Scars on the Face of God

by Chris Bauer

  So, when Father Duncan said he wanted to drive me to the hospital, I told him if he did, I wouldn’t get out of the truck when we got there. Sure, it was a concussion. So what? Boxers got a hundred of them each time they stepped into the ring, and I sure wasn’t an exception.

  “Just take me home,” I told him. “Viola can care for me. She’s done it before.”

  So here we were, Father grinding through the gears of my Willys, coming up on the church rectory where we’d need to make a right at the traffic light and then another right at the stop sign to my house in the middle of the block.

  “Here, Father, I wanted to show you this.” I pulled out a folded paper from my jeans pocket. “I found it in Sister Magdalena’s room this morning.” Father Duncan downshifted as we approached the traffic light, his footwork on the clutch better this time, the truck easing to a stop. I unfolded the test paper Sister Magdalena had graded. I put it between us, on the seat. “Tell me what you make of it.”

  The light changed to green and Father’s hands and feet got busy shifting and foot-clutching and turning the steering wheel. One glance at the paper was all he needed. “It’s a catechism test.”

  “Right. But look at what Sister wrote in red at the bottom after the last true-false question. It says, ‘Forgive me, he is mine.’”

  We needed to be at a full stop for him to do as I’d asked, and since we had only one more turn to make before we got to my street, Father held off looking at the paper. It was coming up on six p.m. Still some sunlight left, dusk not yet surrendered to dark.

  It was past my suppertime but apparently not Father’s, since I was hearing noise as we cruised by the side entry for Our Lady’s rectory. Tinny, blaring music coming from the open kitchen window, near as loud as the school’s PA system. Mrs. Gobel’s radio. Which meant that, among other things, the rectory supper hadn’t been served yet.

  The side door to the rectory opened and out came Our Lady’s young novice Harriet looking a bit flushed, a small laundry bag held tight to her bosom with both hands. Harriet was a dutiful young girl given to Mona Lisa smiles and few words. Wasn’t really a novice yet but rather a postulant, or pre-novice, which meant that among other things she still had all her hair, a wispy auburn under a black veil, both veil and hair off her waify face because she was walking fast.

  “Evening, Harriet,” I called to her from the truck, trying to better Mrs. Gobel’s radio.

  I saw Harriet’s lips move, but I didn’t hear her because of the music. When she passed in front of the rectory’s kitchen window, the wild rock ’n’ roll piano playing stopped. Harriet flinched, her voice lowering so as not to be shouting.

  “Pickin’ up Monsignor’s warsh,” she repeated for me then raised the gathered white bag she was carrying by its drawstring so I couldn’t miss it. I nodded to her just before she entered the back of the convent, managed a smile to go with it. The truck rolled to the stop sign.

  “Monsignor’s ‘warsh,’” I repeated for Father, the hillbilly accent intentional. “Seems the monsignor don’t let his dirty laundry pile up for very long, seeing how often he has her collect it for him.”

  For sure I wasn’t as dumb as that comment made me sound, but Father’s poker face said he wasn’t taking the bait. After a few seconds I lost my patience.

  “Look, in case you haven’t picked up on it, there’s a real problem here, Father. I don’t know what the monsignor’s selling, to Harriet or to anyone else, but he’s for sure selling it through false promises, outright lies, and bullying, and taking advantage of his position just so he can get some jangle for his dangle, know what I mean? This girl comes from a poor West Virginia family. She’s someone’s daughter who’s gone off to a place her folks probably won’t never get to visit, to serve the Church and to obey God. She’s as pure as they come, and she’s fallen prey to this, this crazy, sonovabitchin’ monster. Sorry for the language, Father, but you need to understand. The monsignor is ruining lives.”

  Father guided the truck onto my block, and now I saw Viola poking her head out from behind our silver aluminum storm door, looking anxious.

  “Whatever stories he’s feeding people,” Father said as he pulled the truck curbside, “I don’t think he sees them as lies. So maybe you’re right. Maybe he is unbalanced. It happens to clerics as well as laypeople. You’ll have to trust me when I say I’m working on it.”

