I tried to rebuild.
Four days after Cornelius departed, I knelt before the crucifix, clasped my hands in the original configuration, and prayed.
The words were ash.
Our Father.
The Father, the Heaven, the fourteen years of scaffolding under both, all rubble, but I prayed, because praying was the first brick. A man laying one brick is a man who intends a building. I laid it yet did not look up to see whether anything held.
I ate breakfast in the rectory, not on the blanket she had folded against the wall. I opened the Summa to a page I had not read. I made a marginal note about Aquinas on repentance, whether a man who has fallen can return to grace by repeating the disciplines that preceded the ruin. Can a man raise again the house he pulled down, laying the same bricks in the same order? Aquinas says yes. The prodigal walked the same road home.
I went to the cabinet.
The scourge hung on its hook, the leather tongues stiff from disuse, the knotted ends dark with oxidized blood. The smell was iron and tallow and the sour tang of old discipline, and the smell was familiar, and the familiar was the first comfort I had felt in four days that was not her.
I removed my robe. My back was a topography of fourteen years: channels, welts, scar tissue layered on scar tissue, the map of a man’s war against his own wanting. No one had updated the map for weeks.
I raised the scourge and swung.
