The Devil's bed

chapter
twenty-two

David Moses,” the priest said unhappily and shook his head. “It’s been twenty years since I heard that name.”

They sat at the bar in the lounge connected to the bowling alley. The television above the liquor bottles was tuned to a Twins’ game, but the sound was turned down. Father Don Cannon fingered a shot glass of Dewar’s that was backed up by a chaser of beer. Bo was nursing a bottle of Leinenkugel’s. He’d already told the priest everything he knew about David Moses, and everything he suspected.

“You really think he tried to kill Tom Jorgenson?”

“I’m almost certain of it,” Bo said. “I just don’t know why.”

The priest signaled the bartender. “We’re going to a booth, Patrick. I’ll let you know when we need another round.” He motioned for Bo to follow, and he walked to a dimly lit booth well back in a corner. After they sat down, he slammed back his Dewar’s and took a hard draw on his beer. “Did you know he chose his own name? David Solomon Moses.”

“What do you mean, he chose it?” Bo asked.

“He didn’t even have a name when he came to us. His existence had never been officially noted, and his mother had never given him a name. Or one that he would tell us. This was probably the least of the sadnesses in that boy’s history.”

“You know about his history?”

“Until he left us, anyway. David wasn’t Catholic, wasn’t anything really, and so what he shared, he shared with me only as his confidant, not his confessor. And more’s the pity.”

The thunder from the alleys almost drowned the priest’s dour voice, and Bo leaned nearer.

“David came to us in unusual circumstances. He was sixteen, just orphaned. No other family that the authorities could identify. He wasn’t a good candidate for adoption. Kids that age seldom are. The social worker assigned to his case believed that St. Jerome’s was a better option than foster care. After I heard about David, so did I.

“He was the most remarkable young man with whom I’ve ever worked. Brilliant. He arrived at St. Jerome’s with a limited understanding of the world and proceeded to read quite literally everything in our library. He soaked up knowledge. I remember many times sitting up with him in my study late at night deep in ecclesiastical arguments. He had a wonderfully analytic mind. I admit, at one point I entertained the hope he might even have a religious calling. But that was my own blindness.

“I knew there was great potential in David, both good and bad. And the bad wasn’t his fault.”

“His childhood?” Bo said.

Father Cannon finished his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “That boy was raised in the basement of an old farmhouse by a man about as near to the devil as a man can get. By all rights, David should have been totally ruined, but he wasn’t. There was a strength, a resilience in him that was remarkable. Do you believe we come already forged into this world, already created as the beings we will be?” He didn’t wait for Bo to answer. “I do. David was born strong, and he resisted as well as he could the forces that sought to break him. He told me things about his childhood that made me weep, Mr. Thorsen.” The priest paused a moment, and Bo thought his old eyes might yet be fighting back tears. “I believed we had David on the right track. He was in school. He’d made the gymnastics team. He’d joined the debating society. He seemed to have made friends. He was blossoming, and it was wonderful to see. In those days, I thought of him a little like Lazarus. He’d been dead, but he was alive again. Then the thing happened with Tom Jorgenson and his daughter, and we lost David forever.”

The priest hesitated.

“You can’t leave me hanging, Father. Tom Jorgenson’s life is at stake.”

“You’re certain of that?”

“I’m just about to the place where I’d stake everything on it.”

The priest thought it over. “We might need another round for this.” He signaled the bartender. When the drinks came, he threw the Dewar’s down his throat and followed it with a swallow of beer. Braced, he addressed Bo again.

“As I said, David was doing well. I knew some of what had gone on in his life, but I was aware there were things David kept inside. He was scarred in ways that didn’t show immediately, and I was so full of myself, so pleased that I had this kid so quickly headed toward a normal life, that I ignored the warning signs.”

“What signs?” Bo asked.

“We had an arrangement with Wildwood in those days. Kids from St. Jerome’s were employed during the summer and on weekends in the fall to help with the work in the orchards. We bused them out, bused them back. I arranged to have David work there. His first day he met Kathleen Jorgenson.

“Girls were a topic David and I discussed occasionally. The only woman he’d ever really known was his mother, so the opposite sex was a mystery to him. The first thing I did was to assure him that this was normal. Actually, he was quite popular with girls at school. He was smart and athletic and the uniqueness of his circumstances, his being an orphan, made him attractive to girls his age. Although David was cordial enough, he kept them all at a distance, studying them, I think, so that he wouldn’t be out of control. When he met Kathleen Jorgenson, all his precautions went poof, turned to dust. He fell head over heels in love with her. The problem was that she didn’t feel the same way about him. Friends, that’s all they were in her eyes. Good friends.

“‘How can I get her to love me?’ he’d plead with me. He became a broken record, although he controlled himself admirably around her. Or so it appeared.”

“Any idea what Tom Jorgenson thought of David?”

