by Chris Bauer
“He gives Sister Dymphna fits sometimes. Heard him argue with her about God the Father, and about sickness, and wars, and how could they happen if God was so good?”
Father had his chair pushed back, slouching some in it, his buggered-up fingers folded in his lap. One hand went to his chin to rub his stubble; maybe also to help him size up what was being said. Finally he said to me, “So, Adam knows his German fairly well?”
“Sure sounded like it. Not unusual for this area. Sister Dymphna speaks it also.” Time for me to wrap things up. “One other thing worth mentioning, then I got to be going. A family’s interested in adopting him. His sister Ruthie’s part of the deal, too. Close to a miracle in my mind, her being mute and all, and the two of them nearly fourteen, no less. Wonders never cease, I suppose.”
I thanked Father and Mrs. Gobel for their hospitality and headed for the back door.
“Certainly sounds like good news for them,” Father said. “When are the adoptions final?”
“A few weeks maybe. Sometime after Easter.” Viola heard these things, often told me about them. “Just has to be approved by Monsignor Fassnacht and the other members of St. Jerome’s Board. Why you asking?”
“No special reason. We’ll need to recruit another ballplayer for the parish team.”
No big loss, I thought. The boy’s head was too big for his baseball cap anyway, and most of his teammates and kids at school didn’t like him much. As for me, fresh from the incident at the ball field, Adam gave me the creeps.
6
Without being able to explain the geometry of it, the town of Three Bridges took up an area close to two square miles of real estate, except it was packed into a big triangle, kind of like the shape of one of them alpine ski houses with a steeply pointed roof. Along the bottom of the house’s first floor was Schuetten Avenue’s two east-west travel lanes, its four lanes carrying buses and trackless trolleys and cars. Fewer trolleys and more buses nowadays, and I could say for sure I wouldn’t know near as much about Barry Goldwater and what he stood for if it weren’t for this reason. Billboards on wheels was what they were. Chalk this up to progress in the sixties, which also brought us the new restaurant that had caused all the commotion, or at least the hole they’d dug for it had. Word was the restaurant would sell twelve-cent hamburgers and ten-cent orders of French fries from a counter you walk up to. The teenagers in the neighborhood were already talking about it. Cheap food, and fast, but no place to sit. As far as this alpine house went, put the hole for this restaurant where it belonged: in the house’s cellar, below Schuetten Avenue.
My red suspenders weren’t in any of my drawers. “Viola, where’s my red suspenders?” I raised my voice. “Viola? Honey?”
The bottom floor of this alpine house was maybe eight city blocks’ worth of storefronts. Next level up began layer after layer of brick row homes built where the bungalows and shanties had been when I was a kid. On the left side of our alpine house, running north on a slant like a roof, were the Reading Railroad train tracks. Elevated in the south, where Schuetten Avenue ran under them, they outlined the western side of the roof right up to the Three Bridges railway station about a mile north, at the roof’s peak.
Right side of the town was the most interesting part. The Wissaquessing River came down from the northwest, ran southeast under the train bridge to form the right roofline. Near its tip were the Volkheimer fairgrounds, fed by the one bridge in the area that carried cars across the river, a silver two-laner. The Volkheimer Tannery was behind the fairgrounds in the distance, its two smokestacks making like it was an underway ocean liner full-steaming its way past the low rise Wissaquessing Mountain Ridge skyline. The tannery’s stacks were a red brick, except their south sides were badly spoiled by long tan and white stains that reminded a person of overflowed oatmeal, the staining a byproduct of the tanning process. Southeast of the stacks were the three Volkheimer houses. Across the river from these properties and inside the town limits were the orphanage and Our Lady’s church and school, and next to the schoolyard was the block of row houses where Viola and me lived.
No red suspenders anywhere I could see around this bedroom. I held my jeans up with my hand, smelled burnt toast on my way down the stairs. “Ain’t walking around like this all day,” I mumbled, “and I ain’t wearing a belt neither. Viola.”
