Well here we go. The first part of the story.
It is my habit, when I am able, to go to confession on Saturdays. It's a habit I formed a few years ago, because it was necessary for my work.
But I haven't worked for some time. It's been, what? Three months now. Three months since I was put on administrative leave.
Three months and a week since I killed the girl.
And three months and six days since my last confession.
I wouldn't have carried around her death on my soul for three months. I asked to see a priest as soon as I woke up in the hospital; about five minutes after I learned she was dead.
The confession was insufficient. I know this. I can feel it in my soul, feel it whenever I try to open the breviary to pray, feel it whenever I say mass, alone, in private, for I would not dare in my current state to say it in public. I can feel that my five minutes spent with Father Mark, the assistant hospital chaplain, a cheery young priest of twenty-eight years old, his face radiating goodness and the love of God, fresh from the seminary, were in no way sufficient.
I spared him the worst, and simply told him that I had let the girl down, had failed her, had failed the church, and she was dead. He'd heard of the circumstances, of course -- the story made the rounds throughout the diocese in a matter of minutes, priests being as fond as anyone of gossip. He gave me absolution; he tried to cheer me up as best he could. But it was pro forma, my heart was not in it; and I hadn't begun the process of self-examination, the terrible trial of self to fully understand where I failed, how I failed, and how my own sinfulness prevented me from giving the girl what she needed. The book Fr. Ricardo had given me explained it clearly enough; the book that had been handed down for centuries, the book which began in the See of Milan, crossed the sea to Baltimore, and which had been in our own diocese for over a hundred years, since our own little New England mill town became important enough to receive a purple hat and a coat of arms all its own. The book explained it in simple Scholastic logic.
The ritual never fails. The failure belongs to the priest.
The failure was entirely mine.
The logic behind it was simple enough; the faded scribblings of an Italian priest in the chapter on Failures referenced the Bible passage clearly enough; it was a verse I had long committed to memory.
"Hoc genus in nullo potest exire nisi in oratione et ieiunio."
Mark 9:28-9. The first recorded failure of an exorcism by the Church.
Father Ricardo had pointed out to me that the newer translations of the Bible missed the last part, the ieiunio. He brought out the NAB translation which we used in Mass every Sunday, which simply translated the phrase as "This kind can only come out through prayer."
"They footnote it of course," he added. "They mention in a footnote that the variant on the text includes the part about fasting. I would simply tell you to remember that St. Jerome did not footnote it. And I will also point out to you what our book tells us, which is that the failure of a priest to observe proper fasting is one of the principle causes of failure. If you fail at an exorcism -- and I pray to God each day that you do not fail, for it will haunt you all your days in ways I cannot make you understand with words -- it will not be because you missed a sentence in the Rituale, recited the wrong psalm, forgot St. Bartholomew in the litany of saints, or ran out of holy water. It will because your own preparation in the days leading up to the battle was insufficient. And that failure of preparation in most cases will not be due to insufficient prayer. It will be because of a lack of fasting."
I was never any good at fasting.
I had thought about Fr. Ricardo a lot in the last three months. How when I came to work for him he was almost completely blind, and walked with a cane in a terrible, crouched shuffle. He had refused assistants for years, and those whom he took on invariably quit after a few sessions, asking the bishop to be reassigned to work that was more congenial. Running a soup kitchen or being the new guy in a parish rectory was not fun work, but it was relatively free from terror, and not so austere as the demands Fr. Ricardo put on us.
When the bishop had assigned me to Fr. Ricardo, he made it seem that I had been specifically requested. He mentioned how well I had done in the seminary in Latin, and that he had an old priest who still did work in Latin, whose eyesight was bad, and who was in need of a young priest to help him with his readings. I didn't realize at the time that I was being sent to Fr. Ricardo principally because the bishop did not like me.
I figured that part out after I was told by Father Ricardo exactly what his ministry was.
That was eight years ago.
Today was a Saturday. I was in civilian clothes, as I was still on leave. I suppose, though, technically, I was not on leave, since the bishop had told me to take a few weeks, and I had not reported in to the chancery. I was not in my own parish, but was in the parish of St. Edward's, an old stone church on the outskirts of the city, built when the neighborhood was still rural. I checked my Rolex and saw that I was on time; it was nearly three thirty, and I'd be coming it and the tail end of Fr. Tim's confessions.
I know what you're thinking. Why do I own a Rolex?
It isn't because I have forgotten my vow of poverty. It's because the Rolex is a Swiss watch, a mechanical watch. It has no electronics in it. This one is more than fifty years old, beat up, scuffed, and probably the cheapest one they ever made.
I wear it because people in my line of work have bad luck with electronics. You set a digital alarm clock, it never goes off. You use a GPS to give you directions to a house, it puts you in the wrong county. You write down your to-do list on a computer, and the next time you open up the file, it's gibberish.
We don't know exactly why that is. I have my theories.
We have even worse luck with cars. Which is why I had walked to St. Edward's.
I came into the church, crossed myself with Holy Water, and genuflected toward the tabernacle. I kneeled in a pew, and said a few prayers while I waited for the light on the wooden confessional stall to indicate that Fr. Tim was free.