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stepped into the yard. The night sky was starless and black, the air damp with an expectation of rain. High up, a faint glitter occurred in the atmosphere, as if the stars had been crushed to microscopic powder and sown by a miserly hand. Kylie let it distract her a moment, and Father Jim got her, his arm an iron bar locked across her throat. She dropped the shovel and clawed at him. She thrashed and kicked. Kylie was five foot one and weighed one hundred and five pounds. Father Jim was built to Biblical proportions. He increased the pressure on her throat. Her vision throbbed and she went limp.
    When she came to, Jim had her slung over his shoulder, her head hanging straight down, the taste of vomit in the back of her mouth. Kylie’s head pounded. She swallowed and it hurt because of the crushing pressure Jim had applied to her throat. Though it felt like she’d been unconscious a long time it couldn’t have been more than a minute. He carried her through Billy’s house, crossing the open dining area toward the hallway to the bathroom and bedrooms. Billy lay sprawled by the open front door, where Father Jim had left him. Only not quite. He was in a different position, having stretched out his right hand, reaching forward, dragging himself, his face down. Kylie saw this very briefly, and then they passed into the hallway.
    Jim dumped her on the bed. The candle still glowed calmly next to the Yeats book. Now captured in the black window glass were a bed, a girl, a candle and a tall man with straggly gray hair; he had lost his hat. Kylie tried to sit up. Sickening pain swooned through her head. The priest pushed her firmly back down and held her there.
    “Don’t move,” he said, his hand hard against her chest.
    “I’ll tell my mother,” Kylie said.
    “You have to get right. I finally realized that was the problem. Even your mother realizes it and accepts it. Maggie isn’t stupid.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “Lie still now.”
    He removed a ball of twine from his overcoat pocket. Kylie stared at it. He grabbed her right wrist and pulled her arm over her head and began tying her to the bed post. Kylie tried to pull free, and he squeezed her wrist so hard she thought it would snap.
    “Lie still .”
    “Don’t do that, please don’t.”
    He quickly finished with the left wrist. When he reached for her right she swung her fist into his neck with all the strength she could summon, which wasn’t much. But it was enough to make him gag and back away from her. It didn’t matter, though. Before she could even try to untie her left wrist, Father Jim struck her an open-handed blow across the face, his callused hand like an oak plank. The blow left her mostly insensible while he finished tying her. After a while she regained some presence of mind. Her wrists were secured to the headboard posts and her ankles were tied to the footboard posts, her legs spread wide apart. He had removed her pants.
    At first she didn’t see him. Then his voice came out of the darkness in the corner of the room, where the candlelight barely reached his eyes. He was sitting in a chair, holding something in his lap, contemplating it. Kylie couldn’t see what the thing was.
    “When God’s Judgment befell the Earth,” he said, “I thought He had forsaken us, and I despaired. I imbibed and became cruel to my brothers.” Father Jim spoke in a measured, practiced tone, as if delivering one of his pickup truck sermons, as if he had rehearsed the words.
    “My faith broke utterly,” he continued. “Broke upon the rock of my despair. In my mind there was no God. But in time I came to realize that of course the Creator was indeed in perpetual residence, and that He had a plan. He always has a plan.”
    Kylie pulled at her restraints. The twine dug into her skin.
    “‘Be as little children,’” Father Jim said. “This was the Lord’s admonishment. And after God smote the world those who remained did became as