In God's House (46 page)

In the three years after the Dubois criminal case ended, Kate and the children moved to New Orleans, Julie left Thiberville, and Matt died. I was kind of lost. Doctors didn’t want me subjecting myself to the stress of practicing law, and I’d lost interest in being a lawyer. For that whole period, I felt like I had just been
sleepwalking
through life. It was no longer fair to my clients or to me to continue to play the part of a lawyer. This morning was the first morning of my life when I did not know where I would be going after today. I knew there was nothing left for me in Thiberville.

I was in my office, wearing one of Matt Patterson’s sweatshirts. The sweatshirt had arrived in a package shipped by Barbara from Hope House a week after Matt’s funeral. She included the note, “Matt wanted you to have this – his favorite.” It was his legacy to me.

Mo too would, reluctantly, have to be moving on. She and I had been packing up my office and were just about finished. I was in the process of closing my law practice. By the end of the month, my professional life would be over. Mo and I were alone in the office, putting away files, listening to the Rolling Stones. As she boxed the law books I had sold cheap to a young lawyer just starting out, I truthfully told her, “I never much cared for those books. There are no pictures, ya know.”

Our old family country home in Coteau had stood empty since Kate had moved to New Orleans. When I thought about Coteau and the wonderful times our family had there, I found myself drifting
into a melancholy state. I tried to never think about it. I had listed it for sale several years earlier. A mutual friend had told me Kate planned to marry a good man in New Orleans. She was moving on with her life and I was now making plans to leave Thiberville.

Matt had been dead for almost four years. Desmond McDougall had essentially been fired from his former position at the papal nunciature. He continued to tell the truth about the Church, testifying on behalf of victims who had filed lawsuits against the Church. I was proud of him and happy that he was so effective. Recently I had seen him on a national talk show on a Sunday morning. “It’s simple,” he’d said. “When it becomes known that a priest has sexually abused a child, there are only three forces in play: a bishop, a prosecutor, and the press. If one of those three does the right thing, does their job, the right thing will happen. All too often none of them does their job, and then the priest abuses another child, and another and another. We need responsive and responsible bishops, prosecutors and journalists. One wonders how they can all duck their responsibility to these children, but they have done so consistently in some places.”

The Christmas after Matt’s funeral, Des sent me one of those tourist photographs in a cardboard holder with the logo of Café Roma written above the picture. It was a picture of Matt, Des and me laughing. I’d kept it on my desk. Now, I picked it up and looked at it for a long time before handing it to Mo to put in a storage box.

Julie was in Africa, working for a private relief organization. She moved around a lot and her letters took a long time to get to me. Sometimes I would receive a batch of three or four in the same week. I responded to her through her parents’ address in Arlington, as they were able to get parcels to her via her employer. On her rare visits to the States, she called and we talked for hours. I always traveled to meet her in New York on her way home. In Africa, she had found what she had been looking for all of her life.

Just as I asked Mo, “You want to tape me inside a box and stick me in storage too?” the phone rang. She picked it up and slammed it down a few seconds later.

“Renon, my friend Sally says the Old Bishop’s House is on fire. Let’s go see.”

We walked out of the office into the outer bands of a late-season hurricane due to come onshore during the night. The sky already had a strange look as layers of clouds raced along a low course, holding to the contours of the earth. The wind was gusting.

It was only four blocks to the Old Bishop’s House. Firefighters were dousing the spire and steep roof of the nearby cathedral and adjacent chancery building with gallons of water, trying to protect them from the flames and sparks that were shooting out of the Old Bishop’s House. Other hoses were aimed at the house.

The fire chief, Wayne Doucet, a client of mine, stood on the sidewalk in front of the house, walkie-talkie to his ear. He saw me and motioned that I could approach him, nodding to the policeman to let me cross under the crime scene tape.

“Look at this,” the chief said, pointing to the ground in front of him.

I pressed against the waist-high iron fence and looked at the lawn. There were fifty or more carved African masks scattered near the fence line.

