The bishop says, “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.”
“Oh God have mercy!” cries Tom. He leans way over and covers his face with his hands. He drops to his knees.
The bishop grabs Tom by the arm. “Shall we go in the other room, Father?”
“No,” Tom says. “I have to confess. I’m a liar and a coward. I can’t pray anymore and I don’t have any faith. I’m a terrible priest. I’m not worthy.”
The bishop starts to say something, but then Louelly calls right out, “The Holy Ghost is here! The Holy Ghost is speaking to his servant Tom! Praise the Lord! Praise Jesus!” She leans way back in her chair and waves her arms in the air. “Wheeeee! Whoooeee! Labitibi-ta!”
The bishop drops Tom’s arm and Tom leans against him and stares at Louelly. Then Louelly is hollering Non nobis domine domine non nobis domine domine sed nomine sed nominee and the bishop says, “That’s Latin! Where did you learn Latin?” and Louelly stops dead and hushes, which I have never seen her do at anybody’s bidding once she is speaking the tongues.
“We don’t even use Latin any more,” the bishop says, like he can’t figure out where he is.
Louelly says, “I speak whatever the Spirit gives me to speak. And I am a Holy Roller, but I fellowship with anybody the Lord gives me to fellowship with, even a preacher that wears a quilt.”
“I’m pleased to hear it,” the bishop says. Then he looks at Tom. “Father, I’m totally confused. I allowed you to come here because I thought you felt called. That’s what you told me and that’s what the Jesuits told me. Then when you picked me up in Justice you told me you were failing in your mission. But we arrive and I find—” he waves his arm “—this.”
Tom speaks real quiet. “I lied. I lied to my provincial and I lied the you. I lied to my friends here.” He looks at Jackie. “I want to go back to Honduras. It’s more home than here. But I’m scared. I don’t have the strength for it.”
The bishop puts his hands together and turns his back to us like he is praying what to do. He walks to the window and looks out. Then he says, “Hassel, would you read from the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians?”
When I stand up to read I see Jackie has gone out on the front porch and Dillon has followed her. The screen door slams shut. I read, “ ‘Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profits me nothing.’ ”
Then the bishop says, “I think we should continue with the Mass. Father Kolwiecki, you have confessed and are absolved. We’ll talk more about this later. You should feel free to take communion and so should anyone here who’s been baptized. This is just what the Mass is for.”
It is real interesting, that Mass. It does seem holy, the way that wine burns your throat when you swallow. After it is over, the bishop takes Tom off to the next room to pray. When everyone else leaves I sit on the couch and listen. I can’t make out their words but it is the same thing over and over, like when the Holiness speak in tongues only low and soothing. I get down on my knees and shut my eyes and ask the Lord to keep Tom safe.
JACKIE
I didn’t feel like going home so I went to Dillon’s trailer, threw myself full length on the couch, and cried myself out. Dillon sat in a chair across the room and watched. When I was quiet, he said, “Go talk to him.”
“No,” I said. “He doesn’t want me. I don’t mean a thing to him.”
“Why did he come back here? He didn’t come back for Hassel or for me.”
I rested my head on my arm. “It looks like he came back to hide.”
“He could have hid anywhere,” Dillon said, “but he picked here.”
“He wants to go back to Honduras,” I said. “You heard him. He wants to go back.”
I thought of all the Hondurans he knew, people I would never meet, whose lives he’d shared more closely than mine. I hated them. I turned my face away, shut my eyes, and pretended to nap, nursing my anger. After while, I did drift off to sleep. The telephone rang and I sat up with a start. It was almost four-thirty. Dillon was standing by the door with the phone in his hand. He held it out and said, “For you.”
I spoke into the receiver.
“I had to drive the bishop to the motel in Justice.” Tom’s voice was quiet. “Then I came back and did some thinking. I need to talk to you. Can you come to the house now? Please?”