We kept a small portable TV in the kitchen that gave snowy reception through a busted antenna. Viola had a chair pulled up right in front of it. She twisted a dishcloth around her fingers, still not hearing me. “Viola, don’t you smell the toast?”
“Oh, dear God. My goodness. Look at this, Johnny, on the television. We’re in the news.”
I popped up the toaster and joined her in front of the portable. Hugh Downs was showing pictures of a train wreck on The Today Show. The footage was mostly from overhead and real shaky; they’d put a TV camera in a helicopter.
Mr. Downs was busy telling us what had happened “in this small Pennsylvania town known as Three Bridges north and east of Philadelphia. There’s a report of one person dead…”
I wasn’t able to get real close to the train wreck—police and fire departments had everything blocked off—so I pulled my truck onto the grass a hundred yards or so before the train bridge that spanned the river, then I craned my neck and squinted. The railroad crossing poles were lowered on both sides of the track, their red lights and signal bells flashing.
A Reading Railroad coal train had jackknifed. Not one of them long freighters that take a half hour to pass and always seemed to show up when you were in a hurry. This one was only fifteen cars or so, mostly all black except for a brown locomotive and a burnt orange caboose. The locomotive was still on the tracks a few car lengths past the other side of the bridge. The actual wreck started on the bridge itself. Seven cars had derailed, were unattached and zigzagged across both sides of the tracks, two of the cars on the bridge. The coal the two had been carrying fell twenty feet down, into the Wissaquessing River.
Before I left the house I’d heard the train’s engineer explain the wreck to the news folks on national TV: “I checked my watch; it was around six a.m. I saw someone in the haze up ahead, walking on the tracks, their back to my train. I had the throttle down, going slower on account of the crossing signal and the station on the other side of the bridge. I blasted the whistle to high Hades, but the person kept right on walking. As we rolled closer, I saw it was actually three people.” The engineer puffed on a smoke, took a long drag. “I’m only carrying coal, no passengers. Just me and my three crewmen. I don’t wanna kill nobody, so if someone’s on the tracks, we’re stopping the train. The brakeman engaged the brakes”—the guy shook his head, had about had it with the newsman and his microphone. “It was a woman; she had hold of two kids…”
Authorities at the scene wouldn’t tell the news folks who the victim was, but they did say she’d been identified from some belongings in a packed blue suitcase found nearby. There was a search underway for the children.
The Philly coroner probably never had occasion to visit Three Bridges prior to a few days ago, and now he had a second incident needing his attention here. I watched him pull away in his official station wagon, the woman’s body in there with him.
“Half a body and body parts, Wump,” a middle-aged town cop with a drinker’s nose said when I asked him about it. He knew me from church but his name wasn’t coming to me. “That’s what the coroner’s got. Didn’t see the body myself, but those two officers over there, they got sick scraping up pieces of her from the tracks and the wheels of the train. Not a fair match, a freight engine against flesh and blood. Top half of her was laying on the bridge, bottom half was churned into hamburger and crammed into the engine’s undercarriage.”
“Sounds horrible. Any witnesses?”
“Only the engineer and his crew. The engineer swears there were two kids walking with her. If he’s right, they vanished.” He looked right then left. “Look, do me a favor, Wump, and move it on alon
g. If I fraternize with the citizens too long it looks bad, know what I mean?”
Soon as I got to the school custodian’s office, I picked up my projects for the day. First one was to pick open the lock to Sister Magdalena’s room at the convent. She’d been in it for two straight days and hadn’t said a word to no one.
Sister Dymphna, Father Duncan’s baseball assistant, was a sturdy midforties woman with flat feet, her sturdiness and fallen arches both coming from her weight, with said flat feet requiring her to wear orthopedic footwear most of the time. Sister raised her hammy fist, knocked on Sister Magdalena’s door, called to her. Neither got a response. Sister moved out of the way. I got down on a creaky knee in front of the door handle, its old-fashioned lock complete with a keyhole. I could have picked it, but all it really needed was a rap on a screwdriver stuck between the strike plate on the doorjamb and a thingy-piece coming out of the lock.
