Empire Falls (10 page)

“Well, it doesn’t look like I’m painting anything today,” he said, sliding out of the booth. Somehow the plate of cookies was empty, and Miles could feel the last of them lodged uncomfortably in his gullet.

Together, the two men went out onto the porch, where they stood listening to the rain.

“How many more days do you have on the north face?” Father Mark asked, contemplating the church.

“A couple,” Miles said. “Maybe tomorrow and the next day if the weather clears.”

“You really should stop right there,” Father Mark advised. “I’ve been hearing more rumblings from the diocese. We may be out of business before long. I suspect poor Tom’s the only thing that’s saved us until now.”

For more than a year now, rumors had persisted that St. Catherine’s Parish would be combined with Sacred Heart, on the other side of town. Empire Falls, once sufficiently endowed with Catholics to support both, had been losing religious enthusiasm along with its population. Now the only reason for two parishes was simply that Sacré Coeur, as Sacred Heart was still known to most of its French Canadian parishioners, required a French-speaking pastor. Otherwise, the parishes could’ve been combined years ago. Father Mark suspected that Sacré Coeur would be the survivor and that he would be shipped elsewhere. He didn’t speak French, whereas Father Tibideaux was bilingual.

What hadn’t been resolved was what to do with Father Tom. While there were homes for elderly, retired priests, especially for those in ill health, his dementia, which vacillated between the obscene and the downright blasphemous, made the diocese cautious about placing him among elderly but otherwise normal clergymen, most of whom had served too long and too well to have their faith tested further in their final years by a senile old man whose favorite word was “peckerhead.” Besides, Father Mark was able to handle the old priest, who had lived in St. Cat’s rectory for forty years and was comfortable there. In a sense it
was
his house, just as he maintained. Also, there were words worse than “peckerhead,” and if the diocese tried moving Father Tom he might start using them. Hearing him carry on had already converted several of St. Catherine’s Catholics, some to Episcopalianism, a few others to fearful agnosticism, and the bishop didn’t want to risk his contaminating other priests. No, the diocese seemed to believe that they had the Father Tom situation under control, and until recently they’d shown no inclination to break containment.

“Have you gotten any sense of where you might be assigned?” Miles asked.

“Not really,” Father Mark said. “I suspect they’re not through punishing me, though.” He had a doctorate in Judaism, and the perfect position for him would be at the Newman Center of a college or university. That was the sort of post he’d held in Massachusetts before he made the mistake of joining a group of protesters who climbed the fence of a New Hampshire military installation and got arrested for whacking away at the impervious shell of a nuclear sub with ball peen hammers—an act that Father Mark had considered symbolic but that the base commander, a literalist, had interpreted as an act of sabotage and treason. Not that this protest had been Father Mark’s only offense. In addition to teaching and pastoring at the university’s Newman Center, Father Mark had also hosted a Sunday evening radio show, during which he had drawn his bishop’s ire by counseling loving monogamy for a young male caller “regardless of the boy’s sexual orientation” and further advising him to trust God’s infinite understanding and mercy. Apparently, what happened to young, overeducated, rumored-to-be-gay priests who’d landed cushy campus gigs and doled out liberal advice was that they got packed off to Empire Falls, Maine, probably in hopes that God would freeze their errant peckers off.

“I hope they don’t have any worse duty in mind for you,” Miles said, trying to imagine what such a thing might be.

Father Mark shrugged, studying the half-painted church. “They can’t really hurt you unless you let them. I certainly don’t regret coming to Saint Cat’s. She’s been a good old gal. And I wouldn’t have missed out on our friendship.”

“I know,” Miles said. “Me neither.” Then, after a moment, “I wonder what will become of her?”

“Hard to say. Some of these beautiful old churches are being bought up and renovated into community theaters, art centers, things like that.”

“I don’t think that would work here,” Miles said. “Empire Falls has even less interest in art than religion.”

“Still, you’d better quit when you finish the north face. You could be painting Empire Falls’s next Baptist church.”