“A neighbor across the street said she noticed smoke, looked closer and saw someone throwing these things out of an attic window. There has to be somebody in there.”

“Are you going in after him?”

“No. The staircase is gone and we think he’s on an upper floor. There’s nothing left up there now. Not enough oxygen to support life. And it’s too dangerous.”

The walkie-talkie cackled. The fire chief listened.

“A fire officer in the back says he thinks he saw someone downstairs. Now they don’t see him. Maybe a smoke shadow. Smoke does strange things.”

The wind was kicking up and water from the fire hoses was blowing on us. I had no protective gear and became drenched. Some of the smoke was no longer rising straight up in a plume.
It was blowing down the boulevard just above ground level.

“Man in the hall! Man in the hall!” The chief shouted into his walkie-talkie. He grabbed something that looked like a
scuba-diving
outfit, strapped it to his body and ran up the front walk toward the house. Two of his men followed.

For an instant, I clearly saw the man in the house. He was standing in the center of the entrance hall, surrounded by flames. He was still, his arms at his side.

As the chief reached the porch swing on the front gallery, a beam fell in, blocking the entrance to the house. The second falling beam caught the chief on the shoulder and knocked him to the porch floor. Two of his men pulled him to safety as the porch collapsed. A loud rush of air came from the back of the house and blew out some of the front wall, causing part of the structure to fall in on itself.

When the paramedics had finished looking at him and bandaging his shoulder, Chief Doucet walked up to me. “Did you see him?” he asked.

“Yeah, I did. I saw him,” I said.

“Did you recognize him?”

“Yeah. It’s Monsignor Jean-Paul Moroux.”

“What the hell do you think he’s doing in there? Why didn’t he get out?”

I shrugged and shook my head. I couldn’t take my eyes off the place where Moroux had been standing. The smoke obscured my vision as I strained, trying to see Moroux again.

Doucet said, “When I got up on the porch, I could see him real good.”

“Yeah?” I said, staring hard, still looking for Moroux.

“He was smiling.”

The fire chief walked away.

Minutes later, the Old Bishop’s House was reduced to a pile of charred rubble. I looked at the ground. Moroux had saved the masks but made no attempt to save himself.

I walked inside the gate. I picked up two masks, one for me and one for Julie.

The truth had been heavy. The truth had been contained in cartons sealed, taped tight, and addressed to the police department in Thiberville, the district attorney’s office, and the office of diocesan and insurance legal counsel. Monsignor Jean-Paul Moroux had borrowed a utility van from the diocesan maintenance department the day before. He had spent all night copying thousands of pages and packing a number of identical boxes with the fifteen personnel files Renon Chattelrault had deposited in the bishop’s office three years earlier – the last time Moroux and Chattelrault had met.

Added to the incriminating material contained in the personnel files was a 174-page affidavit, notarized by an attorney in
Jean-Paul’s
hometown in neighboring Acadia Parish. The attorney had not bothered to read the affidavit, but only verified that Moroux had signed it in his presence, attesting to the truth of the contents of all of the documents.

Moroux had typed the long, sworn affidavit over the past month in evenings during sober intervals. It detailed what Moroux knew about every diocesan priest who had violated his vow of celibacy during Moroux’s tenure as vicar general, whether the acts involved very young boys and girls, teenagers, or adult males and females; it included information on priests who had impregnated women. Moroux even mentioned his drunken encounters with undercover vice cops when he was a young priest.

When Moroux finished offloading the cartons at the post office, he was wringing wet with perspiration. He returned the van to the maintenance warehouse, and drove away in his car. With all four windows down, the breeze chilled his wet clothing and skin. He drove until he reached his childhood home, the farm in Acadia Parish. He slowed as he passed the house where he had spent the first fifteen years of his life before he entered the seminary.

When he returned to the Old Bishop’s House, he phoned his secretary, Lydia, to inform her that he would not be in his office until the afternoon. He climbed the steps to the attic and began working with a wood burner, scorching deep lines into a wooden African mask.

