“And knocked on the door—”
“Would you do that?” He leaned slightly toward me. “Go on.”
“Would you let me in?” I asked.
I might have shoved him back in his chair.
“Once, weren’t churches open all hours?” I pursued.
“Long ago,” he said, much too quickly.
“So, father, any night I came in dire need, you would not answer?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” The candlelight flared in his eyes, as if I had raised the wick to quicken the flare.
“For the worst sinner, maybe, in the history of the world, father?”
“There’s no such creature.” Too late, his tongue froze on this last dread noun. His eyes swiveled and batted. He revised his proclamation to give it a new go-round.
“No such person lives.”
“But,” I pursued, “what if damnation, Judas himself, came begging—” I stopped—“late?”
“Iscariot? I’d wake for him, yes.”
“And what if, father, this lost terrible man in need should knock not one night a week but most nights of the year? Would you wake, or ignore the knock?”
That did it. Father Kelly leaped up as if I had pulled the great cork. The color sank from his cheeks and the skin at the roots of his hair.
“You have need to be elsewhere. I will not keep you.”
“No, father.” I floundered to be brave. “You need me to be gone. There was a knock on your door—” I blundered on— “twenty years ago this week, late. Asleep, you heard the door banged—”
“No, no more of this! Get off!”
It was the terrified shout of Starbuck, decrying Ahab’s blasphemy and his final lowering for the great white flesh.
“Out!”
“Out? You did go out, father.” My heart jumped and almost slewed me in my chair. “And let in the crash and the din and the blood. Perhaps you heard the cars strike. Then the footsteps and then the bang and the voices yelling. Maybe the accident got out of hand, if accident it was. Maybe they needed a proper midnight witness, someone to see but not tell. You let in the truth and have kept it since.”
I rose to stand and almost fainted. My rise, as if we were on weights and pulleys, sank the priest back, all but boneless, i
n his chair.
“You were witness, father, were you not? For it’s just a few yards off and, on Halloween night, 1934, didn’t they bring the victims here?”
“God help me,” mourned the priest, “yes.”
One moment full of fiery air, Father Kelly now gave up his inflammatory ghost and sank, fold on fold, flesh on flesh, into himself.
“Were they all dead when the crowd carried them in?”
“Not all,” said the priest, in shocked recall.
“Thanks, father.”
“For what?” He had closed his eyes with the headache of remembrance and now sprang them wide in renewed pain. “Do you know what you’ve got into?!”