Seamus Watson is black, but he was adopted by redheads. One woman would not be able to keep him sane, so he has two. He looks great in a kilt.

Aequilibrium (April 20, 2010. Issue 16.)

The dustbowl drive between Toluca de Lerdo and Atlixco is a stew of trash, dirt, and stones. In the hundred or so miles we’d travelled so far, Nopaltzin had pulled the jeep over twice to rinse the air filter, using most of my bottled water. The heat and the particulates made the car seem asthmatic, wheezing and choking through the grooves in the landscape.

"Another trip to the convento, eh, Hombueno?"

Nopaltzin was a much better driver than conversationalist. I took most of what he said very lightly. It is difficult for me to put much care into a man with a comb-over, not to mention his mismatched shoelaces

I despise being called Hombueno. God is good. I am of sin by design.

On my first trip to the convent, I pulled over on the side of the road to help a woman who I thought had fallen with heatstroke. I had no way to know she'd been there for at least a week. I flipped her over to discover she’d been baked in the sun, the wrinkles in her skin ironed out by the mummifying outdoor heat.

As the townspeople saw my hand clasped to my rosary, attempting to console the lifeless woman, they determined I was the Hombre Bueno, the "good man" since I stopped to help, when all others just passed her by.

Since then, the shortened nickname had stuck.

I prefer Padre. Padre implies leading the child down the path, and not ruling out discipline. Discipline and respect are good ways to stay alive.

Atlixco is separated enough that the residents of the convent have made a vow and industry of being women. There were times in the 1800's where it functioned as not much more than a brothel. If you could make the trip, it would be made worth the while.

I, however, am a dedicated man; to my cloth, my god, and my wife. I would never take comfort there. On the contrary, by mission, I am the liberator of those that would grow to become the machines for earthly delight. Today, I need to find a boy.

"You know Hombueno, the times of fun at the convento, they are close to over. Three of the sisters have fallen to La Infirmidad this year. Will you take all of the children this time?"

"Nopaltzin, you are the one driving. Do you think all of the children of Santa Clara will fit in your jeep?"

A straightforward stare and shiver response were enough to signal his lack of trust. We'd rarely spoken about it over the six years he’d known me. He thinks I cherry pick the children here, to take back and sully with the hobbies of some of my peers. I could never reveal my marriage, or the fact that my twelfth child will be born days from now. Logically, there is safety in not arguing against his assumption. History has taught him and everyone else to turn the other cheek, to look the other way in these matters. The irony is not lost on me.

For sake of Nopaltzin, for the Church, for all of the best in the long run, I reveal as little as possible. Nopaltzin has no symmetry, and no place in the plan. He is a tool that makes work easier.

I have only been truly open with one person. It’s impossible for most to understand my relationship with God. I am the result of a calling, and Dragana is my partner in mission. She is a chance that I was appointed to take. I boarded my first plane to leave anything familiar, and there I found her. The arid and ugly of Mexico made that first trip seem that much more nostalgic. I could not think of how anyone had ever owned a blanket here. In Serbia, blankets were gold.

Dragana worked as an advocate for an orphanage where I provided grief counseling for the displaced who’d lost siblings. I pledged service to God two weeks before, and was eager to get out of the city as quickly as possible. The bus to Serbia was surprisingly sparsely volunteered. Enroute to Susek, the truck engine seized, leaving us laid out on the bed, listening to the animals in the shadow of the Danube, drinking Rakia to stay warm late into dark. Homemade alcohol was a new experience. For her, in comparison to the aftermath of civil unrest, a bedraggled, forced-bearded priest looked pretty tempting.

By the time the sun began to creep into view, the half gallon gas can we’d rigged suitable for potables was drip dry.

“Bless me father, for I have sinned.” She slurred into my ear pulling close to me. I had never taken a confessional before. She was my first.

“I have cursed at God and taken his name in vain. I have given up my faith.” I was confused by her tone. Maybe it was inebriation? She seemed to joke, but to me a loss of faith is devestating. You can never lose faith. Laws of man, pretenses of morality, nothing should be strong enough to shake faith.

This is my job. To bring her back to us, Him and me.

“Why would you lose faith when you still have the blessing of being on the bountiful earth?” My words sounded saccharine, even to me. I’d seen confessions in the movies, and this was the best I could do.

“God gives me no bounties.”

This was cold. I knew the meaning behind it was more serious than drunk talk in a pickup should be. I could already feel His actions in place, these small moments being much larger than they seemed from my limited view. He knew we were together; He put us here. He does all! We are the ones that sit back and apply judgement, foolishly trying to make sense of His wisdom.

