The Walk

“The boy died three days from internal bleeding. His funeral will be tomorrow. Did you know that?”

Father Graham shook his head, keeping his eyes on their steps along the sodden gravel and mud caked road, strewn lightly with damp, limp leaves from the dying autumn. The winter chill had yet to arrive, but a damp heavy air hung over the two men as they continued their walk.

“The family’s destroyed.”

Bishop Mark continued, dressed for the weather. Both men would be easily mistaken for layfolk with their thick, generous winter coats, though their slacks had a starchy quality and theirs shoes had a polished sheen to them one would only get from a housekeeper.

“The Larkins are barely ready for tomorrow. The poor women are inconsolable, but I was able to talk to Moira long enough to know their dresses and shawls are lying out in a guest room. A cupboard, really. But James…”

Graham snuck a flicking glance to his superior, only to catch a glimpse of his head staring ahead at the woodland road before them, speaking, it would seem, more to the horizon.

“James is in a bad way altogether. The drink will take him by the week’s end, I’d say. He’s no more a drinker than most. I remember taking his confession years ago, when his father was still alive. I have to laugh; he used to come in and say, ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, but don’t tell my daddy!’ Absolutely terrified he was, as though I’d say it over tea and cakes after mass when I’d visit. No; James never drank more than most. Maybe even less. But… that’ll change, won’t it? …Won’t? It?”

There was a harshness to those final words, barely concealed. Graham looked bravely to his superior, who seemed to be composing himself; a slow jerk of the head tensed his jaw, his eyes reached around their own corners to watch Graham sternly, checking they weren’t catching on quite yet.

Graham cleared his throat at last, silent for the last mile.

“Aye. It’s a divil, the drink. The bathing pool of desperation. He’ll drown his sorrows in the black depths of stout. I pray the Lord spare the womenfolk. Men do wicked things when they’re desperate.”

“Do they?”

Again, Graham turned to Mark, searching his stoney face to explain such short, terse tones. Mark’s eyes were masked again by the watchful glare at the horizon.

“And do you hear these tales, Father Graham? Do the men of Ballybaile get up to such deeds?”

“No, your Grace.”

“Do they not mention it in confession?”

“I… I have not heard of any such confession. Impure thoughts, drink, and gambling are common, but no one has a taste for that kind of stuff in these small parts. They all go off to Dublin for that kind of stuff now. People are changing.”

“Yes!”

Mark didn’t mean to laugh as he agreed. An amusing thought occurred to him.

“In a number of weeks, we’ll be in a new decade. Goodbye nineteen-seventy-nine. Hello to the Eighties! We’ll be out of names for these decades soon. But yes, I believe you are right. People change.”

“But the Church is eternal.”

Graham’s chuckle laced grin and smug flex of his brow hung and stewed in the silence like a vulgar utterance, drenching Graham in a sudden and consuming wash of embarrassment, leaving Mark’s judging exhale all the more punctuated by the march of their wet, moist steps.

“Yes. The Church is eternal. Graham? There is a story going around-“

“I know”

“About you-“

“I know”

“And Seán Larkin.”

“I know.”

“Tell me what you know then.”

Graham had already frozen from the sharp order by the time Mark had spun on his heels, grinding the stones and twigs underfoot. Mark’s sunken, starved cheeks, roughened by dull razors, his thinned, smoothed cap of greying toast-brown hair, and those narrow, sharp, steady hazel eyes faced Graham, daring him to lie.

Graham inhaled shallowly, unprepared.

“James, Mr. Larkin, I believe, I mean, I think, is so distraught with grief that he believes lies, slander, made about me, against me, and says I was often asking for Seán, for altar service, and that I took an unhealthy interest in him, which is grotesque and abhorrent and sacrilegious and-“

“True?”

“… Your Grace?”

“Is it true?”

“… I don’t understand.”

“Did you sodomise the boy?”

Crows perched high among the woodland trees marked to fall for timber scattered in mean-spirited laughter, cawing and cackling as their shadows rippled over the men and their beating wings crackled the dim, milky grey sky. The two men waited for the noise to evaporate between them; protecting one, restraining the other.

