The Way Home

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’

‘As have we all, my child. How long?’

The boy hesitates. His knees hurt, but he can’t get up now. Even if his father is not watching – which he doubts – the priest will tell him. The priest always tells, especially on naughty little boys like Rhys.

‘How long?’ the priest pushes.

‘Two moons, Father.’

‘Two whole moons, why, that in itself is a shame. A smart boy like you should know better than to anger our good Lord. But go on, we will get to that once I’ve heard the rest of your sins.’

Rhys looks up at Father Grant. An English Father, he’d never do well here, they said, except he had. The townsmen had taken to him almost as well as the townswomen. On Sunday, the pews were never empty and there was never a shortage of people looking to confess their darkest, deepest desires. It wasn’t that the people here were particularly sinful, not in the slightest. It was just something in Father Grant’s voice that compelled them back to the old, rickety church.

They could go a few days, the most vile of them perhaps even a whole week without coming in to pay their respects, but in the end, Father Grant always got the better of them. Perhaps they saw him walking in the early morning, right before dawn, making his rounds and tipping his hat. Or perhaps they heard him singing inside the church and each time, they would envision the old priest all alone inside this empty house of God.

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Of course, those who were truly blessed saw Father Grant in their dreams, if by chance, they’d been straying particularly far from Our Lord. And in their dreams, Father Grant did not sing. He opened his mouth and let out the most agonizing cry that had them waking in the middle of the night and crying out.

It wouldn’t be the first time a resident had been seen running down the road in the early hours and knocking on the priest’s door. And the priest always answered, because the priest never slept. Or so it seemed.

Certainly a possibility, judging by the hollow, dark circles under his gray eyes. Rhys loses himself each time inside those haunting circles, which is why he’s stopped coming to confession each week. Because during Mass, he can avoid looking straight at the Priest, but here, there is no one else. Just him and the old man. And sometimes the boy’s father, peering through the hole in the wall, to make sure the boy gets all his sins out. Wouldn’t want the evil lurking inside, would we now?

Rhys’ father has big dreams for the boy, who will not be a farmer like him. A field worker, toasting his brow from dawn till dusk in the merciless sun. His son will never go hungry or want for respect, like his father has. Because his son will be a clergyman. That’s why it’s crucial the boy be cleansed, that he be kept pure, because God would know otherwise, if any evil thoughts got into the boy’s mind.

Of course, the father does everything he can to watch over him, to make sure he does not stray from his path, but boys his age sometimes get funny ideas.

Inside the priest’s stuffy room, there is nowhere to hide and Rhys stares into the Father’s melting face and whispers his sins, all out at once, wishing, longing to be rid of this.

‘Are you forgetting anything?’ the priest fixes the boy with his cold eyes.

Rhys shakes his head, but it’s too late, he’s been here too long and his head’s starting to hurt. Like it does each time he comes back here. He hears her again, the voice of the woman, or rather, her screams. She’s here every week, screaming unintelligible words. Noises and terrible confusion.

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‘There’s a woman,’ Rhys says, surprising both the priest and himself.

‘A woman?’

Father Grant is wary of women. He knows who it is that led man into sin and he knows that this is how it begins.

‘What woman, child?’

‘She’s screaming here.’

‘Inside the church?’

‘No, here. In here, in this room. She’s always screaming when I come here,’ the boy slurs and it must be the heat. The insufferable heat that threatens to suffocate him. And he just wants the confession to end, but it doesn’t end. Father Grant stares at him for a long, long time, his cold eyes suddenly on fire.

From time to time, he shakes his head. He is conferring, in his mind, with the Lord himself about this most sinful little boy.

‘There is no woman screaming here.’

‘There is,’ the boy says and a distant part of him frets that his father will hear. And there will be hell to pay when he gets home. But his father is momentarily distracted, by his neighbor’s plump wife. He has no time to hear the boy and for now, it’s just him and the priest.

And the screaming woman.

‘It must be God then, son. Punishing you for your transgressions. You should ban such thoughts from your mind, boy. Even now, the Devil waits to snap up your soul and carry you into eternal damnation. You don’t want that, do you? I said, do you?’

The boy shakes his head. Shivers, as the priest’s voice grows louder for a second than the woman’s screams.

‘Good, now. Of course you don’t. You’re a good boy, at heart and you must strive to stay that way. You must trust in Our Lord, for he is merciful and he will always show you the way home, even when you’re lost. Even when you think you hear strange women inside your mind. You may go now.’

‘Don’t I get a punishment?’

‘It is not punishment, boy,’ Father Grant chides, ‘it’s your path to salvation.’

He shrugs, because the boy’s confession has unsettled him. ‘All I can tell you is pray. Whenever you hear this woman, you pray to Jesus to save your sinful soul.’

Rhys leaves, relieved. Now, he can go outside and feel the air on his skin and hear as the woman’s screams die away, because the woman never screams outside Father Grant’s little room. And he won’t have to do this for another week. Two, if he’s careful. He can get around his father, he thinks.

And as he walks through the empty church, thinking thoughts of trickery and deceit, he barely notices as the walls around him slowly turn from brown to red.

It is only when he’s standing in a pool of thick blood that he sees the carnage inside the church. In the distance, the woman is still screaming. The victim, he realizes.

‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name, thy kingdom come…’

And as he prays, cold realization sinks in and he understands, finally, that it is not Father Grant’s parish that he’s seeing, but his own.

 

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