An Imperfect Miracle

by Thomas L. Peters

  Then I told Mr. Santelli about Father Tom getting arrested for the murder, and he said he’d just seen the news pop up on his little computer screen. He said that he hoped folks didn’t take it out on Mary. I asked him what Mary had to do with Father Tom getting arrested. He said people were always blaming God for what the bad priests were up to, and he expected that they’d blame Mary too on account of her shrine being so popular.

  I ran straight home and told Mom the news. I almost hated to because Mom never believed me whenever I told her something important. She always had to get on the phone first and talk to her girlfriends before she gave me any credit for knowing anything, and this time was no different. After she chattered with them awhile, she told me that it must be some kind of a big foul-up. She said that everybody knows Father Tom wouldn’t kill anybody on purpose.

  “What reason could he possibly have?”

  The more I thought about motive, the more scared I got. I hoped that if Father Tom really was the killer he hadn’t bashed in Runyon’s skull just on account of me, and that instead he was trying to get out of paying the blackmail money. I didn’t want to feel like it was my fault for him going to prison.

  Mom called up Pastor Mike next, and they gabbed for so long that we never did go out for lunch. I was about to head back to the shrine to talk things over with Mary, but Mom said she wanted me to stay with her all day. I didn’t really know why either, because all we did was sit around on the couch watching TV and eating popcorn, with her hugging me every once in a while.

  The next morning I was even more antsy to go down to the shrine, this time to talk to Carlos, and maybe get him to say a special prayer or two for Father Tom if he hadn’t already. Carlos was good at praying, a lot better than me anyway. Mr. Santelli told me once that Carlos would climb up the concrete steps to Mary’s face on his hands and knees every morning before they opened up the shrine and pray for nearly a half hour with his eyes shut tight and his head bowed and every muscle in his body all tensed up. When I asked Carlos why he did it, he said it made him feel good to do something he didn’t have to. Mr. Santelli called it penance, which he said was one of those fancy Catholic words I didn’t need to worry about. He said it worked for plenty of Catholics though, and that Carlos was pretty slick at it.

  Just as I was finishing my orange juice Pastor Mike showed up, and Mom made me stay home again. I put up a big fuss about it, and Pastor Mike even tried to get Mom to change her mind. But like I said, Mom could be awful stubborn at times and wouldn’t back down. I even tried to get Pastor Mike alone and kind of feel him out on whether he thought Father Tom was really the killer or not. But Mom hovered around us like some big pesky bug on a hot muggy night. Then right out of the blue Mom asked him if the cops had come around again.

  Pastor Mike said that some bald heavyset cop had stopped by his apartment just yesterday, but the questions seemed pretty routine and that Mom shouldn’t worry. I figured it must be the round cop and wondered why he was hassling Pastor Mike. Then I thought maybe he’d found out that Pastor Mike had been the one to cook up the idea for Mary’s shrine. I didn’t see how it was possible though, because neither of those cops seemed bright enough.

  Pastor Mike decided to hang around all day helping Mom do stuff, like carry boxes down to the basement and help paint the wall right next to the kitchen, the one that had been peeling a little lately, and to fix the leaky bathroom faucet, and some other chores I can’t even remember now. Mom made me stick around to help out, which was really unfair because school started the next day. So I never did make it down to the shrine, and I was pretty bummed about it too. I wondered if this was how it was going to be all the time once they got married. But I didn’t want Mom hollering at me in front of Pastor Mike, so I kept quiet about it.

  The next morning I left for school early so I could stop by the shrine and talk to Carlos. But Mr. Santelli said that Carlos hadn’t shown up yet, which wasn’t like him since he was always early. The line to see Mary was already backed up way far, and with Chewy egging me on like usual I headed off to school so I wouldn’t be late.

  I sat through my classes mostly thinking about poor Father Tom sitting in some jail cell. The jail was only a block or so away from my school, but it might as well have been on Mars. I would have sent Chewy over there to make him feel better, but because she was just a dog Chewy probably wouldn’t have known what to say. And even if she could have dredged up the right words somehow, Father Tom couldn’t see her or hear her, unless God let him, which I wasn’t sure if He would or not.

