Kiss of the Wolf

by Jim Shepard

  She prayed a lot at home, usually early early in the morning, before we all were up. She had all the little statues in her bedroom. And the pictures with the palms still behind them from whenever the last Palm Sunday was.

  Our church was St. Anthony’s on North Avenue. Not St. Anthony of Padua, who helped people find lost things—the other St. Anthony. The one in the desert who was always resisting the temptations of the devil. The devil showed up at his hut in the form of a pig. Just what the temptation was involving the pig, we didn’t know. Maybe the devil was tempting him with bacon. But how big a temptation was that? It seemed like a lot of work. He had to kill the pig, etc. Anyway, the pig was in the stained-glass windows above the confessionals on the right side of the church. I prayed on that side. I was a little girl, twelve years old, just about Todd’s age. It sounds terrible now, but I used to pray sometimes to the pig. He was small and they did him cute. I guess I didn’t believe it was really the devil. I think I figured everybody pictured in church had to be good.

  The confessionals on the other side didn’t get any light. They were much darker. They were used by visiting priests. You’d go in there, it’d be like a cave. You couldn’t see the priest and you didn’t know him anyway. So you went there if you had serious sins to confess or you hadn’t been to confession in a long time. It was good for gossip: we’d watch who went over there. Oh, Mr. Motz: what’s he doing over there? So it kind of backfired on you.

  It was a very Italian church. Father Favale was the priest for thirty, thirty-five years. He joked every Pentecost Sunday that our sins were committed in Italian, confessed in English, and pardoned in Latin.

  There was one sister always used to joke with me that because of me she prayed to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. She thought I was a hopeless case because I wasn’t religious enough.

  She’d make notes when I was bad, like in the middle of the winter, and she wouldn’t punish me then. When it was spring and beautiful out, then she’d keep me after school. I could hear all the kids running around and having a great time, and she’d say, Nina, remember when you did this? And when you did that?

  But I was good kid for the most part.

  My mother was worried about my lying. I lied, you know, like kids do. I wasn’t a big liar. My mother believed as long as you never told a lie you were always on God’s side. The most important thing was to tell the truth. You did something wrong, okay. But it was worse to lie about it. And if you lied, that was bad enough. It was worse to pretend that you hadn’t lied, and to keep going: every second you lived the lie was another sin.

  They’d hit us when we got caught. But not so often; it wasn’t like other schools. It was funny: when you were getting hit, you thought the world was like that. Then afterwards when you met other people who weren’t Catholic or didn’t get hit in school, you thought: it isn’t like that. And then, sometime after that, you realized the world was like that, after all. So then you thought maybe you were better off knowing early.

  TODD

  The worst thing up to now I ever did was commit a sacrilege. The way we were taught, a sacrilege was this huge thing, and really rare. It didn’t seem so rare to us. The sisters made it a big thing and then they didn’t. You couldn’t tell. For instance, in fifth grade these two guys got into a fight. Sister Amalia tried to break it up and got punched in the chest. She was upset. She sat there on the floor holding herself and said it was a sacrilege. The kid who did it was scared. But we didn’t believe her. We didn’t think she was that holy. Also, it was an accident, and we didn’t think you could get a sacrilege that way. We made the kid feel better. Later he was coming back from Communion at Easter and he held up his arm for us, right there in church. The sisters didn’t know what he meant, but we did: he was going, Here’s my arm; it hasn’t fallen off yet.

  But there was another kind that wasn’t accidental. One year our parish priest went away and the guy who replaced him was mean. In confession he’d go, “C’mon, c’mon,” if you stopped to think. And if you said something he didn’t like, he’d say, “You did what?” You heard it all the time. It was embarrassing. Kids would come out of the booth bright red, or crying.

  You couldn’t predict what would set him off. Once, I told him I stole some books from the local bookstore—nothing big, two little things on dinosaurs I put under my sweater—and it must’ve been the nineteenth case of that, that day, or he must’ve just been sick of it or something. He blew up. He said, “What did you do that for? What were you thinking?” And then he said, “You could afford to buy something like that. Your parents could afford it.” So everybody out in church knew I must’ve stolen something. And I said without thinking, “Don’t shout it,” and then he got seriously mad. He kept me in there longer than he was supposed to, just yelling at me. He kept his voice down for that. Then he gave me fifty Hail Marys and fifty Our Fathers. Fifty is a huge amount. I had to go to the altar rail and kneel there, and no matter how fast I said them—and after the first ten I was flying—it still looked to everyone in the church like I must’ve killed my mother.

  The worst part was I was so scared of confession after that that I didn’t go. I kept not wanting to go to Communion. I had all these mortal sins on my soul. The sisters were like, Why aren’t you going to Communion? What could I tell them? So finally I went. The whole way up in the line I was telling myself, Go back, go back, you’re going to commit sacrilege. Because it’s sacrilege to receive with a mortal sin on your soul and you know it.

  I stood there in line feeling like such a hypocrite, such a liar, the sisters thinking I was being a good Catholic while I was doing this.

