by Chris Bauer
“Yes. So goes the legend, Sister.”
They were like Pete and Repeat, speaking each other’s language like I wasn’t even in the room. This evil book with a cartoon demon on its container was written in pig latin on a bunch of donkey hides, and now the orphanage had some German version of it. Why did either of them know this crap?
“Sister Irene inherited it,” Sister Dymphna said to Father. “From Rolf Volkheimer, one of the orphanage’s benefactors.”
“I see. Ever looked through it, Sister?”
“Certainly not, Father; it’s sacrilegious. It’s here only because Monsignor said the archdiocese felt it should stay where it was bequeathed. What good can come from a book with so blasphemous a history?”
“Not much, I suppose,” said Father, his hands working the pages again, carefully gathering and turning them, bunches at a time. “Unless you count as a good thing learning about the evils out there. It’s why the Church has had its scholars study other versions of it over the years.”
While the two of them went on about evil Bible stories, I instead stayed quiet and worked my way around the library. Plenty of interesting antiques and paintings and other trinkets to look at, some of them from before I was born. On the other side of the room was a gold-colored Victorian couch in great condition. And there were even some kitchen utensils I remembered using as a kid, like a wood-handled iron contraption that looked like a fly swatter with a small cage at one end. It held big bars of soap that you swished around in sink water to make suds for washing dishes. And there was an old-fashioned bread slicer, and—
“Jeez. Hello, Adam. You startled me sneaking up like that.”
Adam stood in the middle of the library archway, taking the three of us in. The boy was cursed with two cowlicks near the front of his head that swept the black hair away from his tan forehead. Cowlicks are cute as candy corn on smaller kids; boys nearing their fourteenth birthday had to despise them. Still, it was tough to tell with Adam. He pretty much despised everything. “You wanted to see me, Father?” he said.
Father closed the devil book, and he and Sister quickly returned it to the box. Father moved over to the gold Victorian couch, made room on it by lifting a stack of papers and placing them on the floor. “Have a seat, Adam.”
There was some nervous foot rearranging on Adam’s part that reminded me of a first-grader trying to protect his flank from the teacher’s yardstick. Father sat, then Adam sat, then Father asked, “Would you mind talking a few minutes about what happened to Sister Magdalena this morning?”
Adam’s hands were in his lap, fingertip to fingertip, revealing fidgety thumbs. “Does Sister Dymphna have to listen?”
I leaned through the archway for a quick look down the hallway, about to pull the library’s pocket doors together. Two small boys came storming through the kitchen’s swinging doors into the dining room, then into the hall. They quick-stepped past me to the base of the stairway, their right hands moving behind their backs, each sneaking a glance at the other. The little buggers were guilty of something for sure, but what? Taking food from the kitchen?
No. Guilty of breaking St. Jerome’s no-candy-before-dinner rule. They hopped onto the first step of the stairway, their small hands not able to hide the long licorice whips pressed into their palms, the pieces of the red rope candy sticking out of their white fists at both ends. I cracked a smile at them. I been there, fellas. Your secret was safe with me. Except—
It was then I sensed it, a presence at the end of the hallway, someone watching. I swiveled my head, slowly, to look down the hall. No one was there, in either the hall or the dining room. But beyond the dining room—
I craned my neck to watch as the kitchen doors continued swinging past each other following the boys’ rushed exit through them, back and forth, back and forth, th-thump th-THUMP, th-thump th-THUMP—
As the door swings shortened, I got reduced glimpses into the kitchen. Standing in front of the butcher block was Adam’s sister, Ruthie, unchanged from her blue school uniform and snow-white blouse, her plump hand attached to a licorice whip in her mouth. The twisted licorice piece grew smaller with each pass of the kitchen doors, Ruthie not paying me no attention until, with the doors near at rest, she gave me one midchew, open-mouth glance, her teeth all drippy red from strawberry-licorice spit. Her glance became a childish smile, her chewing and smiling reminding me how this neighborhood had more than its fair share of dull kids. I pulled my head back inside the library as Father answered Adam’s question.
