The Confession of Joe Cullen

by Howard Fast

  “I can’t tell you that,” the priest said gently. “I can’t even look at it that way. There’s only one way I can deal with it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What I do. If I have a soul, I must find it. Do you want a piece of orange?”

  Cullen took the offered orange segment and said, “Father, I met you only twenty-four hours ago, and you already got me more confused than I ever been.”

  “It’s time, isn’t it?”

  “Time for what?”

  “Time to confuse you. Look at it, Joe. You kill, and you work it out. Everyone else is doing it, and if you don’t do it, someone else will. You’re following orders. You’re serving your country. Clean and simple and direct. No confusion. You take a job to bring guns into this place of agony, and what the guns will do doesn’t trouble you, because if you don’t take the job of flying them down, another will, so what’s the difference? And the same goes for the cocaine you take back, and that’s all right because up in Texas at the other end are the fat cats who have always run things, and you know that’s the way it’s always been, and there’s a touch of CIA and army, so you figure it’s no skin off your back if these wealthy and powerful characters want to run dope into the United States, and that’s simple too. So if I confuse you, I have to say it’s high time someone did, and if you feel I put you down too much, you can take your ass out of here.”

  “Jesus, I come to you,” Cullen said. “I like you, I respect you, I bring you stuff — you know, I want to help you. Not just because you’re a priest and I’m a Catholic, but because — oh, Jesus, I don’t know how to say it, but why do you tell me to get out of here? I’m not mad. Only, sometimes I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, and I try — believe me.”

  O’Healey’s pink face crinkled. “And sometimes I don’t know what the hell I am talking about. When I gave my first sermon, I chose this same question — in Catholic thinking, it has the formal name of ‘false conscience.’ That means rationalization, the art of working something wrong through your mind until it comes out right. The act of doing a wrong or evil thing and then rationalizing it into its opposite. This was always at the bottom of my thinking — I suppose part of what brought me to the priesthood — and I built it into that first sermon with all the enraged righteousness of an earnest young man who discovers that nothing in the world bears much resemblance to what he had been taught and read. Fortunately, God was good to me and when I delivered the sermon I was in such stark terror that only a whisper emerged from my lips and no one heard it. I am still a righteous type, and I light into a guy like you for no good reason. I like you, Joe, and I pray for you, so forgive me.”

  Cullen shook his head. For some reason he could not understand, there were tears in his eyes.

  “Shall we split a can of sardines?” the priest asked.

  “Do you know what I forgot?” Cullen asked excitedly. “I don’t have a brain in my head. I forgot the Coke. They got a cooler up there in the executive shack and maybe a hundred bottles of Coca-Cola in it. We’re sitting here and both of us sweating, and I forget the Coke.”

  “Hold on,” O’Healey cried as Cullen bolted out of the shack into the blazing sunlight, but Cullen, moving faster than anyone ever moved at that airstrip, was off and running, and a minute or two later he returned with two bottles of Coca-Cola clenched in the fingers of each hand. He was pouring sweat as he put down the bottles.

  Wiping his face with a handkerchief, Cullen then opened a bottle for each of them, took a long drink, and lit a cigarette. “Smoke, Padre?” he asked, offering the pack to the priest.

  “Padre. I like that. That’s what the campesinos call me. It comes easier than ‘Father,’ trippingly on the tongue, as Shakespeare put it. Ah, Joe, Spanish is a lovely language, music in words. It makes talk a pleasure. No, I don’t smoke. It was a pack a day for years, until I came down here. But you don’t find tobacco in the hills, so I kicked it. Not easy, not easy at all.”

  “Someday I’ll quit, but not now,” Cullen said, taking a long drag. “Right now I feel too good, and if I had my wife, Frannie, here for just an hour, I wouldn’t ask for more — but only for an hour, because after an hour we hate each other. Ah, but I shouldn’t be talking like that in front of a priest.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, you know—”

  “What do I know, Joseph Cullen? Not a devil of a lot more than you do. Oh, maybe a feeling for God that you have yet to encounter. You don’t think you believe in God, do you?”

