The Shepherd's Calculus

by C. S. Farrelly

On the morning Jackie’s dental gap made its appearance, she sat slumped and unblinking in the chair, an ugly purple bruise covering much of the left side of her face. She stared blankly at the gray institutional carpet, the red rims of her eyes swelled with moisture that threatened to spill if the lids dared close. Gone was the surly girl who routinely shouted profanities at Principal Wharton. Before Ally sat a broken being, the slouch of her shoulders exuding defeat.

  A disheveled boy, maybe fifteen, exited Wharton’s office, his face burning with shame, but Jackie didn’t even look up. Wharton’s stern voice summoned the office secretary, leaving Ally and Jackie alone in what promised to be an awkward silence. Ally reached into her backpack and withdrew a packet of the Twizzlers she was selling for the drama club’s annual trip to Chicago. She placed it on Jackie’s lap, where her fists sat tightly clenched. “Fuck Wharton,” Ally said softly to the crumpled figure. “He’s full of shit.” The words stunned her, but she continued speaking, almost without control. “Besides . . . this”—she gestured around the room at the bilious buttercream paint and disintegrating corkboards—“all this is just a blip. A short blip in your life; it doesn’t really matter.”

  Even as her lips curled around the words, she was aware of how contrary they were to everything she’d ever done in her life. Her orderly goals, her nights spent studying or perusing college catalogs, her volunteer work during her spare time. But in that moment, looking at Jackie, whose eyes were wide with a mixture of shock and gratitude, Ally Larkin believed every word. “Doesn’t feel that way now,” Jackie muttered. The rest of her face turned as red as her swollen lip, and her voice strained with controlled emotion. Ally placed a nervous hand on Jackie’s shoulder. “I know. But this won’t last.” She looked Jackie in the eye. “I promise you. It won’t always be like this.”

  Jackie blinked at last, the pools of collected tears exiting in one silent splash. She clutched the Twizzlers and stuffed them into the pocket of jeans that were at least a size too small, pressing snugly against her hips so the excess tissue pushed up beyond the top button in a misshapen lump. “A blip,” she said, looking at Ally one last time as the secretary called her name. Ally nodded. “That’s some fucking vocabulary, Larkin.” Jackie smiled, the jagged flesh around her broken tooth so apparent that Ally felt a shot of phantom pain. Shortly after the door closed, the string of profanities Ally knew almost by heart began seeping out in muffled tones from the space between the carpet and the door. On Jackie’s departure, Principal Wharton shook his head. “Such a shame,” he said to anything and anyone in the vicinity. “That one’s probably going to end up pregnant by junior year, and she has such a head for math.” Ally was too polite (and too Catholic) to say anything, but part of her wondered: If pregnancy really did signal the end of your life as you knew it, might that not mean something different for Jackie, maybe a path to leave behind her unexplained bruises and start anew?

  A couple of weeks later, Ally stood dazed on the basketball court in gym class. Piedmont High was small enough that any attempt to split one class into two teams would necessitate a half-court game, so the third- and fourth-period classes overlapped. Ally spotted Jackie as her class entered and noted her subtle nod of acknowledgment. Ally Larkin, for all her intellectual prowess, was not an athlete, and her complete disinterest in winning a gym-class basketball game would not have surprised anyone who came to know her in her adult years. But by missing three plays in a row, she had raised the ire of a senior on the girls’ soccer team. A preppy named Jami (“With one i,” she would chirp between exclamations of “I mean, right? Right?”) angrily shoved the ball at Ally’s face. “If you can’t catch the ball, get out of the goddamned way.” Ally was contemplating the ugliness of Jami’s sneer surrounding the perfection of her teeth when Jami’s head snapped to the right. It was the result of the basketball bouncing harshly off her cranium. Both girls looked to the source—Jackie Thomas. “If you can’t avoid the ball,” she said matter-of-factly, “get off the goddamned court.” Though never stated, it was clear Ally was unlikely to encounter trouble from The Desirables or The Undesirables ever again. She appreciated this unspoken protection, but never called upon Jackie to provide it. Knowing it existed was enough for them both.