Pop. The door swung back.
The room was the size of the other bedrooms at the convent, a twelve-foot square give or take, with two windows. It was a mess, and there was no Sister Magdalena. Next thing I noticed was the drippy candle wax. It had formed a little river of orange and green and blue on the surface of her mahogany nightstand. Smelled nice in here because of them candles; near as fragrant as a flower shop. On the wall above the nightstand was a painting, the Blessed Virgin, her palms open, looking down at someone who wasn’t in the picture. On the floor in front of the painting was a bed pillow, the indentations from two kneeling knees still visible. The bed wasn’t made, and all the drawers of her mahogany dresser and her bureau were open, some wider than others. Closet door was open, too. If I hadn’t known Sister’s recent state of mind I might have considered the room ransacked. Her desk was scattered with papers that looked like kids’ tests. “From Sister’s sixth-grade class,” Sister Dymphna volunteered.
It didn’t take Sister long to inventory what was and wasn’t in the room. She checked the closet, saw Sister Magdalena’s three nun’s habits. This was one too many.
“And her blue suitcase is missing. Oh, Wump, I have a sinking feeling…”
A crowd of people had gathered in the convent’s parlor when Sister Dymphna and me got downstairs: two police officers, the same Philly coroner, and a woman in plainclothes, plus the convent mother, and the rest of the sisterhood. Sister Dymphna’s legs buckled when she realized who these people were; I propped her up quick.
Standing upright on the floor next to the plainclothes woman was the dented suitcase from the train wreck this morning. I helped Sister over to a couch, sat her next to Harriet, the convent’s novice nun, the youngest person in the room. Harriet was blank-faced, handling the news better than the rest of them.
Weren’t any words I knew of to calm the mourning sisterhood. I felt the pain, too; death left such an emptiness. In this case, it left a heap of guilt as well, something most everyone in the room felt some of. Sister Magdalena walking on them tracks just wasn’t something a happy person would have done, and what with Sister having been on the edge in recent weeks…someone should have done something.
When Monsignor Fassnacht and Father Duncan arrived, the coroner pulled them aside. This left two cops and the woman in plainclothes, a social worker, I figure, to chat with the sisters.
“I need someone to identify the body,” the coroner said in a low tone to Monsignor.
Sister Magdalena had no relatives in the States that I knew of.
“And you shall have someone,” Monsignor said. He scanned the parlor full of sobbing sisters for a candidate, eventually made eye contact with the only one not crying, young Harriet. “How about—”
This wasn’t right. Couldn’t be having a woman—a novice nun, for Christ sake—do what a man should do. “I’ll go with the coroner to make the identification,” I said, interrupting the monsignor without apologizing. “Just let me find my wife to tell her where I’ll be.”
Father Duncan noticed my disgusted look. “I’ll come with you,” he volunteered.
Viola was usually at the rectory this time of morning. I slipped out the convent’s kitchen door onto the back stoop. First step after I raised my head, I nearly knocked Leo over.
“Jiminy Crackers, Leo. You’re like a bolt of lightning anymore, son.” One look past Leo’s shoulder showed me blond-haired Raymond in his wheelchair at the bottom of the steps, a pair of loose-fitting blue jeans pulled high above his waist by snap suspenders. His white shirt was buttoned up to his neck and not ironed but clean, which was more than I could say about Leo’s shirt. A red soda stain had traveled down half its polo stripes. “Today’s not a good day for errands, fellas. Maybe tomorrow.”
Leo had questions. “The police here about Sister? They come to say it was Sister Magdalena run over by the train?” His hair was more mussed than usual, and Raymond’s eye sockets were near as black as checkers. Looked like neither of them had had much sleep.
“That’s what they’re saying, son.” He’d need to talk to someone who could help him handle this. “How about I drive you back home real quick so’s you and one of the sisters can talk?”
When I reached the bottom of the cement steps I turned to talk to him face-to-face, but he was still on the top of the stoop. “Leo? You coming?”