  “No, Padre.”

  “Then what do you do with the wonder, Joe?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The wonder, the mystery? Have you never felt that moment when things come together and it explodes in your mind with the sheer beauty of it?”

  Cullen thought about it and then said that he felt pretty good right at this moment.

  “Not exactly what I mean.”

  “No, I guess not,” Cullen agreed. “You know, Padre — you don’t mind I keep calling you Padre?”

  “I told you, Joe. I meant it.”

  “Yeah — well, what I meant, I mean what I’m trying to say is that I never had this kind of a conversation with a priest before, I mean not in confession but just sitting like this and talking. You know, with a chaplain, well, you don’t go to the chaplain, and anyway I hated the bastards, if you’ll forgive me, and I’d see them doing their absolution thing when maybe there wasn’t even a head in the body bag, and even if there was a head, you couldn’t be sure whose body or legs were in there with it — oh, Jesus Christ, I’m really being stupid.”

  “No. You’re being honest.”

  “I shouldn’t say this to you, but I don’t mean you, Padre. I mean—”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Anyway, I think you’re the first person in my life I ever talked to about this kind of thing. I mean, God — you know, and then I dump on priests—”

  “Go on,” O’Healey said. “I’m not putting up any defense of priests. I’ve seen some cold and heartless bastards who walk around in black nightshirts and I’ve seen others too brainless to know what was going on in the world, and there are all kinds, so say your piece. I’m curious. I’m interested.” He smiled and nodded at Cullen, for all the world a beardless, redheaded Santa Claus, his pink cheeks a bit puffed, his tiny nose peeling and pink, his bright blue eyes in nests of wrinkled flesh.

  This was the second time Cullen had talked with Father O’Healey, and he was afraid that he would say something that would cause the priest to tell him to go away and stay away. Certainly, O’Healey had pitted his life and beliefs in a struggle against men like Cullen and Oscar Kovach, who represented, at least in part, the force that was pouring a stream of weapons into Central America, who were supporting the demented military dictators in their slaughter of peasants who struggled against them and of peasants who were suspected of struggling against them and of unnumbered women and children who happened to be in the line of fire or who might be witness to what had happened. Cullen knew this, and his first approach to O’Healey, the day before, had been very tentative. O’Healey, however, had responded with a warmth and charm, and had captured Cullen completely. Yet Cullen, unable to forget what he stood for and what O’Healey stood for, was afraid that the priest might reject him. He didn’t want that to happen. He had discovered something in O’Healey that he had never touched before. The priest had turned him inward and with almost magic simplicity had broken through a lifelong resistance to the contemplation of his inner being.

  It all burst out now — or imploded, restoring a jumble of memories and happenings that had been squeezed out of his consciousness, a father who beat him until one day Cullen had grabbed him and whispered, “Touch me again and I’ll kill you,” a mother who was an alcoholic, a childhood of pain and sorrow during which he built a shield of Irish macho and fought with everything and anyone who came his way. It came back now, and the middle-aged man tried to ha
ndle it.

  He clung to O’Healey. Don’t chase me away, Padre, don’t put me down as an animal. I need something desperately, and I don’t know what I need.

  “What you said before …?” He took the last bit of Coca-Cola. “I’ll open another bottle for you.”

  “No. I’ve had enough for now. Open another bottle for yourself, Joe.” Father O’Healey watched Cullen thoughtfully while the pilot drained the Coke in a single long swallow. He was intrigued by the big pilot. He sensed the inner struggles of a man bludgeoned by contradictions, faced with inner antagonists he could give no expression to. Cullen was a simple man who was complex beyond belief, which was not a new thing for the priest. He also liked Cullen.

  “What you said before …?”

  “Forget what I said before. Nothing I say is very important.”

