Scars on the Face of God

by Chris Bauer

  “Yes. No record of their funerals either. There are only records of prayers offered on their behalf, with ‘Male Baby’ noted in place of a first name. I found prayer offerings for a number of other newborns with the same first-name notation, bunched into the late 1870s, ’80s, and ’90s, all who died the day they were born. It’s as if a plague had the town in its grasp. A plague affecting newborn boys only.”

  “A plague manufactured by the Catholic clergy, Father.”

  “C’mon, Wump,” he said, frowning. “Ease up on the Church, okay? We’re on the same team here.”

  “Yeah, but what they done back then—”

  “Look, we don’t yet know what happened. You’re speculating based on fifty-year-old childhood memories. There’s a lot of room for interpretation.”

  “Fine, Father.” But I wasn’t wrong, and I was sticking to my guns. “So how many was it who died the same day they were born?”

  A light gust of a warm wind pushed the hair off Father’s forehead, a break in the cooler weather we’d seen so far this April. The weatherman said it would get hotter through the rest of the week, maybe set some records. Father answered me. “There were prayer offerings for one hundred and twenty-four children in less than twenty years. That’s a lot of prayers for dead children for a town small as this one was back then.” His eyes went distant; they narrowed as the wind brushed us again. “Yet I found only fifteen grave markers for them.”

  Had to be the ones who died from natural causes and made it to the graveyard, which we agreed on. I didn’t need to ask where the other one hundred and nine went; we both knew. One thing I did need to ask. “So how about their baptismal records?”

  Father’s head bobbed a few times. “I asked myself the same question. The fifteen buried in this cemetery,” he spoke as he watched the last car leave through the gates, a chauffeured black Cadillac, the bishop in its back seat, “were all baptized in this parish. I could find no baptisms recorded for any of the others anywhere throughout the diocese.”

  No Catholic baptism, no burial in a Catholic cemetery. That was the rule, no matter how good a life a person led. Abe Lincoln, a friggin’ president of the U.S. of A., and the man whose religious ideals I lived by, couldn’t have been buried here; he wasn’t Catholic. Hell, based on this reasoning, Our Lady of the Innocents, the Blessed Virgin herself, wouldn’t have qualified either, and it was her church.

  “You find it odd, Father, that all them infants died before they could be baptized?”

  “I can’t speak for the times back then, Wump. There could be some practical reasons why a child with Catholic parents might not have been christened, although to not christen them—”

  “Yeah. To not christen them,” I said as one baby came to mind, my insides suddenly turning, the echo of long-ago and not-so-long-ago screams ringing my ears for an instant. “That pretty much slams the gates of heaven shut right in front of their little faces, now don’t it? Or so the Catholic religion teaches. So I’ve got a new theory for you, Father. Want to hear it?”

  “I’m open.”

  Viola was giving me the cold stare from the truck. I needed to be quick. “Here it is: the Church refused to baptize them.”

  I let Father chew on this for a moment, except what I got from him was pretty much a poker face. I continued. “I figure the crazy monsignor pastor back then thought there was something wrong with all them infants, so he refused them the sacrament. Might also be why Sister Irene and him didn’t get along.”

  I checked on Viola again. She faced forward now, knew I was looking at her, was giving me her profile only. “I’ve got to get Viola over to the convent, Father. This theory make sense to you?”

  “I think it fits too easily with your contempt of the Catholic clergy, Wump. Again, speculation but no hard evidence.”

  “Evidence? The Church, I figure, knew all about the lunatic monsignor and kept quiet. Except for, like I said, Sister Irene. She had run-ins with him all the time. Maybe she had the goods on him. I got to get going, Father. See you at the convent?”

  Father reached through a separation in his vestments, into his pants pocket. “I hope to be there. Here, take this. I have a favor.”

  It was a folded piece of loose-leaf paper. I opened it, saw a column of hand-printed names with dates next to each of them.

  “These are the names of the fifteen infant boys who are buried back there—the ones who did get baptized. Look them over and let me know if you can tell me anything about them or their families.”

