Son of a Critch

by Mark Critch

  “What’s the date today, by the way?” I asked in a tone that definitely didn’t make it sound as though the question was coming from a fugitive.

  “I think it’s the twenty-third,” he said, practically driving me away in a getaway car. I imagined the hospital administrator berating him as the news media clamoured outside his door. “How did you let him get away, you fool!” the boss would scream, taking away his broom and beating him with it. My Moses emptied the garbage can and replaced the bag. Now I was afraid he’d leave before leading me out of the desert.

  “One last thing,” I said, wincing. “What year is it?” “What year is it?” is a question you don’t hear that often. It generally involves someone who’s either a time traveller or crazy. Judging by the look the janitor gave me, he suspected the latter.

  “Nineteen ninety-four,” he said and quickly wheeled his cart out of the room, leaving the garbage in the washroom for another day. “Okay,” I thought, “don’t forget that: almost four, the twenty-third, 1994.” But what was my name? I had no idea. But the answer was staring me right in the face. On my wrist was an ID bracelet. Patient Name: Critch, Mark P.

  The doctor returned a short time later. “Feeling any better?” she asked.

  “It’s the twenty-third, I think around four o’clock. And it’s 1994. I can’t believe I didn’t know that,” I said, faking my embarrassment while wondering if it was four a.m. or p.m.

  “That’s impressive,” she said, checking some boxes on the sheet on her clipboard. “I’ll let the nurse know that you can be released.” I hopped up, letting my feet dangle over the edge of the hospital bed. For a moment I considered coming clean and telling her that my head was still fried. I had no idea where to go. I didn’t know where I lived. I didn’t think I even had any money on me. But common sense was overpowered by the desperate need to be by myself while my brain settled.

  “Oh,” the doctor added on her way out the door, “your parents are waiting outside. They’re quite worried. I’ll send them in.” My parents? How old was I? Was this a children’s hospital? As soon as she left, the door to the room swung back open like the swinging doors in a saloon. My mother burst through like a Wild West gunfighter. Her weapon was her tongue and she came in firing.

  “My​God​Mark​What​Happened​To​You? Did​You​Get​Mugged​By​Some​Of​That​Hard​Old​Crowd​Downtown​Or​What?” So many syllables and consonants were flying at me like bullets from a Tommy gun that I didn’t stand a chance.

  An older bald man in a raglan and a checkered suit followed her in. He looked around the room like a detective checking a gangster’s hideout for a kidnapped girl. “Is it drugs?” he asked, and for a moment I wondered if it had been. “Did you take an acid?” Was this a flashback?

  I ignored Sherlock and Watson and walked over to the sink. I needed to splash some cold water on my face. The sudden appearance of the dynamic duo had discombobulated me; I was awash in a sea of confusion. Then I looked at my face in the mirror and was shocked by what I saw.

  My face was covered in dried blood. I’d messed my nose up pretty good in among the VHS racks. And I was also surprised by my youthful appearance, since when I saw the age of my parents I’d assumed I was older. I wet a facecloth and started to rub off the blood.

  “What​Do​You​Want​To​Do​Mark? Do​You​Want​To​Come​Home​With​Us​Or​Do​You​Want​To​Go​To​Your​Place?”

  I had a place? Thank God. I could be alone there. I chose my place.

  We recreated the same confusing car ride from my first seizure, not that I remembered it at the time. Now the role of Jamie’s father was played by a curious cab driver trying to figure out the characters in the human drama playing out in his cab. We pulled up to a townhouse attached to the many houses on either side of it. I bolted from the cab and up the stairs, only to realize that I didn’t have a key. A man stood in the doorway as if he was expecting me. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hi,” I answered, completely unaware of who this man was, but somehow aware that I should know him. “Um, sorry. What’s your name again?”

  “Mike. I’m your brother.” The plot thickened. Was I related to everyone in the city? I looked back at the cab. Mom was pulling herself out of the car and Dad was trying to convince the cabbie to take a cheque. “Want me to get rid of them?” my new-found sibling asked.

  “That’d be awesome,” I said. “No offence. I’m sure your parents are nice people. I’ll be in my room.” A few minutes later Mike came up to find me wandering out in the kitchen.

  “Your bedroom is upstairs,” he informed me.

