It had been, if Father Laurence recalled correctly, Mr. and Mrs. Sorensen’s wedding night. They were asleep in that same hotel.
Sasquatch sightings were fairly common back then, but they ceased after the hotel incident. No one mentioned it right away—it’s not like the Sasquatch put a notice in the paper. But after a while people realized the Sasquatch were gone—just gone.
And now, apparently, they were back. Or, at least one was, anyway.
Barney Korman said he saw one picking its way across the north end of the bog, right outside the wildlife preserve. Ernesta Koonig said there was a huge, shaggy something helping itself to the best crop of Cortland apples that her orchard had ever produced. Bernie Larsen said he saw one running off with one of his lambs. There were stick structures on Cassandra Gordon’s hunting land. And the ghostly sound of tree knocking at night.
Eimon Lomas stopped by and asked if there was any ecclesiastic precedence allowing for the baptism of a Bigfoot.
Father Laurence said no.
“Seems a shame, though, don’t it?” asked Eimon, running his tongue over his remaining teeth.
“Never thought about it before,” Father Laurence said. But that was a lie, and he knew it. Agnes Sorensen had asked him the exact same question, a little more than thirty years earlier.
And his answer made her cry.
On Halloween, in an effort to avoid the Parish Council and their incessant harping on the subject of holidays—godless or otherwise—and to avoid the flurry of phone calls and visits and Post-it notes and emails and faxes and, once, horrifyingly, an intervention (“Is it the costumes, Father,” the eldest of the sisters asked pointedly, “or the unsupervised visits from children, that makes you so unwilling to take a stand on the effects of Satanism through Halloween-worship?” They folded their hands and waited. “Or perhaps,” the youngest added, “it’s a sugar addiction.”), Father Laurence decided to pay Mrs. Sorensen a visit.
Three weeks had passed, after all, since the death of her husband, and the widow’s freezer and pantry were surely stocked with the remains of the frozen casseroles, and lasagnas, and brown-up rolls, and mason jars filled with homemade chili and chicken soup and wild rice stew and beef consommé. Surely the bustling and cheeping flocks of women who descend upon houses of tragedy had by now migrated away, leaving the lovely Mrs. Sorensen alone, and quiet, and in need of company.
Besides. Wild rice stew (especially if it came from the Larsen home) didn’t sound half bad on a cold Halloween night.
The Sorensen farm—once the largest tract in the county—was nothing more than a hobby farm now. Mr. Sorensen had neither the aptitude nor the inclination for farming, so his wife had convinced him to cede his birthright to the Nature Conservancy, retaining a small acreage to allow her to maintain a good-sized orchard and berry farm. Mrs. Sorensen ran a small business in which she made small-batch hard ciders, berry wines, and fine jams. Father Laurence couldn’t imagine that her income could sustain her for long, but perhaps Mr. Sorensen had been well insured.
He knocked on the door.
The house erupted with animal sounds. Wet noses pressed at the window and sharp claws worried at the door. The house barked, screeched, groaned, hissed, snuffled, and whined. Father Laurence took a step backward. An owl peered through the transom window, its pale gold eyes unblinking. The priest cleared his throat.
“Mrs. Sorensen?”
A throaty gurgle from indoors.
“Agnes?”
Father Laurence had known Agnes Sorensen since her girlhood (her last name was Dryleesker then)—she was the little girl down the road, with a large, arthritic goose under one arm and a bull snake curled around the other. He would see her playing in front of her house at the end of the dead-end street when he came home for the summers during seminary.
“An odd family,” his mother used to say, with a definitive shake of her head. “And that girl is the oddest of them all.”
Laurence didn’t think so then, and he certainly didn’t think so now.
Agnes, in her knee socks and mary janes, in the A-line dresses her mother had made from old curtains, with her pigtails pale as stars, had an affinity with animals. In the old barn in their backyard, she housed the creatures that she had found, as well as those who had traveled long distances to be near her. A hedgehog with a missing foot, a blind weasel, a six-legged frog, a neurotic wren, a dog whose eardrums had popped like balloons when he wandered too near a TNT explosion on his owner’s farm. Agnes once came home with a wolf cub, but her father wouldn’t allow her to keep it. She had animals waiting for her by the back door each morning, animals who would accompany her on her way to school, animals who helped her with her chores, animals who sat on her lap as she did her homework, and animals who curled up on her bed when she slept.
But then she got married. To Mr. Sorensen—a good man and kind. And he needed her. But he was allergic. So their house was empty.
Mr. Sorensen was also, Father Laurence learned from the confessional booth, infertile.
Agnes came to confession only once a year, and she rarely spoke during her time in the booth. Most of the time she would sit, sigh, and breathe in the dark. The booth
