by Chris Bauer
I was collapsed on the grass, the cynical side of me feeling like I’d just gone ten rounds with a gorilla. My serious side told me what I felt had mostly to do with my age. It was something that wasn’t easy for me to admit, but it was time I owned up to it.
I let the cynicism resurface because it was easier this way, but it wasn’t working. I seen and felt too much, was given glimpses of things seen only in Bible stories. I was humbled, but humble didn’t seem near as big enough a word to describe just how utterly buck naked it made me feel.
you are wrong, Wump
“What is it I’m wrong about, Raymond?”
Me and Raymond were side by side, lying on a bed of soft new grass that sloped away from the church and ended at the river, and I suppose you could say we were talking. Leo was on his way down the slope with the wheelchair. Raymond explained himself.
about getting old, yes, you are right, but—
about fighting a gorilla
The wheelchair with Leo pushing it squeaked up alongside us.
in your prime the bout goes maybe three rounds, four rounds tops
I was too tired, too hurt, too upset to give the joke the laugh it deserved. I’d lost a friend today. Father Duncan, you, sir, were a hero.
I smiled at Raymond for his effort. “That’s really rich, son,” I told him. “But hey, you got too much faith in me.”
one can never have too much faith, Wump
“Ready?” Leo said as he pulled up between me and Raymond. Leo engaged the wheel lock. I got to my feet, still cradling my wounded paw, feeling a bit dizzy now. I looked over my shoulder at the battered church, its pink speckled granite blocks twinkling in the sunlight, the sun back where it was supposed to be, low in the afternoon sky, but not ready to set yet.
“Help me get his arms, Leo.”
“But, Wump,” Leo said real sheepish-like, his shoulders sloped, his silly grin looking pained, like he was apologizing, “the wheelchair’s not for him. It’s for you.”
The wings reappeared, and Michael, or Raymond, or whichever one of these two beautiful beings this was, helped Leo settle me with my broken knuckles and aching back and head into the seat. This wonderful being addressed me again.
I must do one more thing, Wump
it is something for you
“For me? Why for me? I don’t need nothing.”
Except…wait—
My spirits rose. Maybe there was hope.
“My Viola,” I choked out. “Please. Please say you’ll help her.”
Michael laid a gentle, comforting hand on my shoulder, and as I peered upward at a face that stayed blank, emotionless, no different than moments ago while in the heat of battle, I waited for a response. Michael’s heaving sigh told me the answer. I blinked through my tears.
that cannot be, Wump
I am sorry, but it is the nature of things
yet there is something else…
The magnificent winged creature who was both a frail, impaired boy and a princely angel rose up and glided out over the bank to the middle of the river, the water now calm, the dam sealed back up, the runoff from the spring thaw under control again. He was ghostly quiet as he floated a few feet above the water’s surface, following the tree-lined river upstream toward the tannery, passing over two covered bridges and the remains of the third. He glided back down near the still water. I lost sight of him around a bend.
29
Two Months Later
Sunspots. For weeks it was all we’d heard about. A bunch of them according to the weathermen, all doing whatever sunspots did, and all of them doing it back on Good Friday. Doing things like screwing up radio frequencies and interrupting the earth’s electro-cosmic-magnetic force fields or some such shit like that. And causing the sun to look weak and pale, even creating the optical illusion it was setting at three in the afternoon.
Fine. It’s all a load of crap, but fine.
Father Duncan, Monsignor Fassnacht, and Adam St. Jerome were incinerated when the church’s gas heater blew. The explosion had caused a fire that destroyed the interiors of the sacristy and half the church, and took those three lives with it. I was blamed, me being Our Lady’s lead maintenance person and all. Hogwash, I told them. They knew the old burner was a firetrap. I’d put it in writing last year with a registered letter to the archdiocese’s top maintenance folks downtown, telling them what I had to do each month to keep the damn thing running. They all quit the blame game with me and backed off, the police included, when I showed them my copy of the letter and a postal receipt for it.
