Embracing Darkness (44 page)

“Sure, Father,” replied the doctor, unimpressed with the priest’s complicity in this farce. “Are you a friend of the family? I only ask because, unless the young man gives his consent, I cannot give you any further details about his physical.”

“Tell me,” said Father Poole, anxiously. “Did he pass?”

The doctor hesitated. “Again I cannot… .”

“He failed, didn’t he?”

The doctor sighed. “Yes. It appears that he has both male and female attributes. The army will refuse his acceptance once I submit my report.”

“Please!” Phineas said loudly, grabbing the arm of the doctor to keep him from leaving. “Serving his country is the only thing this boy wants to do. If you go in there and tell him he’s failed his exam because of something over which he has no control, I’m afraid it’ll damn well drive him to suicide. You may as well go in there with a gun and put one shot right between his eyes, because that’s what it’ll do to him.”

The doctor, not inclined to budge on the matter, began trotting out an apology before Phineas cut him off.

“You don’t understand, doctor,” said Father Poole. “This young man is my ward. He grew up in an abusive home. His father would flip a coin to decide between beating his son or simply putting a knife to the boy’s throat and slicing away. Luckily for the boy, the beatings won out every time. I’ve watched him go from a timid sort to a fine young man. I don’t care whether he’s got tits and half a penis. You can push this through. No one need know anything about it. Money still talks, doesn’t it, doctor?”

The doctor said nothing. Father Poole knew that he still had a great deal more convincing to do.

“Do you believe in hell?” asked Father Poole.

“I do.”

“Are you a Catholic, doctor?”

“I am, Father.”

Phineas glanced at the doctor’s nametag. “Lemons. A strange name for a Catholic. Where are your people from?”

“Italy. Our name was Limoncello. They changed it when my grandfather came over, but, Father, this has nothing to do with my religion. It has to do with… .”

“But, Dr. Lemons, I
do
think that it has to do with all this. The principle is all the same.”

“Principle?” asked Dr. Lemons.

“I agree with you that religion plays no part here. What I mean by principle is that you can no more deny this young man his dream because of some silly guideline than I cannot hold you to helping me through all this simply because you and I are of the same faith. That is my point, doctor. One has nothing to do with the other.”

“Father,” began Dr. Lemons, “that’s all well and good, but… .”

“God has a plan for all of us. For example, His plan for me was to become an ordained priest and serve Him and humanity. Your job, Dr. Lemons, is to give physical exams to young men to prove they’re healthy enough to enlist. Now look at our boy, Rex Gunther. He’s a healthy young lad. Not a skip in his heart beat, a blur in his vision, a gimp in his walk. He’s your ideal soldier in training. Oh sure, his chest could bounce up and down as he runs in the field, but he’s promised me to keep it tightly wrapped. And as for his business below, no one is going to study his pecker in the shower.”

“Father,” replied Dr. Lemons. “You can’t possibly think that Rex will last one day in an army barracks. His voice alone will cause suspicion.”

The two said nothing else for a while. After Father Poole had paced the room, he said, “You don’t know how much this means to Rex and you probably won’t risk your job because of it, and I don’t blame you. If you broke your rules for every boy who walked in here with a malady that would keep him out of the service, you wouldn’t last too long. So now I ask you, what
will
make you risk your job to let the boy in?”

Dr. Lemons couldn’t believe what he’d just heard but readily indicated his price: $1,000.

Rex left for Biloxi, Mississippi, a week and a half later. Father Poole had to sell the Keats house, which Mrs. Keats had given to the church as an expression of her devotion to God.

Although there wasn’t much of a market for it throughout the Depression, Father Poole pitched the sale of the Keats home in Holly, asking around whether anyone knew of someone who might be looking to buy a house at a bargain price. In just two days he found such a person, a Mr. Walt Hartley, a friendly sort of bank teller who was a widower with a young daughter the same age as Jessie and Theo.

