Hymns for a Villain · Nowy Grzech

The church burned on a Tuesday. By Sunday we were singing in the ruins, because Father Aldous said God doesn’t need a roof, and nobody was brave enough to point out that the rest of us did.

Seven of us in the choir, before. Just me, after.

And one man in the last charred pew, hat in his lap, listening.

That first Sunday the ash was still warm in places. You could feel it through the soles of your good shoes, a low animal heat, as though St. Agatha’s had not finished dying and was only resting between breaths. The roof beams lay where they had fallen, black ribs across the nave. The stained glass had burst outward in the heat, and the children of Bethany Falls had been picking colored shards out of the grass all week, holding them up to the light, blue and blood and gold, until their mothers slapped them out of their hands and told them it was desecration.

Father Aldous stood where the altar had been, on a square of scorched stone, in a white surplice so clean it looked like a lie. Behind him the bell tower still stood, hollow, its bell cracked down the middle from the heat. The congregation sat on folding chairs brought up from the Legion hall. They had left the old pews where they were, the few that survived, because Father Aldous said a wound should be looked at.

I stood alone on the step where the choir loft had crumbled and sang the processional into the open October air, and my voice went up and up with nothing to catch it.

Seven of us, before. Dorothy Pike and the Lund sisters and old Mrs. Carrow, who had sung alto for forty years, and the two Haskell cousins, and me. After the fire, the Lund girls’ father took a job two counties over and moved them in a week. Mrs. Carrow’s heart began to trouble her. The Haskells simply stopped coming, and nobody asked why, which is how Bethany Falls handled most things. Dorothy Pike said she couldn’t bear to sing in a place that had been violated, and her father, Deacon Harlan Pike, who was also our fire marshal and owned the hardware store on Main, said that was a very fine and feminine sentiment.

So it was me. It had always been going to be me. I was twenty-five that autumn, and I had been singing in St. Agatha’s since I was seven years old, and I had never once in all those years been asked whether I wanted to.

The man in the last pew had not been there the first Sunday. He came the second.

I knew him the way everyone knew him, as a story before a face. Silas Crane, son of the drunk who had run the sawmill down by the river into the ground. Sent away as a boy after his mother died, to the church home that used to stand behind the rectory, back when St. Agatha’s still took in the county’s unwanted sons. Gone at sixteen. Army, people said, and then nobody knew. And then, a little over a year ago, back again, a grown man with a truck and a toolbox and a way of standing very still, fixing up the dead mill with his own hands and speaking to no one.

He was thirty-five, I learned later. That first morning he only looked like weather. Tall and dark and deliberate, in a black coat too good for our town, his hair cut close, a scar pale through one eyebrow. He took the last surviving pew, the one nearest the broken doors, the wood still blistered, and he sat on it as if it were his. He set his hat in his lap. He did not bow his head when Father Aldous prayed.

He watched me.

Not the way the men of the parish watched women, sideways and ashamed, checking themselves against their wives. He watched me the way I imagined a starving man watched a lit window. Openly. Without apology. As if the hymn were a letter I had written only to him, and he was reading every line.

My voice wavered on the second verse. It had never wavered before.

Everyone knew what Silas Crane had done. Nobody could prove it.

The fire marshal called it faulty wiring. Deacon Pike stood on the steps of the town hall and said the words himself, an electrical fault in the undercroft, his big red hands folded over his belly, and then he said that the investigation was closed and the rebuilding would begin before winter, God willing, and that the parish would be taking up a special collection. The town called it the Crane boy finally getting even. For what, nobody said out loud. They said it the way you say a storm was coming, a thing that had been hanging in the sky for twenty years.

I called it nothing, because every Sunday he sat in the ash and looked at me, and every Sunday I sang anyway.

The town did not stop at calling it. Someone painted ARSONIST across the side of the mill in red house paint, letters as tall as a man. Pike’s Hardware stopped selling to him; I saw him turned away at the counter while Harlan Pike smiled and said the store reserved the right. Boys threw stones at his truck from the bridge. At the diner where I waited tables four mornings a week, Marla Dean refused to pour his coffee, and he sat at the counter anyway for twenty minutes with his cup empty and his hands flat on the Formica, and then he left a five-dollar bill under the saucer and walked out, and Marla put the five in the collection jar for the church.