The Cardinal’s murder. The city of Philadelphia was in an uproar because two months had passed, and no one had been charged. Kerm the coroner called to tell me they liked Monsignor Fassnacht for it. Much as I wanted to tell him they were barking up the right tree, considering the man had actually confessed the murder to me and Father Duncan, I stayed mum, and for a good reason. Only one of those four people, counting the Cardinal, was still alive: me, the one with the prison record.
So that was how certain things were explained away. Of course, the investigators had the cause and effect of the heater explosion all wrong. It blew up all right, but only after one hell of a spark had caused it and everything around it to go up, the spark coming from a burning six-hundred-year-old Bible torched by its demonic author. Outside of Sister Dymphna and Mrs. Volkheimer, and Leo, who was there but no one would ever believe on account of how slow he was, I had no one else to talk to about it.
Except, of course, Raymond, and my Viola, but by then it was too late. After a few weeks, when things had settled down, Raymond’s leukemia took him. May 16th it was, in the morning. Raymond, in Leo’s company, sipped some Black Cherry Wishniak soda, properly shook to remove most of the fizz, settled back into his wheelchair, burped, and was gone. Eight days later the leukemia took my Viola.
God’s greatest gift to me, Viola’s love was. For forty wonderful years she gave meaning to my life, a life so ready for the crapper by the time I’d turned twenty. My strength and my savior, and now she was gone.
The first two weeks after her diagnosis, I prayed to Father Duncan’s soul every day, begged him to ask God to change his mind. The last two weeks, seeing her pain, I prayed for a different outcome, and this time my prayers were answered. She might have survived longer, a few more months maybe, suffering like she had but still here for me, talking with me, taking care of me, comforting me. But in the end, the only gift I had left to give her was to let go, and her final caring act for me was to die a happy woman.
These new shoes really pinched.
“I don’t need you to carry me, Wump. Give me your hand and get out of my way,” Mrs. V said, so I gave her the room she wanted. She swiveled out of the seat of my truck, stepped onto the running board, grabbed my arm, then planted both feet on the grass next to a wheelchair I’d set up for her. Around her house, her walker and cane still worked fine, but outside, especially on a grass lawn as uneven as this was, where the paths between the gravestones dipped in spots and were a little soggy, her wheelchair would be a must. She settled into it.
“Big day today,” she said to me, beaming.
“That it is, ma’am.”
I pushed her up to a gated section, about a third of an acre, inside Our Lady’s Cemetery; we entered it in silence. This section contained the Volkheimer family’s burial plots, and was surrounded by a low-rise ornamental iron fence with curled tops that could pass for candy canes, except they were black. I steered Mrs. V around the soft wet spots, careful not to get mud on my new Thom McAns.
New suit, new shoes. New birth, in a manner of speaking. Yessir, today was a big day.
It weren’t no one thing that made Mrs. V and me decide about my “pedigree.” It had been more like a smelling salts wake-up, where all of a sudden everything came into focus, with all this stuff pointing in the same direction, like iron shavings to a magnet. Didn’t know who decided it first, me or her, but when I’d stopped by to see her the day she
got home from the hospital, she looked at me real different, and I expect the look she’d seen on me was the same.
So we talked it through.
Rolf had always been extra nice to me. Made sure me and my kid buddy Heinie got apples or biscuits or something else wholesome to eat when we anted-up our sacks full of dog droppings at the tannery each morning. He’d lectured me when I got into trouble and he’d heard about it. He put up most of the money to have the orphanage rebuilt, paid the laborers extra to get it done early, which they did, finishing it in time for the birth of his and Mrs. V’s first child. He kept a spyglass in the attic of their footbridge, sat real secret up there in a chair in front of a window with a full view of the orphanage’s back yard, where all us kids played. And yeah, his son and me were both born the same day. The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming, for me especially, and for more than one reason, me knowing that a father I never thought I had, had been loving me all along as he watched me grow, and me also knowing it was me who took his life. Couldn’t rightly say I’d ever get that one squared away, accident or not. Not in this life at least.
