Pie Town - Lynne Hinton [104]
A few of the teachers from his school spoke of his commitment to his work even when he was sick and unable to attend classes. The choir from the middle school sang. And the principal read a poem Alex had written about the rain in the desert, hope in darkness. The Monsignor sent a priest from the Gallup church to pray, recite scripture, and share a letter of condolence from the diocese office explaining that Father George wanted to attend the funeral but had left for a silent retreat and was out of state.
The service was dignified and fitting and everyone but the boy’s mother, Angel, was there. No one had been able to reach her after she had been given the news of Alex’s death. It didn’t seem to matter to her parents. Like everything else, Roger and Malene seemed unconcerned that Alex’s mother was not present. They sat quietly during the funeral. They nodded and smiled through the stories, received the gifts made of memories from others, embraced the town’s grief, but neither of them, even one hour after they left Red Hill, could report a single thing that had happened. Their loss covered them like a sickness.
Oris was just as bad. Ever since he returned from Gallup, having heard the news in a phone call from Malene and unable to convince Father George to come back or the diocese to build another church in Pie Town, he spent most of the days and a large part of the nights sitting at the cemetery, staring at his wife’s grave, stunned by his failure and his disappointment. Millie tried to comfort him. She brought him the latest issues of farming magazines she stole from the medical clinic and hung around until he would finally ask her to leave. Mary Romero brought him coffee and cake to have while she sat nearby at her husband’s grave, studying Oris for hours, trying to get him to leave when she left. Even Fedora Snow met him in his driveway one day and invited him to supper later, trying to make amends.
The town and Alex’s family were lost to their grief, lost to the cold clutch of sorrow, lost to the notion that anything would ever be right again. Winter, with its cruel bursts of ice and rain, its long barren nights of frozen darkness, had descended upon Catron County, upon Pie Town, but finally, even as they took a slight comfort in seeing that the condition of their hearts matched the condition of the sky, something changed.
Sometime just after midnight on the day of Alex’s memorial service, when everyone else was asleep, tucked into beds in their tiny cells at the monastery in Northern California, where Father George was in private retreat before starting his new job, the young priest received a message from God.
He was praying, as he had been for days and nights, begging for relief or forgiveness or anything to ease the pain in his mind, bolster his lagging faith, and undo the knot that was lodged deep in his chest. He was tired and just as he was about to fall asleep, kneeling at the altar, Father George suddenly felt lightheaded, a flutter in his chest, and an overwhelming sense of warmth. All around him, within him, there was warmth. And while held in this pool of heat, delighted and at ease, he heard a voice.
At first, he didn’t believe he was hearing it. He thought he was weak from fasting, imagining things, voices or spirits, or that one of the other priests was playing a joke on him, but then the voice, a woman’s, came again. The words sharp, clear: “In that place lies your vindication. In that place is the source of your salvation.”
And just like that, the pool of warmth became a pool of light. A perfect golden light that surrounded him and filled him, and in that moment he knew. He knew what Oris had tried to tell him before he left New Mexico, how the widower had been sent by this angel, his angel. He realized the forgiveness that had come and yet, in the split second of mercy, he also understood that he had not been relieved of the promise he had made to Trina. In that moment of compassion also came the penance.
He left before morning,