The Book of Thomas - Volume One: Heaven

by Robert Boyczuk

  “No!” The word burst violently from me before I could control myself. Looking down, I said, “My father is dead.” I tried to hide my trembling from the priest.

  “Your mother?”

  “She died when I was born.”

  “I see.” Father Paul said. “Do you know what this place is?”

  I shook my head.

  “Orphanotrophium. The orphanage at San Savio.”

  Perhaps the Friar hadn’t left me here to die after all. At least not the quick kind of death I had envisioned.

  “And you seem to be an orphan,” he said, eyeing me as if he was trying to peer into my soul. “Or at least abandoned. A happy coincidence, eh?”

  I remained silent.

  Father Paul shrugged. “No matter, the sanctuary lamp shines for all boys.” He rose and walked around to stand in front of me, placing a knobby hand, as pale as the Bible’s vellum covers, on my shoulder. He stared into my eyes, the tips of our noses almost touching. I could smell the wine on his breath. “Those boys who pull the bell rope are petitioning for admittance. Sometimes children are brought to San Savio, like you, without understanding. The bell is rung for them. We do not make these children stay if they do not wish. Even though you rang the bell, I do not believe you did so knowingly. So the choice is still yours.”

  “I can leave?”

  “If you wish,” he said. He stared intently at me. “We are strict here. You won’t go hungry, but neither will you grow fat. You will work hard and prosper or be indolent and wither. Do you understand this?”

  I nodded.

  “Once admitted, boys cannot leave until they are bound-out as an apprentice to a suitable family. In your case, this will be several years. Do you understand this?”

  I nodded again.

  “Well,” he said, “what’s it to be?”

  I stared at my feet, contemplating my dismal prospects. I was lost and alone in the heart of this Godless city, two Spheres below where I had grown up. A five-day journey had brought me and my father to the Dominican monastery—and we’d been hooded, save during a few hours when we paused, after sun-off. And though I could remember every step I’d taken this night (as I related in my preface, God has gifted me the ability to recall anything I set my mind to recall), at best I could only guess at the route we’d travelled before the monastery, reconstructing it from scraps of sounds and smells, and from the subtle changes in air pressure felt in the eardrums and the churning of the stomach, marking the transition from Sphere to Sphere. Transitions usually only Clergy were permitted to make. Even if I managed to use these spartan clues to find my way home, to climb back to my own Sphere, no one would be there. The Church had taken us all from our beds, my father and his servants, even our cook and gardener and their families. Our modest estate would be empty. Or worse, already gifted by the Church and occupied by cold-eyed strangers. Nor would I find welcome from our friends and neighbours. It was a small rural community, and word would have spread fast. For the son of a heretic, there would be no welcome.

  “I asked you a question, Thomas. . . .”

  “Yes.” I looked up at the priest. “I would stay, Father, if you would have me.”

  “We would.” The priest smiled, giving my shoulder a squeeze before releasing it. He leaned back against the table, placing his palms on its edge. “Now I will give two pieces of advice. You can take them or not as you please, but know they are intended kindly.” He paused, until I nodded.

  “First, it’s only in stories that children are reunited with their relatives. I don’t know if you have an uncle or aunt you think favours you, but no one will claim you. In the thirty-one years I’ve been pastor here, no boy has ever been claimed. The sooner you realize that, the better.”

  I already knew this to be true, but to hear it said aloud by this priest made it real in a terrible and irrevocable way.

  Father Paul reached out and pinched the collar of my nightshirt between his fingers, appraising it. “I can tell you’ve come from a family of some means. And I hear the education in your voice. Likely a Sphere or two above this poor one. The other boys will hate you. A lot are bigger than you—and are hard as stone. Have to be to get through what they have been through. Whatever has happened to you, whatever injustices you believe have been visited upon you, they’ve had it worse. Infinitely worse. You need to remember that when they beat you.”

  I was too exhausted, too empty, to be scared.

