The Tarp

At twenty to nine on Saturday night the freezing rain finds the hole over the front pews, and Calvin Moyer, who has been telling the church board for three years that the roof needs doing, says a word he last used in seminary.

He is standing in the dark sanctuary of Junction Park United with a bucket in one hand and his phone in the other, and the water is coming through the plaster in a thin steady rope and landing on the third pew from the front, left side, where a small brass plate says In Loving Memory of Dennis Aldous Moyer. It is not a large leak. It is the principle of the thing. He puts the bucket under it, and the first drops ring in the empty church like a clock, and he calls the only roofer he has ever trusted with the number.

“Pardy Roofing,” says a voice as thick as molasses.

“Wilf. It’s Calvin Moyer. It’s coming through over the third pew.”

“Over Dennis’s pew?” A pause. “Ah, Jesus, Reverend, sorry. Your pardon. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Wilf, it’s freezing rain. You cannot go on a roof in this.”

“I’m not going on the roof, my love. I’m going in the attic.”

---

Wilf Pardy has been coming to Junction Park every weekday for three weeks, and for the whole of that time he has been very careful not to look at the minister.

He is fifty-four and from Bonavista, and he came to Toronto at twenty-nine with a bag of tools and a cousin’s phone number and no intention of staying. Since then he has been on this church’s slope in every weather there is, his hands so scarred from slate and flashing that they look like part of the roof, and he knows the old slates the way he knows his own knees. He also knows that the minister puts a hand on the end of the third pew from the front every morning on his way to the vestry, in his black shirt and white collar, reading glasses pushed up on his head, and that he looks at the brass plate on it before he looks at anyone.

He’s been careful about that, too.

The attic hatch is in a cupboard behind the choir vestry. Wilf climbs up through it with a headlamp, a staple gun, a folded six-mil poly tarp and a bad knee, his belly scraping the hatch frame, and the minister climbs up after him without being asked, in his good wool trousers and a parka, holding a big flashlight, with water still dripping off his beard.

“You don’t have to come.”

“It’s my church.”

“It’s a filthy attic, Reverend.”

“Calvin,” says the minister. “If we’re going to crawl around in the dark on our hands and knees, you’ll call me Calvin.”

“Right.” Wilf’s ears go hot. “Calvin.”

It is a long low space under the roof trusses, with dust thick as flour and the rain a hard roar overhead, and they go along the beams on their knees with one light between them. The hole is easy to find. A black patch of sheathing, soft and dripping, with a crack in it where somebody’s long-ago flashing has given up. Wilf lies down on his belly across two joists and reaches with the tarp. Calvin kneels at his shoulder and holds the flashlight, and Wilf can feel the man’s warmth all along one side of him, solid and steady, and smell wet wool and soap.

“Hold it just there. Right there. No, left a bit. Perfect.” Staple. Staple. The gun thuds like a small heart. “There, now. That’ll hold her till Monday. The call-out goes on the church’s invoice with the rest, Reverend, same as any job.”

“How long have you been up there?”

“Twenty-five years, give or take.”

“I meant today.”

Wilf laughs, rolls onto his back, and finds that the minister’s face is eight inches above his own, lit from below by the flashlight, white-bearded and wet, with a drop of water running down the side of his nose. Neither of them moves. Rain hammers on the slates. Calvin’s eyes behind the fogged lenses are very blue and very steady, and in them Wilf sees a thing he has been refusing to see for three weeks, and it has nothing to do with pity.

“Wilf,” Calvin says quietly. “You’ve been very careful with me.”

“I have.”

“May I tell you something, and you can say no, and I’ll hold the ladder for you while you go down?”

“Go on.”

“I’ve been watching you cross my parking lot for three weeks with your lunch box,” says the Reverend Calvin Moyer, in the voice he uses for the Beatitudes, “and I haven’t heard one word of the sermon I’ve written about it.”

