“Yeah, Father,” Mr. Clean said. “We’ll take a look.”
The police car radio squawked. They jumped inside, answered the call, and peeled out of the driveway, lights flashing and siren blaring. They took off toward the center of town, away from the stadium. Understandably, there was no time to drive around, no time to take a look.
Maria was at the base of the stairs with her arms wrapped around Manuel when I went back inside.
“Why were the police here, Father Nathan?’ she said. “Are they here to deport us? Are we being sent back to Mexico?”
“No, no one is sending you back to Mexico. Would you make us some tea, Maria? I can’t stop thinking about that tres leches cake you made. Is there another piece left in the fridge?”
Twenty-two years ago, Maria’s mother was my teacher at the Consultoria Española y Lingüística in Santa Volopta, Mexico, where I studied Spanish and worked with Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s Missionaries of Charity. Maria was nine years old at the time.
Santa Volopta lies within the Golden Triangle of the Chihuahua state, the most violent territory in the world outside of actual war zones. Not all the violence is a result of the drug trade. Over the past ten years, 937 women have been murdered, their bodies tossed in random dumps and ditches. Although no arrests have ever been made, high-level policemen and prominent citizens are suspected.
At age eighteen, Maria married a lawyer in Volopta. When he became the municipal prosecutor, he launched an investigation into the murders of the daughters of Volopta; it led to his own assassination. Maria’s mother called me immediately after his body was found, put her daughter and grandson on a plane, and sent them to live with me in Connecticut. She didn’t trust the municipal or federal governments. She was certain her son-in-law’s murderers, the drug czars, and the high-level officials responsible for the killings of the daughters of Volopta were one and the same. In Maria’s mother’s mind, her daughter and grandson were as good as dead if they stayed in Mexico.
From the moment Maria and Manuel arrived, my goal was to provide a spiritual and physical home for them while they integrated themselves into the community and began new lives. The gossipers in the parish, of course, didn’t want to see it that way. It was far more entertaining to contemplate a priest violating his vow of celibacy with the beauty living beneath his roof.
As soon as Maria started appearing in church, attendance and contributions at Mass increased. A dozen men, single and married alike, received a thunderbolt of devout inspiration and started showing up daily. When I turned from the altar to bestow a blessing during morning Mass, I would catch one or more of them trying to steal a glance at her from a side pew. She possessed an elegance that could make men sob in anguish because they would never touch her. Her hair fell past her shoulders in silken strands that shone under the ceiling lights like onyx.
She tended to gaze at the ground, either because she didn’t want to encourage any suitors or because she was desperate to disappear. This habit lent her an air of innocence. When she looked up, there was a gentleness and purity in her oval face and chestnut eyes that took one’s breath away.
It didn’t take long for the comments to start.
“There they are,” a widow said. “The Thorn Birds.”
“His third leg still work?” a former altar boy said.
“If it didn’t, it does now,” his friend replied.
I am forty-five years old. I’ve been a priest for seventeen of those years, and over time, it has been my observation that ethical and moral standards are deteriorating, nowhere more so than in the Catholic Church. And no one has disappointed the faithful more than the Catholic priest. As a result, people have become cynical. It’s just a profession, they say; there is no special calling. For some folks, it’s unimaginable that a heterosexual man such as I would not lust for a woman such as Maria, would not lie in bed wrestling with temptation every night.
And yet, I must insist: I do no such thing. I do not think of her in the way that other men do. I do not want to touch her. I do not want to possess her. I pray only for her and her son’s health and salvation. Seeing them alive and healthy at Mass fulfills me in every way. Such is the joy of priesthood: contentment beyond the scope of sexual fulfillment. In the twenty-one years since a priest gave me a prayer book and changed the course of my life forever, I’ve said the Lord’s Prayer three million, six hundred, and sixty-six times. That is how much prayer it has taken me to reach such a state of contentment.
I was not always this way. There was a time in my youth when I would have broken doors down to get to Maria, and no one would have tried to stop me. I was once the golden boy, a star collegiate baseball player with a bazooka for a right arm, a flame-throwing pitcher drafted in the third round by the New York Yankees. I had all the girls I wanted, and then the only one I ever needed died in a car accident when I was behind the wheel.