by Lee Child
I also heard that no matter how many times Dylan was asked, he wouldn’t admit to pushing his sister down the stairs. That’s too bad, because, as I’m sure someone must have told him, confession is good for the soul.
IN PERSONA CHRISTI
BY OREST STELMACH
Two days before the killers came for Maria, a gang of teenagers rampaged across church property. I was washing the liners under my prosthetic arm when I heard them. Their whistles and shouts came from everywhere, as though they had the rectory surrounded. It was just past dusk, too dark to see clearly out the window. All I could detect were amorphous black images, vaguely human, flitting in and out of my field of vision.
Manuel, Maria’s thirteen-year-old son, was the first to come downstairs. As always, he spoke with facial expressions and physical gestures, as opposed to using his tongue. He hadn’t said a word to me since he and his mother had moved into the rectory, two months ago. Given his father had recently been hanged to death over the course of an hour while a block of ice melted beneath his feet, I wasn’t surprised. He stood now at the base of the stairs, his deceased father’s gold watch around his wrist, lips quivering and eyes bulging, begging me to tell him his mother and he weren’t in danger again.
A Catholic priest must be a father. He is a spiritual provider and protector in the image of God, in the person of Christ. The role of father is my favorite part of being a priest, the one that comes most naturally to me and gives me the most joy.
I walked up to Manuel and put my arm around him. I spoke to him in Spanish. “Don’t worry, son,” I said, as though he were my own child. “There’s nothing to fear. I’ll take care of you.”
When I opened the front door, the clucking and crowing stopped immediately. The sight of a six-foot-three, two-hundred-twenty-pound, one-armed and one-legged priest limping on his prosthetic limb as an empty sleeve dangled at his side sent the boys scurrying. All I could hear was the sound of feet pounding the asphalt as they escaped into old Dillon Stadium, across the street.
“You boys go on now,” I said. “And don’t come back. This is a church, you know.”
The screen door was against my back. When I turned and swung it open, the springs let out a long, eerie squeak. It was followed by the sound of a teenage male voice from the direction of the stadium.
“You need me to hear your confession, Father?”
After a few howls and laughs, more footsteps followed and the voices faded. I went back inside and explained to Manuel that the hooligans were just a bunch of bored kids. He calmed down and returned to his room to finish his homework. His mother, Maria, taught violin at the local university during the day and studied English at home at night. She was in her room listening to language tapes on her headphones and had missed the entire event.
After reattaching my prosthetic arm, I called the police and reported the incident, just to establish a record in case the next time the kids decided to break into the church and steal an icon or a chalice. It took ten minutes for a police cruiser to arrive. That didn’t surprise me.
Once Bermuda usurped Hartford as the insurance capital of the world, the companies moved out and the drug gangs moved in. Now Hartford is just a waypoint between Boston and New York City, and you need a different kind of insurance to walk around at night. With the Kings of Solomon in the South End, 77 Love in the North End, and city and state budget crises, the police are spread thin. There are precious few resources to dedicate to the eastern fringe of the city near the defunct Colt’s gun factory and Dillon Stadium, where the old Hartford Knights used to play semipro football back in the day. The oldest Catholic church in Hartford, however, still stands on a tiny wooded lot, serving a small but devoted parish whose members live in the projects nearby.
After I told them what happened, the patrolmen stared at me as though I were a self-indulgent moron. They exuded the arrogance of the armed and immortal. One of them looked like Mr. Clean, with a shaved head and a physique that could double as a battering ram. His partner was long and wiry, with an untrustworthy-looking pencil mustache that he might have lifted from an uncooperative nightclub owner.
Their eyes told me I was wasting their time. There were serious crimes being committed in other parts of town.
A priest must be a mediator. Just as Moses revealed the law to Israel, the priest brings the human family together through eternal redemption. In this case, though, I needed to redeem myself for appearing to be a pain in the ass in the cops’ eyes.
