An Imperfect Miracle

by Thomas L. Peters

  A little after twelve thirty the cops opened up Main Street to cars again, but the pilgrims kept on piling in anyway, even though it was so hot that some were passing out and had to get hauled away in ambulances. It wasn’t long before the line snaked all the way past the Laundromat and around the corner to where you couldn’t even see the end of it. The only person from our church who I saw marching past Mary that day was Pastor Mike. After he got through the line I ran up to him and asked him what he thought of Mary and her new house. He seemed a little embarrassed that I’d spotted him, but he got over it quick and took off his sunglasses. “I’m glad that the good news of God’s mercy and grace can still bring out so many people.”

  “Do you think that the healings are for real? Carlos believes they are, at least most of them. He says that there might be a few fakers sprinkled in here and there trying to get some attention, but he says that isn’t Mary’s fault.”

  Pastor Mike said he didn’t know for sure but that he hoped so. I asked if there were ever any healings done at our church, and he said there might have been a few once but that he couldn’t prove it.

  “Carlos says that the more money they bring in, the more the town and St. Sebastian’s can spend it on helping poor people.”

  “That’s something we can all be happy about.”

  “Mr. Grimes and his friends don’t seem too thrilled.”

  I pointed at the little band of atheists still marching around in a narrow circle a ways up the street, and looking as sour as ever.

  “It’s a big country, and everybody has a right to say what’s on their mind.”

  “I heard that Pastor Bob’s still pretty ticked off about Mary showing up in town, in spite of all the good she’s doing.”

  “I’ve talked to him about it. He’s starting to see the light now.”

  “You ought to talk to Mom then too, because I think she’s still jealous of Mary being able to fix people up so quick, especially when it seems to take those doctors forever sometimes.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  All at once I felt a gush of warm feelings toward Pastor Mike, even though it seemed like he was being awful short with his answers.

  “You’re one of Mary’s biggest fans right behind me and Father Tom and Carlos and maybe Mrs. Marcella and some of those other old Catholic ladies. How come?”

  He laughed like I was cracking a joke and then started shadow boxing me a little. I got in a few good jabs and even an upper cut. But I decided not to hurt him with the knockout punch he’d taught me, because I didn’t want Mom getting all bent out of shape that I was picking on her boyfriend.

  He never did answer my question, and after he left I got tired standing around and was about to go home when all of a sudden I spotted old Uncle Carl shuffling up in line to see Mary. He had a Pirates’ baseball cap shoved down almost to his eyes, and he kept looking all around like he was worried somebody was chasing him.

  When he got to the bottom step he took off the cap and crossed his wrists in front of him at about belt level, like he was trying to be respectful or something. But after that he didn’t really seem to know what to do. Uncle Carl didn’t go to church much, and I guessed he was a little nervous. He tried bowing his head for a couple seconds like he was praying to her, although I didn’t see his lips move any. After slamming his cap back over his old gray head, he scampered out the exit as quick as I’d ever seen him move.

  I caught up with him and asked him if he’d brought Aunt Helen along. He jumped a little when he saw me and then right away asked if my mom was around. I told him she was back home probably sleeping it off.

  “Good. All I need is your mom or your Aunt Helen finding out about this and busting me for it. I’d never hear the end of it. But I don’t really trust those doctors your aunt sends me to. And even if they do happen to know what they’re doing, I don’t see where there’s any harm in covering all the angles.”

  “Do you mean you asked Mary to heal you?”

  Uncle Carl flinched a little, like he hadn’t really understood exactly what he was doing until just then. He didn’t seem embarrassed about it or anything, just a little mixed up.

  “Do you think once is enough? I’d hate to have to get back in that long line again, not to mention forking over another ten bucks. If you ask me, the price is kind of steep, especially when you’re not even certain it’s going to do you any good.”

  “I’m sure Mary’s on the job. She’s been taking requests for favors from people from all over the world for thousands of years according to my friend Carlos, in all sorts of different languages too.”

  I looked down at his feet to see if they were working any better, but since I was no expert on diabetes I couldn’t really tell. When I asked him if he felt any different, Uncle Carl said he couldn’t tell yet either, and that maybe whatever Mary had done to him would need some time to take hold.

  “The disease came on slow, after all. Maybe it goes away slow too.”

  I told him what Mom was always saying about how when you’re sick it always helps to have a good attitude. Uncle Carl glared down at the pavement like he was about to spit, but then he looked over at me and must have decided to hold it in. After patting me on the shoulder and telling me to hang in there, although I wasn’t quite sure where I was supposed to be hanging, he said he had to split before somebody else spotted him.

  I watched him climb back onto the shuttle to take him down to the parking lot, and I felt a little sorry for him because he seemed to be laboring there toward the end. In my head I asked Mary to help him out if she could, because I would have felt pretty sad if old Uncle Carl kicked the bucket on us.

