Embracing Darkness (43 page)

Joey lit one candle and gave it to Jonas, who then slipped into the space under the rectory. The ground was mostly dry, with thin patches of stray grass, and the ground was level to the outside. There wasn’t much room to stand. Jonas could only stay on his knees if he wanted to keep the rest of his body erect.

“Throw him in here, y’all!” Jonas called out to the others.

Joey had left to get two shovels from Argyle Hobbs’s tool closet. He had to jimmy the lock to get it open and later told Father Poole some lie that they’d been playing hide-and-seek and that Argyle had absentmindedly left the tool closet unlocked. Jessie, the story went, had hidden inside, and as the older boys walked by, assuming that the groundskeeper had forgotten to lock it, snapped the lock back into place. It wasn’t until Jessie’s cries could be heard minutes later that the boys had to resort to breaking the lock in order to free her.

Joey came back just in time to see Rex and Theo pushing the dead man into the rectory’s crawl space. Jessie held back the dog, who appeared to be a bull terrier mix of about seven or eight years old. She had fondly started to call him General Lee, based on Sister Ignatius’s history lesson a few months earlier on the Civil War. She’d passed around an old portrait of the high-ranking Confederate. Jessie couldn’t help but notice, even through the sepia-toned photograph, his bright white hair, which even extended into a thick moustache and beard across his face. Jessie drew an immediate comparison to Robert E. Lee and the dog’s pure white coat.

“General Lee?” Rex and Theo had questioned in unison, not believing their ears the first time they heard their sister call the dog by that name.

“I’d wait before I get attached to that mutt,” Rex said. “Sister isn’t gonna like your having a dog around.”

“She’ll love him just as I do,” Jessie replied. “He saved us from that man!”

“Keep your mouth shut about that!” Joey snapped, throwing the shovels into the space under the rectory. “THEY CAN
NEVER
FIND OUT!”

Jessie wanted to be angry with Joey for the way he was acting toward her, but she couldn’t. She knew he was telling her that for her own good and that of all concerned, including Father Fin and Sis.

After Joey disappeared into the dark space, the younger ones remained outside as Jonas and Joey dug furiously. After about forty minutes Theo noticed movement from his peripheral vision. It was Father Fin and Sis finally returning from their trip into town.

Theo jumped to his feet and said frantically, “They’re back! They’re back!”

Jessie, Rex, and Theo heard the digging suddenly come to a halt. It seemed to the three children that Jonas and Joey were not moving a muscle and had even stopped breathing.

As Joey heard the thunderous crash of an oversized wave as it hit the shoreline, he turned back to the ocean again and thought of how burying the dead man on Holly Hill under the rectory turned out to be the beginning of the end for that era in his existence.

Returning to the present, he heard a request for a soda pop. He turned and saw a beautiful young blond woman about his age. She cracked a smile and repeated her request. Joey Foster was in love.

He and the girl, Marcy Bellows, wed that September, and she became pregnant fifteen minutes after leaving the church. They moved to Providence, where Joey became a manager in a small grocery store. The last anyone heard from Joey, he and his wife were happily married with nine kids, two of whom were twins. People who knew him best when he was a kid commented on how wonderful it was that he had finally found a way to put his sperm to good use.

As Sister Ignatius rounded the post at the bottom of the stairs, she felt a sudden sharp pain in the middle of her forehead, which caused her to lose her balance and collide with the antique wooden chair that acted more as a conversation piece than practical furniture. She banged her knee against the chair’s front left leg as she went down.

She never had liked the chair, probably because it had always reminded her of when she was a child in Exeter. The chair was almost identical to one that sat at the bottom of the orphanage’s staircase. Its purpose was simple. Whenever a girl acted out, and Ellen F. acted out plenty, she was forced to sit for the entire afternoon in the chair that looked exactly like Ben Benson’s solid oak one.

Neither one was very comfortable. The seat was as hard as a rock, and it had no arms. What’s more, the orphanage’s chair had five spiral bars going down its back, a pattern that dug into the sitter’s muscles. Yet, for all its negative attributes, Sister Ignatius felt compelled to sit down in that Ben Benson pre-Civil War chair, whose seat was still hard but whose support bars were at least flat and smooth.

