Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  Francis Xavier rose slowly from the chair. With an outstretched hand, he indicated for the Nuncio to remain seated. The dark look was in his eyes again.

  “Do you remember the circumstances of my election?” he asked.

  Surprised by the question, wary, Cardinal Bellocchi watched as Francis Xavier picked up a heavily wrought silver crucifix on an ebony base, elongated and sorrowful, in the tortured, mystic style of the Spanish Hapsburgs.

  “Do you?” he repeated.

  Cardinal Bellocchi grinned the gold-toothed grin.

  “It was a most extraordinary representation of the Holy Spirit,” he answered.

  Francis Xavier carefully set down the Man of Sorrows and turned away.

  “Did it never seem strange to you,” he asked, “that the archbishop of Genoa, conveying the message of the Holy Spirit, should do so while being struck by a cerebral hemorrhage?”

  “He was well into his nineties, Your Holiness.”

  Francis Xavier looked out the small, open windows above the candles. Cardinal Bellocchi marveled at the spiritual beauty of the face, a face that moved millions by its unpremeditated spirituality. But it was a lonely face. It was an isolated, melancholy face of late.

  “I have had premonitions,” Francis Xavier said very quietly. “There have been messages.”

  Francis Xavier felt more than heard the robes shift and rustle as Cardinal Bellocchi stood and walked toward the candles.

  “The Second Incarnation of Christ,” Francis Xavier said softly. “I know it in Rome as I know it in San Rignazzi.”

  “But these signs can be deceptive, Your Holiness.”

  “The signs have pursued me all my life.”

  “Holy men, men of passionate faith, are vulnerable to deceitful signs.”

  Francis Xavier said nothing for a long time. A choir far away massed powerfully in the night breeze, brought a Gregorian chant rising and falling from a chamber beyond the gardens.

  “Christ does not deceive,” he said.

  Cardinal Bellocchi nervously leaned forward, fingers on the velvet cloth cover of the table at the base of the candelabra.

  “The time cannot be right,” he whispered.

  “I have been speaking with Monsignor Tafuri—”

  Cardinal Bellocchi’s jaw clenched.

  “Monsignor Tafuri is an opportunist, Your Holiness!”

  “Monsignor Tafuri supervises the archives of the Holy Office,” Francis Xavier said, dully. “A rather humble vantage point for ambition, I would think.”

  “The twentieth century is filled with massacres,” Cardinal Bellocchi protested. “Children annihilated by rockets. The creation of artificial embryos. Bizarre religions and drug cults. And the civilized world suffocates in material wealth that gives no meaning. This century, Your Holiness, is not prepared for Christ!”

  Francis Xavier smiled secretively.

  “These are signs of the Antichrist.”

  Francis Xavier sat triumphantly on the white embroidered chair. Cardinal Bellocchi paced the carpet, his black shoes treading softly on the crown and keys sewn into the thick pile.

  “And the Antichrist,” Francis Xavier concluded, “shall be present before the Second Coming!”

  Cardinal Bellocchi stared at him, then lowered his head, a sign of acquiescence. Francis Xavier’s moods were mercurial. At times such as these, there was no influence possible with him.

  The bells of Rome rang out the hour of one o’clock in the morning, a crescendo, then a dying resonance in the cloudy air.

  There was a long silence. Francis Xavier relaxed. His eyes fastened on the carpet between them.

  “What is this, my dear Nuncio?” he asked gently.

  A heavy white envelope, addressed to the Sacred Apostolic Penitentiary of Vatican City, from the cathedral of the metropolitan See of Boston, Massachusetts, lay in a rectangle of pallid moonlight at Francis Xavier’s feet.

  It had fallen from the dossier case of leather, still on the cardinal’s chair.

  “A confession,” Cardinal Bellocchi said, moving toward it. “I had promised to deliver it.”

  Francis Xavier gently put his slippered foot on the envelope. It was strangely cool.

  “I sent you to North America to prepare my conclave,” he teased. “Instead, you work for the Sacred Penitentiary.”

  Francis Xavier bent down and picked up the weighty envelope. He bounced it slowly in his hand.

