Hillerman, Tony (9 page)

Moon opened the penitents’ door. In addition to the standard kneeler, a little straight-backed chair had been crowded into the tiny space. Perhaps this booth was intended for the aged and infirm. At St. Stephen’s one knelt, infirm or not. But times change. He sat on the chair, closed the door behind him, and let the memories come. The darkness was the same, and the silence, and the fear he could remember. And, most vividly, the shame. And finally, the despair.

Moon knelt and leaned his forehead against the wooden grating. The only difference between this .and the confessionals of his boyhood was the sound. Closing the door had shut out the whispers and shuffling of the other students waiting for their turn. But through the closed privacy shutter behind the grate you could hear the indistinct, indecipherable mutter of offenses recited by the sinners on the other side, and of Father Kelly’s instructions to the sinner. And then the shutter would slide open. The dreaded moment would arrive.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Moon whispered into the emptiness. “It has been—it has been a hundred thousand weeks since my last confession, and since then—”

A slight sound reached him through the grating, a polite, throat-clearing cough. The shutter was open. Moon felt his heart stop beating.

“How many weeks?” a soft accented voice said. “A long long time, I think you mean.”

Moon sat back on the chair, drew in his breath.
Of
course. A priest had been sitting there thinking his thoughts, his night on duty in the confessional. “Sorry,” Moon said. “I’m sorry. I was just . . . it was raining, and. . .” He stopped. Nothing to say.

“If I were a religious man,” the voice said, and chuckled, “If I was that, I would say the rain drove you in. And since God makes the rain, perhaps God had a hand in this. In getting you here after one hundred thousand weeks.”

The voice sounded neither young nor old and the accent had that odd cadence Moon had noticed in Filipinos speaking English. A little like reciting song lyrics. He’d heard it in Castenada’s voice. The man behind the wooden grating is about my age, Moon thought. Maybe a little older. But he could think of nothing to say. He opened the door.

“Since we are here, and I have almost another hour, and since you don’t want to get wet, why don’t you just stay and talk? Or even make your confession?”

“Why not?” Moon said. “Because I’d be wasting my time. And your time.”

“That bad, is it? You’ve done something even our God of Mercy could not forgive?”

“I don’t think that’s the trouble,” Moon said. “Another priest told me you have to forgive yourself.” It had been a chaplain at Fort Riley, a captain who had come to visit him in the stockade. He hadn’t liked the captain, and the captain hadn’t liked him.

The priest laughed. “In my long experience in here I’ve learned that’s usually the easiest part. It is for me. I come to like my own sins. I find myself a reason for doing them. But is that why a hundred thousand weeks ago you stopped going to confession?”

“No,” Moon said.

Silence.

The priest sighed. “I guess you’re an American. A military man from the base, right?”

“American, but not military. Here on business. I was just out taking a walk.”

“I peeked out a little while ago,” the priest said. “The regulars have already been in to see me. I’m not going to have any more business. Not likely with the rain. I see three or four people out there. Praying for better lives and better luck. at the side altar. And then there are a couple of poor souls who came in to stay dry.”

Moon heard the sound of a sigh.

“I’ve said my evening prayers. I’ve meditated a little, and when you came in I was trying to remember what I was going to tell my students Monday about Thomas Merton. I have them reading
The Seven Story Mountain
and I’ve taught that book so often that thinking about it makes me sleepy. And my chair in here is just as hard as yours. So then you come in and sit awhile. But then there is nothing but silence. Mi, something different. I start waking up. And when you finally speak you tell me a hundred thousand weeks. That’s a challenge. I think of how many commandments could be broken in such a long lifetime. I think, What could provoke repentance now for sins so fossilized? I was excited.” He sighed again. “But now you are thinking of disappointing me. You didn’t know a priest was lurking here. You were engulfed in nostalgia. I think you were remembering how it was that lifetime ago the last time you asked your God to help you.” The mockery in the tone included them both and swept away Moon’s embarrassment.

“You left out the important part,” Moon said. “About telling God I was sorry. That I had repented. That I would go forth and sin no more.” And as he said it, he realized that he was, in a strange way, confessing.