T
HE HOUSE HE GREW UP IN
on Long Street had been on the market for more than a year, and Miles was parked across the street, trying to imagine what sort of person would purchase it in its present condition. The side porch, dangerous with rot even when he was a boy, had been removed but not replaced; visible evidence of where it had been wrenched away remained in four ugly, unpainted scars. Anybody who left the house by the back door, the only one Miles had ever used, would now be greeted by a six-foot drop into a patch of poisonous-looking weeds and rusted hubcaps. The rest of the structure was gray with age and neglect, its front porch sloping crazily in several different directions, as if the house had been built on a fissure. Even the
FOR SALE
sign on the terrace tilted.

Several different families had rented the house since his mother’s death, none of them, apparently, interested in preventing or even forestalling its decline. Of course, to be fair, Miles had to admit that the decline had begun under the Robys’ own stewardship. On what had once been a tidy, middle-class street, theirs and the Minty place next door were the first houses to prefigure the deterioration of the whole neighborhood. Miles’s father, though a sometime house painter, had been disinclined to paint any house he himself happened to be living in. Summers he was busy working on the coast, and by October he would pronounce himself “all painted out,” though he sometimes could be induced to work for a week or so if the landlord—with whom they had a reduced-rent arrangement contingent upon Max’s keeping the house painted and in good repair—complained or threatened eviction. Resentful of such a strict literal interpretation of their agreement, Max retaliated by painting the house half a dozen different, largely incompatible colors from the numerous leftover, half-empty cans he’d appropriated from his various summer jobs. The Roby cellar was always full of stacked gallon cans, their lids slightly askew, the damp, rotting shelves full of open mason jars of turpentine, the fumes from which permeated the upstairs throughout the winter. Miles was in fourth grade when one of his friends asked what it was like to live in the joke house, a remark he passed along not to his father, who was responsible for its harlequin appearance, but to his mother, who first flushed crimson, then looked as if she might burst into tears, then ran into her bedroom, slammed the door and did. Later, red-eyed, she explained to Miles that what was on the inside of a house (love, she seemed to have in mind) was more important than what was on the outside (paint, preferably in one hue), but after Miles went to bed he heard his parents arguing, and after that night Max never painted the house again. Now its motley color scheme had weathered into uniform gray.

Miles hadn’t been parked across the street for more than a minute, staring up at the dark, shadeless window of the room where his mother had begun her death march, before a police car wheeled around the corner two blocks up Long and came toward him, swerving across the street and rocking to a halt so close that its bumper was mere inches from the Jetta’s own grill. A young policeman was at the wheel, one Miles didn’t recognize, and when he got out of the cruiser, putting on sunglasses that the gloomy sky didn’t warrant, Miles rolled down his window.

“License and registration,” the young cop said.

“Is there a problem, officer?”

“License and registration,” the cop repeated, his tone a little harder this time.

Miles fished the registration out of the glove box and handed it out the window along with his license. The policeman attached both to the top of his clipboard and made a couple notes.

“You mind telling me what you’re doing here, Mr. Roby?”

“Yes, I do,” said Miles, who would have been reluctant to even if he’d had an explanation that made any sense. That a demented priest had called his mother a whore, thereby compelling him to visit the house he’d grown up in, as if his mother, dead these twenty years, might be rocking on the porch, did not strike Miles as the sort of story that would satisfy a man who felt compelled to wear sunglasses on dark, rainy afternoons.

“Why’s that, Mr. Roby?”

To Miles, this didn’t sound like a serious question, so he didn’t answer it.

The young policeman scratched some more on his form. “Maybe you didn’t hear the question?” he finally said.

“Have I done something illegal?”

Now it was the cop’s turn to fall silent. For a full minute he ignored Miles, apparently to prove that he too could play this silence game. “Are you aware that you’re driving an unregistered vehicle, Mr. Roby?”

“I believe you have the registration in your hand.”

“Expired last month.”

“I’ll have to take care of it.”

The cop didn’t register this remark, instead pointing at the inspection sticker on the windshield. “Your inspection’s also past due.”

“I guess I’ll have to take care of that, too.”

No opinion on this either. “So what are you doing here, Mr. Roby?” the officer said, as if he were asking this question for the first time.

“I used to live in that house,” Miles said, indicating which one.

“Used to. But not now.”

“That’s right.”

