An Imperfect Miracle

by Thomas L. Peters

  The little drunk wrote that even though he was confessing to the murder, he didn’t see why he had to turn himself in. He said that the Good Lord had told him through Mary that He’d be the one to do the punishing for killing Runyon if there was any punishment to be given out. He didn’t say exactly how Mary had passed him along the Lord’s message, but I knew by then that Mary had plenty of ways to get her point across.

  The cops started a big manhunt for him right away. But he must have been a sneaky little guy because they finally decided that he’d disappeared without a trace, and after a month or so they gave up. I heard some TV reporter saying that nobody disappeared without a trace, especially not these days with the Internet and cell phone cameras and GPS trackers and everything. I figured that Mary must have stepped in to hide him somewhere. She probably figured that since she’d already gone to the trouble of saving him once, there was no point letting him sink now.

  It didn’t strike me as quite right though that this Smith fellow was able to haul Runyon’s body all by himself out into the woods behind our church. There were so many trees and bushes and old stumps that I knew he couldn’t have driven Runyon’s body all the way in his car. Naturally I thought of a big strong fellow like Father Tom as somebody who might have given him a hand, or maybe even Carlos, because like I told you Carlos had a pretty solid grip for such a little guy.

  I didn’t understand either why the drunk would have swiped Carlos’s silver cross, because I was pretty sure Carlos would have given him one if he’d just asked. And if he’d stolen it like he claimed, why would he have been wearing it around his neck where anybody, including Carlos, could have seen it? And why would Runyon want to scrape Mary’s face off the wall in the first place, since she’d been his meal ticket ever since he began blackmailing Carlos and Father Tom? Of course, I knew from being around Dad that people sometimes do crazy things when they’re plastered.

  I even wondered for a while if the letter the little drunk wrote would have been more accurate if he had put Carlos’s name in place of his. That would have explained why Carlos had gotten so weepy after listening to my prayer at the shrine, and why he thought people would be mad at Mary on account of him. Maybe the little drunk had decided to take the heat for the murder to save his friend Carlos. But I didn’t see how I could ever go about proving a wild story like that. Plus, the last thing I wanted was for Carlos to get tossed into jail too.

  I understood why Father Tom was taking the blame for the murder though, figuring like he always did that it was the charitable thing to do. But why Father Tom wouldn’t have said something when Pastor Mike got arrested, I didn’t know, unless he blamed Pastor Mike for thinking up the whole Mary business in the first place and wanted to get back at him. Of course, I was just guessing, and I never said anything to anybody about any of this, not even to Mom.

  There was so much sympathy for Father Tom after he got out of jail that business picked up right away at the shrine and over at St. Sebastian’s too. Father Tom said that they’d need to build on an addition, like at our church, just to hold all the new members. I figured Father Tom wouldn’t have any problem raising the money either, what with Mary packing them in again. Mom sure was happy when they let Pastor Mike out of jail and kept saying “praise the Lord” for weeks after. The cops said that the bloodstains and hair on the silver cross were the same as Runyon’s and that it had to be the murder weapon. After that the town was pretty nice to all of us, because Mom said that the mayor was worried about getting sued.

  The town even bought us all dinner at a fancy steak house down near Pittsburgh. I ordered a twelve-ounce New York strip, which Mom said I’d never be able to eat. She said I should have gotten the kid’s steak instead. But Pastor Mike and Father Tom and Carlos all told her to go easy on me, and this time she actually listened for a change. That was when I decided that there was hope for Mom after all.

  It wasn’t long before the town council got together and hired a new guy to run the shrine. His name was Roger Baker, and he used to head up the sales department of a big company until he got religion. They hired a businessman like Mr. Baker for the job because they claimed that the shrine could bring in even more money if it was operated a little better. They said that the shrine was the town’s big cash cow now, and that they had to protect their investment.

  Father Tom didn’t much like the idea of hiring Mr. Baker to replace Carlos. But Carlos said he didn’t mind getting canned because he was a little tired of peddling crosses and rosary beads and overpriced pictures to rich old ladies. He said that he wanted to help out more at St. Sebastian’s with what he called “the Lord’s true work of serving the poor and needy.”

  Now why Carlos didn’t put up more of a fight about losing his job struck me as a little strange, since up until then the shrine had been his whole life. Mr. Santelli told me later that “the mayor must have had something on Carlos,” and that was why Carlos gave in so easy. But Mr. Santelli was such a grumpy old guy that I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.

