Nobody's Fool

condition. There too in the shadows Sully’s mother quietly awaited him, just as she had for years awaited the religious miracle the priest kept assuring her would come if only her faith were strong enough, his advice deepening her despair even as it gave her strength to face one more homecoming. A large, content man this priest had been, almost as large as Big Jim, in fact. Large enough, Sully had thought at the time, to perhaps prevent his father’s behavior if he chose to, but even more self-satisfied and inert than large. Even though Sully had been just a boy, he had understood that the priest would not help, that he was content that people’s lives should be studies in hurt and fear. He seemed not in the least surprised by anything Sully’s mother told him about her marriage, about what life was like in their home. The priest took none of it personally, nor did he seem at all discouraged by any sordidness. He himself had found a line of work he enjoyed, and offering spiritual counsel to the wretched was part of his job. And he seemed to understand that to wish people less wretched would be to put himself out of a job.
    â€œIt’s a sin, Isobel,” Sully recalled the priest telling his mother in hushed, holy tones. She had not wanted to bring Sully with her to the church, but he’d been too small to leave alone in the house. She’d placed him in a pew midway up the center aisle, then gone to meet the priest near the altar rail and the confessional. He had wanted her to enter the confessional, to make a confession, but his mother had refused, claiming she was not sorry, that she was not asking for forgiveness. She made regular confessions, but this time she was adamant.
    What she had to say to the priest was not for Sully to hear, but their voices had carried in the cool, dark church, empty except for themselves. “It’s a black sin to imagine that God hasn’t the power to do good in His own world,” the priest told her. “To God all things are possible. It is only to us that things seem difficult. Blacker sinners than your husband have been brought to Him in a moment. Remember St. Paul, struck from his horse on the road to Damascus, the road to faith.”
    â€œIt’s what I pray for,” his mother, one eye swollen shut, had wept, and the priest had smiled down at her until she continued. “I pray that he’ll be struck down,” she explained. “Struck down so that he’ll never get up again.”
    â€œShush, Isobel,” the priest told her. “When such terrible things leave your tongue, they fly directly to God’s ear.”
    She had stood then and turned, peering into the darkness of the church for Sully, who had sunk down into his pew. “What difference?” she said. “God isn’t listening.”
    His mother had never spoken to the priest again. Nor did she attend his funeral later that year. Not that her absence was missed. People came from all over the state to both the viewing and the Requiem Mass. Sully’s father had gone and taken his sons with him. Sully could still remember how they’d dressed up for the occasion, his father and brother in dark, ill-fitting suits, himself in a white shirt that was too small for him, the collar so tight at the neck that his cheeks and forehead pulsed with warmth. The viewing was held not in a funeral home but rather at the rectory, and the line of the faithful come to pay respects extended down the steps and around the corner and up the street all the way to the church.
    The priest had choked to death on a bone. Had anyone been with him, he might have been saved, but he dined alone in the huge rectory dining room which three days later held his coffin. By the time his housekeeper, in the next room, had heard him thrashing in his chair it was too late. By the time she came to his aid, his eyes had already bugged out instark terror, as if he’d been forced to bear witness to something so ugly that his reason had come unhinged and he had stopped breathing. So, almost, had the housekeeper, so terrifying was the sight.
    One must assume that the mortician, a member of the parish, had done his best, but the results were shockingly inadequate, for despite all efforts the dead priest’s expression retained much of the horror present when he was first discovered by the housekeeper. And so many of the faithful were given quite a turn when they saw the priest for