Sure, there’d been some changes for her and me. You could see them right here, in Our Lady’s Cemetery. One newer grave, just recently sodded, for her husband Rolf, a plot that had waited for a body for over fifty years. Today we put some flowers on it, tomorrow being Father’s Day. And now there were two other new graves, still mounds of dirt because they were only a few hours old. My wife, Viola, was buried in one, our son, Harry, in the other. I had them exhumed from the town cemetery next door.
See, right there, right under my nose, was something I’d never considered: my family’s burial plots. All three were in the town’s public cemetery, Bountiful Gardens. Viola told me she’d bought our plots there rather than in Our Lady’s because the town cemetery had a breathtaking two-acre, township-tended arboretum in its center. Truth was, I knew now, she did it because the parish cemetery was for Catholics only, and since no one could prove I was baptized a Catholic, I wouldn’t have qualified. Pretty silly when you thought about it, knowing Sister Irene had every orphan at St. Jerome’s christened, even doing some herself right at the orphanage, including me, or so I’d been told. No less spiritually effective than a church baptism in God’s eyes I was sure, but with no certificate. So there it was: no proof, no burial in a Catholic cemetery, yet with Viola loving me like she did, she never thought less of me because of it, never even questioned me about it. Her final resting place, she’d decided, should be next to her husband, regardless. What a lucky, lucky man I was to have had a love like that.
“It all gets fixed today, Viola honey,” I said, looking over her grave, my empty plot next to it. I couldn’t help but get choked up about this.
Mrs. V stayed silent while I dealt with my grief. When I finally blessed myself, she said, “Now let’s go get you officially baptized, son.”
We retraced our path back down the grassy incline toward my truck. The view was good from here. The river, the bridges, Mrs. V’s property, and less than a mile in the distance, the tannery with its two smokestacks, the low-rise Wissaquessing Ridge as their backdrop. And right now, visible through the cemetery gate, was a flow of people on foot that got near as steady as the march of time. Many were Three Bridges German Catholics, but the past few weekends we’d been getting more out-of-towners, the cars on the street just like the people, all stop ’n’ go and headed in the same direction. Been this way every Saturday and Sunday since Easter. One of a number of changes we been dealing with.
A second was how Mrs. V and me addressed each other. Guess you could say we’d worked it all out. I was still using “Mrs. Volkheimer” or “Mrs. V” or “ma’am,” and she stayed mostly with “Wump.” “Son” sneaked in a lot, a kind of compromise, but she wasn’t really using the word much different now than how she’d used it before, except we both felt the difference when it was spoken. “Mom” hadn’t entered the vocabulary yet. I wanted it to; I just needed more time.
Third, she’d asked me to move into her home. Maybe I would at some point, but it meant giving up the house where Viola and me had spent more than forty happy years together, and it was a step I wasn’t ready to take yet.
Fourth was Leo, or rather Leo without Raymond. A terrible loss for him, and something that knocked him off kilter enough that I hadn’t heard a telepathic peep out of his chatterbox head since. I tried to keep him busy, and what with me still nursing my busted paw, I guess you could say it had worked out okay for the both of us. I should say the three of us, since Leo had taken up with Teddy Agarn, a bull of a young kid but near as slow as Leo. The two boys were a great help with all the clean-up work needed while the diocese lined up contractors to repair the church, plus there was always other school projects, daily trips to the hardware, that sort of thing. And next summer, the three of us would rebuild the roof on Mrs. V’s bridge.
Truth was I wanted to adopt Leo, but was told I was too old. Guess it didn’t much matter, to me or to him. We were already spending a lot of time together, though for me it was never enough. The word around the Catholic Church was that kids who were slow like Leo couldn’t sin, which pretty much made them perfect Heaven material. To know Leo was to believe this. Never realized how much I loved him until now.