“Sister Dymphna’s concerned about you, son, so yes, I think she should be here.”
This decided, I pulled at the pocket doors, but instead of the clack-snap of wood against wood, there was a dry thud when the doors suddenly stopped a few inches from closing, cushioned by a plump fist filled with red licorice whips. The doors opened wider. Ruthie entered, stepped quietly over to stand next to me. She raised a floppy licorice twist in my direction; I declined with a headshake. She returned my smile, more licorice dribble sneaking out the corner of her mouth, her tongue recapturing it.
“But I don’t want Sister getting upset with, you know, stuff I say,” Adam said, “because that’s what happens sometimes. People get upset when I say stuff.”
Sister Dymphna moved to Ruthie’s side. I expected Sister to march Ruthie back out through the library doors, but this didn’t happen. Instead the nun wagged the fingers of her upturned hand at Ruthie, wanting her to ante up the candy, which she did, but with Ruthie quick to gobble up the last few bites of the piece she was working on. How the girl had money enough to keep herself and half the orphanage in penny licorice the way she did, I didn’t know. I pulled the library doors closed.
Adam was right about his smart mouth. There’d been some real gems come out of it at times. Like last Christmas, when donations to the orphanage were coming up short. The little wiseass told the younger kids there weren’t as many toys because some of Santa’s elves came down with penguin clap.
“How about you, Adam?” Father said. “Does it upset you when you say things that bother people?”
Adam looked away from Father, dropped his gaze to his busy thumbs. “Yeah.”
“So, sometimes you can’t help it? It just comes out?”
“Yeah. I don’t even know what some of it means.”
“I see. Fine. So, let’s talk about Sister Magdalena. There were two children with her this morning on the tracks, just before the accident. Do you know who they were?”
“I…she…” Adam said, squirming. “It was me and Ruthie! We were with her. But it wasn’t our fault. Sister started pulling at us, hard. She thought we could make it across the bridge, but I knew we couldn’t. When I broke loose, Sister slipped backward and, ah, you think the police—”
“Whoa, slow down, son,” Father said. “The police will want to talk with you, but they’ve already decided it was an accident. Just tell me what happened.”
Adam started with how he’d slipped out at sunrise to go fishing, something he did a few mornings each week before breakfast, the railroad bridge his favorite place because he could get out over the middle of the river, where the water was deeper. “Ruthie was with me because that’s what she does sometimes, gets up with me when I get up. Most mornings there’s trains, some of them faster than others, but even the faster ones slow down because the station stop is just across the bridge. The slow-movers are the diesel freighters carrying coal. You have to pay attention because if you don’t give yourself enough time to get off the bridge…”
He explained how a woman wearing a dark overcoat with a white scarf tied under her chin appeared in the middle of the tracks off the west end of the bridge. She was carrying a suitcase.
“At first she was just looking at us, and I didn’t know it was Sister Magdalena. When she started across the bridge, I went back to fishing, but I knew something was stupid about her, because nobody crosses the bridge to get to the train station. There’s no room to walk except between the track
s.”
Sister Dymphna glided over toward the open end of the couch and sat next to Adam, Father on his other side, leaving Ruthie and me to stand.
“She started walking faster as she got closer. The wind got under her scarf and blew it off her head and, and, it was then I could see her hair was cut real short, and…” his eyes moistened, “I, ah, could tell. I could tell for sure.”
“You could tell for sure what, Adam?” said Father.
Adam’s lower lip quivered. “That what some of the sisters say but think I don’t hear is true! That she was my mother! My mother! I never saw her hair before, but when I did—” His mouth snapped shut and his breathing labored, coming only through his nose. He touched his hairline just above the forehead and said, sneering. “I saw she had two cowlicks in the front, just like mine!”
