architectural feature: a dome-shaped bell tower that for a reason no one seemed to recall, was painted a yellowish orange color (or was it orangeish yellow?). It looked as if someone had flown by and dropped a big rounded lump of cheddar on the roof. During World War II, the tower was used by local “spotters” to surveil for enemy aircraft (no German planes got past Mayefield), but now it just sat unused in its orange strangeness.
Several generations of Mayefielders had referred to the tower simply as “Cheese Louise.”
It didn’t help that the school’s primary annual fundraiser was selling Wisconsin cheese baskets. Local citizens always knew that in the few weeks preceding Thanksgiving each year, high school students would blanket the town, peddling their little baskets of “cheese for Louise.”
The area around the church and St. Louise’s had seen better days. It was always the first and last part of Father Bernie’s circular walk through town, and the parts he enjoyed the least. Most of the homes along upper Main Street were former mill houses, built by the mill owners in the 1800’s and rented to workers. The mill was long closed, but some descendents of the workers still remained in the clapboard houses, paying rent to a new generation of landlords. These weren’t slums, however – there were no slums in Mayefield, just some neighborhoods better kept than others, although the Hill (aka “colored town” — not part of Bernie’s route) might qualify.
As he walked along the former mill houses, Father Bernie was reminded of the Fagan family, who lived in one of them, and his confessional encounter with Tegan (or was it Regan?). The Fagan clan was one of a number of Irish families in this neighborhood, left over from the days when the Irish immigrants worked in the mill. These Irish families bred profusely and complained vigorously, all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. These were not the “lives of quiet desperation” of which Thoreau wrote; the desperation of these immigrant Irish was immense and loud –very loud– often inebriated. Every one of them had a story, which they often shared with Bernie in the confessional, and he had heard more stories of human grief than most people.
Mayefield didn’t have a lot of these poor, dumb Irish, but the lack of quantity was made up for by the intensity of the Fagan family — the eccentric mother Megan, her hooligan twins, Tegan and Regan, and her whorish daughter, Sharon (better known to the local boys as “Sharon share alike”).
Megan Fagan.
Tegan Fagan.
Regan Fagan.
Sharon Fagan.
He guessed that they ran out of rhyming names by the time Sharon came along.
“Crazy Patrick” –Tegan, Regan and Sharon’s father– was long gone. Megan called herself a widow, but Patrick was probably still living somewhere – somewhere (drunkenly) far away from the rowdy brood he spawned. One day, when Sharon was still a baby, Patrick just walked away from it all. Megan told her neighbors that he died in a construction accident while working in another state, but in truth she had no idea where he was, and didn’t care very much. Life was enough of a struggle dealing with three needy children, much less adding a needy husband to the mix.
Patrick Fagan was three years older than Father Bernie, a friend and classmate of Bernie’s bother, Walt. Patrick and Walt went through school together, from first grade at St. Francis of Assisi Elementary to the 12th grade at St. Louise. They were seniors at St. Louise when Bernie was a freshman. However, Patrick was also a senior when Bernie was a sophomore. In his first senior year –the one he shared with Walt– Patrick attended classes regularly only for the first two or three weeks, then allowed an obsession with his ’58 Chevy and his job at the Mayefield Texaco station to take priority in his life. By late September, he still had good intentions of going to school, but he stopped by the service station every morning on his way and usually got sidetracked in conversation or a tune-up. Before he knew it, it was almost lunch time – too late to show up for classes. Patrick still took time to roar at high speed past the school every afternoon, disrupting classes as the kids jumped from their desks to look out the windows and cheer.
Patrick attended school an average of two days a week until mid-November, when he was expelled. However, he continued his daily (now two or three times a day) wheel spinning in front of St. Louise, much to the dismay of the teachers and the delight of the students. His mother’s tearful pleas got him reinstated the following year. He attended class on a semi-regular basis and managed to squeak his way to graduation.
Crazy Patrick’s legend at St. Louise also included the “deflowering” of a teacher, a claim Patrick proudly –and loudly– made, but one Bernie doubted was true. Patrick’s grammar and composition skills were never up to the school’s standards, and in his junior year he was assigned to study with a young female student tutor from the state university. She came to St. Louise twice a week to work one-on-one with students in need of help. Bernie didn’t remember her, but according to the legend, she was very pretty. Rumors quickly spread about kissing and other intimate activities between Patrick and his tutor, rumors fueled by Patrick’s boast that “She taught me English, and I taught her French.” Whether or not the rumors were true, they dominated the St. Louise grapevine for weeks. Eventually the pretty young tutor stopped showing up, and was she replaced by an ancient nun of the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus order, who brought a ruler with her to class and smacked Patrick on the knuckles whenever he got an answer wrong or whenever she felt like it.
Tegan and Regan inherited their father’s mischievousness and some of his charm, which kept them from getting punished too severely for their unruly behavior. As far as Father Bernie knew, they never did anything truly criminal, but misbehaved often enough to gain the reputations for being “bad boys.” Their various misdeeds included plagiarized and stolen homework, fights with anyone they disagreed with or thought they could beat up, sexual suggestions to any girl over the age of 13, constant cursing, petty theft (often accused but seldom proved), and truancy (an inherited trait).
Despite all of this, the Fagan twins were dedicated altar servers — always on time even for the coldest early Mass—and regular penitents at Saturday confession. Penance cleanses the soul and allows us to start over.
But no one, not even a priest, is without sin.