James Craig - Never Apologise, Never Explain

Death, however, is not a specific moment. It is a process that begins when the heart stops beating, the lungs stop working and the brain ceases functioning. In this case, he knew that it was going to be a long, slow, painful process. He had shown the insolence and malapertness of the heretic, and now his false designs were to be crushed. The prophet, the dreamer, must be put to death and the execrableness of his false doctrines purged.

He didn’t possess the apostolic humility, austerity, the holiness required for anything remotely approaching salvation.

It was too late for zealous preaching.

It was too late for voluntary confessions.

Now there was nothing to do but embrace the pain.

Instinctively, in their souls, the soldiers knew that no man must debase himself by showing toleration towards heretics of any kind. Pettigrew braced himself for another kick. He knelt forward, getting as close to the boy’s boots as he could without making it look too obvious. If he didn’t get much backlift, the boy wouldn’t be able to get much force into the next assault and maybe it would just be a glancing blow. Rocking gently on his knees, he could smell the boot polish. It had been smeared across the toes of his scuffed boots, like make-up on a corpse. If he’d bothered to rub it in properly, he thought idly, I might have seen my face reflected back at me. Instead, there was just darkness.

The boots took a step back. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and waited.

The kick never came.

After a few seconds, the soldier stepped away and turned towards a yelping noise that had started up somewhere to his right. It sounded like a dog hit by a car, but Pettigrew knew that it wasn’t. Cursing and screaming, a woman he didn’t recognise was being dragged down the street by her hair. The boy soldier jumped forward and, without breaking stride, let fly with a casual half-volley, like a kid kicking a stone along the street. His right boot landed somewhere near her mouth and Pettigrew watched her face explode in a mess of crimson, like something out of a Sam Peckinpah movie. The yelping and cursing stopped, replaced by a low, frothy moan.

The soldier studied the toe of his boot and carefully began cleaning it on the back of his left calf, smearing a mixture of blood, snot and nasal cartilage across his olive-green fatigues. Satisfied with the result, he turned back to face the priest, eyes glazed. Stepping closer, he pointed at a large puddle of green paint over to Pettigrew’s right, which was spreading slowly across the scrub of the tiny front yard. The eight tins of Eden Green paint had been a birthday present from his sister. They had been stacked by the door for several months now, waiting for him to get round to painting the outside of his house, a three-room shack his friends and neighbours had helped him build two summers ago. The soldiers had clearly found them too much to resist, kicking them over as they’d jumped down from their trucks.

‘Get down!’

William Pettigrew looked at him uncomprehendingly.

‘Lie in it, fucker!’

The priest looked at the paint and hesitated.

‘Get on with it,’ the youth’s face turned pink as he struggled to find the right words, ‘motherfucker!’

Another boot caught Pettigrew in the small of the back. Forced down into the puddle, his shirt and trousers were immediately soaked in the cloying green paint. Lying still, he felt a small pulse of satisfaction that he had managed to get dressed before opening the door. To be both naked and green would have been a terrible embarrassment.

Of course, it was also a waste of good paint, but that seemed a total irrelevance now, since it wasn’t as if he would be coming back to start the decorating.

A boot tickled his ear. ‘Why didn’t you stay away, dickhead?’

It was a good question.

William Pettigrew was well known locally as a so-called ‘Red Priest’, a liberation theologian and, therefore, a troublemaker. That meant that he was always likely to be on someone’s list. When the coup began, his friends had warned him that he would be a target; that he should lie low, maybe even leave the country for a while. Pettigrew was lucky — he had that option; he had a passport and he had money. He could go back to Great Britain and leave this all behind. On several occasions, the Archdiocese and the ecclesiastical governors had made it clear to him that this was a course of action of which they would approve.

He had toyed with going to Scotland — his great-greatgrandfather had been an innkeeper in Montrose — to see for himself where the Pettigrews had first come from. But, deep down, he knew that was just a fantasy. He would never run away.

In the event, he did leave Valparaiso… for a little while. After a couple of nights of listening to the shooting, he had headed for a village twenty kilometres up the coast, where he spent a couple of nights on a friend’s floor. The whole thing quickly seemed melodramatic and self-indulgent — cowardly, even. By running from his fate, he had put himself in a prison of his own making. After all, Cerro Los Placeres was his home. There was nowhere else to go. There was nowhere else he wanted to be.

He knew that he had to suffer with the people here, share the suffering of the powerless, the impotent. He knew that he could offer his neighbours no solutions to this terrible situation. He didn’t know the answers. But he could walk with them, search with them, stay with them. Die with them.

His only weapon was forgiveness. Forgiveness is fuelled by love; violence is fuelled by fear. Love is the antidote to fear. And he knew that love is what he would need in his heart when he arrived at the gates of Heaven.

So he came back.

For a couple more days, he went about his business in Valparaiso unmolested. It seemed that no one cared about William Pettigrew.

Until now.

Another kick brought him back to the present. More words were whispered in his ear:

‘You are an idiot as well as a pervert.’

‘Do you think God cares what happens to scum like you?’

‘You should have fucked off back to England, while you had the chance.’

‘The Church shrinks from blood but we do not.’

After a couple more kicks, and a few smacks around the head with a rifle butt, Pettigrew’s hands were tied firmly together in front of him. Careful to avoid getting any of the bright green paint on their fatigues, two soldiers hauled him towards the rear of a canvas-covered truck. Half-lifted, half-pushed, he was bundled inside. There were maybe ten or twelve other people already in there, but no one that he recognised in the gloom. They instinctively shied away from him, fearing any association that could make their situation worse. Righting himself, he found a space near the tailgate. Shouting and laughing came from outside the truck. Inside there was only a pensive silence, laced with a heavy dose of fear.

Five minutes later, the tailgate was closed and the canvas flaps at the back of the truck pulled down. Someone shouted to the driver that they were ready to go, and the truck rumbled into life. After a few more seconds they set off, travelling at a steady pace of not much more than twenty miles an hour. Out of the back, through the gaps in the canvas, Pettigrew could see that they were being closely followed by a group of three soldiers in a jeep. One was manning a machine-gun mounted on the back, just in case anyone decided to take their chances and jump. No one did.

It was clear that they were heading south, towards the port area. Pettigrew had been what they called a ‘worker priest’ in Valparaiso’s Las Habas shipyards for almost a year, so he knew this route well. He also knew why they were going there. A couple of naval vessels had arrived in Valparaiso two days before the socialist government had been overthrown. With the President, Salvador Allende, dead, and ‘leftists’ of all descriptions being rounded up, rumours quickly began circulating that these ships were being used as overflow facilities for the prisons.