Hadn’t thought about it in a while, but damn if I hadn’t had the same opinion years ago. Weren’t because of them cowlicks though, because I’d never seen Sister Magdalena without her wimple headpiece. It was because the neighborhood was full up with Germans. A hundred percent Anglo for all I knew, all except for our Sister Magdalena, a Venezuelan, and a darker one at that. So along came this orphaned baby boy and girl, with beautiful deep, dark olive skin just like Sister’s own. Twins, no less. Them babies were the only other persons in the parish with that kind of coloring. But I’d shaken the whole thing off. Sister Magdalena was a nun, for Christ sake.
Adam had more to say. Sister Dymphna was looking real stern but stayed calm, even with the news. She still eyed Adam real close.
“Sister Magdalena told me our new parents were creeps, and our adoption was off because she was taking us on the train away from here, to some other place. A nice place, and to other nice places, too, she said. Places where moms took good care of their kids.”
Sister Dymphna rested her arm on the couch, behind Adam’s head; her eyes were welling up. Father stayed even-tempered. “Go on,” he said.
“There’s trees. Big trees on both sides of the bend, and the tracks run through them before they get to the river. She kept talking, telling me she was sorry she gave us up, that she was our mother, and she loved us, and, and, I got mixed up, and scared, and I didn’t hear the train.”
Adam’s long, skinny face started twisting up in anger. “She grabbed my wrist, then pulled and kept right on pulling at me and Ruthie, and the whistle was blowing and, and…but by then it was already too late. The train was on the bridge.”
Adam’s upper lip raised. Suddenly his breathing picked up and his canines showed. “It was all her fault! She…she was a nun! My m-m-mother was a fucking nun!”
“Adam!” Sister Dymphna’s hand went for his collar, but he got to his feet ahead of her fingers.
“I…We pulled away from her, then we jumped between the girders, into the water. That’s what happened”—his chest puffed up—“and I don’t give a crap if you or anyone else believes me or not.”
He was facing Father and Sister, his back to me and Ruthie. Adam slowed his breathing, the two of them looking at him shocked enough they weren’t doing any talking. Adam broke the silence. “Can I go now?”
The language hadn’t caught me off guard like it had Sister and Father, so while they regrouped, I figured to get my two cents in. “Must have been awful for you, son. Big train like that with tons of coal comes out of nowhere, chugging right at the two of you and the sister. Scary, huh?”
“Yeah,” he said, turning to face me. “Scary.”
“And all that coal got dumped into the water when the cars derailed, right after the brakeman stopped the train. Lucky for you the carload of coal missed the both of you, huh?”
Adam studied me. It was then I decided to do what I’d been wanting to do ever since he walked into the library. Ever since I’d seen Sister Magdalena’s charred palms. Or maybe it was since I witnessed little Sonny Goode’s injuries from his spat on the ball field with him. I nudged Ruthie out of the way, reached up and put my hand on Adam’s bony shoulder, and squeezed.
“Yeah,” he said, looking deep into my eyes, deeper than most folks did. “Lucky.”
Nothing happened. I felt no heat, no fire, no pain of any kind. Nothing like what happened before to Sister Magdalena or little Sonny when they touched him, which gave me no reason to remove my hand other than maybe because the moment was over, so I did. Except now I smelled something.
“You can go now, Adam,” Sister said firmly. “We’ll talk later about your use of profanity, young man. Take your sister so the two of you can get washed up for dinner. Father, if it’s all right with you, I’d like to hold off until after the children have eaten before we call the police.”
I couldn’t stick around to hear the rest of Sister’s suggestion. I needed air, fast. The shit-heap smell was back, so disgusting it was making my head spin, had to get out the front door, before I fainted—
The circus is in town with high trapeze artists under buzzing stars and a full
moon and a spinning carousel with kaleidoscope lights keeping
time with an organ and Sousa’s whipped us up a dandy
down in the sawdust but it ain’t all sawdust
there’s elephants and horses and
straw and a bad awful smell
and oh Jesus there’s
Heinie and ohnonoNO
there he is he’s DEAD
oh Christ ohno Heinie’s
DEAD and all bloody
and DEAD in the red
sawdust on the floor.