“I didn’t mean for you to come out,” I said. “I didn’t dial nine-one-one. I told the dispatcher not to send anyone if you were busy.”
They continued glaring at me, as though motives mattered little in their world. “Hot June night, Father,” Mr. Clean said.
“Probably kids from Franklin Avenue, Father,” Pencil Mustache said. “They break into the stadium to party. They never hurt no one. But we’ll drive around and take a look for you.”
“Yeah, Father,” Mr. Clean said. “We’ll take a look.”
The police car radio squawked. They jumped inside, answered the call, and peeled out of the driveway, lights flashing and siren blaring. They took off toward the center of town, away from the stadium. Understandably, there was no time to drive around, no time to take a look.
Maria was at the base of the stairs with her arms wrapped around Manuel when I went back inside.
“Why were the police here, Father Nathan?’ she said. “Are they here to deport us? Are we being sent back to Mexico?”
“No, no one is sending you back to Mexico. Would you make us some tea, Maria? I can’t stop thinking about that tres leches cake you made. Is there another piece left in the fridge?”
Twenty-two years ago, Maria’s mother was my teacher at the Consultoria Española y Lingüística in Santa Volopta, Mexico, where I studied Spanish and worked with Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s Missionaries of Charity. Maria was nine years old at the time.
Santa Volopta lies within the Golden Triangle of the Chihuahua state, the most violent territory in the world outside of actual war zones. Not all the violence is a result of the drug trade. Over the past ten years, 937 women have been murdered, their bodies tossed in random dumps and ditches. Although no arrests have ever been made, high-level policemen and prominent citizens are suspected.
At age eighteen, Maria married a lawyer in Volopta. When he became the municipal prosecutor, he launched an investigation into the murders of the daughters of Volopta; it led to his own assassination. Maria’s mother called me immediately after his body was found, put her daughter and grandson on a plane, and sent them to live with me in Connecticut. She didn’t trust the municipal or federal governments. She was certain her son-in-law’s murderers, the drug czars, and the high-level officials responsible for the killings of the daughters of Volopta were one and the same. In Maria’s mother’s mind, her daughter and grandson were as good as dead if they stayed in Mexico.
From the moment Maria and Manuel arrived, my goal was to provide a spiritual and physical home for them while they integrated themselves into the community and began new lives. The gossipers in the parish, of course, didn’t want to see it that way. It was far more entertaining to contemplate a priest violating his vow of celibacy with the beauty living beneath his roof.
As soon as Maria started appearing in church, attendance and contributions at Mass increased. A dozen men, single and married alike, received a thunderbolt of devout inspiration and started showing up daily. When I turned from the altar to bestow a blessing during morning Mass, I would catch one or more of them trying to steal a glance at her from a side pew. She possessed an elegance that could make men sob in anguish because they would never touch her. Her hair fell past her shoulders in silken strands that shone under the ceiling lights like onyx.
She tended to gaze at the ground, either because she didn’t want to encourage any suitors or because she was desperate to disappear. This habit lent her an air of innocence. When she looked up, there was
a gentleness and purity in her oval face and chestnut eyes that took one’s breath away.
It didn’t take long for the comments to start.
“There they are,” a widow said. “The Thorn Birds.”
“His third leg still work?” a former altar boy said.
“If it didn’t, it does now,” his friend replied.
I am forty-five years old. I’ve been a priest for seventeen of those years, and over time, it has been my observation that ethical and moral standards are deteriorating, nowhere more so than in the Catholic Church. And no one has disappointed the faithful more than the Catholic priest. As a result, people have become cynical. It’s just a profession, they say; there is no special calling. For some folks, it’s unimaginable that a heterosexual man such as I would not lust for a woman such as Maria, would not lie in bed wrestling with temptation every night.
