Father Bill Wagner spent the last moments of another Christmas Eve in the small rectory that sat next to the oldest existing stone church in the state of Wisconsin. The sturdy church had served the Roman Catholics of Prairie du Chien since 1836. At one time the little Mississippi River town was a bigger hub of commerce than Chicago, when Hercules Dousman became the state’s first millionaire. Dousman began working for the Great American Fur Company some ten years before St. Gabriel’s Church was finished, buying beaver and other pelts from both native and white trappers and shipping them east to his boss, John Jacob Astor. Both men grew rich without ever setting a trap. Dousman’s son built Villa Louis; the mansion still stood on a rise a mile or so away from the church on St. Feriole Island, barely keeping dry during the river’s worst floods, and drawing tourists from all over the Midwest and beyond throughout the year.
But the rectory was no mansion. It was a two-bedroom house clad in dull, dark red brick the color of dried blood. From the outside this night, with smoke puffing from the chimney and a warm light coming from the first-floor bedroom that Father Wagner called his study, the rectory looked cozy. But the priest wouldn’t have described it that way if anyone had bothered to stop by.
The study had room for a small desk and chair, an old, wooden two-drawer file cabinet, and the big overstuffed distressed leather chair and ottoman he sat in now. Wagner had thrown on as many split lengths of birch and oak as he dared, and the tongues of fire leapt, popping and hissing straight up into the flue. But Wagner felt no warmth. Instead, he felt cold and alone.
Earlier he had celebrated Midnight Mass at nine p.m. It wasn’t that many years ago that his parishioners had crowded the pews by eleven-thirty p.m. for a true Midnight Mass. If you came much after eleven you knew you’d be standing at the back of the church or along one of the side aisles. They would sing Christmas hymns for thirty minutes before the hour-long service even began. It seemed then that his people couldn’t wait to greet the news of the swaddling savior. In recent years, though, the Midnight Mass had made the priest feel like Jesus himself in Mark’s version of the Agony in the Garden. While he prayed and sweated blood, his disciples were sound asleep.
By ten p.m. on this evening, the last of the carols had been sung and the congregation streamed out of the proud old church like rivulets of water from a leaky bucket. The priest contemplated sticking around outside in the minus fifteen-degree night air to shake hands and wish everyone a Merry Christmas. But instead, he slipped out the back door of the vestibule. The chill crept into him then, and stayed with him as his shadow trailed him across the frozen lawn and into the side door of the rectory.
He went straight to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of Cave Ale, brewed in nearby Potosi. He opened it and drank from the bottle as he shuffled down the short, narrow hallway to his study, peeling off his coat and hat and hanging them on wooden hooks near the door. The leather chair groaned and creaked as his two hundred and fifty pounds settled in.
Two hours crept past and it was nearly midnight. Three ales and two Driftless Lagers stood empty alongside the chair. But empty bottles are neglected bottles. Wagner looked at the near-empty bottle of lager in his hand and gave hollow thanks to the owner of the town’s only liquor store. The priest had let Nick Bower know when he first came to the parish that he relished the occasional beer. That was thirty-five years ago in July. Being a good Catholic, Bower began dropping off a six-pack of different beer each Saturday evening before he went back to his store after dinner. The years had been kind to Bower’s store, and the priest’s thirst grew along with the proprietor’s business. Father Wagner’s beer selection was now nearly as universal as his Church, and the two cases Bower slipped inside the priest’s door every Saturday evening were always drained and the empties repacked when the proprietor returned the following week.
Wagner turned his vacant gaze to the small desk. It had been his father’s. But his father died three months before Wagner was ordained. He would have been proud that day I became a priest, he thought. Then he teared up and lost the fight to hold back the moisture that suddenly filled his eyes and rolled down his face and onto his shirt. He wiped and rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hand, thinking, but he would be ashamed of me now. His dad had been a dairy farmer and Bill had helped him milk nearly one hundred Holsteins when he was a boy. They milked the cows by hand early in the morning and again before dinner. The son also helped tend to their hogs and chickens and the geese that ran free in the yard.
Together, they plowed the fields in early spring so mother earth would open up and receive their seeds of hay, oats, and corn. They nurtured the crops through the sunbaked summers and harvested them in the waning light of fall.
Every Christmas Eve, Billy and his parents attended Midnight Mass in the nearby town of Bloomington. By the time they made it back to the farm, the boy was asleep. His dad would wake him and the two of them would walk a few hundred yards, most years through drifted snow, to a small clearing surrounded by oak trees. His dad would lay down a tarp and throw two heavy sleeping bags in the middle. They would each climb into a bag and huddle together for warmth, lying on their backs and gazing up at the night sky.
Every year his dad would ask him about the wise men and how they’d followed the star. “Can you believe they followed the star for two years?” he’d say. “Can you believe they saw a bright star in the sky and knew they had to follow? They up and left their families and friends to welcome the Christ Child. You and I can hardly imagine the hardships they faced on their journey, Billy. They crossed mountains, and deserts so hot, they’d make hay-mowing season here seem like the cool of a mild spring. And they kept on until they found the baby. I don’t begin to understand that kind of faith. I can only marvel at it.”
Bill loved those pre-dawn Christmas mornings with his father. He would look up into the sky and see layer upon layer of stars overhead. Away from the light pollution of even a small town, the heavens were peeled bare and though a million suns shined for the boy and his father, always one stood out as the brightest. “Should we follow it, Billy?” his dad would ask. “Should we wake your mother and the three of us head out to find the new Christ Child?” They would laugh, then, and huddle closer. Sometimes Bill felt his dad wanted to light out after the star for real.
In the early hours of the Christmas morning six weeks after Bill turned seventeen, he and his father were in the clearing, their mom asleep in the nearby farmhouse. The boy told his dad that he felt called to follow the star, to become a priest. “But I know that can’t be right,” he said. He was an only child and there was no brother or sister waiting to take over the farm. His dad lay quietly and said nothing.
The boy woke late the next morning. His dad let him sleep in Christmas Day. That was the one morning each year his father milked the cows himself. His mom worked at the stove as he went out to see how his dad was doing. There in the middle of their gravel drive was a 4’ X 8’ sheet of plywood with “FARM FOR SALE” hand-lettered in red barn paint that was still wet.
He ran to the barn as his dad finished milking the last of the cows. His dad released the cow from its stanchion and gave it a tender but firm slap on its rear, sending the cow outside to join the rest of the herd. He had a contented smile on his face as Billy started to protest. “Dad, you can’t sell the farm,” he said. “It’s all you and mom have ever worked for.”
“We’ve spent our lives trying to put food in people’s stomachs. But look around, son. People have more than enough to eat. Now we have a chance, through you, to feed men’s souls. When it comes to food, we are a nation of plenty; but our souls are starving. I love you and I love Jesus.” And the son knew there was no point arguing.
Father Wagner’s head bobbed and he came back from the farm, his eyes blearily fixed on the desk again, the thin layer of veneer that covered it like a skin, was marred and nicked. He could picture his dad sitting at that desk, sorting through his few pieces of mail, or paying his larger stack of bills. The lower right-hand drawer of the desk had been his dad’s “junk drawer,” stuffed with rubber bands, dried-out pens, decks of cards for pinochle and euchre, string, and more. It was a treasure drawer for a young boy, but now it held only a loaded service revolver. A cold reminder that a young boy’s dreams sometimes warp into an old man’s nightmare.