An Imperfect Miracle

by Thomas L. Peters

  That Sunday Pastor Bob was preaching. He was real tall and lean, and from back where we sat most Sundays he looked like all nose, chin and legs, except for his thick gray hair that he combed straight back. Mostly I tuned Pastor Bob out and just sat there daydreaming, because he talked a lot about what to do and what not to do. And I had a hard time remembering all those little rules of his. I guess I could have remembered them if I really tried, but I just never felt like it. I liked Pastor Mike’s sermons a lot better, because he mostly talked about loving your neighbor and not getting a big head and treating other people the way you’d want to be treated, stuff that was pretty easy to understand.

  That morning Pastor Bob started off by saying how bad it was to worship idols and graven images and pictures. I wasn’t really sure what idols or graven images were, but I knew what a picture was and started paying more attention. It turned out that Pastor Bob was all in an uproar about Mary’s face showing up along Main Street and how silly it all was. He said that even if it was Mary and not just some water mark, we’re supposed to worship Jesus and not her. He said that the Catholics were way off base putting so much stock in Mary, building statues to her and painting pictures of her and praying to her and stuff like that, and that we shouldn’t fall into the same trap.

  I didn’t quite follow him on what trap he was talking about, but he made it sound pretty scary and I wondered if I was close to falling into it. Then he said how he’d just read in the paper about some guy in Ohio who thought he saw Mary in a pan right after he’d fried up some rice.

  “Now that fellow bows down and prays to his frying pan every morning before he goes to work,” Pastor Bob said, kind of chuckling.

  Most everybody, including Mom, laughed about the frying pan, but Pastor Bob said it really wasn’t very funny when you thought about it.

  “Weak-minded people can easily be led astray by such foolishness.”

  I didn’t know if I qualified as weak-minded or not, but Father Tom sure didn’t look weak-minded and Carlos didn’t either. I began wondering if I was headed straight to Hell for having seen her face first and telling that blabbermouth Marcie about her. All this time Mom was sitting there beside me mostly staring up at the stage with her eyes sort of glassy and her head tilted sideways a little. I nudged her arm and whispered whether I could leave early to talk to Pastor Mike. She whispered back that I could, so long as I didn’t make a pest of myself. Just then Pastor Bob started talking about the church’s new building project and how they’d need to raise a ton of money real quick to start construction on time.

  “Introduce yourself to Pastor Mike like a little gentleman,” she whispered real intense and breathy. “Just don’t go up to him and start asking questions. I don’t want him to think you were raised in a barn.”

  Mom was always griping about me acting like I’d been raised in a barn, which I thought was pretty strange since there weren’t any barns that I knew of inside the Millridge city limits. Pastor Bob was still begging for money when I went out to the lobby and found Pastor Mike standing all by himself stirring the cream into his little blue coffee mug. I took a deep breath and walked right up to him to introduce myself like Mom told me. He smiled and patted me on the shoulder and asked me how I was doing. He knew my name too before I even had a chance to say it.

  I’d heard Mom going on and on to her friends one time about how cute Pastor Mike was. I guess it was because of his sharp blue eyes and thick black hair that curled down a little over his forehead. But it was hard to tell what Mom was thinking sometimes, and I didn’t really care whether he was cute or not.

  “Is Mary real, her picture on the concrete I mean? Pastor Bob doesn’t think so. He says I’m going straight to Hell if I go down and ask her for favors and stuff, although I haven’t really asked her for anything yet, at least not for myself.”

  Pastor Mike laughed for a few seconds, like I’d just told a good joke or something, and then his face settled into a nice pleasant grin. Pastor Mike had soft, smooth skin and a dimple when he smiled, just like Mom, and I wondered if that was another reason why she liked him so much.

  “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

  “So you don’t think she’s a fake then.”

  “I don’t really know. Do you think she’s a fake?”

  I hated it whenever teachers at school answered my question with a question of their own. I was hoping that Pastor Mike was better than that.

  “I think she’s real, but I can’t prove it. I don’t know how you’d go about proving something like that anyway. The cops even came around asking me questions about her—whether she was a fake I mean. But they didn’t look smart enough to prove much of anything about her one way or another.”

  I noticed Pastor Mike eyeing me up pretty close all of a sudden.

  “When did they ask you these questions?”

  “Just yesterday. They think Carlos and me are in cahoots, but I’m not worried since I didn’t do anything wrong. They didn’t say anything about Father Tom though. Do you think they’re after him too?”

  Pastor Mike’s blue eyes weren’t shining nearly as bright and sharp as before.

  “Father Tom is a fine man. So is Carlos. The police should stick to solving real crimes.”

  I remembered what Marcie had told me and decided to ask him about it just to see what he’d say.

  “Maybe Father Tom wants to drum up some business for his church. His church isn’t growing near as fast as ours, although I think it’s because our church has a lot better music.”

  Pastor Mike shrugged a little and then took a long swig of his coffee.

  “That doesn’t sound like something Father Tom would do.”

  “How do you think her face got there then?”

  Pastor Mike sipped some more coffee.