“And then next week, or next month, back again with the same litany of lust and avarice and anger and malicious gossip,” the priest said. “Is that it? It is for me. It has always-been my problem too. This business of feeling like a hypocrite.”

“Sure,” Moon said. “And do you also feel like you’re wasting your time? The rule says you have to—what’s the language—’make a firm resolve to sin no more’—and when you walk out of the confessional you know you’re going to do it again.”

“It’s usually sex,” the priest said. “With men, anyway. Adultery with the married men, or single men sleeping with their girlfriends, or trying to. With women, it’s more often some sort of malice. Or it’s laws of the church. Missing mass on Sunday without a good reason. It used to be eating meat on Friday, but since Pope John the Twenty-third that’s off the list. God be praised for that. Anyway, women seem to have trouble forgiving somebody.”

“Really?” Moon said. He was thinking of Victoria.

“Sometimes it’s stealing, of course. Shoplifting. Taking a neighbor’s chicken. But finally they get down to what’s really bothering them. Her sister has insulted her and she has done so much for her sister. How can she be expected to forgive this? Surely the Lord would not expect it of her.”

The priest sounded so troubled by this that Moon suspected he had just dealt with this question.

“How about men?” he asked.

“Little things. Things done in anger. God’s name taken in vain. Illicit sex. Hardly ever does anybody confess cheating on the wages they pay, or taking bribes.” He laughed. “In Manila if people confessed to taking bribes, I’d never get out of here.” The tone of that canceled the chuckle.

“I guess you’ll find avarice everywhere,” Moon said. “We have some of it in Colorado.”

“Nobody seems to think greed is against the rules. Or grinding down the poor.” The priest sighed. “I wonder what President Marcos says to his confessor? ‘I’ve been stealing a billion pisos a month from my people. I will give that back. I will stop torturing the political prisoners. I will—’” Brief silence. “Mi, well. I doubt if the president and Imelda go to confession much anymore.”

“So women have trouble forgiving,” Moon said. “How about mothers? Do they forgive their children?”

“How about you?” the priest asked. “Was treasuring a hatred that favorite sin of yours? The one that caused you to leave the church?”

“As you said,” Moon said, “with men it’s usually sex.”

“Adultery?”

Moon laughed. “I was just a boy. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. With a heart full of lust.”

“Impure thoughts? Or impure actions?”

“Fiercely impure intentions,” Moon said. “Relentless. To make it worse, the target was usually the sister of a very good friend. Intention to betray as well as intention to fornicate. Thus a double load of guilt.”

“So you stopped going to confession.”

“I went,” Moon said. “But I quit telling Father Kelly about the things I knew I wasn’t going to stop. I’d just make up stuff. I’d tell him I’d stolen something. I’d lied to my mother. I’d been mean to my little brother. Cheated in class. So forth. Until finally I just quit going.”

Moon heard the priest shifting on his chair. Then a long silence. Finally a sigh.

“And now, a hundred thousand weeks later, how do you feel about it?”

Moon thought about that. Remembering that facet of his childhood. His hopelessness. The certainty of damnation. The sense of loss. He grimaced. “Terrible at first. Now nothing much,” he said. “I don’t feel anything.”

“But you did once, you say. I think that’s usual. You’ve gotten used to it. People do.”

A wise man, Moon thought. Or is it just experience-what you learn from sitting on the other side of the grill for a hundred thousand weeks, listening to someone else’s sorrows? “Sure,” Moon said. “I guess that’s it.”

“Now tell me about that big sin you mentioned. It has to be something besides sex. Jesus didn’t say much against that. He was teaching us to love one another. How long since you’ve read the Gospels?”

How long? He didn’t remember. “It’s been a while,” Moon said.

“Is anyone out there waiting now? Take a look for me.”

Moon pushed his door open. Through the side doorway he could see the falling rain, a gush of water splashing off the entrance steps from a drain spout, traffic lights reflecting off wet pavement, time rushing past. Tomorrow he would have to deal with that. But not tonight. Not now. Inside the church, the three kneeling by the side altar had become a solitary man. Two women sat in the back row of pews, whispering. Across the church, a man leaned against the wall staring toward the main altar. If he wore a blue turtleneck, it was hidden under the yellow plastic of a raincoat.

