Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  Father Malcolm walked back to them. His face was transformed by enthusiasm, fear, and a strange anxiety.

  “You see, in the Catholic Church, no man who has ever been possessed, for whatever period of time, may become a priest.”

  “Even if cured?” Anita asked.

  “Yes.”

  Anita looked perplexed.

  “You must understand the wiliness of the foe,” the Jesuit insisted. “It would be so characteristic to allow the impression of a cure and then later—return—”

  “So you think Lovell was, in effect, an agent of the devil?” Mario asked.

  “It is my firm conviction.”

  A great weight of sadness seemed to descend upon the Jesuit. The shadows now seemed darker, merged with the distant walls, like a theater of the night void, and the Jesuit’s voice came deeply out of his own suffering.

  “Many people, I suppose, would say that Lovell suffered a nervous breakdown. Induced by isolation, a sense of failure, and physical fatigue. And perhaps it does begin with fatigue. Exhaustion. A certain bitterness against the archdiocese for abandoning him. All this, of course, he cannot admit to himself. He throws himself into further devotion, further church improvements, but it only increases his isolation and fatigue. Then there comes what the Church Fathers call an aridity of the soul. The soul is devoid of consolation. It cannot pray.”

  “Go on,” Anita said softly.

  Father Malcolm turned back from the window. Behind his head hung dead fluffs of floated milkweed, spiked on dead black limbs.

  “A state of disgust sets in. Disgust with spiritual matters. Disgust with the physical effort of prayer. Disgust with the mission of the Church. The body is worn and the mind exhausted by long, ardent, fruitless supplication. The loneliness erodes the man’s personality. A malaise, a melancholy, captures the priest. This, Miss Wagner, is called the dark night of the senses.”

  Anita nodded slowly, encouraging, unable to escape the timbre of risk in the Jesuit’s voice.

  “What happens then?” she asked quietly.

  “He loses his bearings. He is disoriented. He has no foundation in his soul. He enters what the Church Fathers named the dark night of the spirit.”

  “Yes.”

  “It is at this point that a man who has chosen to serve God is at his most vulnerable. And Lovell—I deeply believe that Lovell—was entered at that point. He was physically entered and gave up his will to Satan.”

  Mario whistled.

  “Just like that?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  Mario shook his head incredulously, turned and began testing the video tape components. The Jesuit took his silence as reproof.

  In the darkness, Anita felt that Mario had wounded him. She approached the Jesuit and asked gently, “Why did you buy the letters of Bernard Lovell?”

  “To learn everything I could about this church. You see, my uncle was Father James Farrell Malcolm.”

  “The name is not familiar to us.”

  “I thought everyone knew. Certainly, if you’ve researched the church—”

  “We researched it for six months,” Mario said quickly. “There was never a mention of that name.”

  Father Malcolm smiled painfully. “Then the diocesan archives have remained secret.” There was a brief impasse. “He, too, was a Jesuit. A Renaissance scholar. A well-known figure in Boston. He came to Golgotha Falls in 1978.”

  “Why?”

  “For the same reason I am here.”

  “Exorcism.”

  Father Malcolm nodded. His face had grown extraordinarily tense. Frustration and bitterness formed tears in his eyes.

  “But he died here,” Father Malcolm said. “In this church. During the exorcism.”

  Anita stared at the Jesuit.

  “But why the curtain of secrecy?” she demanded.

  Father Malcolm found his tongue blocked and his thoughts blank in front of the attractive woman. At last, he spoke.

  “T-the Jesuit who assisted him reported that my uncle began to stutter . . . began to hallucinate. At the height of the mass, he began mispronouncing the litany—giving it obscene connotations. . . . A-at that point . . . the assistant blacked out—”

  “Please go on,” Anita softly encouraged.

  Father Malcolm turned to her with a peculiar, almost hostile expression.

  “W-when the assistant regained consciousness, he . . . he observed my . . . my uncle . . . James Farrell Malcolm, in . . . in copulation—with . . .” A terrible laughter suddenly broke from the priest. It was utterly without warmth. The strong face looked like a death’s head in the black windows. The laugh died instantly. His eyes were hollowed, deep-lined in shame. “. . . with a farm animal—”

  Dramatically, the Jesuit pointed at the empty predella where once the altar had been. “Right there!” he exclaimed bitterly.