“From what I gathered, he liked the boy quite a lot. He invited David to stay to dinner on several occasions. I know what David thought of him. In many ways, he saw Tom Jorgenson as a father figure, admired his intelligence and his accomplishments.

“As summer drew to a close, David began coming back later and later from Wildwood. He didn’t ride the bus with the other kids. He had this little motorbike he’d built himself from scrap parts he found in the equipment shed at St. Jerome’s. He used it to get himself to and from the orchards. He’d come in late and refuse to talk about what he’d been up to. It was obvious he hadn’t been drinking or using drugs. He was too independent to be involved in a gang. I was perplexed, but I let myself believe it wasn’t serious. Then one night, I got a call from the sheriff’s office. They had David in custody.

“I arrived at the county jail and found a young man I’d never seen before, a very different David. Cold. Eyes hard as steel. It wasn’t anger or fear. It was something frightening, so void of compassion it hardly seemed human. He had a horrible bruise across his forehead and the side of his face. The sheriff told me Kate Jorgenson was claiming that David had attacked her, tried to sexually assault her. As if that wasn’t bad enough, David was claiming it wasn’t him who attacked Kate. It was Tom Jorgenson.”

The priest stopped and lifted his glass to his lips. From the bowling alley came the crash of pins exploding out of their neat formations.

“Tom Jorgenson?” Bo asked incredulously.

“That’s right.”

“I don’t remember hearing anything about that.”

“That’s because it was kept quiet. I arranged to speak with David alone. He told me that he’d been sneaking back to Wildwood in the evenings. He’d sit in the orchard in the dark and gaze up at Kate’s bedroom window. The boy was love-struck. That night, he saw her leave the house and head toward the bluff overlooking the river. A few minutes later, Tom Jorgenson followed her. David followed them both. He claimed that when he reached the bluff, he found Tom trying to force himself on Kate, and he attempted to intervene. Tom vehemently denied it. He maintained he’d been working in the barn and had heard her screams. He hurried to the bluff and found David lying there unconscious. Kate’s clothes were torn. She was hysterical. All of this was substantiated by Tom’s brother, Roland, who’d heard the screams, too, and had come running.

“I didn’t know what to do. I tried to reason with David, but he refused to back away from his story. Tom was beside himself. Who wouldn’t be in the face of such circumstances? Any publicity, the slightest leak, and the whole thing could blow up into an ugly mess. An allegation like David’s could do irreparable damage. Of course, neither the sheriff’s office nor the county attorney had any intention of allowing such a statement made by a kid like David to become public, if they could help it. But no one was exactly certain what should be done.

“It was Annie who finally suggested the military. She pointed out that David was now seventeen, of age if he had the consent of his legal guardian. He was certainly bright enough and physically capable of handling the training. It was an option she occasionally offered in her courtroom to keep a kid out of jail. She suggested a compromise. If David agreed not to make his allegation public and join the service, no charges would be brought against him. If he refused, the county attorney was prepared to charge him as an adult with criminal sexual assault.

“I talked it over with David. I pointed out to him that it would probably come down to a question of his word against the Jorgensons’. In a trial, all the sordid details of his own past would become public knowledge. Did he really want that? He looked at me, and he asked, did I believe him?”

After a few moments of silence, Bo said, “Did you?”

The priest contemplated the last of his beer and thought awhile before he answered. “I’ve worked with troubled kids most of my life. Every once in a while they’ve fooled me, but not often. Yes, I believed him. Or believed, at least, whoever it was who attacked Kate Jorgenson, it wasn’t David. But I also believed absolutely Tom Jorgenson wouldn’t assault his own daughter. So there didn’t seem to be a clear truth anywhere. This much I did know. Once a jury heard David’s history, there was no way in hell they were going to believe him. In the end, I told him it didn’t matter what I thought. But I did suggest that going away was an answer that would hurt no one. He looked at me as if I’d simply washed my hands of him, abandoned him completely. Shortly after that, I signed his enlistment papers.” The priest finished his drink and shoved the empty glass away. “Now you tell me these things about David, and how can I not believe I had a hand in shaping him to this?”

The priest looked ready to slide under the table.

“Father Cannon, if David Moses has revenge on his mind, you may be in danger, too.”

The priest waved off his concern. “I corresponded with him briefly after he left. I told him I prayed for his well-being. He wrote me back saying that he felt no animosity toward me. It was the Jorgensons who’d betrayed him.” He sat back and rubbed his eyes. “Mr. Thorsen, I’m tired. Is there anything more I can do for you?”

“I don’t think so. You’ve been helpful.”

The priest picked up his ball bag and started out. He turned back. “What we are, we are forever. David may have done some horrible things, but inside him somewhere is still a remarkable human being. Please, whatever it is you ultimately have to do, try to keep that in mind.”

The priest left through the lounge door and pushed out into the warm, dark night, leaving Bo to wonder what, ultimately, it was that he would have to do.