Empire Falls

before restoring beauty. He’d scraped until dark, until he could barely see the scraper on the end of his arm, until the blisters formed and filled with fluid, scraped hypnotically until he’d gone beneath the bottom layer of paint in some places, and then deeper still, gouging out rotting wood, half expecting blood to bead up where he’d punctured the church’s skin.
    As darkness fell, after scraping everything he could reach from the ground he’d set up the ladder and climbed higher than he dared in the daylight. He’d felt strangely serene on the ladder, reaching farther and farther out to where the paint had bubbled and cracked. Even as he moved up and out, he felt the opposite sensation, as if he were progressing down and in, through the protective paint and into the soft wood. A powerful and dangerous illusion, he knew, though he couldn’t shake the feeling that if for some reason he were to step off the ladder, he wouldn’t tumble to the ground but step onto the side of the church, as if its pull had supplanted gravity. Now, standing at the sink of the men’s room at Callahan’s, his hands shook to think of it.
    What he had been peeling back with his scraper, he now understood, was not so much paint as years, all of his boyish misperceptions, most of which he’d never seriously questioned. Charlie Whiting . Even with photographic evidence, it was still easier to think of the man in the photo as Charlie Mayne. How many times over the years had he seen photographs of C. B. Whiting in the Empire Gazette , yet never recognized the man he and his mother had met on Martha’s Vineyard? Of course, the man they’d met there was clean-shaven, but still. Had Grace not been in the same photo, Miles doubted he would’ve identified him even this morning. He’d simply followed her gaze and finally seen the truth. Or part of the truth. How long had they been in love before Martha’s Vineyard? Certainly they had only pretended, for Miles’s benefit, to meet for the first time there in the dining room of Summer House, and surely Grace had bought the white dress in anticipation of Charlie Whiting’s arrival—itself so magically fortuitous, occurring just as Grace was running out of money. Miles recalled that even at the time he’d sensed his mother was waiting for someone; his father, he’d assumed, because who else was there?
    And then, after their return to Empire Falls, she’d awaited the fulfillment of Charlie’s promise, only to hear from other employees that C. B. Whiting had been shipped off to Mexico, with his pregnant wife to join him later. Had Grace been shocked to learn—as Miles certainly would have been—that the man who’d exhibited such amazing powers on Martha’s Vineyard had none at home? Or did she conclude that he simply hadn’t found the courage to confront his wife? Had it occurred to her that Mrs. Whiting would have enlisted the aid of her father-in-law—old Honus—and threatened her husband with the loss of his inheritance? Was the announced pregnancy—no child was born after Cindy—nothing more than a story concocted in order to keep Charlie Whiting from abandoning his family? Was it Charlie’s wife or his father who somehow managed to convince him that a solemn oath sworn in private to a desperate woman from the wrong side of the river counted for less than one sworn before family in public? In answer to these desperate questions came nothing but a terrible silence and a second child, since Grace’s, growing inside her, was all too real, leaving her to deal with life as she found it, with who she herself was—a married woman, a mother, a breadwinner, a good Roman Catholic.
    It was St. Cat’s, Miles now understood, that had played the pivotal role in drawing his mother back into the life she’d been trying to escape from with Charlie Mayne. The church in the form of Father Tom had lured her back into what she would’ve abandoned by offering her eternal hope as recompense for her despair. The old priest might’ve been mad even then, Miles had realized as he scraped, ignoring the blisters that were forming. Right inside, in the sacristy—the room’s heavy air thick with stale incense and its open closet full of priestly vestments, Sunday’s golden chalice safely in its nook, surrounded by all the necessary props of religious authority—Father Tom had no doubt explained to Grace the price of absolution. Another priest would have required no more than a full and