I said, “Are you drinking? I don’t want to talk to you if you’re drinking.”
“No,” he said. “No drinking from now on. I want to face this with a clear head.”
“All right. I’ll come.”
I set the phone in its cradle and thought I might be the one who’d need a drink before the evening was over. Dillon stood in the kitchen and sipped a cup of coffee.
I said, “You be here all evening?”
“Wasn’t planning on going no place.”
“Good. I may need a shoulder to cry on again.”
“You going over there?”
“Yes. I think he wants to say goodbye, probably for good.”
“Go on,” Dillon said. He followed me to the front door and opened it. “But don’t you go afraid. And don’t you get to be an old woman and wish you’d said or done something you never had the nerve to.”
“Dillon, don’t expect—”
He shut the door in my face. I turned away, blinking back frustrated tears, and walked to Tom’s house. He was sitting on the front porch steps and when he saw me coming he stood and held the door open, then followed me inside. The room seemed empty after the morning’s crowd, the metal chairs folded and stacked against the wall, the bread and wine gone. I sat on the edge of the couch and Tom stood in the center of the room with one hand on his forehead.
“I’m sorry I lied to you,” he said. “I want you to know it’s nothing to do with you. I’ve lied to everyone.”
“I’m not mad about that,” I said. “I just want to understand.”
He started to pace. “The first lie was to the Jesuits. After I’d been back in the States a little while, they started making inquiries. The Honduran bishops aren’t pleased with what the Jesuits are doing there, but most of them want to keep some kind of relationship. I won’t go into all the church politics, but the provincial told me they’d pulled some strings and I could go back if I wanted to. I said no. I said I felt called to come back to West Virginia.”
“And you didn’t.”
“No. I love this place. I love it a lot. But it’s not where I’m supposed to be now. I can’t explain how I felt in Honduras, but it was just right, even when things were tough. It’s a lot like here, you know. They’ve got mountains that have been stripped for their mahogany trees so they have mud slides and the land looks torn up and beaten. And the people, they need so much.”
“I see.”
He sat on the couch beside me. “I lied to you second. I told you the bishops wouldn’t let me back in Honduras. The only person I told any kind of truth to was Hassel. I told him I’m a coward, and that’s true.”
“Tom, you should be scared. You could get killed.”
He started talking again like I hadn’t said a word. “The third lie was to the bishop. Actually it wasn’t really a lie, it was a setup. It’s like I wanted to be a fraud and a failure here, so I’d have no choice except to face up to Honduras. I’ve been drinking and feeling sorry for myself. I haven’t done much of anything for anybody and I haven’t invited people to Mass. I didn’t tell the bishop any of that until he came down. I figured he’d be pissed and call my provincial and tell him to pull me the hell out of here.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I didn’t figure on Hassel recruiting a whole damn congregation, or Louella witnessing in Latin.”
“Or Jesus showing up in a kudzu tree,” I said.
“No,” he said. “God, no. It’s been looneytunes around here, hasn’t it?”
Then he started to laugh, and I started to laugh. He laid his head back against the couch and watc
hed me. I stopped laughing.
“Is that all?” I said.
He looked quickly at the ceiling, chewed on his lower lip. I couldn’t tell if he was thinking or about to cry.
“No,” he whispered, “there’s more. In Honduras they tortured me. They—
He turned his face away.
I reached out and touched his hand. He didn’t pull back. I turned his hand over and laid the soft flesh of my palm against his. He straightened his fingers and laced them through mine. His eyes were shut and tears slipped down his cheeks.
“For a while they beat me,” he said. “They took off my shirt and burned me with lit cigarettes and cut me with a razor. They held my head under water until I almost passed out. And the last thing was they”—he took a deep breath—“they pulled down my pants and they hooked a wire from a battery to me—to my testicles—and they shocked me. They only did it once. The pain was so awful and I screamed. They laughed. They said, ‘See father, we can make you a eunuch if we want to. We can preserve your vows for you, we can keep you from sin.’
