Phineas Poole is notorious for making bad decisions. Blindly accepting the position as pastor of a small, unknown church in rural New Hampshire isn’t the worst choice he could make. Yet he and Sister Mary Ignatius, an overbearing, foulmouthed nun, choose to risk everything when they secretly open their rectory to shelter abused children. Their trouble begins when they take in Zachary Black, an antisocial misfit with no conscience and a burning hatred for those around him. Assuming the boy’s malevolence to be a cry for help, the priest focuses all his attention and efforts on Black, who has neither the desire to be helped, nor the intention to be reformed. Ultimately, this situation puts the lives of those whom Phineas loves in peril and forces him to reveal the sins of a dark past.

Embracing Darkness

By Christopher D. Roe

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2012 Christopher D. Roe
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4772-5276-5

Contents

Acknowledgements............................................................viiPrologue....................................................................xiOne A Brief History........................................................3Two The Stuttering Priest..................................................16Three A Cold Welcome.......................................................23Four A Less Than Auspicious Beginning......................................28Five Anything Can Stir Memories............................................34Six Father Meets Sister....................................................39Seven Argyle Hobbs.........................................................50Eight A Night without Sleep................................................57Nine Ben Benson............................................................65Ten A Morning like No Other................................................83Eleven Four Years on the Hill..............................................97Twelve Meeting the Bensons.................................................109Thirteen Ellen F...........................................................131Fourteen The Newcomers.....................................................181Fifteen Zachary Black......................................................198Sixteen The Newest Residents of Holly Hill.................................237Seventeen True Colors Shine Through........................................276Eighteen A Holiday of Betrayal.............................................303Nineteen Three Surprises in One............................................333Twenty One Big, Happy Family...............................................366Twenty-One Broken Angels, Broken Hearts....................................392Twenty-Two If You See Darkness, Color It Black.............................436Twenty-Three A Man Lurks from Sun to Sun...................................455Twenty-Four Things That Fall Apart Stay Broken.............................511Twenty-Five Cleaning Up the Mess...........................................572Twenty-Six Duty Calls......................................................622Twenty-Seven Armageddon....................................................650

Chapter One

A Brief History

I am often haunted by my memories of the Benson Home for Abused and Abandoned Boys. The fragmented pieces of an injured childhood have left what little remains of my life in ruins, yet I'll not make what I'm about to tell you about me. Not at all. In fact, that which I feel compelled to express on paper isn't autobiographical whatsoever; and although it takes place in the town of my birth, none of my kin are involved.

What's more, born and raised a strict Congregationalist, I find that my faith here takes a back seat to everything involved. In other words, my story is the story of others. All that occurs, you see, are events that I've researched. Some of those involved are simply people whom I once knew; others, people I just heard of; and a few, ones I feared.

Imagination and wonder are truly remarkable. Some say the two go hand in hand. Perhaps so, but wonder does lead to many things. It opens doors, huge floodgates of supposition. A powerful thing, surely, to be able to search one's memory and wonder how the whole world could be different, or even to wonder about everything that exists within the confines of one's own small town.

I wonder a lot.

I wonder how, had I chosen a different path, my life would have been. I wonder whether the mistakes I made, both during my stay at the Benson Home for Abused and Abandoned Boys and afterwards in adulthood, could have been avoided had I done things differently.

I wonder what children who are like I once was—abused, beaten, and neglected—become once they reach adulthood. Do we necessarily become like our parents? Is the abused always destined to become the abuser? Or do we become something worse?

I wonder too whether I can answer such questions. Isn't the first step to self-improvement admitting to yourself and to others that you have a problem? I know all too well what my wife and children think of me. I've made mistakes. I acknowledge that. God only knows how many mistakes I've made. And I'm paying for them every day.

I wonder why I ever became a writer in the first place. Was it so that I could relive the pain of remembering over and over as I transfer my reality into fiction? Was the decision a way to torture myself as a means of atonement? Some people become alcoholics or drug addicts to hurt themselves on purpose because of self-hate. Do I hate myself?

I do not wonder why I've finally chosen to write this story. I desperately wanted to tell it, even though it was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. It took me years to drum up the courage. The research has steered me all over the country and consumed two years of my life. I had to investigate whatever needed to be found out to get the story right. The interviews were many; the disappointments and doors slammed in my face were even more. However, I vowed not to give up until I got everything down for a fair and accurate account of what occurred in Holly, New Hampshire, between 1925 and 1942.

What would it have been like had Father Phineas Poole not been asked to take over the Parish of St. Andrew's in the spring of 1925? Would the small Roman Catholic population of the town have grown substantially or decreased dramatically? Would the troubled youth of Rockingham County have been better off with indifferent foster families, or would such children have benefited more from a state-run institution whose bureaucracy would neglect these lost souls far worse than any private citizen ever could?

Wondering becomes complicated. That's why I stopped asking myself questions that were too complex to answer. Instead, I concentrated on only one: Would things ever be as close to normal again as they were in Holly before the arrival of the new priest?

St. Andrew's Roman Catholic Church was nothing spectacular, but then again neither was Holly. It was as close to a normal, small New England town as anyone could hope to find at that time. It had been established in 1640, shortly after Reverend John Wheelwright and his followers arrived, courtesy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, today known as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Wheelwright had been exiled for rather inflammatory religious opinions that he shared with Anne Hutchinson, his sister by marriage. His other sin was that he robbed the land in and around what would become Holly, land that had once belonged to the Squamscott Indians.

Being a man of the cloth, one would presume that Reverend Wheelwright treated the natives fairly, giving them more than the twenty-four dollars that the Dutchman, Peter Minuit, had paid for Manhattan Island only twelve years earlier. Yet who am I to say how their business transpired? There isn't much in our local history books to shed enough light on whether or not Wheelwright acted magnanimously or miserly.

I suppose this speculation is irrelevant, since it's more astonishing to me that Holly was even founded at all. Even though it was hundreds of years ago, folks around town still hold to the legend that, when Reverend Wheelwright came through this territory on his way to establish Exeter, he passed a great spread of land. What made him choose to press on was not that he thought the...