by K M Stross
“‘What are you planning on doing with the house?’ he asked.
“I dried my eyes with the sleeve of my suit coat, staring over the red-carpeted pulpit so I wouldn’t have to face this man I had just cried in front of. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. She left everything to me.’
“‘Have you applied to college?’
“‘A few.’
“‘Did you get in anywhere?’
“‘A few.’ It was a lie—I had gotten into a technical college in northern Wisconsin, and that was it. I had good grades, but so did everyone else in my class. Everyone was anxious to get the hell out of that town the moment they could.
“He asked me what my summer plans were and I told him I didn’t know. Toward the end of high school, I had been working summers at the A&W, but the idea of spending another summer dragging my feet around a grill never really crossed my mind. Money itself wasn’t an immediate worry. Wherever I decided to go to college, I had enough money thanks to the inheritance. My grandmother had never been wealthy, but she had her property, and some retirement left.
“‘I need the flower beds around the church weeded,’ Father Tony said. ‘And then I need the trim around the stained-glass windows repainted. Do you have any painting experience?’
“I thought about it, then nodded. I’d painted my grandma’s porch last spring.
“Father Tony looked me in the eyes. ‘The church could use some fixing up too. It’s not every day I get a competent volunteer to help me with the chores. Fred Dansky says he’ll help, but… he has a tendency to be hungover until late afternoon. And Jill Carroll, well, you know.’
“I laughed, surprised that Father Tony actually knew about Jill Carroll’s shoplifting tendencies we thought was only common knowledge for those working at the A&W. And Fred Dansky was just a drunk. A guy who tried all the time to do good things, but usually a case of beer got in the way. Lots of older guys in town drank and either drove around on snowmobiles or drove around on ATV’s.
“I agreed to help him, and the very next day, I was kneeling on the bed of tulips under the stained-glass window of Mary Magdalene on the south side of the chapel, pulling the scattered blades of grass from between each flower.
“Father Tony made me work. As soon as I got there every morning, he had a list of things to do. It kept my mind off of everything else, and I never felt stressed, not once. I worked it all out of my system during the day, and when I got home at night, there was no time to feel sorry for myself or think about my grandmother because my eyes would already begin to shut before I could even reach my bed.
“He never tried to connect with me, which is probably why he succeeded. There were never any questions about my parents or my grandmother, about how I was coping or what I had decided for the fall or anything else. When he had a free moment, he talked about sports, people in the town, anything that came to his mind. His therapy was to keep me busy, exactly what I needed.
“In September, I made the decision to stay in town.
“‘College can wait,’ I told Father Tony. ‘At least for now.’
Father Tony relaxed in his chair, tapping his pen on his desk. He watched me and kept his dark green eyes right on mine. When he frowned, the space between his eyebrows wrinkled into a Z-shape.
“‘A year,’ I continued. ‘Just to help out a while longer around here. I don’t really have any expenses, and my inheritance can collect interest for another year.’
“He continued tapping the pen on his desk. I think I wanted him to respond, to tell me what to do—it didn’t matter what, exactly. He could have told me to go off to college or to defer for a year, and either way, I would have been relieved just to let him make the decision. He just kept tapping his pen.
“In September of that year, the church’s piano player passed away. Gil Rosenthorpe had been playing the organ during every service for twelve years up until that point, and I managed to fill in as best I could with my three years of piano experience. My grandma had made me learn piano because she thought everyone should know one musical instrument. It kept me involved in the services. Usually, I just sat and followed along, not really caring one way or the other. But now I had to listen. I had to listen to Father Tony’s sermons, listen for cues, and listen to the congregation’s voices.
“I noticed a man who started showing up regularly to the ten-thirty services, always taking a seat in the back row, always sitting alone and keeping to himself during the offering of peace. He stood out like a sore thumb because of the scar on his cheek and greasy black hair that made him look more like a trucker passing through than any regular conservative citizen of Township.”
