The skies opened up not long into their journey, a torrential rain that impeded their progress and flooded the rutted dirt roads, causing mud and boulders to fall from the hills, placing obstacles in their path that slowed them further. As the hours ticked by, and the two crossed rain-swelled rivers and moved higher into the hills, to his dismay, Dugan learned more about the major than he cared to. Unlike the conscripted Corporal Menendez, the major had volunteered for military service. He had eagerly participated in the rape and torture that were an inherent part of belonging to the Salvadoran military. In fact, he enjoyed it. Along the way, he had participated in university bombings, in the kidnap and murder of union officials, and the forced resettlement of entire villages. He was proud to have been one of those on the roof of the buildings across from the National Cathedral who opened fire on the mourners of the assassinated archbishop, leaving hundreds dead in the plaza below.
The major had nothing but sneering contempt for the vast majority of his fellow citizens, the campesinos, those ninety-percent of El Salvador’s population who were impoverished farmers. He spared some of his hatred for the unions and the intellectuals and the college students who were the true source of his nation’s misery, so far as he could tell. The major was just brimming with opinions on that subject.
As distasteful as spending time in this man’s mind was, since he was there anyway, Dugan also solved the riddle of those ubiquitous black SUVs with tinted windows. They were the preferred vehicles of the “Mano Blanco,” the notorious death squads made up of moonlighting off-duty military and right-wing paramilitary assassins, whose job it was to sow fear among the populace by means of indiscriminate killing and targeted murder.
Returning to his own thoughts, Dugan estimated they were now about twenty miles from Chalatenango. He still had a few hours grace until he needed to seek shelter from the day. He guessed too that about an hour had passed since they went through the last government garrisoned town, and Dugan finally sensed an emotion coming from the major that he could understand. The emotion communicated they were now deep in the no man’s land between government held territory and that controlled by anti-government insurgents. Dugan diagnosed the emotion now coming from the major as fear. He was delighted.
At about that same time, he noted their vehicle was on a bone-jarring, stony dirt track about halfway up a steep, winding hill, whose edges plummeted dangerously hundreds of feet down the cliffside. Around then too, Dugan realized he had spent about as much time as he wanted to in this man’s company. When they came upon a cutout in the roadway that would allow the major room enough to turn around, Dugan instructed him to stop the vehicle. Lifting his bag and the briefcase from the floor, he stepped from the car and directed the major to turn around. The primary emotion he sensed then from the major was relief.
Dugan stood watching as the major made his U-turn, and watched further as the vehicle proceeded down the mountain road from which they’d come. Inexplicably, it went only a few hundred yards when, for some reason, the major gunned the engine and turned the wheel sharply to the left, lifting the car off the road and plunging it down the bottomless hillside. Smiling, Dugan turned and started hoofing it, content in that moment he had done at least his small part to make El Salvador a nicer place to live.
4
The priest made one last sign of the cross before tiredly and with the cracking of arthritic knees getting up from the dying woman’s bedside. He had spent most of the night offering her and her family what little comfort he could, granting her the last rights of the Catholic church and doing everything in his power to make sure she was ready. It wouldn’t be long now. She would be dead by morning.
Her young children stood vigil by her side, a girl and a boy, ages nine and eleven. Their father had been disappeared long ago, taken somewhere on the road to San Salvador. The priest would send one of the sisters over in an hour or so to make final arrangements for the body and to scoop up the children, who would now reside in the orphanage he had established in the parish house adjoining the church. Not that there was room for two more, where children slept nine to a room. Nor was there food enough for more mouths, he thought with a sigh. But God would provide, or He would not, and the priest would make do either way.
On the other hand, these two were older than most of the little ones now in his care. That, and they had all their limbs. Some of his children were missing arms and legs from the mines used by anti-government forces. Still others were dying from the wasting disease. No, just so long as he could keep the eleven-year-old out of the guerrillas’ hands, who had lately taken to coming out of the mountains to abduct boys as young as him to take part in their war, the two could be put to good use helping with the other children. That thought made him smile, because perhaps God already was providing.
