Altarboy novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Eighteen
Kaz's father puts him on the lawn on his birthday, Kaz hides in the church confessional, and the sexton kneels on the other side to talk to what he thinks is an empty box.
On the morning of his eighteenth birthday, Kaz Wojcik woke up to the sound of his own bed being dragged down the stairs.
He ran out in his socks and found his father standing on the front lawn with a cup of coffee.
His mattress lay on the grass.
So did his clothes, his school trophies, and his boots, thrown into a pile.
"Happy birthday," Gene Wojcik said.
"What is this?" Kaz said.
"You're a man now. Men pay rent."
Across the street, a neighbor had stopped watering her porch ferns to watch.
Two houses down, three men from his father's roofing crew sat in a truck with the engine running.
Gene's girlfriend leaned in the doorway in one of Kaz's old T-shirts.
"Dad, it's six degrees above freezing," Kaz said.
"Then you'll move fast."
"I don't have anywhere to go."
"You've got a whole day to find it."
Kaz looked at the girlfriend.
She looked at her nails.
He knew exactly whose room it was going to be by tonight.
He could have begged.
His father wanted him to, and the whole street had come out to see it.
Kaz took his house key off his ring instead.
He held it up so everyone could see.
Then he dropped it into the storm drain at the curb, and it clinked on the way down.
"Now you can't say I stole it," he said.
His father's face went the color of brick.
Kaz went back inside past the girlfriend and up the half-empty stairs to his mother's closet.
Nobody had opened it in six years.
On the top shelf sat her recipe tin, dented, with a faded picture of a cow on the lid.
He put it inside his hoodie, against his ribs, and carried it out the front door.
He didn't take the mattress.
He took one black glove, because the other one was under a boot, and he walked.
By dark he had walked across half of Scranton.
He had four dollars, a phone at eleven percent, and a cow tin.
The only door in the city he knew without thinking was the side door of St. Hedwig's.
He had served Mass there from ten to twelve.
Then his mother died, and he stopped going in.
The church sat black and enormous at the top of Prospect Street, with one yellow bulb burning over the sacristy door.
Kaz went to the statue of St. Joseph in the yard and felt under its stone foot.
The key was there.
His mother had shown him that when he was ten, so he could let himself in early to light the candles.
He let himself in.
Inside, the church smelled the way it always had, of cold stone, wax, and old wood.
His breath came out white in the dark.
He walked the side aisle without a light.
He knew every board.
By the third pew he found what he was looking for, the tall wooden confessional with the two narrow doors and the middle booth for the priest.
When he was eleven he used to hide in the priest's side during the choir practice.
It had a bench, a heavy curtain, and a sliding grille that nobody had oiled since the war.
It was the only place in the building where a person could shut a door.
Kaz climbed in and pulled the door closed.
He sat down with the tin in his lap and let his shaking hands go still.
He did not cry.
He decided that out loud, in a whisper, to no one.
Then the cold got into him, and he slept sitting up.
He woke to a key in the front door.
It was not the soft sound of the sacristy.
It was the big brass lock on the main doors, turning slowly and carefully.
A flashlight beam swept the ceiling and went out.
Footsteps crossed the nave, heavy and unhurried.
They stopped at the confessional.
The outer door on the penitent side opened.
Someone big settled his weight onto the kneeler on the other side of the wall.
Kaz stopped breathing.
Only the carved grille separated them, a hand's width of dark wood.
On the other side, a man let out a long breath.
"It's me again," the man said.
His voice was low and rough.
"Father Cyril put the wrong Mass in the book. Again."
Kaz held absolutely still.
"I fixed it before he saw. I always fix it before he sees." The man laughed once, without any humor in it. "Da, I can't keep this up. I'm so tired of being the only one awake in this building."
Kaz pressed the tin against his chest.
He had a clear thought.
He is talking to nobody.
He is talking to an empty box, and he thinks he is alone.
The man went on.
"Halina Pelc is coming Wednesday. If she looks at him for five minutes, it's over. They take the parish, they take the roof, they take the old man."
His voice dropped.
"I've got nobody to tell."
Kaz's throat tightened.
He had not meant to make a sound.
But he had been cold for fourteen hours, and he had walked eleven miles, and the cough came up without asking.
It rang in the little wooden room like a gunshot.
On the other side the kneeler creaked.
For a long second nothing moved.
Then the grille slid open in Kaz's face, a gap of black air, and a big hand shot through it and closed on the front of his hoodie.
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