  “No, sir. What you say is important and you said something about the mystery exploding in your mind.”

  “Something like that — yes.”

  “Because I want to understand you. I think it happened to me once,” Cullen said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It was the first time I ever slept with a woman. It was a girl in high school. I really liked her. I guess I liked her as much as I ever liked a girl. But how could I feel that thing if it was a sin?”

  “Perhaps it wasn’t a sin.”

  “Anyway, I don’t believe in sin,” Cullen said. “When I think of the stuff we did in Nam, I’d have to be a fucken idiot to believe in sin — I’m sorry. I talk and I don’t think. God’s going to put me down because I miss mass for a month, and then he claps his hands when I blow the head off some twelve-year-old VC with a gun in his hands. I’m sorry, God, those are my orders, and can I still go to heaven? Bullshit, bullshit.”

  O’Healey nodded. “That’s a sorry picture you paint. I get uneasy when I talk about God, because I don’t know one damn thing about God and I don’t think anyone else does either. But the way I tried to explain it before — I sense something inside of me. I know what you mean, sleeping with that girl.”

  “How do you know if you can’t sleep with a girl?”

  O’Healey shrugged. “I can sleep with a woman. I have. I’m celibate, not virginal. I’m not the best priest in the world. Like you, I’ve seen things so terrible, I can find my solace only in the arms of a woman. I’m not like the priests up north in our country, and I don’t fault them, because they must do what they must do and I must do what I must do.” He lifted a foot. “I wear these sandals, and sometimes I’m barefoot, and I’ve given away my cassock half a dozen times, and I say that without pride and I hope with some humility — and where my parish is, sometimes in one part of the hills and sometimes in another, I can go for days without food, but I must not show hunger.”

  “But you’re going home now, and it’s over.”

  “If they send me back to the States, it’s only a short interruption. I’ll be back here.”

  But even then, it occurred to Cullen that the priest would never go home and he’d never come back, because they’d kill him. Almost desperately, he asked the priest, “But why do you do it?”

  “Ah, why? There’s a question, isn’t it?”

  “Are you sent here? I can’t believe the church would assign you here.”

  “Yes, an assignment. I came for a while, and then I stayed. You really want to know why?”

  Cullen nodded.

  “Well, two reasons. Number one: happiness. I believe that God created us to be happy. I was never very happy. We were the poorest of poor Irish, and maybe you know as well as I do how that feels. My father died when I was a kid, my mother worked her hands to the bone, and I went to the seminary because it made her happy. It didn’t make me happy, and being a priest didn’t make me happy, and I never felt that I was a priest. You know when I became a priest?”

  Cullen shook his head.

  “Down here — out there in the hills, when I gave absolution to a three-year-old child who died because we didn’t have a bottle of penicillin tablets that would cost five dollars in San Francisco, and I gave this little girl absolution and I turned my face up to God and cursed Him, and that day I became a priest; and this is something I never talked about to any other soul — and I’m laying it on you, Cullen, because behind that dumb Irish face of yours, I see something, or maybe only when you smile. I’m here because I found happiness here, and I’m here because I found God here.”

  In college, Cullen had taken a course in astronomy. It was what was called at the time a crap course, which meant you could slide through it without opening a book. It consisted of a series of lectures, two seminars, and no tests. But if it was a throwaway course, it nevertheless turned out to be one of the most interesting parts of his education, and the slides that accompanied the lectures were fascinating.

  It was an hour before midnight here in these Honduran hills, and nighttime had tempered the bitter heat of day. Cullen sat on a bench in front of the tent he slept in, an army issue, and stared at the brilliant canopy of stars and remembered his course in astronomy, and brooded over the immeasurable distances that the heavens revealed from here, the earth, the tiny speck of dust on the outer edge of a minor galaxy. He possessed a deep, subconscious love-hate connection with the Catholic church. Cullen was neither an intellectual nor an uneducated mental boor; somewhere between the two, he nevertheless lacked the training that might have led him around the symbols of the church to some inner truth. When he looked at the heavens and considered the presumption of a Pope who declared himself the vicar of Christ and the spokesman for God, he could not help snorting in anger, and when he recalled Vietnam, he reinforced his belief that a god who put up with this demented slaughter deserved to be put in a straitjacket and locked up forever. If he had been trained or educated by the Jesuits, he might have reasoned his way Out of this hole.

