Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [119]
“The papists anoint at death. We baptize at birth.”
“These are considerations that are of no importance to me. Go get the water. Do not let me hear you talking on a telephone.”
“Don’t trust him, jefe. He’s a capon, the friend of whoever he needs to please at the moment,” Negrito said.
“No, our friend here has no fear. He has no reason to lie. Look at his eyes. I think he doesn’t want to live. He’s a sadder man than even you, Negrito.”
“Don’t talk of me that way, jefe.”
“Then don’t call others a capon, you who are afraid to touch the box in which my children sleep.”
Cody went into the coffee room and filled a small pitcher with tap water. His head was pounding, his breath short, but he didn’t know why. Was it just fear? Krill may have been a killer, but he was no threat to him. Krill was totally absorbed with the status of his children in the afterlife. What about Negrito? No, Negrito was not a threat, either, not as long as he was under Krill’s control. So what was it that caused Cody’s heart to race and the scalp to shrink on his head?
This was the first time he had ever done anything of a serious nature as a minister. And he was doing it at a time when he was about to flee his church and home and become a fugitive, just like the road kid who had forged checks and ended up on a county prison farm. He walked back into the chapel, knocking against a worktable he had fashioned from two planks and sawhorses, spilling a nail gun and a claw hammer to the floor.
Krill had opened the top of the wood box and was standing expectantly beside it, his gaze fixed on Cody. “How do you want to do it?” he asked.
Cody hadn’t thought about it. The images that went through his mind were too bizarre to keep straight in his head. He looked into the box and swallowed. “Put them on the edge of the stage,” he said.
“They’re watching,” Krill said.
“They’re watching?”
“From limbo. They want to be turned loose. That’s what you’re going to do.”
“Listen, I don’t know about those kinds of things,” Cody said. “Don’t make me out something I’m not.”
“You have cojones, hombre. I misjudged you.” Krill placed his children, one after another, on the apron of the stage. The oldest child could not have been over four when he died. The younger ones might have been three or two. All three were wrapped tightly in cloth and duct tape. Only their faces were exposed. Their eyes were little more than slits, their skin gray, their tiny cheekbones as pronounced as wire. There was no odor of decomposition. Instead, they smelled like freshly turned dirt in a garden, or like damp shade in woods carpeted with mushrooms.
“What are you waiting for?” Krill said.
“I feel like I’m doing something that’s dishonest,” Cody said.
“Your words make no sense. They are the words of a man with thorns in his head instead of thoughts.”
“Your children are innocent. They never hurt anybody.”
“Do not make me lose my patience, hombre. Do what you need to do.”
Cody poured water from the pitcher on the thumb and the tips of his fingers and made the sign of the cross on each child’s forehead. “I baptize these children in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
“That’s good. I’m proud of you, man,” Krill said.
“But it’s me and these two men who need absolution, Lord. These children didn’t commit any sin,” Cody said. “I left a woman blinded and maimed for the rest of her life, and the two men standing beside me are covered with blood splatter. We’re not worthy to touch the hem of Your garment. We’re not worthy to baptize these children, either, particularly the likes of me. But You’re probably used to hypocrites offering up their prayers, so I doubt if two or three more liars in Your midst is gonna make a lot of difference in the outcome of things.”
“You better shut your mouth, gringo,” Negrito said.
“I’m done. I’m sorry for what happened to your children, Krill. If y’all are fixing to kill me, I reckon now is the time.”
He walked into the coffee room, his back twitching. Out the window, he could see the deck of his house glimmer in a bolt of lightning,