  After school I got held up by my new science teacher, Mr. Pantek, who wanted me to write a book report on whether something called “The Shroud of Turin” was a real miracle or not. I guess he picked me on account of how sharp and alert I was in spotting Mary’s face on the concrete. I told him I’d do it just to get him off my back, and finally he let me go.

  When I got down to the shrine it was just about four o’clock, which on weekdays was quitting time. How they worked it was that Mr. Santelli would come out right at four and put up a sign after the last person in line. The sign said that the shrine was closed and to come back some other day. But everybody in line in front of the sign could still get in to see Mary no matter how long it took. After a while people figured out that they could show up right at the very end of the day and still get in, so long as they were willing to wait. It was just my luck that a huge crowd of out-of-towners had slid in ahead of me, and the line went back nearly three blocks.

  Mr. Santelli would always try and move things along because he wanted to get home too. But there were a lot of cripples and sick people up ahead that day, and it was taking longer than usual to herd them all through. I waited for a whole hour before it was my turn, and I wasn’t worried about Mom yelling at me for being late for supper either. This was way too important to blow it over some little thing like that. I didn’t even talk to anybody in line, even when some of them recognized me from my picture in the papers. I felt like I had to act real serious if I expected Mary to come through.

  When I got up to the front I showed Mr. Santelli my pass. But because he was in such a hurry to close up shop for the day so he could go home to his supper, he didn’t even look at it. I spotted Carlos sitting all slumped and sad looking behind his counter and went over to try and cheer him up. But as I was strolling past Mary I noticed that she’d changed again. The corners of her mouth had turned up a hair higher, and her lips had opened up a little too. They left enough of a gap that you could see these tiny white specks in between that kind of looked like teeth starting to grow. I climbed up the steps to get a closer look, and instead of five tears, now I counted only three.

  I went over right away to ask Carlos if he’d been working on Mary’s face again with his penknife. Carlos was busy piling up all the money and seemed a little ticked off at me for interrupting him. I let him finish his counting and then told him about Mary’s face changing. He sort of frowned and rolled his eyes a little, which was pretty unusual for Carlos, and then he wandered over to see for himself. It didn’t seem like he really wanted to though, because he was grunting and sighing an awful lot.

  Carlos climbed up to the third step, leaned forward a little, and then stared down at her for a few seconds. But it didn’t seem like he saw anything new or special, because his face stayed just as gloomy and bored as before. I was standing right beside him pointing out all the changes too, so it wasn’t as if he didn’t know what was going on. Finally he straightened up and said that he couldn’t see any difference in her. When I asked him how that could possibly be, he promised he’d look again tomorrow when he wasn’t so tired. Then he went back to get the bags of money ready for the security guards to haul them to the bank.

  Seeing as how snippy and strange he was acting, I didn’t want to bug him anymore. Instead I got down on my knees on the bottom step and started praying to Mary to spring Father Tom out of jail somehow. I don’t remember exactly what I said to her,
so I guess it couldn’t have been much of a prayer.

  Next day at lunch Marcie came up to me while I was waiting for the cafeteria ladies to refill the mashed potatoes bin. She said she’d forgiven me for messing up her pool party, and that she was having another one in a few days before the weather turned real cold. I told her I wasn’t interested, and in a second her eyes flared up at me. Then the words flooded out of her glossy little mouth like she was trying to sweep me away.

  “You’re just mad because that Mary of yours is a fake. She can’t even get Father Tom out of jail. I told you she was just a bunch of dirt. You wouldn’t listen to me though, and now see what’s happened. My dad says that pretty soon the pilgrims are going to stop coming to the shrine, and then the town will just bulldoze her like they should have done a long time ago. My dad says that she turned out to be a lot more trouble than she was worth. And here you thought you were being so smart. Well, you’re just a big pathetic dope, Nathan Gray.”

