“Oh, dear.”
“They have a behavior chart at his school,” said Mrs. Avila. “It’s set up by colors. You get a green ticket in the morning, and if you’re good, you get to keep it all day. If you misbehave, you lose the green ticket and get a yellow one. If you act worse, the Yellow gets taken away and you get an orange one. Patrick went all the way down the chart over a period of three minutes and wound up with five red tickets.”
“Oh, dear,” said Father Souza.
“I hate her!” said Patrick.
“No, no, Patrick, you can’t do that,” said Father Souza. “It sounds as though it was just a misunderstanding.”
“She laughed at me,” said Patrick.
“I plan on talking to the principal about that,” said Mrs. Avila. “But what has him really upset is that she said—”
“
All
holidays are just made up,” said Patrick, in a terrible voice. “Even Christmas. She said they’re all imaginary, that people just make things up!” He folded his arms, and glared at Father Souza in righteous indignation.
“Ah. Okay,” said Father Souza. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Up from his memory floated a scrap about Ms. Washburn: Brittany Machado’s grandmother said she was going to Hell. “I guess she’s a militant atheist?”
“And I have to say I’m a little annoyed at her agenda,” said Mrs. Avila. “I’d like to choose my own time to tell my kids there isn’t any Santa Claus, thank you very much.”
“Except Santa Claus
is
real,” said Patrick. “Right, Father Mark?”
Father Souza looked uncertainly from Patrick to his mother. “Saint Nicholas is real, yes. And children get presents at Christmas for the sake of Baby Jesus, of course. Some people don’t believe that, Patrick. It’s a shame, but we shouldn’t hate them for it.”
“Can we hate people because they’re mean?” asked Patrick.
“No,” said Father Souza. “But you can hate meanness.”
“Well, I really really really hate meanness,” said Patrick. “And I think what you ought to do is go over to her house with a Bible like that guy in that exercise movie and say a spell so her head turns around. Because then people will laugh at her and not listen to what she says.”
Father Souza and Mrs. Avila stared at him in mutual incomprehension. Then Mrs. Avila said, “Did you watch
The Exorcist
, after your father and I told you not to?”
Patrick winced.
“Urn, just a little. Because it happened to be on. Because I was over at Kyla’s house. And it was way back at Halloween. So
anyway
Father, you need to use your powers on Ms. Washburn, okay?”
“Patrick,” said Mrs. Avila, “we’re going to have a long talk with Daddy when he gets back. And priests don’t do magic spells. Is that what you made me bring you all the way up here to ask?”
“They do spells in Theo’s Dragon Gamer Module,” muttered Patrick, not meeting her eyes.
Sensing an explosion immanent, Father Souza said hastily: “I’ll try to talk to your teacher, okay, Patrick?”
“And we’re going to have a long talk with your brother too,” said Mrs. Avila to Patrick, rising to her feet. “I’m sorry, Father Mark. It looks as though Patrick wasn’t really interested in spiritual advice.”
She led Patrick out the door by his upper arm. Patrick turned in the doorway and winked broadly, twice, so Father Souza wouldn’t miss it. Father Souza had used to play ping-pong with Father Connolly, until the old man had passed away. Now he got his exercise most afternoons by walking down the hill and out onto the pier, as far as the end, and back.
He never power-walked. He idled. Sometimes he chatted with the fishermen; today he leaned on the rail and watched the surfers riding the long white combers into land or more often idling themselves, floating on the swell, resting on their boards. Some of the surfers were girls. The black neoprene suits made them look like seal-women out of Celtic legend, strangely arousing. Father Souza watched them regretfully, and lifted his head to stare far down the beach. Just visible at the edge of the dunes was a grove of dead trees, with silvered and twisted trunks. It was a white and silent place. When he had been a child, he had thought that God lived there.
Sighing, he put his hands in his jacket pockets and moved on. Salt mist was beading on his clothes, chilly and damp.
The arcade that used to be at the foot of the pier was gone, had been gone since a long-ago winter storm sent waves over the seawall and collapsed its roof. There was a doughnut shop there now. Father Souza stopped in and bought a latte, and settled into a vacant booth.