  Before I could respond, Father added, “Remember, it’s innocent until proven guilty. Works the same way with the Church. But the Church is going to send him a message I think he’ll understand, and soon.”

  Viola came down our front stoop as fast as her arthritic joints could take her, calling to me every other step. “Johnny! Oh, Johnny! Sister Dymphna called about what happened. Are you all right?” Father handed me my truck keys.

  “I’m fine, sweetie,” I called back to her. “Another dose of aspirin and some supper is all I need.”

  Father was out of the truck a few seconds after me. “Sister Magdalena’s note on this test paper,” he said in a low voice before Viola got to the bottom of the steps, “tells me she may have fallen victim to Monsignor as well. With predictable consequences.”

  He tucked the paper into his jacket pocket. Sister’s funeral Mass was scheduled for Wednesday of next week, and a number of Church dignitaries were expected to attend. Maybe Father and the Cardinal were going to do some talking beforehand, to work on this “message” for Monsignor that Father had just mentioned. His face turned pleasant as Viola clamped her hand onto my wrist. She gave me a hug.

  “Told you I’d get him to stop by, honey. Viola, this is Father Connie Duncan, all growed up and filled out, come back to us here in Three Bridges as Our Lady’s new parish priest.”

  Viola gave him a hug and they talked, but I wasn’t paying attention. Father’s last comment about Sister Magdalena and the monsignor had my mind all tied up.

  “Predictable consequences.”

  Sure enough, her pregnancy was a real possibility. But trying to kill her own children?

  What could bring a person to do that?

  12

  “Johnny, you have a visitor,” Viola said, calling to me from the cellar.

  Much as I never liked going back on promises, I’d called Mrs. Volkheimer to tell her I wouldn’t be by her place to replace them boards on her bridge because I was still a bit hungover from the run-in with the orphanage’s brick stoop. I figured to relax a bit and let Viola fuss over me. So here I was, lying on my living room couch at one o’clock in the afternoon on a Saturday with the television on, checking out what Gene Mauch’s Phillies looked like this year.

  I heard the squeak-squeak-squeak of my visitor coming up the wooden cellar steps, but when the squeaking stopped, I heard nothing else. After a few seconds I saw the side of a head with uncombed sandy hair inching its way around the corner of the dining room wall, then one eye, then a nose, then a mouth with its tongue showing, like it was about to take a swipe at a snotty upper lip, which it did.

  “No need to pussyfoot around me, Leo.” This drew him into the open. “A knock on the noggin was all it was. Come on in. You can watch the Phillies with me.”

  His face lit up at the mention of baseball. He gave me an okay but then caught himself.

  “Er, maybe later, Wump. See, Mrs. Gobel told me the rectory’s kitchen sink has got a rusted-out pipe that’s leaking, so I got this pipe piece for it. Cost me a dollar seventeen.” He pulled a two-foot-long S-shaped drain trap out of a brown grocery bag. Some screw fittings flew out with the pipe and scattered across the dining room’s hardwood floor. “Oops…”

  So much for a quiet Saturday. I popped two more aspirins and reminded Viola how bad it would be if she couldn’t use her kitchen sink, then Leo and me hoofed it over to the rectory. No Raymond today, Leo said, because he was too sick to be outside. I reimbursed Leo his buck seventeen. He stuffed the money in his pants pocket then took to skipping next to me on the sidewalk. The boy was likely to hurt himself wa
ving around a piece of pipe that big, so I relieved him of the bag.

  Words and music by young Leo St. Jerome, catching his breath between skips:

  “We’ll watch the Phillies when we’re done, Bunning, Short, and Callison.

  “Watch the Phillies when we’re done, Bunning, Short, and Callison.

  “Bunning-Short, Bunning-Short…”

  I was on my back in the rectory’s kitchen, my head and shoulders and arms a tight fit inside the cabinetry under the sink, my butt on the linoleum floor. Not a good place to be for overhearing conversations from the dining room, which was fine with me, but with Monsignor shouting into the phone, I could hear most of what he was saying anyway.

