All the Lonely People

A dense fog hung in the ground, uneasily suspended in the chilly air of the morn. The lampposts cast an eerie yellow glow on the wet streets just before a humble little chapel, which sat on a quiet avenue. The sky was a deep milky blue. At six o’clock precisely, a low bell shook the town with its reverberation, purging the silence and disrupting the toiled, the peaceful, and the meaningless slumbers. Some scarce souls continued their rests, though they were just minutes from rising unwillingly. 

In a shack of a home, down a lonely road where nary a foot stepped, a priest woke with uncertainty brooding in the back of his mind. In two hours, he was to perform a wedding ceremony for a detestable pair of people. He stood up, staring silently into the smudgy glass of his mirror, which reflected a tired man, worn from years of gloom and hopelessness. Truth be told, the smidge of faith still present in his nearly hollow heart bounded him to this earth, much like a dying flame that keeps a homeless man warm, and he wasn’t sure why he still believed at all. Hurriedly, he dressed and ate a meager meal, hardly able to be called sustenance, much less breakfast. 

He stepped into a grim world, where wheels ran over cobblestones with no end in sight, where children cried to their mothers at six-thirty, where men grunted as they passed each other on the pavement, as if the words were too much for their stale voices to muster. The priest hung his head low and shuffled past like the others, barely listening to the monotony: those wheels on the cobblestone, those quiet cries of the young ones, those grunts of begrudged men, the rain pelting the ground with an odd and considerable force. 

“Ah, Father McKenzie,” an aged man said as he entered the chapel, “what a quaint day to be married, isn’t it?” 

The priest's drooping eyes spared some effort to smile, though he could not grasp this man’s unbelievably optimistic view of the weather’s warrant for positivity. Still he nodded and uttered a placid “good morning” in succession. 

“Well, I don’t suppose you think it to be a pleasant setting, but it does remind me of when I was a boy, and now my boy is becoming a man, you see.” 

“Personal significance is but a detail, Mr. Quinne, it would be special nonetheless,” he paused to glare down the aisle, “...of course it is a good thing that you’ve found a place to tether yourself into the future.” 

“A family history is something of significance, Father, and make no mistake, it shan’t be lost!” Mr. Quinne said with some fervor. 

“Right you are,” the priest replied, all the while discrediting the man’s words in his mind, which left so little room for consideration. 

The priest readied himself privately, taking small but necessary precautions for minuscule setbacks that had happened in the past. A bride with cold feet, a groom with second thoughts, he spun a web of lies to coax her down the aisle, and lure him up to the altar; a lull in the vows was quickly remedied with a universal quote, a distraught family member was comforted with alleged words of wisdom, all of which written on a notebook that he kept next to his pocket bible, easily memorized more than a decade ago. He thought that he must have believed in these tools, wholeheartedly, at some point in time, but the truth in them had faded long ago. 

 He felt the early morning chill sneak in through the cracks of the church, into the sleeves of his colorful robe, though it might as well have been gray for as vibrant as the actual colors were. He marveled at how warm the church looked, how welcoming and comfortable, and how icy the air felt as he stepped up to the altar. The round and pockmarked groom stood just in front of him, to the side, staring boredly down the aisle. His suit was ill fitting, tight in certain places and loose in others, a cheap gray color, yet there was undeniable bounce in his demeanor. For as distracted as he seemed according to his facial expression, the priest supposed that he must have been a little excited. 

The organ sounded, and all eyes darted toward the back of the church. The pews were sprinkled with unentertained guests who--prior to the start of the music--were audibly sighing, tapping their feet, making small noises for the sole purpose of expressing their impatience. The priest found it strange that few of them sat within a meter of each other. The bride smiled hesitantly, but the priest took no notice of her. He eyes shot towards a woman in the last pew on the left side of the church. She wore a dark gray hat, and a withering winter jacket. Her shoulders were bowed, but when she looked up, her face was serene; calming in a place where everyone’s emotions spiked in negative directions, anxious, angry, impatient, possessive. The priest kept his eyes on the woman, who stared just above his head. In fact, he could hardly pay attention to the ceremony, he took no notice of the bride’s subtle unwillingness to repeat after him, he didn’t recognize the moments prior to the placing of the rings, when the groom’s mother scoffed loudly enough for everyone to hear, when the vows were read with such awkwardness, it brought tears of embarrassment to the groom. He strolled through the process without the small notes that he had made for this very reason. The woman’s gaze never fell, never faltered. Perhaps her eyes were fixed on the cross, he thought, mindlessly rattling off the words he had spoken so many times before. 

“By the power vested in me…” 

Suddenly, and seemingly without movement, the woman’s eyes were on the priest. For the first time in years he stumbled over the phrases, but regained his composure quickly enough, though not so completely. His hands were shaking ever so slightly, and despite the bleak weather of morrow, he found himself in a cold sweat. 

“...m-man and wife.” 

The unhappy couple took several uncoordinated and uneasy steps to alight from the altar, rice was thrown into the air, plentifully, but without excitement. It fell in large heaps over a carpet the color of dried blood; down the poorly decorated aisle, it descended. A waste, the priest thought, a waste of food. 

Disgruntled family members rose from their uncomfortable positions and curtly exited the church. The doors let in a gust of wind and wayward drops of rain that wet the carpet before the entrance. The priest’s eyes switched to the very last pew, but the woman was no longer there. A confusing surge of disappointment briefly coursed through his veins. He swallowed nervously, stupidly wondering if she’d been there at all. 

