The Shepherd's Calculus

by C. S. Farrelly

  He took a long drag on his cigarette, the ember burning right down to the filter, flush with his fingertip. If he felt any pain, it didn’t register on his face. The smoke plumed from his mouth in a heavy exhale.

  “And then I knew how she’d done it. Be a zombie for so long, get out of bed and do stuff without even thinking about it because you can’t. If you stop to think about it, to think about anything, you can’t pretend anymore this life isn’t the piece of shit it is, you know? That this is all there is for you. Thing is”—his voice started to crack—“I know it’s kinda my fault that it happened.”

  Peter stood up in a flash. “You’re wrong, Kevin.” He didn’t mean to shout, but it came out that way. “This is absolutely not your fault. In any way.” He enunciated the words as clearly as he could. “And the fact that you think it is—you just—Jesus, you just need to know that it isn’t. Okay? It isn’t.”

  But Garrity wasn’t listening. The tears were rolling down his face now, even without blinking. They just pooled in the corners of his eyes and streamed down his face.

  “Oh, I knew that’s what you’d say. What else can you say? I mean, all the therapy books, every counselor I’ve had—they all say the same thing. It wasn’t my fault. But you only think that because you weren’t there, okay? You weren’t there!”

  He began crying openly. “You see, all I wanted was a normal place to be. A place where the dishes were put away and the bills were all paid and there was food in the house and my clothes were clean.”

  “Of course you did,” Peter tried. “What kid doesn’t want that?”

  “But that’s just it,” Garrity wailed. “When you’re a kid, that’s all you want. It’s enough. You don’t need anything more than that. You don’t see how big this world is or what comes after right now. So when someone comes along and gives you that—makes everything around you feel normal—you don’t fight the way you should’ve maybe. Or you don’t say no soon enough. Because you don’t want to lose that life. The one with the clean dishes and the movies on Sunday and a mom who gets dressed and changes the baby’s diaper. You don’t want that to go away, so you don’t say anything. And see, once that happens, it is your fault.”

  “You have to know you’re wrong about that. Somewhere in the back of your mind.” Peter tried to get Garrity to look at him, but he stared into the distance. “Look at me. You wanting a normal life doesn’t make this, any of it, your fault.”

  But Garrity wasn’t listening. His vacant gaze indicated his thoughts were far away. He didn’t stare at the wall so much as through it.

  “You know the worst part of it all? Is that after it was over—after I finally said something to my mom and she went to the monsignor to complain about it and he stopped touching me—I didn’t know what to do. At first, he still tried to see me. Tried to explain that I was confused and that he did what he did because he loved me and he wanted to make me happy. Then my neighbor saw him talking to me one afternoon and told my mom, and she went back to the monsignor to complain, and he never talked to me again. Just moved on. I saw him with other kids. Boys who were younger than me, cleaner maybe, and the worst part about it all is that I was sad. I missed him. I missed that he spent time with me and took me to the movies. I mean, how fucked up is that? Because once he was gone, I was stuck back at home with my mom and the messy house and the empty shelves. And I thought, you know, maybe he was right. Maybe he did love me. Maybe he was the only person who ever loved me because that’s all the love I deserved. That kind of dirty love that you’re not supposed to have. But sure, look at me.” He gestured around the living room at the wallpaper peeling just below mold stains on the ceiling, and the pile of dishes in the sink that emitted the stench of sitting dishwater and rotting food. “Maybe he knew all along that I’m one of those people who don’t deserve what everyone else has.” He sank back into the couch. “Hell, I know it.”

  The two men sat quietly. Outside, a strong breeze whistled through the window frames. What remained of the wind chimes clanged against the porch posts, a discordant clatter that matched the air in the room.

  After a while Peter spoke again. “Do you want to tell me what that was about?” He nodded at Garrity’s injured hand. “When was the last time you saw Ingram?”

  “Never met him,” Garrity said. “He offered to come talk to me. Said so in every other letter.”

  “There are more letters?” Peter was surprised. “Letters that you read?”

  “Hell, sure I read ’em,” Garrity said. “Eventually. Just not at first. I couldn’t. The minute I saw those initials after his name, saw the return address for Ignatius. It just turned my stomach, you know? But I finally opened one of them. Took me two days to get through the whole thing it hurt so bad, but I did it.” He shrugged.

  “What did you say when he offered to come visit?”

  “Told him I couldn’t take it. Not right now. Don’t know if I ever coulda, to be honest.” He rubbed his fist. “But, I don’t know. It’s kinda like even though I knew I wasn’t ever gonna meet the guy, I liked the idea of it happening, you know? I liked thinking about how maybe someday we’d meet for coffee or something. I’d have a reason to get up that morning. Have a reason to shower and shave.” He stood up, walked into the next room, and opened a closet door.