  A chill grew in the church. It was a wet river chill from the clay banks. The cold humidity dripped down the interior walls. Mario looked around. The sound of water dripping echoed through the church. It had not been there the night before, and now it irritated him. The priest irritated him. The complexities of setting up the equipment had become far more difficult than he had envisaged, and that irritated him.

  “What makes you think you’re any different?” Mario asked brutally.

  Father Malcolm paled. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Bernard Lovell and then your uncle. Two priests. One performs necrophilia and the other bestiality.”

  Trembling, the Jesuit leaned forward, hands folded in front of him.

  “You’re right. That’s how he works at Golgotha Falls,” Father Malcolm said. “That’s the nerve on which he plays.”

  “The nerve on which who plays?” Mario demanded brusquely.

  “Satan, Mr. Gilbert,” Father Malcolm replied simply.

  A burst of harsh laughter escaped from Mario’s lips. “Satan?” he shouted. “Cherubim! Seraphim! Dominations, Virtues, Powers, and Principalities! This goddamn church is like a bullfight arena to you priests.”

  “Indeed, Mario,” the Jesuit agreed. “It is a dark, evil-infested road a priest travels down—filled with so many traps, so many ways to overcome him.”

  Mario dropped a clipboard on the components box. The slap broke the mood.

  “What overcomes priests,” Mario flung back, “is what’s been fermenting in their souls since Saint Paul got the bright idea of celibacy.”

  “That’s outrageous,” Father Malcolm protested. “My uncle was a refined man, who found many outlets—”

  “But not the natural one.”

  “There are other expressions of love than the genital.”

  “Really? Tell me about it.” He turned to Anita. “I had ten years of going to confession. You know what they ask you, Anita? ‘Did you touch yourself? Did you touch anybody else? Did anybody touch you? Where? How? What did it feel like?’ That’s what they’re dying to know. What did it feel like. And when they’re not asking about it, they’re trying to find out with their saintly hands.”

  The Jesuit blanched.

  Mario caught the cautionary glance from Anita. For several seconds, he worked clumsily at the tape device. His eyes were black and moist with suppressed rage.

  “Look at that rock on which Peter built,” Mario said quietly. “Pick it up and look under it and see what crawls there. Celibacy. The entire Church is built contrary to nature.”

  The Jesuit rose, brushing back his blond hair. To Anita, his revelation had made him a visibly older man, one who had tasted the unsubtle alloy of degradation in the church.

  “Is it contrary to nature, Anita?” he said softly. “I don’t know any more. The Church is changing—slowly—surely—”

  The Jesuit went to the church door. Anita gestured to Mario to apologize, but Mario shook his head.

  “I’m sorry if we spoke without respect,” she said. “We have some strong feelings about this, too.”

  “God allows us the tru
th to overcome our feelings,” Father Malcolm said.

  He nodded a good night and walked to the rectory.

  Mario and Anita went to the van. Mario opened a bottle of wine and began drinking.

  “He just pissed me to high heaven,” Mario said. “That holiness is like a fingernail on a blackboard to me.”

  Anita held her silence. She undressed. Mario, nude, studied the seismograph charts. They also revealed the slight stress that had appeared behind the priest.

  He put the charts on the shelf, turned off the lantern, and lay beside Anita. He chuckled.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Father Malcolm’s uncle. I hope the farm animal was of consenting age.”

  “Mario. It was a tragedy. Nothing to laugh about.”

  But Mario’s chuckle was infectious.

  Anita felt his arm around her shoulder, the hand on her breast.

  Through the side windows, they saw the stars ranged in a dense confusion of constellations. The fields were cold, and the stalks creaked and rubbed in the quick breezes. Dead branches stroked the van. Mario got on his knees.

  “Hey,” she whispered. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m a farm animal.”

  She tried to push the massive shoulders away, trying not to laugh.