  Life at Marquette was immediately different. As a presidential scholar, she was lumped into a group of students just like her, but Ally still carried that social trepidation from high school. When she secured a summer internship with the Archdiocese of Boston based on a personal recommendation from the university president, she found herself in an even stranger social environment. Thrust into a world of cocktail parties and political functions, she struggled to fit in. Catholicism in Piedmont, like everything else about the town, was largely a middle-class designation. In Boston, that seemed to be the complete opposite.

  By day she worked with outreach coordinators in dingy sections of the city marred by graffiti and abandoned houses that reeked of decay. By night she mingled with businessmen and attorneys who spoke nonchalantly of homes on Nantucket and boats with more square footage than her parents’ house. It was the first time she detected the palpable difference between Catholicism in America’s cities and in the rest of the nation. If she stood by herself at a function, she might go unnoticed for an hour. But when Cardinal Mulcahy introduced her, guests seemed to glom on to her, hanging on her every word. When he inevitably spotted someone else, another admirer or an important connection, he would move on, and she was left to face an excruciating span of several seconds when her conversation partners would either politely stay or abandon her immediately.

  The experience was like the anxiety she felt watching water skeeters swarm the Piedmont River every summer—their limbs stretched precariously on the surface, forced into an almost constant state of motion that seemed to save them from sinking. She stared at them, waiting with anticipatory horror for the moment when the spindly legs would tire and give out, leaving the water to swallow them whole. It never came. By science or will or other forces she couldn’t comprehend, their ability to skirt the surface was more definite and reliable than the inevitable calamity she imagined, but it still did not and could not relieve the sense of imminent doom that filled her. However strong and steady something might seem, she worried it could crumble.

  She returned to her studies at Marquette forever changed. If she’d been asked what she learned, she would have struggled to answer. She was now more aware of the challenges faced by a diocese of Boston’s size and historical significance. But she had also seen the Church operate as a business and formidable political entity in ways her Jesuit professors at Marquette never had.

  Not that she was ungrateful. She wasn’t. She knew she’d gotten her job with Casey in DC because of that summer in Mulcahy’s office, but the Church she saw in those months was at times vapid and vain, drenched in wine and artisanal cheeses. She was still trying to reconcile that version of it when she learned the job was waiting for her in DC if she wanted it. Her hectic senior year had deprived her of the chance to process everything—Boston, graduation, and the strange social strata of young, idealistic Washington—and she moved through her new life in somewhat of a fog.

  When she first settled in Takoma Park, before she knew anyone or had established a sense of herself at the office, she visited the church near the Sligo Creek Trail every night. There was something comforting about knowing that, as a Catholic, wherever you were, you could always find a familiar place. It was on one of these contemplative evenings that she met Father Gutierrez. She had managed to get out of work at a reasonable hour that night and had an invitation from Mark to join him and some of his friends from college for a drink in Dupont Circle. Though she would never have said it to him, she was fairly certain he invited her only because he had a vision of her returning to a dark, lonely apartment plagued by the stench of fake floral air freshener and kitty litter. She didn’t have a cat, but her apartment was usually dark. And she was occasionally lonely, but she did not view spending t
ime alone as the same thing.

  Her reticence toward DC was bound to dissipate. She would grow roots there, or she wouldn’t. Then she could try life in a different city. Just as she had known that morning in the office with Jackie Thomas that high school was but one of many parts that make a life whole, she knew also the first city she landed in after graduation need not be her last. That those fearsome first years out of college, with their many bumps and bruises, would feel like high school gym class in another few.

  Mark was correct that she craved company. He just didn’t realize that she wanted the right kind of company, not simply warm bodies with vocal cords.

  She declined his offer and boarded the Metro to return home, settling comfortably into a corner seat with her magazine. Looking up to spot the station stop, she caught her reflection in the window. In the sickly lighting of the train car, she looked small, slightly yellow, and utterly alone.