Miles then caught a glimpse of something red in his rearview mirror and turned in time to see Jimmy Minty’s red Camaro pulling up behind him. Jimmy, who’d grown up next door, was about the last person Miles would have wanted to catch him parked just here. When Jimmy rolled down his window, the young cop abruptly walked back to the Camaro. Miles watched their conversation in the mirror, smiling when the officer took off his dark glasses. In such situations, apparently only the ranking officer got to keep his glasses on. The conversation was short, then Jimmy Minty did a U-turn and headed back down the street in the direction he’d come from. The young officer, clearly disappointed, watched him go, then returned to Miles and handed back his license and registration. “Might be a good idea to take care of these today,” he said, the confrontational edge gone from his voice now.

“You’re not citing me?”

“Not unless you think I should, Mr. Roby.”

Miles put the license back in his wallet, the registration back in the glove compartment.

Now that they were pals, the cop seemed anxious that there should be no hard feelings. “You lived in that house there?”

Miles nodded, slipping the Jetta in gear.

“Huh,” the young cop said. “Looks haunted.”

T
HE
M
OTOR
V
EHICLES
D
IVISION
office was being run out of the Whiting mansion, or rather “the Cottage,” a large outbuilding nestled in a grove of trees behind the main house. This arrangement was only temporary, until renovations at the courthouse, whose domed roof had partially collapsed after last winter’s ice storm, were completed. Since then, justice—never swift in Empire Falls—had ground to a virtual halt. Except for traffic court, most legal matters were being processed out of nearby Fairhaven, whose docket had grown so crowded with the legal business of both towns that everything from building permits to property disputes to small claims to assessments was backed up for months. Even the simplest legal transactions, like Miles’s uncontested divorce, seemed endlessly bogged down. Since he hadn’t wanted the divorce to begin with, he wasn’t terribly troubled. In fact, last spring he’d hoped the holdup might cause Janine to reconsider, though by now he knew that she was determined to marry the Silver Fox, and that somehow she held this legal delay, which had ruined her plans for a summer wedding, against Miles. So determined was she to marry Walt Comeau the moment her divorce became final that Miles had begun to suspect that in some part of her brain, the workings of which still mystified him, Janine realized that this second marriage was some pure folly she needed to commit quickly, lest she come to her senses first.

Miles parked in the small lot between the main house, now headquarters of the Dexter County Museum and Historical Society, and the cottage, which housed, in addition to the temporary DMV, the permanent offices of the Empire Falls Planning and Development Commission, which over the last decade had become something of a joke, since no one had developed anything in Empire Falls during that period, nor was anyone planning to. Mrs. Whiting, as director of the board, kept an office there, however, and when Miles saw her Lincoln parked in the lot, he hurried across the lawn, head down, in the hope that she wouldn’t spy him out her window. He’d been avoiding “the State of the Grill” since his return from vacation, and despite the restaurant’s improved business, he was even more reluctant than usual to spend an afternoon going over receipts and making projections.

Safely inside, he joined a short line and awaited his turn at a window marked
AUTO REG
. The entire mahogany counter, he realized, had been transported from the courthouse, and would no doubt be ferried back again. The other furnishings, including the paintings and photographs of Whiting males that decorated the walls, all belonged to the museum collection. Miles studied these men while he waited. For direct lineal descendants they didn’t look all that much alike except, Miles decided, for one feature. Even as young men, they appeared prematurely old, or maybe just distinguished, their hair white, their brows chiseled in cogitation. Or perhaps they were reflecting with satisfaction that the history of Empire Falls, indeed of Dexter County, was little more than the history of their own family.

After a few minutes, he noticed Jimmy Minty’s red Camaro pull into the lot. Leaving the car idling, the police officer got out and came toward the cottage, angling off the walkway that led to Motor Vehicles and proceeding across the lawn to the back of the building. Miles followed his progress until a man behind him in line tapped him on the shoulder and pointed out that it was his turn. At the window he wrote out the check for his new tags and slipped it through the opening. When the woman on the other side of the glass smiled and said, “Hello, Miles,” he recognized her as a girl he’d gone to high school with. Marcia, according to her name tag. Which was more likely, he wondered, that he and Marcia should have lived so long in such a small town without running into each other, or that he and Jimmy Minty would cross paths twice in half an hour?