Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell (29 page)

“But I’m
not
done!” Molly O’Malley said.

“You are
finished
!” the Archbishop said. “He’s a dead man now. May God have mercy of his soul!”

Molly O’Malley’s litany of sin had only whetted the appetite of the Archbishop for more. From behind the mosquito netting, he proceeded to quiz each of the damned with all the subtlety of a fire bucket thrown into the face of these hellish flames—

How?

How many times?

Where? How could that be?

When? How’s that again?

—and on and on his questions came and went, until the Archbishop had spent every question, save the one that he could take to the bank.

At first, the sinners had snaked slowly forward to hear their fate firsthand from the Archbishop, but as the cold morning gathered up its warmth, the line of sinners along the canal had begun to waver, and then to waggle forward, as though its sudden progress were the grinding work of a divine machine, and not merely the will of a willful Archbishop. This sudden movement was no miracle, of course, though gossip of a merciful God did
course up the writhing line like wildfire. In truth, after peppering the damned with every damnable question imaginable, the venom of the Archbishop had quite simply petered out in the face of such relentless sin.

Yes, he had,
said the self-proclaimed Hads,
and here: and there: like that up there: and this way: yes: and that way too
.

As the day wore down, the Archbishop had come to believe there was nothing Thomas Cushing could not do—and very little that he had not already done.

By late afternoon, the actual penance for each individual Had had become an afterthought—and then not even that. No sooner had a sinner said, “Bless me Father,” than the Archbishop had doled out a few perfunctory rosaries, and a fixed dollar amount payable in full at the most solemn High Mass the next morning. By suppertime, with the long line of sinners still wavering in the dusk like so many lamps, the Archbishop had grown impatient with even this wholesale dissemination of God’s eternal salvation. When the damned kept coming into his buoyant chambers to be saved, the Archbishop had simply fixed a fixed dollar amount payable to the building fund of the Hat City Cathedral, with no mention of Hail Marys or Acts of Contrition—or even a lonely Hosanna in the highest.

All the years of guilt and premature damnation brought on by Thomas Cushing were thus washed away with a divine, dismissive swipe of the Archbishop’s ringed hand. And so our story would have ended, had it not been for the Archbishop’s decision to admit one last Had on board the barge that day as night began to fall.

With a great grunt the Archbishop had flung his massive body through the hole in the mosquito netting until the blood had run down on into his toes. He was left with the pleasant empty-headed elation that always came in anticipation of a great proclamation.
This
was how the Pope must feel (or so he felt) as the Pontiff prepared a heavenly missive
ex cathedra
, for here was absolute power combined with the infallible purity of His light.

So what to call this?

A general amnesty?

Absolute absolution?

A few pointed swoops of the quill of the dove on the parchment affixed with his official stamp—and the Archbishop could send the last town along the canal back on the path to normalcy. He had done his duty that day—no one could claim otherwise—and there was no need to hear another word of the evil that lies in the hearts of women on account of man.

With his looping strokes, the Archbishop wrote the date along the top of the page, and then he dipped the point of the quill into the silver cup once more—a nervous tic that he had always associated with his own great deeds. Nose this close to parchment, the Archbishop addressed his message to Monsignor Fahey in the most formal of terms, and then he drew out a long thin dash in anticipation of the inspiration that had always followed. The Archbishop dipped the quill into the silver cup again, then again, until the point of the quill was covered with the thick black sludge of brackish ink.

Still no words were to be had.

The Archbishop groaned like a cow lowing out loud, and only then did he give in to the dark foreboding that accompanied this unavoidable duty like a drug.

All the while that fateful day, beginning with the first words uttered by Molly O’Malley, the Archbishop had known that something beyond the sins of Thomas Cushing was badly amiss in the last town along the canal. If these adulterous tales could be taken at face value, then here was sin so penetrating that no amount of penance could ever do it justice, and no blanket proclamation could ever snuff out its smoldering fire. The Archbishop had half-heard thousands of smothering confessions in the course of his career: from the venial, made-up tales of vain schoolchildren, to the bile spat out by mad Hat City hatters in need of a hand-out. But he had never heard anything to compare with the gross couplings and copious copulations so glibly admitted to on board the barge that day. The Archbishop knew that both the quality and the quantity of sin were quite beyond the realm of earthly possibility, even for a man as mathematically monstrous as the accused. This had to be the work of Satan himself.

At that moment, the wife of the albino baker barged into his chambers.

She was slight, and doughy white, and she was shaking in slow ripples from the spine outward: a blur for the Archbishop against the porthole’s diminishing light. There was no bright polish to her voice, no distinctive treble or timbre, not a trace of the devil-may-care tonality so common to Hads. The Archbishop could see that she was taller than her adulterous peers, with a long slender neck like the gradual bend of a gas lamp—but she was stooped over, too, as if against her own will, so that the Archbishop could have sworn the sound of her voice came from where her soul waited in hiding.

The Archbishop balled up the parchment soiled by the wasted date.

“
Dash it all!
” he said.

The wife of the baker fell to her knees in his chambers. The Archbishop thought she must be confessing, but he could not be so sure, for not even his keen hearing could make out the shape of her sins, but only the shapeless sounds of shame: the last howls of a lost soul.

“Louder, my child,” the Archbishop said.

“They don’t
love
him.”

“Lift up your eyes to The Lord.”

“They don’t even know if he’s
alive
.”

“Raise up your head, my child.”

“I’m a sinner, Your Grace.”

“I know.”

“But I’m
not
a liar.”

“No?”

“
No!
”

“They’ve all been lying?” the Archbishop said.

“
Yes
.”

“But you’re not lying?”

“
No
.”

“Then tell me what you’re not lying
about
, my child.”

“About
him
,” she said. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“And how long since your last Confession?”

“One day.”

“
One
day?”

“Yesterday,” she said. “
Every
day—every day I confess to what I am thinking about what I have done.”

“What
are
you thinking?”

“That with him I would do it
again
.”

“And just what have you done?”

“Things that a dog would not do, Your Grace.”

“A dog cannot sin, my child. A dog has no soul. You are not a dog, and so you can be saved.”

“
It’s too late
. Can’t you see?”

She stood up—and she pulled down on her skirt—and she thrust her belly up and out toward the Archbishop.

“Come closer,” he said.

“
His!
” she hissed. “
His
kicking and screaming inside of me! I can hear her talking sometimes, Your Grace, and I want to
kill
her.
That’s
my sin too, today and yesterday and tomorrow too—
every
day wanting to
kill
her, and if I can’t, then wanting to kill her
and
me both.”

“You would go straight to hell,” the Archbishop said, “and this child would be lost forever to Limbo.”

“Where else can I go?” the wife of the baker said. “I love him.” She pointed at the big wide swell of her belly, and she began to cry in drops big as dimes. “I think he’s dead, Your Grace. I
hope
he’s dead. I want him dead. And I want to die.”

“
NowNowNowNowNowNow
,” the Archbishop said. “Come here, come
here
, so I can see your face.”

He raised her veil and cupped her cheeks in his hands as he might have cupped a quivering dove.

“You’ll be dying soon enough, my child, and only then will you be dead,” he said. “But your sinning and your suffering must end now—
today
. And so—in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost—“

“
Don’t!
”

“– I absolve you of
all
of your sins. For your penance, you must find this man with horns and bring him back here to me.”

“
Dead
,” the wife of the baker said. “I can feel it, Your Grace. He’s a dead man.”

“And if he’s
not
dead,” the Archbishop said, “then we must bury him alive.”