Dark Mondays

by Kage Baker

  Father Souza led the children to their place in line, just in front of the ox cart. There they waited, shifting from foot to foot on hot asphalt, until the parade stepped off.

  The ox behind them started forward, and the cart began an ominous shrieking that grew louder as it moved slowly down Addie Street. By the time they rounded the corner onto Cypress Street, it was painful to hear. Brittany and Kali walked with their hands over their ears, rosaries held in their teeth. Patrick ignored it all, marching along cheerfully, happy to be moving. He spotted one set of his grandparents taking photos and raised Our Lady in a high sign for them, being unable to wave. “Cut it out!” hissed Brittany.

  Patrick ignored her too. He spotted his parents and the other grandparents with them, video cameras whirring, and he shifted Our Lady to one hand and did the Macarena as he marched.

  “You’re going to Hell,” said Brittany.

  “Nuh uh,” said Patrick.

  “Kids, that’s enough sending each other to Hell,” muttered Father Souza.

  Someone came running out of the Lions Club kitchen with a bottle of Mazola and poured it over the cart’s screaming axle, and that helped a little.

  “Thank you, God,” said Patrick

  “You’re going to—” began Brittany, and then all three little faces turned up to Father Souza, as to a referee.

  “If he said ‘Thank you, God,’ as a prayer of thanks from his heart, then it wasn’t a sin,” said Father Souza patiently. “Brittany, don’t get so angry about—”

  “Yaay!” said Patrick.

  “But ray grandma says—”

  “Kali, look, it’s Ms. Washburn,” exclaimed Patrick, pointing.

  “Hi, Ms. Washburn,” said Kali, waving with her rosary.

  Ms. Washburn, who taught second grade at Cornelia Harloe Elementary, was seated at an outdoor table in front of the Surf Coffee Shop. She was watching the parade with a cool and amused smile, sipping her coffee, but there was a frown line between her eyes.

  “My grandma says she’s going to Hell too,” said Brittany, unexpectedly. Both Patrick and Kali turned to stare at her.

  “She can’t be going to Hell,” said Kali, “we’re going to be in her class this year.”

  “Didn’t you know? She’s an—” said Brittany, but then the band behind them struck up “Louie, Louie” and drowned out further conversation. Father Souza wondered what Ms. Washburn might be, to have gotten on old Mrs. Machado’s comprehensive list of the damned.

  The parade turned the corner and wound its way up the long hill. At the highway intersection, two cops stopped traffic in installments as the parade came across to the vast parking lot of the church. Father Souza moved in front to lead the children through, watching the highway traffic with his pale, worried face.

  Someone parked the ox and got it a bucket of water, as the rest of the parade filed into St. Catherine of Alexandria’s. The band members crowded upright in red and blue rows. There were so many of them they had to leave their instruments in the garden, in gleaming piles. The trains of the Queens were gathered up awkwardly, layered over the backs of pews. Elevating the Host, Father Souza looked out over the packed house and sighed. Today, he had a congregation. Next Sunday’s attendance would drop back to the usual single row of grandmothers and three families.

  After Mass, Father Souza administered a general blessing, invoked St. Anthony, and said a few hopeful words about donations for the Earthquake Retrofitting Fund for St. Catherine’s School. Nobody pulled out their wallets, though.

  The teenagers changed out of their band uniforms or Queen ensembles, grabbed surfboards, and raced back down the hill to the beach. Mothers and aunts collected the abandoned robes and packed them carefully away. The other adults and children went into St. Anthony’s carnival, which had been set up on the empty schoolground, and threw beanbags through holes or ping-pong balls into fish bowls. They won goldfish, black eyepatches, rolls of Smarties candy and tiny pink plastic cars.

  * * *

  School started a month later, though not at St. Catherine’s Elementary. No ABC cards were tacked up above the first grade blackboard. At Halloween there were no drawings of pumpkins; at Thanksgiving, no turkeys made from paper plates and construction paper, nor drawings of Indians and Pilgrims. The day on which Christmas vacation had begun came and went without hysteria, cheers or the janitor dressing up as Santa Claus. Mr. Espinoza had been dead for five years, anyway. Valentine’s Day approached, and there were no red construction paper hearts.