  “My second piece of advice is this: you can do one of two things, Thomas. You can try to be harder and more ruthless than they are. And that may serve you well in the short term—until someone even more ruthless comes along. Or you can learn to forgive them. Which will serve you well on the day of reckoning when we ask God for His forgiveness.” I must have looked at him quizzically, for he said, “Yes, even me, Thomas. I too must beg forgiveness.” I heard the naked shame in his words. “We’re all sinners, Thomas. Every one of us.” Father Paul’s shoulders sagged. “Forgiveness is our only hope.”

  Choir

  I never quite understood the reason for my first fight. If you could call it a fight. Almost before I realized what was happening I was on the ground, gasping for breath, the sharp jab to my stomach delivered by the smallest boy in my form for a slight I was not aware I had given. As I lay incapacitated, the boy picked up a rock and scrutinized me as if he was weighing the merits of bashing in my skull. I looked up, daring him with my eyes. The boy dropped the brick. He spat on me and walked away.

  I forgive you, I thought.

  It was the morning of my first day.

  The orphanage of San Savio at Los Angeles Nuevo had fewer than a hundred residents. The youngest boys looked to be about seven, the older ones perhaps twelve, on the cusp of puberty. I was placed in a form of twenty boys, all roughly the same height and, presumably, the same age, though most had run feral on the streets before coming to San Savio and likely hadn’t an inkling themselves of how old they might be. We shared a cramped dormitory. School was six days a week, sixteen hours a day. At sun-on was Lauds, consisting of hymns, psalms, and a reading from the scripture. After a final short prayer and benediction, we were given five minutes to break our fast. Too little time to do anything other than cram in as much of the stale bread and cooling porridge as we could. The lessons that followed consisted of readings from the Holy Book or its Addenda, a lengthy discourse on those readings, then a regurgitation by the students. For lunch we were given a short time for small bowls of lukewarm soup and whatever bread might have been left over from breakfast, and an equally brief time to play in the courtyard, overseen by one of the clerics, a birch rod at the ready. After midday, three hours of Latin and two hours of chores. The only subject that was not taught by rote came late in the afternoon when we did sums on small, shared chalkboards for an hour. A meagre dinner at half-light, then Vespers before sun-out.

  Sundays were devoted entirely to worship.

  My name is Thomas.

  By the end of the first week I’d come to think of myself as Thomas. It was Thomas who was beaten and bruised almost daily. It was Thomas who tried to make himself small, to pass unnoticed. Even in my dreams I was named Thomas. David was dead, as were all the people I’d known and loved. Sometimes at night I prayed for that boy. I’d whisper, May God have mercy on your soul.

  I suffered the rod no more or less than other boys. I volunteered nothing but answered everything I was asked. Despite my indiffer-ence, I excelled. The simple reason was I forgot nothing I set out to remember. Father Paul, who taught us Latin, called my eidetic memory a gift from God. To me it was a burden. Or, more precisely, a condition. Eidesis, I’d named it: an inability to forget. Each moment of my father’s inquisition, and my own complicity, was carved into my soul. While other boys would forget (or at least soften) their sins with the brush of time, I would carry my guilt to my deathbed, undiminished.

  At the end of my first month, Father Paul advanced me to the form with the largest boys. Those I’d left b
ehind, though disparaging their schooling with every breath, nevertheless beat me for my impertinence. I woke each morning to the throb of new welts and bruises. The boys in my new form mostly ignored me. I was too small for them to be bothered and, as long as I didn’t excel at anything, I posed no threat. So I kept to myself and made sure as many of my answers were wrong as were right.

  A few, though, looked at me with something other than hatred or envy. Something that made me squirm in my seat, that made me grateful they’d left me in the dorm with boys my own size, ones without the sprout of whiskers on their chins. Still, only a few days passed before three older boys contrived to catch me alone in the laundry room. I was pinned to the floor by two, while the third pulled my trousers down around my ankles, then lay on top of me.

  It hurt, but no worse than anything else I had suffered.

  Still, I felt a burning shame. And a craving for vengeance against those three boys. However, what bothered me most was that it bothered me at all. Somewhere, somehow, I was dismayed to discover that there was a kernel in me that had not yet surrendered to the sin of despair.

