On island, p.5
On Island, page 5
“I have a problem,” she said, hosing the cleaning detergent off her rubber boots before turning the hose on the rescue boat. “There are bats in the church.”
The Mountie stopped scrubbing the interior of the boat. “What are you talking about?” he asked his companion, who looked like a sea witch with her red curls tangled by the wind, in her foul-weather jacket, pants, and boots.
“Bats,” she said. She certainly had his attention. “They are living in the church arches under the roof. They shit on the pews and their urine stains the Communion chalices. And they stink.”
“What are you going to do?” asked the Mountie. He was fond of his crew mate, although he kept his feelings hidden, whatever that means on an island where everybody knew everything about everyone else.
“I am going to close the church until the bats leave in the fall,” she replied, turning off the water tap on the dock and coiling the hose into its box at the bottom of the gangway.
The Mountie sighed. His detachment covered several islands in the Salish Sea. His problems were routine: people smuggling ciggies into Canada from the American islands across the International Boundary waters, others smuggling pot back across the strait, speeders on the narrow island roads.
The last breaking and entering case he dealt with involved a man who was spotted disappearing into the bushes of the community park on the neighbour island with an outboard motor mounted on his backpack. Islanders tackled the thief, tied him up to a picnic table, and supplied him with cigarettes and sandwiches until the police boat arrived.
He knew his friend was facing a challenge. She had three strikes against her. First, she was a woman priest. Second, she was an off-islander. And third, she introduced changes in the Anglican service that unsettled some members of her small congregation, scattered across three churches on three islands.
She replaced the four-hundred-year-old Book of Common Prayer with the newfangled Book of Alternative Services, adopted in the 20th century. She abandoned the King James version of the Bible for a newer edition, with more modern language. Simple words for simpletons, thought the Church Warden, although he did not say that to her face.
She introduced non-traditional Taizé services that focused on singing and chanting. She wheedled and whined until the lady members of the Altar Guild agreed to replace the carpets. These changes were not universally popular among members of her congregation, particularly the older ones, although the scattering of younger ones liked the guitar music.
The Rector, as she preferred to be called, was a break with tradition herself. New to the parish, female, and a transplanted Nova Scotian, the redhead lived on a nearby island. She met her south island congregation for the first time at her introductory Parish Potluck held at the home of the Church Warden and his wife.
It is axiomatic that twice as many people show up for the Parish Potlucks than those who actually attend church, drawn by good food and good company and the opportunity for titillating gossip. On that score the new Rector delivered.
The group comprised a retired sheep farmer and his wife, the Sunday school teacher, and other pillars of the community, including the sour-faced church treasurer and the local self-proclaimed heretic who came for the free food. After they had collected their plates of baked salmon, crab dip, and bean salad and settled into their seats, the Church Warden turned to the Rector and said genially, “Now there, why don’t you tell us about yourself.”
“Well, I grew up in Nova Scotia, took a teaching degree at Dalhousie University, and married a classmate who studied law,” the Rector began, sitting up straight in her reclining chair and placing her plate on her knees. The members of the congregation nodded approvingly.
“Then I found out he was an alcoholic, so I divorced him,” the Rector continued. She sipped her wild blueberry herb tea made from berries collected and dried by two struggling young organic farmers on the island.
Some members of the congregation clucked uncertainly. Despite Charles and Diana and other members of the Royal Family, divorce still seemed, well, un-Anglican. The old sheep farmer jolted forward on his chair, his palsied hand spilling his coffee. His wife patted his knee soothingly.
“Afterward, I felt the call to the church, so I went to seminary to study theology,” she continued, ignoring the clicks of disapproval. “There I met my second husband, an Anglican theologian and a professor at the seminary where I was his student,” the Rector continued. “We received special permission from the Church to marry.”
The church treasurer’s eyes bulged and the salmon on his fork paused on the journey to his mouth. The local heretic enjoyed the moment and the bean salad. This was better than a reality television show.
The Church Warden was uncharacteristically at a loss for words. To end the silence that followed the Rector’s announcement, he asked what they all wanted to know. “What brought you to our island parish?”
“When my husband passed on, I read your parish advertisement in the Anglican Journal and asked the Bishop for a transfer,” she answered, sipping her tea and pushing away an arrogant tabby cat who was trying to swipe a piece of salmon from her plate.
A widow, then. Somewhat mollified, the members of the congregation rose from their chairs and headed to the table for more coffee, tea, and brownies before returning home. Everyone knows what Maritimers are like. All those dreary novels about incest and adultery and dysfunctional families that win the CanLit book prizes and top the bestseller lists.
In fact, the Rector had applied for the three-island, three-church parish because she loved the sea. On her arrival she persuaded the parish council to buy a church boat for inter-island travel. A parishioner obligingly provided one, a twenty-one-foot Bayliner in which the Rector, in all kinds of weather, zoomed about the channels separating the islands.