  “Please,” Cardinal Bellocchi pleaded, embarrassed. “Let me deliver it.”

  “You have,” Francis Xavier said, slitting it open with a silver knife. “Are we not the supreme authority of the Sacred Penitentiary?”

  Cardinal Bellocchi smoothed his robes while the Pope read, adjusting rimless spectacles onto the bridge of his nose. One by one, he handed the pages to Cardinal Bellocchi.

  “Extraordinary,” Francis Xavier said. “Have you read this?”

  “Of course not.”

  Francis Xavier slipped his spectacles into his petit point case and put the case under the candles.

  “It is not a confession at all,” he said worriedly.

  With increasing trepidation, Cardinal Bellocchi read the contents of the last page. “It is a testament of a divided soul.”

  “Christ and Satan. Two voices. One man.”

  Francis Xavier waited until Cardinal Bellocchi folded the pages together, slipped them back into the envelope, and put the envelope back into his personal dossier leather case.

  Francis Xavier was studying him warily.

  “How did you come to deliver this letter?” he asked quietly.

  “There was an unpleasant incident in the Boston diocese. An American Jesuit—the man threw himself at my feet, screaming for Christ’s safety.”

  “Why?”

  Cardinal Bellocchi felt uncomfortable in the long, dark stare from Francis Xavier.

  “Why, Cardinal Bellocchi?”

  “The Antichrist had driven him from his church.”

  Francis Xavier flexed his fingers, then leaned forward suddenly.

  “Do you know how many priests we have lost in the last month?” he asked in a tense voice. “Do you have any idea what is happening to us?”

  Cardinal Bellocchi declined to answer.

  “Fleeing churches. Perversions. Heresies. But always—always, Cardinal Bellocchi—after glimpsing signs of the Second Coming!”

  “Yes,” the Nuncio said lamely. “The man mentioned—signs—in his text—”

  Francis Xavier, suddenly moody, stirred restlessly in his chair.

  “It is all too clear,” he said, “the nature of things.”

  Abruptly, he stood, extended his hand, and Cardinal Bellocchi was obliged to kneel and kiss the great ring.

  “In the morning, we will depart for Quebec,” Francis Xavier said. “Present your dossiers to the secretary of state.”

  “Yes, Your Holiness.”

  Cardinal Bellocchi walked heavily toward the ornate door. No records, only oral tradition in the Vatican, memorialized the dangers that circulated like hot breezes toward the chair of Saint Peter. The world had no conception of the risks deep inside the Renaissance corridors, behind the resplendent ceremony of Vatican grandeur.

  Popes were corrupted by holy passions, deformed into heresies, retarding the mission of the Church for generations.

  “It is a grand design, Cardinal Bellocchi,” Francis Xavier said gently. “We listen. We go. We are guided by the supernatural.”

  “Yes, Your Holiness.”

  In the antechambers, Cardinal Bellocchi, grim-faced, raised his hand and swept his Jesuits out into the corridors with him.

  In front of them, waiting for an audience, was Monsignor Tafuri, with five leading millennialists in a semicircle behind him. They looked hollow-eyed, almost vampirish in the pallor of the moonlight now coming through the distant balconies.

  “Do you scent your prey, Monsignor?” Cardinal Bellocchi said.

  Monsignor Tafuri grinned unctuously. />
  “His Holiness wishes to hear our counsel.”

  Cardinal Bellocchi swept forward and his Jesuits made the millennialists split into two halves as they passed.

  All the gilt antiques of the courts of Venice and the Bavarian kingdom graced the long corridors. Paintings of the Spanish monarchy and the Christs of Sienna, Florence, and Pisa. The Church grew, in spite of all its difficulties, into the twentieth century.

  It did so by its driving faith and its superior organization, commanding the beliefs of a billion human beings. It did so not by personal charisma and intrigue, but by the patient accumulation of organizational advantage over the world. Of this, Cardinal Bellocchi was certain.

  Within the papal chamber, Francis Xavier remained alone by the half-burned candles, shielding his eyes, supporting his head against his fingers.

  A dizziness momentarily disoriented him.