  From the Takoma Park station she took a different route home specifically to walk by the church. To her immense relief, it was still open. At the candle station, she discovered she didn’t have any single dollar bills to stuff in the donation box. She scrounged together enough pennies and other change to meet the suggested payment, suffering a momentary pang of guilt after the coins hit the bottom of the collection box. Normally she would have been lighting the candle in honor of her grandfather’s memory. But this time, she lit the candle for herself. To ask for help in figuring out what she was doing with her life. She hadn’t chosen the job with Milton Casey so much as followed along with Cardinal Mulcahy’s suggestion because she deferred to his knowledge and authority. It did not occur to her that of the many subjects a career clergyman might be an expert in, the life desires of a young woman from Michigan was likely to rank quite low on the list. But with the exception of her strange alliance with Jackie Thomas and her future rejection of Steve Tilden, Ally had almost always done what was expected of her.

  After a few false starts, she finally found the candle she was meant to light. Her sister had always chided her for being so fussy about the candles, but Ally believed from her earliest days that there was a moment when you spotted the candle and knew it was the right one to carry your prayer. This one, squat, crusty, and contained by the only dark red glass, was clearly The One. The wick took some patience, and she had just blown out the flame on the lighting stick when she heard a noise behind her.

  Father Gutierrez introduced himself, welcomed her to the neighborhood, and invited her to the rectory for a cup of tea. Three hours later, she bid him good night, the Mass schedule tucked under her arm, and wandered home to the apartment. For the first time since her parents hugged her good-bye and began the long drive back to Michigan after helping her move into her apartment on Maple Avenue, she felt genuinely at ease.

  The day Steve stole her idea, she came immediately to the church after escaping the office. She kneeled at the back pew and slumped her head into her hands. It wasn’t the end of the world. She knew that. Casey had already acknowledged he was aware the idea sprang from her cleverness. That wasn’t what exhausted and drained her so about the incident. It was the weight of the disappointment she felt in discovering that not only did people choose to behave this way, but it was accepted that the person in charge wouldn’t feel the need to correct it.

  When she explained this to Father Gutierrez, he nodded sympathetically.

  “Well, Ally,” he said, his eyes pinched, “I wish I could tell you you’ll never encounter this again. But you will. You’ve learned a valuable, if painful, lesson.”

  It was no different from what her parents had told her about it, but it felt better coming from him. In her earliest memories, hearing news good or bad from a priest possessed an extra layer of importance and sincerity.

  She had discovered this at age eight, when she was leaving Mass one Sunday morning with her family. Her father, his jocular laugh and eager handshake in full effect, walked beside her as they filed past Father Healy and onto the noisy street. The loud flower prints on the dresses of middle-aged women nearby made her want to look anywhere but up, so she fixed her gaze on the shoelaces of her father’s wing tips, following him confidently and securely out of the church.

  But at age eight, away from the nave of Saint Bonaventure’s and the familiar scent of incense mixed with summer sweat, she felt small for her age and far from anything she knew but her father’s wing tips. Exiting parishioners chattered around her. She heard “sodality meeting” and “bric-a-brac sale” and other phrases that held no meaning for her. All the while she watched his shoes intently, reluctant to let them out of her sight.

  She reached up for her father, seeking out his warm hand with its wrinkles of experience and the knobby scars that told brave tales of camping or breaking up dogfights. Strong but gentle at once, he would squeeze her hand reassuringly and all would be better.

  She knew immediately it wasn’t him. This hand was frail, its skin like the leaves that fell from trees in autumn, its hair wiry and stiff, the ends of its fingers cold—almost dead. Ally released the hand, jumping back with a strangled cry. Looking up she saw an elderly priest she didn’t recognize smiling down at her with curiously delighted eyes. She burst into tears at the shock.

  “Now, now,” he said. “There’s no need for all that.” She wailed even harder at the criticism.

