Again he raised the yobie to draw on it and paused.

"Let me ask you something."

He paused again and she said, "Yes, what?"

"You think I do any good here?"

Sounding like he was feeling sorry for himself.

She said, "You want the truth? You don't do as much as you could." She said, "Do more. Talk to people, preach the word of God.

Do what a priest is suppose to do. Say Mass every Sunday, what people want you to do."

"You really believe," he said, staring at her in the candlelight, "I can take bread and change it into the Body of Christ?"

What was he doing asking her that? She said, "Of course you can.

It's what priests do, in the Mass. You change the bread, and also the wine." What was wrong with him? "I believe that, as all those who come to Mass believe it."

"Sally, we believe what we want to believe."

Calling her that, Sally, from asali, the Swahili word for honey, which he did sometimes.

He said, "You want to know what I believe?"

"Yes, I would like to know."

"I did come here with a few good intentions. One thing in particular I wanted to do was paint Fr. Toreki's house. Every picture I ever saw of it, going back years, the house needed painting. I knew how, I used to help my dad sometimes when he had a big job, the outside of a two-story house."

Why was he telling her this? She believed she was listening to his mind wander from having too much to drink.

"My dad was a housepainter all his life. Forty years at least he stood with a wall in front of his face painting it, smelling it, going to his truck with the ladders on top to smoke a cigarette and drink vodka from the bottle. He said to me-it was when I dropped out of college and was helping him he said, 'Go back to school and get a good job.' He said, 'You're too smart to spend your life pissing in paint cans.' The only time he took off was to go deer hunting in the fall.