Son of a Critch

by Mark Critch

  Mom turned the key. Ignition! The muffler coughed up a mixture of dust and smoke as the old girl rumbled to life. She pulled away from the house and turned down the long, steep driveway. I’ll never know for sure what happened next. Either she hit a patch of ice and lost control or just closed her eyes and gunned it. She shot out of the driveway at a speed I’d never seen before. She entered the first lane, then the second, third, and fourth, gaining speed with each one like Mario getting a power-up. She drove across the entire road, cars missing her by inches.

  My father and I watched all this from the command centre. I was certain her eyes were closed. She was going sideways. I’d seen her drive in the wrong direction before—now she was going the wrong way in all four lanes at once. “Good God, your mother is going to get herself killed,” my father reassured me. I nodded silently, picturing the note my father would write the nuns and wondering how many days off school it would gain me. But Mom made it to the other side of the road unscathed, and for the briefest moment it seemed she’d escaped an accident. Then she achieved liftoff, leaving the earth behind as she took to the air from the edge of the ditch on the other side of the road.

  The Silver Bullet burst through a white fence, splintering it into a million pieces. This should have stopped the car, but Mom carried on, punching a hole in the air as she continued uphill. She was somehow going even faster now, through another fence and past a couple of cows that looked as if even they felt they could do a better job behind the wheel. She disappeared through some trees for a moment; I expected to see smoke and flames climbing over the ridge. Instead, I saw the familiar silver girth climbing even farther into a farmer’s field until it eventually found its home in the side of a farmer’s house, just inches from his oil tank. One short drive for mankind, one one-woman derby for Mom.

  The phone rang and Dad flew by me to answer it. I looked for signs of life after splashdown. It must have been Mike wondering where his ride was because I heard Dad say, “No one is coming for you. You just killed your mother,” and hang up. The old man reached for his galoshes a second time and started to re-dress for the elements. In the far-off distance, I could see a man leave his house and approach the vehicle. Mom got out and started wagging her finger at him. She seemed to be admonishing him for sideswiping her car with his house.

  To this day, neither my brother nor I drive. Without a car I was stranded four and a half kilometres from school. Each day I could fake an illness or make myself so late that I missed the bus meant a full day of contended bliss in front of the TV.

  I grew up in a five-channel universe. One was a bizarre little channel run by Memorial University. This station played silent movies, art films, National Film Board shorts, documentaries, and educational movies. You could mail away for a catalogue of available titles, select a show, and either call in a request or mail your selection. This was long before even Blockbuster. There was no such thing as a VCR. And yet we had this TV station that played requests. My favourite was Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid. I was as interested in Chaplin and Buster Keaton as I was in Star Wars. For me, they were just as current as Luke Skywalker. Their feats were no less amazing.

  The second strangest station was NTV: a local network run by multimillionaire Geoff Stirling, a media magnate who even owned a radio station. In this way he was a contemporary of my father’s, but the two men could not have been more different. Stirling was a devotee of Indian mysticism, and it was not unusual for regularly scheduled programming to be pre-empted for an interview about consciousness with his latest guru. Stirling would sit cross-legged and shirtless, seeking enlightenment from Maharishi So-and-So on a hilltop. Thousands of Newfoundland housewives would roll their eyes and get some housework done until “the stories” came back on. All of St. John’s stopped when the American soap operas came on. Their influence is apparent to this day. I went to school with several unfortunate kids named either Frisco, Bo, or Hope.

  Happy Days and Three’s Company ruled. We never used the proper show titles at school. The kids of St. Teresa’s knew them as Fonzie and Jack Tripper. On the playground, they were as popular as Superman or Spider-Man. Then, as I was starting school, a local phenomenon changed my life. A TV show called The Wonderful Grand Band hit the airwaves, featuring performances of original music by a local band mixed with sketches featuring the comedy of Tommy Sexton and Greg Malone. It was the most popular show in the province. The sketches often poked fun at priests and nuns; it was as if it was made for me. I remember being a very young kid watching the show and thinking “This is what I want to do when I grow up.” I didn’t want to be Fonzie or Jack Tripper. I wanted to be Tommy Sexton. He played a teenage Catholic-school student named Dickie Budgell, and he was hilarious. I idolized him.

  All the kids at school, and even some of the nuns, watched WGB. The day after a new episode aired was the one day I never tried to fake being sick. I couldn’t wait to compare reviews of the show with my classmates. Nor could I wait to do my Dickie Budgell impression for them. One such day I came to class to find my beloved Mrs. Fowler missing. A very old nun I’d never seen before stood at her desk. “Good morning, class,” she began, with none of Mrs. Fowler’s usual sparkle. “Mrs. Fowler is off sick today. I will be your substitute.”

  It had never occurred to me that teachers might fake being sick, too. I pictured Sister Margaret with her hand pressed to Mrs. Fowler’s forehead saying, “Well, I guess you do feel a little warm. Get back in bed and no smoke breaks!” This new nun seemed a stern sort, but also fragile from age, so I decided it was worth the risk to chat to the closest fella across from me about the show. “Hey, Mickey,” I whispered to the boy. “Did you see Dickie last night?” To me, Tommy Sexton’s comedic creation had risen to the echelon of Fonzie and Jack Tripper. He was the reason for watching.