  “I am revered by my parishioners, Cardinal! They worship me. Yes, worship! And not in the way the bishop has those altar boys worship him. I know all about the bishop!”

  Leo was here handing me tools, but he didn’t need to be hearing this. “Son, get me the large pipe wrench from the tool box on the back of my truck. The one with the red handle. Now, please.”

  “Okeydokey.”

  Monsignor shouted again. “Cardinal, your administration is a disgrace. I will not forget this. I’ve been passed over—and pushed around—for the last time! You have crossed the line with your accusations. You don’t know schuetten from Shinola when it comes to leading a flock. This is my parish, and Sister Magdalena was one of my parishioners. I should be the bishop’s acolyte for her funeral Mass, not Father Duncan! I demand to know my accuser!”

  Message delivered. Nice work, Father.

  13

  Sister Magdalena’s funeral Mass was scheduled for ten o’clock on Wednesday morning.

  It took until I saw Father Duncan in his vestments saying today’s nine o’clock Sunday Mass for it to sink in. It must have been a struggle for this man through the first part of his adult life, a minor league baseball player waiting on a call to return to the majors who got a call from God instead.

  As he raised his hands above the altar, his thumbs and forefingers together, his eyes closed in prayer, he readied himself to receive the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It was then I realized how we’d been deprived all these years, having to listen to Monsignor Fassnacht mumble through his Latin so fast the altar boys couldn’t keep up, and us watching him make love to his wine-filled chalice like a wino does to a bottle. If there was a Catholic priest out there more devout to his calling than Father Duncan was, I’d never known one. And as I looked at the folks in the pews around me, I felt they sensed the same thing.

  Today was Palm Sunday, the start of the holiest week on the church calendar. The Stations of the Cross would be on Good Friday, the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. It couldn’t have been a more fitting week than the one in front of us for exposing a religious phony the likes of Monsignor Fassnacht.

  Father Duncan addressed the congregation from the pulpit, asking for prayers for the parish sick. When he ended his list by naming Monsignor Fassnacht among them, there was a gasp. A hundred or more rosary-beaded hands went from lap to forehead almost on cue, all signing the cross. “Please,” he told us, raising his palms to a church full of muttering parishioners, “it’s nothing serious. Monsignor is just a little under the weather and will not be saying any of Our Lady’s Masses today.”

  Physically, Father should have said. Nothing seriously wrong with him physically.

  After a good Sunday breakfast of scrambled eggs, creamed chipped beef on toast, and a bran muffin for the plumbing, I dropped the news on Viola that I was headed out to replace those rotted boards on Mrs. Volkheimer’s footbridge.

  Mrs. V kept a stash of wood planking in a shed on the back of her property. The new planks stored there looked near as old as the originals, but the difference was they’d never been exposed to the elements or the wear and tear, although her bridge never got much wear and tear anyway. Only real traffic had been years ago, coming from her and her husband and their hired help. Over time this became just her and the help, then just the help, all of them using it to cross the river to either traipse off to church or into town, or to maybe deliver food donations to the orphanage. Of course, there’d been other traffic a long time ago, back when some of us kids would sneak across to get onto her property. Mrs. Volkheimer had dogs, and dogs meant lawn biscuits, and lawn biscuits meant money.

  “How many need replacing, Wump?”

  Mrs. V spoke to me from her back porch, sitting in a wicker chair with a blanket across her lap. She sipped hot tea from a glass cup, the tea with a hint of orange from the Tang mixed with it. I pulled the wood out of the shed, the planks near as washed out as the shed’s weathered siding. Couldn’t hardly notice her in that chair it was so tall, its fan-shaped back sprouting up and away from her, the chair made more for the likes of Cleopatra than for the hunched-over speck of a person Mrs. V had become. Her sweet, dentured smile accepted another sip from the cup and saucer she held close to her mouth.

  “Four boards,” I told her. “Two on the walls, two on the floor. But we ought to do something about them overhead planks. The ceiling’s sagging in spots.”