“They stopped after that. For a while I was numb there, then the feeling came back. But they talked to me in the jeep on the way to the airport. They said, “Come back here, Father, and we’ll poke out your eyes. Come back and we’ll cut off your dick.’ ”
“Oh God, Tom.”
“When they were torturing me I didn’t pray. I didn’t think about the Church. I thought about you, Jackie. You’re what I held onto. I saw you just as clear, and I tried to talk to you. Once I even called out your name.”
He leaned close suddenly and pulled me to him, put his mouth on mine. His lips were dry. He held me so tight it was hard to breathe. Then he opened my mouth with his tongue. He kissed my ear, my neck, moved to my mouth again.
“I need you,” he said. “I need you so much.” He ran his fingers through my hair. “I took a vow of celibacy. God knows I’ve hated it, but I’ve never broken it. I take vows seriously. But I can’t do what I have to do without a touch of human kindness. I can’t be a priest without breaking that vow at least this once. Do you understand what I’m asking? I’m asking more than I have a right to ask you. I’m asking you to send me back to Honduras.”
“You’re asking me to send you back loved,” I said.
His face was close to mine, searching. “Yes. Are you strong enough for that?”
For answer I unbuttoned his shirt, slipped my arms inside, and stroked the flesh of his back. His fingers tightened on my arm. I pulled his shirt off his shoulders, slid down his chest, and tickled a nipple with the tip of my tongue.
He lay back against the couch and pulled me with him, opened my blouse. I leaned over and kissed him and his hands moved down my front.
He said, “You don’t wear a bra?”
“No, silly. It’s too hot in the summer. Are you disappointed there isn’t one to take off?”
He smiled and shook his head, touched one breast as though he were studying it. Then he took it in his mouth and I arched my back and gave my body up to the pleasure of him. He pulled down my shorts even as I unzipped his jeans, but before I could touch him, he turned me so I lay full length on the couch. He ran his hands over my body and his mouth followed his hands.
Then he stopped, stood, and turned his back to me. I was afraid he would say, “No, I’ve changed my mind, you’re ugly, this is wrong.” Instead he took off his jeans. His skin was pale orange in the evening light.
“When they were hurting me, I wanted so much for you to touch me. I wanted you to touch every place they did.”
He dropped the jeans and turned. I took his wrist and pulled him to me. When he lay still I explored every inch of him, found the small round spots across his shoulders where he’d been burned, stroked three long white slash marks on his abdomen, then traced them with the tip of my tongue. He lay with his eyes shut and his arms flung above his head. I held his erect penis, nuzzled it against my cheek, combed the fine fur of hair at his groin, and gently explored until I found the single thick scar across the loose skin. I leaned close and covered the scar with kisses.
He pulled me back to his chest and our eyes held. His were dark and flecked with gray light.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I should thank you. You’re so beautiful.”
He smiled, and his hand moved across my thigh, between my legs. He kissed my neck, whispered, “This is for you now.” Later he moved on top of me and we slid together, bodies slick with sweat, and began to rock gently. We moved more and more quickly until I rose and moaned and fell back. Tom held on longer, an ecstatic loath to reenter the world, then he cried out and I held him until he came to himself at last.
I spent the night in his bed. The sheets bore his scent, and I stayed awake as long as I could, touching him, sniffing, tasting. In the morning we sat naked in the middle of the living room floor, surrounded by pillows, sipped hot tea, and ate blueberry muffins. Then we lay close again and loved, then tickled one another with the tips of our fingers until he stopped and held his hand against my cheek.
“How can I leave this?” he said.
I put my hand on his. “You love Honduras and you love being a priest,” I said. “And that’s how you’ll leave.” I started to smile to show that was okay, but my throat tightened and I hid my face against his neck.
“You’ve got to go on and live your life,” he said. “No holding back with someone else because of me.”
