Chapter One

* * *
And he went forth, Konrad Johann Meissen
from the Old Country called Germany
to America,
to a place called Missouri.
There he took unto himself a wife called Maria,
and begat himself a son
called John Joseph,
who forsook the home of his father
and went forth to a place called Whitefield, Texas.
There he took unto himself a wife called Clara,
and begat himself a son called
Bruno Thomas Meissen,
who forsook the home of his parents,
and making his own home in Whitefield,
took unto himself
a wife called Agnes
who bore him no sons.
She bore him only daughters
who were named Mary Irene and Desdamona,
who were called Mims and Desty.

—The Meissen Family Bible, 1935

* * *

Bruno Thomas Meissen
Whitefield, Texas
June 1928

In the time it took me to step away from my old man’s deathbed and onto the front porch, my insides settled with a small glimmer of hope. Maybe there was a way out, after all.

I planted my elbows across the rail and pondered Pa’s last words. The windmill creaked at a sudden gust. Dark clouds skittered north, flushing out a sinking sun, over-brightening the patchy yard, and setting aglow the wagon. That was what I feared most about coming home—Pa’s wagon. Being stuck with it, the tools, the menial insignificance.

The screen door scraped behind me. I knew without looking it was the heavy sister by the way the planks gave.

“Ma says go over to the Fisher place. Tell Mr. Fisher we need an advance of fryers and eggs.”

I gripped the rail for patience. Dumb clucks. Soul’s gone to its eternal judgment and all’s on their minds is the temporal.

“They ain’t seen you since you’re back, you know,” she nagged.

I ripped a splinter free, clamped it between my teeth. “And they ain’t gonna.” I could see Ma’s pitiful calf-eyes, hear her shrinking voice that had begged more advances in her lifetime than the Fisher place had head. Because she knew nothing of the old man’s stash. Nothing about the suitcase hidden in the cellar. “Pa ought to have anointing,” I said.

“Ain’t time. Anyhow, don’t make no difference in the end where a soul ends up.”

“Kind of thinking’s contrary to the church.”

The screen door slammed behind me. I sent the splinter flying and stepped back inside the room that held the old man’s last breath.

It was a sparse room, its bare wooden walls the color of a possum’s back, splashed by a play of candlelight that bent and twisted atop a low chest.

Pa lay arranged in a white shirt, between fresh sheets, looking more the size of an old goat than a full-grown man, shrunk to half the size he once was. I’d never seen him outside his coveralls. His worn hands were folded across his chest, his fingernails notched and stained, the way I’d always known them. His eyes were frozen at half-mast. Pale lips slacking back into his cheeks. The world was no better for his living. No worse for his dying.

I rummaged through the chest in search of something that might prove useful for anointing. A missal, a crucifix. A blessed palm would be good, proof that he at least made his Easter duty. My hand hit on a bottle of holy water, cushioned between some linens.

Draping a dresser scarf around my neck, I smoothed the ends so they hung flat at my waist.

“In Nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.” My arms rose to the heavens on the power of the Lord. “Receive Ye this lowly sinner, John Joseph Meissen. Spare him the judgment of eternal damnation. In Your merciful mercy, deliver him from the gates of hell.”

I dribbled holy water on Pa’s ear. “Lord, sin steals our souls through the doorways of our senses. Forgive him his sins of the ear for setting such store in the words of rich men, namely Mr. Fisher. His money don’t necessarily make him a good man. I refer You, Lord, to Your own words about the camel and the needle.”

The name Mr. Fisher scraped across my tongue. The times my old man should’ve taken up my side against him. I yanked at the wet earlobe, causing Pa’s head to slip cock-eyed off the pillow. Causing those upside-down glassy eyes to glare directly up into mine, like he was crawling out from under the wagon, about to say hand me that wrench yonder. Or out from under death, as if there was power in my touch. My knees felt slammed from behind. My heart raced, and the cross-stitch on the dresser scarf jiggled. I jabbed my thumb into the hollow of his cold cheek and shoved his head back straight. Crossed myself with holy water and made a slow recitation of the Act of Contrition until my legs steadied.

“Lord, forgive these eyes,” I continued. “Forgive Pa any sins of lust he might have committed with them. Coveting other women or another man’s possessions.” With the side of my thumb, I pressed one crinkled lid, then the other, into their final sleep.