  “You were a farm animal last night.”

  “I like being a farm animal.”

  Her nipples hardened. She could not push him away. Her laughter began coming through clenched teeth. She pressed Mario down, down into the softness that dominated her. Suddenly, like birds flying out of branches, her body jerked rhythmically and her full cries escaped into the darkness.

  It had come so fast, it caught her by surprise. The perspiration dampened her hair and plastered it down onto her forehead. In a state of soft exhaustion she smiled and winced. Mario had entered her.

  She played her slender fingers across the arched back. She stroked the thick, curly hair. Mario’s shoulder muscles tensed, the buttocks strained. Abruptly, he groaned. The heavy body shook, and then shook more slowly.

  At the climax of his passion Anita imagined, not the powerful, dark hunger in her arms, but inexplicably, the pale, hesitant face of the Jesuit in the church.

  Slowly Mario rolled to her side. He looked up at her as through a heavy dream.

  “Is everything all right?” he murmured.

  “Everything was wonderful,” she assured him, smiling.

  As Mario slept, snoring softly, one hand on her shoulder, Anita looked up at the stars through the tiny skylight in the roof of the van. What had brought the Jesuit here? she wondered. Something confused, psychopathological? Or a strange beauty, a spiritual hunger that lived and breathed at Golgotha Falls?

  Anita looked fondly at the form of the sleeping male nude. So much strength, so much weakness.

  Mario slept in a dark, amoral universe that knew no shame, a brief respite from his deep anxieties. The child emerged in Mario’s sleeping face. Trusting, innocent, and vulnerable. In the daytime work, and in the sex of the night, that child was suppressed by the force of his brutal, driving energy.

  Anita felt, in his arms, like a wild bird nesting on a dark, storm-tossed ocean.

  But was it enough anymore, the extraordinary liberation of the senses? The delicate Anita, the refined child of upstate New York society, the careful writer of science, wanted a quiet place to soar, to seek her own nature. But what indeed was that nature?

  Thoughts of a different ecology flowed pleasantly in Anita’s memories. She drifted toward a broad expanse of undulating fields that surrounded a white Colonial home. It was Seven Oaks, her family home for three generations. And in her imagination she was riding Tredegar, the slender chestnut Arabian from the long, low-roofed stable.

  Seven Oaks was built around a seventeenth-century house that now contained the living room, a sagging roof, and an enormous iron fireplace. Cabinets of china were illumined by small lights. The paintings on the wall were from the French school, and beyond the billiard room was a small indoor swimming pool.

  It was Christmas when Mario first visited Seven Oaks. Hedda was working the entire day with the goose and cakes in the kitchen. Mrs. Wagner served sherry in front of the firelight as the snow fell, fell with a purity remembered from the innocence of Anita’s childhood.

  Mario sat deliberately with his motorcycle boots on the delicately embroidered footstool, answering Mrs. Wagner in grunts and monosyllables. Anita acknowledged to herself that the holidays were moving toward catastrophe. To Mrs. Wagner’s polite conversation about modern writers, many of whom she knew personally, or about painting, Mario returned a blank and hostile silence. Only when Anita and Mrs. Wagner reminisced about Anita’s father did Mario stir.

  Anita’s father had been a stockbroker before the fatal airplane crash. Mario was interested in the stock market. Mario was then a fervent Marxist and saw signs of conspiracy in every motion of bonds, corporate tax benefits, and the portfolios of the rich. A few vulgar comments from Mario broke the mood of delicacy, loss, and nostalgia.

  Nor was it any better when Mario strode out toward the stables with Anita. The vast expanse of snow-whitened land, the farmers working the farm for a tax loss, the elegant Arabian horses were all, to Mario, signs of a class that had lost its integrity and lived in the past. In every luxury he saw the epitaph of a hundred victims of poverty, the street, drugs and violence.

  Nor had Mario missed the significance of the look that passed from Mrs. Wagner to Anita. The look said boor and ill-mannered and crude.

  Mario learned to ride in a single afternoon. He was a natural athlete. He also despised Mrs. Wagner’s pity and willed himself not to appear foolish in the older woman’s eyes.

