by Chris Bauer
“You all right?” he said, leaning in, his head turned up at me.
“I’m fine,” I told him, exhaling as much of the sadness as I could.
Father returned his attention to the book, sneaked an occasional peek back at me. “There were adoptions of younger children, too,” he said, turning backward, forward, backward again. “But—”
Now he saw the sense of it. “You’re right, Wump. Out of the blue, beginning late July that year, there was a flurry of them. Right after the monsignor’s death.”
And the short burst of adoptions continued for some time afterward, even beyond when Sister Irene died. The good Sister popped into my head again. I could picture her sitting at this desk, pictured her gasp, the nub of her quill pen staying pressed against the paper, and pictured her grabbing her chest. I pictured her face thudding onto the open logbook. Pictured her gone. I choked back the tears again.
“Ah, excuse me, people.” A stern, schoolmarmy voice from the hallway startled the three of us. It was Sister Marie, the tiniest nun I’d ever known. Four-feet-eight today, the aging process making her something less than that tomorrow. Sister held a black phone receiver that looked as big in her small hand as a stage prop on Uncle Miltie’s TV show. She spoke to us out of the side of her mouth. “Father Duncan.” Her words were quick and hard, sounding like they came from a duck that was tread on. “Important call for you.”
Father straddled the space between the library and the hall, listening at the receiver, tiny Sister Marie gone. Sister Dymphna and I went back to the logbook.
So who was doing the adopting, I wondered.
The bigwig citizens of Three Bridges was who. Except Sister Dymphna wasn’t old enough to recognize any of their names. She read a few out loud for me.
“Arno St. Jerome,” she said, “adopted by Herman and Hannah Silberbauer on July eighteenth.”
“The Silberbauers were former owners of the old Schuetten Inn,” I told her. “They each came from old, moneyed European families. They went to Mass every day.”
“Oskar St. Jerome. Adopted July twenty-second by Willem and Gertrude Schultz.”
“Willem Schultz made bicycles, also assembled parts that went into horseless carriages. Owned a lot of property. My first two-wheeler was a donation from his shop.”
“Gunnar St. Jerome, adopted by Judge and Mrs. Gergen Ortmann, August first.”
“I remember Gunnar.” I stifled a fond smile. “We poked fun at him because the adoption made him an instant big brother to the judge’s ugly twin daughters a year younger than him. Gunnar had the biggest ears I ever seen. Howdy Doody size, from what I recall. Real flappers. Funny thing was, they looked like—”
whose ears did they look like, Wump
I shot a glance at Raymond, still asleep next to us, in his wheelchair. He hadn’t stirred, except I knew it was him in my head just now. “Ah, they looked a lot like…”
WHOSE EARS WERE THEY, WUMP
Jesus. “The judge’s. And his daughters. Looked just like theirs.”
A chill came over me, my skin tingling as pieces of a broken, long-ago world tried to reassemble themselves in my head. “Now that I think of it, them other two boys whose names you mentioned, they had features that made them fit in real well with their adopting families, too.”
Sister Dymphna’s hands, at first clasped together under her bosom, loosened their grip. One moved to cover her mouth as she nervously sucked in her next breath, the other went for the crucifix on the chain around her neck. The breath escaped through her fingers. She said it first while blessing herself.
“Mother of God,” she whispered. “They were adopting their own children.”
Sister murmured a Hail Mary. I was paralyzed.
It made sense. Their families put their firstborn infant boys in an orphanage teeming with forgotten kids, hiding them rather than kill them. Then the old brimstone-preaching prick-bastard pastor of this needy immigrant parish died, and the panic behind the devil-book proclamation died with him, so all them rich families wanted their kids back. The poorer families…hell, they’d been like chickens made to dance on a hot plate; no real choices. Weren’t nothing could be done, for them or their dead babies.
