"So did I. I never did anything like that again."
"I should hope not," he said. "Neither did I, you may rest assured of that."
We walked a little ways in silence, and then he said, "Ritual and formality, as I was saying. 'Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,' is what I'd say as a way of starting. 'It has been forty years and more since my last confession.' Sweet Jesus, forty years!"
I didn't say anything.
"And then I don't know what I'd say. I don't think there's a commandment I've not broken. Oh, I've kept my hands off the altar boys, and that's more I guess than some of the priests can say for themselves, but I can take no credit for that as it's been lack of inclination that's spared them. I suppose I could go through the list, commandment by commandment."
"Some people do the Fifth Step by going through the list of deadly sins. You know, pride, greed, anger, gluttony…"
"It might be easier. There's seven sins, and that's three fewer than the commandments. I like your way, though. Just saying the sins that are weighing on your soul. Well, I've enough of those. I've lived a bad life and done bad things."
A twig snapped underfoot, and I heard something scurry in the brush, some small animal we'd startled. Off in the distance I heard what must have been the hooting of an owl. I don't think I ever heard one before. He stopped walking, leaned his back against a tree.
"One time," he said, "I was trying to get this man to talk. He had money hidden and he wouldn't say where it was. Hurting him only seemed to strengthen his will. And so I reached in and took his eye out, plucked it right out of his head, and I held it in the palm of my hand and showed it to him. 'Your eye is looking at you,' I said, 'and it can see right into your soul. Now shall I take the other one as well?' And he talked, and we got the money, and I put the barrel of my gun to his empty eye socket and blew out his brains."
He fell silent, and his words hung in the air around us, until the breeze could waft them away.
"And then there was another time," he said…
I've forgotten almost everything he said.
I can't explain how that happened. It's not as though I wasn't paying attention. How could I have done otherwise? The wedding guest could have more easily ignored the Ancient Mariner.
Even so, the words he spoke passed through my consciousness and flew off somewhere. It was as if I was a channel, a conduit for his confession. Maybe that's how it is for priests and psychiatrists, who hear such revelations regularly. Or maybe not. I couldn't say.
We walked and he talked, sometimes at great length, sometimes quite tersely. There was a point when we reached a clearing and sat on the ground, and he went on talking and I went on listening.
And then there was a point when he was done.
"A longer walk than I remembered it," he said. "It's slower going at night, and we stopped now and then along the way, didn't we? The stream's my property line. It's just a dry ditch in the heat of summer, and a regular torrent when the snows melt in the spring. Let's find a place to cross it where we won't get our feet wet."
And we managed, stepping on a couple of rocks.
"After he heard you out, your Buddhist friend," he began, and caught himself. "Jim Faber, that is to say."
"You remembered his name."
"There's hope for me yet. After he heard you out, was that the end of it? He didn't absolve you of your sins. Did he at least give you any penance? Any Aves to say? Any Our Fathers?"
"No."
"He just left it at that?"
"The rest was up to me. The way we do it, we have to forgive ourselves."
"How, for God's sake?"
"Well, there are other steps. It's not penance, exactly, but maybe it works the same way. Making amends for the harm you've done."
"However would a man know where to begin?"
"And self-acceptance," I said. "That's a big part of it, and don't ask me how you do it. It's not exactly my own area of expertise."
He thought about it and nodded slowly. The corners of his mouth turned up the slightest bit. "So you won't grant me absolution," he said.
"I would if I could."
"Ah, what kind of a priest are you? The wrong kind entirely. Knowing you, you'd probably change wine into water."
"The miracle of Insubstantiation," I said.
"Wine into Perrier," he said. "With all the tiny bubbles."
We were on his land from the moment we'd forded the little stream, and we had another five minutes in the woods before we came to a cleared patch of ground. At the high ground on the other side of the clearing was the orchard, to the side of which we'd buried Kenny and McCartney. Beyond the orchard were the gardens and the hogpen and the hen coop, and a ways past that was the old farmhouse.
"Now we'd best be quiet," he murmured, "for voices carry. They'd never hear us this far off, but the animals might. In fact 'twill be the devil's own trick getting past the hog lot without the beasts knowing it. Even if we're dead quiet they'll catch our scent, though how they can smell anything at all beyond their own raw stench is a great puzzle to me."
And there were a few guinea fowl penned in with his hens, he said. Pretty creatures, that roosted in the trees and made a racket when you went near them. O'Gara liked having them, liked the way they looked, and assured him they were a delicacy and much prized on the fanciest table, but he found them stringier than chicken and not as tasty. They were splendid for raising an alarm, though, true watchdogs with wings, and there'd be a little noise from them, a little grunting from the hogs, no matter how carefully we got by them. But these were city boys we were coming after, and what would they make of a bit of cawing and oinking from the livestock?
We switched off our flashlights. There was enough moonlight for us to make our way over cleared ground. We walked slowly, picked up our feet deliberately and set them down softly. When we cleared the orchard I could see lights on in the farmhouse. The only sound I could hear was my own breathing.
We walked on. There was a graveled path but we kept to the side of it, where the grass and weeds made a quieter surface underfoot than the loose gravel. A lighted window in the farmhouse kept drawing my eyes. I could picture them in there, sitting around a table, eating and drinking things from the big old refrigerator, opening Ball jars and spooning out preserves that Mrs. O'Gara had put up. I didn't want to imagine all this, I wanted to concentrate on what I was doing, but the images filled my head anyway.
He stopped in his tracks, caught my arm.
"Listen," he whispered.
"To what?"
"That's it," he said. "As close as we are, we should hear them."
"In the house?"
"The animals," he said. "They can hear us. They should be stirring, and we should be hearing them."
"I can't hear them," I whispered back, "but I can certainly smell them."
He nodded and sniffed the air, sniffed it again. "I don't care of it," he said.
"Would anybody?"
He frowned. He was picking up something on the night air that I couldn't make out. I guess he was used to smelling his hogs and chickens, and knew when something didn't smell as it should.
He touched a finger to his lips, then led the way. The smell got stronger as we neared the fenced hogpen. He went right up next to the fence, leaned his forearms on the topmost rail. Not a sound came from within, and now I smelled it, too, a stale top note to the usual reek of the animals' waste.
He switched on his flashlight, played it around the pen, stopped the beam when it lit up a dead hog. The animal lay on its side in its own blood, its great white flank stitched with bullet holes. He moved the light here and there, and I could make out others.
He switched off the light, nodded to himself, and started walking to the hen coop. It was the same story there, but a little more vivid, with blood and feathers everywhere. He stood there and looked at the carnage and breathed deeply, in and out, in and out. Then he switched off his light and turned on his heel and began walking back the way we'd come.