Our Lady of American Sorrows, Page 2

  “Do you suppose it flew straight here from Avignon?” I asked.

  He snickered. “The Comète doesn’t have that kind of range. It probably flew to Bermuda, then down to Spanish Florida. San Agustin or that big Armée de l’Aire base at Santa Lucia, I’d guess. From there it would be an easy hop across the Caribbean.”

  “But why?” There was no aeroplane due today. It must have something to do with the priests.

  The jet made another pass over the city. That was the usual signal for the pilots from Teixeira to have the Civil Guard clear the landing field down by the river of stray cattle or football games or whatever other uses the shantytown people had got up to for the wide open space.

  Business in the market had come to a halt as people stood and stared, chattering or keeping an awed silence depending on their character. It was clear very few of them had Rodger’s information.

  “Come on,” I said, “let’s get down to the landing field.”

  We trotted toward the market gates and Water Avenue beyond even as a distant bell began to ring. The deep tone could only be the Grand Bell at Our Lady of American Sorrows west of town. As Rodger and I made our way down the street St. Cipriano’s bells picked up the ringing, followed by Santa Clara and the tinny ones at All Angels’, and the bells further east that I didn’t recognize by ear.

  “Can you tell me why the bells are ringing?” shouted a red-faced fat woman from her doorstep, an enameled pan of beans trembling in her hands.

  We both shrugged. “Perhaps the Pope has come!” called Rodger. Despite myself, I laughed as we began to run.

  Then the carillon at the Civil Palace picked up the peal, and the sirens of the Civil Guard wailed as their jitneys poured into the street, and then it wasn’t so much fun any more. Rodger and I scuttled into a little café and pretended to look at stale pastries in the fly-specked case until the jitneys had roared past. The proprietor said nothing, just kept reading his newspaper with one eye on us in case of theft.

  Though the minions of New Albion’s government rarely stirred themselves to action, everyone knew to practice prudence when they did. That Papa was one of ‘them’ had never occurred to me before today, but I stared at the crumbling currant scones, suddenly ashamed of who I was.

  Rodger and I picked our way along the riverbank toward the landing field, stones in hand to drive off the shantytown kids if they hassled us. They were far more dangerous than the occasional alligator come too far up the river. Today though, the arrival of the jet and the Civil Guard scrambling in the streets was more interesting than a couple of boys strayed down from the hills.

  The shanties didn’t quite come to the water. Rather, they stopped at the muddy bluff overlooking the river, just about the high water mark during rainy season. Right now in summer there were dosses and firepits all over the stony beach, where people slept out under the stars to catch the breeze and a few dozen extra mosquito bites. Their houses were built from big steel shipping containers, or coffee crates patched together, or just plain old scrap wood and deadfall. There were even a few made from decrepit busses retired from the overland express routes. No two were alike, except for the little plumes of smoke from their cooking fires and the pervasive odor of rancid corn oil. Mangy dogs growled from doorways while wild-eyed cats ran feral among brown-skinned toddlers playing in the dirt.

  Whenever I complained that we were poor, in our whitewashed house high up on Rondo Street, Mama would send me down to the center of New Albion on some errand near the river, making sure I walked by this place. When I got home again, I would sink to my knees beside my bed and thank God for what wealth we had.

  There was a spit of land ahead of us, mud and sand caught up behind a tall rock everyone called the Bishop’s Head. If you were polite, or too young to understand, you said it was because it looked like a man wearing a churchman’s miter. There was a tangle of trees on the spit, which meant we either had to climb the bluff to our right and actually walk through the shantytown, or we had to pick our way along the stones in the water on the other side of the Bishop’s Head. In rainy season, that would be near-suicidal, but in summer, there was little risk of anything beyond damp feet.

  Rodger said nothing, and neither did I. We both cut left, following the water’s edge. The stones rolled beneath our shoes, cheap canvas sneakers from the factories of Spanish Florida, but we kept our balance. I was slightly in front of Rodger when I got to the Bishop’s Head itself.

