Chance Damnation

by DeAnna Knippling

  “Why?”

  “For the reasons we talked about earlier. To them, I’m no shepherd, just a kid who never grew up.”

  Aloysius was surprised to hear the truth from Sebastian. He’d thought—he guessed they’d all thought—that Sebastian was too full of himself to notice how little he was respected.

  Sebastian paused for a few seconds, then said, “It was wrong of him to send me here.”

  “I told him to do it,” Father Dennis said.

  “Told him.”

  “It was the only way to disentangle you from your father, Vincent. I knew—well, let’s leave it at that. I didn’t know how far things would go.”

  “I wish—”

  Father Dennis shook his head. “I do, too.”

  Then they remembered Aloysius was there, and he didn’t get anything else from them. They drove to Jim Blackthorn’s place and sent him back to his ranch.

  Fair enough.

  Wednesday night, they met at the Fort Thompson church to organize the defense of the Duncan church the following Sunday.

  Liam was in charge.

  For a man who had managed to avoid an entire century’s worth of war and military service by fact of being either too young, too old, or essentially too ornery, Liam had the demeanor of a drill sergeant down. No, Aloysius thought, not a drill sergeant; they usually have too much common sense. A supply sergeant, that’s what the man reminded him of, a man with a lot of boxes to check rather than bullets to fire.

  The plan was to have half the men in the church and half the men in their trucks on top of a nearby hill, all ready to chase down and murder the demons, wherever they appeared.

  A recipe for disaster. The men would be firing at anything, at each other. They’d shoot up the damned church, if nothing else.

  But Father Dennis saved Aloysius from having to say anything.

  He was there with Sebastian, who sat quietly in the back of the church. Sebastian’s face was untouched, but the way he carried himself reminded Aloysius of someone who had been taken out behind the shed and beaten black and blue. And no matter what anyone did or said to him, his expression didn’t change.

  Must have been some confession.

  Liam was saying, “Now, does everyone have enough shells?”

  Father Dennis stood up and said, “This cannot continue.”

  Aloysius closed his eyes. Even with his eyes closed, he could feel the pain that overwhelmed Sebastian from a few pews behind him.

  Liam said, “Young man, shut up.”

  Father Dennis said, “I speak as the Bishop in this matter.”

  Liam said, “You aren’t the Bishop.”

  “I have his authority.”

  “Show me the ring,” Liam said.

  Father Dennis shook his head. “If you cannot take it on faith—”

  “I can’t. If you can’t show me the ring, then butt out.”

  Aloysius opened his eyes and turned around to look at his brother. Sebastian looked even more crushed than he had before.

  “As you wish,” Father Dennis said. And left it at that.

  Chapter 13

  Jerome was honor-bound to ask his father and his brothers. But it was useless, so he didn’t waste much time on it.

  He asked on Saturday afternoon while they were packing up the truck to be ready first thing in the morning. Aloysius and Theodore were lifting five-gallon buckets of water into the back while Sebastian messed around with a rope to tie down the tarp.

  “Aloysius, let me come with you.”

  “No.”

  There. He’d asked.

  “Please.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll ask Father.” It wasn’t a threat he used often.

  “He’ll say no.”

  “Then bring Celeste Marie here.”

  “No. That’s just asking for trouble.”

  Which was true. “Bring her somewhere else that isn’t her house. Anywhere.”

  Aloysius hefted the last of the buckets into the back. Jerome saw there was a place behind the wheel well where he could fit, if he laid sideways. Sebastian jerked the rope tight and tied it off, then slammed the truck bed shut. They were all looking at each other but not talking.

  Finally, Aloysius said, “No. Jim would never let her go. We’d have to kidnap her. And we need everyone for the attack.” He wasn’t talking to Jerome; he was talking to Theodore and Sebastian.

  Theodore nodded. Sebastian jerked on the rope again.

  “Just leave it be,” Aloysius told Jerome.

  “Is Father Dennis going to eat supper here?”

