Then one day late in April you walked home from school, carrying your jacket. Your heart grew light at the certainty that winter had been beaten back into the north. It was time to break out the roller skates and jump ropes and hopscotch chalk, to put away the long cotton stockings, the garter belts, and long underwear, the snowsuits and heavy mittens and scarves!
It was nearly time for First Communion.
But First Communion meant first confession. When that knowledge came over me, unexpected, while I tied my new brown oxfords or gathered pussy willow branches outside of town along the tracks, the air grew cold again.
I studied early and late. Sally and Beverly and I went over the lessons twice a week, once at Sally’s on Tuesday; the second time at my house on Friday.
April zipped out of sight as if on greased skids, and then it was the first week in May.
“Sally, ‘What sins are we bound to confess?’” I read from the Baltimore Catechism, slouching on a chair in the Wheeler kitchen.
“We are bound to confess all our mortal sins, but it is well also to confess our venial sins,” she responded.
Sister was going to test us randomly on Saturday on all the chapters pertaining to confession and communion. Communion was also called the Holy Eucharist. Holy Eucharist was the name of the wafer you were given that must not be chewed, but must be allowed to slide down your throat without hindrance since it was the body of our Lord Jesus. You wouldn’t chew the body of your Lord, would you? If you stopped to think about it, you probably wouldn’t put the body of your Lord in your mouth at all.
One time I made a joke to Papa. He said he was going to play euchre with the boys over at Mr. Navarin’s station after closing, and I told him he was a Holy Eucharist. At first he laughed hard, but then he got mad and told me never to say that again, that it was blasphemy. I still thought it was funny.
Sally and Beverly and I had been studying for half an hour now, and hadn’t seen Mrs. Wheeler, although I could hear someone upstairs, pacing back and forth. Sally’s parents’ room was directly above the kitchen, so it must be Mrs. Wheeler. We rarely saw her anymore, but I was always aware of her, as if she were hiding in the corners, not in a sneaky way, but like a frightened animal. And yet there was a streak of courage in Mrs. Wheeler, if one remembered her saving Hilly from the men in the car.
“Lark.” Beverly sat with her left elbow on the table, head resting on the palm of her hand, and read from the catechism book, “‘What is the Holy Eucharist?’”
“Somebody who plays euchre every Sunday.”
She looked at me dumbly, then the light of comprehension came on, and she slapped her knee with the catechism and laughed with her head thrown back. “Godsakes. Ha ha ha ha. Godsakes.”
Sally stared as if we’d gone mad. I was laughing, too. It was impossible to see Beverly laugh without joining her.
“Doncha get it?” Beverly said, and again broke into wild guffaws. She slipped off her chair, onto the floor and lay laughing in a heap. After a while we forgot what we were laughing about, but we couldn’t stop.
Sally looked away as if we embarrassed her. But there was more in her expression. A wariness. As if she didn’t trust such uncontrolled reactions.
Beverly gasped, “Uncle Eddie plays euchre every Sunday afternoon. Ain’t that somethin’? He does, I swear to God.” She hooted.
“Stop laughing!” Sally shouted. “Do you hear me?” She was out of her chair and standing over Beverly. “Go home then, Beverly. If you can’t stop, go home.”
No one my own age, not even my best friend, was going to tell me I couldn’t laugh. I was running out of steam and about to wind down when she got upset. Now I redoubled my laughing, although it was no longer real. She gave me a dark, wild look, as if she wanted to slap my face. “You’re crazy,” she snapped at me, shoving me so that I would have fallen off the chair but for the edge of the table. “I don’t want you ever to come here again.” Whirling, she ran past me out of the kitchen. I heard her pounding up the stairs to her bedroom.
“Godsakes, what’s wrong?” Beverly questioned. “She turning into a crybaby or something?”
“She wasn’t crying,” I defended, although I, too, was bewildered. And a cold little hand of meanness grabbed my heart, its voice whispering in my ear, “Let her go. Let her cry up there in her room. Serves her right.”
“Let’s go to my house, Beverly.” I began gathering my things. “Maybe Mama will let you stay for supper.”
