“You keep beer on church property?” I said, sitting on his beat-up canary-yellow sofa.

“If the apostles could drink a cask of wine dry, I can have a beer now and again.” He tossed me a well-chilled can of Molson Canadian from his minifridge. We popped the tops on our beers simultaneously and toasted each other’s health. Then he took a photograph from his desk drawer and handed it to me: a young man, grinning, shirtless, muscular, holding an M16. There was a clunky necklace slung around his neck.

“Who’s this?” I said.

“That, my dear boy, is me,” Father Grabowski said. “Dong Hoi, Vietnam, 1972.”

“You served?”

“Sure did,” he said.

“What’s with the funky necklace?”

“Those, son, are human ears,” Grabowski said. “One from each kill I had.” He let that sink in for a moment. I looked more closely at the photo; they were indeed human ears threaded together with twine. “I know a little bit about the monsters war can turn men into. The monsters that go bump in the night when we return from war. Me, Vietnam. You, Afghanistan. Lost causes, lost lives, lost souls. You hate God. Deny Jesus. Screw Abraham and Muhammad and Buddha and Miss America. I get it. When I got back in the world, I found my salvation in the Franciscan brotherhood first and God a distant second. And when I prayed—oh, you’d better believe it—I broke a sweat praying with anger. Like a monster exhausted from being a monster.”

“So, you’re telling me to pray away the monsters, Father?” I said. “Like a child with night terrors?”

He laughed. “I’m telling you if I didn’t have my Franciscan brothers to talk to, I probably would be twenty years in my grave, August. They used to call it ‘shell shock.’ Now they call it PTSD. The difference between the two is at least now they know something about treating it. And it all begins by talking about it. It begins by seeking help.” He finished his beer and asked if I wanted another. I said no. “Would I like for you to pray? Oh, heck yes! But you know what I’d like even more? I’d like for you to talk to somebody. A therapist. A veterans’ group. People who know the monsters. You’ll never quite get rid of them, August. But it’s possible to put them in tiny boxes and stow them away.”

I stood and offered his picture back to him.

“Keep it,” he said.

With ambivalence, I kept the photo.

The picture was in my right pants pocket when I honored a promise I’d made to Tatina.

“August,” the silver-haired man with wire-rimmed glasses said while shaking my hand, “I’m Dr. Sussman. Call me Alan.”

“I don’t want to be here,” I said. “What makes an academic think he can even in the slightest know what I’ve been through?”