Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

In the Baltimore Catechism, the source of all Tim’s knowledge of the world above this one, the Trinity had been depicted as a shamrock—the visual analogy closest to hand for the Irish clergyman who’d written the text. But what if one added another leaf, the way one used to, with an artful graft, after hunting in vain for four-leaf clovers on the small patch of grass in the playground near Holy Cross? Tim did not plan to worship Hawkins Fuller, but why couldn’t his love for him be attached to the love he already felt for the actual Trinity? Had he not, in fact, always been in love, physically and particularly, with Christ, whose dark, haloed image on every calendar and classroom wall glowed more handsomely than any man walking His Earth? Had not Father McGuire, in the first pages of the catechism, promised a kind of divine romance? God has been very, very good to you. He thinks more of you than He does of anything else in this world. To you alone He has given an invitation to live with Him in heaven forever. When Hawkins had removed Tim’s shirt and seen the scapular beneath it, the older man had not seemed surprised, and he had made no joke. He had hung it, without comment, over one of the bedposts at the headboard, where, whenever Tim glimpsed it during the night, it seemed no more out of place—and no less protective—than it did when draped over his own narrow chest and back.