As she sat in the chair, she thought of Jessie, the girl whom she’d raised since infancy. It was her fifteenth birthday today. The nun’s most vivid memory of Jessica as a baby came to her when she plopped herself down in that old relic. She remembered putting the baby in that very chair on the morning of Ben’s, Johnny’s, and Georgiana’s funeral.

With both hands the Sister rubbed her long fingers over the sides of the chair, nearly staring off into space. It was almost as if the chair acted as a time machine that brought back a myriad of memories, both good and bad. She reflected back on the one and only time she had ever hit Jessie six years ago when she and Father Poole had come home after spending a good part of the day in town. They had left Jonas, Joey, Rex, Theo, and Jessie in Mrs. Keats’s care during their absence. When they reached the rectory, all the children were by the front stairs and acting very guilty.

Sister Ignatius assumed it at once to be guilt for having taken in a stray dog without permission. “What are you doing with this filthy animal, Jessica?” the nun had said sternly.

“His name is General Lee,” Jessie had replied innocently, but when she inadvertently looked over to the gaping hole below the rectory’s first floor, Father Poole and Sister Ignatius looked as well.

“What in the name of… ?” began Father Poole, but he was interrupted by Sister Ignatius.

“Children!” she screamed. “What are you three up to? Where are your brothers?”

She shouted out their names three times. After the third shout General Lee barked at the nun.

She screamed, “WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE BARKING AT?”

“Let him be!” Jessie yelled.

In an instant Sister forgot about the dog and impulsively slapped Jessie hard across the face, causing Jessie to lose her balance and fall.

Father Poole reacted immediately, calling out her name and quickly going to her aid. He was about to ask Sister Ignatius how she could have done such a thing, but two things stopped him. First, he didn’t want to undermine her authority in front of the children; second, he quickly recognized her instant remorse.

“Oh, baby!” Sister Ignatius began. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it!” Bending down, she pushed Father Poole away, who in turn lost his balance and fell backwards, landing in a small puddle of urine that General Lee had just left.

She hugged Jessie tightly until the dog let out another bark. Sensing that all attention was now focused on him, he wagged his tail, dangled his tongue, and managed another yelp, though not as loud as the first.

Father Poole got up and immediately realized that his coat carried a strong scent. “I’m going inside to change,” he said, embarrassed, mounting the steps and disappearing inside the rectory.

As Sister Ignatius followed him up the stairs, she peered down at Jessie. “Why don’t you three get that mutt cleaned up,” she said. “He looks a fright.”

Jessie’s face brightened at once. “Really? You mean it? We can keep him?”

The nun replied with a wide grin, “Yes, you can keep him, but we’ll need to castrate him so that he doesn’t go wandering any further than the edge of the summit. We don’t need people down in town complaining about him.”

The children said nothing else but just smiled.

“Alright,” announced Sister Ignatius. “Go clean that dog up. And put the cover back over that hole. I don’t want any shenanigans down there. It’s not a play area. And hurry up because you need to have your lunch.” The nun spotted the blood of the man in the greasy overalls, which stained the dog’s mouth.

“And clean around that dog’s mouth! Goodness! What did you do, feed him leftover hamburger? He’s got ketchup all over himself!”

At half past eight Father Poole finally got out of bed, realizing that it was far later than when Jessie usually woke up on a Saturday morning. Paramount in his mind every morning he found himself in Sister Ignatius’s bed was never to allow any of the children to know of the intimacy the two of them shared. Of course, there were nights when Phineas would stay at the house well after Jessie’s bedtime. She would kiss the two of them goodnight and scurry upstairs, never thinking twice about just how long it would be until Father Fin retired back to the rectory. After her door shut, Phineas and Ellen would wait a good hour or two before venturing upstairs.

Usually the first thing Phineas thought of in the morning was how they were going to manage financially. At the same time he struggled with the morality, or lack thereof, of his actions: his sexual love affair with a nun and his appropriation of money from the collection plate in order to pay the bills every month, one of which was a bribe of silence.

As he put on his last night’s clothes, the priest remembered now-departed Jonas Hodges and Zachary Black. Joey was gone now too, and so was Rex Gunther. “Poor Rex,” thought Father Poole.