And yet, I must insist: I do no such thing. I do not think of her in the way that other men do. I do not want to touch her. I do not want to possess her. I pray only for her and her son’s health and salvation. Seeing them alive and healthy at Mass fulfills me in every way. Such is the joy of priesthood: contentment beyond the scope of sexual fulfillment. In the twenty-one years since a priest gave me a prayer book and changed the course of my life forever, I’ve said the Lord’s Prayer three million, six hundred, and sixty-six times. That is how much prayer it has taken me to reach such a state of contentment.
I was not always this way. There was a time in my youth when I would have broken doors down to get to Maria, and no one would have tried to stop me. I was once the golden boy, a star collegiate baseball player with a bazooka for a right arm, a flame-throwing pitcher drafted in the third round by the New York Yankees. I had all the girls I wanted, and then the only one I ever needed died in a car accident when I was behind the wheel.
The day before the killers came for Maria, the same gang of kids tried to break into the church. They attempted, unsuccessfully, to jimmy open the padlock to the front door with a tire iron, and they ran away when I limped over from the rectory. I wished I could have caught one of them and had a discussion with him, helped him channel his energies into something more useful, such as the boys’ baseball team I coached in the Rotary league. It consisted of misfits and orphans, the shunned and unwanted. But this gang of kids was too fast for a one-legged priest.
“Hey, Father,” the same boy said from his hiding place in the stadium across the street. “You need me to hear your confession, Father?”
It was just past 9:00 p.m. when I got back to the house, sweat rolling down my cheeks from one minute of exertion. That’s all it took on a sultry June night. Manuel was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, like the first time. After reassuring him there was nothing to fear, I dialed 911. I didn’t want to bother the cops, but I had no choice. The kids had tried to enter the church. The church belonged to everyone, but its safekeeping was my responsibility.
This time it didn’t take the cops ten minutes to get there. It took them twenty.
“Doesn’t look serious, Father,” Mr. Clean said as we studied the old wooden door to the church.
“See the dent here?” I said, pointing to a welt in the church’s door. “That’s where they pushed off with the tire iron.”
Pencil Mustache tilted his head at me. “Just kids, Father. You actually saw them, though. Like, with your own eyes. Right, Father?”
“Yes, Officer. I saw them. I may have only one arm and one leg, but I still have vision in both eyes.”
Sirens sounded in the distance. The radios attached to their belts squawked. One of them answered the call, barked a clipped response into the microphone, and nodded at his partner. “We’ll write it up, Father,” Mr. Clean said.
“Yeah. And we’ll drive around and take a look for you,” Pencil Mustache added.
“Yeah, Father. We’ll take a look.”
They rushed back into their cruiser and peeled out of the driveway, lights flashing and siren wailing. They took off toward the center of town, away from the stadium. Understandably, once again, there was no time to drive around, no time to take a look.
The day the killers came for Maria, I was driving back home from the hospital when I spotted Manuel huddled with two older teens along the far side of the stadium. The teens were more than a foot taller than Manuel. They wore inscrutable expressions, knapsacks, and black bandannas wrapped around their foreheads like headbands. I had to swerve away from a telephone pole at the last second to avoid a head-on collision when I remembered I was driving a car.
When Manuel got home, I went to his room and asked him if he felt like a game of catch. He didn’t answer exactly. Instead, he shrugged, grabbed his glove, and shuffled out the door with his head hanging.
Since losing my right arm, I have become more proficient at throwing with my left, though my pitching wouldn’t remind pro scouts of Goose Gossage’s anymore. My prosthesis is a trans-humeral one, commonly known as an AE because it replaces the arm above the elbow. Both the hand and the arm are myoelectric, meaning a battery-powered device converts the electric signals of my muscles above the arm into movements of the prosthesis. It offers the strongest grip of any type of prosthetic; that’s the upside. The downside is the time lag between my muscles signaling a movement and my replacement parts reacting. Consequently, some of Manuel’s throws sailed past me even though they were within my reach. Although I saw the ball coming, I was a second slow when I tried to catch it.