  Sebastian didn’t answer.

  “I’d like to have him hear my confession,” Jerome said.

  “He’ll be here,” Sebastian said.

  Theodore grabbed Jerome’s shoulder and muttered in his ear, “For what you done or what you’re going to do?”

  Jerome told Sebastian, “Don’t like telling my own brother.”

  Sebastian nodded without looking at him. The sun hadn’t set yet, but it was headed that way, and the light was a deep golden that turned him into a silhouette, along with the corrals and the apple trees in the garden. He stared west without covering his eyes. “I’ll tell Dennis.”

  At supper, as he’d threatened, he asked his father.

  “I want to go with the rest of them to the Duncan church,” he said.

  Liam slapped him on his shoulder, making his teeth rattle. “You’re too young, Jerome. You’re a good enough shot, but the grown men will run over you in the heat of things. Stay home. You’ll be old enough to sign up for the Army soon enough.”

  “I’ll wait over at the Blackthorns’.”

  Liam’s face clouded, its smooth lines turning into clenched lumps. “You stay away from that girl.”

  “It don’t matter what you think of her, Father. She’s a girl, and her dad’s a fool. Girls need to be protected.”

  He braced himself to get hit, but it didn’t come, not with Father Dennis still at the table.

  Aloysius laughed into his napkin. “What are you going to do? Shoot the demons with your bb gun?”

  “Shut up!” Jerome yelled.

  “Pew! Pew!”

  Jerome shoved back his chair and charged at Aloysius, but Theodore grabbed the back of his shirt, then wrapped an arm around his chest, and there was no moving then.

  “Stop making fun of the boy,” his father said. He was frowning, but he didn’t look angry anymore.

  “You take it back!” Jerome shouted. It was true, but it didn’t matter. Aloysius never should have said it.

  “Jerome!” Peggy snapped. “Sit down and finish your meal.”

  “No!” Jerome shoved his chair back in and ran up the stairs.

  “Jerome!”

  “Leave it be,” his father said.

  After an hour or so of snarling into his pillow and thumping his fist into his mattress, Jerome felt a light touch on his shoulder.

  He sat up in shock. When a man runs away from the table, you don’t go looking for him, not unless you were his girlfriend or something.

  It was Father Dennis. “Father Vincent—your brother—said you wanted to talk to me. To confess.”

  “I don’t gotta confess.” Jerome wiped his eyes. “I just said that so I could talk to you.”

  “What did you want to talk about?”

  Jerome stretched his face out from crying. It felt tight. He didn’t know, now that he had Father Dennis in the room with him, what he wanted to ask. “If I ask you something you don’t want to tell me about, you won’t tell Sebastian, will you?”

  “Only if it’s a confession. Otherwise I can’t make any promises.”

  “I said, I don’t gotta confess anything. I got something to ask you.”

  “Then you’ll have to take your chances.”

  Jerome nodded. “At least you didn’t lie about it. Well, what I got to know is, do they teach all the priests magic spells, or is it just Sebastian?”

  When Father Denn
is didn’t answer, Jerome said, “When we had the demon in the shed, that is, before Father killed it, Sebastian said something to the demon that was a prayer, and then he commanded the demon to speak, and it spoke and everybody understood it. But then he couldn’t shut it up.”

  Again, Father Dennis didn’t talk, but Jerome didn’t have anything else to say, so he just waited until Father Dennis said, “I don’t suppose you can promise me that you’ll keep what I have to say a secret.”

  Jerome shook his head. “I ain’t no priest, and this ain’t no confession.”

  Father Dennis scratched his head just at the edge of his bald spot, like it irritated him to be losing his hair and he wanted to get it over with. “The church doesn’t teach magic. But magic gets taught anyway.”

  “Like how to play marbles at Catechism.”

  “Like that,” Father Dennis agreed. “But more serious.”

  “You know magic then, too,” Jerome said. “All the priests do.”

  “A little. Some more than others. Your brother knows more than I do.”