  “Right,” I said, sliding past him and finding my way up the stairs and onto a futon. I slept pretty much for two days straight.

  * * *

  —

  But all that was yet to come. It was 1984 and an amazing thing happened. The Pope announced that he was coming to St. John’s. This was an unbelievable event. We had only just gotten a Burger King. The nuns at school were overwhelmed, acting like Liverpudlian teenagers who’ve just been told the Beatles were going to babysit them. They were married to God, but for the dashing Polish Pontiff they might slip off the ring, just the once.

  John Paul II was a very popular Pope, one of the most travelled world leaders in history. And he was a saint-making machine: he beatified 1340 people and canonized 483 saints, more than all his predecessors combined. There was a good chance you’d accidentally end up a saint just by walking past him. He was also that rare thing: a non-Italian Pope. The Polish people had often been mocked. There were Polish joke books just like there were Newfie joke books—and they contained the same jokes. So we felt a kinship with the Polish people, and to us John Paul II was the next best thing to a Newfoundland Pope.

  We’d never had a cool Pope before. Occasionally we had cool priests, younger men of the cloth who felt they could “rap” with the kids about their troubles. These were the loose-collared, short-sleeved types who kept reminding you that they were regular guys.

  “Hey,” they’d say casually as they walked over in jeans. “Hanging out with your buddies, are ya? Pretty COOL. Yeah. You know someone else who used to hang out with his pals all the time? OUR LORD! He had twelve buddies. They called them the apostles. That’s a pretty COOL name for your GANG, isn’t it? The apostles? That would look pretty COOL on the back of a leather jacket. Mind if I smoke a CIGARETTE? Yup. A priest, SMOKING! Can you imagine? It may seem crazy but priests can be just like you!”

  “Ever tempted to drink alcohol? I hear ya. You know who else drank alcohol? OUR LORD! Yup. At one wedding, he even changed water into wine for his pals. Pretty COOL, hey? But of course, buying alcohol for anyone too young to drink it is very wrong, so don’t ever ask anyone to buy you alcohol. But yeah, OUR LORD was a pretty badass guy.”

  The Pope wasn’t a fake, forced kind of cool. He didn’t have to try to be cool. He was cool! He was the real deal, a super hero! Marvel Comics had just released a comic book version of his life story. He had a Popemobile, just like Batman. He’d even been shot and survived, like Superman! All the kids at school caught Pope-mania and begged our parents to take us to see him, the same as if there were a new Star Wars movie or if Spider-Man was going to be at the mall.

  Every now and then a guy would show up at the mall in a Spider-Man suit to pose for photos. It was for those kids who were too old to get a picture with Santa and too young to give up on the magic of childhood altogether. I remember being given a balloon and seeing a guy who looked like the comic brought to life. This was long before the days of deluxe Halloween costumes and cosplay conventions. This Spider-Man had caught me in his web and made me want to believe. That is, until I got close enough to speak to him.

  “Hi, Spider-Man,” I said, wondering what he’d say to me.

  “What are ya at, young fella? Me webs is all gone now and I’m too tired to crawl around on the ceiling, but we can have a picture now, luh.” Unless Spider-Man’s parents were originally
from the Southern Shore, this man was not from New York City.

  I rushed home from school, excited to ask my parents to take me to see the young, cool Pope. But Mom and Dad were way ahead of me. I could hear them already talking about it as I ran into the house.

  “We​Should​Take​Mark​Down​To​The​Basilica​To​See​If​We​Can​Get​Him​Cured.”

  Cured? What? I’d seen the preachers curing the crippled on TV. “Evil spirits, come out!” they’d scream before hitting the afflicted with an open palm to the face. Everyone would gasp in amazement when the sick person fell to the floor. How was that surprising? The guy in the white suit had just punched them in the head!

  Now my parents planned to drag me before the Pope to banish the demons from my lungs and prevent me from having fits. People who were cured by preachers on TV always started to shake and convulse on the floor. What if I was “cured” and it didn’t work? I might start to have a seizure and then everyone would watch, thinking, “Man. This guy is REALLY cured. I mean, look at him shake.”