  With a grave premonition, Francis Xavier retired to his private chapel. In his hand, he clenched the black wooden rosary given him by his mother on his ordination as a priest in San Rignazzi.

  The Duccio gold-leaf Christ shimmered behind twin censers that disgorged fragrant smoke at spiral Baroque pillars. The altar linen was embroidered with the crown and the keys. The tabernacle, studded with rhinestones, glimmered under the massive series of diagonally placed white candles on the altar.

  Francis Xavier knelt in prayer.

  Gradually, the unpleasant sensation of the American Jesuit’s confession faded. Instead came the effulgent expansion from the Duccio Christ, the radiant assurance of the sunlike canopy overhead, and the feeling of wingless, ineffable motions of the Holy Spirit inside his heart.

  A gentle tremble of the chandelier tinkled over his head.

  The melancholy image of Christ regarded Francis Xavier with the glitter perceptible to few, of which the painted halo was but a metaphor in pigment.

  Suddenly, the rosary separated from his fingers, defying gravity. The beads lifted gently and hung suspended in the saffron, incense-heavy air. Slowly, very slowly. Francis Xavier placed his fingers around it again and the black wooden beads resumed weight.

  The chapel shimmered in a fluttering, musical dance of gold light.

  Soon, Francis Xavier felt, deep within the meditative heart, Very soon now.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  In the upper woods of the south ridge, overlooking Golgotha Valley, Harvey Timms, the deaf child, clapped his hands over his ears at sunrise and screamed. The screams echoed down to the Siloam and infiltrated the graveyard and the streets of Golgotha Falls.

  The grocery clerk said that Harvey Timms heard the devil’s laughter of triumph after entering the priest.

  The infections of animals passed from the deformed newborn to adult cattle and pigs. Thrown onto the burning pyres, they split down the stomachs from the boiling heat within.

  Fred Waller, the mechanic, closed his garage and waited, corpselike, for the dominion of the unsanctified dead.

  Miss Kenny, aberrant since the death of her sister, carried a lantern through the side streets of Golgotha Falls, calling in her mouse-like high-pitched voice for the strangled and violated twin, Maxwell McAliskey, whose empty grave now was marked by a single withered rose stem.

  Only the red calf seemed immune from the general fear. It wandered untended, foraging at the churchyard, its tail docked by superstitious children, its hide bearing the scourge marks of charred wood or sharp branches. At sunrise, its bawling rose into a strange harmony with the fading screams of Harvey Timms.

  Hank Edmondson died before his eighty-eighth birthday and was buried in a private family plot outside Kidron. The earth, as it was turned over, disgorged writhing white maggots that slithered away from the shovels. When the tuberculosis had corrupted both his lungs on Friday dawn, his last words were: “The graves shall be opened.”

  In the tavern, the remark was taken to mean a premonition of death. The tavern owner said it meant something else: The violated graves of the Church of Eternal Sorrows would be opened by unsanctified force.

  Men moved in pairs and small groups, waiting, watching the skies, from the sidewalks and the tavern. Only the aged Miss Kenny, calling fitfully among the ruins of the mill and the vacant Victorian houses, disturbed the chill silence of Golgotha Falls.

  Mass hysteria, Mario wrote in his notebook. As a neurotic clings to his illness, the people of Golgotha Valley have clung to the Church of Eternal Sorrows as a focus of their poverty and anxiety. If the priest returns, he will absorb the emotional power of their superstitions.

  Mario’s blackouts, symptom of exhaustion, abated after sunrise. Anita smoked cigarettes on the doorstep of the rectory. She was still unwilling to enter the church.

  Inside the church, the walls took on the ashen, desolate color of the prewinter sterility of the fields and the clay church grounds.

  The only light within was the pale, pulsating yellow altar lamp and the slightly greenish hue of the thermovision image of the beast. Throughout the days and nights. Mario remained at his station, guarding the equipment against the town’s hysteria. The black revolver tucked in his belt, he continued to make entries in his notebook.

  Eamon Malcolm has disintegrated with his loss of faith. As a result, the raw visual and aural fragments of his libido are being projected like an unstructured dream. Steady flow of image possible if all repression removed. Last vestige of repression: the idea of God. I must destroy it.