  “The Bishop didn’t send you.”

  Father Dennis shook his head. “He sent me. He sent me to find out how your brother was doing, working in the same parish he attended before he became a priest. I didn’t tell him what was really going on.”

  “He knows about the magic, too,” Jerome said.

  “Yes.”

  Jerome felt his face screwing up. “I don’t understand.”

  “What don’t you understand?”

  Jerome’s eyes filled with tears and he shook his head. “I don’t want to ask any more questions.”

  Father Dennis stood up. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

  Jerome threw himself face first into his pillow, then pulled it out and put it over his head. He heard the door latch click, then yelled it into his mattress. “Why?”

  He heard a muffled response, but he couldn’t (he refused) to hear what it was.

  In the early hours before morning he felt sick, either because it was all going to go wrong or because he was just sick. He went down to the basement bathroom and cleaned himself out, as much as would come. When he was done, he felt better; no matter what happened, he wouldn’t embarrass himself, as long as it didn’t take too long. He got dressed, put on his boots, and went outside to do chores. He wasn’t worried about Aloysius and them leaving without him; nobody did anything before they did chores, and nobody else’s boots had been missing from the row, just Sebastian’s and Father Dennis’s black shoes.

  After the chickens and calves were fed, he stopped behind the truck bed, trying to work out how to get into his hidey hole and out again without anybody being able to tell.

  He went back inside to the kitchen, and packed a green canvas backpack with a can opener and six cans of beans wrapped in towels, a kitchen knife wrapped in another towel, a crinkly packet of leather needles, and heavy, black waxed thread.

  He panicked and fled when he heard someone else coming down the stairs, and didn’t get the aspirin or the rubbing alcohol like he wanted out of the bathroom.

  After another moment’s hesitation, he put the pack and the bb gun in the back of the truck, then climbed into the cab. He pulled the seat forward, then slipped down behind it and pulled it back toward him. It latched with a thunk.

  At first he couldn’t breathe, not up in his chest. After a few seconds of scrabbling for the latch, he figured out how to breathe down into his stomach.

  He checked again to make sure he could reach the latch to get out, then went back to sleep.

  Chapter 14

  Aloysius pressed down on the brakes and sighed as they squealed. He was going to have to put new brake pads in, one of these days. Probably more than that, he’d been putting it off for so long. He pushed down harder, and the truck jerked to a stop.

  He thought he heard a hiss of air from behind him, and looked over his shoulder at the tarp. Probably a bucket of water splashing around; there wasn’t enough room for any of them to tip over.

  Most of the folks getting ready for the fight had parked at church, both because it was convenient and because it would look like everyone was inside for service. It was true in a way; there were people inside, and they were there in service of a higher cause, in this case, killing demons.

  Aloysius had pulled up in front of the Blackthorn house instead, because he wasn’t sure. Well, that wasn’t true. What he was sure of was that he didn’t want to be at the church when the shooting started. Someone—not just the demons—was bound to get shot, what with some of them not paying attention to where they were shooting and Liam whipping them into a frenzy.

  What he wasn’t sure of was about that little girl.

  There was no getting around it; little girls were cute as flowers and butterflies and sunshine, and the older a man became, the more they made the world turn ‘round. But Aloysius couldn’t make himself believe that that’s all there was to it, with Jerome.

  The girl was a little strange. Not strange in the head, but strange. Aloysius wouldn’t trust her with a gun; she wouldn’t be able to keep straight how dangerous it was. But her father could send her out to pick flowers for the altar in January and she’d come back with something.

  Aloysius shook his head and got out of the truck. The farmhouse was small and tidy, a meticulous white that had been painted and repainted in spots as each imperfection came to light, making it look stippled in the sun.