  The next few weeks I was down at the shrine almost all the time because it was the best show around as far as I could tell. It didn’t take long for Main Street and then the whole town to start changing for the better too. For instance, in just a day or two a new restaurant started up where one of those dirty old bars used to be. Then whoever owned the old Laundromat sold out to a bookstore so the pilgrims would have something to read while they were waiting. There was talk of other restaurants and shops opening up soon too. And with the bars all closing down the drunks started disappearing from the street, and it was actually quieter down there at night than before Mary showed up. I was glad too since I hated having to close my bedroom window in the summer to keep out all the noise from the drunks partying and carrying on. It would get so steaming hot in my room that I couldn’t sleep, and we still didn’t have air conditioning because Mom was too cheap.

  I didn’t see Runyon around much, but when I did he always looked like he wanted to punch somebody’s lights out, except of course when he was jeering at some lady he liked the looks of. Carlos said Runyon and the other drunks were just sore on account of the bars closing down and that I shouldn’t pay any attention to them. He said it wouldn’t be long before they’d find some other place to do their drinking and swearing.

  I noticed that Runyon seemed to be wearing mostly new jeans now and nice cotton shirts in all sorts of different colors and even some fancy-looking sneakers, and I wondered if he’d gotten a job. When I asked Mom about it, she said he must have stolen the clothes and that I better stay away from him.

  It wasn’t long before the town sent around a notice that they were raking in so much money from parking and bus fees that they were cutting everybody’s taxes by twenty percent this year and probably by even more the next. After she read through it a couple times, Mom told me that maybe the shrine wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Then some Japanese fellows showed up in the mayor’s office and announced that they were thinking of turning part of the old mill into a factory for making what Mom called “environmentally friendly residential insulation material,” so long as their company didn’t have to pay any state or local taxes for fifteen years.

  The mayor was sure happy about all the new business pouring into town, because according to Mom he was expected to get reele
cted in a breeze. Carlos kept busy too, and every day a long trailer truck would pull up to the shrine and unload crates of new merchandise to replace the stuff he’d just sold.

  According to Carlos things were going so well that some newspaper people down in Pittsburgh were suspicious that maybe him and the mayor and Father Tom were in cahoots to swindle folks out of their money and sent a reporter up to investigate. It was that same skinny pale sweaty reporter who’d interviewed me already. And even though he had a better job now, probably thanks to Mary and that dumb story he wrote about her, he was just as nasty and cocky as ever.

  He asked me pretty much the same questions as before. But I stuck to my guns until finally he got a little ticked off, judging by how he started scrunching up his face at me like he’d just got a whiff of some dead animal rotting nearby. He didn’t have a chance to call me a liar or anything, because Mom stepped right in and shooshed him out the door.

  He got so honked off that he ended up demanding that the town take the glass case off so he could have some experts study Mary’s face scientifically. The mayor went along with it because he said he had nothing to hide, and that he wasn’t smart enough to have come up with such a crazy idea in the first place.

  According to Carlos, who watched the whole thing in between peddling his merchandise, those experts ran all sorts of fancy experiments on Mary. But all they ended up proving was that the mark on the concrete really was a water stain just like my science teacher Mr. O’Conner had said it was all along. I asked Carlos if that meant that Mr. Grimes and his atheist buddies were right in saying that Mary was a fake, but Carlos told me not to worry.

  “If God wants to use a water stain as the vehicle by which Mary’s blessed and holy image is conveyed to us mere mortals, then that’s just the way it is. After all, God made all the materials in the world, like water and dirt and concrete, so why can’t He use them however He wants to?”

  “They didn’t find any of your knife marks on her then.”

  Carlos looked all around, and then he leaned over until his face was just a few inches from mine. I could even smell his sour breath from that pastrami sandwich he’d had for lunch.

  “I guess not. But it doesn’t really matter, because so long as Mary keeps on doing miracles, the people will keep pouring in.”

  Carlos was right, because nothing much came of the investigation or that dopey reporter’s sour grapes article about her either, and Mary stayed as popular as ever. Maybe even more popular, because there were folks lining up now from Brazil and France and other strange faraway places. I even got the autographs of a few movie stars who had made what they called a “holy pilgrimage” to the shrine searching for a miracle cure to get rid of their cancers. Even though they all ended up dying in a few months, they sure stirred up a lot of good publicity for the town and for Mary too, at least according to Carlos.

  One person who stayed pretty bitter about the whole thing was Mr. Grimes. Carlos said he even showed up at the shrine early one morning and gave an angry little speech about how pathetic we all were to believe that a person who had been dead for nearly two thousand years, even assuming she had ever been alive to begin with, would want to come back on a grimy battered piece of concrete in a stupid nothing little town like Millridge. He said he was planning to go to court to force the town to rip the shrine down. He got so hoarse from yelling and carrying on that he had to go the hospital, where Mom helped look after him for a few days for a bad case of strep throat.

  I wasn’t too worried about the lawsuit though, because according to Carlos lawsuits took forever. Plus, with all the money Mary was bringing in, the mayor said that the town could afford to hire a big-time law firm from down in Pittsburgh to defend her.

