AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"We're different, you and I," she said.
"And Willie is not?"
"You believed in the cause you served. Willie never did. He fought because he was afraid not to. Then his heart filled with hatred when he saw Jim Stubbefield killed," she said.
"I lost friends, too, Abby," Robert said.
BUT she was already walking back toward the house, her hands balled into fists, the leaves and persimmons and molded pecan husks snapping under her feet, the world swimming around her as though she were seeing it from the bottom of a deep, green pool.
"Did you hear me, Abby? I lost friends, too," Robert called behind her.
The following week, on a sun-spangled, rain-scented Saturday evening, Carrie LaRose entered St. Peter's Church and knelt down inside the confessional. The inside of the confessional was hot and dark and smelled of dust and oil and her own perfume and body powder and the musk in her clothes.
The priest who pulled back the wood slide in the partition was very old, with a nervous jitter in his eyes and hands which often shook
uncontrollably, to such a degree he was no longer allowed to perform the consecration at Mass or to administer communion. Through a space between the black gauze that hung over the small window in the partition and the wood paneling, Carrie could see the hands and wrists of the priest framed inside a shaft of sunlight. His bones looked like sticks, the skin almost translucent, the veins little more than pieces of blue string.
The priest waited, then his head turned toward the window. "What is it? Why is it you don't speak?" he said.
"You don't know me. I run the brot'el sout' of town," she replied.
"Could I help you with something?"
"You don't talk French?"
"No, not well."
"I done a lot of sins in my life. The Lord already knows what they are and I ain't gonna bore Him talking about them, no. But I done one t'ing that don't never let go of me. 'Cause for me to wish I ain't done what I did is the same t'ing as wishing I wasn't alive."
"You've lost me."
Carrie tried to start over but couldn't think. "My knees is aching. Just a minute," she said. She left the confessional and found a chair and dragged it back inside, then plunked down in it and closed the curtain again.
"Are we comfortable now?" the priest asked.
"Yes, t'ank you. I was in a prison cell in Paris. I could see the guillotine from the window. I kneeled down on the stone and practiced putting my head on the bench so I'd know how to do it when they took me in the cart to die. But I'd get sick all over myself. I knowed then I'd do anyt'ing to stay alive."
"I'm confused. You want absolution for a murder you committed?"
"You ain't listening. The other woman in my cell was a cutpurse. I done sexual t'ings for the jailer so he'd take her 'stead of me. I go over it in my head again and again, but each time it comes out the same way. In my t'oughts I still want to live and I want that woman to die so I ain't got to lay my head down under that blade way up at the top of the scaffold. So in troot I ain't really sorry for sending her to the headsman 'stead of me. That means I ain't never gonna have no peace."
The priest's silhouette was tilted forward on his thumb and forefinger.He seemed to rock back and forth, as though teetering on the edge of a thought or an angry moment. Then he closed the slide on the partition and rose from his seat and left the confessional.
She sat motionless in her chair, the walls around her like an upended coffin. Sweat ran down her sides and an odor like sour milk seemed to rise from her clothes. A hand that trembled so badly it could hardly find purchase gripped the edge of the curtain and jerked it back.
"Step out here with me," the priest said, and gestured for her to take a seat in
a pew by a rack of burning candles.
He sat down next to her, his small hands knotted on his thighs. The rack of votive candles behind him glittered like a hundred points of blue light.
"You don't have to sort through these things with a garden rake. You just have to be sorry for having done them and change your way. God doesn't forgive incrementally. His forgiveness is absolute," the priest said.
He saw her forming the world "incrementally" with her lips.
"He doesn't forgive partway. You're forgiven, absolved, as of this moment," the priest said.
"What about the house I run?"