Leo danced from leg to leg like he was about to wet his pants. “But…but…” He scooted to the edge of the stoop, looked back and forth between me and Sister Magdalena’s second-floor bedroom window. “Raymond and me are wondering why she didn’t tell no one, Wump. Why didn’t she say nothing about doing what she did? Maybe she left a note or something…”
The convent had a second stairway in the back that went from the kitchen to the second floor. Leo’s cue had me back upstairs, in Sister’s bedroom. The boy could have been right; maybe we’d missed something.
Only papers I saw in her room were the tests Sister had been grading. Page after page of true-false questions in purplish-blue mimeograph ink. A Religion quiz. Sister had put a small red c after each correct answer and a small red x next to the wrong ones. It took me till I got to the last few tests to realize there was one question every kid had gotten wrong: Christ died. Christ rose from the dead. Christ will come again. True or false?
Easy test question. All twenty-some kids answered true, but Sister’s x on every paper said it wasn’t the right answer. On the last test in the pile, Sister had put a red circle around Christ will come again. In a shaky longhand, in the same marking-pencil-red under the x, she wrote, Not if someone else arrives first. Forgive me, heavenly Father. He is mine.
I folded up this last test and stuck it in my jeans pocket then took another look around her room, all dull and dark and brown, the sunlight held out by two shades pulled down in front of the closed windows. The place needed some air. The window shade snapped up when I reached for it, startling me. I was left looking one floor down at Leo, who stood on the grass behind Raymond in his wheelchair, Leo’s head on an upward tilt, like he’d been waiting for me to come to the window the whole time. The little wiseacre deserved a nod for sending me back in here, except his expectant stare froze me for a moment. When I finally broke the trance and nodded, he nodded eagerly back. He carefully spun Raymond’s wheelchair around, guided it onto the sidewalk. Then the two of them were off, crossing the church parking lot.
7
I once saw a body cut in half by shrapnel from an artillery shell that exploded not fifteen yards from me. Saw a sleeping man at the end of my trench lose his legs and his manhood when a hand grenade landed in his lap. Saw so much carnage at the age of nineteen during World War I, in the Argonne in France, that to me every living human body I seen for a long time afterward seemed nothing more than a flimsy container of flesh ready to burst open with the next loud bang. I prayed that what the coroner wanted to show me was more than just pieces of a person.
Father and me hitched a ride in the coroner’s station wagon. The coroner’s name was Kermit Frink, MD. When I addressed him as “Doctor,” he shu
shed me, said to call him Kerm, so I told him to call me Wump. Kerm drove us to Nazarene Hospital, just inside the Philly city limits; we followed Kerm into the morgue.
I’d never been in a morgue before. Cold like I expected, with two walls of stainless steel facing each other, two rows of small doors on each wall. The doors all opened to reveal rollout slabs, enough for twenty-five, maybe thirty bodies. The drains in the tile floor were stainless, too, but the luster on them was gone, probably from whatever solvents they used to remove the blood. The room had a full ceiling of fluorescent lights that all came on with one switch. Kerm tugged on a handle to unlatch one of the stainless-steel doors, then pulled on a horizontal handhold. Out slid a slab with a zippered silvery bag laying on it. The top half of the bag was the right size and shape, like a person’s head and chest were in there; the bag’s bottom half was almost flat. If there were legs and feet in there, they weren’t much more than shepherd’s pie.
Jesus. Poor Sister Magdalena.
Across the bag from me, Kerm looked out from under bushy peppery eyebrows, studied me, and said, “No need to see much more than her face, I hope.”
“No need.”
Kerm pulled the zipper down. Sister’s brown eyes were open but with nothing behind them. Her hair was cropped, still black, with mousy nubs above her ears. Her cheeks were taut, stretched over bony cheekbones; her lips were parted. She was barely recognizable to me, but not because of the accident. In fact her face wasn’t bruised much at all. It was more because of Sister refusing to take food, plus whatever state of confusion she’d been in these last few weeks, a time I hadn’t seen much of her. It didn’t make no never-mind, though. This was Sister Magdalena, and I told Kerm as much. He zippered the bag back up.
