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By Root 385 0

and from a life garbed in tunicles, chasubles, palliums, and miters, but he did not go far. He found a small house on the outskirts of the city, a good distance from the cathedral but still close enough to hear its carillon bells. He chose it for its location. In order for his new business to thrive, he needed to be within walking distance of poverty. Abject was not required. That would be overdoing it. He needed just a paid-on-Saturday, broke-by-Sunday kind of poverty, a deep-rooted not-going-anywhere-soon kind of insolvency. Given his particular area of expertise, he also needed to find a neglected, preferably withering, outpost of his Lord. The young man soon found all that he was looking for. He walked into a wood-framed church equipped with a native priest and little else and offered to keep that congregation alive, for a fee of course, paid upon delivery, per newly bowed head. Father Vincente, né Vũ, who had celebrated Mass only as a lonely affair between himself and the occasional visiting seminarians, agreed and did not bother to ask how.

The young man was not brilliant. He was not even clever. He was gifted, though, with a singular insight: "Where there is gambling, there is faith." This was the gem that his god had unwittingly placed inside his mouth. He, in turn, devised a ritual that made it easier for the two to meet: late-night card games at his house and early-morning prayers at His house. When the gamblers won, they prayed, and the newly converted always won at least once or twice, a hook lodged painlessly inside their cheeks. When the gamblers lost, they prayed. Either way, the young man—as he always got a healthy cut of the pot in addition to the usual per-head fee from Father Vincente—and to a lesser extent the Catholic Church, won. Would Father Vincente have fainted or at least blushed if he had known? But why ask questions when the diocese rewarded him for the steady rate of conversions, the monthly baptismals that multiplied his parishioners, giving him finally a flock.

As the years went by, there developed, however, an increasingly rapid migration from pew to grave in Father Vincente's church. Even Father Vincente acknowledged the irony. "No sooner did they come looking for salvation than salvation came looking for them" became the signature line in his otherwise unremarkable delivery of the last rites. With each passing year Father Vincente noted with growing regret that the young man, who was now the Old Man, could no longer deliver to him that segment of the population that had been the lifeblood of the church. Young men, Father Vincente had been pleased to observe, had a tendency to marry and therefore could contribute wives and offspring to the congregation. Father Vincente eventually understood that the Old Man's appeal was limited to men his own age. "You have to know your customers," the Old Man said with a shrug, his speech slurring, words slipping off his spirits-slick tongue. Father Vincente held his breath and turned his face the other way.

The last time I saw Anh Minh, he closed his eyes and said that he had seen everything, my foolish grin, the stream of red, the open mouths, the white cloth limp in my hand. He dropped his head and said he could save me then but not now. He confirmed for me what I had always suspected. Anh Minh had a weakness for small animals. He could never cut a chicken's neck and hold it over a bowl and watch the blood drain. He understood life through the parables of his chosen trade, and what he witnessed fourteen years ago in the Old Man's house was a blade being sharpened. What he felt shook his body.

On the day when my six-year-old feet bore stains of red, Anh Minh convinced the Old Man that within a few years he would be able to secure a position for me in the Governor-General's kitchen. "Even the lowest-paid helpers get two meals a day and a chance to wear the long white apron someday," Anh Minh said. "But the competition is stiff," he told the Old Man. "Now, every kid who waits outside the back gate knows a mouthful of French, has worked in a plantation