After half an hour, we were both drenched and went back inside. There is no air-conditioning in the rectory and it doesn’t cool down until midnight, at which point the attic fan finally begins to help. The kitchen seemed hotter than the yard. I poured each of us a tall glass of lemonade from the pitcher that Maria had fixed that morning and asked Manuel to sit down for a moment.
A Catholic priest must be a teacher. He helps his parishioners understand the Church and deal with conflicts and adversity. I am less comfortable with my role as Manuel’s teacher because a great teacher should fully comprehend his student’s life. Maria’s mother told me that Manuel had been hiding in a closet and witnessed his father’s murder. Since I can’t truly comprehend what the boy has been through, I’m uncertain if I can establish an authentic bond with him.
He guzzled half the glass and gasped for air when he was done. Sweat trickled down his cheeks. His lungs heaved gently. I took a big swig of lemonade myself to celebrate seeing him diverted from his recent realities.
“When I was driving home, I saw you walking from school with those two boys,” I said.
He choked on air.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. “I just want you to understand two things. Those bandannas they were wearing around their heads? That’s the fashion accessory of choice for members of the Aztec Rulers. You know who the Aztec Rulers are?”
Manuel shook his head, but his eyes flickered in a way that told me he was lying.
“They’re an international gang that specializes in drugs and illegal-weapons distribution. You hear what I’m saying, right? Drugs and illegal weapons.”
He acknowledged me with a slight nod.
“Good. I’m telling you this just to make sure you understand that they may or may not be who they appear to be. But whether or not they’re Aztecs, they are welcome here. Everyone is welcome here. Especially friends of yours. Okay?”
He finished his lemonade. As he stood there with the glass tipped to his mouth, I thought there was something different about him, but I couldn’t tell if it was his physical appearance, his carriage, or just my imagination.
That evening I listened to confessions after Mass, as was customary on Friday nights during the summer. I heard seven in a row, and then I waited fifteen minutes to make sure there weren’t any stragglers, engrossing myself in a series of obscure prayers for wayward souls written by Saint Ignatius of Constantinople. I was drifting on a parallel plane of consciousness, meditating on missing and lost parishioners, when
the kneeling bench creaked on the other side of the confessional screen.
At first, the person didn’t say anything. English and Spanish are spoken in equal measure in my parish, so I usually have to guess which language to use to break the silence in cases like this. Now, however, there was no guesswork involved. They say a priest’s chastity increases his sensory strength. I’m not sure that’s true, but I smelled Maria’s rose perfume as soon as she arrived. The hint of lily, vanilla, and white musk gave her away.
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” I said in Spanish.
She repeated the Trinitarian formula. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” Her voice cracked with emotion.
I let a few seconds pass. “Yes?”
She could barely get the words out. “It’s been four weeks since my last confession. But my last confession was a lie.”
I let a few more seconds go by. “Why was it a lie?’
“Because I was unfaithful to my husband. I was unfaithful to my husband … with one of the men that had him killed.”
As she sobbed, I dreamed of stepping out of the confessional, lifting her in my arms, and comforting her like a man. This pleasant vision flitted in and out of my mind in a nanosecond and was usurped by the reality that a priest must be a judge. He has jurisdiction over the penitent, and the power to forgive sins.
The role of judge is my least favorite. As a priest, I relish the opportunity to help the penitent heal, but as a man, I’ve never fully forgiven myself for one particular sin, so I am insecure about sitting in judgment of others.
After absolving Maria of her sins, I waited a few more minutes to let Maria say her penance before turning off the lights and locking the church. I saw her walking to the rectory ahead of me, and as she passed under the streetlamp at the corner of the church lot, the light illuminated her figure. I couldn’t help but notice her hips gently sashaying in the fabric of her capri pants. And once again I insisted to myself that I did not think of her in the way that other men did. I did not want to touch her. I did not want to possess her. I did not love her more for having the strength to confess to her transgression.