I poured his coffee the next week. I did it before I could think about it. Marla looked at me as if I had spat on the counter.

“Thank you, June,” he said. It was the first time I had heard my name in his mouth. He said it slowly, like he was checking it for weight.

“It’s just coffee.”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”

The fourth Sunday he caught me by the broken gate after service. The congregation had dispersed down the hill in their good coats, casting looks back at the two of us like birds skittering off a wire. Father Aldous had gone to the rectory. My mother was waiting in the car with the engine running and her rosary wound through her fingers.

He did not come close. He stood on the other side of the gate, where the iron had warped in the heat into a shape like a hand half closed.

“You’re off-key in the second verse,” he said.

“You’re a murderer.”

“Nobody died.” His gaze dropped to my mouth, then lifted, unhurried. “I made sure the building was empty. I made sure you were at your mother’s. Ask yourself why a murderer would bother.”

I remembered that night whether I wanted to or not. My phone buzzing on the organ bench at half past eleven, a man’s voice I did not know saying Ruth Ashworth has had a fall, she’s asking for her daughter, and hanging up before I could ask who he was. The drive across town with my sheet music sliding off the seat. My mother opening the door in her robe, perfectly well, bewildered and then angry at being woken. And then from her porch, which looked over the whole valley, the glow. St. Agatha’s on its hill, lit from inside like a lantern, every window gold, and then every window gone.

On Tuesdays I practiced alone in the choir loft until midnight. Everyone knew that. Father Aldous gave me the key himself.

“That was you,” I said. “On the phone.”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

“You could have been seen. You could have been caught.”

“I was careful.”

“Why?” It came out of me too loud, and down the hill my mother’s head turned in the car. “Why would you care where I was?”

Silas Crane looked at me for a long moment through the bent bars of the gate, and I had the terrible, dizzy sense of being known, the way you know a room in the dark by its smell.

“Because it’s the only thing in that building I didn’t want to burn,” he said.

Then he put his hat on and walked down the hill, straight past my mother’s car, and did not look back.

My mother did not speak the whole drive. When we pulled up outside the diner, where I rented two rooms upstairs, she turned off the engine and sat with her hands at ten and two, and said, very quietly, “Father Aldous will want to see you,” and I understood that she had already telephoned him. She had been telephoning Father Aldous about me since I was fourteen years old.

The rectory had survived the fire untouched. It sat fifty yards downhill from the ruin, a square brick house with white shutters and a garden of late roses, and on Monday evening I stood in its front parlor with my coat still on while Father Aldous poured himself a glass of sherry and did not offer me one.

He was a handsome old man. People forget that the ones who hurt you are often handsome, or kind in the face, or soft spoken. His hair was silver and thick, his voice a warm baritone that had been soothing the grieving of Bethany Falls for thirty-one years. When I was a girl I had thought God must sound like him.

“Sit down, June.”

I sat. That was the first lie I told that night: my body telling him it still obeyed.

“Your mother is frightened for you,” he said. “I am frightened for you. That man is a vessel for something very old and very angry. He was angry as a boy, when this parish fed and clothed him, and he is angry now. You have a gift. It is a gift God lent to St. Agatha’s through you, and the devil knows it. Of course he would come for the gift.”

On the mantel, beside the brass crucifix, sat a ledger bound in oxblood leather. I knew that book. Every child in the parish knew that book. Father Aldous called it the Book of Mercies, and he wrote in it after confession, in a small neat hand, so that he might better pray for us. When I was fourteen he had opened it in front of my mother and read aloud that I had admitted to impure curiosity, which meant I had asked Kelly Haskell what kissing was like, and my mother had made me kneel on uncooked rice in the choir loft through the whole of an afternoon rehearsal while the others sang around me. I remember the rice more than the shame. The way it worked into the skin. The small white grains that stuck to my knees afterward like teeth.

When I was twenty I had been accepted to the conservatory in the city, a full year’s tuition to be paid from the money my grandmother left me. I told Father Aldous in confession because I was so happy I could not keep it inside, and because I believed, then, that joy was a thing you offered up. Within a week he had written to my mother about the kinds of girls who went to the city, and the kinds of men who waited for them there, and my mother, who held my grandmother’s money in trust, gave it to the roof fund of St. Agatha’s in my name. There was a small brass plaque in the vestibule that thanked me. It melted in the fire. I had gone to look.