  Mickey was what the kids would have called a “brain.” It was not advantageous to be a brain. Really, all you had to do was listen and do a modest amount of schoolwork; get anything over a seventy percent and you were labelled a brain. Mickey had decided to play it safe with the new nun. He was ignoring me, but I was having none of it. Dickie Budgell had just performed a song called “Babylon Mall,” a parody of the Avalon Mall that my life revolved around. Having never appreciated a satire before, my mind had been blown. In those days, you had to insert a dime into a coin slot and turn a knob to get into the mall’s washroom. Dickie sang the line “Where the parking’s free but you gotta pay to do your pee.” It spoke to me. This must have been what children of the 60s felt when Dylan sang “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” I had to talk about it.

  “Pssst! Did you see Dickie?” Mickey gave me a dirty look and stared forward. The ancient nun at the front of the room started to lead the class through the heavenly hat trick of an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and an Act of Contrition. We all hopped to our feet and I found myself almost shoulder to shoulder with Mickey. “Dickie was some good last night. Did you see Dickie? I love Dickie.” It was like talking to a wall. The children around me asked God for their daily bread, thanked the Virgin Mary for the fruit of her womb, and swore they detested their sins because of God’s just punishments. These prayers gave a kid a lot to think about. Why were we thanking God for bread? Did God make the bread they used for the Eucharist? Or did the Church pay for the bread we ate at home? If so, were we offending God when we traded our sandwiches for chips? Why did Mary have so much fruit in her stomach and why were we thanking her? If we’re being thankful for things we eat, shouldn’t she be the one thanking whoever gave her the fruit? And if we detested our sins only because God was going to punish us, were we really being good? I mean, weren’t we just scared of being caught? But this was no time to contemplate the mysteries of the Catholic Church. I had to mine my classmates for more lyrics to that song.

  “Mickey, did you see Dickie?” I hissed as the entire class bowed and said “Amen” in unison. The accidental applause of thirty arses hitting their seats drowned out my last fruitless attempts at conve
rsation. The ponytail girl stood and sashayed her way to the nun’s desk, all the way fixing me with a knowing smile. What the hell did she want? She leaned in and told the nun something, never once breaking eye contact with me. The nun leaned in to her new conspirator and then joined the girl’s eyes to gaze in my direction. What fresh hell was this? The girl skipped back to her seat, her ponytail wagging back and forth in a manner reminiscent of a dog seeing its owner holding a big stick.

  “Mark Critch to my desk,” the nun croaked. I could almost see a cloud of dust pushing forth from her lungs. Ponytail girl wore a smile as tight as her hairline as I shuffled forward to some unknown doom. “Mr. Critch,” the nun said, making my name sound like a sin in its own right. “Were you cursing during the prayer?” What? Cursing during prayers? What did she think I was, crazy? She might as well have said, “Mr. Critch, did you pull the nails out of Jesus on the crucifix and use the figure to fight your Star Wars toys?” Did that girl lie? What had I ever done to her? How evil do you have to be to lie to a nun about a guy you hardly know swearing during prayers? I looked back at her in stunned disbelief: ponytail girl was basking in my horror as if it were sunshine and she was desperately in need of a tan.

  “No, Sister. I never!” It was a relief to be telling the truth. Normally in this situation, you’d be trying to act shocked. I took a moment to mentally record my every movement and the tone in my voice so that I could replicate it at a later date when needed.

  “Mr. Critch,” she said again. She seemed to grow younger and more imposing with each syllable, the beads of sweat she engendered on my forehead as rejuvenating to her as the fountain of youth. “I have it on good authority from several of your classmates that you were swearing during prayers. Come clean now or else face severe punishment.” Now this was bullshit. Not only did I not swear, but there was no way any other kid except for that Hare Krishna–headed girl had spoken to her since prayer time. And if it was Our Lord using some form of ecclesiastical radio to rat me out, then screw him because he was lying, too.

  “No they didn’t, because I didn’t swear, Sister!” The nun, now once again a girl of sixteen, kicked her chair back and stood to her full four feet.

  “Did you just accuse me of lying?” Now I really was stuck. The right answer was to say no. Nuns, like all adults, lied all the time. But you could never accuse one of that. To answer honestly meant certain death. But to answer correctly meant proving I was capable of lying, therefore making the original charge all the more credible. I could either lie once or tell the truth twice. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but telling the truth twice will often get you in trouble.

  “No, Sister,” I said, opting to play it safe. She looked me up and down. I think she’d momentarily lost track of what coconut the truth was under in this little shell game she was playing. Finally she sat back down at her desk and began to scribble a note. She folded it three times and passed it to me.

  “Take this to the office and give this to the principal. And whatever you do, don’t read it. I will know if you did.” I took the note and crumpled it slightly in my hand. I was no longer frightened. I was enraged. These people were playing a dangerous game. What was the point of saying prayers and doing your schoolwork if you were just going to get shagged over for no good reason?

