Collin Doherty: Winter flowers

The vortex of knife-like pain ripped through Father Collin's abdomen like a Drogheda machete. His little sister, broken-hearted over Agnes's betrayal, sobbing on his worn leather sofa in the St. Patrick's rectory office, the last of the winter chrysanthemums and pointsettias framing her wild gray hair and splotchy red face like a bedraggled Easter bonnet. Her rosary beads in her hands, Siobhan repeated Annie Kate's accounting of Agnes's departure -- her only daughter, her youngest child, the only daughter who survived to adulthood, running off with the Balmoral man. And expecting a child, already two months gone. Even worse, they'd be getting married in the Episcopal Church -- not only a Protestant, but an English Protestant, too -- and that Agnes would be living with his family, raising their child as a Protestant. An English Protestant. Siobhan's first grandchild would be damned to hell for all eternity.

He couldn't stand the pain. This beautiful child who'd been the apple of his eye, the best girl student in all of St. Patrick's history -- his favorite niece and the math genius of the 1928 graduating class. On top of that, so talented and so gifted with music, too, she could bring tears to the eyes of any listener just by a turn of a phrase or hint of sadness in the Chopin melodies she loved to massage the piano with ... all gone, all gone within the space of a few hours. What had happened that Thursday morning? Collin had been hearing confessions that morning -- a man, out of a job for nearly two years, had stolen food from a grocery store; a young woman, fearing spinsterhood, had lied about her age to her fiance and had yet to confess the truth to him; an older woman had withheld money from her four starving children; another man had slept with his brother's wife. Most of them had committed sins that Father Collin could forgive with little more than a set of rosaries for penance. Agnes's betrayal went right to the bone. Not only had she committed the sins of the flesh before marriage. She'd done so with a confirmed heretic and had renounced her Catholic faith and her Catholic family -- as well as her heritage as an Irish girl -- in order to do it. The family would never recover from this betrayal, he thought, as he pondered his sister. This would ruin Siobhan for good.