The jag in the road once had a name: Claremont. A few houses, a gas station, a wood-frame church. Thirty miles west, a once-upon-time Northfield boasted a high school, storefronts and a cotton gin. Today, straight-line winds yell cheers across the rotted floor of the Northfield gym. At Claremont, bull snakes coil like rubber hoses in the service bay of the old Texaco.
          No matter how often I drive through the ruins of rural America, my mind imagines Mayberry and happy kids riding bikes. I grip the wheel and grit my teeth. “Just a ghost,” I tell myself, like some apostle on a storm-tossed sea. “Nothing more than a ghost.”
            The teenager sits sullen in the chair across from my desk. Next to him, his grandfather describes the scene at the house: shattered glass, splintered cabinet.
           “A bullet hole in the goddamn wall!”
            The man glares at the youngster he is trying to raise. “How could you let those hoodlums in the house?”
          The boy stares at the floor. 
          Everybody loves this kid. I love this kid. He’s athletic, affable, a leader in the parish youth group.
          “He’ll wind up prison.” The grandfather buries his face in his hands.
          A month ago, on Holy Thursday, I washed the boy’s feet. I recall the splash of water, the arch in his foot a trout in my hand. But it is not the Upper Room where I kneel. Rather, I’m back in a boat next to St. Peter who points to empty nets.
            We worked all night but the fish slipped away!
          A wave smacks the boat. Frigid water numbs my legs, my feet.
              Juan died of Covid. He left behind a wife and three teenage children. He sported a big smile and loved to laugh. Juan worked in a body shop and took pride in fixing things, from dented fenders to young sons with injured pride. His house was a church, his table an altar. Songs rang from his barrel chest.  
            At the funeral Mass, I place the paten on the corporal and prepare the wine. Above the chalice, a drop of water lingers on the lip of the cruet, like a tear on the cheek of his daughter seated in the front pew.
            I wipe away the droplet, desperate for a swig from Elijah’s jug.
              How much sorrow must we swallow, Lord, before we see your rugged face?
             Sometimes, when I lock the church after Sunday Mass, I long for a glint of light from a golden cross…minus a hanging corpse.  Sometimes, when I drive the roads of my rural parish, I think of trimmed lawns and expensive cars parked in driveways.  But the men in my parish drive work trucks and some of the women pack heat. SUD’s are the new SUV’s. My community sojourns rocky terrain, where tarantulas crawl, wells run empty and topsoil is thin.
          And thin is the skin of their priest.
          Yet, who am I to ask that desert wind not chap my lips? Who am I not to cringe at the sound of dirt falling on a coffin like stones that skid down the slope of a gulch?            In the year that I was ordained, Blessed Stanley Rother penned a letter to his bishop in Oklahoma as gunfire echoed outside his church in Guatemala: “A shepherd does not run at the first sign of danger.”  
          Nor does a shepherd run—I wince at the words—from fading towns and bullet rounds in a land of wounded hope.
          This is my parish. The parish I love. Where children once waved to strangers on Main. And rode their bikes through months of summer sun.
            Come, Lord. Come, Lord Jesus.