  After I received, I went back to my row and put my head on the pew in front of me. I looked up and there was Sister Amalia, and she gave me this smile, like she was happy I was so good. I thought, You committed a sacrilege just so you wouldn’t be embarrassed.

  That night I realized people were going to Hell not only because they were bad but also because they were weak.

  I didn’t do anything about it for six weeks. Every time I got Communion—because I had to get Communion, otherwise, why wasn’t I getting it?—I was committing sacrilege. Sacrilege, sacrilege, sacrilege. All my friends were ahead of me and behind me in line, getting Communion like it was no big deal. Because it wasn’t for them. And I kept it all from everyone. Who could I tell? It was like a nightmare; it was so easy to stop, and I wasn’t stopping. It was like I thought, What difference did it make? My soul was so black it couldn’t get blacker. But it was getting blacker. I thought I was setting sacrilege records. I thought somewhere God was thinking that this was all too bad. He knew everything, so he knew I wasn’t evil, but that that wasn’t going to make things any better. People were going to Hell for stealing a car or for missing Mass. I was going to get off the hook?

  Then I found out you had to go to confession before confirmation. We went as a group; there was no getting out of it. And I had to confess it, because the bishop would be giving us Communion at the ceremony, and I thought, Even I can’t do that sacrilege.

  So every night the week before, I was up, praying, crying, I didn’t know what. I found myself under the bed one night. Finally, the day of the confession, I was the second one in line, the whole class and Sister Amalia out there in the pews, waiting. I was so miserable by then I just gave up. I just went in and said, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been six weeks since my last confession.” And he asked why it took me six weeks. I told him because I’d committed this sacrilege. He said, “You did what?” I thought, Here we go. But when I explained it, he said, “That’s not a sacrilege,” like that was obvious. I was so relieved to hear anybody say that that I didn’t argue with him. He gave me like fifteen Hail Marys for penance. I was so happy I was all teary-eyed. I still thought it was a sacrilege, but now it was like I had special dispensation; I had a priest tell me not to worry about it.

  That was the worst thing I’d done until now.

  The other
night when I was up with my mother, I remembered all that, remembered being up all night worried about the sacrilege.

  This is worse, now, than then. It’s like there are two of me wandering around at once. I’m someone else from the person everyone thinks I am.

  If I was God, I’d be harder on me than her. She’s scared and doesn’t believe in everything, anyway. But I learned every day in catechism what the right thing to do was. I was an altar boy. I helped serve Communion. It’s like when I had the sacrilege: like every day I’m slapping God in the face, over and over and over.

  JOANIE

  Services on good Friday, Stations of the Cross—my mother was one of those Catholics who excused herself from a lot of the duties because she had a hard life. That’s what she said. The idea was that God let her off on that.

  I think her mother always had the harder life. My father’s always been good to her, and they’ve never been poor. Her mother had to come over from Italy with her husband and four kids, start up from nothing. When I remind my mother of that, she says, Yeah, but she didn’t have to put up with being me.

  By that I think she means that her mother expected a lot of unhappiness.

  My mother had this thing she would say to herself to cheer herself up: It could always get worse than this. She’d say it in this tough way, like she’d taken somebody’s best shot. I remember her saying it once when she’d taken me shopping with her at Read’s. I was six years old. I hadn’t even known she was unhappy.

  She said that to me when Gary left. I said to her, “How could it get worse than this?”—even though even then I could think of ways. She said, “It just could.”

  Now I say to myself, It could always get worse than this. I repeat it.

  My mother’s got no patience for unhappiness. She says she has less now even than she used to. Which means she has less patience for anything that might be adding to the problem, like my father or the Church. She was secretary of the Rosary Society for two weeks, they started busting her rocks about the way she wrote up the reports, that was the end of that.

  So she joked that God let her off on stuff like that. It was like going to the eleven-o’clock Mass: the really great Catholics, they were there on the dot for the seven-o’clock. My mother and I figured God appreciated that, but he also had the later one for the rest of us. If you spent Saturday night hiding bottles from your husband or bailing your kid out of juvenile detention, or you just felt so bad you wanted to lie there in bed an extra three hours, there was still that last Mass. It was like Mass for the shirkers and the exhausted.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t believe, even in the Church. She just picked the rules she thought were important, for her sake and ours. Lent she never went for, for example.

  She tried to bring me up right. She sent me to Blessed Sacrament. The building was falling apart; the building should have been condemned. There was a hole in the floor of the seventh-grade classroom near the heating vent: the seventh-graders could spit down onto the third-graders.

  I had a sister there, Sister St. John of the Cross. I had these Martian cards then, cards about Mars invading the Earth—the whole story took up fifty-something cards. A boy I liked, Lawrence Harrigan, gave me his doubles. I was amazed by them. They had things like frost rays and heat rays: skin coming off the bone while the guy looked down and watched, these Martians grinning. Giant insects that picked guys out of cars. There was one gave me nightmares of a woman with hair like my mother on a web with a huge black-and-red spider. Lawrence said it was like Hell. Lawrence was always looking for ways to bring his problems in line with the Church.

