If Angels Burn

Page 4

What had Charlie said? With some of them, you just do what you can and pray for the rest.
I've done what I can for her, Alex thought as she walked out into the physicians' private parking lot. John can cover the praying.
Her relationship, or lack thereof, with her brother was another weight she carried. It hurt, because despite the fact that his God and the church had built the wall between them, Alex's feelings hadn't changed all that much. There was still a large part of her that wanted to adore him and tag after him and persuade him not to leave her alone.
John was still the only person she had ever loved without reservation.
Hard as it was for Alex to admit, there were some things that simply weren't fixable. She could patch up her patients on the outside, but she could never erase or avenge what had been done to them. She couldn't heal what didn't show up on the CT scans and the X-rays. She knew because the old wounds John had left inside her were still bleeding.
Alex was so wrapped up in her private misery that she didn't see the two men approaching her until they were only a few yards away. She didn't recognize them, but they were well dressed in nice, expensive suits.
Her automatic, woman-alone defenses relaxed. Maybe they're new or visiting.
"Good evening, Dr. Keller," one of them said, nodding to her as they approached each other.
"Hi." She'd taken off her lab coat with the ID badge, so how did he know her name? He wasn't an American physician, not with that pretty accent.
As soon as Alex passed them something hard and blunt hit her in the back of the head, sending her staggering forward. Pain went off like a land mine inside her skull as the two men caught her by the arms. Then the one who had spoken stepped in front of her. A big hand holding a square of damp cloth came directly at her face, too fast to dodge.
What the hell… Too late Alex tried holding her breath, but the strong smell of chemicals was already filling her head. Is that… ether?
Whatever it was, it knocked her out four seconds later.
"Panem coelestem accipiam, et nomen Domini invocabo," Father Carlo Cabreri prayed as he held aloft the consecrated host.
John Keller automatically translated the Latin into English. I will take the bread of heaven, and call upon the Name of the Lord.
Although it was not a high holy day, and a strange Italian priest was offering mass entirely in Latin, the members of St. Luke's parish filled the old church's pews. They came to kneel, and pray, and take Communion, as their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents before them had done. As John had, every Sunday morning from the age of ten.
"You are Catholic now, John Patrick," his adopted mother, Audra Keller, had told him after he had been baptized in the faith. Ten years old, holy water running down his face and making spots on his brand-new suit. Alexandra, barely five, sobbing into Audra's shoulder because the blessed water had been cold and had gotten into her eyes.
St. Luke's had been the first church John had ever seen inside, and the only place of worship he had ever attended before joining the priesthood. The old parish priest, Father Seamus, had even shaken his hand after the Kellers had brought him for his first mass.
"You say he's not been baptized, Audra? Well, now." He ruffled John's hair. "We'll wash away that sin you've been carrying around and make a good Catholic of you yet, Johnny boy."
Seamus, who only last year had died peacefully in his sleep, had never guessed what Johnny boy had been carrying around inside him.
What he still carried.
You didn't keep your promise, Father.
St. Luke's had been built to resemble those churches that the early faithful residents of Chicago had left behind in Ireland, but the inside had been remodeled by the latecomer Italians. His foster mother believed that was because the Vatican had paid to rebuild the church after the Chicago Fire of 1871.
"The Irish let them," Audra said with amused resignation, "because by then they were running the entire city from their meatpacking plants."
Audra and Robert commuted from their beautiful home on the South Shore to attend mass in the church of their childhood, but Alexandra had never liked St. Luke's. She told John it was an awful place.
"It smells, too," his little sister had complained. "Like something died in there and nobody found the body."
Audra Keller blamed the scorched brick you could still see near the church's foundation, and the smell from the greasy prayer candles, still made by the Poor Clares from a local convent from rendered beef and pork fat.
"Why can't the nuns use beeswax?" John's adopted mother had asked Father Seamus once. Although she wouldn't allow John or Alexandra to keep a pet, Audra supported any cause involved in protecting animal rights. "The smell from those things makes everyone sick."
"Beeswax is too expensive," the old priest reminded her. "Making tallow candles provides a small income for the convent."
Despite this, the Kellers had brought their adopted son and daughter here every Saturday for confession and Sunday for Communion, because their parents had done the same with them, as had their parents' parents. After his overseas experience, John had requested, and was granted, a place at St. Luke's. He had considered it a blessing at the time.