“No.”

Mark waited for more. Graham, in his silence, searched, with his rocking eyes, for reason and meaning behind Mark’s patient stare.

In the end, Graham gave up.

“I know why we are here.”

Mark pulled back his head slightly, scanning the priest with a sweeping brush of his studious eyes, carefully considering his almost boyish qualities; a fattened, round face, kind, crinkled eyes, doleful and wet like a baby, and an immature, thinning fringe of straw blond hair sitting flat with grease and sweat upon fresh, betraying wrinkles.

“You do?”

“We’re to talk about my relocation.”

“… Yes.”

Mark walked on. Graham was so caught off-guard by this sudden act that he had to stretch his strides to catch up with the bishop. Mark returned to speaking to the world ahead of him.

“This is not your first parish.”

“Eh…No, your Grace. This is my fifth.”

“And this will be your fifth time being assigned a new parish.”

Graham waited before and after answering, making sure he had heard Mark correctly.

“… Yes.”

As bishop, Mark would have been aware of Graham’s prior parishes and privy to why he was relocated. Why was he dragging this out? This sort of thing is surely routine for him.

“And those four previous times, they were all slander and lies as well? You’re very unlucky for a priest. It seems to follow you wherever you go.”

Graham merely nodded and hummed in agreement. He sensed he should be quiet for a while.

“God tests us all. Including me. Especially me. What do I do with you? You’re a very unlucky priest. Deeply unlucky. Do I make the same choice my peers have, and run the risk of being unlucky again, or do we try to understand why you’re so unlucky? So unlucky, a ten-year-old dies from internal bleeding after being raped aggressively.”

Graham looked to Mark, expecting something; a disgusted glare, an exasperated scowl, an interrogating leer. But Mark simply walks on. Once again, Graham jolts to a skittering scramble to keep up. Mark’s eyes remain up ahead, though now they list a little to the bank of trees on their right, darting from bright neon-green spray-painted X to bright neon-green spray-painted X upon the tree trunks.

When the silence wasn’t filled by anything more than distance caws, Graham went to speak, his dry throat cracking and groaning, announcing his attempt to seem unphased.

“Surely, your Grace, you don’t believe these slanderous lies. It’s the stuff of tabloids and communist papers. The Church is being attacked. I’d fear there wouldn’t be a priest left who isn’t accused by this time next year. The laymen, they’ve grown bitter in modernity. I’ve been run out of four homes now for trying to serve God. If I must be relocated, reassigned a new parish to serve, I will go, but surely you don’t believe such horrible, disgusting lies, much less about a priest!”

Now it was Graham’s turn to walk on ahead a little as Mark dropped from his view. Graham clumsily looked back to Mark on his left and turned around on his right, retreating to him, following his line of sight to a tree, marked to fall just like the others, only this one has two Xs upon the coarse trunk. The bottom one of the pair is a slightly different shade, drippier, wetter, as though freshly criss-crossed. It’s askew; almost like a cross.

Graham was about to ask what was the matter, when Mark simply walked on, stepped up upon the slight embankment of overgrowth and trekked into the heavy shaded brush of fern and moss.

“Mark! Your Grace! I don’t think we should stray from the path.”

Mark doesn’t respond.

Graham searched the length of the mucky path, parted by timber hauling trunks; heavy, thick treaded tires packing the earth under them during the week gone. It was Friday, but work ended early for the weekend, out of respect for James Larkin, their foreman. Graham turned heavenward to the treetops swaying and swishing like curling, beckoning fingers. He then turned back down the road, spotting someone small and threatening in the far distance; a form growing with every step. It wouldn’t do well to be seen skulking here, Graham reasoned, as he slipped and stumbled over the mound, following Mark.