Loudly, so that Sally might hear, Beverly answered, “Yeah, let’s go to your house, Lark. Your ma makes better cookies anyhow.”
Out the back door we went, Beverly slamming it behind us. “She sure acted like a baby,” Beverly exclaimed as we minced across the muddy backyard to the street.
Glancing back as we reached the corner, I thought I saw Sally at her bedroom window, standing behind the dimity curtain, watching us depart.
“Where’s Sally?” Mama asked.
“She couldn’t come.”
Mama’s typewriter was on the kitchen table, but she carried it into the living room. “I nearly pounded the keys off that machine today,” she told us. “I can type forty words a minute now.”
Beverly and I sat down at the table and took turns reading and answering questions while Mama scrubbed baking potatoes, greased the skins, pricked them and popped them into the hot oven. I noted that she included one for Beverly. Nudging Beverly under the table, I nodded.
But, for all our seeming insouciance, our bad consciences held our noses to the catechism, and we did not let up until Papa came in to supper.
Papa and Beverly enjoyed a strange relationship. There were levels on which Papa did not approve of Beverly. She was not “womanly” in appearance or behavior. And she came from a distinctly “low-class” situation. While he himself derived from the hardworking poor, he greatly mistrusted the ragtag and bobtail who lived in the shacks south of the junkyard, suspecting them of the criminality and moral decay to which he might sink, were he in their place. Papa was never sure I ought to be associating with Beverly.
On the other hand, Beverly was in many ways the son for which he secretly wished. She could catch a softball or shinny up a telephone pole. Fearless and brash, she was a daredevil with a hearty laugh and the confident swagger of a self-made man. Her “Godsakes” he found both naughty and irresistible, and he laughed as though it were a joke between them. Had I said “Godsakes,” he would have slapped me or grabbed my arm, leaving bruises, asking me who did I think I was, taking God’s name in vain?
Mama did not interfere between Papa and Beverly. If it was on this basis that Beverly could come to our house with Papa’s blessing, then Mama would go along, but she never treated Beverly in that manner herself.
“Time to get out the fishing poles,” Papa observed at supper. “You fish?” he asked Beverly.
“Sure,” she said, cramming a spoonful of baked potato and gravy into her mouth.
“You got a pole?”
“Sure.” She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “I made it myself.”
“That so? Catch anything?”
“Godsakes, I got twelve bullheads once last spring.”
Papa laughed, as if at a sparkling witticism.
After supper Mama said, “I’ll take Beverly home on my way to bridge club.”
“Bridge club?” Papa said, as though this were the first he’d heard of it.
“Don’t pull that,” Mama warned. “I told you at lunch.”
Beverly jumped down from the table and ran in the living room, settling herself in the red leatherette rocker Santa had brought me. Beverly was simple-minded over my red rocker. Sometimes I got peeved when she plunked herself down in it, rocking hard enough to wear the rockers down to a sliver, but Mama said it was an opportunity to practice my generosity.
“I’ll be back,” Papa said, going next door to the office.
“I’m leaving for bridge at quarter past seven,” Mama told him.
When the time came for her to go, taking Beverly with her, Papa hadn’t come home yet. We could hear his typewriter on the other side of the wall.
“If he’s not here in ten minutes, Lark,” Mama said, “you pound on the wall.” We sometimes did that to let him know it was time to come home.
After Mama had kissed me good-bye, and she and Beverly had departed in the truck, I undressed and pulled on my nightie. Easing the sin notebook out from under the mattress, I found a pencil in the kitchen and climbed into the crib.
What Beverly and I had done to Sally that afternoon must be a sin. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t feel so crummy about it. I sat for a long time over the notebook, trying to decide which commandment we had broken.
The list of my transgressions went on for page after page. Some I had entered in great detail, some were one word: “sassed” or “cussed.” The notebook contained more than a year’s worth of sin. The old ones from when I had first started the entries, were getting blurry and smudged. I went over some of them now, wetting the lead on my tongue and sharpening up the hazy printing so I would be able to read it in the confessional.