Now he wondered if God indulged in practical jokes.
The parish had never been a wealthy one, but since John had left for his mission in South America, it had steadily declined into a slum. Those who could afford to move out of the neighborhood already had. Drug use, always popular during economic crunches, steadily increased, as did burglary, prostitution, and gang violence.
John hadn't realized that his childhood home had become a ghetto until he had taken over managing St. Luke's neighborhood mission, which provided hot meals for the disadvantaged. The food always ran out long before the line of hookers, winos, and crack addicts did.
Passing out bowls of watery chili and reading from the Book of Matthew over the slurps was not only useless; it was a mockery. John had become a priest to fight evil by strengthening the faith, not to run a soup kitchen for people who would gladly sell their souls—or his—for a needle or a rock.
John would have ministered to his parish, but they didn't seem to need him, either. The faithful who came to St. Luke's might have been pardoned for believing that the Almighty had a deaf spot when it came to them; so few of their prayers were answered. Still they attended faithfully, and would kneel and pray the Rosary and call upon God to relieve their suffering whether John offered mass or not. Their robotic devotion to their faith seemed grim and hopeless, but it never changed, and it refused to die. Like the parish itself.
John watched the Italian priest's stern features as he closed his eyes to pray. Father Carlo Cabreri was Archbishop August Hightower's executive assistant and one of the busiest priests in the parish. Yet Carlo had shown up at the rectory and insisted on offering the morning mass.
Hightower must have received John's letter.
Does he think Carlo can talk me out of it? John knew that in his remote way, Hightower was fond of him. He had been John's first confessor, and before that had helped Audra Keller convince John to enter the priesthood. Maybe he sent Cabreri to remind me of that.
Unfortunately for the bishop, there was nothing to discuss. John was resolved.
His gaze drifted up from the altar rail to the saint statues carved in the low arch overhead. A thin, dusty strand hanging from Saint Paul's receding chin swayed gently, stirred by a current of air from one of the broken clerestory windows.
"Domine, non sum dignus…" the priest murmured, beginning the prayer that he would repeat three times before he himself consumed the host.
The remaining Latin words faded out as the English version of that first phrase pounded inside John's head. Lord, I am not worthy… I am not worthy…
John had always been unworthy. His parents, life on the streets, and the beast inside him had seen to that. When he made the decision to join the Friars Minor and become a priest, he had hoped to change the man he was. And he had.
Now he was unworthy and a total failure as a priest.
As Cabreri prepared to administer Communion to the faithful, John went to kneel at the altar rail. Partaking of the symbolic body and blood of Christ was one of the most sacred rituals of the faith, but now it felt like cannibalism. John was not worthy to come to this table, or partake of this holy feast. He was worse than a failed priest; he was an impure one.
"Father?" one of the altar boys whispered.
John looked up to see the boy extending the ceremonial plate beneath his chin, and the Italian priest holding the stamped, coin-size host in front of his nose.
"Corpus Christi," Father Cabreri repeated patiently.
John parted his lips and accepted the host. The thin wafer immediately adhered itself to the roof of his mouth, where it had to stay until his saliva reduced it to a swallowable paste. Even when he was a boy, John had never chewed the host.
One did not masticate the body of Christ.
Hei, padre.
Since John had returned from South America, his senses had plagued him. He heard voices that weren't there, smelled odors that should have escaped his nose, and even tasted things in food that he had never before detected. He told his doctor, who performed the tests that quickly eliminated the possibility of disease or a brain tumor.
"You're in fine health, John. Better than most of your compadres over there at St. Luke's." Dr. Chase chuckled over his own joke. "My best guess is, you're suffering a bit of SID."
"I'm sorry?" John had not been familiar with the term.
"Sensory integration disorder. You've just come back to civilization after, what, two years in the jungle? Naturally your brain developed different neuropathways, which are now tuning in on what seems like inappropriate things. We saw a lot of SID when all the young men came back from Vietnam."
The doctor had assured him that eventually the condition would fade. That had not happened, and at times, John was sure he was getting worse. Like now. The smell of Chantilly perfume from the old woman to his left was so strong he wanted to lean over the rail and puke.