Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

What had stopped him from getting into bed—he knew the whip would never stay in its legendary place—had been the thought of Hawk, who, he’d decided months ago, near the end, should be the only man he would ever know in this way. So, he now reasoned, while the person just ahead of him in line entered the confessional: if Hawk had once been sin, he was now the giver of chastity. Why couldn’t those two things cancel each other out and let Timothy Laughlin go back to being what he’d once been? Why couldn’t he, safely reunited with God, retire the active memory of his earthly love, frame it like the picture of some dead loved soldier on a mantelpiece? “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned; it has been twenty-one months since my last confession.” No shifting, no sense of surprise from Father LeTour. The priest replied in what Tim now recognized as a Cajun accent: “Yes, young man?” The “young” sounding like “yoang.” Tim had so often replayed his abortive confession to Father Davett that he could now recite his own part from memory. But Father LeTour seemed to be working from a different script, or none at all. To each admission that emerged from Tim’s lips, the priest replied, merely, Mmm-hmm. “I intend to stop. I have stopped.” “Mmm-hmm.”