“I’m not a child,” I said.

“No. You are a grown woman, which makes the choice more serious, not less.” He sipped the sherry. “We pour the new foundation on the twenty-sixth. The contractor is Harlan’s cousin; he has been very generous with his rates. By Christmas there will be a floor under us again, and by Easter walls. I want you to sing at the blessing of the foundation, June. I want the town to see that what that man tried to destroy is rising. And I want you to stop speaking to him.”

“He didn’t hurt anyone.”

Father Aldous set down his glass. He reached out and laid his hand on the oxblood book, lightly, the way you might lay a hand on the head of an obedient dog.

“You told me once,” he said gently, “that you dreamed about leaving. Driving and driving until no one knew your name. Do you remember? You were twenty-two. You said you sometimes wished your mother would die so that you could go.” He smiled with great sorrow. “I have never told Ruth that. I pray for you every day, that you will never need me to.”

I walked out into the dark with my hands shaking inside my pockets. I did not go home. I walked the long way, down River Road, past the dead orchards and the bridge where the boys threw their stones, until I came to the mill.

There was a light on in the upper window. The red paint on the siding had been scrubbed at and had only smeared, so that ARSONIST now read like something bleeding. The river ran loud and black beneath the old wheel. I stood in the yard and nearly turned around four times, and on the fifth the door opened, and he stood in it, backlit, in shirtsleeves, with a dish towel over his shoulder.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Silas said.

“You don’t get to say that. You’re the one who sits in my church.”

“It isn’t your church.” He stepped back to let me in. “But you should come inside before someone on the bridge sees you, because they’ll tell your priest, and he’ll write it down.”

The mill was not what I expected. I had imagined something feral, a man living in one room among the sawdust. Instead the ground floor had been gutted to the stone and made warm: a long table of reclaimed oak, a woodstove, shelves of books, and against the far wall, of all the impossible things, an old upright piano with its front panel off and its hammers exposed, half restored, the felts laid out in rows on a cloth.

“You play,” I said.

“I fix.” He poured me a glass of something amber without asking and set it at my elbow and then did not come near me again. He leaned against the stove with his arms folded, a whole room away, and it felt closer than the rectory ever had. “Why are you here, June?”

“I want to know why you burned it.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Don’t tell me what I want.” The words surprised me. They surprised him too; I saw something move behind his face, a hunger that was very nearly delight. “Everyone in my life has always told me what I want. My mother. Father Aldous. God, supposedly. I’m twenty-five years old and I’ve never been allowed to want anything that wasn’t handed to me first. So don’t you do it too.”

He was quiet a long time. The stove ticked. The river talked to itself under the floor.

“I’ll tell you,” he said at last. “But not tonight. If I tell you tonight you’ll go home and kneel down and try to pray it away, and you’ll hate me for making you try. You’re not ready to stop believing him.”

“Believing who?”

“Aldous.” He said the name without the Father, and it sounded naked, almost obscene. “You still flinch when you say his name. You looked at the door when you came in, like you were checking whether it could be locked from outside.”

I had. I hadn’t known I’d done it.

“I heard you,” he said, more softly, “the first summer I was back. They had the doors of St. Agatha’s propped open for the heat, and I was on the bridge, and you were practicing. Alone. Some hymn I used to know. And I stood on that bridge until it got dark. I came back every Tuesday after that. I know every sound your voice makes, June. I know where it’s tired and where it’s lying. I know that on the second verse of anything you sing for him you go flat, because that’s where you stop meaning it.” He looked at me steadily. “I’m not a good man. I’m not going to pretend to be one so you’ll like me. I’ve wanted you for a year and a half, and I’d have gone on wanting you from that bridge for the rest of my life if you’d never poured me that coffee.”

The glass was cold in my hand. I realized I was breathing as if I had been running.

“Ask me to leave you alone,” he said, “and I will. I’ll stop coming on Sundays. You’ll never see me again.”

I opened my mouth to ask. I swear I opened it.

What came out was, “Walk me to the road.”

He walked me to the road. He did not touch me. At the end of the lane he stopped, and I stopped, and for one long moment we stood in the dark with the whole cold sky over us and the space between our bodies humming like a struck bell. Then I turned and walked home.