  “That’s quite enough.” The words were commanding, but not angry. “You’ve just wandered off course a bit and gotten away from your parents. Were you at Mass just now?” She nodded, her lips frozen. “And you were listening?” Again she nodded.

  “Good. Then you know it’s possible to get lost and still find your way back. Right?”

  Her panicked breaths became less shallow, growing into deeper inhales until at last she could speak. “You’re not my dad,” she’d said petulantly.

  He broke out laughing. “Indeed, child, I’m not. If I were, it would require a good deal of explanation!” She didn’t know what it meant at the time, but relaying the comment to her parents that night at dinner, she noted the way they, too, laughed. Thinking back on the moment now, she flushed with embarrassment at how little she had known. He extended his hand, but she had no desire to touch it again, to feel the papery wisp of it and the way the skin bunched and crinkled so easily in her grasp.

  “Fine then,” he said. “You don’t have to hold my hand, but you do have to come with me.” She did. And he returned her, as promised, to her parents.

  Of course, with the recent developments in the Church, she couldn’t help but wonder if she would have felt safe going with him now. If he would have returned her like he was supposed to. Over the past few years, she’d become aware how thoroughly corrupted this trust and bond had become. But never once in all her years alone with a priest had she encountered questionable conduct, and she knew that while not all clergy were to be trusted, nor should they be painted with the same brush. In her short time in DC, Father Gutierrez had proven himself a source of genuine support and comfort.

  He blushed when she told him as much. Or when she said the bad apples were getting all the press now, but there were so many good ones out there like him. No matter how many new allegations popped up, which happened pretty often these days.

  Father Gutierrez smiled and put his head down, hiding his face until the color had returned to normal.

  “I appreciate the compliment, Ally. Really, I do. You have to know that. But I only wish it were that simple,” he said. “Every one of these guys? Someone in their parish—most of them in fact—saw them the way you see me. That’s the thing. They don’t wear signs around their neck. If they did—if all things dangerous did—this world would be very different.”

  Ally knew that from a rational place in her mind, but she felt robbed of her ability to believe good things about all the priests she’d known in her life. From the earliest days of the scandal’s eruption, back when she was still in high school, she hadn’t been angry necessarily. She hadn’t been offended li
ke most of the people she knew, as they talked about it in the parking lot of Saint Bonaventure’s or in the supermarket checkout line. It was naturally disturbing to her the way it was anytime a pedophile was identified, whether he was a random drifter or a respected baseball coach. But as the scandal moved on, growing larger and wider, she’d felt cheated the way she did when she was eight and Santa brought her a generic-brand Barbie doll instead of the real thing. Her parents tried to chase away her disappointment, explaining that it was just as good, but Christmas was never quite as special to her afterward. It so changed the way she looked at Santa, it was almost a relief to learn the truth of his identity a few years later. She no longer had to pretend she wasn’t a doubter. And while she never personally experienced impropriety with a priest, she looked at the growing list of the guilty—from the men who committed the crimes, to the superiors who allowed it to continue—and felt the indelible impact of it on her sense of faith.

  “Have you read the articles, Father?” she asked Gutierrez. “The statistics say it’s possible one out of six do this. That can’t be right, can it? Because if it is, that means I’ve probably met at least one. Eaten dinner with him, or sat in his class, volunteered with him. And the whole time, I was part of it. Helping him put on that face to the world while he did these things.”

  Their crimes didn’t just physically and mentally damage their immediate victims. They stole the comfort of belief from every follower. Maybe her own belief was an optimistic version of what she wanted to think happened in Jerusalem two thousand years ago but was just as misinformed as her perception of priests and the Church in general.

  “I want to remain faithful,” she told Gutierrez. “About people in general. But it’s not easy.”

  Gutierrez patted her hand. “You’re allowed to have doubts, Ally. I’d be lying if I said I never had them. Realize it comes with the territory, not just of being a Christian, but of being part of humanity. You can’t know everything with absolute certainty. It wouldn’t be faith if you could.”