She had been diagnosed as barren, which to a drunken 19 year old, even with limited experience, seemed to be an invitation. God had given me a present, a confidante, a Mary. He spoke to me and told me to let go, to be less dogmatic for a moment; and reminded me to trust Him. There was not a second where I considered being “safe” or regulating my rhythm. As she climaxed I could hear His voice in her. I was advised to sew and to reap. I was enlightened that the spark of my seed is the start of a holy bonfire. The connection surged beyond fluid, flesh, alcohol. As God and I laid with her, pleasing her, satisfying her base, we also fixed her. I felt our conception in the moment it occurred. The sounds of a lion being born from a stone. The animals stopped their noise to marvel at the hand of God, waving over us two.

Just before dawn we finished our tumble. The remoteness of our transport trouble had removed us far from anything but the farms, most of which had been razed to campfires. We were loud enough to wake the dead, and in some ways did.

“You are amazing for a priest, are you sure you haven’t done that before?” Dragana sputtered between heaving catch-up breaths Bedding her until she was unable to speak coherently felt like an accomplishment.

“You aren’t born a priest! I got some practice in. I was in the fuck-before-you-frock program.” Dragana could not help but laugh. I used this sort of humor often to attempt swaying conversations from the subject of sex. Usually a priest dropping the f-bomb makes everything else just stop.

“You should give up the collar, and come live with me in Novi Sad. You could do the same amount of good for the kids, and enjoy the benefits of being in a house where you have unlimited access to me.” As she spoke, she spread her legs for me again, to remind me of what I would be missing if I said no. “If I shack up with a Father, that makes me a Mother of sorts, right?.”

I felt the mood drop. It was one of those points where you’re too drunk to know where your mouth is going. Her words didn’t pass through her own personal filter, and she’d said something aloud she’d never wanted to hear.

I felt her shoulders sink as she lay on my chest. She was devastated. No amount of humor or awkward ironic profanity could make this feel more like right.

“Mothers are not all they are cracked up to be. Or fathers either. Look at me. I am a Father, but with none of the benefit other than the title. I have no one to carry my legacy, or watch grow up. I am a Father to everyone, but a friend to no one. I am barren too, and not by choice, by divine appointment”

She snapped back at my bumbled attempt at empathy

“But what is there in the world other than to create someone to carry the knowledge of your family history? Your history is the Church, and its stories are in the Bible, and in other churches, all through the world. Your children are God’s children. To be a mother is to be complete.”

Refuting her would have been useless. The conviction of her tone let me know that these had been the arguments she’d used internally to justify her anger with God about her infertility.

“If only my mother had been infertile.”

Did I say it under my breath as intended?

I felt her shoulders tense against me. She looked at me horrified, like I had slurred her profoundly. I was too deep to do anything but fix the situation with truth.

“How dare…” she began as anger welled, I could see her fist balling to strike me. I folded.

“Can you forgive me for my sins?” I blurted like answering a question just after the buzzer. Her open hand fell flat on my face, the only force behind it the gravity of my table-turn. I did not pause for her reply.

“The relationship with my Mother was far from normal. When she first explained to me His plan, which the other children saw as something dirty, something horrible, my conditioning from society had told me to recoil and hide from the suggestion. It was my place to honor her. In denying her, I denied God. He has since helped me heal the misunderstandings of my childhood. It wasn’t sex. Mother’s don’t have sex with their children. No one would make that choice. There was no choice. He had guided her to this conclusion, and guided me to be born from her to complete this plan.”

I had given myself up to the idea that if she could run, she would do it at that moment.

“Then, through the death of my only child, a daughter, and the passing of my sister, I learned that God provides balance. If I don’t trust in what he tells me, I get no closer to him. It’s not mine to question his authority, not in my actions or those things I have no control over.” This was an affirmation that before had only been expressed internally.

I could see that she took some comfort in what most would see as freakishness. She’d finally felt someone to feel sorrier for than herself. She seemed to want to help me. The tragic crashing of post coital euphoria had brought an epiphany to her, and a therapy to me.

She was the first person I’d let touch me willingly. This was right, and God affirmed it for me. I feel sorry for those that wander about looking for a sign from Him. The conversations we have had together. The days we spent seated in the makeshift shrine of my closet. The stories He told me about Joshua, Issac, even Jesus, that the apostles could not be privy to. He had explained that without seeing the future, they’d have had no comprehension of the rest of His message. I felt proud to have Him so close to me.

She waited at least a full five minutes before speaking a word. She held me in a way that I would never give up.

“What happened to your daughter?” Slowly and delicately she rolled out her question.

“I don’t really like to think or talk about her. God’s hand, natural causes.” I had never been asked before.

“I can understand not wanting to revisit it. How old were you?”

“Fifteen.”

