Authors: Lynne Hinton
T
here was no consolation for the people of Pie Town on the Sunday they were to assemble at the burned-out church, the Sunday Alex died. No organizing, no clarity, no hope. Katie White had finally gotten everyone to listen to her as she explained that she and Rob Chavez had been at Holy Family the night of the fire, that it had been the two of them who left the candle burning on the altar. She screamed it out after everyone had heard Roger’s announcement about Alex, screamed out the entire thing, how Rob had dropped Trina off but then had later gone and gotten her and how they had snuck into the church without ever alerting the priest and had snuck out the same way.
She shouted her confession, ran from person to person, looking for absolution, but no one responded, no one really cared. They only looked at her, looked through her, as if she was a babbling idiot. In the wake of Alex’s death her confession mattered little.
For the next week Roger and Malene walked around like ghosts. Ever since the hospice nurse called the time of death at 10:30
A.M
. on Sunday morning, and after the funeral home personnel drove over and removed Alex’s body, the grandparents had wandered from place to place as if they were waiting to be swallowed up by the earth.
Neighbors and friends came to sit and hold vigil, and they came armed with food. They brought casseroles and homemade tortillas, pitchers of iced tea and bottles of wine. They made biscochitos and baked cakes, had bowls of chile stew and plates of tamales. They made sausage from their hogs, chorizo, slaughtered for the season, and searched for the fattest and most tender chicken breasts to grill in open pits like their ancestors used to do. In sorrow and in sympathy, they brought the very best they had.
Malene accepted each gift, each offering of friendship, each token of helplessness, but she ate only what was fed to her, only what was spooned to her from Roger’s hand. She was like a child, sitting at the table, hands in her lap, leaning toward her ex-husband, chewing and chewing. And even though she ate sopaipillas, empanadas, and fresh posole, she never tasted a thing. Food became only something she had to swallow like medicine. She didn’t speak to anyone, wouldn’t brush her hair, and had to be forced out of bed by her father. She could not even cry.
Roger was no better. He stayed with his ex-wife, moved into the master bedroom with her, the two of them curled around each other every night, arms and legs wrapped around pieces of their broken hearts. He received visitors, talked the small measured talk that goes on in houses where death has struck. He watered the plants around the house, long since wilted, took out the trash, mopped the floors, changed their sheets, even went through closets throwing out old clothes, but he had closed and locked the door to Alex’s room. He could only walk by it, stand there with his hand on the knob, unable to enter.
The funeral was held at the chapel at the funeral home in Red Hill. More of a memorial service really, since the body was not present, having been donated to science at the boy’s wishes, the funeral was brief and ordered. Everybody from Pie Town was there, and many had to be turned away because the seats were full and the line of those standing was three deep and stretched around the room and outside under the large stained-glass windows. A few of the townspeople spoke about the boy, about how he had meant something special for them, some secret act of tenderness, about his quiet and kind ways. A resident of Carebridge, driven to the chapel by ambulance and carried up the stairs by an attendant, explained how Alex was their favorite visitor at the nursing home, how he read them stories or taught them new card games, how he never complained when he had to stay late because his grandmother couldn’t get off duty, and how his laugh was like the sunshine.
A few of the teachers from his school spoke of his commitment to his work even when he was sick and unable to attend classes. The choir from the middle school sang. And the principal read a poem Alex had written about the rain in the desert, hope in darkness. The Monsignor sent a priest from the Gallup church to pray, recite scripture, and share a letter of condolence from the diocese office explaining that Father George wanted to attend the funeral but had left for a silent retreat and was out of state.
The service was dignified and fitting and everyone but the boy’s mother, Angel, was there. No one had been able to reach her after she had been given the news of Alex’s death. It didn’t seem to matter to her parents. Like everything else, Roger and Malene seemed unconcerned that Alex’s mother was not present. They sat quietly during the funeral. They nodded and smiled through the stories, received the gifts made of memories from others, embraced the town’s grief, but neither of them, even one hour after they left Red Hill, could report a single thing that had happened. Their loss covered them like a sickness.
Oris was just as bad. Ever since he returned from Gallup, having heard the news in a phone call from Malene and unable to convince Father George to come back or the diocese to build another church in Pie Town, he spent most of the days and a large part of the nights sitting at the cemetery, staring at his wife’s grave, stunned by his failure and his disappointment. Millie tried to comfort him. She brought him the latest issues of farming magazines she stole from the medical clinic and hung around until he would finally ask her to leave. Mary Romero brought him coffee and cake to have while she sat nearby at her husband’s grave, studying Oris for hours, trying to get him to leave when she left. Even Fedora Snow met him in his driveway one day and invited him to supper later, trying to make amends.
The town and Alex’s family were lost to their grief, lost to the cold clutch of sorrow, lost to the notion that anything would ever be right again. Winter, with its cruel bursts of ice and rain, its long barren nights of frozen darkness, had descended upon Catron County, upon Pie Town, but finally, even as they took a slight comfort in seeing that the condition of their hearts matched the condition of the sky, something changed.
Sometime just after midnight on the day of Alex’s memorial service, when everyone else was asleep, tucked into beds in their tiny cells at the monastery in Northern California, where Father George was in private retreat before starting his new job, the young priest received a message from God.
He was praying, as he had been for days and nights, begging for relief or forgiveness or anything to ease the pain in his mind, bolster his lagging faith, and undo the knot that was lodged deep in his chest. He was tired and just as he was about to fall asleep, kneeling at the altar, Father George suddenly felt lightheaded, a flutter in his chest, and an overwhelming sense of warmth. All around him, within him, there was warmth. And while held in this pool of heat, delighted and at ease, he heard a voice.