---

The manse is next door, a brick house with a crooked porch, and they cross the lot together on glazed ice with their arms hooked like two old drunks. Inside it is warm, and Calvin puts on every lamp and sets the kettle on and finds a towel and a grey cardigan the size of a tent. It’s Dennis’s. He gives it to Wilf without saying so, and Wilf knows it, and puts it on.

Calvin has not made tea for another man in this kitchen in a year and a half. He keeps noticing that. He puts two cups on the table and takes a bottle from the top of the fridge, a squat brown one with a handwritten label. Wilf looks at it and laughs.

“That’s Screech.”

“A parishioner from St. John’s gave it to me at Christmas. I didn’t know what to do with it.”

“You drink it.” Wilf takes the bottle, pours two fingers into each cup of tea, and clinks his against Calvin’s. “Slainte. Or whatever it is you lot say.”

“Cheers will do.”

The Screech goes down like a lit match. Calvin coughs, and Wilf pats his back, and the hand stays there longer than it should.

“I should tell you,” Calvin says, to the table, “that I was married for twenty-nine years. To Dennis. He died the October before last. His heart, in the night, in the bed upstairs, and I didn’t know until morning.” He turns his cup around on its saucer. “I haven’t been touched since the funeral, apart from handshakes. I’d be very bad at this, Wilf. I might cry. I might do something ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous is allowed.”

“He told me. Before he died. He said, don’t sit in this house like a lighthouse keeper.” Calvin’s voice wobbles and goes steady. “I thought it was a joke.”

Wilf puts his big scarred hand over Calvin’s on the table. It’s warm, and heavy, and not asking for anything.

“I’ll say what’s what,” he says slowly, rubbing the grey beard he trims himself, “and you stop me. I’ve been on that roof three weeks and I haven’t looked at the slates once. The church pays me for the roof. That’s the board’s business and it’s on an invoice and it’ll never be anything else. If you think this is part of it, say so, and I’ll finish my tea and go home. It isn’t. This is mine and it’s yours, and nobody’s paying for it.”

“I know that.” Calvin looks up. “I’d have said it first if I could.”

“Say it now.”

“I would very much like you to kiss me.”

So Wilf does.

---

It’s a slow kiss, and a clumsy one, because their beards bump and Calvin’s glasses fog, and when Wilf pulls back Calvin has his eyes shut and is breathing hard, as if he has just surfaced. Wilf has one hand buried in the minister’s short white hair. The other has found Calvin’s waist, wide and solid, and the soft round belly under the black shirt.

“You all right, my love?”

“I am extraordinarily all right.” Calvin opens his eyes. “Where do you want me?”

“Where do you want to be?”

“By the fire,” Calvin says, surprising himself. “There’s a gas fire in the front room. And a rug. And I’d like to lie down.”

There is a rug, thick and wool and old, in front of a gas fireplace that Dennis once spent a whole Boxing Day arguing with, and Wilf drags the cushions off the couch and spreads a duvet on it while Calvin turns up the flame, takes off his glasses, and lays them on the mantel beside the white tab from his collar. They undress each other by firelight with the slow shy care of men who have not done this in a long time. Wilf unbuttons the black clerical shirt and finds a white undershirt under it, and then bare skin, pale and freckled, with a pelt of white hair across his chest and a belly like a soft hill. He puts his mouth on it.

“Oh,” says Calvin, in a voice full of surprise. “Oh, my.”

“Good?”

“Wilf. It’s been so long. I’d forgotten it could feel like this.” His hand has found Wilf’s head and is moving in the grey hair. “Don’t stop. Please.”

Wilf doesn’t. He kisses down the soft slope of that belly, and unzips the good wool trousers, and draws them down with the underwear. Calvin’s cock springs up flushed and heavy against his stomach, pale as the rest of him, and Wilf takes a breath at the sight of it for a second in the firelight, something very like reverence.

“Some fine,” he murmurs. “Isn’t that the loveliest thing.”

“You’re embarrassing me.”

“Not near enough yet.” And he takes it in his mouth.

Calvin’s cry fills the front room. His hips jerk up and Wilf catches them in both hands, pins them gently to the duvet, and takes him down slowly, nose to the white hair, the thick head against the back of his throat. He has a deep, warm, patient mouth. He works his tongue along the underside in slow strokes and hums, and Calvin’s fingers clench in his hair.