  Instead of arguing with her, I just turned around and walked away. It shows you how low I was feeling, letting Marcie get the best of me like that. Then at recess some kid who lived so close that he could go home for lunch and be back in twenty minutes said that he just heard from his mom that the cops had arrested Pastor Mike for the murder too. They claimed that he was in cahoots with Father Tom. The kid said that reporters from all over the country, all over the world even, were headed to Millridge to cover the trial. According to the radio reports, Pastor Mike had helped kill Runyon on account of how he was jealous over some little nurse who worked over at the hospital.

  All of a sudden I got to feeling so panicky that I could hardly breathe. I wasn’t sure if Mom would ever survive Pastor Mike going to prison, seeing as how hard she’d worked to get him to marry her. I thought about the old guy with the shakes walking away from Mary all steady and straight, and Uncle Carl shedding his diabetes, and a ton of other folks being helped out too from all their ailments and troubles. Whether she was a fake or not, I was hoping there was one more miracle left in Mary. I decided to ditch school and head straight for the shrine. Chewy knew what I was thinking too, because she was already way out ahead of me.

  Because it was lunchtime I was worried there’d be a big crowd, but hardly anybody was there. I figured it was on account of Father Tom and Pastor Mike going to jail, and that folks were finally getting sick of all this religious mumbo-jumbo, which was what some of the newspapers were starting to call it. Mr. Santelli looked pretty gloomy too. He said that he was too old to find another good paying job if the shrine had to close its doors.

  When I got near the steps I looked over at Carlos, but he was sitting behind the counter staring out the window and seemed kind of lost. I felt sorry for him, but I didn’t know what I could say to make him feel better. Then I knelt down on the bottom step. I even took away the purple pillow just to show Mary that this prayer of mine was so important that I was willing to bruise up my knees a little. I decided to say the prayer out loud too, since it had worked so well in getting Chewy back. The words hit my brain all of a sudden, like it was a miracle or something.

  “I don’t really care if Father Tom or Pastor Mike or both of them together killed Runyon or not. And I don’t care either that they acted sort of sneaky when they got the town to turn you into a shrine. And I’m not even all that mad anymore that they didn’t tell me about it. I’d just like them out of jail as soon as you and God can work something out. I’m not asking so much on account of them either, although they’re both really nice guys, but because of my mom and because of you. I figure that Father Tom and Pastor Mike can put up with staying in jail until some jury lets them off. Or even if the jury sends them to prison, they’ll probably still end up going to heaven, because you’re a lot more forgiving than we humans are. But I’m worried about my mom going all to pieces in the meantime. She’s already lost one husband, and Mom’s not too steady sometimes, at least that’s how it seems to me. And I’m worried about all the folks who believe in you being disappointed when your shrine closes up. They’ll just bulldoze you into the ground, and what will have been the point of it all?”

  Then I took a deep breath to get my courage up for the hard part.

  “Now I know I’m not the greatest kid in the world, but I’m asking you to listen to me anyway, even if you don’t think what I’m asking is the right thing to do, because I know you’ve got your own ideas. We’re not as strong as you are, after all, and we need a little extra help sometimes.”

  I tried to think if I needed to say anything else, but nothing came to me. I thought about crossing myself like the Catholics do, but Mary would have known I was just faking it. I looked over at Chewy lying beside me and wondered if she had anything she wanted to say to Mary, but Chewy smacked her lips some and seemed satisfied.

  I kind of moped over to where Carlos was standing behind the counter. Carlos was whimpering a little now, and I decided he was just sad for having been so short with me the day before. I told him not to worry about it and headed for the exit. But he grabbed me by the arm and held me still, and his grip was a lot stronger than I would have expected from such a little old guy. Then he wiped the water out of his eyes with his other hand and said that he needed to tell me something. He said that people would soon be saying mean and untrue things about Mary, but that I shouldn’t pay any attention to it.