  18

  A convent was normally a dreary place to be most days of the week, for me at least, but only because it was too quiet. Plenty of times I been here fixing things, hammering this, tightening that, where some of what I was working on didn’t cooperate, so I’d let go a little swear word or two because I couldn’t help myself. Cripes, you might have thought I cursed out God in church with a mouthful of hamburger at three o’clock on Good Friday the way those nuns would come at me, wagging their fingers then blessing themselves so I wouldn’t burn in hell.

  I was in the convent’s long dining room, could see Viola in the adjacent kitchen, a flowered apron on. She was slicing up her angel food cake and putting it on paper plates, helping the sisterhood serve the funeral-goers who’d stopped by to accept their offer of hospitality. Been maybe forty parishioners come through already, give or take.

  Funny thing about poor Sister Magdalena: she never threw stones. There was this one time I let go a granddaddy of a curse when I was working on a second-floor toilet. I stuck a screwdriver in my finger trying to hammer out a stubborn rubber flapper inside the tank. It drew blood and cracked the toilet porcelain at the bottom; no way the tank could hold water after that. What came out of my mouth was a real showstopper, something like “holy fucking Mary fucking Mother of God.” I hadn’t realized Sister Magdalena, rest her soul, was passing by in the hallway. The swearing stopped her in her tracks outside the open bathroom door. I figured I was in for a good scolding and pulled my bleeding finger out of my mouth to deliver an apology, but she’d already done an about-face and returned to her room. It happened one Saturday morning, I recall, because it took me most of the day to replace the toilet tank, and the whole time I worked on it, Sister stayed put behind her closed door. I felt horrible about it and was first in line for confession that afternoon.

  “You look very nice today, Wump,” Sister Dymphna said. She was complimenting me on my black church-going suit and my combed hair. “Would you like a refill?”

  Sister took my empty cup and saucer, returned in a few minutes with a serving tray. Fresh cup of coffee for me, some steeping tea for her, and two pieces of Viola’s cake. We moved to the parlor and sat.

  “She’s finally at peace,” Sister said. “Peace, thank heaven, for her tortured body and soul. God in his infinite wisdom will have mercy on her.”

  Sister shocked me with this comment. Just to make sure I’d heard her right, I gave her a chance to change her words. “You mean tortured like in some kind of mental illness, right?”

  Sister gave me a sly look and returned her cup to her saucer, looked left then right before answering me in a low voice. “He played with her faith, Wump, and counted on her vow of obedience, and her willingness to sacrifice herself on its behalf. He also convinced her of something else that, on the face of it, sounded so utterly ridiculous, but to a young Venezuelan novice who spoke and read little English when she first arrived in the States—a person who had vowed to dedicate her entire life to Christ and the Church—it was more like a dream fulfilled.” Sister shook her head. “He convinced her the Second Coming of Christ was imminent, and she could be the Mother of God. He even showed her passages from the Bible where he claimed this was written. He’s mad, you know.”

  Monsignor Fassnacht. You sick, sick bastard.

  “So our young Sister Magdalena became pregnant, with twins,” Sister said. “Adam and Ruth were delivered by cesarean section, the procedure arranged as a favor, then ke
pt quiet by a doctor at Nazarene Hospital. Then Sister gave both children to me, to care for them in the orphanage. Over time her depression grew, pushing her toward her own madness.”

  “But Sister,” I wanted to say this gently, in case she didn’t know, “I think Sister Magdalena, ah, that is I think she and the monsignor were still, ah…”

  Truth was, Sister Magdalena went back. I seen it, on a regular basis. The same as what Father Duncan and me seen yesterday with Harriet the postulant leaving the rectory. Mrs. Gobel’s radio, blasting that rock ’n’ roll music so the old cook couldn’t hear what was going on upstairs, and Sister Magdalena taking out the monsignor’s wash afterward, same as Harriet did regularly now. It had begun again, this union between Sister and her tormentor. Went on for months; didn’t stop until around the time Harriet showed up.