She hadn’t asked my current age, and my scruff helped hide the fact that I was still not very far removed from that time

“My sister was murdered in the same year.”

I could see she was preparing for more exposition, and I needed to cut things short, before she became scared.

“We are with child.”

She trusted me when I said it, with no flinch. She was committed, and so was I. We laid in a vacuum, held high in His hands, pushed closer to the rising sun. Less than a year later, his abundance brought Josh, the most beautiful child I’d ever seen. Nine pounds of miracle.

The balance was poised to be set, This was the first time I returned God’s favor. I readied to give serenity to one who would not have it otherwise. I’d seen him wandering on the outskirts of a burnt out field as they were hooking the tow line to the site of our first miracle.

He had a badly repaired cleft palate, and stared us down like a hungry animal. When I approached his Mother, and explained that I could make sure he was taken well care of, she looked at me as a saint. She bent to kiss my feet. To her, he was a burden.

I assumed him to be about two years old, and was still being nourished solely on the breast. His stomach was distended. When I picked him up, I was concerned he might float away.

The boy looked into me. He too saw the spark of the plan. All of us wanted this to happen. God and I spoke about the best way to make the boy’s ascension occur. I could not tell Dragana. Not about this part. Not even having a child of her own would make her quite understand what He and I were to do for him.

As darkness settled, the boy and I conversed with Him. The boy had no concept of language, but he stared at my mouth as it moved. God is not inhibited by barriers of syllables and sounds. God spoke to him through me for better than an hour, in a conversation that came through my lips but I was not allowed to hear.

The child did not say a word of response. He laid in front of me ready for his voyage. God explained to him that all would be okay. He was coming home. I slid my rosary around his sunken throat. He made no noise as I tightened it’s grip, twisting it around my fist. Holding him close to me. Taking him back to the source. When his body fell, immediately drew cold, I could tell his burden was lifted as well. According to the fish scale, he weighed seven and a half pounds. Before I sent his corporal shell into the Danube, I tied a fox I’d bought in market that day firmly to his foot. This was as close as I could get; seven pounds of him, about two pounds of fox.

Nine for Him. Nine for me.

Over the next years, Dragana and I would be as close as a secret forbidden marriage would allow. She was very understanding of my needing to do God’s work, as she had been from the beginning. She was getting to do her dream job, which was raising our brood. Serbia was completely under the radar, and that kept everything nice and neat.

It wasn’t until our sixth and seventh child that any true complication arose. My father’s mother was a midwife, and she’d passed down everything she knew to the only child she had, and subsequently my father to me. Because of this, I never felt a need to go to a hospital. Hospitals tend to ask questions that cause trouble. We didn’t even know they were twins until the second started crowning.

Twins proved to be a task.

In the rows of forgotten children I’d encountered at the orphanage, most were glanced over like insects. People shooed them, shuffled them from room to room with no agenda. There was a pattern that He and I had discussed. Each time a new one was born, He would tell me their destined place. He made these particular children invisible. There is no other explanation.

Twins however, drew everyone's attention. They were impossible to ignore. Their mother had died giving birth to them, and the story was heart wrenching, even in a grim place like the orphanage.

With the twins, I felt the plight of the martyr. It was pride against God’s wishes. I experienced doubt. Doubt is why we punish ourselves, and why He punishes us. It was foolish to have doubt. All of it was perfectly aligned. I remember the mix of joy and sickness that came with the twins being born. They were our first girls. Their arrival made me start to question. Balance before had been relatively easy to maintain. But to find twins? The American agencies normally placed twins before they were out of the incubators. I’d only delivered our daughters 4 weeks before these two arrived, motherless at my doorstep!

Why did I still feel need to doubt? I would be punished for sure.

They knew the difference in pressure as I entered the room. My uneased lack of faith caused them to be fearful. God was not going with me into their room if doubt came as well. Children are more perceptive than the masses give them credit for. They began to cry just before I crossed the threshold. I had wanted them to stay asleep, so that this would not be so visceral. Having to do things quickly makes you lose discipline.

I removed the pic line from the smallests arm, and a spew of red shot across my face. I could taste it. This did not feel righteous. He had forsaken me right in midst of this task. Without him, I was weak. No one came to respond to the cry of the two children. No one paid any attention anywhere around here. They had given up.

I was disinterested in seeing blood. I did not care for it. Blood reminded me of the first favor returned in my presence. The two lay there, still steady pouring. They had been put on a thinner to try and keep circulation up from pneumonia. This was my punishment. Seeing the white sheets on the bed developing, being overtaken by this blood. So fresh that it was not copper. It smelled like clean dirt. The sight caused me to faint into a memory. I felt my face hitting the floor, and the darkness of my closed eyes set a backdrop to replay my first moment of doubt.

