Read Online Green Thumb by Ralph McInerny - Free Book Online

Sadler’s falling dead on the golf course.”
    â€œRaskow hasn’t been on campus. I have. I’ve interviewed people, I have all the facts.”
    But Mendax just kept shaking his head. “Stick with obits, Swithins.”
    So he knew about that. But Mendax had become the editorial equivalent of a stone wall. Swithins felt beaten.
    â€œI’ll write the death notice,” he said.
    â€œGood. But don’t use incendiary language.”
    Swithins went into the city room and sat at a computer. He felt like crying. But by God, this was his big chance. He would write this story if he had to place it in The Shopper. He got up and stormed out of the city room. No one noticed him leave.

13
    In his room at Holy Cross House, Father Carmody put down his breviary and asked Dennis Grantley if he would like something.
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œA beer?”
    â€œIf that is the best you can do.”
    Thus induced, Father Carmody got out a bottle of Powers and poured a niggardly ounce for his less-than-welcome guest.
    â€œSo you have been wandering about the world like the devil in Job.”
    Grantley sipped his whiskey and ignored the remark. Once Carmody had been a golfer, but he had quit the game when he despaired of eventually shooting his age. Once on the course, nothing was more pleasant, but it became increasingly difficult to waste from three to five hours or more establishing the fact that his game was not what it had been. Grantley was an old friend, of sorts, a man who had been about the campus almost as long as the old priest, but he was an uncomfortable reminder of the passage of time. Father Carmody had moved to Holy Cross House from Corby, the clerical residence on campus, without complaint, refusing to see it for what it was, the last station on the journey of life. Others in the house were in various stages of their final illness. Once a week there was a melancholy row of wheelchairs filled with those awaiting a haircut, once-mighty figures reduced by strokes or worse to drooling oldsters submissive to whatever they were wheeled to endure.
    Carmody himself remained hale and hearty. He might have stayed on campus, but even the seniors there had seemed young whelps to him, and he preferred the autonomy of Holy Cross. He could get around by golf cart or drive when he chose to leave the campus. His room here was much as his room had been wherever he had lived on campus, and he had dwelt in a succession of buildings—first in the Main Building, when residence there was not unusual, then moving on to a hall where he had been rector before he would have been ignominiously removed from under the Golden Dome in the Main Building. In his mind’s eye, his present quarters were simply his present quarters; such intimations of mortality as came to him were applicable to others rather than himself. His grandfather had lived to a hundred and both his parents were gaga in their nineties when God called them to Himself. His own mind was clear, his energy somewhat diminished but, with judicious napping, adequate, his physical examinations productive of unwelcome praise from physicians, as if his health were some accomplishment, a product of his will. Father Carmody recognized a grace when he received one.
    The most difficult task of all is growing old. This was a truth he had come to see as much in the breach as in the observance. Grantley had not grown old gracefully. He repined. He groused. He resented. And he lapped up Powers as if it were water. Carmody replenished his glass, his own scarcely touched. Temperance was an easy virtue.
    â€œYou heard about Sadler?”
    â€œWhich one?”
    â€œMortimer. They found him dead on the sixth green of Burke this morning.”
    Of course Carmody had heard it all, but there was a mordant pleasure in allowing Grantley to tell the story as if it were news.
    â€œPoison,” Grantley said, smacking his lips. “The poor wretch must have taken