  The front of the house, facing south, was open to the sun, but the other three sides were shaded with elm trees and brush, lilacs and chokecherries and spirea bushes. The grass next to the house was cut and tended, with little flower patches full of half-dead flowers drowning in mud; beyond a barbed-wire fence around the yard, the grass went wild. Everything from purple thistles and alfalfa to fuzzy pasques and hollyhocks ready to be turned into square dancers, with dozens of flowers he couldn’t name and hadn’t seen anywhere else. The grass sang with bees.

  Blackthorn’s old Ford station wagon was parked in the driveway, which was unusual. He normally parked it in the barn with a cover on it to keep off the birds. Aloysius took a deep breath and felt something lift off him.

  He walked up the path, which had been paved half with cement and half with gravel, where the cement had broken off, and knocked on the door.

  Blackthorn opened the door under his hand, almost as if he’d been about to come out anyway.

  “Mr. Jennings,” he said. “Did you need something for the church?”

  Aloysius felt his earlier moment of relief slip away. “You going somewhere?”

  “To the church,” Blackthorn said, as if Aloysius was an idiot, which might be the case.

  “You aren’t going to take Celeste Marie and leave?” Aloysius asked.

  James Blackthorn frowned. “Whatever for?”

  “It’s just something that Jerome’s been saying for the last few days. That the—” He felt like an idiot— “demons are trying to abduct her, and they won’t give up until they do.”

  Blackthorn said, “If you believe that nonsense, you’re crazy. I have another load to bring up from the church. Excuse me.”

  Aloysius stepped aside to let Blackthorn pass.

  Blackthorn shut the door behind him, then pulled out his key ring and locked the door. “Can’t be too careful, with all the gold,” he explained. “Not that I think you would take anything.”

  Aloysius said something under his breath, and Blackthorn walked past him toward the station wagon.

  Blackthorn stopped. Aloysius hesitated at the man’s front door, unsure of what he wanted to do, but knowing he wasn’t going to be able to do it with Blackthorn anywhere around. The little girl. He wanted to convince the little girl to open the door, get into the truck, and escape whatever was about to happen.

  Blackthorn cleared his throat, and Aloysius turned to go. The door grunted and the seat hissed as he slid into it. He pulled the door shut and started the engine.

  Damn it.


  Back at the church, Theodore helped him unload the water buckets as Blackthorn and Sebastian put another load of cloth and metal in the station wagon. The church was full of about half the men; the rest of them were parked over a hill, waiting to come roaring over the hill, charging into the enemy.

  If Liam hadn’t been in the middle of everything, Aloysius could have talked them into a plan with a little more sense to it, but there he was, banging on truck tires with this cane and shouting.

  “Try not to shoot the windows,” Blackthorn said.

  “It’s a gunfight,” Liam said. “What do you expect? Some of the windows aren’t going to make it.”

  Aloysius was done getting mad about it, though. He knew that his father was going to be just as cavalier with the men as he was with a few sheets of glass, and he didn’t have the strength to worry about a few sheets of melted sand anymore, no matter how long they’d been hanging in the windows of the Duncan church.

  Theodore pulled a bb gun out of the back of the truck. “Bringin’ in the heavy artillery?”

  Aloysius smiled at one of Theodore’s rare jokes. “I don’t know how that got in there. Must be Jerome’s.”

  Theodore shook his head. “That kid. You better pull around with the rest of the trucks, or it’ll get run over when the cavalry comes down the hill.”

  “I’m going to park up at Blackthorn’s,” Aloysius decided. “I’ll walk back down. I don’t want it to get shot up or run over by demon buffalo.”

  Theodore nodded. “My truck ain’t worth the walk.”

  As Aloysius drove back up to the Blackthorn place, Jim glared at him. Aloysius touched the edge of his cowboy hat to acknowledge the look. He made sure to park away from the house, away from the barn, and he didn’t go within fifty feet of either, just walked straight down the hill to the church.

  Blackthorn was still glaring at him on his way back down, with his shotgun over his shoulder and a bag of shell boxes in his left hand.

  “I don’t trust those hired hands with guns,” Aloysius explained. “I hope you don’t mind. I just got that truck a year ago.”