  During my early stay, a dream plagued me. In it, I was back at the Dominican monastery, chained in my cell, asleep on soiled straw. Yet I could see and hear, as if awake. A warm glow danced across the stone walls of the passageway, growing in intensity, and an inhumanly tall figure flowed around the corner, a corona of pure light silhouetting it. The figure bowed under the archway to my cell, wings I hadn’t been able to see until now, brushing ceiling and floor. An Angel. So indescribably beautiful, I ached. The Angel looked upon me—the sleeping me—with tenderness, its gaze as pure as that of a mother looking upon a newborn. A look of love. In that moment I knew I must love the Angel in return.

  But then the Angel was gone, and with it, all certainty, its light dwindling as my sleeping form thrashed on the stone floor of my cell, drowning in the darkness of my troubled dreams.

  The fights with other boys continued unabated. I had quickly learned that boys who don’t fight back are doomed to be bullied forever. So I made a point of observing the tussles in which I wasn’t a participant. I was particularly interested in those in which a smaller boy bested a bigger one. After a few fights, it seemed to me that size, though perhaps the most important thing, didn’t guarantee victory. Speed and agility, and an understanding of leverage—how to use a larger boy’s weight against him—could quickly turn the tables. I watched, and I learned. I practised my newfound knowledge whenever I could. Within a few weeks, only the biggest boys dared bully me. And with them I learned that sometimes one can win by losing. Winning against the worst bullies only seemed to enrage them, but losing to them (after I delivered several blows that would leave prominent and painful bruises), lessened their ardour for return matches. They’d won, after all, so what did they have to gain by provoking further confrontations?

  In the classroom, I learned little I did not already know. But outside the classroom, in the dorms and the dining hall, in the courtyard and laundry room, in the larders in the cellar, my education continued.

  I learned that it was best to eat everything under the watchful eye of the Brothers, rather than pocket a crust and have to fight another boy for it later.

  I learned the Brothers could be as cruel as the boys—and invoked God the most when inflicting their cruelest punishments.

  I learned that although it was always bad to be summoned by Brother Finn (who was fond of drinking undiluted wine, which fuelled his fondness for boys), it was especially bad when Brother Finn was drunk. Bad in a way that made even the toughest boys cry. So bad, sometimes, that Brother Finn wept, too.

  And I learned that when I was first summoned to Brother Finn’s office, on a day when he was particularly drunk, I had no tears left in me.

  But perhaps the most important thing I learned was that Father Paul took immoderate pride in his choir. Which meant that choirboys were inviolable—not subject to schoolyard justice or the whims of the bullies. Off limits, even to Brother Finn’s attentions.

  At the start of my sixth month at San Savio, Father Paul announced choral tryouts. Tryouts were necessitated whenever a boy in the choir was bound-out as an apprentice, or when the onset of puberty ravaged an angelic voice. One by one the boys were summoned to Father Paul’s office to sing the praises of God. After I sang, Father Paul declared that I had been doubly blessed: he told me that not only did I have a memory to be envied by the most renowned scholar, but that I’d been blessed with a voice that would make Angels weep.

  I doubted this. I thought my audition poor and my chances a long shot. Singing had been forbidden in my father’s house. And in the few places where I was free to sing—out of earshot in the fields surrounding our house, and on the road as I walked to school—my own voice sounded no better or worse to me than any other child’s. But perhaps I inherited some modicum of talent from my mother. I knew she had truly been blessed. My father would speak of her voice with reverence. Describe it in such intimate detail that I could hear it. A voice that brought light into every corner of the house and every corner of my father’s heart. He said her reputation was such that people, important people—Bishops and the like—would make excuses to visit, to stay to dinner, in hopes of coaxing a song from her. Our tightfisted gardener grumbled that my father squandered much of the harvest silver for overpriced copies of songbooks and the fanciful novels she loved to read. When, in the years leading up to my birth, the Church had finally banned all books save the Good Book and its Addenda, he told me my father didn’t bring her precious books to the burning, but had built a cabinet with a false back in which to hide them.