“His name was Gabriel Morrissey. He wasn’t born in the town.”
“‘He reminds me of someone from a horror movie,’ I told Father Tony a month or so after he started showing up. We were standing outside in the cold, covering the rose garden with Styrofoam buckets before the frost could kill them all.”
“‘He’s a rather interesting fellow,’ Father Tony said.”
“I helped him cover the last rose bush with one of the larger Styrofoam cones. I asked, ‘How long has he been here? I’ve never seen him in town.’”
“Father Tony straightened his back. ‘Probably ten years, though his church dedication is new. He’s a very interesting fellow.’”
“‘Is he? I can honestly say I’ve never heard you use that description for anyone, especially not twice.’”
Father Tony laughed. ‘Gabriel works down at the stone quarry. He lives near the lake.’
“‘I know where you’re going with this,’ I said. He was avoiding eye contact, scanning the outside of the chapel for something that wasn’t there.”
“‘With what?’ he asked, smirking and fiddling with his hearing aid.”
“‘This,’ I said. ‘I know you better than you think. I don’t need a friend.’”
“Father Tony looked at me with this glimmer in his eyes, the same kind I saw when I’d been waiting for him to decide my future. ‘You don’t?’ he asked. ”
“The truth was by that point, I had almost subconsciously made a commitment to visiting at least one bar per weekend with a fake ID just to get out of the house. There weren’t many chores to do now that summer was over, giving me more free time. It always felt so empty, that hole in my heart never quite filling up no matter how I chose to waste away the dull hours between sleep and the church. Painting, writing, reading, none of it really worked. Sometimes, if I tried hard enough, I could lose myself in television for a few hours. The few friends I’d made at the A&W stand had gone off to college.
“So I drank alone, only occasionally taking in a game of darts or pool and only when I was invited by someone. I drank one town over so no one would hassle me about the fake ID. If no one bothered me, I don’t go out of my way to bother them.
“Gabriel, it turned out, was beyond reproach anyway. After every service, he left through the back doors as quickly as possible, never sticking around for the coffee and doughnuts or any of the volunteer meetings Father Tony held in the afternoon. I occasionally found myself glancing in Gabriel’s direction during the services, between the songs and sometimes during them when I had a particular chorus memorized. That way, I could be sure he wouldn’t catch me.
“Because there was something about Gabriel that forced me to look. It was almost a fascination—every time I looked at him I saw something new. His features always seemed to change, like his body couldn’t quite find its niche no matter how hard it tried. Everything but his scar. That scar, thin and running down his cheek in one unbroken line, never moved, never healed, never faded as the months dragged on and the ground began to freeze.
“In January, I started taking classes at the technical college, working toward a degree in aeronautics. I became fascinated with planes and spent the majority of my time in the hangars at the county airport. I came home infrequently, only to attend Mass on Sundays and help out in the afternoon. While I
was gone, Father Tony had grown close to Gabriel, and I’m not above saying I got a little jealous over it.
“But guess what? I was happy. I loved airplanes. I loved flight. I found a local who owned a Cessna 172S and had him take me up every time he did any crop dusting. I couldn’t get enough of it. Flying was my life.”
Cross took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
“The first symptoms came quickly before the first semester was even over. It started as small mistakes here and there, an added light or a mismatched wire. Once the summer classes started, I couldn’t hide the fact that the vision in my left eye was beginning to hinder my work. The professor noticed too, and he sat me down in his office in August, just a few weeks before the summer session would officially end.
“He told me he was going to have to fail me in two classes. His forehead was sweating from the lack of air conditioning, and my back was sticking uncomfortably to the plastic chair; the heat wave was creating short fuses all over campus.
“‘I can get through this,’ I said. ‘I went to the doctor. It’s glaucoma. I can take pills to slow it down. He says it won’t get much worse for a while. Years.’