  I’d never been in the hallway alone before. I took the long way to my execution, passing several classrooms of older kids. The doors were open, revealing the same rooms with older versions of the same people in them. Was this my fate? To buy endless versions of the same outfit and be given slightly more complicated workloads from slightly different nuns until they spat me out at the other end to repeat the entire process in a slightly different school?

  I stopped at every fountain for a drink as if they were the Stations of the Cross. In a way, they were. Each one marked another step toward my own personal crucifixion. The old nun condemns Mark to die. Mark accepts his note. Mark dies on the cross. I walked to the door of the office, my legs filling with lead. The secretary gave the pale-faced five-year-old a puzzled look. “Can I help you, honey?” My hand trembled as I gave her the note. I studied her face as she read it, hoping to glean some clue as to why I was here. Her look of concern turned to condemnation as she refolded my death sentence into three tidy squares. “Sit there. I’ll need to get the vice-principal.” Vice-principal? What the hell was a vice-principal? She disappeared around a corner and reappeared in about the length of time it would take someone to read that note.

  I was ordered around the corner into the unknown. A stern-looking man with grey hair and dark eyes sat at a desk and spoke without looking up from the nun’s denunciation. “Are you Mark?” No, b’y, I’m the friggin’ Pope.

  “Yes, sir.” He looked at me and then back at the note. He did this several more times as if he was having trouble reconciling whatever the nun had written about me. He cleared his throat, unsure of what to say.

  “Mark,” he began, before clearing his throat a second time, “it has come to my attention that you swore during the Act of Contrition. Now, it wasn’t just that you swore. It was also what you said. Why were you saying that word?”

  What word? Whatever they think I said, it must have been pretty bad. What could it be? The F-word? The S-word? I didn’t know any other swear words. Were there other ones? I’d never heard the F-word until I got to school, so surely I couldn’t be blamed for picking that one up. And how do you rat out a specific swear to a nun, anyway? When you tell on a person don’t you have to say the word? So if I was in trouble for saying it then shouldn’t the person who repeated it be here, too? And for that matter, shouldn’t the nun who WROTE IT OUT LONGHAND? At least I said it in a moment of frustration. Hey, Sister! Is that the same hand that you bless yourself with?

  “I don’t know what word she thinks I said, sir.” I was desperate for a clue.

  “You mean to tell me that you said so many curse words during your prayers that you don’t know which one I’m talking about?” Jesus, he had me there.

  “No, sir,” I protested. “I never said no bad words. She made it up!”

  “So, Sister Bernadette made this whole thing up?”

  “No, not her, It was—” I stopped short of naming the ponytail girl. For one thing, I didn’t even know her name. Secondly, if she was capable of lying to a nun to screw me over when I’d barely ever spoken to her, then what would she do if she knew I’d ratted her out to the vice-principal? I thought of our lord on the cross. Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. “No, sir.”

  “I’m glad we’re finally getting some truth here,” he said, turning his internal autopilot on to his scared-straight speech. “Swearing is a very serious thing, Mark. Bad words are bad because bad things happen to people who use bad words…” He was clearly unsure of where he was going with this. “And it’s a slippery slope because once you start swearing at your age, pretty soon it leads to stealing. And then, after a while, you feel so bad inside that you start drinking and doing drugs and the next thing you know you’ve gone and killed someone. The prisons are filled with people who started off swearing.”

  This was beginning to sound like a recap of his life. Was it a warning or an admission? Who did you kill? Where is the body? On second thought, don’t tell me. If I know too much you’ll have to kill me, too.

  “We must take responsibility for our actions. So, Mark, where did you hear this bad word?”

  “I don’t know what word it is, sir, but if you show me the note, I can tell you.” I wasn’t trying to be cute. I would have admitted to anything to get out of the office. I just wanted him to show me the confession before I signed it. Switching to bad cop mode, he pushed himself away from his small wooden desk with a sigh.

  “Things will go much easier for you if you tell me where you heard that word,” he half-pleaded. This was not a man who wanted to unlock the psyche of a five-year-old boy. He wasn’t interested in the inner child of this outer child. He just wanted me to tell him the s
ecret word so he could have another coffee and stare at the clock until the bell rang like everyone else in the building. “Now, let’s try this again,” he offered. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what it was you said during prayers?” This was going as poorly as it possibly could. I needed a plan, but I couldn’t think. It was all so confusing. My hands started to sweat. I could feel the staccato rhythm of my heart in my chest and began to feel faint. For the first time in my life I was feeling the various symptoms I’d faked to stay home from school and I was at school. This had to be some kind of punishment from on high. Maybe God really was watching after all. “Well?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I really don’t. Honest.” My exasperated inquisitor decided to crank the rack. He opened a drawer, removed a familiar manila envelope, then dropped it on the desk with a thud. Its weight was silencing. Even the clock stopped ticking for a moment, as if fearing what the strap might do to its hands, too. This did nothing to encourage me to do the right thing. All rational thought evacuated my mind by some kind of mental diarrhea. My consciousness was flushed from my brain, down my throat, and exploded into my stomach. I’d had butterflies when I entered the office, but now it felt like a hundred men were running around inside of me, wildly swinging their butterfly nets in an attempt to help. It wasn’t helping.