Outside, a creeping darkness erased the edges of the wagon. Crickets flitted and rubbed. Grasshoppers pinged against the rusty screen door. And there beside the deathbed, as I anointed Pa’s nose, I drew a blank. How can these odd-shaped knobs that smell and breathe for us possibly offend the Lord? A lightning bug flitted past the window, then another. I doused the nostrils good and proceeded on.

The sins came easy for the mouth: cursing, lying, gossip, gluttony, name-calling. Sissy. What he called me in front of Mr. Fisher.

I didn’t mention the suitcase, not knowing how the Lord viewed Pa’s revelation.

Dabbing his hands with holy water, my fingers froze, stuck there atop the shriveled pile of flesh and bone. Snagged on the memories of the few times in life that my old man and I touched—by accident. That was not to count the switchings. Once, when my head reached about level with the wagon side, while handing him a hammer, our fingers brushed, and we pulled away from each other as if from a blister asp.

I stepped back from the bed. Poured what was left of the holy water onto the dresser scarf, and cleansed my hands as I’d seen done by the priests at the seminary, wiping each finger with a separate attention. The anointing was complete. The old man’s eternity was now up to the Lord.

By then, the porch was dark. Across the field, the Kinderschied place blazed in its gluttony of electric lights. The barn, the silo, the wide two-story house. I wondered what Agnes would say when she learned I was home for good.

Maybe I hadn’t failed at becoming a priest after all. Maybe the suitcase was a sign.

Chapter Two

* * *

Mount Calvary Monastery
Booneville, Missouri
March, 1928

Dear Agnes:

I’m sure you know this is Lent, the month of repentance. Another boy and I scrubbed down all the statues on the monastery grounds, including the Virgin. I’ve now got a daily rosary started in the dorm. I have one follower so far. The right road is always hard to see. With any luck, I’ll keep getting your letters, thanks to my friend, Peter, who works in the mailroom with Brother Melvin, who is a dumb ox. I’ve received very few letters from home or family. People mean well, but human weakness gets the best of most. I’ve learned to offer my sacrifices up in the proper spirit. I’m getting a good education, which is the second most important thing, the first being my religious vocation.

Yours in Christ,
Bruno T. Meissen

* * *

I found the suitcase exactly where Pa said. In the cellar, hidden under the bottom shelf inside a gunnysack that turned to dust soon as I dragged it out. A sneezing fit took hold of me, so much so that it was all I could do to stay standing. When it finally settled, I wiped my eyes and nose on my sleeve and steadied myself down on my knees.

Pulling the lantern close, I examined what lay on the dirt floor before me: a dusty, rectangular case, peelings of its original reptile veneer still clinging here and there, its chewed corners the color of cellar rats. I popped the latch and lifted the lid. My head went dizzy from what looked up at me. Loose coins, silver and gold, canvas bags tagged with names unheard of. Paper money—some loose, some bound.

Never in my life had I imagined that just a few buggy lengths from the shack where I grew up lay hidden this kind of money. I lowered my backside flat on the floor, folded my legs, and situated the suitcase in my lap.

My chest heaved for breath, sucking in the mildew and damp. Then, like a starving orphan set before a feast, my hands went wild, grabbing up the money, piling it in my lap, shoving it in my pockets. I felt outside myself, a madman, saliva running down the corners of my mouth.

The words of the Lord hammered my head: The love of money is the root of all evil. My hands stopped mid-air. Be sober and vigilant, because Satan lurks in cellars seeking those he might win to his legion.

I made the sign of the cross, emptied my pockets, and dumped the money back in the suitcase, pausing only long enough to study the double eagle on a twenty dollar gold piece, to inhale its worldliness, wondering how many palms it may have crossed before it ended up in my old man’s.

I wanted the money and didn’t want it, all in the same thought. I counted and tried not to count. Speak, Lord, I prayed. Speak to me. But all that announced itself was my own rote memory of His words: You shall not shut your hand from your brother, but open it wide and give to him sufficient for his need.

Slow, calm-like, I retrieved the money from the suitcase and counted out six stacks: Me, Ma, the spinster sister, the married ones, all the while fighting the urge to just grab it all up and run. Keep it for myself. Hide it under the caved-in bridge, the culvert beneath it. Compensation for the pain in my head, the bitter memory that wouldn’t ease. Growing in me like a festering boil. The morning Abbot Schmidt expelled me from Mount Calvary.

