by Jerome Wilde
“What?” she said, not really paying attention.
“Could you tell me about the phone call?” I said.
“We just got up from the supper table,” she said, looking to her husband for confirmation. “The phone rang. I answered it. I always do. Ralph doesn’t like to talk on the phone.” She again looked at her husband. “And darned if it wasn’t Frankie. Like to thought we was never going to hear from him again. I was so surprised, I didn’t know what to do with myself. He was trying to tell me that he was in trouble, but I just kept asking him where he’d been all this time, almost two years, maybe more than two years. Where’d he gotten himself off to, and didn’t he know how worried we was about him?”
I listened while she tried to tell me what their conversation had been about.
“I just couldn’t get over it, kept asking him where he’d been. He kept saying he was in trouble, that he was going to go to the police and turn himself in, and that he didn’t have time to talk. ‘Mama, please, I can’t talk right now’—that’s what he said. Several times. I asked him why. He said he was afraid they were going to come and get him.”
“Who’s they?” I asked.
“He didn’t say. Just said he couldn’t talk, and he was going to the police, and we could find him there, and he would explain everything when we saw him. But then the phone line went dead—like he was cut off. Like he was standing there, and someone came up and pushed the button down on the receiver. He was just talking, then he was gone. Weren’t no more than a minute.”
“What time was this?” I asked.
She looked to her husband.
“It was about 6:30 p.m. or so,” the man said. “That’s generally when we finish supper.”
“And this was Friday evening?”
He nodded. They both did.
“Do you know who did this to my boy?” Mrs. Peters asked, taking up where Mr. Peters had left off.
I shook my head. “We’re trying to figure it out, ma’am,” I said. “Do you know why Frankie ran away in the first place?”
This produced looks of discomfort.
“It was that damned Internet crap,” Mr. Peters said, turning his face away so I couldn’t see him.
“How is that?” I asked.
Mrs. Peters sighed. “He met some Catholic people,” she said, pronouncing the word “Catholic” the way she might have pronounced the word “cancer.” “Took a notion in his head that he wanted to be Catholic. Well, we’ve always gone to the Church of Christ, and I just couldn’t understand what had gotten into him. This was about three years ago, I suppose. And these people were a bit odd. Said the Pope was the Antichrist, strange things like that. The whole church had gone into ‘apostasy’ or whatever, and they weren’t no longer Catholics, or something like that. I just couldn’t understand it myself. If the Pope ain’t Catholic, then what is he? But Frankie said there had been a lot of changes in the Catholic Church, and they weren’t Catholic any more, but this group he had found on the Internet was. They were ‘true Catholics’.”
I frowned.
“They kept writing to him, sending him books and stuff,” she said. “I just don’t know what happened. He started talking about wanting to be baptized a Catholic, and I said he’d already been baptized, and he couldn’t go off and join the Catholics ’cause we was Church of Christ people and always had been. He said we were heretics and going to go to hell, and we was mocking Jesus by not being Catholics ourselves—‘true Catholics’, whatever that is.”
“So he got himself baptized?”
She shrugged, and a bit of despair washed across her face. “I don’t know. He ran away. He kept saying he wanted to go visit these people, and we wouldn’t let him. I was scared of those people, didn’t know who they were or what they wanted. And they did something to him. He sort of lost interest in school, lost interest in his friends, was fighting and arguing with us all the time, didn’t want to do his chores. I didn’t know what to make of it.”
“Then what happened?” I prompted.
Mr. Peters snorted. “We took that damned computer away from him, that’s what happened. Wasn’t going to have my own damned son telling me I was a heretic and going to burn in hell, not after all I’d done to raise him and raise our family and be a good husband and a good father.”
There was silence.
“Then what?” I asked.
“Well,” Mr. Peters said, “he ran away. Shortly after that. He got quiet for a few weeks. Things seemed to be getting better. Then we got up one morning and he was gone.”
In other words, their son had most likely run off to join a religious cult. Not exactly original, by any means. I gave Daniel a brief look.