  The rituals of life went on, or they didn’t; when they ceased, it was astonishing how quickly they were forgotten. St. Anthony still had his day, but for how many more years?

  Father Souza sat in his office and looked out at the vacant school building, at the rows of empty windows. His gaze settled inevitably on the jagged cracks that had shot up through the old brickwork, like black lightning out of the earth, on the morning the earthquake had hit. He had long since learned to accept acts of God, but this one had rather surprised him.

  Phantom children moved on the weedy playground, in the plaid woolen uniforms or salt-and-pepper corduroy of a generation past. A tetherball swung listlessly against its post, as the fog blew by.

  A real child was coming up the walkway to his office, followed by a woman. Startled, Father Souza rose and opened the door.

  “Hi, Father Mark,” said Patrick. “We have to talk.”

  “Patrick,” said his mother, in tones of reproof.

  “Mrs. Avila?” Father Souza guessed, extending his hand.

  “Hi,” she said. “Do you have a minute to talk to us?”

  “Okay,” said Father Souza. He let them in and they settled in the two chairs that faced his desk. He returned to his chair, wondering why Patrick was wearing gardening gloves fastened over his sneakers with duct tape.

  “I, ah, I’ve met Patrick’s father at Mass, of course,” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t come because I’m Lutheran,” she said, amiably enough. “Well, not Lutheran Lutheran, but… you know.”

  “Sure,” said Father Souza.

  “My dad is away on Campaign,” said Patrick.

  “Campaign is where he and the other re-enactors go up to Lassen Campground in full costume and pretend they’re sixteenth-century Italian troops fighting battles,” Mrs. Avila explained patiently. “Which is why I had to take the afternoon off to deal with this.”

  “I have this really big problem, Father,” said Patrick.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “Well…” said Patrick, “we were supposed to make holidays, right? And so I had this really great idea, and—”

  “Ms. Washburn gave them this creative assignment at the beginning of the semester,” said Mrs. Avila. “They were supposed to invent holidays. Come up with a reason for the holiday and make up customs for it, and pick a day of the year, and that kind of thing. So Patrick came up with Monkey Day.”

  “Which is this really cool holiday all about monkeys?” said Patrick. “Like everybody wears monkey shoes, and eats monkey food like bananas and banana bread and banana milkshakes? And chicken strips only you call them monkey fingers? And—” He jumped to his feet and waved his arms. “Just do everything monkey! Like playing Monkey Island on your dad’s computer and watching monkey DVDs and stuff. King Kong. Mojo Jojo. Tarzan. You know.”

  “He put a lot of work into it,” said Mrs. Avila.

  “And I got an A and a gold star!” said Patrick, husky with fresh anger.

  “He did too,” said Mrs. Avila. “But, this morning, he asked me for permission to take his Tarzan DVD to school.”

  “Because today is Monkey Day,” said Patrick. “And I even put on monkey feet and we stopped at the store and bought bananas for everybody in my class—”

  “And I asked him if he had permission to bring a cartoon to school,” said Mrs. Avila, looking at Patrick sternly.

  “Well, it’s Monkey Day!” shouted Patrick, “So I said yes, okay? But then when I got
to school I was giving everybody bananas—and Ms. Washburn said there was no eating in class—and I said it was Monkey Day, and she—”

  “She laughed at him,” said Mrs. Avila.

  “So then I said I was going to go to Audiovisual to get the DVD player, and she said no, and I said but it was Monkey Day, and she said, Patrick, don’t be silly, that was five months ago, and I said no it wasn’t, Monkey Day is on February 12—”

  “Because it’s Darwin’s birthday,” explained Mrs. Avila, looking a little embarrassed. “His father came up with that.”

  “No, that’s okay,” Father Souza said. “Catholics don’t have a problem with Evolution.”

  “And she said, Monkey Day was only made up, so we couldn’t have it! And then she said, ‘Take those rid—ridic—ridiculous things off your feet’!”

