Body of Christ

By Mayo Mohs

REAL PRESENCE

by Richard Bausch

Dial; 279 pages; $9.95

Something is wrong with the crucifix. Hanging in the tiny church in a Virginia country town, it distresses the new pastor. The wooden corpus, Monsignor Vincent Shepherd observes, has "square, unsuffering eyes" that symbolize to the priest so much that is wrong with his church and his world. The sense of crucifixion is gone. Instead, he reflects, "it was as if Christ had never really suffered and died, but had only had the Last Supper, with twelve smiling men of social commitment and three folk guitarists, and then knocked the stone away from the tomb."

But something is wrong with the priest too. Shepherd has suffered a heart attack, and he is preoccupied with his own mortality. He clings to time as if to fend off eternity, but does little with it. He sits for hours in front of the rectory television set, resentful of parishioners who disturb him with their problems, unmindful that their private griefs are real wounds.

Into this desiccated shell of a man blows an outlandish wind of salvation, a rickety truck full of outcasts who make the Joads seem like landed gentry. Duck Bexley is the woebegone father of a brood of five; his wife Elizabeth is pregnant with the sixth. Bexley earned his name from a father who thought that trouble fell off him as water off a duck; in truth it clings to him like fresh tar from a hot summer road. In Korea, he won a Bronze Star for annihilating 44 Chinese trapped in a ravine. Their ghosts haunt him. Now he is past 40, dying slowly of the degenerative disease lupus, unable to keep a job. Elizabeth abides, a back-country madonna.

This is Flannery O'Connor country, where souls are gnarled and agony seems the only common measure of humanity. Even the corpulent landlord, Mr. Wick, who first comes into focus as a Dickensian villain, on closer inspection becomes merely a grownup, terrified boy forever humiliated by a sadistic father.

The doctrine of the Real Presence, in Christian theology, is the belief that Jesus Christ is truly present, body and blood, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist: the living symbol of God among men. For Bausch's troubled priest, it becomes a metaphor for the world beyond the sanctuary, where the Real Presence must be sought among the lowliest of people and the darkest of hearts.

Bausch suggests that the Monsignor's conversion may have to be a journey away from the priesthood to the fatherhood of the forlorn Bexley family. It is a measure of this fine first novel's catholicity -- with a lower-case c-- that the choice seems almost irrelevant. In or out of the collar, this Shepherd seems at last to have found his calling.

--By Mayo Mohs

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