  A few days after the letter came out, that nosy newspaper reporter down in Pittsburgh came up to snoop around again. He said that a little no account drunk like John Smith, assuming that was even his real name, could never have pulled off such a slick crime on his own. He claimed that Carlos and maybe even Father Tom must have been in on the murder too. He even wrote a big long article saying that if two shady characters like them were lying about the murder, they were probably lying about everything else. By that he was talking about the shrine and how it was all just a “sophisticated scheme,” as he called it, to cheat poor people out of their hard-earned money.

  The problem was that the reporter really didn’t have any proof. The public got so mad that the newspaper had to take everything back, which I heard ended up costing the reporter his job. But the Mary-haters, as Carlos called them, still weren’t through. Some fancy college professors even came to town and gave a talk on how people who went to see her were just a bunch of hayseeds looking for an easy way out of their problems. They claimed to have done a study where they followed some of the people around who were supposedly healed by Mary, and that they all went back to being sick in just a few days. But if those professors were anything like Mr. Grimes, for instance, who ended up doing thirty to life, it was hard to know whether to believe them or not.

  Now about those stuffy professors, I didn’t go to their talk myself, but some of Mom’s nurse friends did and they said it was pretty boring. The only good part was when some old guy with bad teeth who claimed Mary had healed him from Parkinson’s disease barged in about halfway through and started hollering at the top of his lungs that it was all a lie what they were saying. I was glad that Mom had been wrong about him and that the healing hadn’t worn off yet, since he seemed like a pretty decent old fellow.

  But no matter how hard the newspapers and the professors and the Mr. Grimeses of the world tried to scare people off, more and more pilgrims were lining up to see Mary all the time. Mr. Baker said it was because of all the publicity, and that there was no such thing as bad publicity. He said that with all the new business, the shrine was planning on buying up all the property on both sides of Main Street for two whole blocks.

  He said they were going to tear everything down so they could put in nice shops and restaurants and a hotel and a big museum to Mary, and even a fancy office building for all the shrine’s employees. He said that the shrine would have to start hiring a boatload of new people too, what with all the pilgrims pouring in from all over the world for healings and other favors. And with all those new jobs, pretty soon the town actually started growing again.

  One day I was sitting in school daydreaming like usual when it hit me that I’d never thanked Mary in person for helping to spring Father Tom and Pastor Mike out of jail. I was so ashamed of myself that I snuck out of the cafeteria at lunchtime to go see her, because I didn’t think I could hold out all afternoon.

  It turned out to be M
r. Santelli’s last day selling tickets at the shrine. Mr. Baker said he didn’t like the idea of a guy manning the ticket counter who only had three fingers on his right hand. He said visitors might be asking themselves if Mary was such a hotshot, how come she didn’t grow him his two fingers back? So Mr. Santelli was getting moved into the shrine’s bookkeeping and tax department, which he said he liked a lot better anyway because the hours were more regular. Plus, he didn’t have to put up anymore with all “those screaming nut cases,” as he liked to call some of the noisier pilgrims.

  After I showed Mr. Santelli my pass I went up to say hello to Mary and to thank her. But even from way far back I could see this great big toothy grin on her face. And when I got closer I noticed that her tears were all gone, every last one of them. It looked to me like she was getting ready to bust out laughing, and I wondered if anybody else had seen the changes.

  I ran back and told Mr. Santelli, and he came right over. He couldn’t hardly believe it either and said that I was probably the first person to have seen her new face. He said that Mary must have had a soft spot for me to keep picking me to show all these signs and wonders to. That made me feel kind of good, since like I told you Mr. Santelli was a pretty rough old guy and didn’t go around handing out compliments too easy.

  You should have heard all the fussing and fuming after that. Some people, mostly outsiders, since according to Mom the townsfolk had kind of gotten used to their taxes going down, were howling that Mary’s new face just proved that the shrine was nothing but a big swindle and publicity stunt all along. Mr. Baker, who was loving all the attention, kept the story going by hiring a chemist from some big university to come in and take a look at her. The chemist said in this long report, which I don’t think anybody ever really read, that the changes to her face had something to do with how the concrete had gotten weak and brittle from all those years of sitting out in the rain. But that was about all he could say really, and nobody ended up caring too much what he thought.