After stepping out the door and into the darkness, he glanced both left and right and blessed himself. You never knew who might be lurking in the thick shadows, government forces sent to kill you, or poor thieves who would find this priest had nothing left to offer but words and the wooden cross around his neck. He had been robbed many times in his years here, and had surrendered what little he had gladly. Now, he had nothing left to give, and he knew that was the most dangerous position of all.
He found his limp was more pronounced this evening as he walked along the deserted streets, no doubt exacerbated from the past few hours spent on his knees. Or perhaps, there was more rain coming. He could always tell. He’d had the limp for about ten years, his rheumy left hip long ago giving up the ghost. Of course, he knew his disease wasn’t helping any. He gave himself only a few more months before he would be joining those poor children’s mother.
Curiously, while ambling through the palm studded central plaza, past the bullet pocked and graffiti marred buildings of downtown, he did get the sense that he was being followed. He even turned once or twice, but saw and heard nothing. Of more immediate concern, as he approached the flaking plaster walls of his church, he discovered he was no longer in control of his own thoughts. Like someone flipping through a Rolodex, his mind went backwards in time of its own accord, as if it were being rifled by someone else. Most disconcertingly, the Rolodex had stopped suddenly on the card bearing his greatest shame. Feeling himself redden, he stopped once more to shake his head and bless himself, to rid his mind of this interloper, this demon, whatever it was, and soon thereafter knew he was alone again.
Frowning at both the sense of violation and the rekindled memory, he walked into the church and went down the aisle, stopping at the front pew. Sidling his way in, with yet more creaking, he got down on his knees to say a Rosary, first for the dying woman and her family, and next for this town and for the whole nation, which surely needed God now more than ever. He decided then that given the recent stir of his own long buried secrets, that when finished with those Rosaries, he would say another for himself, in the hope that God might grant mercy on this poor sinner’s soul.
He was on only his third Hail Mary when he flinched to hear the bell in the confessional ring. Looking up from his prayers, he glanced across the sanctuary and did sense there was someone inside the small booth. Or something, he thought with a shiver, remembering his walk to the church. But whoever it might be, he had a job to do, and he would do it. That was another of the hard won lessons that the unbidden memory had conjured.
And so, with a faint sigh and another crackle of knees, he stood up from the pew and shuffled toward the confessional, more than a little discomfited he had not heard the person come in.
5
Though he at first dismissed it as impossible, while skulking in the shadows as the old man exited the house of looming death, Dugan blinked again and could have sworn he recognized the limp. At least, he had known only one other person in his lifetime who walked in such a manner. While listening to the man’s hitched gait, he crept to the window of the shack and peered in. Amid the flickering of weak candlelight he saw two wide eyed children standing by the bedside
of their dying mother. One glimpse of her waxen visage revealed to Dugan she had no more than an hour left.
Stepping from the window, he cocked his ear and attuned himself once more to the man’s awkward footsteps, and in that moment knew that it was true. What remained of the mortal he once was had dismissed it as impossible, but the vampire in him had known all along it was him. If he had learned nothing else in his time as a creature of darkness, he had learned that a man’s gait was as unique as his fingerprint.
He flashed back suddenly to those dark days in his hometown, though mostly the nights, when his neighborhood was overrun by vampires. They had succeeded in killing his father and his best friend, not to mention most all of his newspaper customers.
In the midst of it all, as he and his friends did their utmost to battle them, they sent Mark McCaffrey and Brian Dolan down to the church to get jugs of water blessed by the priest, in the faint hope that Holy Water might be used as a weapon. And though they found out the hard way that it couldn’t, Mark brought back some other information as well.
Jimmy asked if Mark had gotten the water blessed.
Mark nodded. “Yeah. Father Gould was really cool about it too, didn’t even ask what it was for…” He stopped.
Jimmy prodded. “Go on.”
