The Lightning Rule Read Online Free PDF Page B

turned his back on the church. For that, he felt he paid his own price. He was still paying.
    Edward was heavy, though he was getting lighter. The muscles in his legs were wasting, the knees growing knobby, the calves thin. He wouldn’t eat. He would only drink. He could forget about the wheelchair was when he was drunk and when he slept. So Emmett would let him sleep.
    He settled Edward into bed, making sure his legs were uncrossed to maintain circulation, and pulled a sheet over him. In that weather, the sheet was unnecessary, yet putting his brother to bed uncovered seemed wrong somehow. Emmett shut off the television and felt his way to the staircase in the dark, running his hand across his father’s lounge chair to get his bearings. As he climbed the stairs, he was careful to forgo thesteps that creaked in spite of the fact that, in his present state, nothing would wake Edward.
    Emmett’s bedroom had originally been his parents’. For weeks after he inherited the house, he slept in his childhood bedroom in his old bed, a tiny twin, with his feet hanging off the end. He couldn’t sleep where they had slept. It wasn’t until he moved their mattress into the garage and brought over the queen-size bed from his old apartment that he could finally change rooms.
    He undressed in the dark, peeling his sweat-dampened shirt from his body, and folded it for the laundry, then he knelt on the floor to pray as he did each night, hands clasped atop the bed. When he was a novice at the monastery of Saint Andrew’s on the Hudson, his mattress had been filled with straw and propped on a steel frame cot. Beneath his pillow lay a foot-long whip made of braided white cords and thin chains. That was where all the members of the novitiate kept their whips. There was no whip under Emmett’s pillow anymore, only a memory that stung.
    Every Monday and Wednesday, a bell would ring at bedtime, a call to the novitiate class to remove their shirts, take up their whips, and flagellate. Flogging one’s self for the duration of an Our Father was mandatory. The pain was marginal compared to that inflicted on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, when the inch-and-a-half width of the whip’s chain was to be tied around the thigh, its wire prongs driven into the skin for a span of three hours. If wrapped too loosely, the chain would drop to the floor with a telltale thud. Numbness set in if it was strapped too tight. All the while the prongs dug into the flesh, restricting the wearer’s gait to an awkward hobble and turning sitting into a torture akin to a tourniquet. The chain was a constant reminder that obedience equaled pain. The red welts it imparted were evidence that a true Jesuit never forgot Jesus’ pain, that a true Jesuit ignored his own.
    At Saint Peter’s College, Emmett had been educated in the sect’s fierce intellectual style, where everything hinged on obedience and evidence. Their teaching emphasized a nimble brain. Logic was lightning fast or it was lax. The brothers would grill pupils constantly, relentlessly. Why do you say that and Give me a reason were common refrains. They had taught Emmett discipline, that the quality of his thinkingand his arguments was as important as the quality of the result. When he graduated from college and left for the monastery in Hyde Park, New York, intent on taking his vows, he believed it was logic leading him there. Except logic didn’t live in his heart.
    Feeling the grain of the floorboards grinding into his knees, Emmett prayed from rote. That night, his prayers sparked a memory. It was about one of the priests from the abbey who had been sent to do missionary work in the Pacific islands. The main territory of the New York Province had long been the Philippines, a highly civilized region seeded with a healthy amount of Catholic converts, thus not a hardship post. At the end of World War II, the pope broadened the province’s scope to include the South Pacific, a less cushy and less