My head was spinning, searching for other confirmations but, hell, this was fifty years ago. Weren’t many of my childhood memories left to draw on, least not many I could call up on demand. Still, seeing the names of these and other boys in this logbook shook loose a few. Glimpses of faces, some older, some younger, of kids with wavy brown or curly red or straight blond hair, with flat and wide or long and thin noses, and with short and squat or tall and skinny bodies. Those rich folks had kept their firstborn boys in St. Jerome’s all them years—why in God’s name not rescue them earlier? If any of them looked too much like their real parents, well whoop-dee-god-damn-do-and-shit-me-an-apple, so what? Who could have proved anything? Instead they let them live a lie in an orphanage. Only thing the kids had going for them was Sister Irene, taking care of them, watching over them.
Watching them—that was it. She was the why. Sister Irene, providing for them, but at the same time keeping a vigil, their parents trusting her to look for tendencies, or indications of evil behavior. And now, thinking harder on it, I realized one St. Jerome’s boy had a real bad one.
We called him Donkey. A long-faced six-year-old with a wide mouth of separated baby teeth. When he laughed he sounded like a jackass getting his balls squeezed. What happened to him made a lot more sense to me now.
Donkey had a speech impediment so bad, he could have been a martian for all us kids knew. Was dim-witted, too. But his biggest problem was he was a firebug. Liked torching outhouses. Actually, it was only one outhouse he set on fire all by himself, but when us boys heard about it, we got him more matches and prodded him to do it a bunch more times. Some of the local folk caught him on their properties while their commodes were still in flames, stick matches in his pockets, his laugh loud and annoying. Rest of us kids, we—
Jeez, now that was weird. Weren’t no other kids now that I thought back on it, just me and him. Anyway, I always got away. After each outhouse fire, there’d be a complaint made to the orphanage, but since Donkey was so young, Sister Irene had always managed to talk him out of trouble.
Then late one fall night there was another fire, a huge one. A silo full of harvested grain ignited—a real spectacle that one was, start to finish—and the laughing half-wit wouldn’t leave with me so he got caught again. Far as I knew, no formal complaint ever got filed about it. But soon afterward, miracle of miracles, Donkey got adopted. And soon after that, God rest his soul, he was found a little south of here, face down in the Wissaquessing River.
Us boys got told he’d slipped off the bank and cracked his head on a rock. Such bullshit, I knew now. It was his parents who’d offed him, just cleaning up after the mistake they thought they’d made six years earlier, when they let their firstborn son live.
Christ, what in the hell did they think they knew? Only thing Donkey was guilty of was being too simple.
I was dancing around something else that tugged at me through all these memories. A question I hadn’t asked, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. I scanned the log again.
Sister Dymphna, still beside me, followed my eyes and finally said what we were both thinking. “I’m wondering the same thing, Wump. About your adoption. Were they your real parents?”
I didn’t look nothing like them. Not back when I was a kid, and not now. Sure, I had a bull of a body same as Mr. Hozer did, which was something him and his wife had figured was good for farming, but nothing else matched. Not eyes or hair or nose, and definitely not ears, his the size of pocket watches, mine twice that. Besides, I hated the Hozers so much I couldn’t have been blood-related. When their grain silo sparked up the night I left their farm, it was all I could do to keep from spreading the fire to their farmhouse with the whole damn Hozer family still inside, sleeping. Got close to making it happen. Real close
. Can’t tell me a natural-born son would have hated his real family that bad.
“Won’t never know, Sister,” I said to her. “Either way, it was one adoption that didn’t take.”
Father Duncan was off the phone now with news of some sort. “That was Mrs. Gobel. Nazarene Hospital phoned the rectory. It’s about Mrs. Volkheimer. She wants to see a priest. Can you take me over, Wump?”
I was stunned. “But she’s only there for observation. What happened?”
“A coronary,” Father said. “Happened overnight. She’s stable and awake, but she’s asking for last rites. We’ll take the Bible with us.”
Last rites. Extreme Unction. Hearing Mrs. Volkheimer’s name, I quit with the self-pity and made myself focus. But I managed one final look through the last few pages of the orphanage logbook. In the Adopting Parents column, I didn’t see the name Volkheimer anywhere.
