by Chris Bauer
Sister backed the bus up real slow a few feet closer to Father and me, the distance shortened until we were almost face-to-face with Adam. She crammed the stick shift into first gear, the transmission grinding. Adam’s smile returned, stayed with him as he spoke again, this time over the ear-grating noise of metal mating with metal, his eyes flicking between my face and the death announcements in my hand. He spoke directly to me.
“Stirb, und betrachte die vernarbene Gesichtbildung von Gott.”
The bus pulled forward and Sister steered it into a wide circle, the bus chugging and bouncing over the uneven grass. As she guided it past us on her turnaround I started translating Adam’s German in my head. Sister waved to us, and I kept my hand up to wave to Leo in the seat behind her, Leo’s frail friend Raymond in his wheelchair in the aisle. Leo was preoccupied, leaning over the seat back, concentrating hard on Adam in the rear of the bus.
Leo’s face had a look I’d never seen on it before, but it was one I recognized. Seen it years ago back when I was boxing, on the faces of determined men in the other corner of the ring just before the bell for the next round, and those men seen it on me too. It was a serious look that said next time, you SOB, you’re going down for good.
5
Father had accepted my offer of a lift so we were in my truck, a few stop signs from the rectory.
“You speak German, Father?”
He wiped some sweat from his forehead and eyes with a hand towel. The towel settled on his mouth a moment before he returned it to his gym bag, open on the seat between us. “Yes. I learned to speak and write German while I was in the seminary. It’s one of the reasons I was assigned to this parish.”
“Then I take it you understood what Adam said back there.” I shifted the truck from first to second gear. Cruising the shorter side of these city blocks, third gear never got much use. As we neared the next stop sign, I got a peek at Father’s face. There was another time and place on it.
“Yes, I understood it,” he said, finally. “It sounded like a quote, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard it before.” The truck bucked a little and I pushed in the clutch to keep it from stalling, then nursed the brake until we stopped. Father continued. “What he said was, ‘Die, and behold God’s scarred face.’”
“My translation, too, Father. Never heard it before neither. At least not exactly.”
“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’? Have you heard something like it?”
I pulled out them tiny old German death announcements from my shirt pocket and handed them to him. “Here. Closest I ever seen to it. It’s in there somewhere.”
It was in my head now, too, somewhere. Just had to sort through nearly sixty years of crap to get to it, then I’d be able to tell Father what things had been like around here, back when I was a kid. A lesson in parish history. Concentrate, I told myself.
Found it.
“It was 1911, Father, late June. The parish monsignor had just died. A lot of parishioners were at the cemetery for the burial, even us kids…”
…Two wrinkly hands grabbed the doorframe of the carriage from the inside. An old monsignor I never seen before dropped his foot onto the carriage step and pulled himself out. Waiting for him in the mud, with his hand out like a gentleman tending to a lady, was a young priest with an open umbrella.
It was a Thursday, but people was all dressed up like they got for Sunday Mass. I was sidled up next to Sister Irene, me and her huddled under her large black umbrella; no idea where Heinie was. He’d be in a heap of trouble if he skipped the monsignor’s funeral.
Heinie finally showed at the far end of the cemetery lawn, traipsed up the hill, and squeezed through the crowd of respectable town folk and parents who all took to pulling their kids in close when he brushed past. He edged in next to me, me still next to Sister Irene under her umbrella. Sister shot Heinie a raised-eyebrow, you-oughta-know-better gander.
The visiting monsignor dragged his cassock through the wet grass on stiff legs that for sure had some old-person’s condition the way he was walking. All the sniffling parishioners got out of the way so he could hobble up to the casket. Behind us was the new gravesite dug out for our dead monsignor. Must have been two hundred people here come to pay their respects, except parts of what I heard, from parents who didn’t think any kids were listening, told me more than what their tears did: a lot of these folks were here just to make sure he was dead. Sister Irene, I figured, was one of them.
I poked Heinie in the ribs. “You still stink,” I whispered. “You was supposed to get washed up from this morning. Them people are all looking at us.” This I was sure of, since the gap between us orphans and the parish families got twice as big when Heinie showed up. “Sister’ll put a stop to our dog-shit business if you don’t get washed up afterward.”
“Maybe I didn’t wanna come,” he whispered back. “Maybe I was a-scared of him.”
“Maybe I was a-scared of the monsignor, too, like some of these folks are, but I came anyway. And I don’t smell like dog shit.”
Two sniffling parish nuns turned and raised their pointer fingers to their frumpy lips to shush us, their faces scrunched up like we was diseased. When they straightened up they were facing Sister Irene, her eyes now narrowed at them, her arm still around Heinie and me. The two nuns retreated under their umbrellas and got back to their crying.
The crippled old monsignor circled the casket, stopped once on each side to sprinkle it with holy water. “Tu es pulver et in pulverem reverteris…”
Back at the head of the casket the monsignor closed his prayer book and handed it to an altar boy, then slapped his hands together like he about had enough for the day. When he opened his hands again he talked to us.
