Canon Excerpt from "Salem's Lot"
His hand was unsteady and instead of gripping the bottle the fingers knocked it off the desk and to the carpet with a heavy thump, where it lay gurgling good scotch into the green nap.
"Shit!" said Father Donald Callahan, and reached down to pick it up before all was lost. There was, in fact, not much to lose. He set what was left on the desk again (well back from the edge) and wandered into the kitchen to look for a rag under the sink and a bottle of cleaning fluid. It would never do to let Mrs. Curless find a patch of spilled scotch by the leg of his study desk. Her kind, pitying looks were too hard to take on the long, grainy mornings when you were feeling a little low -
Hung over, you mean.
Yes, hung over, very good. Let's have a little truth around here, by all means. Know the truth and it will set you free. Bully for the truth.
He found a bottle of something called E-Vap, which was not too far from the sound of violent regurgitation ("E-Vap!" croaked the old drunk, simultaneously crapping himself and blowing lunch), and took it back to the study. He was not weaving at all. Hardly at all. Watch this, Ossifer, I'm going to walk right up this white line to the stop light.
Callahan was an imposing fifty-three. His hair was silvery, his eyes a direct blue (now threaded with tiny snaps of red) surrouned by Irish laugh wrinkles, his mouth firm, his slightly cleft chin firmer still. Some mornings, looking at himself in the mirror, he thought that when he reached sixty he would throw over the priesthood, go to Hollywood, and get a job playing Spencer Tracy.
"Father Flanagan, where are you when we need you?" he muttered, and hunkered down by the stain. He squinted, read the instructions on the label of the bottle, and poured two capfuls of E-Vap onto the stain. The patch immediately turned white and began to bubble. Callahan viewed this with some alarm, and consulted the label again.
"For really tough stains," he read aloud in the rich, rolling voice that made him so welcome in this parish after the long, denture-clicking peregrinations of poor old Father Hume, "allow to set for seven to ten minutes."
He went over to the study window, which fronted on Elm Street and St. Andrew's on the far side.
Well, well, he thought. Here I am, Sunday night and drunk again.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
He leaned his forehead on the window, allowing the handsome face that had been, in some measure at least, his curse sag into drawn lines of distracted weariness.
I'm a drunk and I'm a lousy priest, Father.
With his eyes closed he could see the darkness of the confessional booth, could feel his fingers sliding back the window and rolling up the shade on all secrets of the human heart, could smell varnish and old velvet from the kneeling benches and the sweat of old men; could taste alkali traces in his saliva.
Bless me, Father,
(I broke my brother's wagon, I hit my wife, I peeked in Mrs. Sawyer's window when she was undressing, I lied, I cheated, I have had lustful thoughts, I, I, I)
for I have sinned.
- Salem's Lot, by Stephen King