“Nobody’s waiting.”

“Then why not help me pass the time? You can just satisfy my curiosity. A simple act of kindness.” Moon heard the sound of the priest shifting in his chair. “Or why not make your confession?”

Why not? “I guess for the same reason I stopped in the first place.”

“A sin you don’t want to stop?”

“Yeah,” Moon said. “Or can’t.”

Silence. Moon realized he was hungry. What time was it anyway? Would the hotel coffee shop be open? Why was he carrying on this dialogue with this odd man? He considered that. Because he was enjoying it, of course. And that surprised him. But then, it had been a long, long time since he’d had this sort of conversation with anyone.

“Why don’t you marry her?” the priest asked. And chuckled. And said, “Allow me to quote Saint Paul: ‘If they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. It is better to marry than to be on fire.’ You remember that one?”

“Sort of,” Moon said. “But she won’t do it. She says later, maybe, but not yet.”

“But she will copulate with you?”

“Sometimes.”

“For the pleasure of it,” the priest said, thoughtfully.

It wasn’t a question but Moon said, “Yes.” And then he said, “No. Maybe not. I think she enjoys it but the way it is, she lives in my house. She is supposed to pay rent, but it usually doesn’t get paid. I pay the bills, buy the food, take care of her car—”

“Yes,” the priest said. “I see.”

But Moon knew he didn’t see. Not really. And suddenly Moon wanted this man to understand. Maybe to understand himself.

“She’s a lot younger. Just turned twenty-two. And very, very pretty. High school cheerleader. Do you have those in Manila?”

“Not exactly, but I know what you mean.”

“Not much education, and a sorry family situation. Her dad drank and beat her mother, and then he beat her. The family split up, and then her mother was—well, she got a reputation for being promiscuous. Anyway, Debbie moved out when she got out of high school.”

Moon stopped there. How much of this was he going to talk about? And how could he describe it? Any way he told it, it would seem he was trying to justify using her. In a way he was. In a way they were using each other. How could he describe this relationship? Suddenly the oddity of all this struck him and he laughed.

“Yes?” the priest said.

“I am thinking,” Moon said, “that you may need that hour to hear all this. It’s about how a guy who has been a sort of total loser sees a woman who is just about as sexy-looking as women can get, and before he knows what’s happening he’s caught up in the kind of weirdness that would make a chapter in a psychiatry book. Is it love, is it pity, or is it a way to make amends for ruining another woman’s life? Or is it just predatory testosterone at work?”

“Pity?” the priest said. “If it’s based on pity, it’s not going to be much of a sin.”

“Why do we talk about stuff like this to a priest?” Moon asked. “If you’re a good priest you haven’t had much experience.”

“Well, now. How about before the priest took his vows? Or how about slipping and repenting and being forgiven? All that’s possible. Anyway, we hear a lot. You’d be surprised what we hear sitting here in the darkness. And we get to know the ending of these stories. Usually you only know the beginning. And we have enough testosterone to understand the urges.”

So Moon talked about Debbie, how her beauty and her awareness of her beauty were part of the problem. It was all Debbie thought she had to offer, Moon said. Which was sad. He’d first seen her at Granddad’s Tavern in Durance, dancing with a ski bum, wearing cutoff jeans and a T-shirt, object of desire of every male in the place. Including Moon Mathias. But she was too young for him; she attracted the predators and, clearly, was attracted by them. It hadn’t occurred to him she’d give him a thought. He’d been wrong. He’d noticed her three times in the bar; then she appeared at the newspaper office. She’d asked for him by name. She handed him the sort of news release from the utility company where she worked that normally would have been mailed. She flirted. He’d asked her out to dinner and taken her home to bed, and within the month she had said she was looking for a room to rent. He’d rented her one.

“I can’t see you in the dark,” the priest said. “Are you a tall, handsome fellow?”

“Nobody has ever suggested that,” Moon said. “I’m big, built like a barrel, broken nose, and I guess you’d say I look harmless.”

“I don’t think women are as interested in how men look as the other way around,” the priest said. “What do you think attracted her?”

Moon had never answered that question before, not even to himself. He said, “I think she was afraid. I think sort of subconsciously she figured I wouldn’t hurt her.”