“‘And then what?’ he asked. ‘You’ll never get a license. You’ll never get hired. I’m sorry.’ It’s funny—I can remember Father Tony’s words because of the way he made me feel. I can remember my instructor’s words for the same reason.
“‘So I’ll never fly,’ I said. ‘I can still fix planes. I know the guts of every Cessna model flying right now.’
“He leaned back in his chair. ‘You can’t work on multi-million dollar machines with an eye infection.’
“‘It’s not an eye infection!’ I screamed. I could feel the tears welling in my eyes, my heart pounding against my chest. I didn’t want to cry because I was afraid it would make me go blind forever.
“My professor shrugged. He was a fat, little middle-aged man, the type who should have been teaching gym, and at that moment I hated him more than anyone else in the world.
“Because I knew he was right.
“‘No one’s going to hire you,’ he said. ‘You know what you’re doing, but you miss a lot of things. Perfection is essential in this business.’
“I asked him what I should do, what I could do. For the first time, I had felt like I had found my place. Now it was being taken away.
“He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. He told me to find something else to do as if it were that easy. Maybe for some people, it is.
“I didn’t bother finishing out the last two weeks of the summer session. Everything I had learned, every manual I had memorized, couldn’t save me from a hands-on test in low lighting conditions. I could read through every single textbook on every engine and every wiring system of every single machine in the world, and it would be useless.
“I went to the only person I could: Father Tony. I found him outside of the church, watering the rose bed as I drove back into town. I parked, got out, and almost fell at his feet, explaining to him everything that had happened and hoping somehow he had an answer for me.
“Instead, he offered a question:
“‘What will you do now?’
“I looked up at him. He had that same look on his face that he always had: absolute stoicism. My decision was mine alone to make, and both of us knew it. I chose to join the seminary in Minneapolis, studying to become a deacon. I would turn this curse into a blessing, a sign that I had been on the wrong path and hoping against hope that I could find solace in religion, not simply use it like I did after my grandmother’s death. I wasn’t sure if I believed in God, but I did believe in the strength Father Tony gave people.
‘It wasn’t until my second year that I met up with Morrissey again. He had entered the priesthood, and we found ourselves in the precarious position of two reluctant roommates. The dormitories were a place to meet new people, where everyone could establish a support base during the more difficult times that younger priests often faced.
“He prayed before bed. He prayed when he woke up. I did neither, opting instead to spend my free time buried in automotive manuals so I could help one of the local youth clubs restore donated cars. Under the Church’s health plan, I could afford all of the best medicine for my eyes, but I didn’t trust myself to work on the cars, so I just supervised the kids. It kept me busy and out of my dorm room where Morrissey was beginning to take his studies more and more seriously.
“I don’t know how to explain things. There were times when the two of us could spend weeks on end working together, laughing, watching TV or just relaxing, as if we had been best friends since we were kids. I remember one time, a few months after we were first paired together in the dorm, we snuck off to watch Minnesota’s basketball team practice at the gym across the street and spent the entire night putting together the perfect trade that would send the Timberwolves to the NBA Finals.
“We agreed we could get a good draft pick if we’d just trade our star power forward who wasn’t really fitting in well anyway. I told him the two of us could probably put together a team that could take on the Timberwolves’ bench warmers.
“‘Who?’ he asked with a laugh. He had this abrupt sort of laugh that didn’t sound genuine. It took some time to get used to. ‘The deacons or the priests?’
“‘Both,’ I said. ‘You gotta have both. The deacons are the big guys in the paint. The priests shoot the three-pointers.’
“He laughed even harder. ‘Deacons for show, priests for dough.’
“‘Hell,’ I said. ‘The two of us could probably beat their benchwarmers, for Christ’s sake.’
“And suddenly his good mood disappeared. That was how it was. Just one slip-up, one sin, one fucking commandment broken and he would overheat. After that, he didn’t speak to me for two days. I would wake up, and he would be praying. He would be praying for me, asking for forgiveness in my name. Asking God, begging Him, for an appropriate penance I could serve in order to return to God’s grace.
