Blind Tommy & Father Gerard (2)

The thing that you have to know about Blind Tommy was that he wasn’t really blind; people just called him that because whenever anything happened around him and somebody – usually the police – asked about it, he always answered he didn’t see nothing.

The other thing about Blind Tommy was that, even though he was slow in a general mental way, he could be quite clever when he thought about something. Most people didn’t know that, because he kept his thinking to himself.

Blind Tommy’s road to the job at St. Calvin’s Hospital was pretty twisted. He'd gotten himself into assorted hassles and did some jail time, slowly progressing from fuck-up to jackass. After a stint on a felony E, his parole officer took a shot at saving him, and called a friend he knew at St. Calvin's. The friend was a priest, though the parole officer knew him better as the guy at the end of the bar at O'Hanny's. He persuaded him to Blind Tommy on as a janitor.

The priest was Father Gerard. He was a cranky former pastor whose drinking had gotten him removed from two parishes. Off the bottle, Father Gerard was a solid if austere minister; on the bottle, he was a lot easier to get along with, a man who could explicate each of Paul’s letters, sing all the rounds of Finnegan’s Wake, and hold forth knowledgeably on the various subtleties of different Irish whiskey, examples included. Drunk or sober, he had a weakness for lost causes and second tries, and while his failings were legion, he understood that charity was the most important virtue.

Father Gerard took a liking to Blind Tommy. Maybe he saw him as a kindred soul; Blind Tommy had gone to jail because of an alcohol-inspired crime binge. In any event, he became something of a confessor to Blind Tommy, listening to his troubles and sins. Most of the latter were petty transgressions – venial sins in Catholic theology, small lies and broken confidences, abuse of his body, as opposed to others'. Some weren't even sins – Blind Tommy was off the juice, and since he spent all his money on a dump of an apartment two blocks from the hospital, had very little opportunity to really sin.

Until one day, Blind Tommy told Father Gerard about a sin that even Paul would have shuddered to forgive . . . .

(more to come)