Some Rise by Sin Read online

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My sincerest thanks to my editor, Michael Signorelli; my agents, Aaron Priest and Lucy Childs; and my lady, Leslie Ware, for her patience and help in the revisions to this book. Also to Molly Malloy, for the tale she told me and taking risks she did not have to take; Dan Cantu, for sharing his knowledge and experience; Father Bill Cosgrove, for his advice and insights; and above all, to Elizabeth Pettit, a selfless servant of the dispossessed who opened my eyes to a Mexico seldom seen by tourists.

  Well, heaven forgive him! and forgive us all!

  Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall;

  Some run from breaks of ice, and answer none,

  And some condemned for a fault alone.

  —Measure for Measure, act 2, scene 1

  CHAPTER ONE

  Shrouded in his brown Franciscan robe, Father Timothy Riordan stepped out into the sharp, dry cold of early morning to look at the stars. The sky, moonless and clear, gave no hint of dawn. He stood still in the rectory courtyard, eyes raised toward Polaris. Then, looking like a medieval monk performing some occult ceremony, he turned slowly left to right, taking in Orion as it fell toward the western horizon, the Dog Star blazing low in the south, Spica hovering over the Sierra Madre, where the sun would rise in two more hours. Completing the circle, he tracked the Dipper’s pointers back to Polaris.

  He’d read somewhere that six thousand stars were visible to the unaided eye; here in the Sonoran Desert, far from city lights, the air so transparent he could have imagined himself an astronaut on the moon, there seemed to be ten times that many: a profligate splatter of glittering worlds, each a window into the mansions of God. That was how he liked to think of them, even as the astronomy enthusiast in him knew that if they were windows into anything, it was the past: the light striking his eyes had begun its journey to Earth when the Roman Empire fell, when men were painting images of bison on cave walls, when dinosaurs wallowed in Jurassic swamps.

  Did these contrary views of creation suggest a mind at war with itself? Riordan didn’t think so. Observing the heavens produced an awe akin to a religious experience: behold the eternal, behold the shoreless ocean of space and time; and the constellations’ procession along the ecliptic—stately, harmonious, predictable—had the same soothing effect on his soul as the drone of Latin chant.

  The habit’s cowl slipped to his shoulders, exposing his cheeks and ears to the chill as he turned again, this time from right to left. He ended with his gaze once more on Polaris, the north celestial pole. These rotations had become, in recent months, like the ritual of an obsessive-compulsive; he felt that if he failed to perform them, dreadful things would happen. That dreadful things continued to happen anyway hadn’t convinced him that this practice was a superstition as futile as a rain dance. He entertained the possibility that it worked a kind of prophylactic magic, preventing still greater evils from afflicting his parish. Mexico had taught him many truths. One of them was: Things are never so bad that they can’t get worse.

  He returned to the rectory, made coffee, and, holding the steaming mug in both hands to warm them, went to his room. It met the standards for Franciscan austerity—narrow bed, desk, armoire, bookshelf, walls bare except for a crucifix and a shell painting of the host and chalice—though Riordan wasn’t austere by nature. The knotted cord girding his waist was supposed to bind him to a life of self-denial, but physical pleasures—the smell and savor of pollo mole Actopan, the burn of a good bacanora, the wind chafing his face when he opened up his Harley on a paved straightaway—often made the spirit’s struggle with the flesh an unequal one.

  He switched on the space heater—the rectory’s thick adobe walls seemed to produce cold rather than merely trap it—made his bed, then read his breviary, his cowboy boots clomping as he paced the clay-tile floor. He liked wearing cowboy boots; they made him the six-footer his driver’s license falsely claimed him to be. Though he’d kept all his hair—uniformly gray except for a few reddish strands streaking both temples—he’d lost nearly an inch in height since his ordination, twenty-six years ago, and now stood exactly five ten and a half in his stocking feet. Everyone shrinks with age, Lisette Moreno had told him; the spinal disks compress under the prolonged pull of gravity. He’d joked with her: What would happen if people lived as long as turtles? Would gravity eventually crunch them down to the stature of six-year-olds? Would we live in a world populated by wizened dwarfs?

  Finished with his breviary, he dragged the glowing heater over to the desk and fired up his laptop to read over the homily he’d composed last night. He was distracted briefly when his eye fell on the desk photograph of the Riordan clan, taken at his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. They were the very picture of Irish Catholic fecundity: the elderly couple surrounded by eight children and twenty-two grandchildren, a population recently increased by two. Riordan stood on the far left, the absence of a spouse and kids making him appear isolated. His mother and father had that hale and hearty look seen in billboards plugging retirement communities for “active adults” with images of shined-up gray-hairs swinging golf clubs or riding mountain bikes. They were in their mid-eighties now, his father recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s, his mother with rheumatoid arthritis, both bound for some assisted-living facility lying beyond the golf courses and bicycle paths. “We’re rounding third, and home base is a hole in the ground,” his father had written in his last letter (not an e-mail, a letter, handwritten in a spidery script). The universe delights in change, Riordan thought, recalling something he’d read in Marcus Aurelius. Old age and death were nothing more than change, and therefore not to be feared. Dad might find that a debatable proposition.

