by Chris Bauer
There was a section of tannery property nothing grew on, maybe twenty acres, just above Lake Walapaken. Looked like a forest fire destroyed it, except if it had been a fire, some of the evergreens would have come back by now. Been a long time, thirty years or more, that it looked this way. Ever since Mrs. V’s nephew Hugh got involved in the business. Yep, far back as when the bastard was just a tannery supervisor, deciding that dumping solvents and waste into trenches on the tannery’s property was easier and cheaper than having it hauled away. Back then, it was legal because they didn’t know any better. But it isn’t legal now.
CLINK-CLINK.
CLOINK.
“Ouch.”
Felt that one, iron mallet to iron chisel, all the way up to my elbow. Stronger than the bricks, this mortar was, no matter how old the wall.
I heard water running on the other side. Correction: cancer-causing, baby-killing, chemical-carrying sewage was what it was, on its way to the Delaware River. All it needed was a few more whacks and the wall would be weak enough, then I could go home to bed. Had to be getting close to one a.m.
CLINK-a-chip-chip, CLINK-a-chip-chip, CLINK-a-chip—
Crunch.
What was that? It came from behind me, around the bend. Crushed glass maybe, or gravel, under someone’s foot. I turned and squared myself, my grip tightening on the mallet.
“Anybody there?” I strained to listen above the low rumble of water surging against brick as the sewage runoff slapped into the high wall to my back, me listening hard at the dark, underground silence that lead away from me. Hundreds of feet of empty cement tunnel darkness, so far with no indications. Then I heard something. Another crunch, followed by another, and another, and then—
Squealing.
I concentrated. Is it squealing, or screaming?
Squeaking rats came running at me, didn’t know how many, a dozen maybe, and I dropped my mallet to pick up my nine-volt flashlight. They scattered back in the other direction. This storm tunnel was closed off on both ends, hadn’t carried water for thirty years but hell, they were rats, and rats always figured a way in. Creepy little bastards. I picked up the mallet again.
CLINK-a-chip-chip, CLINK-a chip—
Crunch.
Shit, not again. “Look, you little fuckers, take a god-damn hike—”
“Wump.” A distorted voice reached me from behind, nearly made my breathing quit. The voice echoed a second time. “You need to stop. Right now. Not one more blow to that wall. Stop. Please.”
I turned to face a flashlight that blinded me. I nudged my work lantern with my foot, to direct it at the voice.
“Father Duncan.”
I was a little less excited seeing it was the father and not them damn rats. “Guess I should say how nice it is to see you, Father, but I won’t.”
Father walked out of the tunnel’s darkness, was in street clothes and an old baseball jacket. Right about then I figured he had a good idea of what I done to the brick wall in the other tunnel that led to the restaurant excavation site.
“Wump, please don’t do this. Let the authorities—”
“Let the authorities do what, Father?”
“Go after whoever’s dumping poisons into the sewers. Let someone else sort it out. You’re an ex-con. There are bigger issues…”
“The authorities already know.” CLINK-a-chip-chip. “It’s in the groundwater, too, Father. But Kerm our coroner friend told me today they’re not investigating nothing.” CLINK-a-chip. “Hugh Volkheimer buries some of his tannery waste, pours the rest of it into the sewers. Pays someone to look the other way. Saves money because he doesn’t haul it away and get it treated. Makes him rich. Makes all them SOBs rich. Makes innocent people—”
CLINK.
“…innocent young people like my son, Harry, suffer and die. And mark my words, Father. This is the reason there’s been so many children born in Three Bridges who are either dimwits, deformed, or sickly. Or never got born at all.” CLINK!
My blood pressure was up, my heart was in my throat. “That’ll do it.”
Six course of brick chiseled out, four bricks deep. The water pressure would take care of the rest.
“I suggest we get back above ground. So tell me, Father, what made you come looking for me, and why look here?”