“Do you know where he went?” I asked.
They both shrugged. They didn’t know. Their son didn’t say. It was, I thought, rather like Earl Whitehead’s story.
“I searched through his things,” Mrs. Peters said. “I was trying to find letters they’d written to him, something with a return address, but he must have taken all that stuff with him or got rid of it. We went to see the Father at the Catholic church in our town, but he didn’t have an idea of where Frankie had gone. He said there were a lot of strange Catholic groups that weren’t really Catholic that were going around and saying things like that, that the Pope was a heretic and all of that business. He said our son could have gone anywhere in the state of Missouri, and maybe even Kansas or Chicago or Lord knows where else. So we filed a missing persons report, but the police couldn’t help us, and we didn’t hear anything, all this time. Not till this past Friday.”
We regarded each other in silence for many long moments.
“It seems to me that your son got himself mixed up in a cult,” I said. “Maybe the group is located here in the city. Maybe he finally got away and was trying to call you and get help, but they found him. He didn’t give you any names, like the name of this group that he was talking to over the Internet?”
“No,” Mrs. Peters said. “Well, he might have, but we can’t remember now. ’Course we tried and tried to think back, trying to remember everything he had told us, but it was all so strange to us. ‘Saint’ this and ‘saint’ that, and ‘father’ this and ‘father’ that and ‘bishop’ this and ‘bishop’ that. It didn’t really make any sense to us.”
“But he talked about ‘fathers’ and ‘bishops’?”
She nodded. “Well, not bishops, but ‘the bishop’. Apparently the one in charge of the group was a bishop. Frankie was always talking about how ‘the bishop said’ this and ‘the bishop said’ that. Frankie said he was the only real bishop left, that all the rest of them weren’t Catholic no more, that they was all going to go to hell for destroying the Catholic Church. We just didn’t know what to make of it.”
Neither did I.
“The TV said Frankie was… crucified,” Mr. Peters said, his voice very quiet. “I guess I don’t understand that.”
“We don’t either,” I replied.
“I guess I don’t understand why they would….”
“We don’t either,” I said again.
He fell silent. His wife burst into fresh tears.
Georgina Durmount very graciously came over to my office to take them in hand, to explain to them how to go about having Frank’s body moved, how to deal with the paperwork, the death certificate, the hundred and one details. She was also going to do the hardest part: she was going to explain to them exactly how their son had died.
And she was going to have to answer the question most on their minds: how much had he suffered?
I watched them go and reached into my desk drawer for the bottle of Advil.
“Oh man,” Daniel said, rubbing a hand through his hair.
“Perks of the job,” I said.
IX
FR. CYRUS was an old friend. He was the one who had accepted me into the seminary program run by the Franciscans. I had gone to live at St. Joseph’s House when I was eighteen, first becoming a religious brother, e
ventually a priest. I had been a good student, but what I didn’t understand at the time was that the Franciscans had accepted me not because they thought I would become a priest, but because I had needed somewhere to go. That I had been ordained at all had surprised them, and Fr. Cyrus sat me down after my ordination and asked me whether or not I really wanted to be a priest. Or was I perhaps just running away from the past?
That conversation had made me extremely angry, but Fr. Cyrus was right. I did not have a vocation to the religious life. I had not been called by God to live a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience, following in the footsteps of St. Francis of Assisi. I did not really understand what “poverty” was all about, and chastity and obedience were all but impossible. I had not been called upon to become an alter Christus, “another Christ.” I was a boy running away from the past and looking for the family I’d never had, and Fr. Cyrus had been saying it was time to start dealing with reality. It was time to grow up.
St. Joseph’s was a large apartment building, four stories, set back off the road with a large, tree-heavy front yard and a small parking lot in back. Daniel pulled around the building and stopped. It always felt like home, no matter how many years had gone by. There had been eighteen brothers and priests living there when I had joined; now there were five. Vocations had dwindled. Young people didn’t want to be Franciscans and priests. They wanted to be rock stars or Wall Street investors.