He warmed his hands on the cup and watched the early twilight falling. Something came rolling down the sidewalk, on a wobbly trajectory: a cocoanut. It came to rest against a planter containing a skimpy date palm, as though huddling with a fellow exile from tropical climes. Father Souza wondered how it had got there.
A woman was sitting in the booth across from him, sipping coffee and making notes on something with a red pen. Grading papers? Yes. He recognized Ms. Washburn.
He cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said. “You teach at the public school, don’t you?”
She lifted her eyes to his, and he had a mental image of a figure in armor going on guard. Her eyes were gray as steel.
“I do, yes.”
“You’re Patrick Avila’s teacher?”
“Ah,” she said. “I imagine I know what this is about.”
He smiled awkwardly and extended a hand. “I’m Father Souza. I guess you did me a favor; one of my parishioners actually got upset enough about something to ask my advice. Can I hear your side of the story?”
But he could tell his attempt at self-depreciating charm was wasted. It was plain, from the look on her face, that she saw a host of blood-drinking popes and Inquisitors in phantom form standing at his shoulder.
“I don’t particularly see any need to defend my actions to you,” she said. Her accent was patrician, with a certain New England starch.
“Defend, no, no. I just thought you could enlighten me a little,” said Father Souza. “Patrick was pretty upset.”
“Patrick had a violent episode in class,” said Ms. Washburn.
“So I gathered.”
“I’ve made a recommendation that he should be tested for Attention Deficit Disorder.”
Father Souza winced. “I wouldn’t have said Patrick’s problem was paying attention, would you? Just the other way around. He was able to keep focused on the monkey thing for five months.”
“Are you an educator, Father Souza?” inquired Ms. Washburn.
“No,” he admitted. “But I know it’s not a good idea to be in a hurry to pin a label on a child.”
“Neither is it a good idea to let a condition go undiagnosed,” said Ms. Washburn. “The sooner Patrick can undergo corrective counseling, the better.”
Father Souza sat back and stared at her, baffled. “What exactly did he do that was so bad? Did he hit you?”
“Not physically, no. He resorted to verbal abuse. He kicked a chair across the room. He disrupted class to the extent that a full hour of the school day was lost,” said Ms. Washburn.
“Sounds like a pretty angry young man,” said Father Souza. Ms. Washburn flushed and took a sip of her coffee.
“Patrick was clearly acting out,” she said. “His home life, possibly. I understand his father is in some kind of paramilitary cult. If his parents encourage violence as a means of accomplishing goals—”
“I don’t think they do,” said Father Souza. “I think Patrick was angry about getting laughed at, when he thought he’d invented this wonderful holiday. Patrick’s mom thinks you were trying to demolish belief in Santa Claus.”
“
Demolish
is a loaded word, don’t you think?” said Ms. Washburn. “I would have said that, as a teacher, I have an obligation to teach what is true. I will not teach lies. If I can encourage my students to see through lies, I owe it to them to do so.”
“So the point of the made-up holidays assignment was…?”
“To teach my students the truth about social rituals,” said Ms. Washburn, looking Father Souza in the eye. “People simply make them up. Patrick made up Monkey Day. These events are only as real as we make them. They have no significance, otherwise. If people are ever to be free, they need to understand that. All that absurd…
panoply
, all that pageantry and symbolism, is a trap.”
Father Souza remembered her frown lines, as she’d watched the parade go by.
“It’s folk art,” he said. “It’s the celebration of people’s faith, it’s their identity. You ought to at least respect cultural tradition.”
“It’s a trap,” she repeated. “An impressive spectacle that keeps people from thinking.”
“Okay… and how do you feel about respecting other people’s beliefs?”
“I tend to favor truth over illusions. ‘Wine is strong, a king is stronger, women are stronger still, but Truth is the strongest of all,’ ” Ms. Washburn quoted. “That’s in your Bible, isn’t it?”
“Third book of Esdras, actually,” he said.
“There you are. And the truth shall make you free.”
“Gospel of John. Look, you know that Patrick’s parents are pulling him out of Harloe,” he said. “They’re going to send him to Saint Rose’s, all the way out in San Luis Obispo. That’s a twelve-mile commute every morning and afternoon, and the tuition isn’t free. You’ve lost a bright student, and I know they made a formal complaint against you. Nobody’s winning, here.”
“It’s a shame, isn’t it?” said Ms. Washburn. “Perhaps you ought to convince them to reconsider.”