  The Pope landed in Newfoundland to terrible weather. It poured rain during a lakeside Mass for 80,000 people. “We​Can’t​Bring​You​Down​To​That​Mass,” my mother said. “You’ll​Catch​Your​Death​Of​A​Cold​Going​Down​There​To​Get​Cured.” We waited until the next night when he’d speak to Roman Catholic educators at the Basilica of St. John the Baptist. My brother had been chosen to attend the outdoor mass representing his high school, but he used the day off to hang out with his friends, ditching on his one chance to meet the Pontiff. The rest of the family piled into the car like Mercury Seven astronauts climbing aboard the space capsule. Every ride with my mother could have been the last, and the poor driving conditions didn’t help matters. The rain poured again this night, its sideways sheets like freezing cold needles. Just leaving the house to get to the car made my face feel like a dart-board pelted by a thousand English pub drinkers.

  This was the rare time that Mom didn’t park at the mall and transfer to a bus. We drove the whole way downtown to the flip, flip, flip soundtrack of the windshield wipers. The closer we got to the Basilica, the slower we moved. I’d never seen anything like the winding line of traffic before us. Hundreds of cars queued up in hope of seeing His Holiness. Crowds of people huddling under umbrellas pushed past us on the sidewalks. The church had long since filled and now the faithful lined the roads, content with just a glimpse of the Holy Father as he drove past inside his Popamatic Pop-Up Trouble Bubble.

  Ahead of us, we could see that both the Mounties and the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary had come out to direct traffic and the hordes of pedestrians. It was like an amped-up version of the Santa Claus parade except there was only one float. I locked eyes with a little girl in a raincoat. She held her mother’s hand with her right mitt and a small bouquet of flowers with her left. Her feet barely touched the ground as her mother pulled her through the crowd to get a better view. The tips of her yellow rubber boots skipped on the sidewalk like a rock skimming a pond. We looked at each other as if to say, “I wonder what’s wrong with you. Why the need to get blessed? You look normal enough.”

  “Good God, Mary,” the old man exclaimed, lighting a Rothman’s off the ring of fire in the dashboard cigarette lighter. “We’ll never get out of this. There’s nowhere to park. Turn around.” There was no stopping now, though. My mother had come on a Holy Pilgrimage and God would not look kindly on quitters.

  “Look​There’s​A​Spot​There! Sure,​That’s​Fine​Now​There,​Luh!” My mother turned sharply into the crushing crowd of pilgrims. Like the sea at Moses’s command, they parted and the bottom of the old Chev scraped the sidewalk, making enough sparks to light a thousand cigarettes. She skidded to a stop on a grassy embankment, right where you’d expect the second shooter to be during an assassination attempt. “That’s​Lovely,​Sure,” she said as she covered her head in a see-through plastic rain hat.

  “I’ll stay here,” the old man called after Mom as she got out of the driver’s seat and opened my door. “Make it quick, will ya?” I admired his religious principles. He was enough of a Catholic to come this far, but not quite devout enough to bother getting wet. The path to holiness was littered with good intentions and my father was perfectly happy being a tile in the foyer of wherever that path led.

  The second I left the car, I was damp. Five feet on, I was soaked to the bone. My coat became heavy with water and my feet were completely submerged. I now trailed behind my mother, dragged along just like the little girl in the raincoat. I fantasized that the Pope would see me skimming the surface of the water and whisk me away to the Vatican to become a saint.

  After all, it wouldn’t be the first time someone in the family had been taken to Rome for performing a miracle. We have second cousins on Dad’s side who hailed from Gaskiers, just like my great-grandfather and grandfather. There are a couple of priests on that side, including one Father Critch with stigmata. Stigmata is the phenomenon that occurs when someone suffers wounds without injury in locations corresponding to the crucifixion wounds of Christ. They go to bed one night and then wake up the next day with holes in their hands and feet. Whether stigmata is a miracle, a psychical manifestation of stress caused by extreme and fervent belief, or absolute trickery depends on the depth of your own Christianity. You see the glass either half full or full of it. The wounds usually appear in the palms of the hands, as they do in religious iconography. However, the Romans would have nailed victims of crucifixion at the wrist. The fleshy palm isn’t strong enough to support the weight of the intended victim. So if you believed in stigmata, you’d have to believe that God didn’t quite remember how his only son was nailed to the cross. This would prove that God was a man. Jesus’s mother would remember exactly how it happened.

