True Believers(17)

He wished he had thought of it. He really did. He wished he could go down the street to St. Stephen’s and look Dan Burdock in the face.

Instead, he went back to his desk and started to go through the material he would need if they did decide to go out to the cemetery and picket. People thought it was easy, but it really took enormous planning, especially if he meant to keep his people in line. They had to be kept in line. When they were let loose on their own, they got violent. There were people who thought he meant them to be violent, but he didn’t. He only wanted them to be violent if they were not also out of control.

A minute or two later, he stopped, thinking that something had been odd, and he hadn’t noticed it. Looking down the street at St. Stephen’s. Looking down the street at St. Anselin’s. All those homeless people. What was it?

His mind came up blank. His coffee cup was empty. He got up to fill it.

It would come back to him, eventually, whatever it was he had seen, and then he could think of what to do about it.




7

Mary McAllister had met the Reverend Roy Phipps only once, but that had been enough to tell her that she never wanted to meet him again. It wasn’t that she hated him, exactly. She had expected to hate him. She had seen him on the news, carrying his signs at the funerals of people who died of AIDS, saying that those people were right now burning in the fires of hell. If there was one thing Mary remembered with perfect clarity from her religion classes as far back as First Holy Communion  , it was that no human being could ever know whom God had sent to hell. That was because no person could know what was going on in a person’s mind at the very moment of death, when God gave everybody a last chance at repentance. Mary had always suspected that this was a chance everybody took advantage of, so that nobody ever went to hell at all—maybe not even Hitler. She was sure that none of the men she had met so far at St. Stephen’s, like that poor Scott Boardman who had just died, was in any danger at all of going to hell. It wasn’t their fault that they were confused, or that the people around them had been so cruel to them that they felt there was nothing they could do but band together and fend off the world. In Scott Boardman’s case, he had been molested by a priest. He couldn’t be held responsible for his hatred of the Catholic Church. If she had been a saint, Mary thought she might have been able to bring one or two of them across the street to St. Anselm’s and a life of principled chastity, but she wasn’t a saint. She wasn’t even close. What she did instead was to make a point of being friendly to all of the men she met, and to tell them “God bless you” at every possible opportunity.

Now she pulled the soup kitchen van into the parking lot behind St. Anselm’s and tried to get a look at St. Stephen’s, but there was nothing to see there but the lighted doorway to the church. Ever since she’d heard that Scott Boardman had died, she had been worried about poor Chickie George, who took this sort of thing very badly. People laughed at Chickie, but Mary knew better. He was really a very sensitive person, very sensitive and deep, and she had learned that if she listened to him long enough and with enough sympathy, he would start to tell her the truth. She had always had an intellectual understanding of how lucky she had been—to have had parents who loved and cared for her; to have had a nice house in a nice neighborhood; to have had a good education and to have the possibility of more. Chickie had begun to make her feel it emotionally. There were times now when she lay in bed in her dorm room at St. Joseph’s and stared at the ceiling for hours, trying to work it out. She couldn’t make the world right. She couldn’t go back in time and give Chickie the kind of parents she had had, instead of the kind he had had, who seemed to have been ogres with credit cards. The Lord God only knew, she couldn’t straighten out the economic mess the world was in and make sure that everybody in South America had enough to eat. So—what?

She got out of the van and checked the clock over the church. It was five-thirty. She locked up—you had to lock up, even in the church parking lot, even in a neighborhood like this—and tugged at the driver’s side door to make sure it was secure. Then she started across the lot to the back door of the church. It was cold enough so that she knew she should have been wearing a coat, but she hated wearing them when she drove, so she hadn’t. Instead, she had a thick wool sweater and a turtleneck over flannel-lined L. L. Bean jeans. She saw Marty Kelly’s pickup truck and patted it as she walked by it. It made her feel instantly better, because Marty hadn’t been in church for weeks. Bernadette’s diabetes had been acting up. Sister Peter Rose had told her. Maybe Marty and Bernadette had come in for Scott Boardman’s funeral, because Bernadette had been close to Scott the way Mary was to Chickie.