"The first one died at 1:17."
He said it before I asked him anything. I had barely checked that the recording was working.
"Who?"
"A woman. Eighty-two. Cancer. Her daughter called the rectory."
"And the second?"
"Two forty-six."
He looked down.
I waited.
Father Michael Corbett had been a priest for thirty-seven years. Pastor. Associate. Hospital chaplain for a while. Two rural parishes at the same time when there stopped being enough priests to give each one its own.
"The second was thirty-nine."
He stopped there.
I asked whether he wanted me to stop the recording.
"No. Why would you stop it?"
"I don't know."
"Neither do I."
Then he told me.
The man was dying in emergency. His wife was there. His brother. Two children, both old enough to understand that everybody was lying to them.
Father Michael anointed him. He prayed with the family. He stayed until the doctor came back.
Then he walked to the parking garage.
"I got in the car."
He put both hands out in front of him, as though they were still on the steering wheel.
"And?"
"I couldn't turn the key."
That was it.
He sat there. Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. He was not sure.
People think priests become accustomed to death. He told me that is true and not true.
"You get accustomed to what you have to do. That's different."
He knows where to stand. He knows not to block the nurse. He knows that if a family is fighting, death does not stop the fight. Sometimes it makes everybody worse.
He knows when somebody wants prayer and when somebody wants the priest simply to shut up. He knows how long to keep his hand on someone's shoulder. He knows not to say that God needed another angel.
"I hate that sentence."
He said that twice.
But knowing what to do did not mean nothing followed him out of the room.
That night something followed him.
He got into the car and could not drive.
"So I made the third call."
"Another hospital?"
"No."
He looked straight into the camera.
"I called the bishop."
I thought I had misunderstood him.
"At three in the morning?"
"Three sixteen."
"You remember the time?"
"I remember everything about that parking garage."
I asked what he told him.
"Nothing useful. I said, 'I think something is wrong with me.'"
"And what did he say?"
"He said, 'Where are you?'"
That was all.
Not what happened. Not whether this could wait until morning.
Where are you?
The bishop arrived a little after three-thirty. No driver. No secretary. Black trousers, sweater, coat over it.
Father Michael was still sitting behind the wheel.
"He knocked on the passenger window."
"What did he say?"
"He said, 'Move your garbage.'"
There was a stack of parish bulletins on the passenger seat.
Father Michael laughed when he told me this. It was the first time he laughed.
"He got in?"
"He got in."
"And then?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"We sat."
For forty minutes.
Two priests in a hospital parking garage. One of them happened to be a bishop.
Father Michael kept apologizing. The bishop eventually told him to stop.
Then Father Michael said something he had not planned to say.
"I told him I did not think I could do another one."
Another death. Another hospital. Another family looking at the door because the priest had arrived and therefore something final was now happening.
"What did he say?"
"He said, 'Then don't.'"
Father Michael looked at me.
"I was furious."
"Why?"
"Because priests don't say that."
"What did you want him to say?"
"I wanted him to tell me I could do it."
The bishop didn't.
He took Father Michael's keys. He drove him to the rectory. Another priest retrieved the car later.
Father Michael slept until noon.
At 12:40 the telephone rang.
Another hospital.
I asked if he went.
"Of course."
"Did the bishop know?"
"He was the one who called."
That confused me.
Father Michael smiled.
"He said, 'You said you couldn't do another one last night. It's not last night anymore.'"
I wrote that down.
Father Michael watched me write it.
Then he said:
"That's the night he became my bishop."
I asked what he meant.
"He had been bishop for six years."
"But?"
"But that night he was my bishop."
There are things a diocesan archive can tell you about a bishop: installation date, appointments, pastoral letters, ordinations, parish decrees, photographs of the Chrism Mass.
There will be nothing in the archive about two priests sitting in a hospital parking garage at 3:37 in the morning.
Nobody thought it was history.
It did not feel like history.
It felt like one man who could not turn a key.
Father Michael is seventy-four now. He still takes hospital calls. Not as many.
He says younger priests are better about talking to one another than his generation was, then changed his mind halfway through the sentence.
"Maybe they talk more. I don't know if they say more."
I asked him how many nights like that he had had.
"Like that?"
"Yes."
"One."
Then he reconsidered.
"One where somebody came."
That was a different answer.
I asked him the question I had really been working toward.
"Who looks after the priest after the priest leaves the room?"
He did not answer.
I let the recording run.
Twenty-three seconds. I know because I checked afterward.
Finally he said:
"You hope somebody does."
Then:
"Sometimes nobody does."
He asked me not to make the story sad.
I told him I could not promise that.
"Fair enough."
Then he pointed at me through the screen.
"But put in the garbage."
"The bulletins?"
"Yes. Put in that the bishop made me move the garbage before he sat down. Otherwise you'll make him sound like a stained-glass window. He wasn't. He was tired and annoyed and he came anyway."
That, I think, is the part worth keeping.
Sometimes the history of a diocese is not the decree or the photograph or the bishop's coat of arms.
Sometimes it is 3:37 in the morning, a parking garage, a stack of parish bulletins, and the fact that somebody answered the phone.