by Chris Bauer
Leo circled left for an opening; the wheelchair followed. Leo moved right; Raymond mirrored him. Movements that were at first cautious and unhurried became furious and whirling, these two young warriors in mock mortal combat. I got dizzy following them until suddenly their play stopped, Leo stutter-stepping then sprawling at the foot of the wheelchair, his head angled against Raymond’s bent legs. He’d been tripped up by an untied shoelace. The tip of Raymond’s sword moved in close to his fallen partner’s neck and stayed there. Raymond finally pulled it back.
Since I known him, Leo had never been so full of himself that he couldn’t laugh at his mistakes, but this time there weren’t no laughter. He double-knotted both sneakers in silence, picked up his sword, stood, and faced Raymond again. “I’m ready,” he said.
I checked my watch. If I didn’t leave now, I’d miss Viola at the house.
I didn’t make much out of what I’d just seen, or what I’d thought I’d just seen. Toys or not, boys playing with weapons of any kind, ancient or modern, was something I never got used to seeing since my days in the trenches in France, and it didn’t take much to bring them war nightmares back. So yeah, I’d get a little confused sometimes, seeing and hearing things that weren’t really there. Two young boys playing with toy rubber swords was all it was. Not gallant warriors swinging steel blade against steel blade, their ringing blows echoing throughout the schoolyard, which was what I thought I heard a second time, just as I closed the front door of my house.
One thing was for sure. Raymond was blind, but his other senses did a hell of a job of making up the difference.
9
A date was chiseled into the granite block in front of where I stood, near eye high. 1899. The year St. Jerome’s Home for Foundlings was rededicated. Same year I was born.
I put my fingertips inside the etched numbers. They were polished and smooth to the touch, so smooth the feel reminded me of the porcelain cherubs standing witness over Our Lady’s baptismal font.
One-eight-nine-nine.
Sixty-five years it had been. Young for things made of granite. Old for a man.
It was late afternoon and I was on the orphanage’s front stoop, waiting for Father Duncan. The original, one-story version of St. Jerome’s went up in 1896, its exterior sided with used clapboard not much better than tinder, and near as bad as the shacks the tannery workers lived in. Two years later the German Catholic parishes of Philadelphia put the city’s masons to work, adding two more stories and replacing the orphanage’s wood siding with block granite from the same local quarry that supplied the stone for Our Lady’s church and school. The masons worked through a harsh, snowy winter, and when construction fell behind, donations from Rolf Volkheimer put enough manpower in place to finish the home’s new exterior in time for a first-day-of-spring dedication.
This time of day, the exterior was a few shades lighter than the parish buildings, the sun angled low enough to catch the pink and white flecks in the rough facing of each block, giving the place a fuzzy, speckled glow. Sister Irene once said more orphanages would be built if the need arose. It must have worked out they weren’t needed; to this day, St. Jerome’s was the only one in the county. Seemed the orphan population in these parts declined not long after I got adopted and moved near Pittsburgh.
“Hell’s full. Go to Pittsburgh.” The punch line to Father’s joke. About summed up my experience with the area, far as I could recollect it.
So, when I ran away from them bastard parents of mine to go back east in 1915 at the age of sixteen, St. Jerome’s had some beds open, and the sisters let me stay till I got my legs under me and found a place of my own. Heinie was gone, adopted not long after me, but his adoption had ended a lot worse. His new parents found him face down in a pile of manure in the family’s stables, kicked in the head by a horse. Killed instantly, one of the sisters had told me. Broke my heart hearing that.
I’d also overheard the sisters talking about how the folks in Three Bridges had by then apparently quit throwing their newborns away. Sounded odd at the time, from what I remembered. The German Catholics in the area, and in the bungalows especially, were just as poor as when I’d left, so it made no sense why the killing had stopped.
Father Duncan was now on his way up the walk, his cassock replaced by a black spring jacket over a navy-blue turtleneck. I pushed St. Jerome’s bell.
A breathless Sister Dymphna, her face red and flustered, opened the door. Now that she was in her forties, her weight was finally catching up with her. “Come in,” she said. She led us out of the large vestibule, her head tilted forward, her wimple looking like the pillbox hat on that little bellhop Phillip Morris used to sell its cigarettes.
Counting the sisters and the home’s administrators, and all the orphans who passed through here, I was the oldest person I knew of who’d been a regular visitor at St. Jerome’s over the years. Most of my visits were to work on a project of some sort, like plastering interior walls, replacing the wooden porches with masonry, and digging the tunnel ditching when the orphanage went from well and septic to city and sewer water back in the twenties. For me it had always been anything for the money, glad for the extra work tossed my way after I’d started with the church. Never got anything extra while I was at the tannery. The two younger Volkheimer brothers had kept me on as an adult, for no reason other than I was a bull of a worker. They weren’t near as nice to me as their older brother Rolf was, back when I was a kid picking up dog shit for pennies. After Rolf’s disappearance a lot changed, both in the way the tannery was run and—coincidentally—for me personally, with me getting sent off to live in Pittsburgh. I’d concluded, right or wrong, that Rolf’s two brothers had something to do with it. “It” being Rolf’s disappearance. But hell, that was over fifty years ago and both brothers had long since cashed in. Any wrongdoing they’d done, God would have made them pay for it and righted it by now.