  I had one hand on the stone, balancing against the warm, gritty surface as I watched my feet carefully. There were a couple of pools deep enough to soak me to the thighs there, and always the possibility of turning an ankle. I almost stepped on a black cloth floating in the water, overbalancing to avoid it, when I realized it was man.

  “Ahh!” I shouted, then shut up.

  Rodger almost ran into me. “What is—” he started to snap, then stopped as he saw it too.

  It wasn’t just a man, it was a priest. Face down in the river. With a ragged, bloody hole in the back of his head.

  My stomach heaved, and I vomited, trying to lean away from the dead man.

  “They will kill us,” Rodger said quietly when I was done. “Just for knowing of this.”

  “It has to be the new priests,” I said. I was shivering, and my nose stung. I cupped my hand and reached down for some water to wash my mouth out, then stopped. I did not want to drink of this priest’s death. I finished my thought. “The water’s always deep up by Our Lady of American Sorrows, but no one from New Albion would expect this river to carry a body away in summertime.”

  “Priests.” Rodger made the word a curse. “Killing is a sin. I am quite sure it says so in my Bible.”

  Reaching down, I touched the dead man’s shoulder. He bobbed in his little pool.

  “Don’t,” Rodger said.

  “I have to.” I realized we were whispering now. I stepped in with the corpse and pushed down harder, then caught his other shoulder and turned him.

  I recognized the man. It was a brother from Our Lady of American Sorrows who had occasionally assisted with Mass at St. Cipriano’s. It made me sad that I did not know his name. He still wore his hand-carved pectoral cross over his cassock, and a look of sad surprise on his gray-fleshed face. I tried to close his eyes, which were clouded and dull, but the open lids were wrinkled tight from the water.

  Instead I took his hand. A priest probably needed no help from me to get into Heaven, but I was pretty sure no one had given him last rites. I couldn’t do that either, but I could pray for him.

  After a few moments, we headed back the way we had come. “Why?” Rodger asked after a time, but I had no answer.

  At home, Mama glared at my muddy pants and wrinkled sneakers. “Where have you been?” she demanded. “Swimming in that filthy river?”

  “Please, Mama, not now.” I wanted to tell her what I had seen, hand the problem of the dead priest to someone older and wiser, but Mama would just be afraid and run to Father Lavigne. Papa would know what to do, but he was downtown in his high-windowed office, or perhaps out at the landing field with whoever the Pope had sent to trouble us.

  I felt a burst of guilty relief that whatever troubles had come to town were not about my father. The Holy Office would not have shot a priest to dump him in the river. But they were still troubles, terrible troubles, even if the Holy Office were not involved.

  I could certainly run to Father Lavigne myself, but I was worried. For him, for me, for New Albion. These truckloads of priests were poison for us all.

  “Mrs. Dalhousie says that new aeroplane brought a cardinal all the way from Avignon,” Mama said. “He must be here to consecrate the mission of those new priests.” She leaned close. “I worry about them.”

  It was as if she had read my mind. I thought when I got older that sort of thing would stop. “Me too, Mama.”

  “Mrs. Dalhousie says they’re Jesuits.” She looked around, as if one were hiding behind the door of our kitchen. “Big men.�
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  Watching with Rodger, I had only seen them in the backs of the trucks. It was hard to tell how big they really were.

  Big enough to kill our local priests, I realized.

  “I don’t know, Mama,” I said. “Can I go change my clothes?”

  She ruffled my hair and smiled, beauty passing across her face like a momentary shadow. “Yes, Peter, you may change. Go wash up, too.” Mama raised her voice. “And Rodger, you may come in from the alley and have a cup of tea.”

  “I’m a mess, Mrs. Fallworth,” he said from the alley.

  “So is my floor, thanks to Peter. I’ll set out a pan for you to wash your shoes.”

  I went to our little bathroom and scrubbed until I couldn’t feel the rough dampness of the dead priest’s cassock on my hands anymore.

  That afternoon, Rodger and I got our rods, some salt and ground peppers, a wicker cricket case and two old bananas for bug bait. “We’re fishing for bats,” I told Mama.