She valued her role as a fisher of men, both on- and offshore. “It is very rewarding to be involved in saving someone’s life,” she confided to the Mountie over coffee in her rustic kitchen, where ceramic cats napped on the well-scrubbed counters. She had made him a batch of his favourite sugar cookies.
They met when she and her crew returned a stolen boat to the dock and filed a report at the police station. The Mountie was assigned to the detachment to replace a woman RCMP constable who was afraid of boats, a handicap in a policing area that covered the islands in the Salish Sea.
“There is nothing more beautiful than the sun rising over the ocean when we have been out all night on a search, and the sky lightens and then turns crimson-streaked with gold and pink, and the water reflects the colours,” the Rector continued. Her friend was silent as he sipped his coffee and reached for a cookie. He found nothing romantic about nighttime police or rescue missions.
She described a night patrol when the phosphorescence in the water turned the boat’s wake into a river of liquid silver. “When I looked over the side of the boat it was as though a million bits of confetti were slowly rising and falling through the water, and the salmon were silver streaks approaching and then curving away from the boat,” she said, pushing away a live cat that was investigating the plate of sugar cookies on her kitchen table.
“One night, a silver fountain bubbled through the sea as a seal came up for air while Orion wheeled through the night sky,” she told him. Those nights on the water were Holy. She didn’t see how anyone could experience that and not believe in a Creator. Smiling, feeling somehow cheered, the Mountie finished his coffee and left to resume his normal rounds.
Island life followed its seasonal tides. Autumn faded into winter. Spring blossomed into summer.
Parish life continued peacefully, despite the grumblings of some parishioners who disliked female priests on principle. There were pancake breakfasts and parish picnics, weddings and funerals, flower shows and garden parties, and occasional movie nights on selected topics with environmental themes. Environmentalist David Suzuki’s taped television shows were particularly popular.
Then the bats invaded the church.
They arrived in the spring, roused from their long winter sleep, their genetic clock ticking with the need to breed. A number selected the church arches for their maternity roosts, spending their summer days hanging upside down from the rafters, or flying from one roost to another, the pups clinging to their mother’s undersides.
When they became aware of the intruders, members of the congregation who cared about the environment debated whether they were of the big brown bat or the little brown bat myotis species. Others mentioned nervously that humans can contract rabies from bats and die a horrible death. No one in the congregation found them cute.
The redheaded Rector found them repulsive. One Sunday she pointed to the bat droppings on the pews and the urine-stained chalices. The Church Warden’s wife shuddered and the organist examined the keys of her instrument for signs of bat excrement.
But no one knew what to do. Bats were protected under the Wildlife Act and could not be indiscriminately killed. The Church Warden opened all the windows of the church and turned off the lights, hoping the bats would leave on their own. The Rector sent for the Environment Department’s Safe and Sensible Pest Control pamphlet on bats, which had little to say about bats already in residence.
But the bats hung in there.
Finally, the Rector found an answer to her prayers. She announced the church must be closed until the bats left in the fall, when foam insulation could be sprayed to block the holes under the eaves to prevent them from returning in the spring. Until then, she declared, church services would be held in the Community Hall down by the ferry wharf.
The church treasurer objected. “We’ve always had bats in church,” he told the woman priest. A retired accountant, he carefully managed the church’s fragile finances. He disliked the changes introduced by the Rector and ignored her Words and Music offerings, declaring them not real church services. He rarely attended the visiting American minister’s interdenominational services, and he thought meditation in the church should be banned. Well, at least restricted to real Buddhists.
He refused to attend the Community Hall services. Sitting outside in his car, he sent his wife in to pick up the collection and contributions to the Development Fund. He had nothing against the Community Hall, where church services had been held before the upside-down-boat church was built, but renting the Hall was not in the budget.
Secretly, in his heart of hearts, he had never accepted the decision to allow women priests in the Anglican Church. What is the world coming to? he mused, as he counted the bills and coins in the collection plate, entering the total on the proper forms. They will be blessing homosexuals next.
He refused to authorize the purchase of a new copy machine, forcing the Rector to crank out each Sunday’s Order of Service pamphlet on the old hand-operated machine. He complained when she asked the service man to check the fuel tank for the emergency generator when it leaked fuel and fumes into the Fair Trade shop in the church basement, which remained open for business.
The Church Warden and other church members faithfully attended the Community Hall services, but they were powerless in the face of the truculent treasurer’s reluctance to support the Rector’s efforts to resume services in the church itself only when the bat invasion was resolved. Secretly, some of them preferred the informality of the Hall that was less, well, religious. More like group therapy with hymns.
When the bats finally left in the fall to forage for their winter food and no one took steps to prevent their return to the little church, the redheaded Rector, her prayers for patience unanswered, removed her priestly stole with its embroidered golden cross and packed her bags. She told the Mountie, “I can’t deal with this any longer. I quit.”
“It’s no sin to stop putting up with bat shit,” the Mountie consoled her.
