Empire Falls

he’d only torn the letter in quarters. He had a roll of Scotch tape right in his desk.
    The artist, Father Mark learned when he visited his studio on Wednesday, had been raised in Nicaragua, the son of a low-level American diplomat, who’d died there in a car accident, and a woman from Managua. As a young man he’d come to the United States to study, but after the Sandinistas fell he stayed on. His paintings—Father Mark thought them extraordinary—were expressly religious in theme and imagery, and utterly devoid of irony. American artists were no longer able to paint without irony, the young man agreed, pleased by Father Mark’s observation. While there was nothing overt in the paintings he was shown that day in the studio on the top floor of the red-brick building in downtown Fairhaven, Father Mark came away more certain that the artist was gay. Only on the drive home did it occur to him that the spiritual dilemma the man had mentioned had not come up.
    That followed two days later, over the phone. Father Mark took the call in the den, purposely leaving the door open. The young art professor began by apologizing for dragging Father Mark all the way to Fairhaven and then not finding the courage to bring up the subject that was troubling him. Not at all, Father Mark said. The paintings themselves had been well worth the trip. The simple truth was, the young man said, that he’d enjoyed Father Mark’s company so much that he hadn’t dared say something that might very well make him loathsome in his new friend’s eyes. At least he hoped they were friends. But now, since Wednesday, he felt ashamed of himself in an even more complicated way, so he’d decided that the best and only thing to do was the honest thing, and confess his sexual orientation.
    Yes, said Father Mark, looking up from the phone to find Father Tom in the doorway, and he continued to stand there until Father Mark made a motion for him to move along. If the old priest had any recollection of what had transpired between them earlier in the week, he gave no sign. Listening to people talk on the telephone, to Father Tom’s way of thinking, was the next best thing to hearing confessions.
    This pregnant silence was exactly what he’d been afraid of, the young artist blurted, sounding distressed. Father Mark hastened to explain that he’d been interrupted and that his silence indicated neither shock nor mortification nor revulsion. He assured the young man that he now had his complete attention, after which he proceeded to talk for half an hour, during which Father Tom found occasion to pass by the open door four more times.
    The artist’s crisis of faith had been occasioned by the betrayal of a friend who—if you can believe it, he said—also happened to be a priest. He hadn’t seen the man in nearly a decade, not since they’d known each other in Texas, where he’d been in graduate school and both had been active in the Sanctuary movement, helping illegal aliens cross the border into the United States, providing them with temporary safe houses and, eventually, forged documents that would allow them to work. Many of these refugees had given their life savings to “coyotes,” smugglers who would abandon them to their exhaustion and the hot Texas sun; the majority were rounded up and taken back across the border. The lucky few who slipped through the net wanted nothing more than the kind of hard, dirty labor most American workers spurned, and half of their meager wages they sent back to families in Guatemala or El Salvador or Nicaragua or Mexico.
    Both the activists had been arrested on numerous occasions, and it was in jail that the young artist confessed to the priest that as a gay man, he felt as lost and abused in an increasingly hostile church as the illegals did when they were off-loaded from trucks in the darkness and turned loose to find their way, or not, across the Texas desert. If there was no place for him in the Catholic Church, where was he to go?
    The priest did more than anyone ever had to put his mind and heart at rest, assuring him that the church was as large and diverse as the world itself. All of God’s children were welcome in it. True, there were many who condemned what they did not understand, who made the church seem small and cold as a prison cell. Far better to remember who it was that Jesus Himself chose to befriend during his brief tenure upon the earth. Far better to be an outcast here than in heaven. But