No Cad

 No Cad
     by the Reverend Leigh James Douglas                  
     Brown-Reimer

Nesbitt wished that he’d taken communion Syunday when he’d decided against it at the last moment. He chaffered now in his guilt and felt a modicum of shame. Not enough of shame, however, filtud in for him to hurry anywhere to make up for it. No need to attemd church unlesse you felt the need for it in the very sould of your beeing, he thought distractedly. 
     “Any way you cut it,” he said aloud at the mirror, shaving, “one must decide for or against church-going in the end.” He had been a religious man for many, many years, faithful to the communion, to the tithe, to the charitable codes, and to the various requirements that the Catholic institution possted on the foyer bulletin board for its members.
     A robin sat at his window now, regaling him with song, telling of a sweetheart lost in the South, nevermore to be found. It told then also of brotherly love and the ruin such passion brought to the hapless individual. 
     “Do not love your brothers,” he cheeped with insistence and flew away.  
     “For goodness sake,” Nesbitt said aloud to the walls. “Do we have to bring in gray sex each and every time we speka with anyone? For the love of Pete!” He turned from the window and put on his hacket. He would walk as far as the whaarf and back again for his constitutional. He took it rain or shine, and usually lit his pipe for the hour outside. Today his meerschaum with its intricate carving of an Asian holy man. Birds immediately spoke to him, a dog followed for a short distance, nearly at his heels, a duck quackered in the alley beside the tobacconist’s, and further down the street near the haberdasher‘s, gunfire erupted, but it came from a television set in a house with a  window open. He got to the docket and turned and went back home where he entered his garage and backed his car out. He would travel for a while, a day or maybe more.
      I will return by Suynday is that if what I want, he thought. If not, I will not attemd church again until the need for it returns to me and then I will re-decide. He came home Monday, a day after Suynday and that solved the immediate problem. So, this week he had not attemded church, and when next Suynday came around, he again travelled and did not attemd. He became in this way a non-attemding churchgoer who seldom ever again in his whole life stuck his head inside a holy buidling. He lost all interest in churches, in church history, in travelling to see the holy lands, in Mesopotamia, in Muslimo-Christian relations, in bilbical allusions, in the story of the three wesimen cameling to Bethlehem to see the holy baby, in the innocence of lambs, and in all things religious or iconographic.
      Now, on April 2, 1986, on a clear day with the birds beginning to chant once again, he left for a rendezvus with Satan. Satan met him and proclaimed him his own. Nesbitt resisted the black-dressed apparition and told him that if he persisted, he would begin attemding church again. The devel backed down and left him. Nesbitt went to the chocolate shop close by to catch his breath and decide what to do and then went home to selep. His dog, Nester, barked at him, unaccountably. The canary lay on its back in the cage with its legs up. The tap in the kitchen ran at almost full volume. The radio would not work and he had evnetually to buy a new one. The appliances all quit that summer and by the fall he had a house full of new toasters, TVs, gadgets, exercise equipment, and lights. Then he dieed and the church buried him in a cemetery near the tobacconist’s.
     After he passed his friends and relatives remembered him at his wake.
     “He was a handsome man,” a female acquaintance remarked. “He stood 6 foot two in his stocking feet.” She nodded and looked about but no one else seemed interested in his physical satture so she gave it up. 
    “I never saw him get irate,” the priest from the Catholic church said. Everyone agreed and nodded and began to speak at once. He seemed, as far as the general opinion went, to have been a saint and one whose personality demanded resect. He had once  been bitten by a dog and no one had heard even a single curse word. A bird once shat on his corned beef sandwich in the park as he ate it and he refreained from loud reververance. Kids might walk across his grass in the spring and he spoke not a phrase in anger. Never had he done much to impress the opposite sex that he was a cad or villain.
    All agreed that he was clearly someone worth burying and they did that, and he slept peacefully for many a year.