* * *

The day had started ordinary enough. I was coming out of daily Mass when Brother Melvin handed me a note: Abbot Schmidt requests that you come to the conference room next to the library immediately following breakfast.

I gulped down a few bites of sausage and raced from the dining hall, my hopes soaring higher than the towering oaks shading the walkway, all the while thinking that maybe the abbot had changed his mind. For months I’d begged him to bend the monastery’s foolish rule that held a seminary student must be in his third year of study before he could serve as altar boy, putting me near twenty-one before I could serve again. I’d been altar boy to Father Noggler back in Whitefield since I was fourteen, clear through high school. I knew the entire Latin Mass by heart, including the priest’s responses, which I believed qualified me ahead of schedule.

My feet glided across the threshold and into the conference room, but skidded to a halt at the foot of a long, dark table. A council of brown-robed monks with frozen stares sat along both sides. At the head, in a high-backed chair padded in red, sat the abbot, his lips pressed thin, spectacles at the edge of his nose.

My heart stopped as I spotted the stack of pink letters that lay in front of him. And next to them, a white envelope. And next to it, the familiar Mount Calvary’s Rule Book.

Abbot Schmidt cleared his throat. “You may remain standing, Bruno, while I read to you.” His long, thin fingers lifted the rule book, the red ribbon marking the page. “The rule: During the first and second years, a seminary student may receive uncensored correspondence from any member of his family once a week. Correspondence from non-family members is forbidden. If such correspondence is received, it is to be turned over to the monk in charge of the mailroom immediately, without fear of penalty.”

The abbot’s hand closed around the stack of pink envelopes and shook them. “I do not recognize the name Agnes Kinderschied to be among your family.”

I gave the table a good slap. “She’s nothing to me. Nothing!”

The monks sat motionless.

“If she’s nothing to you, as you insist, why do you save her letters under your mattress? You have been deceitful. You have broken, with each of these letters, a rule of the rule book. Furthermore, you have broken another rule by your deceit.” The abbot laid the pink envelopes aside.

He picked up the white envelope and read again from the book. “The rule: ‘Mount Calvary Monastery will not accept a family’s only son without the blessing of both parents. You have withheld from me your mother’s notification of your father’s imminent death, and her request that you return home to take his place as head of the household. Even if, as you say, Miss Kinderschied is nothing to you, your family is something.”

I gave the table another swat, mindful of my rising voice. “It’s not my fault she wrote those letters. I told her to stop.” I skimmed the faces of the brown-robed stones, hoping to find a pair of merciful eyes in one of them, ready to take up my side. Not a hair moved. Not a stitch or a breath. “And it’s not my fault Pa’s dying.” My words turned whiny—sissified, as Pa would say. “I don’t want to go back to the farm. I want to amount to something.”

“Perhaps you’re more suited for the secular world. Perhaps that’s where the Lord wants you.”

At least his voice had lost some of its bite. “I’ll direct Brother Melvin to furnish you a sack for travel. He’ll drive you to the train in the morning.”

* * *

Down in the cellar, the lantern’s light flickered to dim. On shaky knees, I slipped Ma’s money atop mine, then the sisters’, sweat pouring off me like a jug as I worked the money straight in the case, gauging so as to level the rows and stacks, fitting the coins just right.

The abbot’s words nagged at me: “Your mother’s notification of your father’s imminent death, and her request that you return to the home to take his place as head of the household.”

Well, that didn’t come free.

I latched the suitcase, tucked it under my arm, and climbed out of the cellar.

Chapter Three

* * *

Whitefield, Texas
June 8, 1928

Dear Bruno:

I’m receiving your letters on a weekly basis. My sisters tease me because I practically meet the mail wagon halfway to town. I’m always so gratified by what you write, each of your letters a beautiful sermon in itself. I cling to your every word and try to live by them. You’ll make a wonderful priest.

I’m still working on the sin of pride, as it relates to some of my many weaknesses. As you know, one weakness is sewing more pretty clothes for myself than I really need. The other one, my swollen head when someone compliments me on my artistic handwriting. At your suggestion, I’ve almost completely gotten rid of my useless swirls and curlicues so as not to call notice to myself. You are right. Satan lurks in the most beautiful disguises.