“Like that. God, Wilf, like that.” The sounds that come out of the minister are low and broken and startled.

“Oh God. Oh, God. Wilf. I’m not going to last.”

Wilf pulls off, grinning up from between his thighs. “You’re not meant to. That’s only the start. Hold on.”

He gets Calvin’s trousers off the rest of the way, then shrugs out of the cardigan and his own wet clothes, and they look at each other, two big naked middle-aged men, one white-bearded and flushed on his back, the other grey-furred and kneeling over him, with the gas flame shuddering orange along both their bodies.

“I should mention,” Calvin says, “there are condoms in the drawer beside my bed, upstairs, and a bottle of the water-based kind. I bought them on Tuesday. I would much rather be embarrassed than sorry.”

“Tuesday.” Wilf’s face breaks open. “And I thought I was being careful.”

“You were. Go and fetch, please, before I lose my nerve.”

---

He is gone four minutes. When he comes back down the stairs in the half-light with a foil strip in his fist and the bottle in the other, Calvin has turned onto his side on the duvet with his back to the fire and one knee drawn up, waiting, and Wilf stops on the bottom step to look at him because he can’t help it.

“Lord thunderin’,” he says softly.

“That is not a prayer I know.”

“It’ll do.” He lies down on the duvet facing him. His belly brushes Calvin’s, and the heat of the man all the way down his front is a wonder. He cups Calvin’s cheek in one hand. “Face to face, my love. If you’ll have it. I want to see you.”

“I’d like that. I’d like very much to be looked at.”

“I’ll look all you want.”

He thumbs the bottle open, slicks his fingers, eases Calvin’s top leg up and over his own hip, and slides one finger down the cleft between the minister’s thighs. Calvin gasps. Wilf kisses his mouth, and kisses his beard, and the finger goes in slowly and finds the give, and the second one follows, and Calvin’s breath catches and goes ragged and he begins to talk, as if the words are pushing out of him.

“It’s so— oh. Oh, that’s— Wilf. Fuck.”

The word, in that voice, deep and round and made for a pulpit, goes through Wilf like a bell. He actually has to stop and close his eyes.

“Say it again.”

“Which?”

“That one.”

“Fuck,” says Calvin Moyer, a minister of the United Church of Canada, with his leg over a roofer’s hip. “Fuck me, Wilf. I would like you to fuck me, please. Now, if you’re quite ready.”

Wilf makes a noise he would call a cough if anyone asked. His hands aren’t entirely steady as he opens the foil and rolls it on. He slicks himself with the cold gel, and pushes the head against the soft place he has opened, and holds there, his forehead against Calvin’s.

“Tell me when.”

“Now.”

He pushes in. It’s slow, and tight, and so hot the room tilts, and Calvin’s mouth opens in a long, shaking, silent O and his hand grips Wilf’s shoulder so hard it will bruise. Wilf stops, a third of the way in, shaking all over.

“Stop?”

“No. God, no. Just give me a moment, I’m only— it’s very large.”

“I’ve been told.”

“By whom?”

“Never you mind.” He’s laughing, and the laugh shakes him, and the shaking pushes him in another inch, and they both groan. “Calvin. My love. You’re a wonder.”

“Keep going.”

Wilf goes on in, and on, until his belly meets Calvin’s and the whole length of him is inside that clutching heat, and there they lie on the rug in front of the flickering fire, nose to nose, breathing the same breath. Calvin’s hooked leg is tight round his hip. His white beard is wet. A tear has run out of one eye and into it, and Wilf kisses the track of it.

“All right?”

“I am,” Calvin says, “so far beyond all right that I don’t have a word in any language I read. Move.”

He moves.

It is slow at first, a gentle rolling stroke, with their hips close and their chests pressed together, and every time Wilf pulls back and slides home he feels Calvin shudder from his scalp to his toes. They kiss between thrusts. They kiss through them, open-mouthed and messy, and Calvin’s hands are in his hair and on his back and gripping his arse. Wilf talks into his mouth, not meaning to.