  “I don’t want you out late,” she said. “Not with all these goings on.”

  “We’ll be safe at the coast. No one ever goes there.” Which was more or less true, except for tourists and the people who worked in Ostia. “We might even sleep out.”

  She kissed me, which she hadn’t done so much these last few years. “Come back safe,” Mama said, then we stepped out into the alley.

  “We’re not going to the coast,” said Rodger.

  “No way.” I shivered, the image of the dead man in the river very clear in my head. “I want to get a better look at these new priests.”

  “Good,” he said. “You’re smarter than you seem.”

  We stashed our gear in the pressing room of one of the old coffee mills and headed up the alley to be out of sight if Mama stepped out the back door. Once we made it to Formby Way, the next cross street, we headed west.

  Our Lady of American Sorrows is on Bullback Hill. The road out there is a westward extension of Water Avenue into the countryside that finally leaves the riverbank and switchbacks up to the monastery. The back wall hangs forty meters or more up above the river at a wide bend, which was where the dead priest must have been shot and thrown off before floating down to the Bishop’s Head. But there was an old sacbe, a Mayan road, that ran westward parallel to the river just behind a line of bluffs, coming quite close to the monastery without being visible from it.

  I figured the new priests wouldn’t know about the sacbe yet, since no one used it but goatherds. The Cistercian brothers weren’t likely saying much right now.

  As we walked past the Catalpa Street Oil Depot, a government jitney drove by. Brakes screeched as it slammed to a halt just in front of us. Rodger and I looked at each other, but there wasn’t much point in running.

  Yet.

  Then Papa got out.

  My heart sank. He had a revolver on his belt. I had never seen him carry a weapon in my entire life, not so much as a machete. He looked very angry, but judging from the way his eyes darted around, not at me.

  “Are you crazy, Peter,” Papa hissed. “This is no time to be on the streets!”

  “I…” I wanted to tell him about the dead priest, ask him what to do, but I couldn’t see who was driving the jitney. Papa had gotten out of the left side, the passenger side. I wasn’t afraid of him, but I was afraid of what his job might make him do.

  Papa cleared his throat. “You boys go home,” he almost shouted. His voice had a weird, false heartiness. He was lying at the top of his lungs. His eyes kept darting to the left, his head almost shivering.

  “Yes, sir,” Rodger suddenly shouted back, and grabbed my elbow. “Right away.”

  Papa jerked his chin left, set one hand on his pistol, and bellowed, “Get out of here, then!”

  We got. Rodger almost dragged me away from my own father, into the nearest alley. Papa jumped back in his jitney, which took off with a squeal of tires. Immediately afterward we heard a diesel straining up the hill.

  Rodger and I peeked out.

  It was another open-topped truck, like the ones we had seen carrying the priests yesterday. There was a machine gun mounted on a pintle just behind the cab. Half a dozen Civil Guardsmen sat in back with rifles pointing over the side.

  “It’s a coup,” Rodger said.

  “Against what? New Albion barely has a government.”

  The last alcaldé had died of cholera when I was twelve. In the four years since, New Albion had simply kept functioning under a ministerial junta. I’d learned in school that our little country was technically an English protectorate, but there had been no financial or political support from Londres for several generations. In practice, when high justice was required or something irresolvable happened in government, the abbot from Our Lady of American Sorrows was consulted, or a message sent to the archbishop in Teixeira.

  As Papa liked to say, the death of the alcaldé simply streamlined that process.

  “Maybe there will be a new alcaldé,” Rodger said.

  “Like we need one.”

  We heard a popping noise from downhill, toward the middle of the city. Sirens wailed.

  “Guns?” I asked, just as the unmistakable stutter of a machine gun began.

  Rodger and I hid among the pipes of the oil depot until dusk, long after the gunfire and the screams had died away, though the open-topped trucks continued to rumble through the streets of town.

  Evening found us picking our way along the goat paths among the hills. We caught occasional glimpses of Our Lady of American Sorrows, the monastery’s walls floodlit as if for a festival. Someone was taking no chances. But whom? With what?