  The homily. He would deliver it at today’s Requiem Mass, the Missa Defunctorum. He considered the Latin more appropriate; as far as their earthly existence went, the dead were defunct, all right.

  Only two of those he’d buried recently had died of natural causes in the fullness of years. The others, like the two young men to be interred today, had been booted out of life well before their time, usually by a burst from a nine-millimeter or a cuerno de chivo—the AK-47. The lucky ones, that is. The luckless had been tortured to death or burned alive. Kyrie Eleison. Lord have mercy. The Lord better have, because it was in short supply around here.

  He’d said so many requiems that his sermons had become variations on a theme, like the one he was reading now: messages of assurance, of comfort, of hope borrowed from Scripture or from Shea’s Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels for Christian Preachers and Teachers. “We cry out, why did Ángel Reyes and Hector Díaz have to die so early in their lives? All we can say is that they were called to heaven for our Lord’s own purposes, and all we can do is pray that He will forgive their sins that they shall be justified on the day when the Earth dissolves in ashes.”

  He didn’t believe his own words. There must be something else he could say, closer to the truth.
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br />   Two days earlier, a detachment of paratroopers had attempted to quell a demonstration in the town plaza, a protest against the orders to disarm the pueblo’s autodefensa, its citizens’ militia. A gun went off—whose, no one knew for sure—and the soldiers opened fire. Whether they’d shot over the heads of the crowd or into it was another thing no one knew for sure. The former, Riordan figured, because Ángel and Hector had been watching the demonstration from up on the bandstand when the paratroopers’ rifles cracked and the bullets found them.

  He stared at the screen, as if expecting the laptop to write a revision automatically. What would it say if it could? If they’d been standing a few inches to one side or the other, they would have lived, that’s what; therefore, the Lord had not summoned them for His own inscrutable purposes. Their deaths had resulted from the random convergence of the bullets’ trajectories with their positions in the plaza. That was the truth, but to declare it would be to rob their families of all solace. It would be to tell them that they lived in an absurd universe. Or in a universe ruled by a God as careless of human suffering as the stars Riordan had gazed at this morning. No sparrow falls that the Father does not see it. But it falls regardless, so what difference does it make if its fate is observed by the eye of heaven?

  A second after that heretical thought, his organs seemed to liquefy and spill out of him. Doubt was the antidote to complacent self-righteousness; lacking doubt, there could be no faith, as there could be no courage without fear. But this sudden emptying wasn’t the physical manifestation of doubt. This was how it would feel to lose his faith entirely. How it would be to live in the absence of God. Mexico, drowning in a blood-dimmed tide deeper than any Yeats had imagined, the sicarios killing as much for kicks as for money (And why not? he thought. Might as well enjoy your work), was testing his faith. That struck him as … what? Strange? Peculiar? Ironic? The conversion of the Americas had begun in Mexico. He’d seen the fact proclaimed on the gilt-edged pulpit in its first church, La Señora de la Asunción: la evangelización del nuevo mundo comienza aquí. And hadn’t the late Pope proclaimed Mexico to be semper fidelis? Yet this nation ever faithful was putting his faith to the test.

  He silently recited the Lord’s Prayer and a Hail Mary, begging forgiveness for thinking that God did not care for His creatures. He prayed for his faith to be strengthened. Then he printed his homily and read it a second time, hoping the words on the page would ring more true than they had on the screen. Of course they didn’t, but they would have to do.

  * * *

  The church of San Patricio de las Colinas was large enough to merit a full-time cook and a house cleaner. Their services seemed extravagances to Riordan, not in keeping with a Franciscan’s dedication to a life of humility and poverty, and for a while after taking over as pastor he’d considered letting them go. Father Hugo Beltrán, the parish vicar, opposed him, arguing that the two women, though humble and poor, had not taken vows to those conditions of life. Wasn’t it more Christian to give them some pride and income by providing them with honest work? “Besides, you are not so humble and poor as you think,” he’d said. “One who is humble and poor does not ride a motorcycle with so much chrome as yours.” Riordan wasn’t sure if it was the bike or merely its chrome that brought the vicar to this conclusion. He agreed to keep the women on, but only if he and Father Hugo cooked breakfast for themselves and for the Resident, the man everyone knew as the Old Priest.

  This morning was Riordan’s turn, as it was most mornings—Father Hugo had once tried to fry an egg and had incinerated the yolk. Riordan had learned to cook years ago, when he was studying in Rome, to spare his finicky palate from the dismal fare served at the North American College.

  He grabbed an onion and a tomato from a wicker basket and placed them on a cutting board.

  “Would you dice the tomato and onion?” he asked, turning to Father Hugo.

  The vicar did make a decent prep chef; he wielded the knife skillfully. When he was done, Riordan scraped the vegetables into a cast-iron skillet, ignited a burner on the propane stove, and set a wind-up timer.

