The Devil's bed

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.”