“I’ll take the house, Father,” Hartley said to a relieved Phineas Poole. “Two thousand dollars seems to be a fair price for the property. And besides, it’s beautiful up here. And with the new bank in town opening up, I’ll need to be local. Hate to make that trip here from Brentwood every day. Not my idea of smart economics. After all, I’d need a car, and cars also need gas. The last time I checked, walking doesn’t cost one red cent.”

“Well,” answered Father Poole, “it’s a good thing you don’t have a car. You’d have a hard time getting it up here, what with there being no road. That’s not to say you
couldn’t
get a car up on the hill. It’s just that everybody prefers to walk anyway. Besides, automobiles prove deadly for grass.”

The two men patted each other on the back like old chums. Phineas had much to be happy about. He was glad that the Keats house was going to have life in it once again, a place that was once the scene of terrible domestic abuse. Children’s laughter would again resonate in the house. What’s more, he was able to do right by Rex Gunther, and that made Father Poole beam.

For a second or two the priest thought of Ben Benson. He raised his eyes to the heavens and said to himself, “Well, old man, you’re getting your wish, more so than I could ever have dreamed.” His smile faded as he reflected on how much he missed Ben Benson, but he quickly remembered the wonderful people by whom his life was now blessed. This time he thanked God.

With the Hartleys moved in and the bank draft in Father Poole’s hand, he went to the National Bank of Holly the next day to deposit the money into his church account. A week later, after the funds had cleared, Father Poole returned to the bank and asked to have a check made out in the amount of $1,000 to Dr. Michael Lemons. He made sure not to conduct the transaction while Hartley was in the bank. Larry Fields, notary and assistant to the manager, executed the transaction instead. For fear that it would lead to questions best left unanswered, Father Poole asked Mr. Fields not to mention the sizeable withdrawal to Mr. Hartley.

“Father Poole,” commented Fields, who was a tall, thin man with thin lips, high cheekbones, and black hair graying at the temples. “We value your business
and
your privacy as our customer. If you wish this transaction to be kept in confidence between yourself and me, I completely understand. It won’t go any further than the two of us.”

Jessie didn’t lose any time in running over to the Hartley house to meet Sue Ellen Hartley. All Father Poole had said was, “She’s the same age as
you
, Jess.”

Jessie longed for a female friend with whom she could share her innermost secrets and desires, talk about boys, and of course swap tales of the day when they’d gotten their first period. For Jessie it had come relatively early.

At fourteen years old Jessie had gone to Sister Ignatius after English class and told her that her vagina had been bleeding in the bathtub that morning. “I thought I’d cut myself at first,” Jessie said, “but when I hopped out of the tub and began to dry off, I looked to see where it was coming from, and I saw red lines going down my legs along with the water.”

Sister explained the whole birds-and-bees business to Jessie that night as she tucked her into bed. “Now that you’re growing into a young woman, you need to be careful of all the goings on with those boys. You may see them as your brothers, and they may see you as their sister, but
they
are
still
boys
. And the fact that they’re not related to you might make them even more eager to pounce.”

Confused and very tired, Jessie yawned and replied, “What are you talking about, Sis?”

“Never you mind, dear,” answered the nun. “Just remember that if they try to jump on you, kick them right between the legs. If you do, they won’t ever try anything like
that
again.”

Sue Ellen Hartley turned out to be everything for which Jessie had hoped: a best friend, confidant, playmate, partner in crime, and, best of all, surrogate sister. The two girls enjoyed each other’s company immensely and spent nearly every waking moment together, except for the hours when Sue Ellen, whom everyone called Swell for short, was in school at Wheelwright Academy.

A favorite pastime for the two girls was that of hooking their legs around the maple’s lowest branch and hanging from it upside down, just as Father Poole had taught Jessie and her brothers many years earlier. Jessie even taught Swell to climb the maple. When the girls weren’t aloft, they spent time with Theo and the new children who, now that Jonas, Joey, and Rex were gone, occupied their old beds.

By early 1942 eight new boys came to the orphanage nearly within a month of one another. Word had gotten around the church that several of the original children had left.

Charlotte Wickham was the first to comment. She asked Father Poole one Sunday before church whether she could have a minute after the service to talk to the congregation. He consented but might have thought twice if he had known that she was ready to dump more kids on him than he could handle.

