Six Catholics and an Atheist by Barry Rachin (polar express read aloud .txt) 📕

Kirsten Hazelton, the discharge planner at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, was sitting alone in a rear pew of the prayer chapel, when Dr. Wong entered and slid down on the polyurethane oak next to her. “Strange place for a patient conference,” the osteopath noted. With his round, boyish face the stocky, middle-aged man was old enough to be her father.

“The chapel was closer to the wards than my office.” She didn’t bother stating the obvious, which was that, except for a few diehard Catholics, hospital staff seldom ever visited the somber prayer room. "Mrs. Edwards is leaving us tomorrow." The elderly woman had tripped over a frayed rug two weeks earlier and fractured a hip. Surgery was uneventful, the patient already up and about with the aid of a walker.

"She's being released to rehab for a few weeks before going home," the doctor confirmed.

"Yes, well that was the original plan." Kirsten was staring at a picture of the Holy Mother alongside a gold crucifix that adorned the altar. "Her son, Brandon, apparently wants the woman placed in a nursing home so he can put the house in the hands of a real estate broker."

Dr. Wong listened impassively, staring at a pile of missals and hymnals arrayed on a rack near the holy water. "What does the patient want?"

"To return home, naturally. Mrs. Edwards is quite upset."

The osteopath rubbed his chin. "Have you thought about asking Father McNulty to intercede… plead her case with the family?"

Kirsten's features cycled through a series of unflattering contortions. In his later sixties, Father Evan McNulty was a hellfire and brimstone ideologue with no social graces to speak of. The skinny cleric suffered from rosacea - the cheeks, nose, chin and eyelids mottled with spider-like blood vessels and chronic eruptions. He much preferred the challenge of defeating evil in the abstract to the mundane banalities of parish life. "Father McNulty would be my last choice."

"Yes, I know what you mean." The doctor leaned back in the pew extending his legs beneath the velour kneeler. "Mrs. Edwards is only in her seventies. Once the bone mends, that woman's got another decade of active years ahead of her."

"Which is just my point: she doesn't belong cooped up in some drab, geriatric facility playing bingo and trying to make small talk with residents who can’t recall what day of the week it is."

Dr. Wong smiled and patted her hand reassuringly. "I'll drop by Mrs. Edwards' room later today and make sure she doesn't get bullied into making a bad choice." The older man seemed momentarily lost in some private reverie. "You get solace from your faith?"

"Yes, of course. Don't you?"

"I'm an atheist."

Kirsten burst into a fit of laughter, which quickly ebbed away to nothing when she realized that the physician was not responding in kind. "You're serious?" He shook his head. "But you work at a Catholic hospital."

"What difference does that make? Doctor Shapiro is orthodox Jewish and the chief of oncology; Dr. Watanabe, is a practicing Buddhist. Being godless doesn't imply a lack of morals." He rose to his feet. "Maybe I better speak with Mrs. Edwards before Brandon badgers her into giving up her independence."


The following day Kirsten ran into Dr. Wong eating lunch in the hospital cafeteria. No sooner had she sat down then the physician's cell phone twittered. He spoke briefly and hung up. "My daughters are coming home for the holidays, and my wife is already frantic about the preparations. What are you doing for Thanksgiving?"

"Keeping my options open," Kirsten replied evasively. She had been dating an intern since the summer, but the relationship fell apart when the doctor got offered a position at hospital in Connecticut. Her parents didn't know about the breakup and the notion of going home alone was terribly unappealing.

Truth be told, Kirsten was relieved Jason had taken the new job and moved away. The man had his priorities – a lucrative medical practice and rapacious sex mapped - out from the day they met. Her boyfriend used the bedroom to unwind, as a diversion from the strain of twelve-hour shifts and academic studies. Kirsten somehow didn't see that ever changing. For the young medic, romance was a novelty. Away from the emergency room, he had few hobbies or outside interests. What Kirsten needed was a younger version of Dr. Wong - not that she was the least bit attracted to the roly-poly physician, but still, at least he golfed on weekends, took his youngest daughter to figure skating lessons at the Lynch Arena in Pawtucket and baked homemade breads. Perhaps a brief ad in the personals section of the local paper might jump-start a new romance, get Kirsten's pitiful social life back on track:


Thirty-something female looking to meet devout Catholic with no major vices, social diseases, sexual aberrations, fetishes or incurable neurosis. Must be family-oriented, compassionate, love children and not be married to the workplace. Smokers need not apply.

"I spoke with Brandon Edwards," Dr. Wong said, interrupting Kirsten's private reveries, "and informed him that ultimately his mother should choose what's in her best interest… even waved a Patient's-Bill-of-Rights form under his nose."

A few years back, Kirsten had used a similar ploy with another dysfunctional family. It was nothing more than a bluff, a hollow show of bravura. "And what was his response?"

"Brandon promised to honor his mother's wishes." He leaned across the table and tapped Kirsten's forearm. "Problem is, I don't trust that guy. He gives me the creeps."

