It's Hard To Be Holy

EP. 51: Chapter V

Coarse and Offensive Language. Reader Discretion Advised.

The thrill that was the Stripping of O'Toole's did not endure in St. Gregory's. By the time Alfonso Ignatius (the Second) and Edward Joseph Towne graduated from high school in May of 1975, the common apathy of the parish had returned in full force.

Graduating from high school is a momentous occasion for any person and should be treated as such, but Edward Towne found himself thoroughly depressed by the idea.

'Nothin's changed,' he said to Bud the night before they received their diplomas, 'except now it's worse...'

There was always the intrinsic sense of impending doom around Ed. He liked to blame it on that certain team from the Fens, but he knew that such a sense could only be born.

And he knew from where it came!

Every single Towne before him that had ever lived in St. Gregory's had been the same sort of people. Good, calm, quiet, and respectful. They never gave into passion, they never were overexcited; they never found themselves acting dishonorably, and they never gave a neighbor an excuse for gossip...

That is to say every Towne before Catherine.

Ed never thought of his mother much as a child, and his aunt and uncle never talked of her if they could help it. It wasn't an omission of spite, to be fair, for Eugene and Claire Towne were not malicious when it came to that unmentionable relative. Rather, Catherine Towne, Eugene's younger sister, a specter in her own right, had caused too much grief for the family to have any measured opinion. It was better, the aunt and uncle believed, to say nothing and hope that their nephew forgot that he was only legally theirs.

The neighbors, those who did know Catherine in all her ways, respected Eugene and Claire enough to refrain from tittle-tattle around the nephew. The only person to break this unspoken rule was Mrs. Nora Lynch. She was old enough to have told her stories to both mother and son, and on one Summer's eve, she had pulled Ed to her and whispered: 'You're just like she was. Always happy and laughin'! She had a wonderful laugh!'

And years later, standing with his diploma, and watching out of the corner of his eye as his best friend's mother wept over her own son—'at least now there's proof ya aren't as stupid as ya act, Alfonso!'—Edward Towne recalled this bit of information and found it oddly inspiring.

What I could be, he wondered, if I was a bit more like her? Happy...

Of the few memories he had of Catherine, hazier and hazier as time passed, her face would appear to him, eyes, never quite in focus, gleaming behind a tangle of wild, curly brown hair that waved from side to side as she howled with laughter.

'I wish,' he told Bud in private, 'I could remember what it sounded like.'

But the laughter had not lasted, and it was Catherine, everything to do with Catherine, that had turned her son so suspicious.

'Your mama is sick,' his uncle and aunt had told him. 'She needs help, and she's gettin' it, and she'll be home soon enough, and she'll be so happy to see you.'

And trusting boy that he was, Edward believed the lie long enough to forget that there was ever a mother to begin with.

And when his aunt had told him that Catherine was in heaven, and his uncle could only cry, it didn't hurt as it should have, it just seemed...right.

Yet, Edward Towne could not keep his cheek turned through the entry into manhood. There were too many in the parish, young mothers, now some his age, whose children were regularly taken from them by the state, or, if they were as lucky as he'd been, some relative, to not start drawing comparisons.