At first, he didn’t believe he was hearing it. He thought he was weak from fasting, imagining things, voices or spirits, or that one of the other priests was playing a joke on him, but then the voice, a woman’s, came again. The words sharp, clear:
“In that place lies your vindication. In that place is the source of your salvation.”
And just like that, the pool of warmth became a pool of light. A perfect golden light that surrounded him and filled him, and in that moment he knew. He knew what Oris had tried to tell him before he left New Mexico, how the widower had been sent by this angel, his angel. He realized the forgiveness that had come and yet, in the split second of mercy, he also understood that he had not been relieved of the promise he had made to Trina. In that moment of compassion also came the penance.
He left before morning, the sky still dark and studded with stars. He walked and hitched rides from San Francisco to Gallup to see the Monsignor at the diocese, catching rides from two truckers and a vanload of Mormons, and in absolute clarity of what he was to do.
Once he was allowed to see his superior, he told him everything. He told the entire story of how he had gotten drunk and impregnated a girl and later refused to assist or help her. He explained his silence about Trina being with him the night of the fire in Pie Town, how he had not stood in defense of a girl who had been wrongly accused. He told of his promise and his failure to keep it. All of this he told without hesitation or defense, and then he waited for his judgment.
It didn’t take long. The older man dropped his head and then lifted it again. Absolution came from the Monsignor, instruction for counseling and a designated time of probation, and then the Monsignor paused. He turned to the young priest standing before him and said, “I assume this conversion experience that has led you to confession has also led you to an understanding of service.”
Father George raised his shoulders, lifted his face, and replied. “Pie Town,” he said. “I am being sent back to Pie Town.”
Father George explained about Oris’s visit earlier when he had been in Gallup, and about the unexpected voice that came to him while praying. He told him about the pool of light, the sweet experience of relief. He said he knew he had to return to the place he had abandoned, the people he had left behind.
As the Monsignor listened he suddenly remembered his own visit from the old man from Pie Town, how he had begged the Church to rebuild after the fire, to give his town another sanctuary. “We cannot rebuild the church,” he had explained to the man and then again to Father George. “There are no funds. If you do this thing, you will have no assistance from us here.”
And Father George had smiled and nodded. The news did not discourage him.
After listening to Father George’s request, engaging in his own time of prayer and discernment, talking to the young man’s spiritual director from his seminary, as well as his hometown priest, the Monsignor agreed and sent the young priest back to his original post.
Upon hearing the news, Father George had turned to leave the office, the joy spread wide across his face, when the Monsignor stopped him. He reached behind his desk and pulled out a large box, explaining that the old man from Pie Town had asked that Father George be given its contents. “I forgot that I had this. After you left, I had planned to mail it,” he explained. “But since you’re here . . .” And he handed the box to George. “I can’t imagine what it is.”
And George opened one end and peeked inside. He smiled and closed the box without displaying what he had seen. He bowed and left the diocese and his superior.
Father George, freed and focused in a way he had not been in a very long time, found the old station wagon parked in a lot behind the offices, drove out of town, stopping only to gas up, make a call, and then a visit to an out-of-the-way stop in Amarillo.
It had taken him a while to track her down, but he recalled enough of her story, their conversations, that he remembered the name of the bar she frequented. From the bartender he found the place she was staying. In the end, it hadn’t taken much to convince her to join him. It seemed, in fact, to George that she had been waiting for him to call, that she had been expecting him, expecting the best of him. And when he drove into town, she was standing outside the bar, her suitcase packed, a knowing smile across her face.
“Took you long enough,” she said as she threw the suitcase in the backseat.
“I’m a little slow,” he answered. And he opened the passenger-side door while she got inside.
The two of them, therefore, arrived in Pie Town and the parking lot to the diner in the exact same way, but in an entirely different spirit than they had first appeared almost six months prior.
When he opened the door and stepped out of the car, Trina was already standing beside him, delighted with herself and her growing belly, confident and rested, stretching as if she had finally gotten home, as if she had already been received. When the priest emerged from the car, the first thing everyone noticed was his feet.
Without knowing that Oris Whitsett had chased down the priest in Gallup, been refused and then later gone shopping and bought the man a gift, the people of Pie Town just assumed that somewhere along the way from Northern California to Pie Town, New Mexico, somewhere along his journey from distant and unattached bidder of the Church to confessed and redeemed sinner, somewhere from lost to found, blind to seeing, broken to mended, Father George Morris had found a good pair of boots.
I
am as light as a feather now that he is with me. I go places I never before had interest in or desire to visit. We dance upon moons and sail across low clouds. I never knew I was so lonesome for company. He is as young now as he was then, a child wanting to stretch and go farther than yesterday, try a new dive, see a sunset from another pinnacle. He is my joy.
Of course, his first desire is to go home, to finish what had begun, to see come to pass what was birthed in his frail, beating heart. We have been granted permission, and I have told him my tales, recorded the events he missed and what has already fallen into place. He smiles, seeming as if he somehow knows more than even I, and I smile in response because maybe he does.
We come with the wind because humans always find hope in the change of wind. It is the breath of God, after all, and it is meant to remind them that there is more to this world than just themselves.
We come with strangers, once unwelcome and now necessary, once ridiculed and now desired, once held at arm’s length and now pulled desperately into hearts. And we laugh at the absurdity of it all. These are the two who will bring hope back to this place of despair. These two, pushed out and pushed away, and the one still preparing to come, these are the ones who will put the world back on its axis. These two, not angels, not those with special powers or sleight of hand, but these two, broken and healed, lost and found, these two bring the gifts from heaven.
God is a God of humor and mystery. And though it seems long and often unpredictable, we enjoy the ride.