not unfurl one crease of its fold. Do not even hold it to the light to make out its contents. Remember, from God’s will to Pope’s quill, from Pope’s charge to my duty, from my duty to your honor.” The courier then set the letter in Bertolli’s outstretched hand. “Now off you go, ragazzo, off you go.”

Inside the confessional, Bertolli ran his nervous, chubby fingers over the fine papal letter and not-so-innocently flaked away at the elaborate wax seal. It was a perplexing time in his young life. His Confermazione was fast approaching and he was having great difficulty rationalizing his boyish instincts against his pending manhood. For reasons unbeknownst to him, many of the actions that had brought him so much joy, and he had given hardly a thought to, now brought him far less joy and provoked far more thought. Such contemplation was not pleasant and the idea of giving up the antics that had defined his youth was not easy for him.

Indeed, tormenting the old padre had been the highlight and focus of his last four years. Evidence of his former antics and triumphs was all about him. Even inside the confessional, a deep inhale through the nostrils could still catch the slight aroma of the rotten eggs Bertolli had hidden two years back. It had taken the old padre four vexing months, in which he’d thought a demon had inhabited the sacred domain, before he finally discovered the source of the fetid sulfuric odor.

Oh, but times had changed, and much to Bertolli’s current consternation, the new Good Padre, as he was commonly called, existed so far beyond Bertolli’s limited understanding of the world that the poor boy’s mind was in crisis. Even his altar boy responsibilities, which had always been a perfunctory duty forced upon him by his grandmother, were now a service he secretly relished. He was spending so much time at the church that his grandmother had come to suspect he’d discovered a key to the wine cellar and was up to no good.

After all, pondered Bertolli, who was this new Good Padre? He’d simply arrived in town the very day after the old padre died. But how? Bertolli wondered. He knew everything that went on at the church, and no one to his knowledge had notified the diocese in Florence that the village was in need of a new priest—and so quickly. As far as Bertolli could recall, in the four years he’d been an altar boy, no one informed the diocese about anything, ever. But there he was, at the door of the church, so Bertolli did what everyone else in the village did: he let him in, fearfully assuming that the Holy See had a far greater vision than anyone had previously imagined.

The timing of the new priest’s arrival was just one of the many mysteries that perplexed Bertolli. The man was, without a doubt, the most confounding person Bertolli had ever laid eyes upon; a man whose voice seemed to echo from Bertolli’s bowels to his brain like a sacred hymn chanted by a hundred monks; who spoke in metaphors that only made sense after a day’s pondering; who cooked meals for him with flavors well beyond anything his own grandmother ever prepared; who was as big as a water buffalo, yet gentle as a ewe; and whose eyes glowed with a magnanimous joy that transfixed the boy.

But more than anything, Bertolli’s mind was gripped by the utter incomprehensibility of the Good Padre’s appearance. It was possible to describe the size of the Good Padre’s shoulders, the thickness of his chest, the bellow of his voice; however, his complexion seemed to defy thought itself. Every time Bertolli was in the presence of the Good Padre, his brain would flutter with a vague, foggy notion that the Good Padre was as dark and shiny as a profoundly purple eggplant 3. But the thought would not stay still and the more Bertolli tried to comprehend it, the thought would slip and twist and become even more incomprehensible. It was like trying to draw water with a sieve. Every time Bertolli attempted to confirm such a thought out loud, either to himself or another, the thought would simply drain from his mind and the words evaporate from his tongue.

The courier’s charge now clanged like an Easter morning church bell in the belfry of Bertolli’s mind. He was trying to change, he was trying to be good, but old habits, even for young altar