  “Maybe it’s just a water stain like some people say, or maybe it really is a miracle. But whatever the cause, she provides hope to those who believe in her. We all need hope. We can no more live without it than we can live without food or water. And who are we to deny people hope, regardless of the source?”

  “So you don’t think Mary is just some Catholic thing then like Pastor Bob says, because Mom’ll never let me switch to being Catholic. She doesn’t like all the candle burning and air swishing and the long robes and everything. But Mom can be pretty mule-headed about stuff.”

  Pastor Mike laughed a little and then swilled down the rest of his coffee. He kind of slurped it there at the end, like Mom always did in the mornings when she was still waking up. I remembered thinking that if I ever drank my orange juice like that, she’d have been on me in a second to clean up my manners. I wondered if Pastor Mike knew what he was getting into by hooking up with Mom.

  “The Catholics put more emphasis on Mary than we do, but it’s only out of reverence for her. Maybe I’ll have to talk to Pastor Bob and see if we can iron out our differences.”

  “Do you think she can really do miracles?”

  “I think we should respect the beliefs of others, just like we hope other folks will respect ours.”

  “You mean when all those old ladies down in the front start lifting their hands way up in the air and swaying back and forth like they’re gonna faint any second?”

  “Sort of,” he said, and smiled.

  Then he patted me on the shoulder again and looked around for some place to set his coffee mug, like he was trying to shake loose of me. But I still had some more questions.

  “Did you quit talking with Mom long enough at the blessing ceremony to see the old guy with the shakes getting healed?”

  “I heard about it. And it’s probably more polite to say Parkinson’s disease.”

  I followed him to a window ledge a few yards away where he set his mug. I was hanging so near to him that my legs almost got tangled up with his. He didn’t seem to mind me tailing him though, not like my English teacher, Mr. Grimes, for instance, who always acted like I had s
ome sort of disease.

  “I saw the whole thing, and it sure looked real enough to me, although I guess it was possible that the old guy could have been faking it. Mom says that even if he actually felt better, it’ll wear off before not too long and he’ll be as bad off as he was before, or maybe even worse. But Mom’s always so gloomy about everything that I don’t know whether to believe her or not.”

  Pastor Mike said he hoped it wouldn’t wear off, and then he started looking over my head toward the doors of the auditorium, like he expected church to end soon. I remembered something else that had been bugging me.

  “How do you know what Mary is trying to tell you if she’s not saying anything? Carlos says she’s a sign for something, something important that’s gonna happen, but I can’t figure out what because she won’t say.”

  Pastor Mike sure was quick, a lot quicker than Mom, anyway, and maybe even Carlos, because he had his answer all ready to go. He even looked me right in the eyes for a few seconds, like what he was telling me was important enough that I ought to pay attention. I flinched a little since I wasn’t used to it. The teachers at school, for instance, always seemed like they were talking to the walls.

  “Your ears just hook up with your brain, Nate, but when you listen to Mary you have to listen with your heart too.”

  Then he flicked my ear lobe with his finger.

  “So it’s kind of like her words just show up inside you.”

  “Kind of.”

  It sounded a little like how Chewy talked to me now that she was invisible. I looked around to see what she was up to, but I couldn’t find her. I wasn’t worried though, because after church Chewy usually liked going outside to chase snakes. Our church was built smack up against the woods, and the snakes seemed to like living there.

  Then Pastor Mike started asking me all sorts of dumb questions about how Mom and me were doing, and whether Mom was happy, and whether I was happy, and how he’d like to see me around church more and stuff like that. He even asked me about Chewy. I told him not to say anything to Mom about Chewy being invisible because Mom wasn’t really smart enough to understand it, and he promised he wouldn’t. Then a clump of words burst out of me so fast that I never really saw them coming, at least not until they were floating right out there between us.

  “Mom’s thinking of moving us up to Erie so I can get another dog and run around in some field. I don’t really want to though, especially now that I’m sort of famous around here for being the one to discover Mary. I don’t think they’d care much up in Erie one way or the other, unless Mary followed me up there. But I’m not sure if she’s able to show her face in two places at one time, or even if she’d want to. So if you’re thinking about asking Mom to marry you, you’d better get to it before it’s too late and we’re long gone. Mom thinks she’s too old and fat for you anyway.”

  Pastor Mike’s eyes got real wide, and he sort of stumbled around for a few seconds, like maybe he wasn’t quite as quick as I thought.

  “Well, that’s good to know. Thanks for the tip.”

  Then church let out and I had to scramble out of there fast to keep from getting crushed among all the old ladies charging out to surround him. Mom usually hung around the lobby gossiping with her friends and trying to angle in to see Pastor Mike, but today she seemed in a rush to leave. I gave my secret hand signal to Chewy to get back in the car, and we all took off. On our way home I told Mom what Pastor Mike had said about Mary not being so terrible and scary after all. She nodded but didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

  “It’s funny that Pastor Mike takes Mary’s side, almost as strong as Father Tom and Carlos do, and he’s not even Catholic.”

  “Pastor Mike thinks for himself,” Mom said kind of dreamy.

  Since Mom wasn’t talking much, I spent the rest of the ride home staring out the window trying to decide whether Mary was speaking to me inside my heart yet or not like Pastor Mike had warned me about, but I couldn’t tell.