  “I even, you know, knew what I’d wear.” His muffled voice came from inside the closet. He pulled out a dress shirt still folded in its package—pale blue with thin red stripes. Garrity walked back in and set the shirt on the table next to the coffee. It was so new and fresh next to the grungy table with its water-mottled newspapers and empty beer cans. “I thought I’d take him to Saint Francis of Assisi church there in Belleville. Father Ingram sent me a letter once with a quote from him, and it stuck with me.” He turned and faced Peter as though he were delivering an address to the Supreme Court. “‘All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.’” He bobbed his head on the last word, his tone solemn and profound. His eyes closed for a moment, an added gesture of piety. Then they flickered open and a smile broke out on his face, a broad, enthusiastic grin that hit Peter square in the chest. Kevin came back around and sat on the couch, the pristine shirt in its package clutched in his hand.

  “I thought maybe, as dumb as it sounds, we’d get together and I’d feel normal, you know?” The smile struggled to stay on his face. The lines of his mouth were still curved upward, but his eyes were going dim with disappointment.

  “Like he’d be able to tell me why this happened and then it really would be okay. ’Cause I’d know—I’d get why everyone else got off scot-free. Why you never had nothing like this happen to you.” His smile died, face frozen as he stared blankly at the floor.

  “I thought he could tell me maybe I was special. Like God picked me because he knew I could take it.” His voice trembled. “A couple of years ago when this all blew up? I was approached by the lawyer representing the other kids. See, my mom had copies of letters she’d sent, logs she kept of what days she visited who and what they talked about. This guy asked me if I’d sign on, turn over that information when I did. There’d be a payout at the end of it, he said. I got forty thousand dollars when my mom complained. They made her sign something saying we wouldn’t talk about it. The money’s long gone, but I told the lawyer I didn’t want their money anyhow. I didn’t want to have nothing to do with them ever again. All I wanted, I told him, was an apology. For letting him do that to me and the others for so long. For ignoring us.”

  He shook his head angrily. “It’s been four years of going back and forth with that lawyer and twenty-five years since it happened, and I’m still waiting for an apology. I know what the lawyer says. That they can’t because it’ll be seen as an admission of guilt, and now that there’s a civil suit they legally can’t have contact with me. But it’s tough to swallow. Ingram’s the only one yet who’s ever said shit to me about it being wrong. That’s why I started reading his letters. I had sent the others
back, and one day I was sitting here feeling sorry for myself and I thought, fuck it, just read what he has to say. It can’t make you feel any worse.”

  Peter smiled. “Ingram was a master at saying the right thing.”

  Garrity nodded. “You’re right about that. I finally opened one of them, and he started by saying that he knew nothing could fix it, that he wasn’t writing to me to say it would be okay or that it would ever be anything other than what it is. But he wanted me to know he was sorry, as someone who gave his life to Christ and the Catholic faith, and that they had failed me. He said what drew him to God was His infinite capacity to forgive. That we could make mistakes or we could choose to do the wrong thing, the worst possible thing sometimes, but if we could find the strength to admit it and ask for forgiveness, it would be granted. His greatest disappointment in life, he said, was that the very men who sold that line for a living didn’t really believe it themselves. But he believed it, he said. And he hoped I did, too. Because if one of them failed me, then they all failed me, and he hoped I could forgive him.”

  Peter folded into himself, the weight of relief and agony pinning him to the couch. Guilt, profound and powerful, washed over him as he imagined James Ingram sitting by himself in an office writing letter after letter, holding steadfastly to the belief that the right words uttered by the right man could heal the damage. That anything could. Snippets of their conversations through the years and the many hours spent philosophizing about sin and forgiveness converged with this newfound knowledge of the purpose behind the letters. Of acts that proved James Ingram didn’t just think about these ideas, these definitions of sin and redemption. He lived them every day, until his very last breath. The tears came so quickly, so suddenly that they pinched the corners of Peter’s eyes. He looked around the room in an effort to keep from blinking. When at last he did, tears splashed onto his shirt and arms.

  “How did he die?” Kevin Garrity asked quietly.

  “Alone.” Peter grimaced as though he’d eaten something bitter. “He died alone.”

  Garrity inhaled sharply and dropped his head into his hands. “I hope that’s not true. I have to believe that something—I don’t know, a spirit maybe—was there with him, telling him it was going to be okay.”

  The scornful chuckle pushed its way out of Peter’s chest before he had a chance to stop it. “Really? That’s what you believe?”

  Garrity smiled his broken smile again, one side of his mouth curling up faster than the other. “Every minute of every day? Nah.” He nodded his head around the room. “But right now—what else do I got? What do any of us got?”