“He was so afraid. Afraid of what would happen after he died.
“For Morrissey, penance became the path to redemption. He had begun a course about the saints of the Catholic Church and took comfort in the idea that even the most violent men could be redeemed in the eyes of God. He was obsessed with Saint Moses the Black, an Ethiopian who led a gang of bandits through the Nile Valley before taking refuge with monks and finding God. Saint Moses was eventually martyred after barbarians attacked his monastery.
“‘He had to die,’ Morrissey would tell me, ‘because it was his penance for all of the sins he committed before dedicating himself to God. But he was never a truly bad person.’ He had an explanation for every saint he studied, a formula for their canonization. He loved formulas, but he always seemed lost. Like he couldn’t quite figure out what to believe or how to reconcile that with other things like science and history.
“He began to reinvest his monthly allowances into chemistry, his only other passion. He told me once that it was while reading about the saints that he began to see patterns in the miracles that were performed and supposedly verified. He told me anyone could perform a miracle. It was only a matter of finding the right chemicals to perform the miracle you want. The right ingredients.
“‘Are you saying saints are frauds?’ I asked, always anxious to test his infallible theories. I’d begun to take any opportunity to get under his skin because I was so fucking sick of his righteous bullshit. It was the prayers for me that got to me. The way he’d throw me in for good measure. The way he’d suggest I pay penance for my sins and then maybe, maybe, God would take away my glaucoma. Or maybe the glaucoma was my penance.
“‘No,’ he said that day, more patient than usual. We were sitting in our dorm room, and it was an extremely cold October morning. Classes had been canceled for the day because parts of the center were without heat thanks to faulty wiring installed during the summer. I wanted to open the thermostats on the campus and dig around and find the probl
em, but I never even tried. By that point, the tunneling in my left eye was always visible, and it filled me with terror. I slept with my light on so instead of drifting off to sleep in darkness, I could see the soft pink behind my eyelids.”
“‘What I’m saying,’ Morrissey continued, ‘is that certain chemicals interact naturally with other chemicals and can produce hallucinogens that affect people or crowds in general, and it would explain a number of events in history. Take the Holy Fire, for instance.’”
“‘What’s that?’ I asked.”
Morrissey reached under his bed and produced one of his textbooks, opening it to a particular page and turning it around so I could see the photograph under his thumb. In the picture, a middle-aged man, smiling, was holding a large candle with a bright orange flame. A woman, mostly cropped out of the picture, was holding her hand over the flame without suffering any sort of visible pain.
“‘You’re saying that’s a hallucination?’ I asked.”
“‘No,’ Morrissey said, snapping the book shut in annoyance.” “I’m saying there’s an explanation for it.” He told me how you could dip a candle in white phosphorous and it would ignite when it came into contact with air, and you could delay the process with an organic solvent, and then went into the whole chemistry thing.
“‘So how does she hold her hand over the flame?’ I asked.”
Morrissey sighed. ‘That’s not the point. The point is that we can use science to examine the saints. We just have to be careful.’ His face darkened like it always did when he acknowledged any positive contribution science could make. Like it was a symbiotic disease that needed to be kept in check. I think he liked chemistry because it didn’t have to be an antagonist to God, not like evolution or planetary science.
“But I don’t know exactly why it enticed him so much. He saw some kind of connection between the saints and the miracles. He saw some kind of loophole.”
“In December of that year, we went home to help Father Tony winterize the church. The bare roses still weren’t covered up so I took care of that, then fixed up what I could around the chapel. I even risked fiddling with the wiring inside, nothing too extensive, just enough to keep everything running through another winter. And I did all right. It felt good, having my hands working on something mechanical again, but I noticed the glaucoma in my eye was hindering the quality of my work. What should have taken a day ended up taking a week, and I missed the first two days of the new semester because of it.”