I did ask myself, after. I asked on my knees, in the dark, in the only corner of St. Agatha’s that still had a floor. I went up the hill at two in the morning and knelt in the ash where the Lady Chapel had been and said, Tell me what to do, and for the first time in my life I did not hear an answer and was not sure I wanted one.

The answer came the next Sunday, when I sang Abide With Me, and my voice cracked on the high note. It had never cracked, not once in eighteen years. It broke on when other helpers fail and comforts flee, and the congregation shifted on their folding chairs, and Father Aldous turned from the scorched altar with his face full of patient disappointment.

And from the last pew, low and perfectly in tune, Silas Crane sang it with me, all the way to the end.

His voice was nothing like mine. It was rough at the bottom, a voice that had not been used for singing in a very long time, and it carried the melody the way you carry something that belongs to the dead: carefully, with both hands. The whole town turned to stare at him. He did not look at any of them. He looked at me, and sang, and I found the note again because he was holding it, and we finished the last verse together over the blackened beams, in life, in death, O Lord, abide with me, and when it was done the silence on that hill was so complete you could hear the ash settling.

Father Aldous prayed for his soul.

I stopped praying for mine.

I went to the mill that night without deciding to. My feet decided. The rain had come in off the ridge at dusk and I arrived soaked through, my hair plastered to my neck, and when he opened the door he took one look at my face and did not say I shouldn’t be there.

He gave me a dry flannel shirt of his and turned his back while I changed by the stove. I watched the muscles of his shoulders hold themselves still under his shirt, and I understood that it cost him something to keep them still, and I undid the last button slower than I needed to.

“Tell me,” I said.

He sat down across the oak table from me. He put his hands flat on it, the way he had on the Formica at the diner, as if he needed to feel something solid.

“You know there used to be a home,” he said. “Behind the rectory. The St. Agatha’s Home for Boys. Twelve beds. The county paid Aldous a stipend for each of us, and the parish fed us on what it collected, and we worked the grounds and served at Mass and were grateful. I was twelve when my mother died and my father couldn’t stand to look at me. Aldous was younger then. He had the same voice.” Silas’s jaw worked. “Harlan Pike was his deacon already. He did the discipline.”

“Discipline,” I said.

“There’s a room under the choir loft. There was. A storeroom off the undercroft, stone on three sides, an iron door with a bolt on the outside. Aldous called it the quiet room. If you were willful, you went to the quiet room to reflect. No light. Bread in the morning. A bucket. A day, if you were lucky. Three, if Pike was in a mood.” He was not looking at me now. He was looking at the piano across the room, at its bare hammers. “There was a boy named Tommy Vane. Eleven. Small for it. He had asthma, bad, and he wheezed at night, and it kept the others up, so Pike called it willfulness. February. They put him in the quiet room on a Friday night with no blanket.”

The stove hissed where rain found its way down the flue.

“I tried to get him out. I got as far as the undercroft with a crowbar from the tool shed before Pike caught me, and for that they put me in the coal cellar next door. There was a wall between us. Old stone. You could hear through it if you put your mouth close. Tommy was frightened of the dark, and he couldn’t breathe right, and I didn’t know what to do. So I sang to him.” Silas’s voice didn’t change at all, which was the worst thing about it. “Abide With Me. It was the only hymn we both knew every word to. I sang it over and over, all night. He sang with me for a while. Then he just listened. Then I couldn’t hear him breathing anymore, and I kept singing, because I thought if I stopped it would be true.”

I had my hand over my mouth. I don’t remember putting it there.

“In the morning they let me out and told me Tommy had been fetched by a family in Ohio. There was no family in Ohio. The register says Thomas Vane absconded. Ran away. A week later the floor of the quiet room was new concrete, and Pike had lime on his boots.” He finally looked at me. “I told a county social worker when I was thirteen. She told Aldous. Aldous told her I was a disturbed boy who set fires. He’d found matches in my bunk; he put them there himself. I went to the quiet room for four days. When I got out I did set a fire, June. A woodshed. I was fourteen and I wanted something in that place to burn. So now there’s a record, and a record makes a man a liar forever.”

“You went to the police,” I said. “Later. As a grown man.”