No answer. Father looked at the chiseled mortar and broken bricks strewn on the tunnel floor. “Wump, you’ve done a bad thing. We’ll call the water department to let them know. Maybe they can repair the wall before—”
“I ain’t calling nobody. Forgive me, Father, but don’t give me any of this two-wrongs horseshit either. I’m sixty-five years old. I’ll be six feet under by the time the folks around here figure out how much damage has been done to their water. I gave them bastards a chance. This’ll be payback and a message. My message.”
“But I could help with this message, Wump. I could get the Church involved. The Church has a powerful voice…”
“You keep the Church out of this. You keep those crazy fuckers out of this!”
CLINK!
“Wump—”
“Tell me something, Father. You see anything else down here? No? How about more baby skeletons? They’re here damn it, all bunched up at the other end of this cold, damp, unholy tunnel, against another brick wall. And there’s more of them, in other tunnels, too. I worked on these sewers, back in the twenties when they were being rerouted. The construction company paid us not to say nothing. ‘We’re walling them off at both ends instead of filling them in. No one will know. Those skeletons are ancient history. Can’t do nothing about them babies now,’ is what they said.
“Goddamn the Church! They told these poor people to throw their infants away. Why would they do that, Father? Tell me! WHY, DAMN IT?”
“Wump, no more hammering—”
CLOINNNK!
“Oh no—”
A brick shot past my ear. I turned, and a gush of filthy brown water hit me flush in the chest. “Go, Father! GO!”
Loose bricks and mortar shot past our heads from behind us like red and white chiclets, their fragments bouncing off the cement floor until a tide of sewage collected them in a sudsy filth underfoot. We legged it around the tunnel’s slight bend, the wastewater already near knee-deep and pushing us, my legs getting heavy as I swished through it. Father reached the ladder first but leaned back to drop a hand on my shirt collar. He pulled me in front of him, pushed me onto the first rung. I began the climb, Father on the rungs beneath me, and each time I slipped, he jammed his shoulder against my butt, propping me up and holding me steady until I regained my footing. Now the entire tunnel was a rising river, alive with waves of sewage and dead things and the stink of flooded cesspools. Near the top of the ladder I slapped a hand onto the sidewalk cement, ready to pull myself out. It was then I felt a rumble, growing quickly, the ladder shaking from a vibrating thunder hard as a subway platform just before a train appeared. I dropped down a step as my ears pricked up, and I froze. I knew what was coming at us from the other direction.
“C’mon, Wump, move!”
“Grab the ladder, Father, tight, and hold on!”
He did as I said then cocked his flashlight to the left, and for a second we were able to stare into the empty darkness at the other end of the tunnel, one side wall illuminated but not far, ten feet maybe, the light reflecting off the smoky wall’s cement, the shiny brown river still gushing beneath us.
No. Please, no…
I heard them, could hear their tiny, innocent voices echoing at the other end of the tunnel, heard them screaming, heard them bleating like frightened, helpless sheep all crying out, all lost, and all forgotten, and—
They were moving, coming toward us, getting closer.
—and all unprotected and unloved and unsaved and—
The rush of screaming baby voices stopped, leaving us with a roar loud as a busy sewer in a thunderstorm. I lifted a soggy boot onto the next rung, about to climb again. It was then I felt a hot breath near my t
emple, no more than an inch away. I sensed a pair of lips as they moved to within a kiss of my ear, two suckling desperate lips whispering crazy baby-talk what wasn’t really crazy, least not to me, no-sir no-how unh-unh, their message boring into me like a drill bit into plywood—
—unbaptized
—we’re all unbaptized
—why, why, WHY—
We were slammed by a frothy tidal wave of backwash from the south, catching us between two wastewater surges with undertow that collided like surf crashing onto a beach. I held the ladder rails tight, felt Father still beneath me, his head jammed into the back of my legs, his arms wrapped around me and the rails together. My eyes and mouth were closed tight, trying to blank out the things nudging up against me in the water, bumping into my arms and legs, swirling around my head. When I felt a slight drop in water pressure I reached my arm through the open manhole a second time and pulled myself up and out of the tunnel, onto the sidewalk, the black, starlit sky overhead. I dropped a hand onto Father’s shoulder and pulled at him as he fought his way up the ladder. At street level and out of danger, the two of us doubled over, hacking and coughing and erping our stomach contents onto the sidewalk like we each had bad cases of the taproom twirlies.
