Collin stopped sweeping the floor before the altar. He looked out to the pews, empty just like the last Doherty family reunion. Siobhan and Patrick, gone to Washington, had visited him only twice – when Julia died back in ’38 and when the Balmoral man died ten months ago. Now that Agnes’s husband was dead, Siobhan held hope she could visit her daughter without refighting the Battle of the Boyne.
Collin needed to rest before mass began in forty-five minutes. He sat in the back pew and looked at his church, his since ’06. Nearly forty years he’d had this parish and now, it sat silent as a sepulcher. He knew so few of the parishioners any longer. So many had left Philadelphia during the Depression, so few jobs in Pennsylvania and so many in Ohio, Michigan, as far away as California. And the war – he’d lost more than a dozen young boys. Only one of them came back for a funeral, Anthony Balfiglio, the troubled boy who’d planted those seeds in Agnes’s head. Maybe he had intimidated Anthony, who knew what teenaged boys thought?
His heart warmed at the thought of young Agnes, so bright and hopeful when she disobeyed his orders to write with her right hand. He thought of the change in her, the young wartime widow who sat in his front pew only thirty minutes ago and poured her heart out to him. He’d scolded her again, said she’d been a sinner and needed to repent.
He’d had enough of the dead quiet. He wanted his niece again. He called for Father Callahan.
“Thomas,” he said when he met his associate in the sacristy. “I need you to officiate at mass. I must attend to personal business.”
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