“Monsignor Gunther Krause was a true religious visionary. A shaper of men’s souls. A student, yet also a protector, of the New Testament. A bastion against evil, with thirty-eight faithful and steadfast years in the service of the Church, the last sixteen in this growing parish of hard-working, humble, and most importantly…”
Sister Irene’s hand squeezed my shoulder.
“…obedient—Catholics.”
The monsignor raised his palms to us. “Godspeed to heaven, Monsignor Krause, for you are most certainly in His favor. Live eternally in the warmth and splendor of God’s unblemished, perfect face. May you rest in peace.”
Sister’s grip on me tightened, my shoulder all hunched because she was hurting it a little, except she didn’t notice.
“Monsignor Krause,” Sister whispered to herself, shaking her head, “was insane.”
Father Duncan stayed focused on the death announcements I just gave him, not saying boo about my story on the old monsignor’s funeral. My truck eased to a stop in the church parking lot behind the rectory; I turned off the ignition. Father placed some of the cards and announcements next to each other on his lap, studied them while speaking to me without looking up.
“So what do you think, Wump? Was the monsignor crazy?”
“Can’t rightly say, Father, I was only a kid. I can tell you he wasn’t a nice person, least not to me and the other kids at the orphanage. He gave one boy a penance that nearly killed him. Told him to pick up all the trash around the train station, the tracks included. The little guy lost an arm under a coal car and nearly died. Eight years old, he was. That don’t sound too sane, now I think about it.”
Father was taking this all in, shaking his head in agreement the way a person did when they were really thinking about something else. “Have you had a chance to look over these death announcements, Wump?”
“Not yet, Father. Just got them this afternoon from Mrs. Volkheimer. I read a few, that was it.”
Father picked out two of the cards, both the bookmark kind. He pushed the others around on his lap until he found a third one that interested him. The rest of them went into a pile on the seat. He laid out the three he liked on his lap again. “These are for Volkheimer children, one each from three different sets of surviving paren
ts. The deaths are a few years apart.”
“Mrs. Volkheimer pulled them out of her family Bible,” I told him. “The others are probably from the families of her husband’s two brothers.”
Father nodded. “Do you remember any epidemics or widespread illnesses in this area back then?”
“Only real epidemic I can rightly remember,” I told him, “was poverty.”
Father took this in with another absentminded uh-huh, then handed me each of three cards, one by one. “All three are for infant boys who died the day they were born. One in 1896, one in ’98, one in ’99. Look at the prayers offered on each of them.”
This got my attention, but was more because of the date on the last one. I was born the same day in 1899 as this boy was, or so the sisters at St. Jerome’s had told me, except they also said they weren’t really sure it was the exact date. The bother of it was, this kid had been born rich, into comfort and protection—into a life with parents—and he never got to experience it. My life began the same day, and I was healthy enough to get abandoned into a childhood filled with pain and want and anger, and a longing that would never get satisfied: to be loved by a mother and a father. It still hurt.
I shook off the self-pity so I could take a harder look at the passages on them cards like Father had asked. “They’re all in German,” I told him, which meant I needed a couple of minutes. The translation finally came around.
“They say, ‘Some shall die so that all shall live.’ The next line says, ‘May God cleanse your souls so you can enter Heaven and behold God’s beautiful face.’”
“Your German’s better than you give yourself credit for, Wump. On all three cards, that’s the script. Three infant boys from different families, all dead at childbirth.”
“Actually, Father,” I said, still looking one of the cards over, “there’s no mention of childbirth. They just say they died the day they were born.”
Father reread them, start to finish. “You’re right. And there’s something else. They don’t read like the other announcements she gave you.” He lifted up the small pile from the seat and started sorting through them. “These three are for prayer offerings, not funerals. None of the funeral announcements mentions anything about ‘some shall die,’ or about beholding God’s face, beautiful or otherwise.”
“But, Father, don’t that make sense? The ones that say them things are for newborns. Don’t they go right to heaven, long as they’re baptized? Don’t that make them different from adults?”
“Correct again,” Father said. “Mind if I keep these cards for a bit?”
I told him sure, long as he gave them back to me by Saturday so I could return them to Mrs. V. He agreed, grabbed his gym bag, and climbed out of the truck. He leaned back inside the window.
“How about you come inside the rectory for some iced tea? Monsignor tells me it’s one of Mrs. Gobel’s specialties.”
“Need to be getting home, Father. I got chores around the house need doing.”
“One glass, Wump. Besides, I could use some help sorting out what happened after today’s practice.”
He wanted to talk about Adam. “Okay. One glass.”
Mrs. Gobel, the rectory cook, was built like a puff pastry with legs. She poured some iced tea for us, then she went back to her radio and turned the music up loud while she finished preparing dinner. A sixth sense, this woman had; knew when people were about to talk about something that was none of her business. Had also probably heard things going on elsewhere in the rectory she’d wanted to know nothing about. Behavior unbecoming a priest came to mind. A loud radio came in handy for this sort of thing. Father Duncan would learn soon enough.
“It was plenty nice what you did for them boys, Father, getting all new equipment for their team. Real nice.”