  “Yes, they were together again, I know,” Sister said, lowering her voice some more. “It started back up as a kind of blackmail, you could say. Monsignor is on the orphanage’s adoption approval board. The last hurdle for clearing prospective parents interested in children at St. Jerome’s. Adam’s and Ruth’s adoptions were in Monsignor’s hands. There aren’t many chances left for children their age to find a family.”

  “Blackmail? Like in the movies?” This was pissing me off. It was going on between priests and sisters—holy people, for Christ sake—in a convent and a rectory. Places you’d expect were protected from crap like this. “So you’re saying Sister started back up with the monsignor because he threatened to reject the adoptions?”

  Sister Dymphna put a finger to her lips to quiet me down then she stared, sizing me up like she was deciding which way to answer. “On the contrary, Wump,” she said finally. “Sister did what she did because the monsignor threatened to approve them.”

  Back when I was a kid, getting adopted meant you had at best a fifty-fifty chance at a better life, but that was decades ago. Nowadays there were jobs enough for everyone, and money enough, too, for raising families. The country was loaded with optimists, all wanting to see the USA in their Chevrolets. So it had to be hands-down better for an adopted child to be raised in a new family instead of in an orphanage. Just had to be. “Why wouldn’t she want them to get adopted?”

  Sister Dymphna took the last bite of her cake; I hadn’t touched mine yet. “Sister did want them to find adoptive parents,” she said, “just not the parents being considered. They’re wealthy Europeans. Old country German, actually, and new to the US. They were highly recommended by Monsignor. She saw something sinister in that. As for me, I came down on the side of knowing it was the last chance for the two of them. And as smart as Adam is, he’d surely get a good education with this family.”

  I agreed with Sister’s logic, except it made me feel worse about Sister Magdalena’s state of mind as she neared the edge. “Any idea what Sister would have done once she got out of Three Bridges with the children? Desperate and, you know, as depressed as she was, and them on the run? As needy as Ruthie is and as nasty as Adam can get, it would have been real difficult for the three of them.”

  “No, I don’t. But I must say I think you’re too hard on that boy, Wump,” she tsk-tsked. “Adam’s a born leader who’s going to make a real difference. His prospective parents think he’s entirely engaging and mature beyond his years. And they also believe they can be of developmental assistance to Ruthie, too, as she gets older. Look, I agree Adam may be a little emotionally scarred by all these goings-on, but with the right encouragement I expect he’ll straighten out. Which brings me to another topic: Have you gotten those things together for us for Good Friday?”

  I caught a glimpse of two smallish hands reaching for the last two paper plates of Viola’s cake on the table in the dining room. I craned my neck to see who had spirited them off, but I was too late. “Sure, Sister. It’s all in the anteroom next to the church sacristy. Play swords from the five-and-dime, some old broom handles I fitted with spear tips I made from cardboard; the centurions are pretty much all set. And I nailed some scrap wood together for the cross, so all the props for the Stations are ready. The cross should be light enough for a small kid to carry.”

  “We won’t be pressuring any of the younger children with that burden, Wump, but I’m sure it will still be fine. Thank you for your help.”

  “My pleasure. So who’s playing Jesus then?”

  “We thought it would be a fitting gesture,” she said, eyeing a new mourner entering the parlor, “for Adam to do the honors, since he’s an eighth-grader and he’s leaving us.”

  Adam? As the crucified Christ? I wanted to say “It’ll be your funeral, Sister,” but for once I kept my mouth shut. Sister excused herself and left to greet the new guest.

  I took my cup and saucer over to the dining room window to finish my coffee and work out the Adam-playing-Christ scenario in my head. Outside on the convent lawn was Leo, a paper plate full of Viola’s angel food cake in his hands, leaning over Raymond in his wheelchair. Leo broke off small pieces for his buddy, fed them to him and took some for himself. Raymond still looked peaked, but the past few days his cheeks had started showing a touch more color. The two boys finished up their cake, Leo pushing the last few crumbs into Raymond’s mouth.

  19

  Father Duncan’s list of the fifteen infants buried in Our Lady’s cemetery in the late 1800s had a number of surnames I recognized. Common German family names like Schmidt and Huber and Werner. The phone book was loaded with them and so was this town, but I was in luck. The list also had the name Goode on it, and Three Bridges had only one Catholic family with that last name, so I wouldn’t need to waste any more of my Wednesday playing detective. I was plenty busy otherwise, getting the church ready for Easter.

