Free Wages of Sin by Penelope Williamson Page A

don't commit sins,” he said. “Even the sin of murder. But no one at this rectory would ever have hurt Father Pat. We loved him.”
    Rourke said nothing.
    Paulie pressed his lips so tightly together that a muscle spasmed in his cheek. “I'm your brother,” he said.
    “Tell me where you were last night.”
    The taut silence stretched on between them, until it was filled with the chatter of the mockingbirds and, out on the street, the roar of a car with a hole in its muffler.
    “I can't,” his brother finally said, so softly Rourke barely heard him.
    “I'll find it out. Eventually.”
    “God,” Paulie said with a torn laugh. “Do you have any idea what you look like when you smile like that? You'd
scare
the truth out of a body if there was any truth to be had.”
    “I've always been able to scare you, Paulie. After a while it got to where it wasn't even fun anymore.”
    “And you always have to win. Every game we ever played, you always won.”
    Rourke searched his brother's face a moment longer and then he looked away, and the other man breathed a sigh as if he'd been given a reprieve. They sat together for a small while in silence, both lost in memories that were oddly comforting in spite of all their pain, perhaps because they were shared.
    “Remember,” Paulie finally said, “how our daddy used to always say, ‘This is such a sad and sinful world’?”
    “Yeah. And he sure enough contributed his share of both sadness and sin.”
    “Did…” The word caught in his throat as if he'd swallowed a large bubble of air. “Did you hate him?”
    “Sometimes.”
    Rourke waited for the rest of it, waited for his brother to ask if he forgave their father. And their mother. Paulie had never even been able to speak aloud about their mother and what her leaving had done to them.
    Rourke wasn't sure what his answer would be and it didn't matter anyway, because his brother didn't ask.
    Father Paul Rourke watched his brother walk away with that hard, confident way of his. It had never struck him before this moment how much Day had grown up to be the image of their daddy. The sun-tipped hair, the startling dark blue eyes, the wide mouth with its promise of cruelty. Tall and lean, but not thin, with a boxer's shoulders and a boxer's way of carrying himself, on the balls of his feet, as if spoiling for a fight.
    Always so sure of himself. Always so tough.
    Mike Rourke had tried to raise both his sons to be tough, and then he'd worked hard at showing them that no matter how tough they ever got their old man would always be tougher. The toughest Rourke of them all. He had made his point easily with Paulie, who had always felt powerless before his father. Day, though, just wouldn't stay down. No matter how hard or often he was hit, he kept getting up and coming back for more.
    Only two years separated them, but Paul Rourke had never understood his little brother, never known where Day got his snarling courage, although he'd always felt that one of life's great mysteries would be solved if he could. All those shared hours of their boyhood, they had fought and dreamed and sinned together, and he had never really
known
his brother.
    But then, how well can you ever really know someone? he wondered now. How much can you ever know of that place deep inside a man's guts where he lives? Certainly, Paulie thought, he had never really known himself.
    Above the door to the seminary that he had run away to as a boy were inscribed the words of Jesus Christ:
Anyone who does not take up his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
When he walked through that door he had thought he could lose all memory of where he had come from, and he had truly believed that all he had to do was take up the cross and joy would come. Only he had been wrong. He loved the Church, with all its holy mysteries and ceremonies, but he hadn't forgotten and the joy hadn't come, and he had hidden this shameful lack from himself and from the world like a sin