“As you all know, friends,” said Charlotte, “Father Poole has lost a few of his little sheep. Jonas went back home to Dixie; Joey is now on his own, and so forth. So, with only two left, I wager that he and Sister are so desperately seeking new children to help. I mean, there’s all that empty space now! I volunteer at Exeter Hospital as a candy striper. I’m chummy with several nurses and I have it under good authority that there are more helpless little souls to save. But we can go a step further! I say we go around town—heck, even out into the surrounding towns—and gather up all those poor, helpless children who, if it were not for the kindness and generosity of these two saints doing God’s work, would surely perish.”

Father Poole and Sister Ignatius were speechless but hardly able to contradict the proposal. How could they? After all, they were now the proud saviors of abused and abandoned children. They forever more would be connected with this charitable work.

Within a few days the first of the new children were welcomed into the rectory. In addition to myself, these boys were five-year-old Xavier Patch, whom everyone called Ziggy, seven-year-olds Charlie Ryder and Dylan Fielding, eight-year-old Gabriel Sparks, ten-year-old Lou Conner, thirteen-year-old Jordan St. James, and fourteen-year-old Billy Norwin.

There was little difference between the backgrounds of these new arrivals and those of Jonas, Joey, Rex, and Theo. After a while, as the nurses at Exeter Hospital knew all too well, their stories were horrifically similar: heads put through pane glass, broken cheekbones, fractured limbs, severed toes, indiscriminate beatings.

With so many more mouths to feed, Father Poole needed more than ever the money left over from selling the Keats house. He had enough to care for the new children, but, even though the congregation pledged to dig even deeper into their purses and pockets, Father Poole knew he couldn’t rely on that supplemental income for long.

“People have short attention spans,” he said to Sister Ignatius on the first evening the newcomers came to stay in the Benson Home for Abused and Abandoned Boys. “They’ll give for a while, because they have a vivid memory of seeing those boys’ wretched faces and the homes from which they came. After the memories fade and the emotions subside, however, so too will their generosity.”

On a mild day in late February of 1942, the children were gathered in the front yard playing when Jessie saw a well dressed soldier walking up the path to the rectory. Upon his knock Sister Ignatius answered the door, and the man removed his hat as he entered.

Father Poole took his keys and wallet and left the bedroom, ready to begin his Saturday rather late, although such was not his original intention. Ellen had gone down to make breakfast a half hour earlier, but since then he hadn’t heard a peep from her or the slightest sound of clanking pots and pans coming from the Benson kitchen. As he walked downstairs and called out to Sister Ignatius, there came no answer. He walked over to the front door and stood there, his head down and his hand on the knob, waiting for her to respond. His keys now in his pocket, Father Poole was about to put his wallet in the same place, the left inside pocket of his blazer, when he clumsily dropped it on the floor.

The priest bent down to pick up the wallet’s spilled contents: four one-dollar bills, a picture of his parents, a folded sketch of himself as a stick figure that Jessie had drawn when she was three, some lint, an Indian-head penny that he had found on “The Path to Salvation” one day, and a letter he’d received back in late February. It was a letter given to him by the soldier whom Jessie had seen coming up the path. He read it again, as he had done a hundred times before.

February 21, 1942

To Whom It May Concern:

It is with great regret that we inform you that Rex Gunther was found dead in his barracks yesterday morning. Please accept our sincerest condolences in your time of grief.

Sincerely,

Major Stanley Zabrisky

U.S. Army

Biloxi, Mississippi

The soldier who delivered the letter had told Father Poole and Sister Ignatius that the letter was purposely ambiguous due to the state of Rex’s body when it was found.

“What are you trying to tell me, Sergeant?” Father Poole asked, consoling the Sister, who hadn’t stopped crying in his arms since the priest read the letter.

“Private Gunther had a hard first few days in Biloxi and filed several complaints about the men in his barracks taunting him. Complaints ranged from whipping his naked body with wet towels to finding human feces on his pillow.”