  “And he called her a Work Destroyer,” said Mrs. Avila dryly. “And a few other things. I got quite an e-mail from her. I had to leave work to go pick him up from the principal’s office.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “They have a behavior chart at his school,” said Mrs. Avila. “It’s set up by colors. You get a green ticket in the morning, and if you’re good, you get to keep it all day. If you misbehave, you lose the green ticket and get a yellow one. If you act worse, the Yellow gets taken away and you get an orange one. Patrick went all the way down the chart over a period of three minutes and wound up with five red tickets.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Father Souza.

  “I hate her!” said Patrick.

  “No, no, Patrick, you can’t do that,” said Father Souza. “It sounds as though it was just a misunderstanding.”

  “She laughed at me,” said Patrick.

  “I plan on talking to the principal about that,” said Mrs. Avila. “But what has him really upset is that she said—”

  “All holidays are just made up,” said Patrick, in a terrible voice. “Even Christmas. She said they’re all imaginary, that people just make things up!” He folded his arms, and glared at Father Souza in righteous indignation.

  “Ah. Okay,” said Father Souza. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Up from his memory floated a scrap about Ms. Washburn: Brittany Machado’s grandmother said she was going to Hell. “I guess she’s a militant atheist?”

  “And I have to say I’m a little annoyed at her agenda,” said Mrs. Avila. “I’d like to choose my own time to tell my kids there isn’t any Santa Claus, thank you very much.”

  “Except Santa Claus is real,” said Patrick. “Right, Father Mark?”

  Father Souza looked uncertainly from Patrick to his mother. “Saint Nicholas is real, yes. And children get presents at Christmas for the sake of Baby Jesus, of course. Some people don’t believe that, Patrick. It’s a shame, but we shouldn’t hate them for it.”

  “Can we hate people because they’re mean?” asked Patrick.

  “No,” said Father Souza. “But you can hate meanness.”

  “Well, I really really really hate meanness,” said Patrick. “And I think what you ought to do is go over to her house with a Bible like that guy in that exercise movie and say a spell so her head turns around. Because then people will laugh at her and not listen to what she says.”

  Father Souza and Mrs. Avila stared at him in mutual incomprehension. Then Mrs. Avila said, “Did you watch The Exorcist, after your father and I told you not to?”

  Patrick winced.

  “Urn, just a little. Because it happened to be on. Because I was over at Kyla’s house. And it was way back at Halloween. So anyway Father, you need to use your powers on Ms. Washburn, okay?”

  “Patrick,” said Mrs. Avila, “we’re going to have a long talk with Daddy when he gets back. And priests don’t do magic spells. Is that what you made me bring you all the way up here to ask?”

  “They do spells in Theo’s Dragon Gamer Module,” muttered Patrick, not meeting her eyes.

  Sensing an explosion immanent, Father Souza said hastily: “I’ll try to talk to your teacher, okay, Patrick?”

  “And we’re going to have a long talk with your brother too,” said Mrs. Avila to Patrick, rising to her feet. “I’m sorry, Father Mark. It looks as though Patrick wasn’t really interested in spiritual advice.”

  She led Patrick out the door by his upper arm. Patrick turned in the doorway and winked broadly, twice, so Father Souza wouldn’t miss it. Father Souza had used to play ping-pong with Father Connolly, until the old man had passed away. Now he got his exercise most afternoons by walking down the hill and out onto the pier, as far as the end, and back.

  He never power-walked. He idled. Sometimes he chatted with the fishermen; today he leaned on the rail and watched the surfers riding the long white combers into land or more often idling themselves, floating on the swell, resting on their boards. Some of the surfers were girls. The black neoprene suits made them look like seal-women out of Celtic legend, strangely arousing. Father Souza watched them regretfully, and lifted his head to stare far down the beach. Just visible at the edge of the dunes was a grove of dead trees, with silvered and twisted trunks. It was a white and silent place. When he had been a child, he had thought that God lived there.

  Sighing, he put his hands in his jacket pockets and moved on. Salt mist was beading on his clothes, chilly and damp.

