Even so, he still excelled at listening to confessions. With his hearing aid at full power, he bent to the screen of secrets. More than any other blessed sacrament, Father Damien enjoyed hearing sins, chewing over people’s stories, and then with a flourish absolving and erasing their wrongs, sending sinners out of the church clean and new. He forgave with an exacting kindness, but completely, and prided himself in dispensing unusual penances that fit the sin. People appreciated his interest in their weaknesses as well as his sense of compassionate justice. Also, he knew when they lied to him. He read their hearts. He was a popular confessor. There were those, he knew, who waited to unlock their secrets until they witnessed him personally entering the box, and others who even backed out of the church when one or the other of his younger colleagues, Father Dennis or Gothilde, slipped through the narrow door. Hearing sins was work that required all of the tactful knowledge he had developed during the years spent among these people. His people. He was proud to say he had been adopted into a certain family, the Nanapush family, whose long dead elder had been his first friend on the reservation. Whose daughter, Lulu, was as his own daughter now. But did she, did any of his trusting friends, family, parishioners, suspect? Could they imagine? Of course, one could say that in his letters Father Damien had burst the seal Christ had set on words spoken in that box — but only to a higher confessor. The gravity of his confidences was such that he could not risk revealing all to even so local an officer of the Church as a bishop. To address the Pope was, he had to think, next door to confiding in God. Still, it made Father Damien uncomfortable that he should have taken on such a lonely responsibility.
If you would deign to answer, he thought now, but stifled that twinge of irritation with another sip of the remarkable wine.
The night was mild, and Father Damien rose to let in that spectral air. He hoisted a small-paned window and the sigh of night-singing grasshoppers and crickets entered his small study. A pure sound, welcome, promising a light refreshing rain. Clearing everything away, washing the world innocent. If only he, too, could be washed to perfect goodness, forgiven! Father Damien drank deeply of the old, secret pain, and once more took up the pen.
And if you would kindly take the trouble to look back into your files, you’ll find that I’ve been faithful in every respect, conscientious to the letter of my vow, except in regard to the problem of the confessional.
As long as the subject of Penance has been raised, however, I must also begin this final report by admitting that I address you abjectly, as a sinner and also as an impostor, hoping for an absolution. But lest your judgment of what I have to say be prejudiced by what I have decided to tell before death robs me of the chance to make a dignified revelation, I will save my explanations for later. For now, let me begin by humbly calling to your attention the various reports that I have mailed carefully to Rome. Because of the utmost secrecy of my undertaking, I have, of course, kept no copy of these epistles, relying instead upon the vast array of conscientious scribes with whom I picture Your Holiness surrounded, and whom I am quite sure will have studied and remarked upon the lengthy documents that I have sent to Popes Pius X, Benedict XV, Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, and yourself, my gracious and eternal father.
The wine changed suddenly to water. In a reverse miracle, Father Damien’s heart faltered, and he could almost feel the vagueness flooding upward into his mind like a ground fog. He capped his pen. Slowly and with regret, he turned off his desk lamp. In the sheer moonlight, he allowed his eyes to adjust and then he tapped his fingers on the letter to the Pope and pushed it underneath a set of files. He smoothed his cassock carefully as he rose and walked across the room to the only other piece of furniture within it — the dark and gleaming rectangular box of strings and keys that he loved with a human love. He stroked the glossy finish of the piano gently, as though touching the hair of a sleeping child, then turned away, walked across the narrow hall.
He used the bathroom, brushed his teeth, and washed vigorously, then tottered in exhaustion to his bedroom, a neat cubicle with just space enough for a single bedstead of new-painted white iron, a small rectangular wooden bedside table, a rough bureau of varnished pine, and a hanging closet, cedar scented but shallow. Father Damien tugged the chain on the lamp and then made sure the door was firmly shut. He first removed his starched white collar, laid it with care on the top of the bureau. Next he unbuttoned his cassock, stepped out of it, and arranged it on a slender hanger that he set upon a brass hook. The black gown was outmoded, but he refused to jettison the garb in which he had originally understood his calling. With a clothes brush, he sleepily swiped at a few bits of lint, then struck away a bit of dust from the black cloth and turned back to sit on the edge of the bed. Bending with an incremental tediousness, he removed one moosehide moccasin, waited for a moment or two, and then took off the other. He set them lightly on the floor on either side of his feet.
By the time he finished that task, he was breathing hard. He continued to sit, clad only in a thin cotton undershift, rubbing one foot with the other. His feet were clean, delicately arched, tough soled, white, and young looking. His thoughts were mightily drifting, but then, suddenly, there was yet one more burst of reason. A second wind! A delayed reaction. That last gulp of wine had powered him. With hungry movements, Father Damien reached into the bedside table drawer and drew out his emergency pencil and pad of notepaper.
If memory serves me right, and I am over one hundred years old, the first of my reports dealt with an occurrence that forever set me on my course, and caused me to assume the mantle under which I have since served with joyous devotion. With no offense to your prodigious memory, let me begin at last by telling the truth.
Father Damien continued to write on the notepad, ripping each page off and piling it beside him as soon as he finished. Bare feet dangling, he scrawled what he could remember. “3 A.M.,” his report began, “In the Thrall of the Grape.” He wrote with increasing swiftness and passion, against his waning energy, for an hour and a half. When he had finished, he sank forward, set his feet down, and slowly balanced. Standing, he pulled the thin undergarment over his head and shook it out once before hanging it on an iron hook nailed to the back of the door. He was so tired that the room tipped. But he managed to stick to his routine. He lifted a neatly folded nightshirt from the top dresser drawer and laid it on the bed. Then, with slow care, he turned off the bedside lamp and in moonlighted dark unwound from his chest a wide Ace bandage. His woman’s breasts were small, withered, modest as folded flowers. He slipped the nightshirt over his head and took a deep breath of relief before crawling between the covers. At once, he fell deeply into slumber. During the night, assailed by dreams, he turned over once, unconscious, and knocked across the floorboards the sheaf of papers he had written.