  When he gazed at the star-sprinkled sky like this, he would feel a cold chill take over his body, the vastness reducing his own ego to insignificance. He would feel himself shrink and vanish, himself and all about him meaningless and hopeless.

  Oscar Kovach came out of the tent, joined him on the bench, and offered him a cigarette. Cullen lit up and took a deep drag. Kovach said, “I swiped a bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of the executive shack. You want to have a few swallows?”

  “Not right this minute.”

  “You been in that shack?” Kovach asked him.

  “I been there.”

  “They got everything. They got two cases of champagne, and not just champagne but Dom Perignon, would you believe it, and a case of Jack Daniel’s and a case of Haig and Haig, the Pinch Bottle, no less, and just about anything else you want to mention, and these monkeys take what they want, the officer shit I mean. They cut the balls off one of those militia mothers if he even set foot inside.”

  Cullen nodded. “I brought some sardines and oranges to Father O’Healey. They don’t seem to mind what I take.”

  “We’re big shit. We come in and out of here on the big birds. They better damn well mind their ABCs with us. You been spending a lot of time with that priest.”

  “I like him. He’s a good guy. You ought to talk to him.”

  “No way. I hate priests. They scare me.”

  “You’re a Catholic, Kovach, aren’t you?”

  “That’s why they scare the hell out of me. I haven’t been to confession in twenty years, and now I don’t have the guts to have someone point out the road to hell. Anyway, do you ever think about getting laid? I mean right here. Some of these Indian chicks are gorgeous, specially the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, and they are built. Cullen, they are built, and there’s a shower on the other side of the supply shed where you can wash them down, and you lay a dollar on them and they do it. You name it and they do it.”

  “You’re an animal, Kovach,” Cullen said sourly. “I got a daughter. I haven’t seen her since Frannie and I split up, but she’s my daughter.”

  “OK, don’t get excite
d.”

  “I ain’t excited. You’ll know it when I get excited.” Cullen rose and walked off into the night. He detested Kovach. Ten, fifteen years ago, he would have provoked the other man, and then decked him, but brawling was in his past. He didn’t do it anymore; he had no taste for it.

  The moon was up, three-quarters full, and it cast a silvery glow on the airstrip, and that and the starlight made it possible to walk at this late hour without stumbling over objects. Cullen found himself at the shed where the priest was kept. The guard was asleep. A sleeping guard, found by one of the officers, would be beaten half to death. Cullen shook him awake.

  “Volvi a hacerlo,” the guard moaned.

  “Look, none of my business. My lips are sealed,” Cullen managed in bad Spanish. The guard was no more than seventeen, small and frail. Cullen patted his shoulder and went into the shed. A single candle burned, and Father O’Healey was on his knees in prayer.

  Cullen sat down on a packing case and waited. After a few minutes, the priest stretched his arms and climbed to his feet. “I’m not sure,” he said, not facing Cullen yet aware of his presence, “that kneeling is the best mode for prayer. I have an old aunt, past eighty, who still fusses with her tiny garden on her knees, and she tells me it’s a result of practice with prayer, but the way I feel, in ten years it will be a miracle if I can kneel or get to my feet after. What can I do for you, Joe?”

  “Hear my confession.”

  “Come on, Joe, come on — do you believe in God?”

  “No.”

  “Then I can’t hear a confession. What good would it do? I can’t give you absolution.”

  “All I want is confession.”

  “Joe, Joe, use your head. What in hell does confession mean! You’re going to tick off your sins? For what? You don’t even know what your sins are.”