you're too young & eager to love

Just a little warm up/blurb.

There's really nothing in this to suggest that the girl is a prostitute, unless maybe you squint and look real close? Originally I wanted to develop a priest and a prostitute in a Western setting, but the thing with driving by the seat of your pants while writing is that ... well, your writing just develops as you go. So! Ta da.

~~~~


Won’t you just let me pretend
this is the love I need?
And I will grow
out of all the empty words I often speak.
WAXAHATCHEE





Sourstone is a forgotten town. It’s tucked behind what the locals refer to as The Black Woods, a patch of forest a few acres long, as full of thorns and old oaks as a tick full of blood. Except for Timber Creek winding its way precariously through the thicket, the Black Woods are nearly impenetrable, so most everybody has to trudge the long, lone path circling the perimeter of the forest if they want to find the town.

In his early days, before he was considered a local, Father Bathe used to sit on his back porch at dusk and he’d see a woman out in those trees. The White Woman, he called her, a slip of a thing in porcelain colored lace with eyes as blue as an Arizona sky. Sometimes she would seem to be smiling at him. Sometimes he wouldn’t be able to see her face, and he’d swear she was crying along with the owls and the foxes and all those other night creatures that were just starting to emerge. He’d only just begun to drink in those days, a few cautious sips from the bottle after dinner, and while he’d needed those sips to strengthen his resolve against the godless territory he’d suddenly found himself in, he knew the White Woman wasn’t a drinker’s delusion. She’d had too much light around her; she’d shone bright against all the dark trees. Back then, he’d thought everything was a spiritual sign, and the Woman was no different.

Bathe never told anyone about her, but sometimes the Sourstone urchins would babble about seeing a lady lost in the woods. Once, a child went missing, and the bereaved mother blamed it on a woman in white, a woman luring her baby into the woods, as evil as a fairytale witch. Bathe never questioned the mother about it, but he’d held her hand and bowed his head and prayed to St. Anthony. They never found the child, but the White Woman stayed around.

By the time Bathe is fifty, she’s a Sourstone legend, a bit of local myth, a story whispered by weary parents into the ears of naughty children. Bathe hasn’t seen her himself in over three decades, either because she’s taken offense to the amount of whiskey he now drinks or because God no longer sees him worthy of receiving His signs, but he can still picture those dusky nights, still see the glimpse of a slender figure on the brink of the woods, beckoning to him with a sad smile and a silver arm; he can still remember the sound of a woman whose cries reminded him of an owl’s trill.





He finds Modesty on his property line a week later as the sun starts to dip down over the horizon. She’s unconscious and covered in cuts from thorns and branches. Her bare feet are bloody. She’s wearing white.

Bathe thinks he’s caught himself a soiled dove.





What she sees first is the white of his collar, a pristine ivory square staring out at her sharply from the base of an older man’s throat. His shirt is black and sharply creased, like it’s new or well ironed, but all the darkness makes his build hard to identify when he looms so closely above her. His face comes into focus slowly. It’s lined and weathered with cracks -- above his bushy eyebrows, at the corners of his eyes, framing the sides of his mouth -- but it is not an unkind face. The man has the nose of a hawk and bloodshot eyes; his hair is the muted brown of dead leaves, but the grey at his temples gives him a more studious look than the alcohol on his breath reveals.

When he realizes she’s looking, he sits back on a three-legged stool beside the couch she’s been placed on. He’s tall, solidly built like a farmer or laborer, but he hunches to hide it.

“What’s that about?” she asks by way of an introduction, looking at the white square on his neck again. Her voice is scratchy, and she’s never been so thirsty in all of her life.

“It’s a clerical collar.”

“You’re a man of the cloth.”

“Yes,” he says, but something in the way his eyes draw together and his mouth grimaces makes her think otherwise. “I’m Father Bathe. I found you on my property. You seemed to have come from the woods, although I don’t know how. Can you tell me what happened?”

“My name’s Modesty.”

“And?”

She shrugs a bony but smooth shoulder. She wants something to drink, but she doesn’t want to ask for it.

“Rest some more.” Father Bathe has a confident and soothing voice. He pats her hand the way docile men are supposed to. Modesty can remember many things, even now in the fog of wakefulness, but not the last time a man touched her so passively.





The girl, Modesty, falls back to sleep within two minutes. Her eyes blink rapidly for one second, and then she sighs before turning her head into the couch pillow. Her hair, a red bronze like certain coins, falls against her cheek. Bathe thinks about tucking it back behind her ear, but he decides not to. He’s already been intrusive enough by cleaning the scratches on her arms and legs and bandaging her feet. He knows how far the freckles run up her calves and how they slope beyond her shoulders, decorating her back like constellations.

He lets her rest.

He doesn’t think of going for help. Sourstone residents mostly keep to themselves except for church meetings on Sundays, and it’s only Wednesday, and she’s only a girl.





She stays until her feet have healed. And then she stays longer.





“I think you could be a sign,” he tells her over a third glass of whiskey on a night that is dark with sin. He’s starting to slur his words and his mouth is wet. His eyes seem hungry when he looks at her from his hunched position against the table.

“A sign from who?”

Bathe stares at her, hard. She's been with him a month and sometimes he has trouble remembering her name, although her face comes to him often. He clears his throat. “That’s what I’m tryin’ to figure out.”

Modesty smiles and stretches out her foot. She rubs his ankle with his toe.






When Bathe thinks back on his time with her, he’ll wonder at how easily he let the devil through his door.