Kirsten briefly met the son, who had only visited his mother twice in all the time she was recuperating at the hospital. The day of his mother's surgery, Brandon never even bothered to make an appearance and didn't resurface until a week later. "And do you believe that malarkey about honoring his mother's wishes?"

"No, not really, but there's only so much we can do."

Kirsten agreed wholeheartedly with the doctor's assessment of Mr. Edwards. The fellow had a distracted, morose manner, responding to the discharge planner's light banter with monosyllables. Kirsten slit open a packet of creamy poppy seed dressing and drizzled it over her garden salad. "I've been researching atheism," she deflected the conversation.

The doctor looked up with mild surprise then grinned good-naturedly. "And what have you discovered?"

"A meager two per cent of the world's population identify themselves as godless."

"Yes," Dr. Wong replied, "that's absolutely true, but in the Scandinavian countries, those numbers are inverted." His tone was more instructive than argumentative. "In Japan upwards of sixty-five per cent don't believe in God at all and in the Nordic countries such as Sweden the figure climbs to eighty-five - just a few percentage points lower in Denmark, Norway and Finland."

Kirsten stumbled across similar statistics when she Googled the topic on the internet. Among the intelligentsia, belief in personal gods or a heavenly afterlife were at an all-time low, the implication being that more educated and cultured individuals felt no compelling need to fill the churches. Similar findings had been duplicated in studies dating back to the late nineteen twenties, establishing an inverse correlation between IQ and religiosity. "In the U.S., those communities with the highest percentages of atheists tend to have the lowest murder rates," Dr. Wong mused, "while in rural communities where people are the most religious, violent homicides are considerably higher than average."

Kirsten speared a cucumber wedge and raised it to her lips. She had no desire to debate the issue. Dr. Wong’s logic was rock solid, any opposing position indefensible. "Less than one per cent of the prison population is made up of non-believers while atheists are historically more tolerant toward women and homosexuals. We also beat our children less often and tend to donate more to charitable causes."

"Ouch!" Kirsten raised her hands in an attitude of capitulation. "Okay, I'm throwing in the towel!"

"No, please don’t!” “Unlike that gasbag, Father McNulty, you're one of the good Catholics. The church needs you more than we do," he parried the humor like a tennis ball across a sagging net. "I just wanted to make the point that we non-believers aren't ogres."


Later that night Kirsten babysat her nephew, Wilbur. Her sister, Alice, had a PTO meeting and her husband was away on business.

"Tell me a bedtime story," the boy insisted as she was settling him under the covers.

"What would you like to hear?" Kirsten drifted over to a bookshelf crammed with illustrated offerings - Junie B. Jones, Grimm's Fairy Tales, the Richard Scary series and mishmash of Disney picture books.

"No, I don't want any of those. Make one up."

"Off the top of my head?" Kirsten settled into the rocking chair alongside the single bed and sat thinking for the longest time.

"I like the crazy ones," Wilbur insisted. Over the past year, as her personal life caromed further and further out of control, Kirsten's impromptu stories had become equally offbeat and bizarre.


"Penrod and Sarah Smithers lived all by themselves. Totally, completely and utterly alone. And that’s the way they liked it. Penrod was twelve years old; Sarah turned eight on June 6th. It was a smallish but very pleasant birthday party. Just Penrod, Sarah and their pygmy goat.

"What was the goat's name?" Wilbur demanded.

"Lambchop."


Exactly a year, three months and twelve days earlier, their parents decided to vacation in Africa. The Smithers wanted to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in northeast Tanzania and shoot a few elephants, crocodiles and water buffalo. It never occurred to them that certain African animals might be endangered or that Penrod and Sarah were ‘endangered’ in a different sort of way.
“There are exactly thirty-five TV dinners in the freezer,” Mrs. Smithers counseled as she piled the luggage into the trunk of the Volvo. The Smithers always bought Volvos. They were very safe and reliable autos and, when it came to family transportation, you didn’t want to take unnecessary risks. “The TV dinners should last a while, and we put some extra money in the dresser drawer under your father’s silk underwear. But that’s only for emergencies.”
Mr. Smithers wagged a finger under his son’s nose. “Don’t squander the money.”
“If you get sick and tired of TV dinners and want a pepperoni pizza,” Mrs. Smithers added, “that’s perfectly OK.”
The parents were only suppose to be gone a week. How many water buffalo can a person shoot? And how many dumb snow-covered mountains can you climb before the stupendous, African safari vacation becomes boring with a capitol B?

"What's a Papist, Auntie Kirsten?" Wilbur blurted.

Kirsten stared at the child in disbelief. "Why do you ask?"

Rolling over on his stomach momentarily, he punched the pillow, propping it up against the headboard. "My daddy calls you the Papist,… the goody two-shoes Papist, so I was wondering…"

Kirsten felt her cheeks flush. She knew her brother-in-law had no use for religion - not that he held any sophisticated, teleological convictions similar to Dr. Wong's - but this was too much!. "A Papist is a Catholic, but it's not a particularly nice term." "Do you attend church on Sundays?"

"Can't"

"Why not?"

"Interferes with soccer practice." The boy wiggled his rump under the covers. "You can continue with the story now."


Well, a week passed and then a month. The folks sent