She turned in her keys to the parish Bayliner and bought her own boat. She applied to the Bishop for an appointment to a church on a northern island and joined the local Coast Guard Auxiliary. The Mountie applied for a transfer to her new parish and they were married there by another woman priest the following spring.
In the resulting scramble to clean up the bat droppings on the church pews and floors and scrub the Communion chalices and find a replacement Rector in a priest-poor parish, no one thought to block the bat entry holes under the attic eaves during the winter months.
The Bishop sent a new priest to serve the island parish. The new priest was a rumpled sort of man, with a vague manner and a vacant look. His sentences trailed off into unfinished questions. He talked about Emotional Intelligence and Affirmative Thinking and other concepts not normally discussed over post-Communion coffee in the church basement.
Still the congregation was prepared to cut him some slack. They prided themselves on being open minded. They read Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate World at the book club, and reminded one another of the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would like them to do unto you. Or most of the time.
The Church Warden’s wife, however, sat through the services in a state of anxiety. The new priest couldn’t seem to deliver a recognizable Anglican service. Was he going to conduct the services in his shirt sleeves (horrors!) or would he wear his clerical stole?
He rarely had a printed Order of Service like the United Church minister did, setting out the hymns and the prayers. He selected hymns from three different hymn books, causing some confusion as the congregation tried to find the right hymn in the right book while the organist gamely played on.
He chose the Apostle’s Creed because, he told the congregation thumbing through the prayer book, “it is short.” Sometimes he said that they didn’t have to say it at all because the people on the neighbour island had recited it earlier that Sunday. He forgot to include the General Confession—the Church Warden’s wife enjoyed recounting her modest sins—and the General Thanksgiving that allowed her to reflect on the equally modest blessings of her life.
Her state of nerves peaked when he decided to ask the congregation to form a circle and serve each other the wine in the silver Communion cup and the wafer on its silver plate instead of serving it himself to people kneeling at the Communion rail, as traditional churches did, even the United Church minister, who explained that since her church was set up during the Temperance Movement, the Communion cup contained only grape juice.
The problem was nobody could recall the correct responses as they served each other the wine and the wafers.
Worse, the Absent-Minded Priest, as she referred to him privately, usually forgot to call for the collection plate to be passed around, which infuriated the Church Warden who was responsible for the little church’s precarious existence. “God does not pay the Hydro bill,” he fumed, pacing in his study after they returned from church services.
Somehow they managed to maintain the church over the winter. No one told the new priest about a potential bat invasion.
The next spring, the bats came back.
PET PARADE
THE OFF-ISLANDER’S SECRET AMBITION WAS to win a prize in the island’s Pet Parade, where the island dogs displayed their owners in a ritual as predictable as the fall solstice. The off-islander lived in town with his wife and children, his English setter, Rupert, and the calico cat, commuting regularly to their weekend cottage on island to conduct business and enjoy island life.
He earned his living selling island real estate, sometimes feeling like a vulture, circling the carrion of failed marriages and funerals and the fate of older islanders who were carted off island in Dora, the ancient ambulance, to chronic care wards in town, never to return.
The people who lived on island and off island had their issues. When he first came to the island, the realtor shared a telephone line with a local fisherman. Sometimes, when the off-islander was on the phone, his call would be interrupted by the fisherman who complained, “You are a weekender. You’re only supposed to use the phone on weekends. We locals get to use the phone on weekdays.”
Usually the off-islander obligingly hung up, clearing the phone line for the fisherman.
He joined the island’s Men’s Club and the service club, which was pretty well mandatory, and played bridge with the elders in the Community Hall on Friday afternoons when he was on island, but even after fifteen years as a part-time resident he still felt self-conscious in his fleece and faded jeans.
Winning an event at the Pet Parade, calculated the off-islander, would gain him acceptance among the island residents. Maybe Rupert could win him the respect he longed for.
The pet show was presented in the ballpark situated in the valley, sponsored by the island’s service club. Admission was free. Dogs and their owners paid ten dollars to register.
The audience sat in metal chairs under white canopies borrowed from the Community Hall, studying their programs with the intensity of racetrack regulars studying their racing forms. Their restless children played in the outfield, ringed with golden broom blazing against the green cedars.
A wet wind from the sea was rising in bursts that threatened to bring the canopies down on the crowd. Some people clung to the metal posts that supported the canvas to shelter themselves from the impending rain.
Along with the more traditional events, such as Best Trick and Best Retriever, were less challenging categories, such as Shake a Paw, or Whitest Teeth, or Happiest/Saddest Dog. The off-islander wistfully hoped Rupert would win People’s Choice Best of the Winners. He did not want his candidate to claim the Haven’t Won a Prize All Day award.
The judges for the Pet Parade sat at their own table at the side of the grassy patch where the event was staged. They included the wharf manager, who attached cotton floppy dog ears to his own and dressed in the costume of the Hanging Judge who executed justice in the BC Interior during the nineteenth-century gold rush.
