Empire Falls

question God’s wisdom, if He arranged things so that children so often were given burdens far too heavy for them to bear.
    As his “date” with Cindy Whiting approached, Miles had been thinking a lot about life’s inequities and his mother’s tendency to take them to heart and to act upon her belief that we were all put on earth to make things a little more fair. It was Tick who’d made the request to hire that hopeless, bedraggled boy, but it was his mother, no doubt, who’d whispered in his ear when his instincts had argued against doing so.
    “It’s a good story with a bad lesson,” Father Mark admitted. “Maybe I’ll work on it. I do get some of my better homilies from our afternoon chats. I always feel guilty after we’ve talked, like maybe I should pay you back with a recipe for the restaurant. Actually, I don’t really think God’s anything like my grandmother, but I can’t help wondering if the situation isn’t instructive, seen from the child’s point of view. I mean, what if we assume our relationship to God to be one thing, and it’s really something else? What if there’s something central to the equation that we’re leaving out? Maybe, like children, we assume ourselves to be of central importance, and we’re not. Maybe the inequities that consume us here on earth aren’t really the issue.”
    “So feeding the hungry isn’t important?”
    “Not exactly. Maybe it’s important, but not quite in the way we think. Maybe, to God, it’s our way of expressing the ‘something else’ that passeth beyond all understanding. Something we aren’t meant to understand.”
    “Nonsense.” Miles grinned. “I understand your grandmother perfectly, and so do you. You’re trying to make a mystery out of selfishness.”
    Father Mark chuckled. “Yeah, I guess. She was a mean, self-centered old harridan. Still, we’re attracted to a good mystery. Explanation, no matter how complete, isn’t really that satisfying. Take those two, for instance.” He pointed out the window at Max and Father Tom, who were seated in the gathering dusk beneath a big weeping willow. To Miles they looked like a pair of old hobos who couldn’t decide whether to get up and catch the night freight south or let it go and hop a train in the morning. With each gusting breeze the thin brown willow leaves swirled down upon them, some settling in their hair. Neither man seemed to notice. “Part of me wants to know what in the world they find to talk about, yet I doubt I’d feel much wiser for knowing.”
    In the week since Max had started helping Miles with the church, he’d struck up a surprising friendship with the old priest. At first Miles had thought that Father Tom, slipping ever deeper into his dementia, didn’t recognize Max as someone he’d long known and despised utterly, but this was apparently not the case. When questioned, he recalled quite well that he’d always held Max Roby in the lowest possible esteem as a blasphemer, a shiftless charmer, a drinker and general ne’er-do-well. What he seemed less clear about was why he’d objected to these qualities. While neither Miles nor Father Mark wanted to deny the codgers their friendship, both agreed they bore watching.
    And on Miles’s advice, Max was still not allowed in the Rectum, as the old man was notoriously light-fingered; if Father Mark didn’t want the church’s valuables turning up for sale at Empire Music and Pawn, Max had best be kept outside.
    “He’d steal from God?” Father Mark had wondered, the question tinged with the priest’s usual irony.
    “He’s pretty fearless where God is concerned,” Miles answered. “I can’t tell whether he’s a genuine atheist or simply believes in a God who’s lost His grasp of the details.”
    “A God you could bullshit?”
    “Exactly,” Miles agreed, shrugging. Bullshitting God would be Max’s plan in a nutshell. Miles could even guess his father’s opening gambit. He’d point out to God that if He expected better results, He ought to have given Max better character to work with, instead of sending him into battle so poorly equipped.
    However, as much as Miles hated to admit it, the painting was going a lot faster. Probably it had something to do with the fact that they got to work right away, instead of Miles wasting an hour with Father Mark over coffee. And it was also true that even at “sempty” Max could still climb like a monkey. He also could paint from either the ladder or the