Flight Dreams Read Online Free PDF

burning spices and gums wafts through the little church and hangs as a blue-gray cloud above the heads of the faithful, slowly shifting strata with the meager whiffs of air admitted through ventilating windows cranked wide at the base of each stained-glass Gothic arch.
    October sometimes brings relief, but not today. The early sun pierces the eastern windows, making brilliant the colored shards of martyrs’ blood and fishermen’s robes. The filtered light seems to magnify the heat rather than quell it, causing both flesh and clothing to stick to the varnished pews. Many in the congregation choose to kneel rather than make contact with the benches. The combination of heat and the midnight communion-fast can cause the less hardy to faint during the Sunday service, but that prospect is least likely at the first Mass of the day, so the church will be filled.
    Four altar boys—ruddy-faced Indian brothers garbed in scarlet cassocks and fine lace surplices—busy themselves in the sanctuary, preparing for High Mass. They light six candles at the main altar and many more at the side altar that enshrines a painted statue of the Virgin Mary. Wide-eyed, a child in the congregation points toward the waves of heat that rise from the candles and cause the plaster saint to hula on her pedestal.
    From its cramped loft, the choir sings Gregorian chants a capella. The climate, joined by what the members of the little parish term “the dark years of neglect,” has rendered the organ irreparably silent.
    The congregation is now gathered, all facing reverently forward. Though they don’t look like rebels, they are, united in purpose from many walks of life. Most are either quite old or very young. This place was chosen as a new home by the older members of the community because it represents something familiar, something that was once part of their lives, but lost. To the young, this place represents something they never knew; they yearn for the “purity” of older ways, finding it more compatible with the idealism of youth. Conspicuously absent from the crowd are the middle-aged, the mainstream, the people who shape and inhabit the world at large.
    There is a girl of about twenty with long straight hair. Beaming a smile that makes her plain face pretty, she struggles with an infant who is annoyed by the heat.
    An old black man kneels near the back of the church. He has a proud bearing that belies the poverty suggested by his worn but spotless clothes. He fingers a rosary, its beads clicking against the slick surface of the pew in front of him.
    There is an Indian woman with a weathered face topped by a braided crown of jet-black hair. She keeps a stern eye on three children who sit silently, wagging their legs.
    A young man kneels piously with his wife sitting next to him. He is bookish-looking with freckles and wire-rimmed glasses. Sunken cheeks and a long horsey chin amplify his humorless features. He prays to a wrathful God.
    His wife, by contrast, seems almost amused by his sobriety, harboring secrets about him that these other people could never guess. He brought her to this place, and she has maintained a girlish cheerfulness—while anyone else might have left him.
    In a pew near the front of the church, center aisle, is a woman who neither kneels nor prays, but sits reading a popular novel, waiting for the service to begin.
    The choir stops.
    Silence is broken by the bell that hangs in the doorway from the sacristy to the sanctuary. The first of the altar boys has pulled its tasseled cord once, sharply, and the clang brings the congregation to their feet. An odd noise fills the church—the sound of damp clothing peeled from the pews.
    The little procession approaches the altar. Behind the four boys walks the priest, a man in his late fifties, perhaps sixty. The zeal that flashes in his blue eyes reflects a lifelong dedication to his calling. The same dedication, though, has worsened the toll of his years, and the flash of his