The Scorpio Races

I have to win.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

PUCK

“Kate, you do realize that you aren’t at fault.”

Father Mooneyham sounds a little tired, but he always seems to sound that way to me when I go to confession. I smooth my hands over my smock. I felt badly coming to church in my trousers, but I wasn’t about to ride Dove in a dress, so I put a smock on over my pants. I feel it’s a fair compromise.

“But I feel guilty. I was the last one to hold his hand. And when I let go, he was dead.”

“But surely he would have died anyway.”

“Maybe not, though. What if I’d stayed and held his hand? I won’t ever know now. I’ll always wonder.”

I stare at the brilliant stained-glass window over the altar. The peculiarity of the confession booth allows me to see the rest of the building from my vantage point. Because St. Columba’s apparently predates confession or priests or sin, the booth was added much later. The confessional is open to the rest of the church, and the curtain is only between the confessor and the priest. And the curtain is ridiculous not only because Father Mooneyham can just watch the penitent walk through the pews toward him, but also Father knows everyone’s voices on the island, so even blind, he’d know whose sin was whose. The only real benefit of the curtain is to allow you to pick your nose without a holy audience, something I’d seen Joseph Beringer take advantage of before.

Now Father sounds a little cross. “This sounds more like egotism to me, Kate. You are ascribing much power to what was, after all, only your hand.”

“You’re the one who says that God works through us. Maybe he wanted me to stay there and keep holding it.”

There’s silence for a moment on the other side of the curtain. Finally, he says, “Not everyone’s hands can always be the site of miracles. We would be afraid to touch anything. Did you feel called to stay by his side? No? Then put down your guilt.”

He makes it sound like something I can wrap in wax paper and leave by the door for Puffin. I slouch back in the chair and look at the ceiling of the church.

“I’m also very angry with my brother,” I add. “Anger’s a sin, right?” I remember, however, that God sometimes came over all righteously angry, and that was all right. I feel slightly righteous about my anger over Gabe’s decision to leave the island, so perhaps it’s not a sin after all.

“Why are you angry at him?”

I wipe a tear off my cheek. It’s a very cunning tear, because I didn’t even feel it coming. “Because he’s leaving us behind, and not even for a good reason. Nothing I can change.”

Father Mooneyham says, “Gabriel.” Because of course he knows which brother I mean now.

He doesn’t say anything for a few minutes, just lets me cry. Orange and blue light from the stained-glass windows finds its way through my hands cupped over my face. It’s very quiet in the church. Finally, I wipe the sleeve of my shirt across my cheek.

The curtain shivers slightly and I see Father Mooneyham’s hand offering a handkerchief. I use it to dry my face and his hand withdraws.

“I can’t tell you anything that he’s said in here, Kate. And I don’t know if it will make you feel any better to know that he has sat in that same chair where you sit now, and he has cried as well.”

I try, without success, to imagine Gabe crying. Even at our parents’ burial, he had looked dry-eyed into the hole in the ground, shivering in the wind, letting Finn and me lean against him and weep. Despite that, the image of him in this chair, crying, creeps into my head, and I can feel myself softening toward him. I’m resentful that this hypothetical Gabriel can work such magic on me. I say, “But he doesn’t even have to go.”

“Mm. I will tell you one thing he said, Kate. He said that you don’t need to ride in the races.”

“Of course I do! We need the money.”

“And the races are your answer to that problem. It’s how you feel you can solve it. Gabe has a problem, too, and leaving is how he feels he can solve it.”

It’s a horribly wise way of looking at it, and it annoys me. “Isn’t there something holy about taking care of widows and orphans? Isn’t he supposed to be taking care of us?” But even as I say it, I remember him saying I can’t bear it. He had been taking care of us. From that dry-eyed funeral where he let us lean on him in our grief to working late on the docks to trying to spare us from Malvern. I suddenly feel very selfish to begrudge him his escape. I sigh. “Why does it have to be leaving, though? Can’t he come up with a different answer? Can’t I change his mind?”

Father Mooneyham considers this. “Leaving doesn’t mean not coming back. It wouldn’t hurt you to meditate on the story of the prodigal son.”

This is about as comforting as a cold brick when you’re lonely. I stuff Father Mooneyham’s handkerchief back under the curtain, and when he takes it, I scowl at the stained-glass window over the altar. There are thirteen red panes in the middle of it, and Mum or someone told me once that they were supposed to represent drops of Columba’s blood. He was martyred here. It was back before the natives knew that confession and priests and sin were good for them, so they stabbed Columba and threw him off one of the western cliffs. Then his body washed up with the capaill uisce one October and because it wasn’t disgusting, even after being in the ocean for so long, he was sainted. I think his jawbone is still kept there behind the altar.

This reminds me, suddenly, of how Gabe had decided when he was fifteen that he was going to be a priest. He’d been absolutely no fun for about two weeks. It was Gabe who’d told me the story of Columba; I remember sitting in the pew with him then. His hair had been slicked back with water because he’d felt it added to his ethereal appearance. I feel a sudden pang of longing for that foolishly serious Gabe and the trusting and always ill-contented Puck that I’d been then.

“Aren’t you going to give me a penance, Father?” I ask.

“Kate, you have yet to confess any sins to me.”

I cast my mind back over the past week. “I considered taking the Lord’s name on Monday. Well, not ‘God.’ I thought about saying ‘Jesus Christ!’ I also ate an entire orange without telling Finn, because I knew he’d be annoyed.”

Father Mooneyham says, “Go home, Kate.”

“I have been horrid. I just can’t think of them right now. I don’t want you to think otherwise.”

“Will it make you feel better to say two Hail Marys and a Columba Creed?”

“Yes, thank you.” He absolves me. I feel absolved. As I get up, I see that someone is waiting in the pews on the opposite side of the church, waiting to confess. It’s Annie, Dory Maud’s youngest sister. Her lipstick is a little smeared, but it seems cruel to tell a blind woman that, so I don’t say anything. I almost don’t notice Elizabeth, sitting at the end of the same pew with her hair pinned up to her head and her arms pinned across her chest. I can’t decide which of them is confessing. Annie looks dreamy, but she always does because she can’t see farther than three feet away. Elizabeth looks vaguely angry, but she always does because she can see farther than three feet away.

“Puck,” Elizabeth says.

Annie says hello to me in her soft voice.

“Where are you headed?” Elizabeth asks.

I feel a little lighter. “I have to return a jacket.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE