Jim Shepard - Kiss of the Wolf

That night I realized people were going to Hell not only because they were bad but also because they were weak.

I didn’t do anything about it for six weeks. Every time I got Communion — because I had to get Communion, otherwise, why wasn’t I getting it? — I was committing sacrilege. Sacrilege, sacrilege, sacrilege. All my friends were ahead of me and behind me in line, getting Communion like it was no big deal. Because it wasn’t for them. And I kept it all from everyone. Who could I tell? It was like a nightmare; it was so easy to stop, and I wasn’t stopping. It was like I thought, What difference did it make? My soul was so black it couldn’t get blacker. But it was getting blacker. I thought I was setting sacrilege records. I thought somewhere God was thinking that this was all too bad. He knew everything, so he knew I wasn’t evil, but that that wasn’t going to make things any better. People were going to Hell for stealing a car or for missing Mass. I was going to get off the hook?

Then I found out you had to go to confession before confirmation. We went as a group; there was no getting out of it. And I had to confess it, because the bishop would be giving us Communion at the ceremony, and I thought, Even I can’t do that sacrilege.

So every night the week before, I was up, praying, crying, I didn’t know what. I found myself under the bed one night. Finally, the day of the confession, I was the second one in line, the whole class and Sister Amalia out there in the pews, waiting. I was so miserable by then I just gave up. I just went in and said, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been six weeks since my last confession.” And he asked why it took me six weeks. I told him because I’d committed this sacrilege. He said, “You did what? ” I thought, Here we go. But when I explained it, he said, “That’s not a sacrilege,” like that was obvious. I was so relieved to hear anybody say that that I didn’t argue with him. He gave me like fifteen Hail Marys for penance. I was so happy I was all teary-eyed. I still thought it was a sacrilege, but now it was like I had special dispensation; I had a priest tell me not to worry about it.

That was the worst thing I’d done until now.

The other night when I was up with my mother, I remembered all that, remembered being up all night worried about the sacrilege.

This is worse, now, than then. It’s like there are two of me wandering around at once. I’m someone else from the person everyone thinks I am.

If I was God, I’d be harder on me than her. She’s scared and doesn’t believe in everything, anyway. But I learned every day in catechism what the right thing to do was. I was an altar boy. I helped serve Communion. It’s like when I had the sacrilege: like every day I’m slapping God in the face, over and over and over.

Services on good Friday, Stations of the Cross — my mother was one of those Catholics who excused herself from a lot of the duties because she had a hard life. That’s what she said. The idea was that God let her off on that.

I think her mother always had the harder life. My father’s always been good to her, and they’ve never been poor. Her mother had to come over from Italy with her husband and four kids, start up from nothing. When I remind my mother of that, she says, Yeah, but she didn’t have to put up with being me.

By that I think she means that her mother expected a lot of unhappiness.

My mother had this thing she would say to herself to cheer herself up: It could always get worse than this. She’d say it in this tough way, like she’d taken somebody’s best shot. I remember her saying it once when she’d taken me shopping with her at Read’s. I was six years old. I hadn’t even known she was unhappy.

She said that to me when Gary left. I said to her, “How could it get worse than this?”—even though even then I could think of ways. She said, “It just could.”

Now I say to myself, It could always get worse than this. I repeat it.

My mother’s got no patience for unhappiness. She says she has less now even than she used to. Which means she has less patience for anything that might be adding to the problem, like my father or the Church. She was secretary of the Rosary Society for two weeks, they started busting her rocks about the way she wrote up the reports, that was the end of that.

So she joked that God let her off on stuff like that. It was like going to the eleven-o’clock Mass: the really great Catholics, they were there on the dot for the seven-o’clock. My mother and I figured God appreciated that, but he also had the later one for the rest of us. If you spent Saturday night hiding bottles from your husband or bailing your kid out of juvenile detention, or you just felt so bad you wanted to lie there in bed an extra three hours, there was still that last Mass. It was like Mass for the shirkers and the exhausted.

It wasn’t that she didn’t believe, even in the Church. She just picked the rules she thought were important, for her sake and ours. Lent she never went for, for example.

She tried to bring me up right. She sent me to Blessed Sacrament. The building was falling apart; the building should have been condemned. There was a hole in the floor of the seventh-grade classroom near the heating vent: the seventh-graders could spit down onto the third-graders.

I had a sister there, Sister St. John of the Cross. I had these Martian cards then, cards about Mars invading the Earth — the whole story took up fifty-something cards. A boy I liked, Lawrence Harrigan, gave me his doubles. I was amazed by them. They had things like frost rays and heat rays: skin coming off the bone while the guy looked down and watched, these Martians grinning. Giant insects that picked guys out of cars. There was one gave me nightmares of a woman with hair like my mother on a web with a huge black-and-red spider. Lawrence said it was like Hell. Lawrence was always looking for ways to bring his problems in line with the Church.

Once a day, I asked Sister St. John of the Cross if I could go to the lavatory. I moved the time around so it wouldn’t look suspicious. I carried the cards in my skirt pocket and spread them out around the toilet in the stall. The third day I did it, wham, the stall door opens, there’s Sister St. John.

She said, “I knew you were up to something. I knew. ”

I was trying to get my cards back. I would say anything. I asked her how she knew. She said she could see it in my face. She said the guilt was in my face. She said, “I can tell everything you’ve done.” And I knew she could. She’d seen through me. She knew what a horrible girl I was all along, and she’d just let me make things worse, pretending I wasn’t, her knowing all the time.

You know the only prayer I ever had that was real, that was from my heart? It was a prayer I said whenever I was really scared: PleaseGod pleaseGod oh pleaseGod, pleaseGod. That was my prayer.

When we were reading about the Passion in the garden, when the apostles were asleep and Jesus said, “Let this cup pass from me”—when he wanted more than anything else to just get out of things — that was the closest I ever felt to Jesus.

They spent the morning in the house like two sick people. Todd didn’t get dressed. Joanie didn’t answer the phone. They ate cereal. He went back to bed.

In the afternoon he woke up half off his mattress. He could hear Audrey playing “Chopsticks” down in the living room. The radio was on in the kitchen, turned low.

His dog could play the piano when someone held her paws. They’d bought her the piano, a toy piano, as a joke. His mother liked to make her play “Some Enchanted Evening.” Audrey had to be in a certain mood to stick it out for any length of time.