  In that moment Peter felt like the fraud he’d always known he was becoming. He could write eloquent articles on the role of religion in society, participate in panels alongside esteemed theologians and professors. But for quite some time, long before Sheeraza Akhtar’s arm landed on his terrace, he’d been a man of hollow faith. He knew the right things to say and how to put religion on a pedestal where he could tear it down just as quickly, but didn’t know how to feel it. Over the years, his letters from Ingram had brought a momentary burst of renewed spirituality, a pride in feeling close to God and the way growing up Catholic had shaped that relationship. But Ingram was gone. And with him, Peter feared, went the last pieces of him that could believe. He wanted to think there were more Ingrams in the church than there were predators. Sitting across from Kevin Garrity, however, he found it difficult. He thought back to when Ingram had stopped wearing his Roman collar and the way so many servants of the church would forever be tainted by the shame, secrecy, and role of unknowing accomplice foisted on them by the others.

  “Who did this to you?” he asked Garrity when at last he could speak again. “What was his name?”

  Garrity shrugged. “Does it really matter? I’m not going get an apology or anything else that really matters. Not until it’s too late anyway.”

  “I can’t promise you money or an apology even,” Peter said. “But I do know he didn’t get away with this for years on his own. Someone else knew. And someone above that person knew. Think back to when you were a kid, Kevin. What was the one thing you learned more than anything about being Catholic? I don’t mean about God. I mean about being Catholic.”

  Garrity scoffed. “You do what you’re told.”

  “By whom?”

  “Whoever’s more important than you.”

  Peter nodded. “Give me his name, Kevin. Give me his name and I’ll find out who let him get away with it.”

  Garrity’s eyes clouded. He dropped his head, and his voice fell to a whisper.

  “Hartnett,” he said with note of fear. “Father William Hartnett.”

  CHAPTER 13

  On Saturday mornings, Ally Larkin would rise early to go to the farmers’ market in Takoma Park before heading to the office for a few hours. On the walk back to her apartment, she usually stopped at a small Catholic church tucked away near Sligo Creek Trail to light a candle for her grandfather, who had died her senior year of college. It wasn’t just the attractive façade of the church with its gabled rooftop that drew her there. It was a deep and gradual connection to the space. To the right of the entrance was a carving of the crossed keys of Saint Peter, the gatekeeper of Heaven, while two saints flanked the gothic arched entrance. The church of Saint Bonaventure, Ally’s local parish back in Piedmont, bore none of the overt Catholicism of this structure. Sprawling and cavernous with the indistinct modernism of many post–Vatican II churches, Saint Bonaventure barely stood apart from the cinder-block buildings of the local technical college. (“Gaston County Tech! Where You Can Find Your Future!” the advertisements squawked with undue optimism.)

  Inside, this church was simply, tastefully decorated in contrast to that one. Stark white stretches of vaulted ceilings arched between sturdy dark-brown wooden beams. The crucifix above the altar did not feature the sort of Soap Opera Jesus that frequented the churches of Piedmont. Gone were His sweaty curled locks, pink lips, and pale blue eyes. This Christ, expertly carved from one piece of dark wood, twisted and writhed with almost palpable suffering, the polished hollows and contours of the wood casting shadows across a body that seemed to sag with the weight of unbearable pain. Seeing this carving was the first time Ally really considered the relationship between suffering and forgiveness in a more than perfunctory way. Gazing at the body, she wondered if inflicting such torture could really be forgiven. This was a question she would revisit for the rest of her life. The line between her Saturday visits to the church and her struggle to find a sense of belonging in Washington was intimately drawn. The reliable presence of Father Gutierrez, a middle-aged priest originally from Baltimore, who greeted her with a smile and revived her optimism, was an added benefit.

  Her path to Washington, DC, had come with a host of questions and doubts. In her last semester at Marquette, where she double-majored in philosophy and economics, she began the arduous process of looking for a job, along with all of her classmates. The practical application of politics had never actively attracted her. Growing up in Piedmont, she’d never quite mastered it on a high school level. The notion of doing so as a career was even more foreign. Her default mode was to move quietly below the radar and hope she wouldn’t attract attention.

  At Piedmont High School she’d gotten along fine with the various social strata, but never truly connected with one over another. As an academic high performer, she heard snide comments from various factions and cliques counterbalanced by unsightly exuberance from her teachers. Her Friday nights did not include parties held by The Desirables, who usually extended the kindness of ignoring her unless the need to pass calculus forced an uncomfortable tutoring alliance.

  But nor did she belong to the less respectable class of students, boys with wads of chewing tobacco in their lower lips and girls who could most kindly be referred to as “roughhewn,” sporting different-colored hair every other day from the cosmetology courses they took in the vocational program. One of The
Undesirables, Jackie Thomas, a rotund girl with red cheeks and a gap in her teeth (“You should see the fucker who did it,” she said of the gap’s source, a confrontation with her stepfather), was more often than not seated outside Principal Wharton’s office when Ally arrived each morning to read the daily announcements over the PA system. Such students were usually lined up outside the door to pay for transgressions from the previous afternoon. Smoking under the bleachers. Beaning a fellow student with a roll of paper towels during Home Economics.