“That’s the way, my love. Just like that. You’re gripping me so lovely. I’ve wanted this since the first Monday, did you know that? I stood on the roof and watched you come out of the vestry and I thought, Wilfred, you’re a goner.”

“I watched you from the study window. I put my sermon down.”

“You never.”

“I put it down and I looked at you for forty minutes. Your forearms, Wilf. You take your jacket off at ten every morning and I lose my place in Scripture.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph.” The pace picks up. The sound of skin on skin fills the room, soft and wet and rhythmic, and the gas fire hisses, and outside the freezing rain ticks on the windows. “That’s some fine sound. Say it again.”

“Stop being so reverent, Wilf,” says Calvin. “Fuck me.”

Wilf does as he’s told. He grips the back of that wide thigh to hold it high and drives in deep, deeper.

“Give me the lot, Wilf,” Calvin says through his teeth. “I want to ache for you in the pulpit.”

“God, you’re hot in there. Hot as the stove. I could stay in you till spring.”

“There,” Calvin gasps. “Right there. Don’t move.” Wilf doesn’t, and then he does, and Calvin throws his head back with a shout and the brass-bell voice cracks in half. His cock is trapped hard and leaking between their bellies, and every thrust slides it through the slick of both of them. Wilf takes it in his fist and strokes it slowly in time.

“Wilf. Wilf, I’m— that’s— I’m going to—”

“Go on. I’ve got you. Let it come. I’ve got you, my darling, I’ve got you, go.”

Calvin comes with his mouth against Wilf’s, a long groan swallowed in a kiss, his cock jerking in Wilf’s fist and spilling hot over both their stomachs, his whole body clenching round the thick cock inside him. The rhythm of it wrings Wilf dry. He tears his mouth loose and shouts, “Calvin!” and drives in again and comes, shuddering, again and again, with his face buried in the white beard and his arms locked round the man’s back.

---

They lie there a long time. The duvet is a ruin. Wilf has reached over and turned the gas fire down to a low blue line, and the rain outside has thinned and softened into something that could almost be thaw. Calvin’s head rests on Wilf’s chest, and Wilf’s hand moves slowly over his back.

“That went well,” Calvin says eventually, into his chest hair.

Wilf starts to laugh, a big helpless wheeze, and Calvin joins him, and they lie there shaking until the duvet slides off one shoulder.

“I’ll have the proper job done on the roof by Easter.”

“I know you will.”

“Calvin. In the morning— I don’t want you thinking I’ll—” Wilf stops and tries again. “I’m not a man who’ll vanish.”

“I know that too.” Calvin lifts his head and looks at him with his glasses crooked, and there is no hurry in the look. “I have a service at ten-thirty. You are very welcome to come, if you want to, and equally welcome to stay in bed. I will not mind either. I’ve lived alone a good while, and I believe I’d like to find out what it’s like not to.”

“I’ve never sat through a United Church service.”

“You’re a Newfoundlander. Anglican, I’d guess.”

“Fell out of it at fifteen.”

“Then you can have a look at ours.” His smile is crooked and warm. “I’ll keep the third pew free.”

---

At half past ten on Sunday the church is as full as it ever gets, forty people, give or take, and it smells of wet coats and floor polish and a little of the thaw. The tarp holds. A bucket stands under the dry place on the ceiling just in case. Wilf Pardy sits in the very back pew, in a clean shirt, with his cap crushed in his big hands and his bad knee stuck out in the aisle, and hardly breathes.

Up at the front, the Reverend Calvin Moyer stands at the pulpit in his black robe, with his white beard trimmed and his glasses pushed up on his head, and looks out over the pews. He finds the back one. His face doesn’t change, except around the eyes.

“Let us sing,” he says, “number three hundred and twelve.”

The organ starts. Forty people stand up. And at the back, half a beat behind everyone else and a good half-tone flat, a man who has not sung in a church since he was fifteen opens his mouth and finds he still knows every word.