“State police, fourteen months ago. A ward with no family, no missing person report, a register in the priest’s handwriting that says he ran away, and a man with a juvenile arson charge claiming a beloved pastor buried a child. They were polite. They wrote it down.” His mouth twisted. “Everyone in this town writes things down.”

“So you burned the church.”

“I burned the floor. The fire was set in the undercroft, under the loft. I know how old wiring fails; that’s my trade. The loft was meant to come down through the floor of the quiet room. Any honest investigator digs through a collapse like that. They’d have found him.” He spread his hands on the table. “The honest investigator was Harlan Pike. He fenced it off in a day. And on the twenty-sixth they pour a foundation over all of it, and Tommy Vane is under a church forever, and the parish sings over his head every Sunday for another hundred years.”

I got up. I walked around the table. My legs did not feel like mine. I thought of every Tuesday night alone in that loft, singing to God with my whole chest, and the small bones under the stone beneath my feet, listening.

“I sang over him,” I said. “For eighteen years. I stood right on top of him and sang.”

“You didn’t know.”

“Aldous knew. He gave me the key. He liked it, I think.” My voice broke, not on a note this time, on something older. “He liked hearing me up there.”

Silas stood. He was very careful. He came around the table as if I were an animal that might bolt, and stopped an arm’s length from me, and I saw that his hands were shaking. The man who had burned a church to the ground had shaking hands.

“June,” he said. “I can go outside. I can sit in the truck until you want to go home and drive you there. You don’t owe me anything for telling you.”

“Stop it.” I took a step and closed the arm’s length myself. “Stop giving me the door. I know where the door is.” I put my palm flat against his chest and felt his heart going under it like something trying to get out. “My whole life, every single thing I was allowed to have was handed to me by someone who could take it back. I don’t want to be handed anything. I want to choose it. I’m choosing it.”

“Say what you’re choosing.” His voice had gone rough, down at the bottom where it had carried the hymn. “Out loud. I won’t read it off your face and get it wrong.”

“You,” I said. “I want you to take me upstairs.”

He made a sound I had never heard a man make, low and helpless, and then his hands were in my wet hair and his mouth was on mine.

I had been kissed before. Once, at nineteen, by a twenty-year-old from the church softball league behind the Legion hall, a dry nervous thing that I had confessed the next Saturday and knelt for. This was not that. This was a man who had wanted me across a burned church for a year and a half kissing me as if the wanting had been starving him. He kissed slow and then not slow. He tasted like woodsmoke and the rain. When I opened my mouth to him he groaned into it and pulled me against him so hard that my bare feet left the floor, and I wound my arms around his neck and let them.

He carried me up the narrow stairs to the loft where he slept, under the old beams, where the sound of the river came up through the boards and the rain drummed a foot above our heads. He set me down at the edge of the bed. He did not follow me down. He knelt on the floor in front of me instead, between my knees, and looked up.

“The moment you want to stop,” he said, “it stops. No reasons. That isn’t a door. That’s just true.”

“I know.” I touched his face, the scar through his eyebrow, the rough jaw. “I believe you.”

He unbuttoned his own flannel shirt off me one button at a time, the way I had done it by the stove, and I understood he had been watching after all. He took his time. He looked at each inch of skin before he touched it, and he touched it with his mouth first, my collarbone, the hollow of my throat where my voice lived, the curve of my breast, and when he closed his lips over my nipple I arched off the bed and heard myself make a sound that would have earned me a week of rice.

“There,” he murmured against me. “That one. I’ve wanted to hear that one.”

Then he did something that undid me. He slid his hands down my bare legs and lifted my knees, one and then the other, and pressed his mouth to each of them, soft, reverent, right where the grains had bitten when I was fourteen. I had told him about the rice that first night at the mill, in half a sentence, and he had not said a word. He had kept it.

“Nobody should ever have made you kneel,” he said against my skin.

I was crying and I did not care. I pulled him up by his shirt and dragged it over his head, and he was scarred there too, pale burns along his ribs and a long white line across his back that I didn’t ask about yet. I put my mouth on them. I wanted to learn his body the way he said he had learned my voice, every place it was tired, every place it lied.

When he moved lower and kissed the inside of my thigh, he stopped and looked up at me again, a question in his dark eyes, and I said, “Yes,” and then, because it felt like singing, “yes, please, Silas,” and he put his mouth on me.