I’ll write again soon.

As ever,
Agnes

* * *

One week after I climbed out of the cellar, I put on my suit—a black, prickly remnant from my seminary days—dusted off my good shoes, oiled my hair flat around a clean part, and headed for the Kinderschied place.

As I knocked on the front door, my heart kicked up like a scared cricket. When no one answered, I cupped my hand to my eyes and peered through the screen, down the long wide hallway. Not a sight or sound of life around.

Over at the porch railing, I looked south toward the sprawling pastureland, past the barn, the shed for farm machinery, out to the spread of even black furrows and green fields. Horses and cattle grazing. A tractor chugging along in a cloud of dust. Off to the right, I spotted the women in the vegetable garden. Hoeing and gathering, it looked to me.

My eyes went back to the pastureland, recalling the summer day a few years back when I worked here with the threshing crew. How Augustus Kinderschied insisted we take our noon meal in his kitchen—unlike most farmers who fed their crews right out in the fields.

I’d never heard such a noisy kitchen! The hustle and bustle around our tables, what with all seven daughters fussing over us, setting out our plates and drinks, bringing us seconds. And Rosie, their ma, manning the stove, clanging the pots, and barking out orders in a laughing, good-natured sort of way.

Right off, I saw that Agnes stood out against her sisters. Where they were stout, dull-haired, and plain in their dress, she was slender, honey-haired, and wore bright colors. I’d seen her in class, but never paid her any mind until that day in the kitchen when she slipped a piece of pie onto my plate.

“I’ve seen you around,” I said to her. “School and communion. But I never knew which Kinderschied bunch you belonged to.”

“I’ve seen you, too.” She pinked up, flushing out a crop of freckles across her cheeks. “Seems the nuns always pick you for special school chores, Like raising the flag, or pounding erasers, or leading the prayer at Assembly.”

I wolfed down a bite of the pie. “Peach is my favorite. Only pie a woman should make, my way of thinking. You make it?”

Her eyes connected with mine, frozen-like, as if my question stumped her. Finally, she managed a bashful yes.

Just as I was trying to figure out some way to keep her standing there talking, the field hand next to me said, “Well, little lady, the rest of us gonna get some of that pie?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Her hand, the one holding the pie server, slapped at her forehead. “I forgot all about you!” Her blush deepened. “Honestly, sometimes I don’t know where my mind goes off to.” She worked her way around the other men, flustered, slipping pie on to their plates, throwing me a nervous glance before she moved on to another table.

The next time I paid her any mind was when school took up that following September. The morning she came to Father’s Noggler’s communion rail wearing lipstick, I happened to be the altar boy who held the paten to her chin. When I saw that bright red painted mouth, I wasted no time. At lunch hour, as she sat with her classmates on the back steps of the school and took her sandwich from her pail, I chipped a small stone at her feet. She flashed me a tight smile and dropped the stone in her pocket.

I walked up the steps and proposed to her what I had in mind. From that day forward, after a hurried lunch in our separate places, we met on the church steps where she listened to my catechism recitation for the afternoon’s class. Days stretched into weeks, and soon she seemed to lose some of her bashfulness.

“How many capital sins are there? Name them.” She sat on the steps, tracing her finger across the catechism in her lap, a blessed palm marking the page.

“There’re seven capital sins.” I stood on the sidewalk facing her. “Number one, pride. Forbidden under the first commandment. Thinking of ourselves as more important than we are. Number two, covetousness. Forbidden under the tenth commandment. Preoccupation with worldly goods.” As I recited, I pounded my fist against my palm.

Soon, her chin was keeping rhythm with my answers, as if she was saying them along with me under her breath.

The sin of lust was coming up next, and I wondered how best to get around it.

She had pulled at her skirt and tucked it tight around her legs. “Can we go back to the sin of pride for a minute?” she asked. “I mean, how good am I allowed to feel about myself? Is it okay for me to display my Excellence in Handwriting Award in a place of prominence on my dresser?”

“Long as you don’t get a big head over it. Keep in mind who it came from. You think too highly about that award, it’s a sin. What do you, by yourself, have to be proud of? Nothing. Take your pretty purple blouse there. It all comes from God. Some from dumb animals, like your nice shoes there.”