The fire had started in the attic when Jean-Paul Moroux set his woodburning tool on a stack of color photographs. The flames quickly began sucking oxygen out of the air, hurting Moroux’s lungs. As he pulled masks off the wall and tossed them through an open window, his sleeve caught fire and charred the flesh of his arm.

Carrying his favorite mask under his good arm, Moroux walked downstairs to the ground floor. He made his way to the kitchen. Behind him, he could hear the fire snaking down the stairs. The old cypress boards sounded like they were breaking apart. He set the mask on a counter and drank a glass of cold water. Out the back window, he could see the cemetery and wondered for a moment what his funeral would be like, whether he would leave a corpse or only ashes. He wanted to sleep in the cool earth of the Saint Augustine Cemetery.

He walked into the center hall, holding the mask under his arm. He was mesmerized by the flames crawling down the stairs, coming closer. His brain rapid-fired images – his younger self lying prostrate in the cathedral as he received holy orders; as a six-year-old, crying on a riverbank as he watched the first fish he ever caught die; his mother in a coffin with rouge smeared on her
cheeks, even though she had never worn make-up in her life; a young African man sitting with James Baldwin outside Les Deux Magots in Paris, eyeing Moroux flirtatiously; and a snapshot from his recurring dream of brightly dressed Africans on a red-dirt road bordered by lush green fields.

For a moment he thought of the huge packages he had deposited in the mail that morning, material sent to lawyers, the police, and a prosecutor’s office. In making that mailing, he had broken a sacred vow by intentionally acting to bring scandal to the Church. He had been prepared to live with the consequences. He would now die with the consequences.

He stood rooted in the hallway, fascinated by the flames, how quickly they spread around the room, randomly attaching themselves to objects. He felt water from a fire hose, just some spray. There was no air left to breathe. He lifted the mask and peered through the eyeholes for his last look at this world. As he squinted at the flames coming closer, he hummed the song his mother used to sing in the kitchen when she baked. He had not felt this way since he was a boy. He was happy.

The hurricane came through during the night, knocking down trees and power lines. When daylight came, only the hospitals and government buildings with generators had power. I drove out to the country to see if there was damage at the Coteau house. I unlocked the gate, left my car on the road and waded through standing water to the house that had been our home for years. The force of the night winds had pulled some shutter stays out of the walls. Now the shutters were swinging free, banging against brick walls.

The front porch light was swaying in the breeze. I righted the old rocking chair and had a seat. The place was in poor condition, in danger of falling into ruins. For the first time, I wondered if I had kept it this way intentionally so it would never sell. When the house was gone, everything would be gone. If I no longer had my family, my profession, or my faith, I still had this place. It was all that was left.

I resolved then, while sitting in the rocker, that I would fix it up, sell it, and let it go. It was no more than a symbol of a time, and my whole life seemed to be made up of symbols and remembrances. For the first time since Kate and the kids moved away, I let myself into the house and wandered through the empty rooms. It smelled damp and dusty. Sasha had forgotten some stuffed animals in her bedroom closet, or maybe she left them there on purpose. Jake’s old snake-hunting gun was propped in a
corner of his room, rusted from him leaving it in the gazebo for a winter when he was a kid. Some torn rock-star posters dangled from the wall in Shelby’s room. In my study, a tree branch had cracked a leaded glass window.

The grand piano was the only piece of furniture left in the house. Kate had insisted I sell it as no one ever played it. I had been unable to bring myself to sell anything that had belonged to us. Her clarinet was on the piano bench. It was not something she would have forgotten or overlooked. I picked it up and walked back onto the front porch.

I sat in the rocking chair holding the clarinet in both hands, looking over the land around the house. The grass had turned to weeds that were now waist high. I could not see the pond. I blew a note on the clarinet and was startled by the response. The ducks on the pond started quacking. I couldn’t see them through the tall grass, but I could hear them coming to the bank. The ducks were still here, waiting for Sasha to feed them again.