Pie Town - Lynne Hinton [78]
He had heard about the opening and made queries. In the end, they had all agreed that it would be a good match. He had great computer skills and excellent organizational qualities, liked order, and was task-oriented, everything the president needed in an assistant. It had been decided in only a matter of weeks, and even though everyone saw the new job as a chance for the poor parish priest who had lost everything in a fire to start over, no one spoke of it in that way. The diocese was being refigured in the western part of the state anyway, and a priest would no longer be serving the parish in Pie Town. It was a good placement at the seminary, a good move for the Gallup diocese and a good match for Father George Morris.
If anybody in Pie Town was upset about his leaving, no one said so. If any of the parishioners were sorry to see him go, it was never brought to his attention. The Altar Guild had planned a nice reception at the parish in Omega on his last Sunday. The members of the three churches had raised some money to help him buy replacement books, and the prayer shawl group had sewn a few new vestments. But no one stopped by the rectory to try to change his mind. No one hung around after Mass to try to understand his reasons for leaving. Accepting what the fire had left them and honoring the decision handed down to them from the diocese that no church would be built in its place, no one seemed concerned that the church would not be rebuilt and that Father George Morris was moving on.
He yanked the calendar off the wall and stuck it in a box sitting by the desk. “It’s for the best,” he told himself and opened the desk drawers to see what else he had left to pack. He shuffled through a few papers, pulled out some ink pens and a pair of scissors, dropped them into the box. He shut that drawer and pulled out the one beneath it, thinking about his short tenure in Pie Town, thinking about the few sermons he had preached in his time there, the few people he had actually gotten to know. His time in his first parish had been short and not very successful. He would mostly remember being the priest in place the night the church burned down, and that was how Pie Town would remember him as well. He sat down at the desk. He was tired from the packing.
After weeks of living next to ashes, next to the place where the church had been established over one hundred years before, next to the tiny chapel built by the townspeople, he had not spoken to anyone about the night of the fire. If Trina had used him as an alibi, if she had told anyone about the time she had been around the church, starting in the parking lot and concluding in the rectory, about what she was doing the entire time she was there and what time she left, he hadn’t heard it. The town had somehow gotten wind of the news and assumed that she set the fire, unintentionally of course, so no charges would be filed and no payment demanded from the young woman. There were rumors that she did it on purpose. A few said that she was in the sanctuary with a boy for reasons other than religion, some said that she did it out of meanness or spite, while only one or two suggested that she was there to pray. Everybody accepted that Trina was the cause of the fire, but they differed on her motives. As for Father George, he had not seen or talked to her since that night.
The sheriff had stopped by the rectory a few days after the cause of the fire had been determined, but he hadn’t asked about the priest’s interaction