She looked puzzled, as if maybe my answer was too complicated for her.

“One thing to avoid,” I went on, shaking my finger at her, “is taking too much notice of our bodies. We get all wrapped up in them, we’re just one step away from lust.” I balanced back on my heels and locked my arms across my chest. “Like that lipstick you got on there. Sin of vanity. Preoccupation with your looks. One of Mary Magdalene’s weapons.”

She gasped; her finger flew to her mouth and plowed back and forth across her lips.

Right then I changed the subject. “I haven’t told anyone about this yet. Where I’m going after graduation come spring. You’re the first to know. The Lord’s called me to be a priest. I’ve felt it as far back as I can remember.”

Her jaw dropped. “Does that mean you’ll be forgiving sins? Lordy! I hope you never have to hear my confession.” All at once that smeared mouth of hers ran off like an open water spout. “Honestly, Bruno, I have so many sins I can’t count them. Sometimes, I’m not even sure what they are, exactly.” She pushed at her hair, her eyes flitting everywhere but at me. “I just feel like the Lord is good and mad at me most of the time. Some days it seems like the whole sky’s about to fall down around me.” She turned loose of the catechism to shape a cloud over her head. “Honestly, if just once I could feel….”

“Well, time to go.” I stopped her foolish gibberish. “Class bell be ringing directly.” Then I did something that wasn’t in my nature. I reached down and took her hand, to help her to her feet. And there, at the end of the hour of the Angeles, we stood face-to-face, the catechism suspended somewhere between us.

Her leaf-green eyes fixed on mine, startled-like, sending a fire shooting up my back. My hand still held hers, each finger pounding its own life. My eyes had nowhere to go but into hers. The air hung fragrant between us, flushed with the bloom of honeysuckle and the sweet smell that flowed white from the broken milkweed beneath our feet.

“Write—” my breath came short. “Write to me.”

* * *

Two years later, I stood there on the Kinderschied porch, waiting for Agnes to come in from the garden. At the bang of a door somewhere around the back, I knocked again, cupped my mouth and yelled through the screen, “Anybody home?”

The sound of feet came tap-tapping down the hall. Then Agnes’s high-pitched voice, “Well, for crying out loud! Bruno Meissen! What on God’s green earth are you doing here?”

“I’ve come calling.” I grinned. “Come to take you for a walk.”

“You’re the last person on earth I expected to see standing at my front door! Why, just a few days ago I sent a letter to you at Mount Calvary!” She flitted around inside the screen like a confused moth, I guess too surprised to ask me in. Then she ducked behind the bare coat tree, removed her garden apron, and used it to wipe off her lipstick. Finally, after pinching her cheeks, she pushed open the screen door, and fell in step beside me.

The sun hung like a pearl, timid behind a thin veil of haze, the only sounds the drone of the distant tractor and our feet gliding across the smooth lawn laid out for croquet. I side-stepped a wicket and kicked a wooden ball out of my path. “Someone didn’t pick up after themselves when they finished their game,” I pointed out.

“Oh, Bruno, we rarely put it away. Someone’s nearly always in the mood for a game.”

I shook my head at such laxness, snapped off a small twig as we passed under a cottonwood tree, whittled it with my teeth. “I come home to bury Pa.”

“I just heard yesterday at church. I’m really sorry. I didn’t think the abbot would let you come home for the funeral.” She gnawed at the red skin of her thumb where there clung only half a fingernail.

“I ain’t going back,” I said.

She looked at me in that startled way of hers.

“The Lord changed His mind about where He wants me.”

“He change His mind or you change yours?” Her mouth slid into a teasing grin.

She rankled me, needling that way about something that wasn’t funny. I didn’t answer, just veered off down toward the creek, cut my heels into the ground till I reached the water’s edge.

Her footsteps followed right behind.

I skipped a rock across the water, then another. “Agnes, you remember that catechism question?” I turned and faced her.

“Which one?” She stepped back, keeping just inside the shade of a scrub.

“About Catholic marriage.”

That same old blush hit her cheeks.

I lifted the twig from my mouth and shook it at her. “It went something like, What is necessary to receive the sacrament of matrimony worthily?”

“At the moment, Bruno, I don’t recall.” She eased herself back against the trunk.