I had not known. No one had told me a body could be a hymn. I had been taught that this part of me was a door to hell, and he knelt at it like it was an altar, patient and hungry, learning me with his tongue until my hands were fisted in his hair and my heels were digging into his back and the rain overhead sounded like applause. He listened to me the way he listened on Sundays. When I went flat he changed; when I found the note he held it, and held it, and held it, until I broke open under him with his name in my mouth and nothing at all between me and the dark.

He came up and held me while I shook. He was still half dressed. I could feel how hard he was against my hip, and he did nothing about it, only kissed my wet face and my hair.

“I want all of it,” I told him, when I could talk. “I want you inside me. I’m sure.”

He undressed the rest of the way. He reached into the drawer by the bed for a condom, and his hands were shaking again, and that made me laugh, a real laugh, and he laughed too, into my shoulder, helpless. Then he settled over me and braced himself on his forearms and looked down into my face.

“Look at me,” he said. “I want you to see who it is.”

I looked. He pushed into me slowly, so slowly, a stretching fullness that stole my breath, and he stopped at every sound I made to read it, and when I wrapped my legs around his hips and pulled him the rest of the way in he shut his eyes and said my name like the end of a prayer.

We moved together in the loft with the river underneath us. It was not gentle for long. I didn’t want gentle; I had had eighteen years of careful. I wanted to be wanted like a fire wants. I dug my nails into the burns on his back and he drove into me harder, deep and rolling, his mouth at my ear telling me how good I felt, how he had dreamed this on the bridge, how he would never, never have enough, and I believed every word because his body was saying it louder. When he reached between us and touched me in time with his thrusts I came again, clenching around him, and felt him lose his rhythm and follow me over, shuddering, his face buried in my neck and my name coming out of him ragged and low, over and over, the way you’d sing something to keep someone breathing.

Afterward he lay with his head on my breast and I stroked his cropped hair and listened to the rain.

“They’ll know,” I said. “Someone will have seen my car.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” I said, and was surprised to find that I meant it.

They knew by breakfast. Marla Dean took my apron off the hook and handed it to me folded and said she couldn’t have the kind of talk I’d bring. My mother came to the diner steps and did not come in. She stood on the sidewalk in her church coat and said, “Your car was at the mill all night,” and when I said yes, she crossed herself and walked away, and I watched her go with a grief so old it felt like a limb.

On Sunday, Father Aldous named me from the scorched altar. Not by name; he didn’t need to. He spoke of a daughter of this parish who had lain down with the man who burned the house of God, and he asked the congregation to pray for her, and every head on every folding chair turned to me where I stood on the choir step with my hymnal. Harlan Pike was smiling.

I closed the hymnal. I set it down on the ash. I walked down the burned aisle between the chairs, and in the last pew Silas rose and put on his hat and followed me out, and behind us nobody sang.

That night someone put a brick through every window on the ground floor of the mill. Wrapped around the last one, with a rubber band, was a page torn out of a Bible. Exodus. Thou shalt not suffer. Silas swept up the glass without a word, and I watched how carefully he did it, and I knew that if I let him he would go up that hill in the dark and finish what he had started, and this time someone would die.

So on Thursday, when Father Aldous drove to the diocese as he had every Thursday for thirty-one years, I let myself into the rectory with the key he’d given me for the altar flowers.

The Book of Mercies was not on the mantel. I found it in the study, locked in the bottom drawer of his desk, with eleven others beneath it, the same oxblood leather, going back three decades. I broke the drawer with a letter opener. My hands were perfectly steady. That frightened me more than anything.

I found myself first, because I couldn’t help it. J.A., age 14. Impure curiosity. Recommended correction to R.A. And later, J.A. confesses wish to attend conservatory. Pride. A danger to her soul and to the choir. Spoke with R.A. I found my mother too, in a book from when I was four: R.A. confesses she intends to leave her husband and take the child to her sister in Maine. Counseled obedience. She will stay. She had stayed. She had stayed and stayed and handed me to him, because he had taught her that staying was holiness.

Then I found the February, twenty-three years ago, and the entry in that neat small hand that I read four times standing up and once more sitting on the floor.