  Impatiently, Mario waited for the Jesuit. Just as nervously, Anita watched from the doorway of the rectory. With each passing hour, the likelihood of Eamon’s return diminished and the dread began to lift from her mind.

  Then, over the squeaking, searching calls of Miss Kenny by the ruined mill, Mario heard the approaching rumble of a large automobile.

  The Oldsmobile topped the ridge like a great wounded bird, one wheel flapping over the mud, the passenger door scraped and badly dented, and steam escaped from the radiator.

  “Oh, God—no—” Anita whispered.

  She ran out to intercept the Oldsmobile.

  The Jesuit did not park it as much as let it die, crashing gently into the bushes by the road loop. He remained sitting, eyes cast down, haggard, lips twitching.

  Very slowly, he looked up as Anita climbed the slope toward him. It was chilly and she wore a thick red plaid jacket over her white blouse. The belt buckle and leather boots, in western cut, seemed oddly out of place against the white church in the gray soil.

  He looked down at his shaking hands, then back into her pale face.

  “I am heartily sorry,” he said quietly, “that I offended you, Anita.”

  For an instant, she watched him, the unshaven face, the eyes grown deeper with self-knowledge, the inability to look at her for more than a second or two.

  When she came closer, she saw the bruise of his lips and the torn dashboard. The passenger window was cracked and the metal below savagely angled by the collision.

  “It’s not important now, Father,” she said. “There is only one necessity . . . Get out of Golgotha Falls!”

  Instead, he opened the door, pulled himself out of the Olds­mobile, swayed, and grabbed the open door.

  “Free will,” he said in despair, “is so often an illusion, Anita.” The cracked lip began slowly bleeding again. “What we do, the thoughts that move our bodies, our desires—are signals of forces that can tear the earth apart.”

  In his eyes, she saw the shattered remnants of the once-proud Jesuit and in his place was a vastly more complex being, a man come face to face with his own unfathomable and self-destructive passions.

  “This valley is my perimeter, Anita,” he said, “until a greater one than myself comes.”

  “Father, I want to take you to Boston. I want you to have medical advice.”

  The rain squalls on the ridge flared like a corona over the scrub brush and then fell back on the gray fields. In Golgotha Valley, people of the town and farmers aimlessly wandered the furrowed and dessicat
ed fields.

  “This happened through me, Anita,” he said softly. “I am rooted here. By work—and prayer—perhaps things will turn right—again—”

  But the immensity of the labor to overcome himself and to consecrate the church yet again and to tend the people of Golgotha Valley seemed momentarily to crush his purpose.

  “I fled my absolution to come here,” he whispered to Anita. “A penance is due to arrive at the cathedral, but I escaped before it could come.”

  He wiped the thin thread of blood from his lip with his thumb.

  “I cannot perform the mass,” he said in a broken voice, “but I can restore the church. Work. Pray. Perhaps—I—will be able to leave Golgotha Falls—someday—”

  “Let me take you! Now!”

  “You would place your very life in danger.”

  Bitterly, yet subdued, fatalistic, he began walking down the ashen gray slope toward the church.

  “Father!” she yelled, running after him.

  But he continued marching down, without a contrary will, cognizant of the internal horrors of the church.

  “Father!”

  Mario, his legs up against the thermovision, where the shaggy beast grinned at the Jesuit, also grinned.

  “I knew you’d come back, Father.”

  Father Malcolm walked slowly through the dirty church. Bits of detritus fallen from the dead peach trees crunched under his shoes. The image of the beast glared at him malevolently. He stopped in front of it, his jaws clenching.

  “This is why I had to come back, Mario,” he whispered.

  Anita came from the vestibule, breathing hard, and stopped at the main part of the church. Mario casually lowered his legs and turned to the Jesuit.

  “That’s why you came back,” he said, pointing at Anita.

  Father Malcolm whirled toward Anita, white and trembling.

  “The beast appeared the instant you wanted sex with her,” Mario said coolly. “It’s your own lust. Made into an image. By your brain.”

  Father Malcolm’s jaw worked, clenching over and over, as though deep and bitter rage dominated him now.