  The arcade that used to be at the foot of the pier was gone, had been gone since a long-ago winter storm sent waves over the seawall and collapsed its roof. There was a doughnut shop there now. Father Souza stopped in and bought a latte, and settled into a vacant booth.

  He warmed his hands on the cup and watched the early twilight falling. Something came rolling down the sidewalk, on a wobbly trajectory: a cocoanut. It came to rest against a planter containing a skimpy date palm, as though huddling with a fellow exile from tropical climes. Father Souza wondered how it had got there.

  A woman was sitting in the booth across from him, sipping coffee and making notes on something with a red pen. Grading papers? Yes. He recognized Ms. Washburn.

  He cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said. “You teach at the public school, don’t you?”

  She lifted her eyes to his, and he had a mental image of a figure in armor going on guard. Her eyes were gray as steel.

  “I do, yes.”

  “You’re Patrick Avila’s teacher?”

  “Ah,” she said. “I imagine I know what this is about.”

  He smiled awkwardly and extended a hand. “I’m Father Souza. I guess you did me a favor; one of my parishioners actually got upset enough about something to ask my advice. Can I hear your side of the story?”

  But he could tell his attempt at self-depreciating charm was wasted. It was plain, from the look on her face, that she saw a host of blood-drinking popes and Inquisitors in phantom form standing at his shoulder.

  “I don’t particularly see any need to defend my actions to you,” she said. Her accent was patrician, with a certain New England starch.

  “Defend, no, no. I just thought you could enlighten me a little,” said Father Souza. “Patrick was pretty upset.”

  “Patrick had a violent episode in class,” said Ms. Washburn.

  “So I gathered.”

  “I’ve made a recommendation that he should be tested for Attention Deficit Disorder.”

  Father Souza winced. “I wouldn’t have said Patrick’s problem was paying attention, would you? Just the other way around. He was able to keep focused on the monkey thing for five months.”

  “Are you an educator, Father Souza?” inquired Ms. Washburn.

  “No,” he admitted. “But I know it’s not a good idea to be in a hurry to pin a label on a child.”

  “Neither is it a good idea to let a condition go undiagnosed,” said Ms. Washburn. “The sooner Patrick can undergo corrective counseling, the better.”

  Father Souza sat back and stared at her, baffled. “What exactly did he do that was so bad? Did he hit you?”

  “Not physically, no. H
e resorted to verbal abuse. He kicked a chair across the room. He disrupted class to the extent that a full hour of the school day was lost,” said Ms. Washburn.

  “Sounds like a pretty angry young man,” said Father Souza. Ms. Washburn flushed and took a sip of her coffee.

  “Patrick was clearly acting out,” she said. “His home life, possibly. I understand his father is in some kind of paramilitary cult. If his parents encourage violence as a means of accomplishing goals—”

  “I don’t think they do,” said Father Souza. “I think Patrick was angry about getting laughed at, when he thought he’d invented this wonderful holiday. Patrick’s mom thinks you were trying to demolish belief in Santa Claus.”

  “Demolish is a loaded word, don’t you think?” said Ms. Washburn. “I would have said that, as a teacher, I have an obligation to teach what is true. I will not teach lies. If I can encourage my students to see through lies, I owe it to them to do so.”

  “So the point of the made-up holidays assignment was…?”

  “To teach my students the truth about social rituals,” said Ms. Washburn, looking Father Souza in the eye. “People simply make them up. Patrick made up Monkey Day. These events are only as real as we make them. They have no significance, otherwise. If people are ever to be free, they need to understand that. All that absurd… panoply, all that pageantry and symbolism, is a trap.”

  Father Souza remembered her frown lines, as she’d watched the parade go by.

  “It’s folk art,” he said. “It’s the celebration of people’s faith, it’s their identity. You ought to at least respect cultural tradition.”

  “It’s a trap,” she repeated. “An impressive spectacle that keeps people from thinking.”

  “Okay… and how do you feel about respecting other people’s beliefs?”

  “I tend to favor truth over illusions. ‘Wine is strong, a king is stronger, women are stronger still, but Truth is the strongest of all,’ ” Ms. Washburn quoted. “That’s in your Bible, isn’t it?”