“What are we going to find here?” Daniel asked, flashing those brilliantly white teeth.
“Answers, perhaps,” I replied. I was finding it hard to adjust to his presence and to his constant stream of questions. I had gotten into the habit of doing everything by myself, my own way, at my own speed, without someone else tagging along.
If it had been anyone but Daniel Qo and his sly, knowing smile, I would have been excessively annoyed. Captain Harlock knew what he was doing when he made Daniel my partner.
I rang the bell on the back door, and we were greeted by an old monk: Brother Bernard.
“Father Ascension!” he exclaimed, using my old religious name and ignoring the fact that I was no longer “Father” anyone, though I had never been officially excused from the priesthood, which required a dispensation from Rome. I had applied, but grew tired of waiting for an answer. John Paul II was a real hard-ass when it came to dispensing priests from their vows. He was too busy canonizing saints. He had canonized more of them than all the popes before him put together. His saint output was astonishing. He was much too busy to tend to that mounting pile of dispensation requests.
Brother Bernard opened the door and motioned for both of us to go inside. He gave me a hug, then took a long look at my face, while I took a long look at his. He was still just as ancient and careless about his personal appearance as ever, yet that light was still bright in his eyes. He had been the porter for St. Joseph’s for decades and might very well be the porter until the day he died.
“Who’s your friend?” he asked, turning to look at Daniel.
“My partner, Daniel Qo,” I said. “Daniel, this is Brother Bernard.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Daniel said, hesitantly holding out his hand as if he wasn’t sure whether the man would shake it or not. Bernard did, offering a huge grin.
“Why did you call him Father Ascension?” Daniel asked.
“That was his name,” Bernard said. “I forgot your real name,” he added, looking at me.
“Thomas Noel,” I said.
“Ah, Thomas, that’s right. Thomas, like St. Thomas. ‘Doubting Thomas,’ we used to call him, when he first came.”
“I can see why,” Daniel offered with a smile.
“I need to see Fr. Cyrus,” I said.
A shadow went over Bernard’s face.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Fr. Cyrus is sick,” he said. The way he said the word “sick” suggested that it wasn’t just a cold or a flu.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I’ll let him tell you,” Bernard said. “He’s on the third floor, same room as always.”
Daniel remained behind as I went up the stairs. I paused briefly on the second floor, the whole of which was a chapel. It was here that the brothers said prayers and held Mass. I had spent a lot of time here, on my knees in front of the tabernacle containing the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, pouring my heart out to him, increasingly angered by his continued silence. That’s the problem with God, the constant silence. If God wanted to have a relationship with us, why didn’t He? What was preventing Him? Why were some blessed with visions and divine favors while the rest of us were left to stumble around in the darkness?
I made a face at the tabernacle, surprised at how resentful I felt at that particular moment. The old hurts still had the ability to bite, and bite deep. I was reminded of how deeply disappointing my relationship with God had been, and still was, and probably always would be.
On the third floor, I pushed open Cyrus’s door and found him propped up in bed, a smile on his face. He was very pale, looking haggard and old. He was almost eighty, so perhaps that was to be expected.
“Fr. Ascension,” he said, his voice throaty.
“Fr. Cyrus,” I replied. “Please call me Thomas.”
I went to his bed and knelt down, taking his old, feeble hand in my own. “What’s wrong?”
“Cancer,” he said. “I’m not a young man anymore.”
I felt something in my heart tightening up. Fr. Cyrus was one of the few people from my past that I loved, honestly and truly loved, with all my heart and soul. In so many ways, he was the father I’d never had.
“It’s not serious, is it?” I asked, knowing the question was stupid.
He shrugged and smiled. “Look at this,” he said. He showed me the business card I had given him on my last visit, several months ago. “I dug this out. I was going to call you. Just haven’t felt like getting myself downstairs. I wanted to make sure you were… okay.”
