Ray Bradbury - Long After Midnight

"That's not so much confession as medical fact, I can see."

"My doctor yells at me, Father."

"He should."

"I don't listen, Father."

"You should."

"My mother's no help, she's hog-fat and candy-wild."

"I hope you're not one of those who live at home still?"

"I loiter about, Father."

"God, there should be laws against boys loitering in the round shade of their ma's. Is your father surviving the two of you?"

"Somehow."

"And his weight?"

"Irving Gross, he calls himself. Which is a joke about size and weight and not his name."

"With the three of you, the sidewalk's full?"

"No bike can pass, Father."

"Christ in the wilderness," murmured the priest, "starving for forty days."

"Sounds like a terrible diet, Father."

"If I knew the proper wilderness, I'd boot you there."

"Boot away, Father. With no help from my mom and dad, a doctor and skinny friends who snort at me, I'm out of pocket from eating and out of mind from the same. I never dreamed I'd wind up with you. Beg pardon, Father, but it took a lot to drive me here. If my friends knew, if my mom, my dad, my crazy doctor knew I was here with you at this minute, oh what the hell!"

There was a fearful stampede of feet, a careening of flesh.

"Wait!"

But the weight blundered out of the next-door cubby.

With an elephant trample, the young man was gone.

The smell of chocolate alone stayed behind and told all by saying nought.

The heat of the day swarmed in to stifle and depress the old priest.

He had to climb out of the confessional because he knew if he stayed he would begin to curse under his breath and have to run off to have his sins forgiven at some other parish.

I suffer from Peevish, O Lord, he thought. How many Hail Marys for that?

Come to think of it, how many for a thousand tons, give or take a ton, of chocolate?

Come back! he cried silently at the empty church aisle.

No, he won't, not ever now, he thought, I pressed too hard.

And with that as supreme depression, he went to the parish house to tub himself cool and towel himself to distemper.

A day, two days, a week passed.

The sweltering noons dissolved the old priest back into a stupor of sweat and vinegar-gnat mean. He snoozed in his cubby, or shuffled papers in the unlined library, looked out at the untended lawn and reminded himself to caper with the mower one day soon. But most of all he found himself brambling with irritability. Fornication was the minted coin of the land, and masturbation its handmaiden. Or so it seemed from the few whispers that slid through the confessional grille during the long afternoons.

On the fifteenth day of July, he found himself staring at some boys idling by on their bicycles, mouths full of Hershey bars that they were gulping and chewing.

That night he awoke thinking Power House and Baby Ruth and Love Nest and Crunch.

He stood it as long as he could and then got up, tried to read, tossed the book down, paced the dark night church, and at last, spluttering mildly, went up to the altar and asked one of his rare favors of God.

The next afternoon, the young man who loved chocolate at last came back.

"Thank you, Lord," murmured the priest, as he felt the vast weight creak the other half of the confessional like a ship foundered with wild freight.

"What?" whispered the young voice from the far side.

"Sorry, I wasn't addressing you," said the priest.

He shut his eyes and inhaled.

The gates of the chocolate factory stood wide somewhere and its mild spice moved forth to change the land.

Then, an incredible thing happened.

Sharp words burst from Father Malle/s mouth:

"You shouldn't be coming here!"

"What, what, Father?"

"Go somewhere else! I can't help. You need special work. No, no."

The old priest was stunned to feel his own mind jump out his tongue this way. Was it the heat, the long days and weeks kept waiting by this fiend, what, what? But still his mouth leaped on:

"No help here! No, no. Go for help—"

"To the shrinks, you mean?" the voice cut in, amazingly calm, considering the explosion.

"Yes, yes, Lord save us, to those people. The—the psychiatrists."

This last word was even more incredible. He had rarely heard himself say it.

"Oh, God, Father, what do they know?" said the young man.

What indeed, thought Father Malley, for he had long been put off by their carnival talk and to-the-rear-march chat and clamor. Good grief, why don't I turn in my collar and buy me a beard! he thought, but went on more calmly:

"What do they know, my son? Why, they claim to know everything."

"Just like the Church used to claim, Father?"

Silence. Then:

"There's a difference between claiming and knowing," the old priest replied, as calmly as his beating heart would allow.

"And the-Church knows, is that it, Father?"

"And if it doesn't, I dol"

"Don't get mad again, Father." The young man paused and sighed. "I didn't come to dance angels on the head of a pin with you. Shall I start confession, Father?"

"It's about time!" The priest caught himself, settled back, shut his eyes sweetly, and added, "Well?"

And the voice on the other side, with the tongue and the breath of a child, tinctured with silver-foiled kisses, flavored with honeycomb, moved by recent sugars and memories or more immediate Cadbury fetes and galas, began to describe its life of getting up and living with and going to bed with Swiss delights and temptations out of Hershey, Pennsylvania, or how to chew the dark skin off the exterior of a Clark Bar and keep the caramel and textured interior for special shocks and celebrations.

Of how the soul asked and the tongue demanded and the stomach accepted and the blood danced to the drive of Power House, the promise of Love Nest, the delivery of Butterfinger, but most of all the sweet African murmuring of dark chocolate between the teeth, tinting the gums, flavoring the palate so you muttered, whispered, murmured pure Congo, Zambesi, Chad in your sleep.

And the more the voice talked, as the days passed and the weeks, and the old priest listened, the lighter became the burden on the other side of the grille. Father Malley knew, without looking, that the flesh enclosing that voice was raining and falling away. The tread was less heavy. The confessional did not cry out in such huge alarms when the body entered next door.

For even with the young voice there and the young man, the smell of chocolate was truly fading and almost gone.

And it was the loveliest summer the old priest had ever known.

Once, years before, when he was a very young priest, a thing had happened that was much like this, in its strange and special way.

A girl, no more than sixteen by her voice, had come to whisper each day from the time school let out to the time autumn school renewed.

For all of that long summer he had come as close as a priest might to an alert affection for that whisper and that dear voice. He had heard her through her July attraction, her August madness, and her September disillusion, and as she went away forever in October, in tears, he wanted to cry out: Oh, stay, stay! Marry me!

But I am the groom to the brides of Christ, another voice whispered.

And he had not run forth, that very young priest, into the traffics of the world.

Now, nearing sixty, the young soul within him sighed, stirred, recalled, compared that old and shopworn memory with this new, somehow funny yet withal sad encounter with a lost soul whose love was not summer madness for girls in dire swimsuits, but chocolate unwrapped in secret and devoured in stealth.