How embarrassing it was going to be, kneeling in the confessional, reciting this endless litany of evil. I would be mortified. After my first confession, I promised myself, I would never sin again. I couldn’t endure this worry and disgrace a second time.
A week from tomorrow. That was the day of first confession. Then I could throw the notebook away. In the meantime, confused about my sin against Sally, I wrote: “hurt Sally’s feelings.” Outside the bedroom window the sky was light. In the trees alongside the Harvester Arms Hotel, birds were noisily bedding down for the night. Beverly was probably out playing kick-the-can with the other kids who lived south of the junkyard. I put my head down for a minute to listen to the birds and the rhythmic pounding of Papa’s typewriter.
The next thing I knew, I was awake and shivering. I’d fallen asleep without pulling up the quilt. But that wasn’t what woke me, I soon realized. It was Papa, standing beside the crib, terrible emanations of disgust and humiliation rolling out from him in scalding waves.
“What is this?” he demanded, sounding physically ill from the shock of what he had found.
“What?”
“This!” He held up the sin notebook.
“No!” I jumped up to snatch it from him, but he was too quick. He held it high above my head. “Papa, please! Give it to me,” I cried. “Please, Papa. You’re not supposed to read it.”
“I’ve already read it,” he told me, each word an indictment.
“No, Papa! Please. It’s mine.” I climbed down from the crib and fastened myself at his waist. “Please give it to me! Sister said no one should see it. It’s just to help us confess.”
“You’re going to confess all of that?”
What was he saying? That I should withhold some of it?
“We have to, otherwise we can’t go to heaven,” I wept.
“Do you really think you’re going to heaven?”
I was no longer sure. “Sister said. If we’re really sorry …”
Unfastening my arms from his waist, he asked, “What kind of kid are you? Where did you come from?” Tossing the notebook into the crib, he turned and walked out of the bedroom and out of the house.
38
SALLY WAS NOT SPEAKING to Beverly or me. For that matter, she spoke very little to anyone. I believe she would not have come to my house to study catechism on Tuesday, but Mama was sewing communion dresses for Sally and Beverly as well as for me, and she had to pin Sally’s hem on Tuesday. She told me to tell Sally and I did. Sally didn’t answer yes, no, or maybe, but she headed for my house after school, walking half a block behind Beverly and me.
As we sat around the kitchen table answering catechism questions, or took time out to slip into our white dresses and stand on a chair in the living room while Mama pinned up our hems, Sally did not speak one word of conversation. She didn’t act mean. She acted quiet.
I had some idea how she felt. Since Papa read my sin notebook on Friday night, I had not felt like talking to him. I had got over my anger. He did not believe that, and he kept teasing me and tickling me and winking at me and doing other things to make me smile, but I didn’t feel like smiling.
Mama was so busy sewing the communion dresses, she didn’t notice, or if she did, she assumed I was being quiet so as not to bother her.
Wednesday morning as I was leaving for school, Papa came out of the depot office and called to me. “Wait!”
He hurried across the platform.
“I have to go,” I told him. “I’ll be late for school.”
“I’ll give you a ride.”
I didn’t want him to give me a ride, but I climbed into the truck.
“You know that this is a sin, don’t you?”
“What’s a sin?”
“Treating your pa like this. You’re supposed to honor your father and mother. Didn’t the sisters teach you that?”
I nodded.
“Well?”
I didn’t know what to say. I guessed that he was probably right.
“Well?” he repeated.
“Well, what?” I asked. What should I say? I hated when he wanted me to say something and I didn’t know what.
He threw on the brakes, sending my lunch pail and school things flying onto the floor. “Get out!” he yelled.
I grabbed up my things as fast as I could and jumped down from the cab.
“You’re going to hell, little girl.” He gunned the engine of the old truck and spun away, leaving me standing in the street a long way from school.
Thursday afternoon after school, Mama took me to Lemling’s Photographic Studio to have my picture taken in my communion dress and veil, holding my new white prayer book and my new, white seed pearl rosary. Later she was to say of the portrait, “Doesn’t she look pretty? A little sad, too, like a saint.” A saint?