H.P. confesses that the boy Vane died in the quiet room through his neglect, and that he buried him beneath it at my instruction. Absolved. Penance: silence, and service to this parish for the rest of his life.

He had written it down. Of course he had written it down. It was how he owned people, even the ones who dug his graves.

I found the old register of the Home in a box in the closet, Thomas Vane, absconded, and put it in my bag with the book, and walked out the front door of the rectory past the roses, and did not look back.

Silas read the page at his oak table under the one lamp while I stood behind him. When he was done he put both hands over his face and his shoulders shook without any sound, and I held his head against my stomach and let him.

“You stole from a priest,” he said finally, muffled.

“I took back a confession.” I tilted his face up. “I photographed every page. I sent it to the investigator you talked to, Reyes, and to the newspaper in the city. It’s already gone. Whatever they do now, it’s gone.”

He stared at me as if I were a fire he had not set.

I pulled him up out of the chair by his shirt and led him up the stairs, and in the loft I put my hands on his chest and pushed, and he sat down on the edge of the bed and looked up at me.

“Last time I let you do everything,” I said. “Tonight I want to be the one who says what happens.”

His throat moved. I saw what it cost him; this was a man who had controlled every Tuesday, every phone call, every match. “Yes,” he said. “Whatever you want. Tell me.”

“Lie back. Keep your hands on the sheets unless I say.”

He lay back. He fisted his hands in the sheets. I undressed in front of him slowly, the way the rain had taught me, and watched his eyes go black and his chest rise, and I had never in my life felt so powerful, so holy, so entirely my own. I stripped him too. I kissed down his body taking my time, the burns, the long white line on his back when I made him turn over and back again, the hard flat of his belly, and when I took him in my hand he said my name through his teeth like a man in a fever.

“Can I touch you,” he asked, strained. “Please.”

“Not yet.”

I rolled the condom onto him myself, clumsy and laughing, and then I straddled his hips and sank down onto him, inch by slow inch, watching his face, and he arched up off the mattress and swore, and his knuckles went white in the sheets and stayed there. I set the rhythm. I set it slow, until he was begging, and then I let him beg a little longer, because I could, because it was a sound I wanted to hear.

“Now,” I told him. “Touch me now.”

His hands came up to my hips like he’d been waiting his whole life, and he held me while I moved on him, and sat up to take my breast into his mouth, and I rode him until the loft blurred and the river roared and I came with my head thrown back, singing out loud, no hymn in it at all. He followed a moment after, clutching me to him, his face pressed to my heart.

“You own me,” he said into my skin, wrecked. “You understand that. You’ve owned me since the bridge.”

“No,” I said, and kissed his hair. “Nobody owns anybody anymore. That’s the whole point.”

Investigator Reyes called on the twenty-fifth. She believed us. She needed a judge, and the judge was in a trial two counties away, and the warrant would come by noon tomorrow. The concrete trucks were booked for seven.

“Five hours,” Silas said, and I watched him go to the window and look up at the hill, and I knew what he was measuring.

“I’ll stand on it,” I said. “At dawn. On the quiet room. They’ll have to pour it over me in front of the whole town.”

He didn’t like it. He went out at dusk to find the contractor, to reason with him or to do something worse, and he made me promise to stay at the mill. It was the only promise to him I ever broke. At eleven I took his flashlight and climbed the hill, because I could not bear the thought of Tommy Vane alone up there one more night with no one singing.

The undercroft stairs were half choked with debris. I got down them on my hands. At the bottom, under the black collapsed beams of the loft, the iron door of the quiet room still stood in its stone frame, rusted shut, the bolt on the outside. I was pulling at it when the flashlight beam behind me was not mine.

“Reflecting, June?” said Harlan Pike.

He had found the empty drawer; Aldous had called him. He did not ask for the book. He hit me once across the face with the back of his hand, hard enough that the stone floor came up to meet me, and while I was still on my knees he dragged the iron door open with a shriek and threw me into the dark and slid the bolt home.

Through the door I heard Father Aldous’s voice, calm and sorrowful, coming down the stairs. “The Crane boy’s girl,” he said. “Setting a second fire for him. They’ll say she was unwell. God forgive her.”

Then I smelled the kerosene.

