Grinning

He was grinning triumphantly as he spoke.  And ‘though it’s past fifty years, I can still hear his exact words.

“‘Tis money I’m after, d’ye ken? Else I’ll be tellin’ everyone.”

He was still grinning when I hit him with the hammer.  Square on the temple, freezing that wicked grin in place forever.

I buried him in the village churchyard—the first of several as it turned out.  I no longer recall the details surrounding the others, but I have never forgotten my first.  ‘Tis his malevolent grin, I think, that cements it in place.

Past midnight, under a canopy of stars, I dug the soft loam by a headstone, its inscription weathered by elements blown ashore from the Irish Sea.  By dawn, ‘neath sod I carefully replaced, it looked no different than any other untended gravesite.

I was not irreverent with his body, nor with those that came after.  They were draped in vestal cloth before I laid them atop the rotting caskets already in the ground. 

The lad was missed in the village, of course, and by his widowed mother—an embittered shrew, and thus the recipient of scant sympathy.  His disappearance caused quite a stir, bringing visits from the county constabulary, but to no avail.  Phantastic fables were spun over pints in the local, but the boy had become something of a rascal by then, and it became the accepted wisdom that he had run off to escape his mother, to make his own way.  It was surely a story I agreed with, nodding solemnly whenever someone talked to me.

In the years following, each time I deposited young lads in the cemetery, six in total, there ensued the same consternation, same puzzlement, same inadequate investigation, same fatalistic acceptance—summed up in a phrase from a relative at one of the funerals:  “Sure, ‘tis an act of God, who does not deign inform us of his reasons.”

There were other lads, too, with whom I enjoyed a loving acquaintance—boys who, as they grew older, grew distant, eventually unwilling to accommodate me.  But only the six devil’s spawn who threatened to tell were ever dispatched like the first.

‘Tis God’s design, I have no doubt, that has brought it all to light now.  And as I think about it, this comeuppance is nothing less than I deserve.  To be sure, I have confessed my sins to a succession of younger priests who have come to the parish—most of my sins anyway, never the murders.  And ‘tis sure I am that not one of them, shocked ‘though they were, has ever broken the sanctity of the confessional to inform on me.

Nevertheless, I stand here now, shackled, shamed, and surely damned in the eyes of all who trusted me.  The cemetery is alive with people in yellow dungarees, waving ground-penetrating radar wands over the gravesites.  Four sites have already been desecrated with bright red flags, obscene markers at the base of timeworn gravestones.

To be sure, I could not have told the constables where I laid my lads to rest, except for the first one.  His I have never forgotten.  And ‘tis his that has been freshly excavated as I watch, praying no spectral spirit will arise to strike me down.

In stunned silence outside the tape-barrier strung by investigators, dozens of villagers stare at me, disbelieving.  Some squint in the harsh sunlight, one hand over their eyes, some gawk from the cool shadows of hawthorn bushes surrounding the churchyard.  ‘Tis certain there is no sympathy for me, chief suspect in what is rapidly becoming the story of the year across our sainted land. 

A stir at the open grave catches my attention.  A burly sergeant stands slowly, cupping something fragile in his hands.  As I watch, transfixed, he approaches, thrusts his parcel at me.  Face-to-face with the horror, I turn away.

‘Tis the lad, of course—more exactly, his skull—shattered at the temple where my hammer had struck.  Below gaping eye-sockets, his rictus grin is as wicked as ever it was.

The sergeant does not let me off the hook.  “Look at this, Father!  Look at it, ya Papist piece o’ shite!”

And so I do, knowing I am revealed to the world, monster that I am.

“Tell me, Father,” the sergeant says, spittle flecking his moustache, contempt dripping from every syllable, “did ye offer the boy absolution afore ye killed ‘im?”

He was grinning triumphantly as he spoke. 

_{(745 words)}

_{© J. Bradley Burt 2021}