  Chapter 6

  After we got home from church I went outside and roamed around our street for a while. But no one was out except this big red-haired kid from school, I think his name was Rich something. He strutted up to me all cocky and said that Father Tom and Carlos were just using this Mary thing to swindle the people out of their hard-earned money.

  “And you’re in on it too. Carlos is probably paying you off somehow. That’s what my dad says anyway.”

  When I rolled my eyes, he stuck out his flabby chest at me.

  “Do you want me to prove it to you?”

  “How are you gonna do that?”

  He waved at me to follow him, and I decided I might as well since I didn’t have anything else to do. We started off toward Main Street, and it wasn’t long before I could tell we were headed toward the abandoned lot where Mary was. I told him that I’d already studied Mary up close, and that if he was itching to show me how her face was just painted on or something like that he could save his breath. He whirled at me so fast that I lifted my arms in front of my face because I thought he was going to punch me. Instead he fixed his veiny eyes on me and grinned a little.

  “I betcha he’s still there. He probably figures that all the religious people are at church, so he can get away with it. You better be quiet though, or you’ll scare him off.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “He’s probably one of your buddies. You tell me.”

  I told him he was nuts, but he kept waving me on. Main Street was about as quiet and empty as I’d ever seen it. The bars were closed on Sunday, so there weren’t even any drunks stretched out on the sidewalk. We walked up to the karate place and then leaned our shoulders against the front wall and tiptoed all the way to the end. The kid peeked around the corner first, and then he turned and grinned at me all cocky.

  “I told you so,” he whispered.

  I leaned past him and took a look for myself. Even though he was wearing these funny-looking green goggles, I could tell it was my English teacher, Mr. Grimes, on account of his bushy gray hair and how slender and weak his legs and arms looked. A sledgehammer was standing straight up next to him, and he was cradling some sort of gadget in his rat-colored little hands. He finally got it working and a red purple flame shot out the front and then died away. A few second later he aimed the nozzle right at Mary, but I was so surprised by it all that I just stood there gawking until the kid pulled me back.

  “He’s probably trying to burn her face in permanent with that blowtorch. And if that don’t work, he’s gonna chisel it in with that big hammer he’s got.”

  I finally sucked in enough air so that I could talk, although the words came out kind of broken up and breathy.

  “That’s Mr. Grimes from school, and he don’t even believe in God. He’s probably trying to burn her face right off the concrete because of how much he hates anything having to do with religion.”

  We both took another look, and I was about to holler at Mr. Grimes to stop when a little man with a blue skull cap on seemed to pop right up out of the weeds. At first I didn’t recognize him because he’d shaved off his whiskers, and he was a lot more flexible than I’d remembered him. It was only when he grabbed Mr. Grimes by the shoulder and spun him around that I got a good enough look at his face to tell that he was the little drunk Mary had patched up. He told Mr. Grimes to back off, but Mr. Grimes just cussed him and then whirled back toward Mary with his blowtorch. Without waiting even a second the little drunk sucker punched Mr. Grimes right in the middle of his back. He must have really packed a wallop too because Mr. Grimes went down like somebody had just shot him.

  The drunk grabbed the blowtorch and emptied out all the gasoline into the weeds. I wondered for a second if he was planning to set fire to the place. But instead he took a knife out of his pocket and jabbed the point into the motor, and then he worked it all around inside until he must have been sure that it was busted for good. He threw the blowtorch on the ground next to w
here Mr. Grimes was still lying and groaning, set the sledgehammer on his knee, and began working the blade of the knife in between where the hammer was hooked onto the wooden handle. It wasn’t but a minute before the hammer fell off. Then he threw the handle into the weeds too and hollered down at Mr. Grimes that he better stay away from Mary from now on, or something even worse might happen to him.

  I turned to the kid and gave him as cocky of a grin as I could work up on the spot. The kid spit on the pavement and then shoved me so hard that I almost fell over. I wasn’t about to be pushed around by the likes of him, and I slipped in a few strong belly shots before he wrestled me into a headlock and started punching me in the face. While he was doing that, he stuck his leg out in front of me and flipped me down. Lucky for me I landed in the weeds instead of on the sidewalk. He wasn’t much of a puncher though, because I could tell I wasn’t bleeding any.

  “What are you gonna do now, sic your invisible dog on me?” Then he called me a loser and strutted off, cackling and swearing. Right away Chewy snuggled up to me like she always did when I was feeling low. Chewy said the kid was a big dope and that he wasn’t worth worrying about. She said he’d get his some day. She said kids like him always do. Then I remembered from somewhere that the kid’s dad was that doctor Mom had taken me to see. When I told Chewy she said she wasn’t surprised, because she’d never liked that doctor from the beginning. She said that doctors like him were always trying to cause trouble.

  Just then Mr. Grimes limped by us, massaging his back, and he was in such misery that I didn’t think he even saw me. I looked toward Mary again and noticed the little drunk sitting on the bottom step gazing up at her. I didn’t know if he was praying or just admiring her. I was about to go and ask him how Mary had closed up his cut, but I was afraid he’d bawl me out again for bugging him.