Empire Falls

bare-assed, shrivel-dicked old clergyman to open the door and grin at her. While Mrs. Walsh did not look forward to this prospect, neither did it frighten her. At fifty-three she was through with the foolishness of men’s genitals. In fact, it had been many years since she had cared what hairy things dangled between their pale, scrawny legs. She now considered the fact that she had ever cared a kind of temporary lunacy and was thankful that her madness had been short-lived, not terribly virulent, and ultimately cured by marriage, as God intended.
    The door remained closed to her threats, which left Mrs. Walsh no alternative but to enter without invitation. The door was unlocked and revealed, when she pushed it open, an empty room. Mrs. Walsh made sure it was empty, getting down on her hands and knees, a maneuver she would have preferred not to perform on her inflamed joints, to look under the bed. Her thought was that an aging priest balmy enough to appear pantless in her kitchen might just be playing hide-and-seek. But no one was under the bed and there was no place else in the spartan quarters large enough to conceal a child, much less a full-grown man with the mind of a child.
    Neither did the old priest seem to be anywhere else in the rectory. Mrs. Walsh checked every room and every closet in the house, and even took a flashlight down into the cellar, a damp, horrid place that still had coal bins and plenty of dark corners for a demented old priest to hide in. She had just about satisfied herself that Father Tom had risen early and defied orders by going out for a walk, or perhaps sneaked over to the church and hidden in the confessional so he could spy on the young one and listen in on whatever liberal nonsense he was spouting from the pulpit, when something occurred to her and she hurried back upstairs to his room.
    He still wasn’t there, but more to the point, his bed did not appear to have been slept in. Of course it was possible he’d made it after getting up, as he’d done all his life until his mind began to go, but now he mostly forgot. Yesterday, Saturday, had been Mrs. Walsh’s day to change the bedding for both fathers, and when she pulled back the cover and examined the sheets beneath, they felt and smelled freshly of Clorox. Not so much as a hint of stale, flatulent old clergyman.
    But it wasn’t the bed that provided the real clue. It was the wastebasket, and Mrs. Walsh nearly walked right by it without noticing. The basket she’d emptied just yesterday was now nearly full again, and what it was nearly full of was the small, mint-green envelopes used by parishioners to conceal from other parishioners just how niggardly their weekly offerings were. Every last envelope, no doubt collected from Saturday evening’s five-thirty Mass, had been torn open and then tossed into the wastebasket. Also within the metal cylinder were checks that had been enclosed in the envelopes. What Mrs. Walsh registered immediately was the complete absence of legal tender.
    When the young one came loping across the lawn after early Mass, Mrs. Walsh was waiting for him, arms folded across her matronly bosom. Where another woman might’ve been thrown into a tizzy by this point, Mrs. Walsh had remained composed. She now bore the expression of a person who knew that someone’s head was going to roll and whose comfort derived from the sure understanding that it would not be her own.
    “Good morning, Mrs. W.,” Father Mark said in the kitchen door, his excellent spirits no doubt due to the fact that his sermon, at least in his view, had gone well. “Is that your famous New England pot roast I’m smelling?”
    To satisfy his curiosity, he went over to the stove and lifted the lid of the kettle she was using to brown the meat. How many times had he been told that such familiarity was not appreciated in her kitchen? Did she poke her head into his confessional and comment upon whatever penance he dispensed?
    “Notice anything missing when you rose this morning?” Mrs. Walsh asked, as he replaced the lid on her pot.
    “No,” said Father Mark warily.
    “Notice anything missing now?”
    Father Mark took in the entire kitchen, which seemed to be pretty much in order. Was the woman suggesting that they’d been burgled in the night, that he’d failed to lock the door when he came in? Whatever her game was, he had no time for it. Father Mark was, as Mrs. Walsh had intuited, still buoyed by the success of his sermon, but