Barbara Callahan: My Mother's Keeper

Author Barbara Callahan told EQMM that this new story drew deeply from her Catholic background. “When I was a kid,” she says, “it was very easy to overhear the confession of the person on the other side of the priest, so I decided to do a ‘what if.’ What if a thirteen-year-old girl overheard someone confess to murder? I set the story in the fifties because this type of confessional, for the most part, doesn’t exist anymore.” Ms. Callahan currently lives and writes in New Jersey.

I make very little noise when I go into or leave a place because I’ve had thirteen years of practice. No, maybe twelve. I didn’t fully walk until I was a year old. In my grandmother’s house, where mother and I have lived since 1947, I learned to be very, very quiet. If I giggled too loudly or danced with new shoes on the hardwood floors, Mother whispered, “Shush, Catherine, you’ll hurt Grandmother’s already hurting head.” Sometimes my noise hurt Grandmother’s hurting stomach or hurting knees.

At first, it didn’t matter that I made very little noise when I went into St. Bartholemew’s Church on that Saturday afternoon in February. I wouldn’t have distracted anyone from their prayers because except for a few people kneeling at the altar saying their penances the church was empty. I didn’t have to wait in line for confession either, but I did go in very quietly in case someone was confessing on the other side of Father Dennehy, who sat in the middle with penitents on either side of him. As I knelt facing the closed panel between Father and me, I examined my conscience and lined up my sins with the venial ones first — like the lie I told my friend Mary Anne, that I liked her new coat when I thought it was really ugly. The most serious sin, the mortal one, I would tell him last, hoping that Father would be tired and overlook it and still give me absolution for wishing Grandmother dead.

When I finished counting up my sins, I heard a deep voice from the other side saying, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” Right away I tried not to listen, but the confessional is very dark so there is nothing to distract you from listening. That Saturday I tried my ususal don’t-listen game to take my mind off the voice on the other side by running my fingers over the wall on my right side, pretending I was tracing sins that were locked in there, sins the penitents were too ashamed to say out loud. I imagined those sins had escaped from their owners and landed on the walls and were waiting to be absolved by fingers like mine.

The game didn’t work and I heard Father Dennehy asking how long it had been since the man’s last confession. I tried sticking my fingers into my ears like I had once before when I heard a boy telling Father that he told an impure joke, but I recognized Gerald Griffin from my class anyway, because he stutters. Some people’s voices just travel through the panel, no matter what you do.

On that Saturday in February, I didn’t recognize the man’s deep voice. But it went right through Father Dennehy and into my ears. After he told Father that it had been two years since his last confession, he started to cry and then I heard his sin. And it was the worst possible sin, the one that broke the “Thou shalt not kill” Commandment. The man said, “I killed my cousin Tim.”

Oh, this was much worse than hearing Gerald Griffin’s confession. I couldn’t move, even to unplug my ears and open the door to leave the box. For a moment, I tried to excuse him and thought he might have wanted his cousin dead like I feel about Grandmother and that he thought wishing something to happen was as bad as making it happen. When he started to sob, I knew he hadn’t just had an evil thought. I never once sobbed about my thoughts about Grandmother.

Father Dennehy shushed him and told the man to go into the rectory with him so they could talk. Two doors opened and I didn’t hear any more voices. I cramped up waiting for Father to open my door and tell me to go home, but I guess he didn’t hear me when I knelt down. I guess being quiet is not always a protection against awful things.

For a few minutes, I knelt there like one of the figures from Pompeii in my history book, imagining I had been covered with the ash of someone’s sin and would remain stiff and silent forever. When my breathing became so shallow like it does when Mother has me breathe into a paper bag, I stumbled out of the box. I walked shakily to the altar of St. Joseph to ask him to calm me down. I put my head in my hands and started to pray, but the smoke from the candles next to me made my eyes water. After I patted them with my handkerchief, I saw the backs of two men walking through the sacristy toward the door to the rectory — Father Dennehy and a tall, wide-shouldered man wearing a black jacket with lettering on the back that said “Gordon’s Garage.”

“Gordon’s Garage, Gordon’s Garage, Gordon’s Garage,” I panted as I ran from the chuch. I kept up the terrible refrain until I reached my friend Mary Anne’s front porch. I sat down on the top step and hoped I’d freeze to death so I wouldn’t have to do anything with the words I’d heard. Why, oh why did I ever go to confession that day? I could have waited till the next week, because I’d still have the same sin about Grandmother, especially since she had started calling Mother a tramp and her new boyfriend a “dirty-fingered oaf.”

“He’ll be just as bad as the first one you got tangled up with,” she said, “the one that dumped that one on you and me.”

That one is me.

And the one she called a dirty-fingered oaf was Bill Gordon, who did have a hard time getting clean fingernails because of all the work he did on cars in Gordon’s Garage, the business he owned with his cousin Tim Gordon, now dead, killed by Bill, my mother’s boyfriend.

My nose started to run and I dabbed at it with my mitten. Freezing to death would be too embarrassing. My friend might find me with icicles coming from my nose. I moved inside the porch to the swing. Maybe the part of me that wanted to die would go away a little if I could talk to someone about what I had heard, someone like Mary Anne. She was the smartest person in the class and she would know if someone who heard a great sin in confession was bound by the seal of confession not to tell, just like the priest was. I argued with myself about telling her until her mom came out and took me into the house for cocoa. She told me Mary Anne was at her aunt Connie’s house for the day. I thanked her for the cocoa and told her I’d be fine walking home.

It’s only been a little while since I’ve been fine walking home. Before Bill Gordon came into our lives, I hated facing Grandmother as soon as I came in the house. She had a list of after-school chores for me and a list of complaints about what I did poorly. And before Bill came into her life, Mother looked so tired when she came home from her job at the beauty salon. But after Bill, Mother looked as cheerful and pretty as her customers.

Bill is a big man with curly blond hair and bushy blond caterpillar eyebrows that join each other when he deliberately frowns. He calls them his “kissin’” eyebrows. He has a short, curly blond beard, darker than his eyebrows, that looks like a pot scrubber. When he smiles, which he does a lot, he invites you into the funhouse that lives inside him. He always asks about my basketball team and sometimes plays one-on-one with me in the driveway with the hoop he put up. Sometimes he invites me to go to the movies with Mother and him if it’s something approved by the Legion of Decency. And sometimes he even asks Grandmother to go to Ramsey’s for ice cream, but she pulls her sweater tighter across her skinny chest and squints at him like he was something missed by our monthly exterminator.