Chapter 1

Poor Brother Thomas knew he was a sinner of the most despicable sort and he wanted desperately to redeem himself. That was uppermost on his mind on that unmemorable Sunday morning. The early mass was long over and this was the popular one that usually hosted most of the non-sinners and the seldom-sinners alike. They wore their Sunday best and surged into the pews of their humble church like docile sheep in search of a purpose. The church stood quite narrow on the street entrance side. In fact, it could easily be mistaken for a storage warehouse or a studio for unknown artists behind the unrevealing blank wall. There was only one circular window way up high with a stained-glass painting designed by some famous Old World painter of religious art.

The window was the gift of Brother Lucas.

Brother Lucas was a bit simple-minded but that only served to make him well-suited to the assignment of supporting the mission of the tiny church in the middle of a crowded major urban area.

Brother Thomas had done his best to welcome Brother Lucas into their midst but it was difficult because he was no better than a deaf-mute with his severe lack of communication skills. It was the cook, Brother Francis that put him on the right path with his service in the kitchen peeling the potatoes and kneading the dough for the bread and churning the cream into butter to fill the metal molds shaped like little rosebuds.

Saturday had been a busy day with weddings, baptisms and even an odd funeral or two adding a bit of sadness to the happy vibes that filled the tiny church with the haunting echo of chant-like prayers.

To top it all off, they welcomed a bumper crop of remission seekers dumping their shameful acts and deeds off to the hard-of-hearing elderly priest from Rio De Janerio. The shadow of a man was a grey ghost on his way to the grave and he bundled the sins together into neat little packages and ate them like popcorn dispensing forgiveness like drops of water from a shower of God’s mercy over the good and evil alike.

It was noticeable that the bulk of the petitioners were of mature years and mostly of the feminine persuasion rather than males. It was supposed the older males went to practice that Sacrament in an adjoining parish for purposes of secrecy for their terrible deeds that generally involved the females left behind. As for young people, they were unforgivably absent because Saturdays were important for other reasons when one is young.

The old priest and another younger one with limited English from some French-speaking order up in Canada did the work on the front end and they assigned the penance and contrition end to the brothers to process with their customary no-nonsense approach to everyday life.

The hopefully shriven were given the option of a complicated formula of prayer repetition that would consume a chunk of Saturday’s hours or to do the “Closet Penance” that gave them an express solution to re-born redemption.

There were two closet doors.

One was painted black and the other red with no words on the doors to explain what was waiting.

Almost all of the faithful knew exactly what was waiting and they lined up according to the depraved depths of their transgressions against the word of God and the teachings of the church.

The black door was the corporal punishment door and that was manned by Brother Lucas with his concentrated focus on doing a good job. The fact that he seemed to enjoy his hidden closet work was never discussed because that in itself was somewhat suspect in the scheme of things to change wrong into right in proper fashion. He was overjoyed that the bulk of the sinners were not only female, but that they were mostly the proud mature women with pretensions of perfection that failed the test mainly because they were built on the human foundation of weakness of the flesh that won out every time. He reveled in humiliating these women by exposing their posteriors and using either his heavy hand or the recently blessed paddle to redden their sinful bottoms with strokes of forgiveness carefully counted for each transgression.

Those in line outside squirmed and crossed their legs at the sounds of the contrite sinners being redeemed on the other side.

The other closet door was painted in shocking red and that was the one reserved for the most serious of sins. It was manned by Brother Thomas. In fact, many of the little variations of penance behind the red door were instituted by him and he owed his imagination to the reading of the minutes of the Spanish Inquisition written by some dedicated interrogators of the devious followers of the fallen angels that infected the righteous with their evil intent. Of course, the modern-day faithful were generally innocent of such mean-spirited intentions, but it was good to stay vigilant in times of trouble just as a matter of corrective control.

The red door closet used some tricks to speed the sinners down the road of redemption.

If they were males, he would tie their transgressing male tools to the “Glory hole” back wall that faced the alley and the homeless people both male and female used them for their own pleasure totally ignoring the will of the sinner-owners reminding them that for every action there is a reaction and they might hopefully not repeat their crimes.

All minors were sat down and instructed to prayer for forgiveness in silent prayer. He considered the mere lack of speech was penance in itself and would prove beneficial in more ways than one.

It was the females that bore the brunt of Brother Thomas’s wrath.

He always started them off by stripping them completely and making them turn endlessly on the platform, bending and squatting for not reason other than to make them feel uncomfortable knowing they were in full view of all in the small space. Then, he would stand them up facing the wall and would rub his erection on their posteriors in a degrading fashion whispering words of insult in their ears just to make them weep in despair. The proud and haughty women whimpered and quivered under his determination to put them back on the proper path. He tested them each in turn to see which ones were receptive to his anal ministrations and then he would stretch their sphincter muscles with his staff of enlightenment to hear them yell and shout in protest against the familiar treatment that humiliated them to a low point of regret for their sins. The other sinning females laughed and giggled at the sinner’s plight. When it came their turn, they knew the shoe would be on the other foot and it would be them wiggling like a fish caught on a hook of righteous indignation at their feminine bad behavior.