And the Hills Opened Up Read Free Page A

stepping forward.  “I’ll go first.”
    Madam Petrov paused, then closed her mouth. 
    “Fine, now you speak up, Ingrid.  Right when we are talking of superior matters.”
    “My apologies, Madam—”
    “Go on.  Do not keep the good Father waiting any longer.”
    Ingrid frowned, as if this invitation was a trap she must skirt.  Father Lynch stepped back into the church, inviting her inside with a theatrical sweep of his arm. 
    “Please, Ingrid.  Come in.” 
    The young woman stepped inside.  Father Lynch nodded to Madam Petrov and the other two girls and shut the door. 
    “Please, have a seat.”
    The prostitute sat on the nearest bench, facing the front of the church.  Father Lynch sat down as well, keeping a foot of space between them.  Ingrid was in her late twenties, with curls of blond hair spilling out from beneath her hat and a full figure that drew your attention from her pinched face, which looked perpetually tired, the eyebrows drawn in dazed perplexity above her blue eyes.  She was originally from Minnesota, Lynch recalled.  She’d run off with a young man at fifteen who’d brought her as far as the Black Hills before dying from cholera, leaving her without an income or trade, in permanent exile from her own family and home.
    Ingrid’s story was more or less similar to the tales he’d heard during Saturday confession over the past year, when he opened the church’s doors to Madam Petrov’s girls so they wouldn’t disturb his male parishioners with their presence.  The church had no confessional, so Father Lynch preferred to sit like this instead, side by side, facing the large wooden cross nailed above the altar.  He felt no need for the penitent to kneel during these conversations—he’d leave such grand gestures to the priests in bigger cities, to those who craved power over their flock any way they could get it.  In a scrabbling town like Red Earth, he was glad to have any penitents at all.
    Ingrid bowed her head and clasped her hands.  She’d taken out a rosary from the pocket of her dress and held it clenched between her hands.  She crossed herself, and took a deep breath.
    “Forgive me, Father, for I sinned…”
    Father Lynch tucked his chin against his chest, half-listening as Ingrid got into it.  These Saturday confessions seemed nearly identical to each other, the usual listing of petty sins and grievances that occur in a brothel—the ivory combs stolen, the men cheated out of their pay, the strange sexual perversions yielded to for money or the lust for perversion itself.  The sudden tears that emerged when speaking of an aborted child or a child given up in the distant past.  And, within these stories, ample evidence of the bad luck and bad decisions that had brought these women to Red Earth in the first place.
    He could sample the favors of any of these women, Lynch knew.  It would only take a few coins to convince them to follow him to the back room and his little cot.  He’d known the favors of women before joining the church—he could still remember the softness of their touch, the pliable flesh of their breasts and the rich smell between their legs.  These women—these bodies—from thirty years ago still haunted Lynch in the night, hovering above his thoughts like lewd, enticing angels.  He’d told no one of these encounters when he’d entered the priesthood, fearing they’d cast him out before he could formally enter, and he’d carried them in his heart ever since, not as a burden, exactly, but as memories both cherished and disquieting.
    Ingrid paused, taking a deep breath.  He’d said the necessary words, when she’d needed to hear them, and the stream of her confession was flowing toward its end.  Father Lynch avoided looking at the young woman while she spoke, keeping his eyes fixed on the cross ahead.  He could see her pale bosom in the corner of his eye, rising and falling as she spoke.  She smelled sweetly of that perfume they all