It's Hard To Be Holy

EP. 26: Chapter VIII

Coarse and Offensive Language. Reader Discretion Advised.

A year after the demise of Big Bertha, Wino Willy returned to St. Gregory's Parish. He no longer screamed. He no longer drank. The mental ward had cured him of all personality, medicating him into nothingness. Now, he would sit on street corners, hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth, eyes fixed on the infinite space before him. The only signs of character left to him were the spasms of movement that crawled under his skin and contorted his body with odd, jerking convulsions. When he could no longer afford his medications, Wino Willy medicated himself with more illicit methods, and when that made everything worse, he cured himself once and for all. He walked out of St. Gregory's, calm as anyone had ever seen him, refusing to look back. He shuffled down foreign streets for hours, until his legs grew tired and his breath came in short gasps. Then he looked up into the sunny sky, opened his arms wide, and let out a roar of triumphant laughter.

No one noticed him step into the street. No one cared. By the time they heard the wheels of the bus screech and the following, crunching THUD echo, it was too late. Wino Willy was finally free.

There were many toasts at O'Toole's that Saturday night. Many fond stories shared of the brave man, who'd returned from the madness of the Korean Peninsula stripped of all his dignity.

'Too bad,' said the St. Gregorites. 'But he was broken. If only he'd been stronger...if only...but what can you do?'

In the end, awful as the tragedy was, the death of Wino Willy meant little to the parishioners. His end was the end of many a failure. It didn't affect them. Broken people break. The good and wholesome survive. It is the way of the world.

'It doesn't matter,' hiccuped Mrs. Fitzgerald from her position under the bar. 'Everything' is fine!'

But if St. Gregory's was the Center of the Center of the (fucking) World, if it was truly as close to paradise as the residents wanted to believe, then it was their own fault for not understanding the first law of paradise:

Be On Guard!

To have the glory of Heaven, one must hear Hell knocking at the door. The inferno of ice cold serpents and vile torments that teethe with rage. Waiting and begging entry. To live in paradise means to live life behind gates. To live behind gates means to be in hiding. No, it doesn't matter what you might hide from. It matters that you are sheltered. Ask any gatekeeper and they'll all tell you the same thing. You may be guarded by the strongest lock imaginable, but something always slithers in. 

For the St. Gregorites, that something was already nestled amongst them. 

Coming closer, ever closer, seeping unchecked...

Wino Willy was just the first taste.

They just didn't want to notice.

For children anywhere, ignorance is acceptable. As children of St. Gregory's, those thriving transgressors in the making, it was willfully promoted. In this, they took their examples directly from the mature folk of the parish. Those 'Should-Have-Known-Betters', who viewed the outside world, news of which now came nightly on their black and white television sets, with contemptuous disdain.

There was this jungle in the East that burned under bombardments of criminal defoliant—
Ah, but who really cared about jungles in the East? There were no jungles in St. Gregory's.

Jungles didn't matter.

Everything is fine.

There was a Bostonian, a rather famous one, whose teeth were straight and skin tanned, whose family had been as present in their lives as Jesus and His Father. A Bostonian, who gave the western world a renewed sense of confidence in a prosperous future. A Bostonian who now lay dead in the sweltering heat of a Texas morgue.