Christ, I was rambling. That’s what this place did to me soon as I walked through them front doors. Pieces of memories all hitting me at once, gunking up my brain, not letting me complete one thought before I started going on about the next. Made me forget sometimes how much love and caring there’d been inside these walls. A real refuge for kids like Heinie and me. Still, no one ever heard me say it made up for not having real parents. Never, because it never did.
Sister Dymphna walked Father and me into the hallway. Each time the doors to the kitchen swung open there was a clear view back to the oak threshold that was the rear exit of the orphanage. A few children buzzed by on their way to the dining room.
Sister reacted. “No running, Robert. Vincent! Fingers out of your nose, child! You’re serving dinner tonight!”
She stopped us next to a pair of wooden pocket doors pulled shut. On the other side of the doors was the orphanage’s library. Her fingers went to the handles; before she pulled them apart, she turned to Father Duncan.
“We need to have an understanding,” she said, her jaw a little tight. “Adam’s been under a lot of stress lately and he’s doing some acting out because of it. The adoptions are nearly final, and his new parents are very eager. I think it best if I stayed with him for your discussion. If he gets upset and wants to stop talking, you’ll have to leave.”
Father nodded, said, “I’m here only because I’m concerned about what happened to Sister Magdalena.”
“Yes. I know what’s got you concerned, Father.”
I’d seen this air about her before, her face all scrunched, her lips straight and thin like some character in the funny papers. A special breed, these nuns were, always ready to circle the wagons when it came to St. Jerome’s kids. A lot like Sister Irene had been with Heinie and me.
“The staff here and the parish’s sisterhood are grieving deeply because of the train accident,” Sister said. “And we are watching keenly for any changes that Sister’s death may cause in the children’s behavior. We had one small fistfight after we got back from Good Friday practice, but that’s normal f
or a school day afternoon. And it didn’t involve Adam.”
Good Friday practice. Sister had planned to get the children involved in Our Lady’s Stations of the Cross service next week. I was supposed to help her get things organized. Rats.
“We missed you, Wump,” she said, seeing right through me. “But we found things to make do.”
The props. I was supposed to find props for them to use. A cloth for Jesus to wipe his face on, some toy spears for the Roman centurions. And something light and small enough for a grade-school kid to carry as Christ’s cross. “I’m sorry, Sister. Forgot all about it. I’ll get those things together early part of next week.”
Sister nodded then pulled the library doors apart. “I’ll look for Adam upstairs. Wait in here, please.” Her dimpled chin disappeared into bulging jowls as she started down the hallway, speaking over her shoulder as she walked. “We’re arranging our archives for the anniversary. Anything in the library you look at, please return it to the same general vicinity.” She hustled into the kitchen through the swinging door.
The library was also an arts and crafts room with glue bottles and wax crayons and colored construction paper and pairs of scissors in two of the corners. What had everything all cluttered up in here was a number of water-stained, misshapen cardboard boxes with their flaps open and a stale-smelling steamer trunk with its top raised. The anniversary the sisters would be celebrating was Sister Irene’s one hundredth birthday. She’d only made it to her late forties, but the sisterhood had celebrated her birthday every year since. Founding St. Jerome’s, and looking after the likes of little trouble-making pugs like me…no better person than Sister Irene I had ever known, although my Viola could give most anyone a good run.
The library had changed a bit over the years. Furniture came and went, the walls and wood trim defaced with either pencil or pen or penknife so often they’d needed repainting and staining more times than I could count. Current coloring was a cream yellow on the plaster, and a light oak stain on the woodwork. The room looked cheerful, but with all this musty old stuff opened up and sitting out, the place smelled a lot like boys’ Phys Ed.
Father worked his way up the right side of the library, and I followed in his wake, both of us sidestepping flaps of interfering cardboard and leaning stacks of plaques and black-and-white photographs and some old paintings, the floor and all the furniture cluttered.
“What was St. Jerome’s like when you were young, Wump?”
“For starters, there’s been some structural changes,” I told him. “The babies originally slept in the same room with us older kids. Walls were eventually put up to make separate bedrooms and a nursery. Now the kids sleep two and three to a room. A few of the older ones get singles.”
“Not much privacy, then,” Father said. “I mean back when you lived here.” He was examining trinkets as he walked, fingering through plaques, framed pictures, books. I was doing the same, both of us headed toward the large trunk in the back, near the wall.
“Little privacy is right. And there wasn’t much of anything a kid could call his own, not even what we wore. There were long closets on each floor where clothes were kept. Shirts, pants, extra shoes, and dresses and petticoats for the girls. But them sisters were good about selecting clothes for us each day. Most times the stuff they pulled out of the closets actually fit.”
The coming anniversary was about to turn the entire orphanage into a shrine to Sister Irene. So many plaques and framed letters, some from Philadelphia Bishops, and Cardinals, and three from a succession of Popes, Leo XIII through Pope Benedict XV.
