Free Wages of Sin by Penelope Williamson

used to know a woman who hooked in a hot pillow joint,” he said. “She had this philosophy that the good Lord got bored on the seventh day and that's why He created sin.”
    Paulie shook his head. “There wasn't any prostitute who said any such thing. I remember you trying out that blasphemous theory on Sister Mary Joseph in fourth grade. You got sent home, which was why you did it in the first place. There was some exhibition baseball game that day, out at City Park, and it spared you from having to suffer the consequences of playing hooky.”
    “Hey, now, I suffered. She must've whacked me a good half dozen times on my hand with her ruler and she had a swing Babe Ruth himself could admire.”
    Paulie smiled again, then the smile dissolved into a wincing twist of his mouth. “It was terrible, wasn't it? How Father Pat died. I can tell by your face.”
    “Yes.”
    Paulie's head fell back and he stared unseeing through the branches of the mimosa tree. White clouds tumbling across a sky the smoky blue of oyster shells. “God help me, Day. Why did I become a priest when I can't—”
    He cut himself off, pressing his lips together tightly in that way he'd always done whenever he was facing something distasteful, as if the taste of it was in his mouth. “I was jealous of him, of Father Pat, only not for any reasons you're thinking. It's possible he might have been a saint, a real saint, only I would never want such a burden for myself, because sainthood is an awful burden—don't you think it's not. And I didn't mind either that he was everybody's favorite priest. Even Father Frank's and the archbishop's, in spite of all the trouble he was always getting into for disobedience, but I didn't care about that because he was my favorite, too…”
    The tears were running freely down Paulie's face again, and Rourke couldn't help feeling a tinge of shame for his brother's sake. A legacy from their daddy, he supposed, who when they were boys had always laughed at them and called them sissies whenever they cried.
    “Only I think I hated him sometimes, Day,” Paulie was saying. “I was just so jealous of him. Jealous of his being so in love with God and with His world, and for always being so darn
certain.
Certain of what it meant to be a priest, of getting it right, when I can't even…”
    He clasped his hands together and his head fell forward in such a way that Rourke thought he was praying until he began to talk to the ground between his spread feet. “The first time I was called upon to administer the last rites, a ten-year-old boy had pointed a shotgun at his daddy's face and pulled the trigger. Someone had covered the man with a sheet and I lifted it to anoint his forehead with the holy oil and there was no forehead there to anoint. There was no head at all, and that was when I knew I was always going to make a lousy priest. I couldn't forgive that boy for doing that to his own flesh and blood, and I couldn't forgive the father for what he must have been doing to that boy, and I couldn't forgive God for allowing any of it to happen.”
    He looked up at Rourke again, and his soul's pain showed on his face. “A priest is supposed to be God's instrument of forgiveness, but I can't forgive, Day. I can't forgive.”
    Rourke wanted to say something to make it right, but there were no words. His brother carried a grief against himself for what had been done to them when they were kids. Rourke knew it, for he shared it. Only for Paulie the grief had driven him into a life of celibacy and obedience and prayer, a life that had welcomed him, perhaps, but not saved him. For Rourke, whenever the craziness took hold of him, he had gone looking for those sweet, seductive paths of self-destruction. And sometimes—most of the time—he found them.
    “Tell me what happened with you last night, Paulie.”
    His brother was holding himself stiff now, as if he feared that he would fly into pieces. “I'm not going to tell you that priests