“Father,” I said, still clearing my throat. “I won’t never be able to thank you enough for your help down there.”
“Forget it, Wump. Glad I was here.” He shivered once, took off his red satin jacket now stained a mucky black and brown, tossed it toward the payload of my truck. “So where does this tunnel lead?”
Father mustn’t have heard down there what I heard down there, else he’d have brought it up right about now. Then again I didn’t suppose Father had nightmares about tiny skeletons of babies who weren’t quite dead, their suckling lips speaking crazy messages to an old man who’d maybe gotten crazy enough to think they were real.
I was getting a chill like Father was. I motioned to the back of the truck, where there were clean towels and rags.
“Well, Wump?” Father said, pulling his shirttail out of his pants and shaking it. “How about it? Where does this tunnel go?”
“This one travels south maybe three blocks, ends at another brick wall on the other side of Schuetten Avenue.” I pulled the truck tailgate down then tossed Father a dry bath towel from a metal footlocker, took a towel for myself. “The wall’s about the size of a small billboard and fully exposed from the other side, at the bottom of a hill. You can actually see the wall from the road. It’s where Schuetten Avenue sits atop an above-grade bend, before it snakes its way into Philly. As a matter of fact…”
I grinned before I got serious again. Father looked at me, asked, “What’s so funny?”
“The wall is a billboard, Father. It’s a sign, painted directly on the brick. The one that greets everyone entering Three Bridges from the south. You seen it?”
“I think so. It advertises a new restaurant.”
“Exactly.”
Until the storm sewer had been rerouted it ran both above grade and below it, as in a fully exposed stream in some spots and a tunnel in others, through a 100-plus-acre property that hooked up with the Wissaquessing River downstream, the property not worth diddly before the rerouting. Might take a few more thrusts like what just chased Father and me up the ladder, I told him, but mounting pressure from the rerouted wastewater would knock out most of them painted bricks in the billboard wall I was describing. Sometime in the next hour was my guess, if it hadn’t happened already, with the sewage left to drain into those 100-plus acres that had become a cow pasture in the valley area below Schuetten Avenue. Then we’d have Hugh Volkheimer, scofflaw tannery owner, meeting Hugh Volkheimer, cattle rancher, I said to Father. The same Hugh Volkheimer who expected to use the prize beef from his ranch to make hamburgers for his first-ever “Black Angus Volkburger Restaurant,” due to open next year, right here in Three Bridges.
One anonymous call to the FDA and it would be good fucking luck getting your beef certified, Hughie.
We were both toweled off and stepping into extra coveralls I kept in the truck for emergencies. So I asked Father a second time, “How did you know where to look for me?”
This section of the old sewers was so close to the Conrail tracks that, when they built the row homes that replaced the shanties, this strip had been left empty. At two in the morning, the only things moving out here were the rats and the stray cats that chased them. Still, much as everyone around town recognized my old Willys truck, for Father to have found me out here, he would have first had to know I was out this late, and second, the general vicinity to look.
“You could say I got a phone call,” he told me, snapping the fasteners on the front of his dry coveralls, “but the truth is I was asleep, so I only dreamt there was a call, from a boy who sounded a lot like your young friend Leo. ‘Wump needs help, near the train tracks’ is what I heard, which startled me awake.” Father dropped his muck-stained clothes inside the truck’s tailgate. “So I jogged alongside the tracks until I saw your truck.”
Father leaned over to look into the open manhole. I did likewise, saw nothing but darkness, but we could still hear the rumble of running sewer water. I was for sure certain he hadn’t heard from no talking dead babies, else it would have come out with his dream right then and there. A few nudges from my soggy work boot and the manhole cover clanged shut, snug inside its iron ring.
“You think maybe Leo is, ah, you know, tele-whatchamacallit, like them Indian swamis?”