Father stuffed his hand under his cassock and into his jeans pocket. “A few phone calls to some friends I still have in baseball was all it took. Not many folks will turn down a priest, right?” He pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it to me. “You can also thank this person, if you can figure out who wrote this.”
I unfolded the paper. The top of it was perforated; it came from a small notepad with a spiral edge, like the one I carried. The paper had blue lines, and the note was printed in shaky capital letters: FOR BASEBALL GLOVES.
“It was in a church offering envelope addressed to ‘the new Father’ along with fifty single dollar bills. Mrs. Gobel found it under the welcome mat at the rectory’s back door this morning. You know anything about it?”
Father beamed while he looked at me, like he was expecting me to fess up to something. I did all my confessing on Saturday afternoons at the confessional so’s I could take Communion on Sunday. “Sorry, Father, can’t say I do.”
“No? I was sure it was from you. Look at the other side.”
I turned it over, saw a list: Screws, Phillips head, three-quarter inch, twenty count. Sandpaper, fine, three sheets. The list was in my handwriting.
“My guess is it’s from Leo, one of the boys who lives at the orphanage. He told me he helped carry your bags from the taxi when you arrived. The boy does errands for me. That’s one of my hardware store lists. Only explanation I can give you.”
Father breathed a few more uh-huhs, folded the paper back up and returned it to the church envelope, the money still inside. He tapped the envelope on the kitchen table. “That’s as good an explanation as any. Thing is, I didn’t know the boys needed new equipment so badly. This donation is what got me started.”
Father shrugged this off, but me, I was still thinking about it. This had been a real nice gesture on Leo’s part, giving up his errand money. He’d been full of surprises lately, making me see things I wasn’t able to see on my own, had now started in doing the same thing with the father. Strange. Still, Father would have figured out how needy the team was soon enough.
“So tell me, Wump,” Father said. “Who’s your favorite Beatle?”
“’Scuse me, Father?”
Father smiled, gestured with his head past my shoulder, at Mrs. Gobel. I turned to see her chopping salad fixings, her back to us, her big hips swaying to the racket on her radio. “I’m talking about those four British boys with the long hair who sang on Ed Sullivan a couple of months ago. Which one is your favorite?”
I took in the rectory’s kitchen while deciding how to answer. It was about twenty by twenty-five, with polished birch cabinets hung on its swirled plaster walls. The cabinets were stained dark and made the kitchen seem somber on days when it was cloudy, but not today, the early evening sun showing through the double windows onto the long birch table where we sat, also stained dark.
“Sorry, Wump,” Father finally said. “That wasn’t a fair question. You’re probably a swing band person who’s got no time for this rock ’n’ roll music making such a fuss nowadays.”
On the other side of the kitchen was a second set of double windows that mirrored the first set. Showing through them like a postcard of side-by-side seashore cabanas were the town’s three footbridges.
“Ringo,” I told him. “Ringo Starr. A name like that, you don’t forget. He was our son’s favorite.”
Father’s look said I surprised him. A moment passed then he asked, “So how many children do you have?”
“Only the one, Father. Our son, Harry. He passed away this past February. He was twenty.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry, Wump,” he said, and I could see he was about to press me on it, was probably doing the arithmetic in his head about how old me and Viola were when we became parents. I wasn’t sure how much I was gonna say about Harry.
Father waited me out. Hell. Maybe it was time I talked some about it.
“Harry wasn’t healthy when he came to the orphanage, but Viola still fell in love with him. It was the last year she worked there, before she took the housekeeping job for the church. Age of forty-one, she was, and me at forty-four, and there we were, deciding to adopt a sick two-year-old boy. Sounded a little crazy, e
ven to us, but…”
I caught myself running my finger around the rim of my empty glass on the table. Father poured me more iced tea; he was going to let me babble. “But Viola, she always wanted to be a mother. God knows how we tried. How she tried…”
Shit. This was hard.
“Five miscarriages, Father. And after each one it took us a while—years, now that I look back—for her to conceive again, but it never worked out. What this woman went through trying to become a natural mother. Weren’t right a person had to suffer like that. Just ain’t right.”
I was drifting back to times I wasn’t comfortable with, and it was making me angry. It took one of them Beatle singers shouting on the radio to finally bring me out of it. The boy said he wanted to hold his girlfriend’s hand.
Father asked, “Harry died so young. What happened?”
“Nothing happened; that was the problem. He got the kids’ cancer and never got well.”
“‘Kids’ cancer’?”
“Acute lymphocytic leukemia. I won’t never forget them words; heard them enough over the years. He didn’t have leukemia when we adopted him, just a weak heart. Harry got the leukemia when he was a teenager.”
There was no more in me that I could tell him at this point without getting all broke up, and risking that Viola would pick up on it when I got home. “Let’s talk about Adam, Father. I got to be shoving off.”
Adam was a weird kid, I told him, but it may have been because he was so smart. He knew a lot about a lot, and he often sounded much older than he was. But he had a mean streak that up till now had kept him at the orphanage, the way I understood it. And this mean streak had a lot to do with religion.