Empire Falls

resolved was what to do with Father Tom. While there were homes for elderly, retired priests, especially for those in ill health, his dementia, which vacillated between the obscene and the downright blasphemous, made the diocese cautious about placing him among elderly but otherwise normal clergymen, most of whom had served too long and too well to have their faith tested further in their final years by a senile old man whose favorite word was “peckerhead.” Besides, Father Mark was able to handle the old priest, who had lived in St. Cat’s rectory for forty years and was comfortable there. In a sense it was his house, just as he maintained. Also, there were words worse than “peckerhead,” and if the diocese tried moving Father Tom he might start using them. Hearing him carry on had already converted several of St. Catherine’s Catholics, some to Episcopalianism, a few others to fearful agnosticism, and the bishop didn’t want to risk his contaminating other priests. No, the diocese seemed to believe that they had the Father Tom situation under control, and until recently they’d shown no inclination to break containment.
    “Have you gotten any sense of where you might be assigned?” Miles asked.
    “Not really,” Father Mark said. “I suspect they’re not through punishing me, though.” He had a doctorate in Judaism, and the perfect position for him would be at the Newman Center of a college or university. That was the sort of post he’d held in Massachusetts before he made the mistake of joining a group of protesters who climbed the fence of a New Hampshire military installation and got arrested for whacking away at the impervious shell of a nuclear sub with ball peen hammers—an act that Father Mark had considered symbolic but that the base commander, a literalist, had interpreted as an act of sabotage and treason. Not that this protest had been Father Mark’s only offense. In addition to teaching and pastoring at the university’s Newman Center, Father Mark had also hosted a Sunday evening radio show, during which he had drawn his bishop’s ire by counseling loving monogamy for a young male caller “regardless of the boy’s sexual orientation” and further advising him to trust God’s infinite understanding and mercy. Apparently, what happened to young, overeducated, rumored-to-be-gay priests who’d landed cushy campus gigs and doled out liberal advice was that they got packed off to Empire Falls, Maine, probably in hopes that God would freeze their errant peckers off.
    “I hope they don’t have any worse duty in mind for you,” Miles said, trying to imagine what such a thing might be.
    Father Mark shrugged, studying the half-painted church. “They can’t really hurt you unless you let them. I certainly don’t regret coming to Saint Cat’s. She’s been a good old gal. And I wouldn’t have missed out on our friendship.”
    “I know,” Miles said. “Me neither.” Then, after a moment, “I wonder what will become of her?”
    “Hard to say. Some of these beautiful old churches are being bought up and renovated into community theaters, art centers, things like that.”
    “I don’t think that would work here,” Miles said. “Empire Falls has even less interest in art than religion.”
    “Still, you’d better quit when you finish the north face. You could be painting Empire Falls’s next Baptist church.”
    T HE HOUSE HE GREW UP IN on Long Street had been on the market for more than a year, and Miles was parked across the street, trying to imagine what sort of person would purchase it in its present condition. The side porch, dangerous with rot even when he was a boy, had been removed but not replaced; visible evidence of where it had been wrenched away remained in four ugly, unpainted scars. Anybody who left the house by the back door, the only one Miles had ever used, would now be greeted by a six-foot drop into a patch of poisonous-looking weeds and rusted hubcaps. The rest of the structure was gray with age and neglect, its front porch sloping crazily in several different directions, as if the house had been built on a fissure. Even the FOR SALE sign on the terrace tilted.
    Several different families had rented the house since his mother’s death, none of them, apparently, interested in preventing or even forestalling its decline. Of course, to be fair, Miles had to admit that the decline had begun under the Robys’ own stewardship. On what had once been a tidy,