  Once a day, I asked Sister St. John of the Cross if I could go to the lavatory. I moved the time around so it wouldn’t look suspicious. I carried the cards in my skirt pocket and spread them out around the toilet in the stall. The third day I did it, wham, the stall door opens, there’s Sister St. John.

  She said, “I knew you were up to something. I knew.”

  I was trying to get my cards back. I would say anything. I asked her how she knew. She said she could see it in my face. She said the guilt was in my face. She said, “I can tell everything you’ve done.” And I knew she could. She’d seen through me. She knew what a horrible girl I was all along, and she’d just let me make things worse, pretending I wasn’t, her knowing all the time.

  You know the only prayer I ever had that was real, that was from my heart? It was a prayer I said whenever I was really scared: PleaseGod pleaseGod oh pleaseGod, pleaseGod. That was my prayer.

  When we were reading about the Passion in the garden, when the apostles were asleep and Jesus said, “Let this cup pass from me”—when he wanted more than anything else to just get out of things—that was the closest I ever felt to Jesus.

  They spent the morning in the house like two sick people. Todd didn’t get dressed. Joanie didn’t answer the phone. They ate cereal. He went back to bed.

  In the afternoon he woke up half off his mattress. He could hear Audrey playing “Chopsticks” down in the living room. The radio was on in the kitchen, turned low.

  His dog could play the piano when someone held her paws. They’d bought her the piano, a toy piano, as a joke. His mother liked to make her play “Some Enchanted Evening.” Audrey had to be in a certain mood to stick it out for any length of time.

  He was sweaty. He was in just his pajama bottoms, but he was hot. He kicked off the covers.

  He’d had a dream about the Holy Trinity. Jesus had looked thin and pale and seemed too disappointed to speak. God the Father had done most of the talking. The Holy Ghost had been behind them, the way it usually was in the pictures, no help.

  He got up. Maybe she’d called. Maybe things were starting to work out, the police on their way.

  He was standing at his bedroom door, squeezing the nap of the rug with his toes. He strained to pick up what was on the radio. It changed to an ad jingle.

  What he was wearing was suddenly stupid. He wasn’t going to be arrested wearing Minnesota Viking pajama bottoms. He changed into soccer shorts and padded downstairs.

  His mother and Audrey were playing the piano. She was kneeling, the dog was sitting. They were just plunking around. The piano was half a foot high and had quarter and eighth notes painted on the sides. They were doing one paw at a time.

  This was not Audrey’s favorite way to spend the morning. When she saw Todd, her tail thumped the carpet.

  “There’s some breakfast out there,” his mother said, concentrating on the keyboard. “I cut up some honeydew.”

  “What’re you doing?” he said.

  “Audrey and I’re riffing around,” she said. “You know. We’re just noodlin’.”

  He went into the kitchen. The radio was on top of the refrigerator. The guy was doing the national news. The local news was after that.

  Todd’s place was laid out, the honey dew in a Tupperware tub. He thought of the catechism stories of boys tested by God in various ways: one boy gave his lunch money to the beggar with sores, one didn’t. One sat down and ate the breakfast he was offered, knowing he’d committed a crime.

  He sat down. His mother still hadn’t called. He hated that he had to bring it up. He hated the fight they were going to have.

  She came into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door and stood there. She was always after him to not leave the door open.

  She had pretty skin, with freckles, and was wearing her hair longer now, down to her shoulders. He liked the color, but she said she was an Italian brunette, like she wasn’t happy about it. He watched her mouth while she bit her lip, deciding what to have. He imagined guys she’d meet in the future wanting to kiss her, because she wasn’t like some women he’d seen who had almost no lips. She used a little tub of Carmex a lot instead of lipstick, and it picked up the light from the refrigerator door.

  She pulled out a box of raisins and a tub of vanilla yogurt. She always bought something like the seventy-pound size. She spooned yogurt onto his plate and pointed
to the honeydew.

  “That’s enough,” he said.

  She opened the raisin box and shook it over his plate. Nothing happened, and then they came out in a clump and spattered the yogurt. She got a paper towel and wiped it up.

  When she finished, she sat down opposite him.

  He didn’t eat.

  She got back up, poured him a glass of milk, and brought over her coffee mug and a spoon. She spooned coffee from her mug into his milk. She worried about caffeine and he wanted coffee and that was their compromise. He’d liked it also because she’d sometimes make fun of Mass when she did it.

  She gave him four spoonfuls. The milk barely changed color.

  “You didn’t call,” he said. She was wearing the same pants from the night before, but a new shirt.

  The local news came on. They listened. There was no story about the accident, or any accident. Audrey padded through the kitchen and collapsed near his feet.

  “Are you gonna eat?” his mother said.

  “Are you gonna call?”

  She got up from the table and went outside.

  He sat in front of his breakfast, wondering what to do. He wanted all of this to be handled by someone else. He felt like a wind was coming and going on his forehead.

  Audrey went to the door, and he let her out and watched to see where she went.

  His mother was weeding on her hands and knees in the garden.

  The phone rang. He saw her sit up and look back at the house. He thought, Let her get it.

  It kept ringing. She was still looking toward the house. He stomped around in little half circles with his fists at his sides and then finally tore the receiver off the cradle.