Image & Likeness

I wasn’t a priest for that long. Only three years. The undergrads I taught theology at the college, of course, figured I’d been born wearing that white collar. But I wasn’t even raised Catholic.

I was born in eastern Kentucky in a mountain town called Sweet Branch, brought up by my mom and dad, then just my dad, and finally by my older brother, Ricky. Our family name was Harp. Dad was a miner until I was five; then he got laid off and took a cashier job at a Shell station that let him drink enough free Mountain Dew to poison a small tree. He had a lean chinless face and a tall frame interrupted by a potbelly like a mild pregnancy. He knew or rather suspected how the folks stopping off I-75 looked at him—a middle-aged guy smoking Kools over his Wonder Bread dinner while he waited for March Madness to start on the little TV over the cigarette case. Sometimes he’d daydream out loud about breathing tainted air in customers’ faces, giving them a little cancer to remember him by. But he liked to remind me and Ricky we weren’t as desperate as we looked—we still had his severance from the coal company. “After that’s gone,” he said, “I’m rentin you two to the circus.”