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third in work clothes with a hunting rifle in his hand, and a dead deer draped on the fender of a truck. There’s an inscription on the back: October ’41. Home from Debert. Three men, decades younger than I am now, faces still defined by innocence and curiosity, yet to be rewritten by experience. My father’s name was Angus. These were his closest friends, Sandy Gillis, in his army uniform, and Sandy’s brother Jack, holding up the deer’s head, a knowing expression on its lifeless face. Effie gave it to me. It had once belonged to John. He didn’t want it when they finally broke up their marriage. The rifle in Jack’s hand was the one his brother Sandy used in 1963.

    That photo, in a way, is my biography: three men who shaped what has become my life, created what became my family. My sister Effie, briefly married to Sandy’s only offspring, John Gillis. And Sextus Gillis, the son of Jack, closer to me than a brother once, smitten briefly, like his cousin, by my sister.

    In another photo, Effie is a child, red hair wild and unruly. And there is a more recent, formal portrait, Dr. Effie MacAskill Gillis, or Faye, or Oighrig nic Ill-Iosa as she sometimes styles herself now that she’s a scholar. The sharp-tongued history professor, with a rare smile for a stranger’s camera.

    And then there is the photograph from Puerto Castilla. Three ordinary people on a holiday. The younger me, tall and leaner of jaw, longer of hair. Jacinta in the middle, shorter, arms outstretched to catch our shoulders, hauling us together. Dark Alfonso on her left, me on the right. We are smiling.

    In one of seven boxes filled with books I find my diaries.

    1975. nov. 26. harsh dreams and the humidity and crowing roosters drive me out of bed early. dawns are pink and misty here. people emerge like shadows from the darkness with their packages and their children. trinkets, fruit and vegetables to sell, families trudging toward the glow of day. there is an old woman who cooks on a bucketful of burning charcoal. through doorways i see women bending over open hearths and the tortillas. everybody friendly to the new priest. and dogs barking at the roosters. the old woman at the smouldering bucket calls me padre pelirrojo.

    I closed the journal, then placed it and the others on top of an empty bookcase. There were a dozen journals. Careful, coded records of my years of ministry. The record of my sordid service for our Holy and Eternal Mother, a source of self-recrimination but also of security. At the university I’d leave them prominently displayed. Reminders of who I am and whom I work for. At the university, my visitors would eye them nervously. They’d mean nothing here, except to me.

    I arranged the journals carefully by year. Then I set the photographs on the mantel above a blocked fireplace. They are as alien as I am, I told myself. Strangers here. Strangers from the dead past. Chilled, I found a thermostat, turned the dial and heard the distant rumble of a furnace.

    In the house where I grew up, I have another photograph from just before that first assignment, in Honduras. I haven’t set eyes on it in years, though I remember it in detail—the dreamy expression, the piety of innocence. One day it suddenly became too much. A reminder of all the contradictions. I shoved it in a drawer. I couldn’t find it now even if I wanted to.

    My sister Effie was the only one to notice it was gone. It was during one of her rare visits home.

    “What have you done with that lovely picture, your ordination portrait?”

    “I put it somewhere,” I said.

    “I still have mine,” she said. “It’s in my office in Toronto. Everybody comments.”

    It was the innocence that bothered me, I think. Maturity has stripped away my palliative optimism.

    they call me pelirrojo. padre pelirrojo. father red, because of my red hair. they should be careful calling anybody red around this place, alfonso says. back home in salvador they called me red.