The way he said it suggested he wanted to make sure I was okay so he could die in peace, so a loose end could be tied up. It would probably not occur to him that I would have appreciated being notified that he was sick so I could visit and try to offer help.
“I’m fine,” I said. “You know you don’t have to worry about me.”
He smiled as if he knew this was a lie, which of course it was.
“A lot of these gray hairs belong to you,” he said, chuckling, pointing at his head. “Why don’t you sit on my bed? I wish I could get up, but I’m tired. What brings you here?”
Now that I knew he was sick, I didn’t want to say. I sat on the edge of his bed, frowning down on him. I hadn’t expected this. What else was going to go wrong? I had always thought Fr. Cyrus was going to live forever, was always going to be there, whenever I needed to hear his voice or see his ancient, wrinkled face.
“How are things at the police department?” he asked.
“That’s why I’m here,” I said. “Are you sure you’re up to some conversation?”
“I don’t look that bad, do I?”
“No,” I said, lying. “I just didn’t know you were sick.”
“Fire away,” he said.
“You have to keep it to yourself, but we’ve had a bizarre death, which I’m investigating. A boy was crucified, after a fashion. He seems to have been involved with a Catholic cult. I was wondering if you knew anything about groups like that.”
“Catholic cults?”
“The boy’s parents said he met some people from this group over the Internet. The people told him things like ‘the Pope is a heretic’ and that their group was the only true Catholic group left on the face of the planet and other outrageous stuff like that.”
“The Pope is a heretic?” he repeated.
I nodded.
“If I had to guess—I’m assuming that’s what you want me to do—I would say you’re looking for traditional Catholics. After Vatican II in the 1960s, there were a lot of changes in the
Church, and a lot of Catholics fell away. Some of them formed ‘traditionalist’ groups, wanting to keep the Latin Mass, not wanting Mass in English. There was a bishop in France who made quite a name for himself by setting up a traditionalist seminary and churning out traditionalist priests. Archbishop Lefebvre. You should look into that, as a place to start. Before he died, not too many years ago, he defied the Vatican and consecrated four bishops to continue his ‘work’.”
“So these traditionalists don’t agree with Vatican II?”
“That’s partly it, yes. There’s a lot of those groups out there, especially here in the US, although there are some in Europe. The ones in Europe tend to be a bit more intellectual. The ones over here tend to be a bit odd. Extremists, disobedient, argumentative. I’ve heard all sorts of stories about them.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Mostly scandalous stuff. Some of these priests and bishops get themselves involved with right-wing causes, or drugs, or sex scandals, all sorts of things.”
“When you say right-wing causes, do you mean things like the Jewish World Conspiracy?”
He nodded, chuckled. “All that kind of nonsense—conspiracies, the John Birch Society, the ‘Church has been infiltrated by communists’. All of it nonsense, start to finish, but that doesn’t stop people from believing it. Anyway, they’re not the first group of people to break away from the Church, not by a long shot. After Vatican I, there were dissidents who broke away because they did not believe in papal infallibility, which had been defined at Vatican I. They also had problems with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which was also proclaimed at about that time. So they broke away. We call them Old Catholics now. Of course, you have the whole Protestant thing, the Anglicans, all the rest of it. Vatican II produced its own unhappy people, and they were just the latest in a long line of what we used to call hell-bound heretics. Now we just call them our ‘separated brethren’.”
He fell silent and seemed to be trying to remember something.
“We had a group come by here, maybe five years ago,” he said, frowning. “Can’t remember who they were. But they were traditionalists. They wanted to buy St. Joseph’s from us. Offered us a ridiculously low purchase price. We sat around the table and laughed about it. They wanted to set up some traditionalist nuns here, or something. Of course we said no. But we were impressed by them. Two of their priests came, wearing cassocks, like the old days, with Roman collars. Knew their theology, weren’t shy about sharing it. Knew Latin. All their seminarians are taught Latin. They were respectful, but you could see they were looking down their noses at us.”