“No,” I whispered.
“I’ll be fine. I’ll write you this time. And I’ll be back, I promise. They give us leaves sometimes.”
I said, “We won’t be able to do this again.”
“No,” he agreed. “This time will have to be enough.”
“Will you confess what we’ve done, as a sin?”
“I’ll confess the breaking of my vows,” he said. “But what we’ve done was no sin. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”
He stayed another week, making arrangements for the house and saying goodbye. He gave his car to Ethel Day, who was laid off from the mine. We loaded his couch in the back of Dillon’s truck and took it to my house. Tom left with only a shoulder bag of clothes and a few books.
We walked to my car at Winco bottom, passed beneath Kudzu Jesus, which had grown so fast it resembled nothing at all. Then I drove Tom to Charleston to catch his plane. We sat side by side on plastic chairs and held hands. When the flight was announced, Tom shouldered his suitcase and turned to me.
“We’re not done yet,” he said.
He held my face in both hands and kissed me. Then he walked up the carpeted tunnel and disappeared.
GOD’S BONES 1987
JACKIE, 1987
Dillon was sifting through a box his mother left him when she died, a cardboard box with white roses on the lid and tied up with a pink ribbon. Inside were journals she had kept, family letters, newspaper clippings brown and brittle as wood shavings. Dillon was taking notes and trying to write the story of his mother and father. Sometimes he brought his work to Felco for me to edit. He was a blunt writer, with no gift for subtlety or the sinuous twists of storytelling, but he was surprisingly open to criticism. He sat meekly at my kitchen table, hands in his lap and coffee cup in front of him, while I marked pages with a red pen.
Once he said, “You ought to write this. You’re better than I am.”
“No,” I said, “it’s your story.”
“Then what about your own stories? I recall when you was a youngun, you was bound you would write some day.”
“I do write,” I said. “I write every day for a living.”
“That’s different,” he said. “There’s too many rules with a newspaper. I’d like to see you cut loose.”
One winter’s evening I was eating warmed over pizza and watching TV when he knocked on the door. I thought he had come to show me more writing, but he held a letter typed on American Coal Company stationery.
“It’s from Arthur Lee,” he said. �
�He’s finally got his revenge.”
I offered him a slice of pizza, but he waved it away and gave me the letter. It informed us that American Coal had purchased the mineral rights to the Homeplace from the Imperial Land Company and had begun to strip the mountain. The cemetery would soon be covered by a hollow fill and the graves were to be moved at a date to be set at the family’s convenience, but no later than March 1, 1987. Signed Arthur Lee Sizemore, Superintendent of Mining Operations.
“You go there to tend the graves,” I said. “Did you know they were stripping?”
He shook his head. “Last I was there was September. They must have been back up on the mountain then. I didn’t even see the permit notice because they run it in a Kentucky newspaper. Come this time next year, that cemetery and most of the Homeplace will be under five hundred foot of rock. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”
“There must be something,” I said, but I knew there wasn’t.
Dillon rocked back and forth on the chair, holding his knees. “You know, in the old days when they stripped a cemetery, they just scattered the bones. Didn’t tell the family, didn’t think nothing of it.”
“I reckon things are more civilized now,” I said.
“My daddy and mommy wouldn’t have stood for this.”
“They couldn’t have done anything if they were alive,” I said. “They’d be as powerless as you and me.”
“What are you saying? Are you saying this don’t bother you?”
“It bothers me,” I said. “I’ll write an editorial about it, and I’ll call whoever is in charge of strip mines in Kentucky, and people will read the editorial and say isn’t that too bad, and the Commonwealth of Kentucky will send me a letter saying the permit is in order and referring me to some book of regulations, and that will be that.”
He wouldn’t look at me, took a cigarette out of his pocket.
“I thought you gave up smoking,” I said. “You promised you would if I came home.”
He paused, then found a lighter and flicked it. “What do you care?” he said.
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