  The paths were winding dirt tracks among the stubbly scrub of the hillsides. Once, so I had been told, there had been great forests along this coast, but centuries of logging and farming had driven them back and dried out the soil. At least it was not so dusty here.

  Walking single file, Rodger and I had little to say to one another. I kept thinking of Papa’s gun, and the truck that had followed him. Had those men been under his orders? Had any of the shots been fired by him?

  Some concern of the world had come to New Albion, something larger than coffee or tourism or our notion of civil affairs.

  “Peter.” Right in front of me, Rodger stopped. His voice was a whisper.

  I stopped too, snapped out of my thoughts and looked around. Two or three hundred meters ahead, in a copse of bushes where the sacbe first assembled itself from scattered gravel, a gleaming spark rose and fell. For a moment, I thought a star had come to earth, a sign to accompany the Papal jet that had landed that afternoon.

  “Sentry,” Rodger breathed.

  Then I realized that what I had seen was a match, someone lighting a cigarette. Like Papa in front of the old mills at home.

  By unspoken agreement we both worked our way up the bank to our right until we could look over the crest. Just like playing Great War when we were younger, shooting each other with sticks and throwing cowpie grenadoes.

  The monastery still gleamed, its floodlights making the high, smooth walls seem marble instead of limestone. Though we were several kilometers from it, the clatter of the diesel generator echoed across the distance. The river beyond the monastery, visible where it appeared from behind Bullback Hill, gleamed in the rising moon.

  No sign of sentries. No one pacing the walls of Our Lady of American Sorrows. No trucks or guards on the road that wound up the hill to the gates.

  “Why is someone up here?” I finally asked. “They can’t know about the sacbe.”

  “I don’t know.” Rodger sounded puzzled.

  “They were shooting people in town today.”

  “Not them.”

  I could hear the rustle as he nodded toward the monastery. Rodger was thinking of Papa, but had the decency not to mention my father.

  “Someone killed that priest,” I muttered. I could see the gaping tunnel of crusted blood at the back of his head, so big in memory that I could have reached inside it, though in life it
must have been no wider than a pencil.

  “Someone,” Rodger said. “But I’m still going on. I’ll bet that’s only a goatherd over there.”

  “No—” I started to say. This wasn’t a game, not anymore.

  He stared me down in the darkness, then I saw the glimmer of his teeth as he smiled. “You’re such a girl, Peter.”

  After that, I had to follow him.

  We picked our away along the path, still moving toward the glimmer of the distant cigarette. We had to cross a hundred meters of exposed meadow, clearly visible from the monastery walls. Silhouetting ourselves in the rising moonlight to the smoker in the bushes ahead at the same time. The bet Rodger made staked our lives, but I wanted to believe what he believed, that something in New Albion was still normal.

  Never in my life had I been afraid of my own home.

  The smoking man was no less of a puzzle when we got close to him. For a moment I thought I was seeing one of the old statues, left behind by the Mayans before they had retreated to their jungle kingdoms far inland. He was short and wide, with an enormous nose and a high forehead. He wore nothing but a loincloth and a feathered headband. In the moonlight he looked as shiny and pale as the stones around him. Then his eyes gleamed as he took a drag on…what?

  A small pipe, I decided.

  Though he made no effort to block the path, we stopped in front of him. The land had risen again, hiding both us and the sacbe from view of the monastery, so we stood without fear of observation.

  “In la ’kech,” he said, in what had to be Mayan, waving the pipe at us. It was oblong, with the bowl carved out of the body rather than attached to it, and seemed to be made of jade. Whatever he was smoking was nothing like Papa’s Gauloises. It was sweeter, more cloying, not at all unpleasant.

  “Hey,” I said. Beside me Rodger stirred, shifting his weight, but he had nothing to add.

  There were stories, told by kids camping around midnight fires, of Mayan sorcerers who flew down from the mountains and spoke to goats and dogs before stealing babies. Everyone knew somebody whose cousin had lost a child to the native wizards. As I’d gotten older, I’d realized we told these stories out of guilt and fear.