“Well, the answer went: To receive the sacrament of matrimony worthily, it is necessary to be in the state of grace, to know the duties of married life, and to obey the marriage laws of the Catholic Church.” I flicked the twig off with my middle finger and came to stand just inches from her. My heart thumped, considering the big step I was about to take. “Agnes, are you in the state of grace?” I gave her my friendliest smile.

Her brows lifted, her eyes widened round as silver dollars. “Oh, Bruno! I believe I’m as close to it as I ever have been.” She straightened away from the tree. “Yes, Bruno, I do believe myself to be in the state of sanctifying grace.”

Two weeks later, I opened the suitcase wide enough to buy a white-gold wedding band.

Chapter Four

* * *

Certificate of Holy Matrimony

It is certified hereby that in the year 1929 AD, on the 15^th day of April, the Reverend Francis Noggler of Holy Ghost Catholic Church, Whitefield, Texas, did join together in solemn rite, the undersigned:

Agnes Irene Kinderschied
and
Bruno Thomas Meissen
In the holy bonds of matrimony:
Of the State of Texas.

Witness my hand and seal the day and year last written
Reverend Francis Noggler
April 15, 1929

Witness: Bertha Kinderschied Witness: Emil Schoeck

* * *

On a cloudless April morning, at an eight a.m. Mass, I took Agnes as my wife, after which we settled into a small two-room house just down the road from Ma. And for the next few months, we stumbled around in a clumsy interpretation of our wedding vows.

In spite of the fact that the Great Depression was sweeping across the country, stripping people of their livelihoods, I managed to find enough odd jobs to bring home a paycheck. Agnes’s pa, who continued to fare well, had plenty of hay baling, threshing, and cotton-picking for anyone willing to work.

And there was Mr. Fisher. Even though I was clear right off that I had no intention of being his handyman, he made me a deal that Ma could stay on his place if I’d do some work for him. Plus, he’d pay me.

Not that earning a wage was a direct necessity for me, what with the suitcase well-hidden under the lower shelf of my cellar. But the contents therein did not change my basic belief that hard work was a sacred obligation, the very soul of a man. The way I saw it, unemployment was an excuse—Satan’s tool—turning men into weaklings who worshipped the false gods of government and breadlines. Besides, working furnished me a little extra to pass along to Ma from time to time, without disturbing the contents of what lay in the suitcase.

I decided not to tell Agnes about the money. She already had a troubled mind about our newly-forged contract of matrimony.

At Thanksgiving, the first big family festivity to follow our wedding, she and I gathered at Ma’s for a noonday hen, then in the evening at Agnes’s folks’ for a turkey. Both places, it seemed to me, there were stolen sideway glances to Agnes’s waistline, looking for the soft swell in her skirt that might announce her in a family way.

It was a shameful embarrassment that I had on my hands a bride who refused me in our marriage bed. At first I was shocked, then angry, but kept myself as loving as possible, while showing her the written proof in the Bible in Ephesians: “Therefore as the church is subject to Christ: so also let the wives be to their husbands in all things.”

The passage seemed to roll off Agnes like the morning dew rolls off a fence post. Her stubborn determination to remain closed to me as a whole wife took up more and more of my thoughts till it was all I had on my mind.

I considered an outright demand that she stop her foolishness and open her legs to me. But she was the fragile type, thin-skinned, a damsel fly clinging to a leaf in the wind. Let a strong gust come along, and it’d knock her right off her bearings. Only God knew where she’d land.

Besides, she was a virtuous woman, obedient in all other ways. If I directed her to call on a parishioner who avoided the rail at Holy Communion, she did it. But not without teasing me first about having eyes in the back of my head to know so much of what went on at Sunday Mass.

Truth is, I spent very little time in the pew with her during Mass, ushering people in as they arrived, then again at communion, and passing the basket for the first and second collections. Plus, I filled in as altar boy when Father Noggler was short one.

It seemed he began calling on me for every parish need. I was honored to be of service to him, but surprised, too, when he endorsed me to head up the Men’s Holy Name Society as president. I was surprised even more to find myself sitting on his select Financial Planning Committee, among a handful of bearded and balding church elders.

Father and I spent so much time together, I finally felt free to take up with him the matter of Agnes’s and my unconsummated marriage. He took a very quick stand on the subject, insisting that I bring her to the rectory as soon as possible.

