Postmarked Baltimore

1
For fifteen years he had blamed me, but he had had a hand in the crime. He had been there with me, inflicting the pain on her. Blackmailing me into my prison, he forced me to do the time alone, without him. He had been my accomplice in the deed and he was still preaching on his pulpit, and I hated him for it, for betraying me and holding me hostage while they all loved him.
The story that follows has finally been written because Father Burns finally did end his life on New Year’s Eve of all nights, 1989. It took the same bullet to silence his storm and launch me from my own silence. Yet the only thing I remember about those years is noise, the terrible noise of the padlock clinking against my cell’s iron poles.
I can’t blame Father Burns for everything that happened. It’s just so hard to admit. I know that I did the deed, plain and simple, the scheming of the priest notwithstanding. I feel his pull still but as a relic. The love I have for Noel is the only thing keeping me afloat and out of thinking of him too much, of the man that stole my angel from me and then tried to kill her. And it’s that same Noel, the original victim in all of this, who I’m on my way to see now for the first time in over fifteen years. It’s past time that she knows the truth. I never wanted to leave her. I never wanted to leave her.
On December 31st 1989 Father Burns made one final stand. It would be both his last night and my night of liberation, and I often think of the coincidence in that new start, new life idea. If not for the image I have in my head of how beautiful those eyes will be when I get home to her, pessimism might have reminded me that it could have just as easily happened ten years ago at the end of the 70’s and the coincidence would have been just as effective, if not more heroic.
I always understood Father Burns’ thoughts and feelings, his ever-crusting faith. The only thing I could do was sit there and wait and fumble with the lock and I did. That’s why I know what happened that night he ended it all.
He had just gotten home at nine o’clock on the heels of an evening Mass and reception. Having not checked his mail in a few days, his box was stuffed with envelopes, mostly insignificant holiday cards from faceless parishioners who claimed to love him. It had always niggled at his nerves, the fakeness in those people. They’d suddenly discover their smile during holiday time and claim brotherly love for all. It was a nasty aggravation he constantly monitored and asked God’s forgiveness for, but like old memories in a shoebox it remained, yet more dust on his soul he could never polish.
Hidden among the meant-for-trash holiday cards, though, was a letter that made his stomach turn. It was postmarked Baltimore with no name before the return address, but he recognized the handwriting. It was unmistakable, even after fifteen years, and he dropped it on his desk and sat in his chair, not knowing what to do.
He had tucked her away. He hadn’t exhumed those feelings since that horrifying dream the night before his ordination. The love was there, but it was a fossil only fit for observing. Opening that letter was dangerous; the risk, putting himself in a position to feel again.

2
In coma-like stillness, his body slightly folded, his head rolled over like a strangled man’s tongue, Father Burns finished another reading of the letter. Two hours had passed and he’d read it over and over again, relishing the cool return of the pain. She was across the country, nowhere near him physically, yet her letter had made their love new again. He couldn’t have felt better. He couldn’t have felt worse.
The candlelight flickered before him on his desk, where a copy of The Scarlet Letter lay open to Chapter Ten just beside the ripped envelope. The light bounced off the walls, transforming the bookshelves into diabolical shapes with large, gaping mouths yawning around him. It was nearing eleven o’clock now on this New Year’s Eve night, and the downtown party had only begun. The distant noise scuttled in his head like rat feet. He looked at the window anxiously, convincing himself that the swarm of rats would break through any moment now. They were scratching the glass, scratching the very threshold of his soul — the red-eyed monsters under his childhood bed turned real in this last hour of his miserable life.
The room was growing smaller. Its smell, always old but bearable, was now stale and confining, pushing the walls in on the priest’s delicate bones. The shelves had long been frozen with dustcicles and the film that mummifies congested books. His attention to cleaning had been petrified like the dust for years, but now he noticed it all. It was sour. He felt aged, and he touched his face as if discovering something new in an old book. Leathery and tired, his skin had a grubby likeness to the unmanicured shelving around him.
The letter on the desk seemed to, at the same time, resuscitate his breath and cut it short, shocking in its reminder of the days upon days behind him, stacked books with pages that hadn’t seen the light of day in over fifteen years. Fifteen years. It felt like forever since he’d held her; it felt like never because he wasn’t holding her now. The stench of age confirmed the chill in this final chapter of his life, a futility he had known for many years but had ignored for some reason he could never finger, and one that was no longer important: He was in a coffin. And only Biology kept him alive.
He had always hated Biology for some reason, although he did enjoy most other subjects. Though English had become his trade in teaching before he ran away to the seminary, he had avoided the arrogance that is often basic to the field. He had heard his friends in college and even his colleagues at the high school say they didn’t have a science mind or a math mind, and it had always eluded him as to what exactly was a science or math mind. It was this precise pinning into black and white corners that the English mind tried to avoid, he thought. These hackneyed clichés that arbitrarily labeled a mind as Englishy or Mathy or Sciency clashed with his notion of what Englishy was. He thought it was nauseating, the way they talked out of both sides of their mouths, even if the culprits weren’t aware of it, to lay stake to the Great English Mind and then dismiss someone else’s intelligence as just “that kind of thinking.” Maybe it was in all of us, Man just being Man, arrogant in our respective places and not willing to promote the worth in someone else’s. I always think about laughing when I think about his next thought.
Maybe I just think too much.
The couple he had married just a week before had told him their whole story. They were so full of life and eager to spend the rest of their lives with each other, just as he and Noel once had been. During the first few months working with the couple, all he could be was a priest that pretended.
“God is love and love is God,” he said on more than one occasion. “And as long as you two keep God in your marriage, there, love will be.”
It was so easy to fake it. They bought into it, and he admired the couple’s wild joy, as a person gawks at the disabled person that struggles to walk straight.
As the months passed, though, his feelings mutated. It was odd, even Father Burns acknowledged, that the more he worked with the couple leading up to their wedding day, the more they started to resemble him and Noel. It wasn’t so much a physical thing as it was an intrinsic quality in the two that moved them toward each other even when they were moving away. It was how he and Noel had been. The flutter of the girl’s eyes, the youthful flirting of the boy, it was all the little things that made love perfect. Such a bitter pill, jagged and exact in its scrape, only sharpened the more he watched them. There were moments when he couldn’t wait to see the couple because remembering wasn’t so bad; there were also times when he couldn’t wait for the wedding to be over. Remembering fond times usually brings sweet nostalgia to the normal man; for Father Burns, though, remembering could be like fingernails across a chalkboard. In a matter of weeks what he had worked so hard for years to erase was materializing again in the form of one woman’s name. And the chalk kept writing it over and over again on the chalkboard.
“I’ve learned my lesson,” he said to himself, still staring at the letter, trying to believe against all sobriety that the letter in front of him wasn’t postmarked Baltimore.