“Telepathic?”
“Yeah.”
“I think he’s an especially sensitive kid, Wump. And I think you and he have a very special bond. Beyond that, only heaven knows.”
17
Wednesday morning; Sister Magdalena’s funeral today. Spent parts of yesterday in a doctor’s office for Viola’s arthritis. That, plus she’d developed a hefty winter cough that wasn’t letting go, so she had some tests done. We spent the rest of the day at our house getting ready for the Easter holiday. Viola made me dig out her cardboard ducks and posters and ceramic bunnies from the basement so she could arrange them around the house and decorate the front lawn like she did every year. I tried talking her into leaving Harry’s Easter basket packed away but she wouldn’t hear of it, so three baskets sat on the dining room table, ready for the Easter Bunny, making like this year was no different. They say the first year after a person’s death is always the worst for the survivors, each holiday a reminder that the person is gone. Viola being so Catholic, and this first holiday being Easter, well, this made it a little tougher.
Our Lady of the Innocents Church holds about six hundred people. Today it was full up, standing room only for the sister’s funeral Mass. Viola and me were in the third pew, sitting with the parish sisterhood, with nuns from other parishes in pews behind us. She was knee-to-knee with Sister Dymphna, their rosary-beaded hands intertwined with each other, their fingers pressing each bead for the moment it took to finish another Hail Mary before moving on. Behind us were the grade-school kids, St. Jerome’s orphans included, the ones in wheelchairs at the end of each pew.
Leo and Raymond were side by side in pew and aisle. It was good seeing this, knowing how sick Raymond had been lately. It wasn’t so good seeing Adam, back in the last pew of school kids, whispering and cracking smiles with the eighth-grade boys. Must have been easy come, easy go for him when it came to mothers. Behind the kids was the rest of the congregation.
In front of us in the first and second pews were monsignors, priests, and sisters from other parishes, plus a few diocesan big shots. The cardinal didn’t come, a bit too frail to attend in person. I admired the cardinal; took real balls to replace Monsignor Fassnacht with Father Duncan as the bishop’s acolyte for Sister’s funeral today. The congregation knew no better, had been told Monsignor Fassnacht wasn’t assisting because he was still too sick. Amen to that, in spades.
The interior lighting of Our Lady’s church always reminded me of those dancing water fountai
ns people see in newsreels on the Las Vegas casinos, where the water was lit from underneath by colored spotlights that exploded upward against a dome of darkness. The church’s smooth plaster walls curved near its rounded ceiling, their white giving way to a soft sky-blue. Paintings in flowing reds and yellows and peaches showed saints ascending to heaven in firecracker starbursts, ushered north toward the pearly gates by tiny winged cherubs in swaddled cloth, the gates guarded by large archangels robed in silver and gold.
Back on Sunday night, with Father Duncan and me sitting in my truck before we left each other’s company, the two of us in clean coveralls but both still smelling pretty ripe from the sewer, Father knew how upset I was. About the tannery, and the baby skeletons, and Sister Magdalena’s death. He’d promised me he’d find some answers, then told me he learned something important the past few days.
“It has to do with those newborns,” he’d said. “I think all of them were boys.”
Sister Magdalena’s service was over, her graveside cleared out except for me and Father Duncan, her casket suspended above its final resting place. I looked to where Father was pointing.
“The section of the cemetery back in there,” he said, pushing the palm of his hand out like he was opening a swinging door, “and farther on up the hill, is where every Catholic from this parish who died during that period was buried.”
The mourners trickled out the cemetery gates on foot, in cars, some in small school buses. My Viola waited patiently in our truck, her homemade angel food cake on her lap. Our last stop would be the parish convent, where the mourners had been invited for coffee and tea. I’d leave soon, as in soon as I could get a grip on what Father Duncan was explaining to me, and at the moment he had me looking out over a rolling sea of crooked old cemetery headstones.
“What isn’t back there,” Father said, “are graves for the infants noted in the death announcements you showed me.”
“From Mrs. Volkheimer’s Bible?”