Fifth and last thing I’d had to come to terms with was my own anger, including my need to personally crush my cousin Hugh Volkheimer’s skull for what he, and the decades of contaminated waste generated by his filthy tannery, had done to my wife and son. The anger had blunted somewhat with all that happened on Good Friday and the weeks since, and with things looking like it was only a matter of time before Hughie’s tannery went belly-up.
With Mrs. V safely tucked back into my passenger seat, I pulled the truck through the cemetery exit and waited for a seam in the throng of passersby on the sidewalk. It was amazing how fast the word had spread. Some walked with binoculars raised, some with their hands shielding their eyes while they squinted, all of them trying to get glimpses of it before they reached the edge of the tannery property, where you were able to see it best. Others, like the feeble and the infirm and the dying, rolled by in their wheelchairs, their heads down, their lips moving in prayer.
“I must do one more thing,” Michael had said to me, and this one more thing he spoke of doing had been spectacular.
When the tannery was operating, which was Monday through Friday, its two round smokestacks got warm enough from by-product steam to take on a faint red glow, something akin to a sunburn. But on weekend days these red-bricked, side-by-side stacks were cooled enough to show a tan-white residue on their surface, a film that looked like they’d overflowed with oatmeal, the discoloration running the length of the stacks and tapering off down near, but not quite all the way, to the bottom. The tan residue had been visible for years, no one thinking any which way about the long, half-a-heart shapes, the stains mirror images of themselves. But the Wissaquessing Ridge behind the tannery was what pulled it all together, the ridge suffering a large rock slide from its peak to its base back on, yes, Good Friday. So now, when folks viewed the ridge from a distant rise at the edge of the property, they could see a natural phenomenon that defied their sense of reason: a forty-foot shape of a long-haired man on bended knee, his gown a loose-fitting mosaic of stratified rock layers, his jagged, protruding chin turned right and raised skyward, his body sized perfect to fit between the two tall smokestacks, with the stacks’ oatmeal residue looking like feathery wings attached to his shoulders. Weren’t no finer stained glass picture of an angel I had ever seen.
Like I said, word spread real quick, especially after all the attention the church fire got from the news folks. Except, also like I said, the wings were only visible when the tannery wasn’t operating. So all them tannery workers, mostly second- and third-generation German Catholics, and every one as devout as an apostle, were calling for it to be a shrine while they looked for new jobs. I gave the tannery six months. Take that, cousin Hughie, you po
lluting bastard you.
But there was one thing that hadn’t quite been wrapped up near as tight as these other events. It was what went on with Adam’s twin sister Ruthie: her candy, her newfound voice, and her disappearance.
Easter Monday, early in the morning, I remembered sitting on the concrete steps out back of the orphanage while Leo was inside scavenging for my stray tools. There I was, tending Leo’s wagon, my arm in a sling, my bum wrist cradled in a cast. His rusty red Radio Flyer was on the grass in front of me, weighed down by my toolbox. Our only mode of tool transport until my cast could be removed, Leo’s wagon was. How my life had changed.
I remembered hearing the screen door snap shut and Ruthie tapping me on the shoulder, sleep still in her eyes, and I remembered how she’d greeted me with the first, last, and only words I’d ever heard her speak:
“Licorice whip?”
Her one hand offered me a limp piece of the strawberry-red candy. I accepted it, tucked into my shirt pocket. What her other hand held had caught me by surprise: a wooden spoon and a potato sack.
Dogshit Ruthie. I never had a clue.
Faded green pullover sweatshirt above worn dungarees. Long pant legs bunched against the tops of tan tennis shoes. Short, straight black hair and sleepy, Spanish-brown eyes. This was what I remembered of her as she left my sight around the corner of the orphanage, and it was the description I gave the police when they finally went looking for her. Ruthie hadn’t been seen in Three Bridges since, nor anywhere else the missing-persons folks had searched. The old German couple set to adopt her, and her twin brother, Adam, were gone as well.