Jack O'Connell - Word Made Flesh

But just three years later, this City of Words was deserted, the culmination of the tragedies that stubbornly rained down upon the Brockden clan until the patriarch was pushed beyond his breaking point. Now the place is just Wormland. And to Gilrein, it is home.

Or, rather, the small section of barn loft where he keeps a bed and a child’s dresser is the closest thing to a home as he’s likely to get in the foreseeable future. And this haven exists only through the good graces of Frankie and Anna Loftus.

He parks the Checker in the barn and climbs up the ladder to the loft. It’s a modest setup, wood-plank floor and walls, slanted dormer ceiling, a roughed-in bath. But it’s clean and it’s quiet and that’s all he wants to allow himself these days. He strips off his clothes and moves into the bathroom, running a hand over his bruises as he goes. In the center of the room there’s a porcelain tub with claw feet. He turns on the radio, and the air fills with Imogene Wedgewood singing, in her Creole-accented French, “Last Chapter (in This Sad Book of Love),” then he starts the hot water and climbs inside, lays his head back over the curl of the edge and stares out the window into the distant cluster of dead apple trees just barely tipped inside the borders of his vision.

Frank and Anna Loftus are the only people left that Gilrein can call friends. The other indie hacks are his associates, colleagues he values and trusts. But when Ceil was killed and Gilrein fell apart, it was Frankie and Anna who brought him to Wormland and saved his life. He hopes he never comes to hate them for this act of compassion.

Frankie Loftus is the son of Willy “The Mortician” Loftus, the neighborhood mayor of the Irish Acre. Frankie and Gilrein met when both were students at St. Ignatius College. Frankie’s family duties at the time involved running the Castlebar Road Boys, the family’s street muscle, a real beer-and-speed crowd that was usually reliable for battering each other instead of their rival gangs. It made for a ludicrous and often schizophrenic existence that found Frankie spending mornings at lectures on Thomas Aquinas and evenings trying to keep up with the CRB ass-kicking parties down in Bangkok.

“Honest to God, Gilrein,” Frankie used to say to his friend, “I don’t know if I’m supposed to be Stephen Dedalus or Sonny freakin’ Corleone.”

Frankie’s real passion was for pop culture in all its cheesy forms, but he never spurned the fat scratch that the mob world provided. He learned to put up with the contradictions of his life and eventually found a way to see an ongoing and ever-expanding humor in his dual existence.

Today, everyone forgets that Anna Coleman wasn’t a local girl. She came to St. Ignatius out of Galloway, north of Boston. Galloway, like Quinsigamond, was a factory town whose massive textile mills on the banks of the Passaconnaway attracted the first hordes of European peasantry to crash the industrial revolution. Anna was the daughter of a one-time boxer — cum — railroad cop and a registered nurse, the youngest of one of those teeming Irish broods that took over an entire tenement and made its walls swell to bulging with offspring.

It was probably clear, right then on that first night, when Loftus and Gilrein, both wildly drunk and pissing next to the Jesuit cemetery at dawn, bumped into Anna Coleman, studying century-old tombstones, that somebody was bound to get hurt. To this day, Frankie will claim that he saw Anna first. But all Gilrein can remember is zipping up the fly of his jeans and turning around to see this stunning young woman, backlit by the rising sun, peering at him from behind a faded slab of marble.

What she was doing in the cemetery is now a matter of debate, though it likely involved a study of missionary martyrs. What’s more certain is that Frankie paid the check for the endless breakfast the trio went on to share at the Miss Q Diner down by the rail lot. And by the time the boys argued over who would leave the tip, it was apparent something had begun.

There were a few sweet years there, the three of them inseparable and probably a little giddy with the Jules and Jim allusion, insulated in the way only college brats can be and living out of Frankie’s well-stocked wallet. They took the requisite road trips and stayed up all night arguing about French pedants, pop music, and how many people Frankie’s dad might have whacked. They gnawed pizza crusts and worried over what kind of pesticide might be coating their dope, scrounged the Ziesing Ave book shops for old Levasque paperbacks and spent countless days sealed in movie theaters. And if, at some point, Gilrein began to sense he was becoming the useless third wheel, it wasn’t long before the Transubstantiation Scandal and his subsequent dismissal from St. Iggy.

Frankie and Anna married the week following graduation. After much internal debate, Gilrein showed up at the ceremony, late and feeling sorry for himself, finally drinking so much at the reception that, unbeknownst to the bride and groom, one of the Mortician’s meatboys, an enormous and legendary ex-cop named Toomey, but more commonly known as the Antichrist, escorted him out the rear doors of the Hibernian Social Hall and dismissed him from the affair with a good-old-boy joke whose punchline was Jaysus, I thought that was your teeth chattering.

Gilrein stayed away, did his year of sorrows down the Canal Zone bars among the hopelessly affected young artistes until he was so disgusted by artifice of any type that he put down the bottle and chose the only career he felt capable of — bunko cop. He kept occasional tabs on his old friends through the humps in the Organized Crime Unit, found out the couple had used the Mortician’s substantial wedding present to buy and restore Wormland Farm. Everyone in the department was more than suspicious when word came that the newlyweds were turning Wormland into a nonprofit corporation called Sanctuary Ltd. Half the cops in OC were betting on a new smuggling line. The other half were split between money laundering and some kind of narcotics stratagem. But after countless wiretaps and stakeouts and the shakedown of every mick informant in town, the enterprise, unbelievably, proved legitimate.

According to the intelligence profiles that Gilrein sometimes secreted home at night, Anna had begun traveling the globe on the Mortician’s nickel, figuring there was a way to wash blood money clean. Using her father-in-law’s connections with the other neighborhood mayors, Anna slipped into a series of similarly blighted holes that the planet’s bureaucrats called refugee camps, shanty towns, tent cities, anything but what they were — a particular circle of hell reserved for that most viciously and relentlessly exploited form of chattel in human history, the innocent child.

With equal parts bribery and physical threat, the latter backed up by certain signs and signals known only to the local mob bosses and political hatchet boys, Anna began bringing the orphaned and the starving and the abused back to Quinsigamond with her. By the time Gilrein made plainclothes detective, Wormland Farm was filled with children of every size and hue. By the time Gilrein met Ceil, Anna had decided to expand the parameters of her mission to include adult casualties of political torture, souls victimized in ways unconceived by even the better-than-average imagination. By the time Gilrein and Ceil got married, Anna was in a Central American jungle getting hustled, for the first time, out of a big chunk of the Mortician’s cash by a death-squad cop who failed to turn over the prisoner they’d negotiated for.

And when Ceil was killed in the Rome Avenue raid, Gilrein was brought to Sanctuary by Frankie and Anna Loftus, a victim, though he couldn’t have known it at the time, of Quinsigamond’s own, uniquely twisted brand of political terrorism.