After a few howls and laughs, more footsteps followed and the voices faded. I went back inside and explained to Manuel that the hooligans were just a bunch of bored kids. He calmed down and returned to his room to finish his homework. His mother, Maria, taught violin at the local university during the day and studied English at home at night. She was in her room listening to language tapes on her headphones and had missed the entire event.
After reattaching my prosthetic arm, I called the police and reported the incident, just to establish a record in case the next time the kids decided to break into the church and steal an icon or a chalice. It took ten minutes for a police cruiser to arrive. That didn’t surprise me.
Once Bermuda usurped Hartford as the insurance capital of the world, the companies moved out and the drug gangs moved in. Now Hartford is just a waypoint between Boston and New York City, and you need a different kind of insurance to walk around at night. With the Kings of Solomon in the South End, 77 Love in the North End, and city and state budget crises, the police are spread thin. There are precious few resources to dedicate to the eastern fringe of the city near the defunct Colt’s gun factory and Dillon Stadium, where the old Hartford Knights used to play semipro football back in the day. The oldest Catholic church in Hartford, however, still stands on a tiny wooded lot, serving a small but devoted parish whose members live in the projects nearby.
After I told them what happened, the patrolmen stared at me as though I were a self-indulgent moron. They exuded the arrogance of the armed and immortal. One of them looked like Mr. Clean, with a shaved head and a physique that could double as a battering ram. His partner was long and wiry, with an untrustworthy-looking pencil mustache that he might have lifted from an uncooperative nightclub owner.
Their eyes told me I was wasting their time. There were serious crimes being committed in other parts of town.
A priest must be a mediator. Just as Moses revealed the law to Israel, the priest brings the human family together through eternal redemption. In this case, though, I needed to redeem myself for appearing to be a pain in the ass in the cops’ eyes.
“I didn’t mean for you to come out,” I said. “I didn’t dial nine-one-one. I told the dispatcher not to send anyone if you were busy.”
They continued glaring at me, as though motives mattered little in their world. “Hot June night, Father,” Mr. Clean said.
“Probably kids from Franklin Avenue, Father,” Pencil Mustache said. “They break into the stadium to party. They never hurt no one. But we’ll drive around and take a look for you.”
“Yeah, Father,” Mr. Clean said. “We’ll take a look.”
The police car radio squawked. They jumped inside, answered the call, and peeled out of the driveway, lights flashing and siren blaring. They took off toward the center of town, away from the stadium. Understandably, there was no time to drive around, no time to take a look.
Maria was at the base of the stairs with her arms wrapped around Manuel when I went back inside.
“Why were the police here, Father Nathan?’ she said. “Are they here to deport us? Are we being sent back to Mexico?”
“No, no one is sending you back to Mexico. Would you make us some tea, Maria? I can’t stop thinking about that
Twenty-two years ago, Maria’s mother was my teacher at the Consultoria Espanola y Linguistica in Santa Volopta, Mexico, where I studied Spanish and worked with Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s Missionaries of Charity. Maria was nine years old at the time.
Santa Volopta lies within the Golden Triangle of the Chihuahua state, the most violent territory in the world outside of actual war zones. Not all the violence is a result of the drug trade. Over the past ten years, 937 women have been murdered, their bodies tossed in random dumps and ditches. Although no arrests have ever been made, high-level policemen and prominent citizens are suspected.
At age eighteen, Maria married a lawyer in Volopta. When he became the municipal prosecutor, he launched an investigation into the murders of the daughters of Volopta; it led to his own assassination. Maria’s mother called me immediately after his body was found, put her daughter and grandson on a plane, and sent them to live with me in Connecticut. She didn’t trust the municipal or federal governments. She was certain her son-in-law’s murderers, the drug czars, and the high-level officials responsible for the killings of the daughters of Volopta were one and the same. In Maria’s mother’s mind, her daughter and grandson were as good as dead if they stayed in Mexico.
From the moment Maria and Manuel arrived, my goal was to provide a spiritual and physical home for them while they integrated themselves into the community and began new lives. The gossipers in the parish, of course, didn’t want to see it that way. It was far more entertaining to contemplate a priest violating his vow of celibacy with the beauty living beneath his roof.
As soon as Maria started appearing in church, attendance and contributions at Mass increased. A dozen men, single and married alike, received a thunderbolt of devout inspiration and started showing up daily. When I turned from the altar to bestow a blessing during morning Mass, I would catch one or more of them trying to steal a glance at her from a side pew. She possessed an elegance that could make men sob in anguish because they would never touch her. Her hair fell past her shoulders in silken strands that shone under the ceiling lights like onyx.
She tended to gaze at the ground, either because she didn’t want to encourage any suitors or because she was desperate to disappear. This habit lent her an air of innocence. When she looked up, there was a gentleness and purity in her oval face and chestnut eyes that took one’s breath away.
It didn’t take long for the comments to start.
“There they are,” a widow said. “The Thorn Birds.”
“His third leg still work?” a former altar boy said.
“If it didn’t, it does now,” his friend replied.
I am forty-five years old. I’ve been a priest for seventeen of those years, and over time, it has been my observation that ethical and moral standards are deteriorating, nowhere more so than in the Catholic Church. And no one has disappointed the faithful more than the Catholic priest. As a result, people have become cynical. It’s just a profession, they say; there is no special calling. For some folks, it’s unimaginable that a heterosexual man such as I would not lust for a woman such as Maria, would not lie in bed wrestling with temptation every night.
And yet, I must insist: I do no such thing. I do not think of her in the way that other men do. I do not want to touch her. I do not want to possess her. I pray only for her and her son’s health and salvation. Seeing them alive and healthy at Mass fulfills me in every way. Such is the joy of priesthood: contentment beyond the scope of sexual fulfillment. In the twenty-one years since a priest gave me a prayer book and changed the course of my life forever, I’ve said the Lord’s Prayer three million, six hundred, and sixty-six times. That is how much prayer it has taken me to reach such a state of contentment.
I was not always this way. There was a time in my youth when I would have broken doors down to get to Maria, and no one would have tried to stop me. I was once the golden boy, a star collegiate baseball player with a bazooka for a right arm, a flame-throwing pitcher drafted in the third round by the New York Yankees. I had all the girls I wanted, and then the only one I ever needed died in a car accident when I was behind the wheel.
The day before the killers came for Maria, the same gang of kids tried to break into the church. They attempted, unsuccessfully, to jimmy open the padlock to the front door with a tire iron, and they ran away when I limped over from the rectory. I wished I could have caught one of them and had a discussion with him, helped him channel his energies into something more useful, such as the boys’ baseball team I coached in the Rotary league. It consisted of misfits and orphans, the shunned and unwanted. But this gang of kids was too fast for a one-legged priest.
“Hey, Father,” the same boy said from his hiding place in the stadium across the street. “You need me to hear your confession, Father?”
It was just past 9:00 p.m. when I got back to the house, sweat rolling down my cheeks from one minute of exertion. That’s all it took on a sultry June night. Manuel was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, like the first time. After reassuring him there was nothing to fear, I dialed 911. I didn’t want to bother the cops, but I had no choice. The kids had tried to enter the church. The church belonged to everyone, but its safekeeping was my responsibility.
This time it didn’t take the cops ten minutes to get there. It took them twenty.
“Doesn’t look serious, Father,” Mr. Clean said as we studied the old wooden door to the church.
“See the dent here?” I said, pointing to a welt in the church’s door. “That’s where they pushed off with the