The quiet room was the size of a confessional. The floor was concrete, the stone walls wet and scored, and when I ran my shaking hands over them in the black I felt letters, names scratched with nails and buttons by boys long grown or long dead. Smoke began to slide under the door, gray in the orange crack of light. I beat on the iron until my fists bled. I screamed. The fire answered, low and busy on the other side.

And then, because it was the only thing left in me, and because a boy had once lain on this floor frightened and unable to breathe, I sang.

Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.

I sang it with my mouth against the stone. I sang on my knees, on the concrete that covered him, the way Silas had sung through a wall. The smoke thickened and my voice went ragged and I did not go flat, not once, not on the second verse, not anywhere. When other helpers fail and comforts flee. I meant every word, and none of them were for God. They were for Tommy. They were for me.

I was on the third verse, half choking, when a voice outside the door came in under mine, rough at the bottom, perfectly in tune.

A crowbar hit the bolt. Hit it again. The iron screamed and gave, and the door swung open on fire and Silas Crane came through it with his coat over his head and got me up and out and over the burning debris and up those choked stairs into the air, and I did not stop singing until my feet were on the grass.

He had been on the bridge. Of course he had. He’d come back to the mill, found it empty, and gone to the one place he always went to hear me.

Father Aldous was standing by the gate, watching the undercroft burn, his white hair lit gold. Pike’s truck was already fishtailing down the hill. Silas set me down against the bell tower and walked to the priest, and took him by the collar, and dragged him toward the stairwell where the fire roared, and Aldous began, at last, to pray out loud.

“Silas.” I could barely speak. “Silas, no. Look at me.”

He stopped at the edge of the flames with the old man half over them.

“If you burn him he’s a martyr,” I rasped, “and you’re the monster, and they’ll never dig. You burned it to be seen. Let them be seen. Please. I want you with me. I don’t want you in a cell.”

For a long time he didn’t move. The fire lit the scar through his eyebrow. Then he threw Aldous down on the grass, away from the flames, and came back and knelt beside me and put his face in my lap, and down the hill the sirens came, the county fire trucks and behind them Reyes’s car, which had been on the road since midnight because the judge had signed early, and at the bottom of River Road a state trooper had Harlan Pike face down on the asphalt.

They found Thomas Vane in the first week of December, under eleven inches of old concrete, wrapped in a choir robe.

Harlan Pike pleaded guilty in January and told the state everything, the way men do once the thing that owned them has been read aloud. Father Aldous was charged in February. The diocese sent a man in a gray suit to say words about healing. The newspaper in the city printed the entries from the Book of Mercies, all twelve volumes, with initials only, and for a month nobody in Bethany Falls could look anyone else in the eye, because everyone had been written down.

Some of the town still spat when Silas’s truck went by. Some of them came to the mill with casseroles and could not say what they were sorry for. Marla Dean poured his coffee without being asked. The red letters on the siding faded in the winter rain until you could only read them if you already knew.

My mother came to the mill in March. She stood in the yard in her church coat, as she had stood on the diner steps, and this time she came in. She sat at the oak table and turned her rosary over and over, and finally she said, “I should have gone to Maine,” and I said, “Yes,” and we held hands across the table and cried like two girls.

We buried Tommy in April, in the town cemetery, not the churchyard. The ruin of St. Agatha’s is still fenced off on its hill. No one has offered to rebuild it.

I sang at his grave. Abide With Me, all of it, in the open spring air. On the second verse, from the back of the small crowd, a rough voice came in under mine, perfectly in tune, and I did not go flat. I have never gone flat on it since.

That night the piano was finished. Silas played it badly and I laughed at him, and he lifted me onto the closed lid and stood between my knees, and asked, the way he always asks, and I said yes, the way I always say it, and we did not make it up the stairs. Afterward I lay across his chest on the floor by the stove, my skin still humming, and he traced the words of the hymn down my spine with one finger.

The conservatory took me in September. I am twenty-six. Silas rents a workshop two streets from my practice rooms, and fixes pianos for half the city, and on the nights I perform he buys the ticket for the last seat in the last row, every time, though I have told him a hundred times he could sit in front.

Father Aldous prays for his own soul these days, I am told, in a cell with no windows. He has a great deal of time to reflect.

I don’t pray anymore. I sing. And in the last row, hat in his lap, the man who burned down my church sits in the dark and listens, as if every note were a letter I had written only to him.

They are.