“Sister Josephine thought it was a prank. She hung up. Called the Dicastery back.”

     Jefferson Smith shuffled in his wheelchair and beamed at his son. “Then she called me. Couldn’t control her excitement.” He looked out of the window at the trees that were shedding their leaves and then at his hands. “With winter approaching, my arthritis becomes worse,” he said with a slight grimace.

     Sam looked at his dad, got up and adjusted the tubes leading from the oxygen cylinder to his dad’s nose. As a non-smoker, he was pleased that the living room with its faded upholstered chairs no long smelled of cigarette smoke.  He noticed the toll of the arthritis on his dad’s gnarled fingers. Sam didn’t want his father to get too excited. It would be bad for his heart. In a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt too big for him, Jefferson was no longer the burly handsome man of Sam’s youth. Sam reminded himself to speak to his mother, visiting his sister in Nashville, about taking him to the VA.

     His father took a sip of Gatorade and made a face. “Poor substitute for champagne,” he said with a wry smile, his teeth yellowed by tobacco.

     “Mum’s said sis is getting a divorce,” Sam said looking at a wedding photograph on a side table. 

     “Kent beats her.”

     “She should try for an annulment.”

     Jefferson shook his head, “Best to walk away.”

     “Maybe,” Sam said. “No child no child support problem.”

     “Bet your Mom doesn’t know yet and you haven’t told her of course,” Jefferson said. “Wow! A great grandson of a sharecropper, who lived in a shack,  will soon live in a palace.”

     “These days they don’t call it a palace. Archbishop’s House will do.”

     “But still,” his father said. “Grand!”

     “The First Temptation of Beckett,” Sam said. His father frowned. Sam felt ashamed of his showing off his learning with the allusion although his father did accompany him on that weekend they visited Canterbury Cathedral. He could not expect his dad to have read Elliot’s play. As a then Rhodes Scholar, Sam saw the play enacted. He never forgot the part about the temptations of Beckett.

     “Your mother and I won’t  live to see it, but the others,” Jefferson said adjusting the oxygen tube, “The others may one day see white smoke from the Sistine Chapel, and then, and then,” he grinned at Sam and pumping a fist, “Cheering crowds would behold in joy a second American pope, and a black one at that.”

     Sam laughed and said, “Maybe one day but that pope won’t be me. I won’t be a bishop much less one with a red hat.”

     “Why not? When God calls, ‘here I am’ must be your answer.”

     Sam sighed. In a wistful tone he said looking at the window, “At one time the world saw a front page picture of naked Vietnamese girl screaming in terror when she was burnt with napalm. That picture brought an end to a evil war. Now the whole world can see a genocide live-streamed in Gaza, and not a peep from our bishops and cardinals, especially the ones close to the big man.”

     “They’re afraid. Reason to be.”

     “When it’s time to speak up about the slaughter of innocents, fright is no excuse. If a precious Jew like Ben of Ben & Jerry’s can feel the anguish of the Gaza mothers weeping over their slaughtered children and scream loudly for justice, where is the morality apparatus that cares more about the unborn than the living and the starving? ”

     “The media has normalized this. Everyone is de-sensitivised.”

     “After all Jesus spoke about a millstone around the necks of those who corrupted children who should then be hurled into the sea. What would he have said about those blowing up innocent children into smithereens with our bombs?”

     “If only MLK were alive,” Jefferson said. Then looking at his hands, he said, “Arthritis has also infected our churches, our values, our society, hasn’t it?”

     Sam nodded. “We’re in trouble when the only moral voices come from de Niro and others in Hollywood and the college kids on campus. I don’t want to join a band of silent cowards.”

     “Times have changed, son. When I marched in Selma as a young boy, we were free to burn American flags. We can still burn American flags but God help you if you criticize the genocidal state. Grants will be cut, tenured professors will be sacked, visas revoked, and you will be arrested. The first amendment is now just a piece of parchment in the face of money and power.”

     “I came here to tell you that I spoke with the Holy Father. His call surprised me.”

     “My! What an honour. To congratulate you no doubt?”

     “In a way, but to give me the blessing I sought.”

     “You didn’t have to ask. His blessings are everywhere.”

     “You don’t understand. I sought his permission. His permission to be relieved of my appointment and to be instead the chaplain of the Mother Teresa congregation in Anambra State, Nigeria.”

     Sam paused to make eye contact with his father. The silence was broken by the calling of a dove. “This good man blessed me and granted my request to be a simple priest.”

     “You mean?” he asked.

     “Yes Dad.”

     Jefferson was silent. Then tears began streaming down his face.

     An alarmed and grief stricken Sam said, “Dad! Sorry to disappoint you. It’s not the end of the world.”

     Jefferson adjusted an oxygen tube in his nostril. He smiled. Through tears, he said, “I weep not in grief but shed tears of joy. You’ve  made your Mom and me the proudest parents on this our Mother Earth.”

     He reached out with his misshaped fingers  to hug Sam, who tears streaming down his face, knelt before Jefferson to receive his father’s blessings.