  Mr. Baker said they were going to keep “Weeping Lady” in the shrine’s name for a while even though Mary wasn’t crying anymore, just to “cause a little stir,” he said. Then a few months later they held a big contest over the Internet to see who could come up with the best new name for the shrine. Thousands of people entered, maybe millions, for all I knew, and they ended up settling on “The Blessed Virgin of Millridge,” which I thought was kind of hokey. But Mr. Baker said that hokey was what people were looking for these days, and they could always hold another contest later on if they ever got tired of it.

  Mr. Baker said they might even set up a podcast of Mary around the clock if they could get enough advertisers to sponsor it. He said it would be a great thing for everybody and keep the money pouring in for a long time. Mr. Baker took my idea and started opening gift shops all through North and South America, and in parts of Europe and Asia too. “Pretty soon,” Mr. Baker told me, “we’ll be bigger than Exxon.” Father Tom told me one afternoon when I was out on the playground shooting some hoops with these big high school kids that he thought the shrine was getting a little too money hungry lately. But there were so many people coming to visit Mary, not to mention all the healings, that Father Tom said he couldn’t gripe too much, although he still didn’t like it. I asked him why he thought Mary was laughing now. He said he wasn’t sure, but that he thought she might be laughing at us.

  “I don’t think it’s so awful that Mary’s shrine is raking in piles of money,” I said. “Mr. Santelli agrees with me too. He says he can’t get by just on his social security, and the company he used to work for cheated him out of his pension. I like it a lot better anyway when Mary’s laughing than when she’s crying.”

  Father Tom stared off at the light blue sunny sky for a few seconds and then stretched real tall and took a deep breath, like he was trying to blow something out of his system.

  “Maybe you’re right, Nate. It might be a good thing after all that Mr. Baker took over the shrine. It could be that that’s why Mary’s laughing so hard.”

  One thing I wasn’t so crazy about was that Chewy left me, or at least I couldn’t see her anymore. It happened right after Father Tom and Pastor Mike got out of jail, and we were all so busy celebrating that I guess I kind of forgot about Chewy. Then when I started looking around for her, she was gone. I looked all over for her too. It was a real jolt, and I cried off and on for days. I felt almost as bad as when she’d died on me. That Sunday at church I even asked God to bring her back, but He must have turned me down this time because she didn’t show. Mom said it meant that I was finally growing up and wasn’t living in my own little world anymore, but I figured she was just guessing.

  I decided to talk to Carlos about it and found him in back of St. Sebastian’s weeding a little vegetable garden he’d planted to keep himself busy on account of all the spare time he had on his hands now that he wasn’t working down at the shrine. If the mayor had something on Carlos, Carlos must have had something on the mayor too because he’d built himself a nice house right next to the garden from money that the town had given him. Carlos called it “a little going away present.”

  Carlos had a silver cross dangling around his neck instead of the gold one. I was wondering if the cops had given it back to him when all of a sudden I thought of Chewy again and began to sniffle a little. But real quick I wiped my face dry because I didn’t want him thinking I was going soft.

  “She could have said goodbye at least.”

  Carlos said that Chewy might have had other things to do and that was why she left, or maybe I was really just imagining her all along the way that doctor thought. He said it was hard for him to tell exactly.

  “Do you think I’ll ever see her again?”

  Carlos leaned over and started brushing his pudgy fingers through the leaves of a scrawny tomato plant until he found a little yellow blossom. Then real gentle he lifted the petals up to where I could see a tiny pale green tomato. While I was bending over to get a better view, I noticed Carlos’s dark eyes sparkling at me.

  “You can never tell what might happen. You should know that by now.”

  I pressed him a little more, but that was the most he’d say. I figured I’d just have to wait and see.

  Mom was happy that I wasn’t sneaking down to the shrine near as often. With Carlos not working there anymore and Mr. Santelli tucked away someplace filling out paperwork, I really didn’t have anybody to talk to. And to tell you the truth, watching all those sick people wheezing and limping past that big concrete slab was getting kind of old. And while Mr. Baker seemed like a nice enough guy, he mostly stayed in his big corner office peering into his little computer screen and counting up all the money Mary was pulling in.

  Now don’t get me wrong. I still liked Mary and everything. I just didn’t see why I had to hang out with her all the time.

  After Pastor Mike and Mom got married, we moved just up the street a little ways to a bigger house where the walls didn’t creak and groan as much at night and none of the faucets leaked. One night I was stretched out on my bed after supper thinking about Mary’s face being a sign that something big and important was going to happen. Then I got to wondering if it had already come true, or whether it was still out there in the future some place just waiting for me.

  The End