The Dark Path by David Schickler

Author:David Schickler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

“WHY SHOULD I HIRE you to teach English?” asks Clement Lowell.

Clement is Daphne’s father. We’re sitting in his headmaster’s office at Tapwood Academy, in the small mountain town of Tapwood, Vermont. The town is high up in the state, in the Northeast Kingdom. It’s late September and on the winding back-road drive to Tapwood from Burlington (Daphne picked me up at the airport), I stared out the window at foliage the bright orange color of hazmat suits. The view didn’t calm me. And here in this oaken office, I’m tweaking out, shredding my cuticles with my thumbnails. I want to bolt, but to where? It’s eight at night, an odd time for an interview, but Clement said he wanted to be sure we’d be alone.

He is tall and thin and has a no-nonsense bearing, like a founding father. I can picture him signing the Constitution. Earlier at his home I had roast beef with him and his wife, Beatrice, and Daphne. The Lowells are putting me up in their guest room.

“You shouldn’t hire me,” I say.

Clement is behind his desk. There’s a picture on the wall of a river, a fisherman.

“Why not?”

“I think maybe I’m going crazy.”

“Why?”

Daphne has told me that he’s a deacon at the Catholic church down the road. I dump my story to Clement. I say that I’ll never be a priest, that God might be a lie, that Catholicism has been my home all my life and now home just isn’t there. I tell him about my horny fiction, my sexy concierge girlfriend. I tell him that I drink and curse, that my heart is a swamp, that Mara Kincannon is the only thing in it that’s not sinking.

“And I keep doing this . . .” I wipe my cheeks. “I keep bursting into tears. My hands keep shaking. I may check into a psych ward a week from now.”

“Teach here for a week first.”

I don’t know how to respond to that.

“David, you’re not crazy, you’re humiliated.” He looks out the window. “When I was your age, I was in the seminary. I was their ace candidate for priesthood and I got handpicked to get sent to study in Rome. A great honor. A week before they sent me, I quit. In those days, if you left, you left in disgrace, in the middle of the night, with your tail between your legs. That’s how I did it.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“I couldn’t live without a woman. I loved the sacraments, the Eucharist. But . . .” He trails off. “A life with a woman, with sex . . . I couldn’t do without it. So I bailed. But I felt like a selfish prick.”

I’m locked in on his words.

“Afterward it was pretty awful. But I had to go through it.”

“Why?”

He shrugs. “Maybe so I could be here, telling you you’re not nuts.”

Black pressure squeezes my lungs. My pulse shoots. Fuck, not again—

“Breathe,” Clement says. “Ride it out.”

I clench and unclench my fists. “My faith is . .

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