“He…he was packing up his car when we drove up to the rectory,” Mark said. “He said he was taking a vacation, but if that was true…it looked like it was gonna be a long one.”
The priest abandoned them. He had left them all alone to fight the forces of darkness. Now, in the middle of nowhere, after all these years, Dugan had no doubt in his mind that it was him. It was the priest. It was Father Gould.
6
The priest opened the sliding door and felt an immediate chill come through the lattice from the confessional next door. He thought he also faintly detected a once familiar undersmell, like fruit left too long on the counter, or meat that was just starting to turn. He had experienced such a smell only once before in his life, coming from the casket of an ostensibly dead man. Beads of sweat began to break out on his forehead. He blessed himself once more.
It couldn’t be, he told himself. It was simply a lingering sensory impression from the reawakened nightmare he had suffered earlier in the evening.
Still leery, while waiting for the confessor to begin, he listened closely for sound coming from the other booth. He might have heard breathing, but wasn’t certain. At any rate, whoever it was, they weren’t speaking. Perhaps like many, they needed some nudging.
“I am here, my child,” he said.
He heard what sounded like a snort from the other booth, followed by, “Bless me father, for I have sinned.”
The priest listened intently. It was a young, male voice, whose Spanish was perfect, yet had an echo of foreignness to it. With a flash of insight, he realized it sounded very much like his own accent.
The boy went on. “It has been many years since my last confession.”
The priest was chilled by the mocking tone in which those words were spoken. When next it said, “And these are my sins,” the priest could only brace himself.
“I’ve committed many sins of the flesh,” he confessed first.
Given his youthfulness, aside from the normal teenage explorations, the priest couldn’t believe that.
“Yes, my son?” he offered to prod him further.
“I . . . I’ve killed people,” the boy said reluctantly.
Alas, it wasn’t the first time he had heard that from a voice so young. Moments later, in his most practiced, non-judgmental tone, he said, “Yes, my son?”
After a prolonged silence, the boy continued.
“I didn’t just kill them . . . I ripped out their throats and drank their blood. It’s how I survive.”
The priest swallowed, knowing then with certainty he hadn’t imagined it. Any of it. The dark memories churned up earlier that night came again to the foreground. His mind had indeed been rifled through, and his blood ran cold to know that this boy was the one who had done it.
“You were the priest in a town called Grantham,” the boy said accusingly, as if hearing his thoughts.
The priest found he was suddenly short of breath.
“Your name is Father Gould. You left us. You ran away and you left us.”
The priest swallowed back his sob. It was true. It was all true. It was his darkest memory. It was his greatest shame. Somehow, the priest managed to choke out, “Have you come here to kill me?”
He heard a cold chuckle from next door. “I haven’t decided yet,” the voice said darkly.
The priest believed him.
With shaking hands, he reached up and took off his glasses. Wiping the dampness from his eyes, he realized then he had been waiting for it. All these years, he had been waiting for it. Someday, he knew, his past would catch up to him, as it catches up with everyone. He understood too in that moment he had begun to believe he would face justice only in the next life, not in this one. He almost smiled to think he could ever have been so foolish.
After composing himself, the priest sniffled and asked, “Is there anything else my son?”
The boy let a long stretch of time go by. “I want to know why,” he demanded finally, in a quavery, trembling voice. To the priest’s ear, it had come out almost a childlike plea, and in that moment, he thought it both long past due and a more than reasonable request.
7
He took some time to gather his thoughts before he started to speak.
“I came late to the priesthood,” he began haltingly, “in what they call a delayed vocation. The Lord spoke to me while I was lying in my bed one evening, just minding my own business. Did you know that he speaks to you? God, I mean. Quite literally, he speaks to you. He did me, anyway. I will admit that when I heard the voice of God call me to the priesthood, I thought it awfully strange. I was then already in my mid-thirties, setting aside that I wasn’t even Catholic, though with a name like Gould, you’ve probably figured that out by now.