  “Five minutes, no more, no less,” he said, and sat down at the kitchen table, which was thought to be as old as the church, its heavy planks, fissured and time-darkened, bound with iron clamps. The Old Priest sat beside him, wrapped in a serape over a wool cardigan, his brown, blue-veined hands quivering, either from cold or age.

  “We are going to have a full house today,” Father Hugo said after a silence. He sounded like a rock impresario.

  “For the wrong reasons,” Riordan said.

  “What reason can be wrong to fill a church?”

  “A funeral for two boys shot to death.”

  “You would prefer everyone to stay home?”

  “I would prefer—” Riordan began, but he was interrupted by the timer’s ding.

  He rose, allowed the onion and tomato to cool for a minute or two, then broke six eggs into a bowl, adding a little salt and pepper, half a cup of grated Parmesan, and a sprinkling of oregano. He whipped the mixture into a froth, dumped in the vegetables, poured the lot into the skillet, and placed it on simmer.

  “And what kind of omelet are we to have today?” asked the vicar.

  “You are untrainable,” Riordan admonished, with gentle humor. “Observe the flame.”

  “Forgive me, maestro. A frittata. An omelet is cooked quickly over high heat, a frittata slowly over low. Also, it is not flipped and served as an oval. It is served round, like a pie.”

  “Exactamente! Perfectly round. And the top is cooked like so.” Riordan removed the skillet from the burner and slid it into the oven, under the broiler. “For no more than one minute.”

  Sixty seconds later, he pulled the skillet out of the oven. After letting it cool for another half a minute, he sliced it into thirds, lifted each wedge out with a spatula, and filled three plates.

  Father Hugo led them in the blessing. With mincing care, he cut his frittata into bite-sized squares. He was a small, bald man with lazy black eyes and a profile that could have come off a Mayan frieze: the sloping forehead, the prominent nose.

  “What do you notice?” Riordan inquired, after he’d savored his creation.

  “It is firm but not stiff and dry. An omelet would be creamy.”

  “You pass, Father Hugo. I’ll train you yet.”

  “You were saying that there is something you would prefer. About filling the church.”

  I would prefer not to talk about it, Riordan thought, feeling his jovial mood dissolve. But he spoke anyway.

  “I would prefer that our parishioners come for the love of God or from the fear of God or even to give themselves something to do for an hour than to bury a couple of eighteen-year-olds.”

  Father Hugo bowed his head between his upraised hands to concede the point.

  “I’m sick of funeral masses,” Riordan went on in a louder voice. “Sick of burying people I should be marrying.”

  “Yes, of course…”

  “And I’m sick of saying the same thing in different words. That they were called to heaven, as if God had something to do with it.”

  “Ah, it’s your lack of originality that troubles you?”

  The vicar’s dark eyes sparkled with pleasure at what he considered a clever remark. Riordan brushed it aside. “No God that we worship can possibly have anything to do with what’s been happening here. What’s been happening all over Mexico.”

  “Are we to have a seminary discussion? How do we reconcile the existence of evil with our loving God?”

  “The Hebrews solved that one.” It was the Old Priest, speaking for the first time that morning. No one knew exactly how old he was; people joked that he’d said the first Mass when the church’s construction was completed, in 1785. He himself had never revealed his age, though with his dingy gray hair cut in a monkish bowl and his gray beard and a face as creased and dry as brown wrapping paper, he had the look of a biblical patriarch. “There was the kingdom of Yahw
eh, and the kingdom of Azazel, where the sins of the people were sent,” he continued, his voice thin and fragile. He folded a tortilla into a triangle, then bit off a piece and pulped it between his yellowed teeth. “On the Day of Atonement, sacrifices were made to Yahweh, but also to Azazel. He received the sins of the people. All their sins for that year were laid upon the scapegoat, and the goat was led to a high place in the wilderness and flung to its death.”

  “Giving the devil his due,” Riordan said.

  “I think that maybe Mexico has become like Azazel’s kingdom. She crawls in sin.”

  “No more than anywhere else,” Father Hugo said.

  “It has been said, hasn’t it, that Mexico is cursed because she is too close to the United States and too far from God?”

  Beltrán shut his eyes and tilted his head backward to signal strained forbearance. He thought the Old Priest was getting soft in the head. “That’s been said, yes, and much too often. It means nothing.”

  “Maybe he has a point,” Riordan said, recalling the sensation of a divine abandonment that had come over him earlier. “Think of these atrocities. Is it enough just to kill somebody? Oh, no. The body has to be dismembered, decapitated, eviscerated.”

  “The newspapers say that it is done to intimidate. That is how each cartel terrifies its enemies.”

  Riordan agreed. That was what the newspapers said. And the TV. And the radio, all attempting to explain the inexplicable. But what they were really doing was denying the unacceptable.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Father Hugo.

  “To maim and mutilate to intimidate your rivals is barbaric, but it makes a kind of sense,” Riordan answered. “What’s going on now … the bodies the state police found in the van last month, heads and arms chopped off. Those people weren’t narcos—”

  “Yes, I know. Migrants,” said Father Hugo, with a dour look.