My father had known what occurred and what God called to him as well.

He shared my sense of faith and duty to serve, but could not give himself to the Church as I had. He did not understand how to keep a wife and be married to Almighty. In this respect I had evolved beyond him.

When God called upon him to make things right with our family, he did not hesitate. I remember seeing my Mother’s face, ash. He’d had no care for the vessel when removing the cargo. He did not love her like I love Dragana.

The blood on their bed looked like more than she could have possibly contained. She looked cleaned by its loss. Like she needed to purge that blood. That blood smelled like the jar of wheat pennies I kept hidden under my bed, old, spoiled.

After my father had miscarried what God called my mistake, he stepped toward me with a deliberateness and a look that showed he was acknowledging me as a grown man.

I had used that look myself when I explained the union of husband and wife to Josh. We were about to have adult conversation, the Lord came through my father that day.

“She dies so that you may yet live.” My father spoke as he handed me the cigar box containing the outcome of his labor and my union.

“And now, as you have laid with my wife, you will leave this house.”

The last gift my parents had given to me was this bundle of things to unwind and understand. I buried my sister and daughter under a moss hill next to the creek. I released my parents that day. I had grown beyond them. The one possession I had been allowed to leave with was something that had no more meaning. The balance for my life had been offset by that of another.

At the local parish, I did not dare to reveal the path that had sent me to them. I told the old hats that I had committed adultery, and gotten another man’s wife with child. After a year of deep thought and prayer, I had come to terms with the fact of my purpose. There is no room here for more. The orphanages were proof of this.

Seeing blood again took me back to a place that God had extracted me from. I awakened to echoes of confused Cossack gibberish.

"Waheela! Waheela!"

Two women seemed to be arguing about who had done this to me, and to the children. I was covered in them, bathed. They were sure we'd all been attacked. I had no idea what they were talking about. As I regained consciousness, I knew it was time to escape. I had to tell Dragana all of it. I let her into the box with me, confessed to the detail, to let her make the decision as to where she stood. I went to her with no doubt or fear, and He was with me.

She was always part of God’s plan. She was the person He had sent as my vessel. At first, she was shaken; looking at things from man’s terms and not His. I opened her eyes to the miracles God had provided us. I assured her that I secured each of our miracles by maintaining the state of the world. I told her about my vision, when she and I were first together. How at the peak of our union in lucid dream I had seen the little cigar box. How I opened it to find it empty, and watched the earth tilt off axis, the fulcrum at the moss hill by the creek. How the weightlessness of the box was enough to throw all into upheaval, and slosh seas and oceans into another great flood. It all made sense to me at that moment. She had been sent to save me and remind me that I am righteous, and that which I do is destined to be righteous, for it is direct from the will of God. She as mine is also Him. Together we are the ones in charge of rebuilding faithful and clean.

She packed her belongings and we came here. Where now Nopalatzin was singing to himself in a Spanish dialect his great Grandfather would have understood, but I did not. I had zoned out in the over- analyzation brought on by some fleeting thought of telling him everything, I would not and could not let on.

“Awake Hombueno?”

Apparently my daydream had not gone unnoticed. He had a puzzled intensity to his question. I suppose my brow was giving away the seriousness of inner thought.

“I’m doing fine, Nopal. Just tired. Thinking about all the children. Trying to decide if I can fit them all in this jeep.” The answer relieved him, as if I were saying “I’m not having sex with these kids.” He chuckled a bit before his reply.

“Ahh, Hombueno, you are a good Father, I knew you were a good Father! I knew you are a true believer and shepherd. Thank you Father for devoting your life to the church and to the children. You are the image of Jesus to me. You are leading these kids to a better life.”

He was so assured that his foot hit the gas pedal, sending us speeding through the dust clouds. I could see the tower of the convent getting closer now.

“Hombueno, we are almost there. Thank you for being here for the people of our village. Thank you for taking care of the mistakes the women at the convento have made, and turning those mistakes into something beautiful. When the children are adopted, where do they go? Is it to the United States?”

“They will go to places far greater than the United States. These children are special, and they will be taken care of by God himself.” My reply caused a huge grin to appear on Neopaltzin’s face.

“Taken care of by God through you, Hombueno. You are the one that brings God to these children. Here they are without hope. You cause them to be reborn!”

I accept my place but I could never take credit for His choices for me.

“Jesus causes them to be reborn, Nopal. God took him from this earth to prove his power and show his love.” I wiped the dirt from my cracked lips as we came to a stop at the front gate of the convent.

“This is true, Padre. He died so that we may yet live.” Nopaltzin put his hand on my shoulder in gesture of kinship, and opened the door of the jeep.

“Yes he did, Nopal. Indeed he did.”