  The Goodes lived one blacktopped street and one concrete alleyway away from Viola and me. There were two kids in the family: the parish baseball team’s little shortstop Sonny, twelve, and his younger sister whose name I couldn’t remember, but I knew was in the first grade. It was four-thirty in the p.m.; prime after-school playtime for the kids in the neighborhood.

  I traipsed down the middle of the doublewide cement alleyway that separated the back yards of one street from the next. A purring car engine approached me from behind; I moved to the side, the car creeping by so close the driver could have picked my pocket. That was how these row homes and alleyways were set up, block after block of attached brick and stone houses, two stories of living and sleeping space above ground level concrete basements and built-in single garages. Waist-high black iron railings separated the backyards, each yard with a narrow patch of grass side by side against rectangles of cement driveway no wider than the family car. Mrs. Goode was rescuing her wash from the tangles of her spiderwebbed overhead clothesline. Little Sonny and his slow cousin Teddy Agarn sat cross-legged underfoot of Sonny’s mother, not far from the garage door.

  Mrs. Goode threaded her way around them while she pulled her bed sheets off the line. She folded the last one as I entered the yard, placed it on top of the other clean wash in her laundry basket. With the sheets and Sonny’s mom out of the way, the boys raised themselves to a knee on the hard driveway. It was a pose I recognized: they were flipping baseball cards. The one with the closest flipped cards to the garage door got to keep both cards. Teddy’s card pile was larger than Sonny’s.

  “Got a minute, Mrs. Goode?”

  The sun had dropped below the flat roofs of the row houses, but was still half visible over my shoulder. She shielded her eyes like she was saluting me; I stepped to the side so the sun was out of her face. “Mr. Hozer. What brings you by today?”

  “Sorry to bother you, ma’am. Our Lady’s new parish priest sent me over.”

  “Father Duncan? If this is about Sonny skipping baseball practice, Father will need to talk with one of the sisters. He was asked to stay after school with a few of the other altar boys. He’s serving the High Mass for Easter this year.”

  “It’s not about that, ma’am. Father wanted me to ask you s
omething about the Goode family tree, if you don’t mind.”

  “The family tree?” Her eyebrows tented. “You’ll need to come inside. I’ve got a casserole in the oven. Now why on earth would Father be interested in the Goode family tree?” she said to herself, me tailing her into the basement entry.

  The laundry basket stayed in the basement. I followed her up the narrow steps into her kitchen, where she pulled a bib apron off a hanger in a small pantry closet, looped the front over her head, and tied off the middle around her waist. She grabbed her oven mitts; the casserole came out of the oven, was left to cool on the range top. She craned her neck toward the screened double window over the kitchen sink. “Sonny!” she called to her boy in the backyard. “Let me know when your father pulls in.”

  Mrs. Goode wasn’t much taller than a bar ledge in a taproom, a fair bet why little Sonny was called Little Sonny, since his father was near six-foot. One thing about her son’s genes, though. They gave a good account of themselves in the arms, wrists, and hands department. I seen this kid throw and hit a baseball. Amazing. The rest of his body would hopefully catch up.

  “My side of the family hails from Reading,” she told me. Some strands of her chestnut-brown hair dropped into her eyes. She blew them out of the way, went after a bobby pin not doing its job above her forehead, then spoke with the pin clenched in her teeth until she’d gathered her hair up and reassembled it. “But the Goodes have a long history here in Three Bridges. As far back as, well, I don’t really know when. Since before the Revolution, I think. So what’s got the new Father interested in the Goode family’s ancestors?”

  “Your husband’s parents—they still alive?”

  “Just the elder Mr. Goode. He’s in his late sixties. What’s this all about?”

  So far so good. Now for a little fib.

  “Father Duncan’s been looking at the oldest parts of Our Lady’s cemetery, checking to make sure every grave is still properly marked. How many brothers and sisters does your husband’s father have?”