  “It’ll all be on account of me.” Then he smiled just a little. “I heard you praying just now. It was a fine prayer too, but you don’t need to worry anymore. Things will work out just fine.”

  All of a sudden he gave me a big hug and said he loved me. I thought about saying that I loved him too, but I was too embarrassed on account of Mr. Santelli being so close by. After Carlos scrubbed the last of the tears off his face, he shot me a big toothy smile and sent me home.

  Just as I was walking out the door, Carlos called out after me. He said that he knew Mary only had three tears now and that her mouth was beginning to open up a little, almost like she was getting ready to laugh. He said he didn’t have anything to do with it either and that it was a sign of something, a miracle, he said, but that he didn’t know what it meant exactly. He said he was taking it serious though and that I should too.

  When I stepped outside I caught the little drunk listening in through the front window. I wondered what he was up to, but I was so beat and worn down from all the praying that I went straight home and crawled right into bed.

  Chapter 16

  The local newspaper printed the whole letter that the little drunk, his full name turned out to be John Smith, sent to the cops along with the big silver cross he claimed he stole from Carlos, the one Smith killed Runyon with. Mom saw it at work and bought the paper right away and read the letter to me when we were sitting next to each other on the couch after supper. I told her I could read it by myself, but I guess she wasn’t taking any chances.

  The letter was kind of long and had a lot of fancy Catholic-sounding words in it like confession and penance and stuff, which I guess the little guy had picked up from hanging around Carlos and Father Tom so much. But the main points were pretty simple and straightforward according to Mom.

  This little Smith guy said that Runyon showed up on Main Street one night drunk and fuming that somebody had been stealing from him. He was mad too that he couldn’t go where he wanted on account of some stupid judge, and that a crazy mutt had even bit him for no good reason. Then Runyon saw the shrine and got ticked off at Mary because he blamed her for all the bars closing down.

  Smith said he’d come back to the shrine that night to polish up the crosses like he often did to help out Carlos, and that Runyon stomped in and said that he was going to scrape that ugly face of hers right off the wall. Smith said he told him to back off, but that Runyon just pushed him away and started going for Mary with a butcher’s knife he’d brought along.

  The little guy said that he just couldn’t allow it, Mary being the Mother of God and all.
So he took the silver cross off from around his neck, the one he’d swiped from Carlos, and bashed the bottom end of it right into the side of Runyon’s skull. Runyon died on the spot, and after praying for Runyon’s soul a little, Smith stole a car and drove his body out to the edge of town and dumped him. He said he would have taken him farther out, maybe even a ways up the interstate, but that he got scared hauling a dead body around.

  Then he cleaned up all the blood at the shrine, buried the butcher’s knife out in the woods, drove the car into a junkyard on the other side of town, and finally walked back to his little room in the basement of St. Sebastian’s like nothing had happened. He said it was a good thing that Carlos had talked the town out of putting in those security cameras over at the shrine, or he’d have been a dead duck for sure.

  He said he decided against telling the cops what he’d done because he didn’t know if he had a right to kill Runyon for trying to scrape Mary’s face off the concrete. He said he didn’t think a jury in Millridge would have sent him off to prison for it, but since he used to be a thief and a general reprobate himself he wasn’t taking any chances. Plus, he thought that because Runyon was such a derelict, the cops wouldn’t work too hard trying to find the killer, and that he didn’t have to worry about some innocent person going to jail for it.

  When Father Tom was arrested the little fellow told himself, at least according to what he wrote in his letter, that no jury in Millridge would ever find such a good man to be guilty of such a terrible crime, and he decided to stay quiet. He thought the same thing when Pastor Mike got picked up. Then as he was walking past the shrine one day he heard a young boy’s prayer, and the prayer shamed him so much that he decided to come clean. He didn’t mention me as the boy he’d heard praying, because I guess he didn’t want to embarrass me. I almost told Mom that I was the kid he was writing about. But at the last second I decided I better not risk it, Mom being so nutty at times and hard to predict.