frigging long walks you made us go on. You had us walking all day sometimes. Was that supposed to be part of our punishment? Like did the province order we had to walk a certain number of miles every week?”
We turn and head back in the direction from which we came, and Owen shakes his head.
“Your ‘punishment’! You’re happy as a pig in shit locked in a room with a television set but the moment someone takes you out for exercise and fresh air it’s — Oh my god! What did I do to deserve this?”
“I’m just saying,” I say as we crunch our way past my old fort again. “Those were some long walks.”
“You know, there are still Catholic pilgrims who’ll walk for over a month to reach the holy sites.”
“Yes but Catholics are insane,” I point out. “They worship martyrs. People who were burned at the stake and eaten by lions and tortured to death. The more you suffer, the more gold stars you get. So of course they’re gonna walk for a month straight, that’s as good as it gets, that’s right up there with self-flagellation. Look at me! My feet are mangled stumps! Look how pious I am!”
Owen, who I happen to know is carrying a set of rosary beads on him at this very moment, laughs his head off at this.
“And besides,” I say. “At least the pilgrims have some kind of destination at the end of it. They’re not just out there walking around for the hell of it. They’re trying to get to Lourdes or wherever.”
“I don’t know if that’s true, now,” says Owen, reaching behind his John Lennon glasses to finger a laugh tear out of the inner corner of his eye. “I mean you don’t have to do all that walking to get to Lourdes or the Shrine of Saint James in Spain, say. You can take a plane, or a bus. The walk is optional. People choose to do that walk for a reason.”
“So they can suffer,” I explain.
“No,” says Owen. “For penance.”
“That’s what I mean. To punish themselves.”
“I don’t believe it’s the same thing.”
“Yeah well walk for a month straight to the Shrine of Saint James or wherever and then tell me you don’t feel like you’ve been punished, Owen,” I say.
“Ah dear,” says Owen, craning his head back and smiling up at the sky now that we’re out of the woods and trudging back across the field. “Whatever happened to that god-fearing young man in his confirmation photo?”
I feel a bit aggravated with Owen now, like it’s not very good social worker strategy to bring up the very thing that made me so pissed off I had to leave the house in the first place. Besides, Owen knows as well as anyone what happened to that pious young man.
“He got old,” I say.
“Penance,” continues Owen, pretending not to notice I’m annoyed. “Is a very deliberate process. It’s thoughtful. You engage in it because on some level you need to. It isn’t something that’s inflicted on you from the outside. You go willingly.”
I decide in that instance to get in an argument with Owen.
“Then why,” I say, “is it always so repetitive — so, like, mind-numbingly repetitious? It’s not about being thoughtful — it’s about rote, like having to recite the times tables in school — it’s about drilling stuff into your brain, precisely so that you don’t have to think about it anymore. Or anything. You know what my mother used to do, when she was worried about something? If Gord was off on a tear or something? She’d haul out her fucking rosary and babble Our Fathers and Hail Marys until she was blue in the face.”
“Well, maybe that helped her,” says Owen.
“It did help her,” I say. “It helped her not to think. It helped her to stay put and let herself get walked all over. It helped her to tolerate suffering, like a good Catholic lady, instead of saying, Fuck this noise! and putting an end to it. It was a huge help to my mother, her Catholic faith.”
Owen doesn’t say anything. You have to know Owen as well as I do to understand that Owen not saying anything when it is manifestly his turn to do so is one of the ways Owen goes about “saying” something — usually something really irritating once you settle down to decoding it.
But I refuse to decode. I just let the silence be silence, ignoring whatever it is