  “For my kids to worry about,” she reminded me, smacking her lips together then patting her chin with a napkin, to clean up after some dribble. “The ceiling planks, the roof, and the storage space up there in between. The whole godforsaken bridge. They’ll deal with it when they inherit this place. For now, let’s just keep to the first floor so nobody falls into the drink when they cross the bridge.”

  I loaded the wood into the truck, put the truck into second gear and let it coast down the grass toward the river, a hundred or so yards from the back of her house. The path the truck took was the path a person would use on foot, since the rest of the back of her property was laid out like a garden, with sculpted evergreens and flowering dogwoods and manicured bushes, and every blade of grass in between as thick as a green wool blanket. I stopped the truck at the bottom of the incline, in front of the covered bridge’s shadowed interior, at an angle that let me see the entire backyard garden from its southernmost point, plus the bridge downstream. Different color, the bridge downstream was, as was the one upstream, the other two in better shape, or at least their second floors were.

  Mrs. V’s gardener did a good job on her property, especially the back lawn. Fifty years ago, this incline had a few medium-size maples at its bottom, the garden covering only the area close up to the house. After she had the maples felled and their stumps removed, the incline looked near as good as them botanical gardens south of Philly that Viola and me used to visit once a year. This was the beginning of the growing season, so the tulips were up but not popped yet. When the flowers started filling in around the sculpted angels and crosses and Roman pillars, it could get just plain heavenly back here. I stayed in the truck a few minutes to take it all in, do some reflecting.

  All the traditions of the Catholic Church, the sacraments, obeying the Holy Father, not eating meat on Fridays, I stayed with them mostly because they meant so much to Viola. Far as my adult life went, I’d been living on simpler terms. Won’t never be able to explain it any better than the way I’d heard Abe Lincoln once put it: “When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.”

  Creeeak. “C’mon, you splintery bastard, you should be loose by now.”

  There was no leverage, me leaning out the window with a claw hammer, trying to get under the old nails that held in the wood siding. I needed to try a different angle.

  “Umph…Goddamn it—” Creak-creak-creak. POP. “Got you, you sonovabitch.”

  The second plank loosened up and came off same as the first, in one long piece, each the size of a small seesaw.

  My elbows rested on the bridge’s windowsill; I took a moment to appreciate the scenery upstream. The window was hardly ever open, the panes painted over in a barn red, same color as the walls. Hikers and tourists were the reason; mostly the reason, I should say. They’d sneak onto the footbridge, paying no never-min
d to the No Trespassing sign, then snap pictures of the river and its scenic banks from its windows. The rumored second reason: Mrs. V once seen a floating baby body from this window.

  What a nice view. Upstream the river bent a little right and gave way to the northernmost bridge, same two-story shape and size as this one but in a soft lavender. Farther up from that the river turned a hard left. The maples set back on the orphanage side were budding this time of year, and for this moment at least, the breeze pushing the hair off my forehead smelled clean as springtime in the mountains.

  The river was a bit choppy, running fast, noisy; Lake Walapaken dam was open. They opened it different times of the year but more so in the spring, to handle the runoff from the winter thaw. If you put a canoe in the water when it was like this, you’d be out of sight around the bend in twenty seconds without paddling. Other times the water was as dead calm as a cup of cold coffee, and almost as black. It smelled better outside the bridge than inside, so I closed my lids and took a few more deep breaths.

  “Hal-lo, Wump!”

  I shielded my eyes. The call came from upstream, on the left bank.

  It was Leo, in jeans and sneakers and a pullover hooded sweatshirt, a pile of tree branches next to him. He winged a branch into the river, slapped his knee in amusement. His mouth slacked open, and out came a hearty laugh that took near all his breath before it was done. One of his favorite pastimes, watching twigs float. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hal-ohhh, Wump! Here I come!”

  Now the whole pile of branches was in the river, all of them tossed in together, and he was screaming with convulsive laughter as he ran and skipped along the bank, hurdling tree stumps and roots and dips in the grass until he got to the footbridge entrance. Inside the bridge tunnel and out of breath, he pushed between me and the open window and leaned his head outside. “Look—the branches! They’re all going under the bridge. Ha-ha! Be right back, Wump!”