  Of this Father Critch, The Evening Telegram had reported that “Critch’s strange experience occurred in Antigua from March 29 to April 4—a cut reportedly opened up on his side and blood oozed from his wrists and ankles. Some parishioners claimed they were thrown to the floor when blessed by Critch (commonly called “slain in the spirit”) and had their injuries healed. Some parishioners have said they believe Critch has “stigmata”—wounds similar to those Jesus suffered on the cross when nails were hammered into his feet and palms and his side was pierced with a sword. The Roman Catholic Church, however, will not go beyond stating the facts when it comes to Critch’s condition.”

  Father Critch was getting quite a following in Antigua, so he was called to the Vatican. They kept his wounds under wraps (in more ways than one) and he disappeared from sight for some time. He finally popped up again after the tragic events of 9/11. He tended to first responders and survivors at Ground Zero.

  His mother was also a Mary Critch, and sometimes her mail would end up at Mom’s house. There are no greater bragging rights among Catholic mothers than being able to tell another mother that your son is a priest. My mother is very proud of her sons and grandchildren and will tell you about them at the drop of a hat. The meeting of these two women could only ever end in a brag-off.

  MOM: Oh,​Hello​Mrs.Critch. Here’s​Your​Mail​Now,​Girl. My​God,​HowStunned​Are​That​Crowd​At​The​Post​Office,​At​All? My​Son​Mark​Is​Coming​Home​Today. He’s​Up​On​The​Mainland​Now​Working​On​His​TVS​how. He​Was​Interviewing​The​Prime​Minister. MyGod. How’s​Your​Son​Doing?

  MRS. CRITCH: Oh, my son? Father Critch. Oh, he’s doing all right, now, I s’pose. He finds his hands and feet hurting a bit, though, you know. Where he has a touch of the stigmata? Yes, but that’s his cross to bear, you know. He won’t be home this weekend because he’s off at the Vatican with the Pope—on account of his stigmata. I’ll miss him but it’ll give me a chance to clean the tablecloth. He was home, now, the other week and we had a lovely meal but he bled all over my good linens when I asked him to pass the pickles. I guess that’s the price you pay now, when the one true God in heaven
decides to use your son that you carried in your womb just like the Virgin Mary did for Our Lord to remind the entire world of his only son’s suffering on the cross. To have his hands and feet suffer stigmata so that the poor people can see with their own eyes how Jesus suffered on Good Friday. If God felt my son was perfect enough to bear witness for Christ, I’m not going to worry about an old tablecloth now, am I? But it’s nice your son met Justin Trudeau?

  MOM: Are​You​Sure​It’s​Really​Stigmata? Perhaps​He​Just​Fell​Off​His​Bike​And​Skinned​His​Hands​Up​Or​Something?

  MRS. CRITCH: Oh, no. It’s the stigmata, all right. At least that’s what the Pope thinks or so they tell me.

  MOM: Yes​Well​Here’s​Your​Mail,​Now. There’s​Nothing​Good​There,​Anyway. I’m​Already​After​Reading​It. You​Should​Really​Pay​Your​Light​Bill. Goodbye.

  But Critchifixion hadn’t happened yet. We were as far away from the Vatican and Antigua as you could get. By now my mother had dragged me to the front of the packed throngs.

  “There​He​Is​Now,​Mark,​The​Pope,​Luh!” And so he was. At first it seemed as if a big blurry globe of shimmering white light was floating down Military Road toward the Basilica of St. John the Baptist. The white of the Popemobile and the ivory vestments of the man inside it were reflecting the glow from the streetlights and camera flashes. The glass of his enclosure was impervious to bullets, but on this night it was more useful as a way to keep out the rain. It was still pouring sideways, as if even the rain was straining to get a better glimpse of him. As the Popemobile inched closer I could see him blessing the crowds as he drove past. His hands carefully made the sign of the cross over his flock, transforming every single raindrop into Holy Water.

  “YooHoo! Pope! Here​Pope,​Pope,​Pope!” my mother shouted as if she were calling a poorly named dog. As he passed right in front of us I felt my face brightening in the light from his travelling Pope aquarium. He smiled and blessed us, and for a split second I felt as warm as he looked. Then he was gone and I was left breathing holy smoke from the Popemobile’s exhaust.