The ground billowed and dipped as though alive and gurgling, a figurative rumbling belly of dirt. And though no clearing was made, and they needed to veer a little side to side every few yards or so, the trees, polluting the once dimply light overcast sky with dark splotches from their fanning branches and clustering needles, shaped their walk, watching the small things crawl across their forestry domain. Graham forced himself to ignore the heavy, weighing dread the overhead darkness bore upon them, for he needed his eyes to concentrate of keeping track on Mark and his own laborious steps, nearly rolling onto his ankle and falling from his uneven steps. The effort winded him to the point of failing to call out Mark, who merely ambled at a steady pace, cocking his steps, as though he knew this impromptu walk well, feeling no struggle to call back;

“You are right, Father. As Bishop, I must protect the Church. You are right; it would be a scandal if there were an investigation. I would risk demotion. Perhaps relocation myself. Retirement. Laicisation, maybe. Then what good am I to anyone. If I act, I may never serve my flock again. If I don’t, I most certainly have failed them. This is the test God has given me. Do I do what I can, or what I must? Do you know what I do when I need to think out a problem?”

Graham, though still struggling to breathe, wasn’t given enough time to respond even if he could.

“I go for a walk. My father used to take me and my brother for walks whenever we needed to talk. As it so happened, my brother kept the tradition alive with my nephew. That’s how we figured out what we were going to do with you.”

The words struck Graham as strange. So strange, in fact, his mind was torn away from the exhausting march through the overgrowth, with the words swirling inside his mind as such speed, struggling to make sense of what the bishop was talking about. Graham did see the freshly dug pit he fell into, lightly covered by loose branches and brush arranged weakly, tumbling in the air before landing on his back with a spine-breaking crunch. The wind was trapped in his lungs, hissing pitifully like a raspy puncture, low and weak. What jagged and protruding rocks were erected at the bottom were digging in Graham’s back, stinging with hot seeping blood, stabbed and torn muscles, and broken bones. The sudden encroachment of the darkness flanked him from all sides, reducing his vision to a strong, solid box of light, facing the wings of fir and spruce, mimicking the flutter of those unseen crows now raucously cawing in malicious delight. His arms, desperate to reach out above them, could barely hover more than an inch off the bottom of this deep grave. Even if he could call out for help, there was no one there to hear him. Mark had walked on.

…

Mark brushed his slacks and coat of cypress cones, scattering them upon the muddy road. As he began to walk away from the double marked tree, he ran through a mental script in his head. He would sign and send Graham’s request for relocation. In about two weeks, a parochial house in Donegal will be waiting by the door and window, expecting a new arrival. When questioned, Mark will explain how he and Father Graham went for a walk, and that was the last he saw of him, assuming he left to stay with relatives in the interval of his reassignment. His disappearance would be a whispered affair. In the morning, with no priest to serve mass, Mark will conduct his grand-nephew’s funeral, a small comfort and honour for the family.

Mark continued down the road, not breaking his stride, even as he saw a familiar face coming up his way. They knew how this was to work. They spoke only when they were close enough, where it was acceptable and expected for James to take off his cap and bow to his uncle.

“Your Grace.”

“James. Out for a walk?”

“Aye. Yourself as well?”

“I am so”.

“Good. Good.”

Mark kept walking, about to pass James, pale and gaunt in the face, his eyes red raw from tears, his nose chapped and cracked from mournful sniffing at the wake. More than enough people there to occupy the women, and to mask James’ absence. The two spoke no more as they looked ahead of themselves, and passed each other, hanging mid-step for what felt like forever, but, in reality, was only one hesitant nanosecond, before both independently keeping to the plan.

Mark would make his appearance at the Larkin’s, distracting the mourners with his ringed hand passed around for kisses, whispered prayers over the coffin, just a little shy of five-feet-long, and casually mention, over his sixth cup of tea, fourth plate of sandwiches, and his second glass of whisky, that he saw James walking the town. This would be their alibi.

But as Mark went on, reminding himself not to look back and see James trudging past the double marked tree, on his way to fill the pit, he thought, during their shared pause, he could hear the barest exhale of whimpered words;

“Thank you.”

Mark kept walking.

#HI