Rex was seventeen when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. News of the surprise attack had struck him differently than the other children. During Sister Ignatius’s history lesson one winter morning in early 1942, hearing of the bravery of men and women in the U.S. armed forces, Rex was transfixed by her accounts of selfless acts of heroism. As he heard all this, Rex sat motionless. Nothing would please him more than to go to war for his country and fight “the Krauts in Germany or the Japs in the Pacific,” as he put it.

He presented the idea to Father Poole that night at supper.

“Please, Father Fin,” Rex began. “This means the world to me. I have to serve.”

Father Poole and Sister exchanged glances. Neither wanted to see the boy go off to war for many reasons: besides not wanting him to come back in a body bag, they knew that in an Army barracks a sexual deformity such as Rex’s could not be hidden for long, even if it went undetected during his entrance physical.

“You can’t go, Rex,” Father Poole said bluntly.

“WHY NOT?” Rex shouted, causing everyone at the table except Mrs. Keats to look up from their plates in surprise.

Quickly becoming aware of the scene he was causing, Rex excused himself quietly and left the table, first bunching his napkin together before tossing it onto his plate of unfinished salmon. Father Poole nodded to Sister Ignatius. The two got up and followed Rex to his bedroom.

No sooner had Rex collapsed onto his bed in bitter disappointment than Father Poole knocked softly at his door. Indignant, Rex shifted from lying on his right side to his left, giving both of them his back. Father Poole didn’t knock a second time. He and Sister Ignatius approached the bed. Phineas remained standing while the Sister sat by Rex’s feet. She put a hand on Rex’s knee, but he jerked it away from her almost immediately.

“I don’t wanna talk about it anymore,” the boy said, angrily. “You two have decided for me already. I don’t need to hear anymore about it. It’s at an end. FINISHED!”

To Rex’s surprise neither of them replied. In the distance they could hear the clamor of dishes, children’s laughter, and mumbled talk in the dining room.

“Well, Father Fin? Sis?” said Rex. “Aren’t you gonna box my ears for talking back?”

Silence again.

“Come on, you two. Yell at me. Tell me you’re gonna punish me for talking back!”

Still the two said nothing.

“I don’t get it,” Rex said.

“We worry about you,” Sister Ignatius said, her eyes sad. “Terribly so.”

“Yes,” Father Poole added. “You’re a special kind of person, Rex.”

“So that’s what this is about,” Rex began. “You don’t want me going off to fight because you think I’m not a real man. You think I’m a girl, a freak of nature! Is that it?”

He jumped off his mattress and walked past the other beds to the window. In a high-pitched voice, more so than his own, he mimicked Sister Ignatius. “‘Oh, sure. Two-Sex-Rex wants to go off to war! That’ll be the day they let a hermaphro in the Army!’”

Sister Ignatius protested immediately. It was true that she had called Rex “Two-Sex-Rex” sometimes, although she claimed that it was a sign of her affection for him.

“It isn’t that we don’t see you as a real man, Rex,” began Father Poole. “You know that we respected your choice to consider yourself a male when you were fifteen. It’s just that, well, with your having gained so much on top, and your voice being as high as it is, let’s face it… .”

Phineas stopped once he heard Rex beginning to cry. The priest and nun both tried in vain to console him.

With both hands clasped over his mouth as if he were getting ready to pray, Rex said, “I am going, whether you like it or not.”

Father Poole and Sister Ignatius knew that they couldn’t stop him. And so on February 4
th
, 1942, Rex’s eighteenth birthday, he and Father Poole went to Exeter and registered him for active duty. Rex was one of fifteen or so young men of either the same age or a bit older, dressed only in their underwear. Rex couldn’t help but stare down at each boy’s undergarments to make comparisons between the bulge between their legs and the one between his own.

During Rex’s physical the army doctor came out to speak to Father Poole while Rex was getting dressed. “The boy is suffering from a cold,” said the doctor. “His voice was quite hoarse when I asked him to read off the letters on the eye chart. And then it went to a whisper when I started asking him the usual questions about his health history, prior diseases, and things of that nature.”

Father Poole tried hard not to laugh. “He
has
had a cold for a few days. I guess it’s just played havoc on his cords.”