“Can you tell me who these people are, Wump?”
Father neared the back of the room, stopped to pick up a beat-up black enamel picture frame. As I got closer to him, I saw it was a photograph under glass with a small brass plate below it, the plate screwed into the frame. It had been taken in front of the orphanage, with all the people posed. The engraved brass plate read St. Jerome’s Rededication—April 2, 1899.
“The person seated in the center is Sister Irene,” I told him, looking over his shoulder. “She was in her thirties back then. Bless that wonderful woman’s soul. I, ah…”
Father gently patted me on the back then put the picture in my hands so I could get as close to it as I needed to. I choked back some tears. The woman was as near to a mother as I’d ever known.
“And this one over here, Father, is Monsignor Krause, the parish’s pastor and only priest, and a crazy one at that, if you listened to Sister Irene. She and him didn’t get along.”
“How about these two men here?”
“Judging from the top hat, I’d say the one standing on Sister’s left is a political dignitary of some sort. The mayor of Philadelphia is my guess. Or maybe he was called Sheriff back then. I don’t recognize him; he was before my time. The second top-hatted fella, the heavy one with the full-length leather coat, is Rolf Volkheimer. And to his left, seated with her hands folded across her stomach, is his wife. Looking real pregnant, I might add.”
It wasn’t a good picture of Mrs. Volkheimer. Her eyes were focused on her hands, like she wasn’t thrilled to be there. I lingered on her image. It was then Father offered an insight that jolted me.
“Those Volkheimer prayer offering cards you showed me: based on their dates, and the date of this photograph,” he said, pausing, “I think her baby died.”
10
Father was right. Her first child was born late April of that year. Jesus. How horrible.
Father Duncan didn’t wait for me to return the picture, instead began working his way into the second half of the library. I hadn’t been able to take another step, still reeling from Father’s insight on St. Jerome’s rededication. I rallied, returned the photograph to the table, picked up another one.
“Hey, Father, look at this picture here. Remember Honus Wagner? He played shortstop for Pittsburgh in the early 1900s. Here he is visiting the kids at St. Jerome’s. Wow.”
Wagner was in uniform and there were other baseball players with him. “You gotta see this, Father. It’s a real gem. Father?”
Father Duncan didn’t hear me. He’d circled back, was now focused on the innards of the opened trunk, his face all pasty white. He made the sign of the cross on himself then reached into the trunk with both hands.
Out came something that looked like one of them stagecoach strongboxes you see in cowboy movies only smaller, a handle on each side, its lid flat and covered in a light brown leather. I pushed some of the clutter on the sideboard out of the way so he could put it down. Father straightened himself up, not taking his eyes off it. Now I could see what was on the box’s lid: a large cartoon-like drawing etched into the leather, in color, of a smiling devil baby.
Father wasn’t saying nothing, just stared at it. The devil’s eyes were like large black buttons floating in larger white circles, one eye lazy, but both of them real loony-looking, like how a sideshow swami hypnotist gets when he puts a whammy on a volunteer from his audience. Inside the devil’s wild grin was a full set of pointy uppers. His arms were raised and groping, like he was looking to be picked up. There was a swaddled white cloth over his groin area with no other clothing, the rest of the body the color of charcoal-smeared salmon. Three fingers and a thumb were on each hand, four toes on each foot, and claws on all of them, red as spurting arteries. And sticking out of his forehead, horns. Same color red as the claws, and as tall as the demon’s face was long. Father passed his open hand slowly over the box, made another sign of the cross, tighter this time. He opened the lid.
I got a sudden whiff of what had to be the sickest shit-heap in Creation. A rush of spit drenched the insides of my cheeks and churned my stomach. After a few gags, the smell was gone. Father looked like he hadn’t flinched.
“Codex Gigas,” he said real sober-like, most to himself, and the book that was in the box was now on the table. Bulky as a toolbox and warped, its wavy brown pages were bound by three leather strips twice as thick as the cowhide sh
oelaces on my work boots. Father’s fingers started working their way through the swollen pages.
“Repeat that for me in English, Father.”
“‘The Giant Book’ is the translation. But it’s also known by another name.”
“‘The Devil’s Bible,’” Sister Dymphna said from under the archway between the library and the hall. Still no Adam, and Sister was looking real cranky. “That should go back in the box, Father. Let’s concentrate on why you’re here. Adam should be along shortly.”
Father stopped paging through the book but left it open. “You know the history of Codex Gigas, Sister?”
“Of this one, yes. As you can see,” she said, joining him, “it’s in German. I believe the oldest one found was written in pre-Vulgate Latin in the thirteenth century by a Benedictine monk, a penance for some breach of monastic discipline.”
“Legend has it,” Father said, “Codex Gigas was written in a single night with the help of the Devil, whom the monk had summoned to his Bohemian monastery.” The book had to be over a thousand pages thick. Father was turning them again. “The one you’re speaking of, the oldest version of the manuscript, is in the Royal Library in Sweden, taken as spoils from one European conflict or another.”
“A manuscript written on vellum,” Sister chimed in. “Prepared from the skins of a hundred and sixty asses. Or so goes the legend.”
