The Confession

Chapter 3 — Twenty Years

Sunday’s homily was on the widow’s mite, and Michael preached it badly. He stood in the pulpit of San Miguel with the morning light falling through the high windows in dusty columns, looking out at the forty-odd faces he knew better than his own — the Okafors in the third row, Gutierrez with his rosary wound tight around his fist, the teenagers slumped in the back trying to be invisible — and he talked about giving, about the woman who gave everything she had, and all the while the stranger’s three facts kept surfacing in his mind like stones in a riverbed: twenty years, the desert, no body ever found.

Twenty years. He did the subtraction without meaning to. Twenty years ago he had been twenty-eight, three years ordained, still new enough that the weight of the stole surprised him every time he lifted it. Twenty years ago the desert around San Miguel had been the same desert — the same heat, the same red rock, the same wind combing through the piñon — and somewhere in it, a man had died in a fight, and no one had ever found him. The thought sat in the pulpit with him like a second preacher, and he stumbled over the closing prayer, and Gutierrez gave him a worried look on the way out that Michael pretended not to see.

After Mass, old Gutierrez caught his sleeve at the church door. “Father, you looked tired today. Are you sleeping?”

“I’m fine, Tomas.” Michael smiled, and the smile felt like something he was holding up with both hands.

He spent the afternoon in the church alone, which was his habit on Sundays — straightening hymnals, refilling the holy water font, doing the small maintenance of a parish that had no money for a full-time custodian. The air inside San Miguel had its own weather: cool, dim, smelling of incense and candle wax and a hundred and forty years of prayer soaked into adobe. He loved this smell. It had been the smell of his certainty, once. Lately — he could not have said when it started — it had become the smell of a question he was afraid to ask.

His faith had been thinning for years, like a cloth worn at the folds. He had noticed it first in the hospital visits. He remembered sitting with Elena Vasquez two winters ago, her body failing in a white room while her family prayed the rosary in the corner, and he had laid his hands on her forehead and said the words for the dying, and she had died anyway, mid-sentence, as if the prayer were a door she had walked through without looking back. He had driven home that night and sat in his car in the rectory driveway for twenty minutes, unable to make himself go inside, thinking: *I said the words, and the words did nothing, and I do not know what I am for.* Then in the confessional, where the same sins came back week after week wearing different faces, absolution had begun to feel like a bandage applied to a wound that would not close. He had not told anyone. A priest who doubts is a scandal waiting to happen, and besides, what would he say? *I still believe, but I no longer feel believed-in.* It sounded like self-pity. He kept it folded small and carried it.

Now he walked the nave with a dust cloth in his hand, and he found himself looking at the desert through the open door — the white glare of the parking lot, the low blue line of the mesas — differently than he had ever looked at it. As if it knew something. As if it were keeping something, patient as a miser, waiting for the right moment to show it to him. All his life the desert had been a backdrop, a beautiful indifference. Now it felt like attention. Now it felt like it was looking back.

*The desert keeps everything it takes.* The stranger’s words, in the stranger’s voice, in his own head.

He stopped in the middle of the nave, the dust cloth hanging from his hand. Somewhere under the floor of his memory something shifted, the way furniture shifts in a locked room. A laugh — a boy’s laugh, wild and bright, echoing off rock. His brother’s laugh, from summers when they were young and the desert was only a playground and nothing in it had ever been buried.

Michael stood very still until it went away. It was only grief, he told himself. Old grief, surfacing the way old grief does, for no reason. He finished straightening the hymnals, locked the church, and walked home through the heat with his eyes on the ground, the way a man walks who does not want to be seen thinking.

At the rectory he tried to read — the breviary, then a novel someone had left in the parish library, then nothing at all. The words would not hold still on the page. Every few minutes he found himself listening for a sound that wasn’t there: a knock, a footstep, a voice through the lattice of an empty room. Once, near midnight, the wind found the loose shutter on the kitchen window and set it knocking, and he was on his feet before he knew he had stood, his heart hammering like a boy’s. He stood in the dark kitchen a long time after that, embarrassed and wide awake, telling himself it was only the wind. The desert, he thought, keeps everything it takes — and some nights it gives a little of it back.

That night he dreamed of red rock and a sky too big for the world, and woke with his pillow damp and no memory of why.