“I was born into a Jewish family, and a loving one at that, though we weren’t very religious. We were the go to temple on high holidays sect of Jewish, if you know what I mean. But then, I remembered that Jesus himself was a Jew, and who was I to question the word of God?
“So, I packed my things and went to St. John’s Seminary in Brighton, Massachusetts, where in addition to learning what being a Catholic meant, I had to complete all the sacraments: baptism, first communion, confirmation, and the rest. I studied with men far younger and more accomplished than I was, and plenty smarter too. I often asked myself what the hell I was doing there; I mean, before the seminary, I was an accountant. Did I tell you that? I worked for a small manufacturing concern up in Maine, which is where I grew up. It was a family run place that made leather goods: belts, boots, purses and the like. Even then, I knew our days were numbered. Competition from overseas and cheap imports were already coming in, and they were going to crush us, eventually. And so, when the Lord called me, I won’t say it didn’t happen at an inconvenient time.
“Anyhow, time went on. I became a deacon, and then I got ordained and worked at a number of parishes throughout New England. Next thing you know, I have my own parish. I will admit I liked the lifestyle. Celibacy was no hardship for me. I was never much of a ladies man, and as a latecomer to the priesthood, I had already sown my share of wild oats. Problem was, I noticed even in seminary that celibacy was a cruel hardship for many younger priests, who hadn’t yet sown their wild oats and were, in my opinion, many of them anyway, coming into the church not because God called them, but because it was a good place to hide from both themselves and society.”
He went quiet to collect his thoughts before going on.
“I suppose all you need to know for the purposes of this story is that I saw a lot of what I thought to be corruption going on. I saw priests who had committed the foulest of sins granted absolution and then shuffled off to the next parish, where I knew they would go
on to commit the same abominable sins. It bothered me so much, I talked to my bishop about it, and was told in no uncertain terms it was none of my affair. I tell you, after leaving his office, I had my doubts about him too. And so, I went on saying mass, and going to meetings of the Ladies Sodality, and ministering to the sick and the dying as best I could, and it was while ministering to the dying that I fell in love.”
After pausing a moment to clear his throat, he continued.
“She was in her early forties. I already in my mid-fifties. Her husband died after a long bout with cancer, so we ended up spending a great deal of time together, both during his sickness and afterward. Don’t get me wrong, it was all chaste. Nothing ever happened, I mean, though I couldn’t help feeling guilty about it. I celebrated his funeral mass, and all the time I was up there, I thought that everyone could see it on my face. It had to be plain as day. I let a few weeks go by before I permitted myself to see her again, and we talked about me leaving the priesthood and us getting married. But I thought back to that night in my bed when the Lord called to me, and I went straight to my bishop and got one of those quickie transfers I’d seen them hand out so frequently to the kiddie diddlers. After that, I never saw her again, and that’s how I ended up in Grantham. And it was in Grantham I began to lose my faith.
“Sure, I continued going through the motions, saying mass and doing all those things I was expected to do. But I began wondering where God was, or more precisely, where he had been keeping himself since the night he spoke to me. I hadn’t heard from him since. Our conversations were all one way. He certainly wasn’t with the victims of those priests I’d seen shuttled from parish to parish after their heinous acts of molestation. He wasn’t with that poor young husband taken from the world far too soon. And I knew then that he wasn’t with me either. I must have hallucinated his visit, or maybe it was all just a dream. But even then, I knew I couldn’t leave the church. I was too comfortable there. I had too much invested. That’s when I learned I was a coward, as cowardly as all those young men who joined the church in an effort to run away from who and what they were. And as you already somehow know, my cowardice was only confirmed in Grantham, when after a man I’d said a funeral mass for and watched get buried with my own two eyes, for Christ’s sake, came to visit me late one night. He scratched at my windows and wanted to come in. He begged to come in. As I sat there all night listening while cowering beneath my bed sheets, I understood then that God wasn’t in Grantham either.”
Applewood (Book 3): The Space of Life Between Page 18