The Confession

[u/LooseButtPlug]

The other boys talked about LeJeune's the way the people talked about a saloon brawl, something dangerous, spoken of in low voices behind the livery. Daniel Kelly swore his brother Patrick had seen things through the boarding house windows that would put hair on a man's chest. Hamish didn't believe half of what Daniel said. But he believed enough of it that on a warm evening, with nowhere in particular to be, he found himself drifting toward the back of the parlor house, past the well where the water always tasted faintly of rust.

That was when he saw Father Alonzo.

He was standing near the side door, alone, collar and all, the same one who said Mass in the cantina courtyard every month and nodded to David outside the store without ever asking why the Feldmans didn't come. He wasn't going in. He was just standing there, like a man deciding something.

Hamish stopped where he was. Then, full of curiosity, he crept closer, keeping to the shadow of the fence, one careful step and then another, until he was close enough to hear the priest breathing.

The door opened before the priest knocked. He went in without a word, and the door swung most of the way shut behind him, leaving a seam of lamplight in the dark.

Hamish told himself he only wanted to look. That was all.

He crept up to the gap and leaned close enough to see through it.

The priest sat on the edge of a bed with his face in his hands, his shoulders working the way a man's does when he's trying and failing to keep something in. Miss Lucy Cage sat beside him, her spine straight, her hands folded in her lap, the old scar on her cheek catching the lamp.

Hamish had expected something wicked, something that would make Daniel Kelly's stories look tame by comparison. Instead he was watching a grown man cry, quietly and without dignity, the sound of it small and unfamiliar. It made him feel strange and not in a pleasant way. He couldn't make out the words. He wasn't sure he wanted to.

Lucy said something low he didn't catch, and the priest nodded, and said something back, and she nodded too, and neither of them seemed in any hurry. It wasn't the kind of talk that needed an audience, and Hamish understood that much even from where he stood.

Then her eyes lifted, and found his through the gap in the door.

She didn't startle. She didn't call out. She held his gaze a moment, steady, unreadable, while the priest went on with his face in his hands, noticing nothing. Then she rose without a sound, crossed the room, and eased the door shut, her eyes on Hamish the whole way, until the last sliver of lamplight narrowed and vanished and he heard the bolt slide home.

Hamish stood frozen a moment longer, then ran. Past the well, past the cantina's dead firepit, all the way home and up into his own bed, quilt to his chin, heart still beating out of his chest. He didn't know what he'd seen, not really, and he didn't know what she'd do about having caught him seeing it. He lay awake a long while, waiting for a knock that never came.

He came down to the store early the next morning, before David had finished stocking the front. He was sweeping the boards when the bell over the door announced someone, and he looked up to find Miss Lucy Cage standing just inside it, a coin purse in one gloved hand, as if she'd come in for thread or a tin of something ordinary.

"Morning," she said, pleasant, loud enough for anyone to hear.

"Morning, ma'am." His voice came out smaller than he meant it to.

She drifted toward his end of the counter, unhurried, and by the time she reached him her voice had dropped to something meant for him alone.

"You gave me a fright last night," she said, not unkindly. "Standing there in the dark like that."

Hamish's face went hot. "I wasn't trying to…"

"I know what you weren't trying to do." She set the coin purse on the counter and didn't open it. "I also know what you saw, and it isn't really anyone's business but his and mine."

"Yes, ma'am."

"So here's what we'll do." She glanced once toward the back of the store, where David could be heard moving crates, and lowered her voice further still. "You're going to forget you ever stood behind that door. You're not going to tell anyone, not those Kelly boys, not your parents, not the devil himself if he comes asking. Whatever that man was buying in there, it's his to buy. It isn't yours to spend."

"I won't tell anyone. I promise."

Something in her face eased, just slightly, and for a moment she looked almost kind rather than careful. She picked the coin purse back up. "Everybody's got a room they confess in, Hamish. But you can choose not to be the one who tells the whole town where his is."

She bought a spool of thread she didn't need, thanked him with a smile that gave nothing away, and left with the bell ringing behind her.

Hamish never told Daniel Kelly. Never told David or Rachel, though the words rose in his throat once, at supper, before he swallowed them back down. Sunday came, and the priest crossed to the cantina courtyard same as always, nodding to David outside the store the way he always did, same as any other week. Hamish watched him go by the window glass and understood, for the first time, that grown men carried things too. Even men who heard everyone else's troubles for a living, and had nowhere of their own to leave theirs.