* * *

In his front room, Agnes sat beside me on a wooden bench, nibbling her fingernails like a goat nibbles grass. Father didn’t waste any time putting her at ease with small talk. “Agnes,” he led right off, “Bruno tells me that you refuse to honor your conjugal obligation to him as his wife. You are violating the primary purpose of marriage, which is reproduction. The pope forbids birth control, and you are practicing it. Knowing this about you, I cannot continue to give you Holy Communion unless you ask God’s forgiveness in confession and submit wholly to your husband.”

She let out a gasp.

“Being denied Communion is the next worse thing to a fallen-away Catholic,” I pointed out to her.

Her arm trembled against mine, her eyes bulging with the look of someone taking a bullet through their heart. “Bruno, you know I’d never purposely live in a state of disobedience to the pope.” She twisted her wedding band with her thumb. “I’d no idea I was sinning.” Smoothing her skirt down over her knees, she went on, “It’s so hard to explain….”

Father and I just watched and waited.

Her words came out strained, quivery. “Father, the catechism was drummed into me starting in the first grade. I memorized sins without even knowing what they were. Sins of the flesh, immodesty, impure touches. I grew up scared to death to look at my own body, much less someone else’s.”

She fixed me with a watery look. “I love Bruno. I want more than anything in the world to be his wife in every way. But … it’s hard. For all that was drilled in my head on what I shouldn’t do, no one ever explained to me what I should do. Nowhere in the catechism were the duties of married life described. Oh, there were those girls at school, the kind that wanted to tell things. But I … well, that fell under the sin of impure talk and listening. I never even undressed in front of my sisters.” Her teeth worked her thumbnail, and I waited for her to say something sensible. “It’s hard to change it all in your head overnight, just by walking down the aisle in a wedding dress.”

Father glared at her, unflinching.

“Besides, I can’t stop thinking of Bruno as a priest. It’s the only thing he ever really talked to me about when we were in school. The idea of—he’s always been so much holier than me, holier than anybody I’ve ever known, except of course you, Father.”

She laid her hand on mine, her fingers hopping with nerves. “Bruno, the way you have us kneel beside the bed and pray before you—before you start kissing on me, why, it makes me feel like we’re in church, right under God’s very eyes.”

About then a cuckoo popped out of its clock. Father glanced at his watch. I’d hoped he’d have more to say to her by now, but he seemed disposed to let her words run out.

The pale hairs on her arms were standing straight up. Her hand went over her heart. “I guess I need to go to confession.”

Father pulled a purple stole from inside his sleeve, draped it around his neck, and motioned me to the front porch.

* * *

On Christmas Eve, I stood at the kitchen door, watching Agnes. I’d sneaked in through the back, cleaned myself up, and put on my church trousers and white shirt. Part of me wanted to slip up behind her, plant a kiss on her neck. But the very sight of her held me in place. The turn of her hips as she moved in the lantern’s light, her dainty hands kneading and shaping a mound of dough, the smell of yeast and cinnamon almost as sweet as her kiss.

She wore her Christmas dress, a rustling green she made especially for Midnight Mass, an apron over it. Her hair was a web of coils and bobby pins. As she worked, she swayed, a graceful dancer, from side to side. A trace of rouge colored her cheeks, vexing me some, but I pushed it aside, happy in the Christmas spirit that had found its way to our marriage bed, happy in my love for Agnes.

She shook the flour from her hands and wiped them on a dish towel slung over her shoulder. I stepped close to make out the words growing along the hem. On Thursday We Sew. For all her interest in needlework, she never seemed to use the right towel on the right day. I lifted it from her shoulder. “It ain’t Thursday.”

Her pencil-straight legs almost caved in. She whipped around so fast that she crashed against my chest, against the bulky package I held in my arm.

“It ain’t Thursday.” I grinned, flirty-like, holding up the towel. “Remember? Christmas falls on Wednesday, and this is Christmas Eve, so it must be Tuesday.”

“For crying out loud, Bruno Meissen, you scared me half out of my wits.” Her wide eyes melted into a good-natured smile as she took the towel from me.

“A little something I found for you at Hennigan’s.” I pushed the package at her.

“Oh, Bruno, you shouldn’t have. I haven’t a thing for you.” Her voice trailed into her list of worries. “Everyone struggling so. Some new brides don’t even have rings.” She held hers up, prideful. “Dough and all.” She laughed.