On Friday, as on Tuesday, Sally, Beverly, and I started legging it home from school to the depot, with Sally hanging half a block behind Beverly and me.
“Godsakes,” Beverly complained, “I thought she’d forget by now.”
“Should we tell her we’re sorry?” We turned around and started running back toward Sally. Sally stopped, backed up a few steps, then whirled and ran as fast as she could. Beverly was more fleet than I. She left me behind and chased Sally all the way to the playground, where Sally tripped on the bicycle rack and went sprawling on the gravel, skinning her knees and tearing her dress.
“Go away,” she screamed. “Leave me alone. Look what you made me do.” She held up her torn skirt. She was crying.
“We was going to apologize,” Beverly explained.
“We’re sorry we laughed the other day,” I told her. “We want to be friends again.”
“I don’t want you for my friends!”
She began gathering up her catechism and two or three workbooks that had scattered when she fell. Some arithmetic and spelling papers were snatched by the breeze and tossed in different directions. Beverly and I ran to fetch them.
“Leave my things alone.”
Sally pulled herself up and hobbled on her skinned legs, desperate to get her papers before we did, as if she didn’t want us even to touch her things. We handed her what we had retrieved.
“Don’t come to my house anymore,” she wept. “Understand? I don’t want you in my house ever again.” She limped away. “You both think you’re so good.”
“No, we don’t,” Beverly called after her, but Sally didn’t turn around or answer. “You got a real pretty house,” Beverly added. “Prettier than mine.”
“And you’re nicer than me,” I called.
Mama and I drove Beverly home after supper. The street outside Beverly’s house was not paved. There was still runoff in the deep ruts. Mama pulled the truck up on the forlorn bald area that was the front yard so that she and Beverly wouldn’t have to jump down into a puddle. Mama’s heels made a
hollow, knocking sound on the boards that were laid down loose for a sidewalk.
The house itself, covered all over with tar paper, was about the size of the waiting room in the depot. Inside, the wallpaper, once pink and blue, was mostly brown from age and soil and leaks in the roof. Several pieces of linoleum, no two matching, covered the floor.
In the back there was an outhouse, and over to one side of the front yard, a pump for water. When I played at Beverly’s house, which wasn’t often, she let me pump water while she put her head under the spout and drank.
Mama saw Beverly to the door, carrying the communion dress, all pressed and hung on a hanger, ready to be worn. Charlie opened the door. Mama said something and disappeared inside for a minute.
Then, “I’ll see you Erhardts tomorrow,” Beverly called out the door as Mama teetered down the unstable board sidewalk to the truck.
“Well, I hope the dress stays clean till Sunday,” Mama sighed, pulling herself up into the truck. “That’ll be a miracle.”
“Did Mrs. Ridza pay you?”
“Beverly’s dress is a present.” She started the engine. “I’m buying my way into heaven,” she said with a laugh, “a few cents at a time. Don’t wrinkle Sally’s dress.” Turning the truck around in the middle of the washboard street, Mama headed across town to the Wheelers’.
At Sally’s, Mama waited a long time on the front stoop. There were no lights on downstairs. She rang the bell a second time. At last the door was opened by Mr. Wheeler. He took the dress from Mama, thanking her.
“You’ll be at church for the First Communion?” I heard Mama ask.
“Yes. Oh, yes.” He nodded, backing away, slowly closing the door. “Oh, yes.”
While I was dressing for bed, Mama made popcorn.
“Are we going to study for confession?” I asked, standing in my nightie beside the stove.
Mama shook her head. “We’re going to read a story.”
“Can we look at a house book instead?”
We curled up on the couch with a couple of house books, one of them the same as that from which we’d cut out our Cape Ann. Beginning with the first plan in the Cape Ann book, we paged through, explaining aloud to each other what features were appropriate for us and which were silly or costly or ugly or simply inexplicable. Reaching #127—The Cape Ann, we exclaimed, “Isn’t this a darling house?” and “We could live in this one, quite nicely,” and “Here’s where we’d have a bed of lily of the valley.”
The Cape Ann Page 28