Blank Slate

“Bless me Father for I have sinned,” said the boy. “This is my first confession.”

There was a brief pause, during which the boy wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers and stole a glance at the screen to his right, though he could not see the priest on the other side, and realized with a pang of despair that he had left the sheet Ms Waters had given him with the words on it on the bus. He shut his eyes and tried to run through the sequence of lines as when they had to recite poems in class, but the prosaic terrain lacked the steadiness of verse and he stumbled after the first two sentences. Did he have to say something else now or was he supposed to wait for a response? Had he already made a mistake that the priest was giving him a chance to correct? Could the priest be running late? Just as he was considering these possibilities, a low, expectant voice broke the silence.

“And what would you like to confess?”

The boy relaxed, grateful for the prompt, though disappointed at having forgotten the steps, and put off slightly by the unfamiliarity of the priest’s voice. It was a surprise despite his having heard that the priest who would hear his class’s confessions was not the one who normally said mass. In fact, he had heard quite a bit about it over the past few days because of the handful of his classmates who assured everyone that this priest was very stern and very old and that he did not like children at all. The boy was not sure how they knew so much, however, as they had never been to confession either. Anyway the priest did not sound particularly old or stern to the boy, although it was hard to tell from such a short sentence.

What was worse was that his mind had suddenly gone blank. He thought of the list of sins he had written on his script and again wished he had brought it in with him. He stretched the silence until it felt unacceptable to let it continue and decided that the only way forward was to make something up.

“I… I tell lies… sometimes,” he said. But this was too vague, he thought to himself. He needed to elaborate. “Like last week,” he continued, “on Tuesday, when I wasn’t finished my homework but I wanted to go play football so I said I’d done it even though I hadn’t. And then when the teacher asked to see it I said another boy stole it and tore it up and she believed me. So he got in trouble and I didn’t.”

None of this was true. The boy had, as usual, completed his homework on Tuesday and shown it dutifully to Ms Waters next morning. But, suddenly, as if the lie had been loud enough to trigger an avalanche in his mind, he recalled one of the sins from his list: the fight he had had with Toby Stones at school the week before over an accusation of cheating in a game on the playground.

“The boy I blamed was angry,” he said, inwardly proud of being able to glide so smoothly from fiction to reality. “So the next day he came up to me during break and shoved me and I fell, but I grabbed his coat and pulled him down, too, and when he fell he broke his wrist and now he has to wear a cast on his arm.” The boy stopped speaking. Having given his account, it seemed clear that it had been closer to an accident than a real fight. He was not sure whether it still counted as a sin. In any case it would have to do, as nothing more came to mind and, besides, he did not want his confession to go on for too long. Already, he thought, moving his stiff knees, he had been in the dark booth for some time.

“Now you say, ‘I’m sorry for these and all my sins’,” said the priest gently after a moment. The boy repeated the phrase. “It appears to me that this fight, and that boy’s injury, came about as results of your lie. Do you agree?”

The boy nodded, remembered the priest could not see him, and said, “Yes.”

“Do you see, then, how lies can have consequences greater than those we imagine at the time of utterance?” The boy did not understand the last word, but answered that he did see. The priest went on, his words now lost on a listener preoccupied by the realization that his fabrication claimed for him far more responsibility for Toby’s wrist than did the truth. Finally, he was jolted back to the booth by a question.

“Do you know the Act of Contrition?”

The boy, his face warm, replied that he did not. The priest guided him through the prayer, his murmurs dissipating into the shadowy corners of the booth with a solvency that made them difficult to follow in the boy’s distracted state. He nevertheless managed to latch onto the sentences one by one and repeat them, echoing his guide’s detached yet solemn tone. The priest then said a prayer of his own, and told the boy to tell his teacher the truth, to apologize to the boy he had lied about and to say three Hail Mary’s.

“I don’t know that one. I’m sorry.”

“Ask your teacher. She may have a missal.”

The boy left the booth and shuffled over to his class. Ms Waters did not have a missal, but did have a small notebook in which she scribbled down the prayer and tore out the page. The boy opened his mouth to tell her that nobody had stolen his homework before remembering that there was no need to do so, since she did not believe anything of the sort in the first place. Instead, he thanked her and made his way to a pew to kneel down.

Ms Waters’s handwriting was small, pretty and hardly legible. There were a few undecipherable words the boy simply had to skip. The remainder he sounded out quietly, tracing his finger back and forth beneath the lines and wondering what they meant.