  Despite his surface cynicism, Mario was overawed by Seven Oaks. He knew beyond doubt that Anita came from a life he had never suspected existed. Mrs. Wagner had an integrity of her own, and Mario was vaguely frightened by its assurance.

  The guests at the Christmas dinner, in their expensive but casual elegance, the jeweled women, the men in soft open-collared shirts, gradually realized that the brooding young man in Anita’s corner was smoldering with a violence they had never had to confront. Mario was drinking too much. The effort of using the correct fork and knife bothered him. The chatter about the choirs of the local churches, the New Year’s sleigh ride with horses under the moonlight, made him tense.

  “Sleigh rides?” he muttered. “What do you think life is, a perpetual picnic?”

  The conversation dwindled to silence.

  “You could feed an entire orphanage on what it costs to run your pampered assholes over the snow!”

  Anita, blushing deeply, put a hand on his arm. It was too late. Mario shook it off.

  “You live in a fiction!” he said, weaving to his feet, pointing at the nearest of the elaborately coiffed women who stared back, shocked, fingers intertwined in a string of pearls. “And everything you have, sleighs and horses, jewels, tax shelters—one day they’re going to be taken by people who have had to live in reality!”

  Embarrassed at their stares, humiliated, drunk, and still furious, Mario lurched from the deep reddish glow of the exquisite dining room with its illumined china cabinets toward the kitchen, slipped, and then stumbled out into the snow.

  The company avoided looking at Anita, and toyed with their food. Anita, throwing her linen napkin onto her plate, ran out after Mario.

  He stumbled angrily through the snow toward the silhouette of the estate’s farmhouse under the stars and then stopped. A deep, decisive chasm separated him from the landscape.

  “It’s me or them,” he whispered, sensing her behind him.

  He turned. In his eyes was a look either of longing and of loss of a childhood he had never had, or of rage, she could not tell which.

  “If I lived to be a hundred,” he insisted, “I would never fit in with them. Or your mother. Or with that part of you.”

  He took her shivering shoulders in his strong hands,
looking deeply into her face.

  “Don’t you understand?” he said desperately. “You’ve got to choose now, Anita.”

  Anita stared at the hostile, yet vulnerable face and saw instantly that Mario was right. Seven Oaks would never fit into his epistemology. He would never see, never feel, the life that had formed her and which flowed in her still. Mario couldn’t bear its superiority to his own miserable origins.

  Anita lay against the warm beating heart.

  “It’s you, Mario,” she whispered. “Always you.”

  “Anita,” Mario whispered, half asleep.

  She drifted back into his embrace, softer now, his great and naked need enfolding her with tenderness.

  They did not make love again, but merely lay close and listened to the breeze through the valley.

  “Anita,” Mario whispered, holding her close, in a curious mixture of pride and affection.

  Yet again the mystery of the Jesuit’s mission tantalized Anita. Even as she lay with Mario her mind was free. Until she felt divided into two different, equal halves.

  The Siloam, restless and deep, moved high on clay banks.

  Father Malcolm was emptied by the long confession to the parapsychologists, but it left him agitated. Mario was antagonistic. Anita knew little of Catholicism. Sighing, he turned his attention to the preparation of the coming exorcism.

  He examined the silver chalice in its case lined with blue velvet. It reflected his haggard face and the panoply of stars beyond the rectory window. In a separate compartment was the silver dish, the paten, on which would rest the blessed Body of Christ, the Host itself. Then he examined the humeral veil, an embroidered linen that protected the paten from his human hands. It was immaculate. It was reassuring.

  In another case was the lavabo, the golden bowl to catch water after the ablution. In cloth wrapping was the censer and capsules of incense grains. In a heavy vessel was the Gregorian water, and chrism, and holy water. All these Bishop Lyons had blessed and given him after the investiture.

  Other boxes, tall black silhouettes, held the other implements of exorcism.

  A silhouette moved along the edge of the graveyard. It was the parapsychologist, Gilbert. Naked, he urinated luxuriously into the weeds and then went back into the van.