“Wump—wake up, Wump.”
Why, it’s Father Duncan who’s took me to the circus, and he’s got a peppermint-
flavored snow cone for me.
“Lift your head and drink more of this, Wump. Here.”
Don’t count me out, Ref, show me your fingers put ’em closer to my face
see I’m getting up getting up right now at the count of eight
but wait, holy fucking Christ you ain’t no ref
you’re a priest! Oh Lord I’m dying—
“Stay down, Wump. Just lie here on the grass a little longer. Sister’s getting a cold towel.”
I closed my eyes until things stopped spinning. “How long I been out, Father?”
“A minute maybe. You’ve got a hard head, my friend. You knocked out a loose brick on this stoop on your way down.”
“Father, I—the last thing I remember…”
Father lifted my head again and gave me another sip. Jesus, was that hot going down. No wonder. Peppermint schnapps. Good as smelling salts. I touched the back of my head. Sure enough there was a doozy of a lump back there.
“You were complaining about a smell, Wump.”
“Yeah. A smell. And—”
An image hit me. A sickening shot of a boy’s face on a dirty floor, his, ah, his head split open, his whole forehead smashed in and open and…oh mymymy.
“I saw my kid friend Heinie on a sawdust floor, dead from a horse-kick to the forehead. It was like I was there, watching from overhead. But what I smelled was dog crap. His face and head were covered in it. Dog crap never made me gag before, ever.”
“Tell me what you had to eat today,” Father asked.
I heard the front door to the orphanage close. Sister Dymphna clopped down the steps with dripping dishtowels and some ice in a washcloth. She lifted my head and put a cool towel behind my neck, put the icy washcloth on my lumpy crown and placed my hand on it to hold it in place, then put the other cold towel on my forehead. That felt much better.
“I had half a piece of burnt toast for breakfast. I missed Viola at the house, so I didn’t take lunch.”
“That’s it? A piece of burned toast?” Father said, shaking his head. “No wonder you fainted, stressful as today was. Three squares a day ought to be a staple for you, Wump. A man your size. Really.”
Sister removed the towel from my forehead, and I could see a slight, caring smile push up her chubby cheeks. I never knew how these sisters managed to stay as up as t
hey did in the face of the suffering they saw, dealing with all these sick and troubled children.
“So, when can I expect you to come by to repair this damage to our stoop, you big troublemaker, you?” she said, her smile still there. “See? Now there’s more than one brick loose.”
We’d all been pushed to the limit today. I hadn’t had much to eat, and God was asking me to digest all this crap about a deflowered sister cut in half by a train, her bastard kids there to witness it. Hell, if Sister Dymphna was able to make light of circumstances like this, I could, too.
“How about I take care of that stoop right now, Sister? What, you think I can’t? Got the tools right there in the back of my truck. Just give me a minute and I’ll have all them bricks chiseled out for you and cleaned up, ready for the quick cement.”
Sister and me shared a small belly laugh. I lifted myself off the grass onto one elbow and she helped me to another sip of the schnapps. Father chuckled too, but it seemed he was only humoring us because his mouth kept its smile and stayed open, even after he stopped laughing. He was eyeing my truck parked out front, and the puzzled look he was giving its low-riding, tool-filled rear end made me think something or other had just dawned on him. Either that or he wanted to head home pronto. I tossed him my keys.
“Here, Father, my head still hurts. Hope you can drive a stick.”
11
Physically, I’m not like a lot of your other sixty-five-year-old males. First off, I’m in really good physical condition. My doctor told me I would beat the male lifespan averages by a decent margin. Second, I could still knock the living butt-squirts out of men half my age. Working at the tannery into my thirties and pushing around them heavy carts piled with cow and pig carcasses had bulked me up pretty good. God gave me big wrists and hands, prison boxing gave me the tools for using them and the confidence in knowing I could take a heavy blow to the head and still keep my legs and my wits. Most of the time, at least.