He stepped down from the altar and stared at the ground several paces before him, where behold, the woman kneeled, discreetly gathering rice. Her slender hands, worn from working, swept over the carpet and let the grains fall into a small bag that she’d balanced next to her, where her hat was tossed. She shuffled back and forth between two spots where the rice was concentrated, and then paused in between the too. She stopped, and looked at her hands that were visibly trembling, she brought them to the ground and pressed them to the carpet. Then she took up the bag and the hat in a single swift movement, leaving the priest to stand in a moment of sadness, a moment to ponder what he’d seen. A poor woman, thin from lack of nourishment, resorting to the advantage of a tradition older than anything he’d ever believed in. She left with her shoulders straight, walking into the rain with no qualms. She paused before continuing down the pavement, and looked up towards the sky. The priest’s mouth was parted in a small wave of shock, and she turned toward him. 

He stood in the middle of the aisle, having taken a few steps toward the spectacle, she, just outside the chapel. Her eyes were a deep green, her skin was fair, and looked to be paper thin. Yes, the priest thought, like paper stretched over wilting bones, stained with purple and black round her only trait that let him know she was young, too young to be destitute. Her small hands grasped the bag, and when she walked into the fog and rain, it was as if she’d vanished. 

Weeks later, the priest’s mind flashed back to the woman every so often. To her bony hands, the tiredness etched along the sharp lines of her face. Her calmness, as if she herself was unaware of her state, her status. 

One day, after serving a mass, he conversed quietly with a few of the church goers, exchanging meaningly and often false pleasantries about his life and theirs, chatting aimlessly about the news and the weather.

“And did you hear they found a girl passed away in the old shack, Cormick Place?” 

The priest’s breath hitched. 

“Why yes, what a shame, a shame it is.” 

“Well, she couldn’t ‘ave been a that much importance, could she?” 

“Well, a life's a life, Mrs. Porter.” 

“My son went and found the poor girl, he did, battered and beaten, and horribly bruised,” Mr. Quinne chimed in. 

“Bruised down her legs was she?” 

“Believe so, might’ve been a whore…” 

“Was she killed?” 

“Yes, I think.” 

“She’s to be buried here then, in the church graveyard?” 

“Why yes, I suppose.” 

The priest’s hands shook with fear. He hadn’t the slightest idea why he knew it was the woman, and he denied himself the knowledge of his rightness, but he knew. It ached at the bottom of his heart, the poor woman, it was her. 

Later that day, he visited Cormick Place, the house where she was found. From the outside, it didn’t seem like the home of a poor person, searching the ground for minute servings of tasteless food, nor did it seem the house of the distant relatives of nobility. Its paint was dulled, but it did not chip, the windows were cleaned, though cracked and scratched, presumably by other physical forces. The door was left ajar, yet no constable wandered within twenty meters of the spot. The priest went in, if only to quietly observe. 

A jar sat next to the entrance, a broken staircase led to the sky, meaning the ceiling was missing a large piece of itself. The wall to the right of him was made of plaster, broken through in some places, the wall to the left of him was made of brick and had been chipped away at until there was a hollow space large enough to fit a sizable box in. Assorted papers were scattered around the floor, as well as pieces of wood, clouds of dust, and jars that were smaller than the one by the door, many half filled with rice. In the far corner, he spotted a large burgundy spatter coating the dirty ground, where a gray hat lay just beside it. The priest left soon after.

That night, a storm blew in from the west that rattled the trees and shook the house, the buildings, the hearts of the people. Rain and ice hailed from above, pounding the streets, the cobblestone, the pavements and walkways, the roofs of buildings, the bell above the chapel. The priest sat in his sinking bed at an ungodly hour, writing away in his little book by a sparse flame. He could not figure out for the life of him why a few moments merely looking at this woman had caused a sea of emotion like he hadn’t felt in years. 

The next morning, the sun shone upon the streets and the houses. The wind blew softly, the clouds hung suspended many miles away from the chapel and the home of the priest. He awoke with tears in his eyes and dressed quickly, somehow finding the peculiar strength to relish his small breakfast. He walked toward the chapel with his hands clasped in sorrow, feeling the presence of his book next to his bible. The children still cried, the men still grunted, the cobblestones were still graced with shabby wheels, but the absence of the rain had brought a new silence, one he couldn’t have described. 

He made his way to the church graveyard, where the grass was overgrown and the stones were crumbling, where a man shoveled dirt onto an unearthed spot. 

“Mornin’ Father,” the man said, “wonderful weather, in’it?” 

“Good morning, sir,” he said, calmly, feeling the lump in his throat. “Allow me, then,” he said, not so much 

offering as he was taking the shovel without acknowledging any objection, “get on, enjoy the day, please.” 

There was a frantic pain in the priest’s voice, and the man’s expression showed that he noticed. He let go of the shovel, and walked as quickly as possible in the opposite direction. 

The priest dropped the shovel and stood with silent tears slipping down his mournful face. He took the book where he had written a sermon, and read it word for word, in front of the grave, in an unwavering voice. His eyes had dried up by the time he was finished, and he sank to his knees before the mound of dirt, which he made smooth with shaking hands. He sat for a few fleeting moments, as if he were being timed. He studied the smaller details, the shade of green the grass was, the texture of the dirt, the gravestone that read “E. Rigby” and nothing else but the year she died. The priest stood and took somber steps to leave the graveyard, brushing his hands on his sleeves. He walked, and he listened, expecting to hear the wheels, the grunts, the cries, perhaps the birds chirping, but it was as if the world was muted.