  On the day my mother died, on the day of my birth, my father collected every songbook and novel hidden in the house, and burned them all himself in the back garden.

  Books, the Bishop had said, sadly shaking his head, were the least of his sins. But a clear sign of a struggling soul, the beginning of his slide into iniquity. It must pain you that he blames you for your mother’s death, but if you help me now, if you help me redeem his soul, he must forgive you. . . .

  I knew the Bishop said such things hoping to unnerve me, to elicit damning evidence from me. Nevertheless, I examined my memories in detail, but could find nothing to suggest that my father blamed me for my mother’s death, or to make me question his love. (All the time, at the back of my mind, wondering how the Bishop had come to know the facts of the burning, imagining a day when I, older and stronger and more persuasive, might ask our gardener this same question.)

  It would have been so easy for my father to blame me. But he hadn’t.

  Had he?

  These thoughts made my stomach churn with uncertainty. Although I could remember every small detail of my father’s gestures, every expression of his affection, the seed the Bishop planted that day sprouted, sending forth tendrils of doubt that, despite my perfect recall, I would never know the secrets of my father’s heart.

  We choirboys had our own special form and a more spacious dorm room, as well as our own area of the dining hall where we enjoyed more varied food and larger portions, though it was still never quite enough. We were given clean albs and surplices to wear when we sang on Sunday—for the boys at sun-on, then later in the cavernous Church for parishioners at the two morning celebrations. Before Mass, when the great doors to the Church were swung wide and the parishioners filed in, I could see the broad steps and pillars outside and the subdued Sunday bustle in the square beyond. It was my only glimpse of the outside world.

  Although I had believed I would never delight in anything again, I discovered an unexpected enjoyment in singing. I picked up everything quickly, never needing to be taught anything more than once. And when I sang, I mercifully forgot myself, lost completely in the sweep and exaltation of music, my soul soaring on its battered wings.

  The fights stopped, as I knew they would. But not the naked envy, which I could see flashing in the eyes of the boys I’d left behind.

  Still, I
knew something like peace.

  Eleven months to the day after my arrival, and three weeks before Christmas, Father Paul announced a special choral presentation to be held that Saturday after Vespers. There were to be no rites, no Liturgy of Eucharist, no Communion. Just song.

  To my surprise, the other boys in the choir greeted the news with a simmering panic. They knew something I didn’t. For the first time since I’d been at the orphanage I wished I had a friend, a confidant, I might ask. But I’d made a point of isolating myself from the other boys, of eschewing the few tentative offers of friendship. There was no one to ask. Especially now, after Father Paul had selected me to deliver a solo at the performance. I was a pariah.

  “Yer sure to be bound-out,” one boy hissed as he brushed past, “castrato.”

  I didn’t know what a castrato might be, but from his intonation I knew it couldn’t be anything good. I shrugged it off, mostly because there was nothing else to do.

  The afternoon preceding the concert the boys in the choir were excused from study. We were directed to scrub ourselves pink in the laundry room, then to take turns picking the lice from each other’s heads. Brother Augustino did his best to cut and comb our unruly hair with his ancient, palsied hands. When we were as shiny as we were going to get, special ecclesiastical robes, smaller versions of Father Paul’s cassock (but without the collar), were brought out. They smelled of cedar—I hadn’t smelled anything like it since . . . since running free on my father’s estate. I willed back the tears.

  With Father Paul sitting in the first pew, we sang the Kyrie Eleison and Gloria; the Credo and Nicene Creed; the Sanctus and Benedictus; and then Agnus Dei.

  All for a scattering of oddly dressed men and women in the pews. They were a different sort of people. Different than the regular parishioners. Their clothes were finer, their shoulders squarer, their hygiene better. Their fear of God less tangible. They sported brightly coloured garb, in crimson and gold and jade, lacking the sombreness appropriate to worship. Two of the women wore bodices that exposed their pale breasts. Impious was the word I might have used. None were parishioners. San Savio was in the heart of an impoverished district and these people were anything but poor. Perhaps they worshipped in more appropriate clothes elsewhere, in parishes more suitable to their station.