Father Souza bit back a retort and stared at the wall above her head, trying to summon patience. The wall was covered in bright yellow vinyl, with a pattern of green monkeys linked together by their tails. They seemed to writhe and blur, under the fluorescent light, vaguely menacing.
“Look,” he said, “we shouldn’t be at odds, here. We’re both in the same business, aren’t we? We’re working for the common good. You get their brains working, and I look after their souls.”
Ms. Washburn shook her head. “Between Reason and Unreason there can be only war,” she said with certainty. He looked sadly at her, realizing that he envied her. She was young, and beautiful in a severe kind of way, and had endless strength to marshal for her argument.
“The thing is,” he said, “the pageantry doesn’t matter. It’s just something they do because it’s fun, because it’s always been done, because they want to see their kids dressed up. About God, they’re apathetic. The Unreason isn’t there, don’t you see? The, the direct, bolt-of-lightning, burning-bush moment when they
know
He exists—isn’t there for them. You think religion holds people in chains… Ma’am, I barely have a congregation. What harm can a few parades and statues do?”
Mrs. Washburn gave him a shrewd look, not entirely without sympathy.
“You’ve lost your faith,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I never had any. I
knew
. That knowledge, that’s what I’ve lost.”
“No, you haven’t,” she said, leaning forward and almost—but not quite—putting her hand on his. “You’re free of illusions, that’s all. And, once you move past that—”
“Then what is there?” he said. “You think there’s some kind of utilitarian political paradise awaiting us all? Some future where we’re all rational and accept seventy-five years of consciousness as all there is and all there’ll ever be?”
“You’ll learn to accept that.”
“Then what was the point of leaving the jungle?” said Father Souza. “We’d have been better off as monkeys. Why become creatures that can imagine a Heaven with a God in it, and want Him there?”
“Because we’re engineered to progress by outgrowing our primitive selves,” said Ms. Washburn. “And that means we must leave our fantasies behind, and our need for them. We’re leaving them already.”
“Patrick isn’t,” said Father Souza, sighing as he got to his feet.
Saint Rose’s, as it happened, had a waiting list, and its principal was unwilling to bend the rules for Patrick’s parents, since they were not members of St. Rose’s parish. There was also the matter of Patrick’s First Communion, which ought to have happened when he was six, but due to one thing and another had been postponed several times.
It was suggested that Patrick might be homeschooled for a few months. It was suggested that Mr. and Mrs. Avila might want to resolve that little matter of the holy sacrament before the start of the next school year, when (if they were truly committed to a Catholic lifestyle for their son) Patrick’s case might be reconsidered.
Patrick did not especially want a Catholic lifestyle. He did not at all want to be pulled out of class with the children he had known since kindergarten and sent to a distant school full of strangers. Nor was he particularly happy about being enrolled in a catechism class on Tuesday evenings with two teenagers, three recovering alcoholics and one aggressively friendly lady who called him Sparky.
“This isn’t fair,” he complained. He and Father Souza were sitting out on the rectory steps after class, waiting for Mrs. Avila to come pick him up. The early summer sun was low, throwing long shadows across the parking lot.
“Unfair things happen, Patrick,” said Father Souza. “To everybody. What we have to do is choose whether we’ll do the right thing anyway, or sit around feeling sorry for ourselves.”
“What do you do when bad stuff happens to you?” asked Patrick, pulling himself up on the handrail of the steps.
Father Souza glanced over at the old school, where a new crop of weeds was greening the empty playground. “I say to God, ‘This is a test, right? Things only look bad. I’m going to go on as though things are going to get better, and trust in You that they will, and… and that’ll be to Your greater glory.’ ”
“And what does God say back?”
He never says a damn thing anymore,
thought Father Souza miserably. “See, you have to believe He’s listening—and that there’s a point to all this, even if you can’t see it—”
“There’s Ms. Washburn!” Patrick flung out his arm accusatorily, pointing.
“What?” Father Souza peered across the parking lot. The library was just closing for the day; it had no parking spaces of its own, so people using the library parked in the St. Catherine’s lot. Ms. Washburn had indeed emerged from the library, and was even now making her way to her solitary silver Volvo. She walked upright as a soldier, holding her keys like a weapon.