  Speaking of money, late one hot afternoon I was inside Mary’s little house watching Carlos count up the day’s take. It was a big stack of bills he was sorting through too, more cash than I’d ever seen. He said that the town scooped most of it right off the top, but that St. Sebastian’s got a nice slice of the profits from selling all the religious goods.

  “It seems like a pretty fair deal to me,” I said.

  Carlos sighed and shook his head.

  “The mayor’s getting a little too greedy if you ask me, but there’s not much Father Tom or I can do about it since the shrine officially belongs to the town. It’s a shame, but after a while money tends to spoil everything, you know.”

  “You just have to sell more stuff then. Maybe you can open up a branch store somewhere.”

  Carlos laughed and then patted me on the head and said I was getting smarter all the time. That was another reason I liked going down to the shrine so much, since Mom was pretty skimpy when it came to handing out compliments.

  I noticed that every once in a while Carlos laid a twenty or a ten off to the side. When he was through counting he slid the little stack of bills into a white envelope and licked it shut. I asked him what the envelope was for. He must have been surprised that I was so curious, or maybe he just forgot I was there, because he blinked at me a few times. Then he coughed and cleared his throat, and for a second he reminded me of how he’d looked when I caught him sticking his penknife into Mary’s face.

  “It’s to pay the utility bills and other overhead expenses.”

  “You must use a lot of electricity then.”

  He coughed a little more.

  “You’d be surprised how expensive it is to keep this place running.”

  As he entered the final numbers for the day into his little computer, I asked him if me being the one to discover Mary was a sign that something big was going to happen to me too, and not just to the town or the country or the world like I’d heard some pilgrims saying. I guess I was being a little selfish, but I couldn’t help it. Carlos said he didn’t know, but that it might. Then I told him that Mom and Pastor Mike seemed friendlier with each other than ever, but that I couldn’t tell yet if they were going to get married or not. Carlos said that grownups are hard to figure sometimes, and I shouldn’t be too surprised no matter what happened.

  “Pastor Mike seems in an awfully good mood now that the building project over at my church has officially broken ground. He says they need more space on account of all the new members.”

  Carlos grinned kind of crafty as he typed away on the keyboard.

  “They must have come into some money recently then, because I’d heard that with the economy being so sour lately they’d been having trouble raising enough contributions.”

  I studied the monitor to count up the numbers he was entering in, but they were all splattered over a big spreadsheet and I couldn’t make any sense out of them. I’d been hoping Carlos would let me use his computer once in a while so I could play some online games, since Mom was too cheap to buy one. But Carlos looked too busy and serious for me to bug him about it just then.

  Finally Carlos hit the enter button and then logged off for the day.

  “Do you have time for a hot dog and fries? I’ll buy.”

  “Sure.”

  He shoved the envelope into his pocket, and I followed him to a brand new restaurant just about a block down Main Street. They must have been paying him pretty well over at St. Sebastian’s, because after lunch he bought me a brand new iPod too, the most expensive one they made at the time, although he told me not to say anything to Mom about it. I told him that Mom wouldn’t know an iPod from a calculator and that his secret was safe with me.

  Later, as I was walking home with Chewy and testing out my iPod, I remembered what that red-haired kid had said about how Mary was a big scam and that Carlos was paying me off to keep quiet about it. But I still didn’t feel guilty about getting the iPod or the free lunches either, because it wasn’t like I was getting rich off Mary or anything. Mary was all about doing nice things for people anyway, and if some sour-minded folks didn’t like it, that was their problem. Chewy agreed with me too, and we ran down into the woods and played hide-and-seek for a while
, because Chewy liked playing in the woods more than just about anything.

  Chapter 9

  In spite of how Pastor Mike was always trying to build me up with Mom whenever they went out on a date, telling her how smart and curious I was and all, Mom still wasn’t crazy about me spending so much time down at the shrine. I guess she thought that maybe I was turning into a “little holy roller” as she called it, and that I might get even a bigger head than I already had. Pilgrims down at the shrine would sometimes recognize me from the newspapers and take my picture and have me scribble my name on it if they had one of those old fashioned cameras that printed out the photo on the spot. It was happening less and less though as folks were concentrating more on Mary and what favors she could do for them. I tried over and over again explaining all this to Mom, but she was pigheaded like usual and didn’t listen.

  So it was easy for me to understand why Mom got all excited when Marcie’s invite came in the mail for me to go to her stupid old swimming party. Mom said it was high time for me to start acting like a kid again and that I had to go whether I liked it or not.

  The morning after I got it Mom was in the basement ironing my shirts, and I decided to try and talk her out of making me go. She had one of those ancient ironing machines she’d inherited from her grandma that she fed the clothes in through padded rollers, which she worked by stepping on a pedal, like she was playing the piano or the organ or something. Mom said she liked ironing my clothes because it took her mind off her troubles. She seemed happy enough to me though, at least ever since she’d been dating Pastor Mike so hot and heavy.