“I don’t want nothing else from you, Aggie. I got what I want.”

She patted at her bobby-pins. “Bruno Meissen, I intended to have these out before you got home. You caught me looking like a scarecrow.”

Tilting her face up to mine, I pulled her close. “You’re beautiful, Aggie.” Our mouths met in a wet kiss, both of us trying to hold on to the bundle. She drew back sooner than I wanted, patting around her bobby pins again.

“Open it.” I slid the bundle to the table, pulled two chairs facing so that our knees touched.

She worked slow, unknotting the red yarn, draping it at the edge of her lap. Next, she removed the brown paper, a layer at a time, careful not to rip it. “Looks like all you bought is paper,” she teased, then turned serious. “These times, it just seems so wasteful, don’t you think?”

“Some people, Aggie, they’re just plain ignorant. They’ve always wrapped with too much at that store, and they always will.”

In a blink of my eye, she turned playful, snatched up the red yarn, and slung it across my head so that it caught on my ear. “Mistletoe!” she said, her bottom lip quivering with a come-hither look. Then she did something completely out of character. She leaned toward me, across the half-opened package, lifted the yarn from my ear, looped it gently around the back of my neck and drew me to her. Her body moved in a new way, sighing and squirming, sinking into my arms as she gave me a passionate, yielding kiss.

But as I began to stroke her breasts, she did what was more in her nature to do. She drew quickly away as if hit by a furnace blast and returned to the business of unwrapping the present, her eyes down-turned and sheepish.

My mouth pinched with a grin. My gaze traced her fingers until finally the gift emerged—a white steepled church, coated in shimmering snow.

She balanced it on her lap and looked at me, her face still flushed. “It’s the most beautiful present I ever got.” Raising it even with her eyes, she peered through its little arched windows and door. “Oh, Bruno, it’s even got the Christ Child in it!”

“Right where He belongs. Trouble with Jews today. Protestants too. Don’t have the true God in their churches.” I took the church from her. “Winds up, too.”

“Bruno, we’re not any better than anybody else just because we’re Catholic. Besides, God might just be happier not always all cooped up inside a church like that.” She watched me turn the key, then went back to patting her bobby pins. “I don’t know why I said that. What do I know, after all?” Her fingers fluttered to a button on her dress. “I tell you, sometimes my thoughts, I honestly don’t know where they come from. Just ignore my rattling.”

I’d already made up my mind to do just that. I finished turning the key. “Not too tight, now. Three-and-a-half turns is all. Break it, you get it too tight.”

“Silent Night” tinkled out of the little windows, melodious as an angel’s wand on a fine crystal harp.

“That’s my favorite song of all time. All time.” Her words bounced off her lips. “They can keep their ‘Stardust’ and ‘April Showers,’ for all that matters. ‘Silent Night’ will always be my favorite.” She wadded her hands into a tight fist and plunked them in her lap.

“Further down the road, we get electricity, there’s a place in the side there, put a Christmas light. Showed it on display at Hennigans.”

We sat there in the glory of the little church, like two proud parents watching their new offspring. When the very last note had played out, Agnes wound it up again. “One, two, three—”

“—and one-half,” I finished for her. We sat some more, in the trance of our first Christmas, me feeding off her joy, my eyes lapping her lips mouthing the tune coming out of the music box.

* * *

Almost nine months to the day, our first child was born. Desdamona Ann, Desty for short. As soon as Doc Fleischer had declared Agnes in a family way, I went to the First State Bank where I’d established an account with the contents of the suitcase, and took out enough money to buy a house—a white, wood-sided, two-story structure with a green-shingled roof and electricity, indoor plumbing, and a telephone pole, plus an assortment of pigs, goats, chickens, and a cow.

To my mind, every good Catholic home needed an altar, a place for the family to gather for prayer. And so I undertook to build one, using a solid wood door, supported at each corner with a rough cedar four-by-four post, which I set up in the center of the dining room, where Agnes stated she hoped one day to have a nice new table with cushioned chairs.

I gave her my word that day would come, then coaxed from her a plain white dresser scarf and the loan of her Christmas Church, which I placed in the center of the scarf, which I ran length-wise down the center of the altar and flanked with a pair of candles.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

PART I

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four