23
We made a quick stop at the rectory, so now I had my truck parked in a space facing the rectory’s kitchen, waiting for Father to pick up what he needed. My fingers tapped the steering wheel nonstop like an assembly line full of trip hammers, just me and the devil book in here.
Yep. Me and the Devil. The Devil and me.
Hurry up, Father.
I opened the truck door; I had to get out.
After a few long minutes, the snap of the kitchen’s wooden screen door made me look up to see Father hustling toward the truck. I caught some movement at a second-floor window, above the kitchen exit. Two slats of the window’s closed Venetian blinds separated as someone sneaked a peek at Father leaving the rectory. Monsignor Fassnacht’s bedroom; the man was like a phantom anymore. The slats sealed themselves back up.
Father climbed into my truck with a black leather bag. I got back in behind the wheel, a sick feeling engulfing me. I’d seen other bags like it many times, working for the parish long as I had, one bag in particular, carried by someone I now despised.
“Your own bag, right, Father?” He knew what I meant.
“Yes, Wump. Mine and no one else’s.”
Most recent was when my boy died. I had the hospital summon its priest on call, long as he was from any parish other than Our Lady’s; I wouldn’t let Monsignor Fassnacht near him.
In the bag would be Father’s diocesan-issue sacrament-of-the-sick gear: a prayer book, a crucifix, some anointing oil, a prayer stole. The bag joined him on the passenger side of the bench seat, his hand on its wide handle. This left me and the big devil-book box together on the left. I put the truck into gear.
Nazarene Hospital was fifteen minutes away, just inside Northeast Philly, where it was a lot more populated. We kept to ourselves for the ride, me grinding through the truck’s gears from city block to city block, first-second-third, first-second-third, happy with the repetition and how it kept my mind blank. The Father, I couldn’t read him, but his stillness made me tense. First, second, third gear…
The truck chugged into the hospital parking lot. It was near noon, visiting hours in full swing since ten o’clock. We parked a distance from the hospital entrance, no spaces open any closer. Father looked down his nose at the Bible strongbox before he climbed out.
“Precious cargo,” he said, rolling up his window. “Anything in the back you can cover it with?”
We’d just left Three Bridges and we were barely inside the Philly limits, not in some roughhouse section of its inner city. There was no real crime around here. Still, so Father could feel better, I dragged out a small canvas paint tarp from the back of the truck, draped it over the box, then tucked it under the box’s corners. We locked the doors.
“She’s on the third floor. Intensive care,” the desk clerk said.
We exited the elevator, Father taking the lead down the bright hallway, his bag held firm in his large-knuckled hand. It was like the parting of the Red Sea the way nurses and orderlies and patients with bottles on wheels all hugged the walls to let him pass, me in his wake. We pushed through a set of swinging doors into intensive care and bumped up against the nurses’ station just inside. Father was cleared to see Mrs. V, and I got cleared because I was with him.
Intensive care wasn’t much more than a wall of light blue floor-to-ceiling curtains pulled around beds on wheels, plus medical equipment we could hear but couldn’t see. The unit was full of beeping and humming and wheezing pumps, and snoring and coughing and mumbling patients. The shoes visible between the curtain hems and the white speckled stick-tile floor belonged some to nurses and some to sniffling, nose-blowing visitors. We headed where the nurse directed us, to the bed at the end of the row. The curtain wasn’t drawn, and it was the only bed in the unit with access to a window.
One of the bed’s chrome-plated pull-up safety bars was down; the bed was empty. We both stopped short.
“Over here, fellas.”
Her voice came from the side of a pink vinyl wing chair turned away from us, facing the window. We circled to its front. The tiny Mrs. V sat upright; she’d been able to see our reflections in the window glass. A drip bottle hung on a stand next to her, and trailing it was a thin clear tube that led to an IV needle that disappeared under white tape stuck to the back of her hand. A second connection, a black wire, led from somewhere under her gown to a machine with a gauge like a clock, a busy red needle inside it. Her white hair was combed back into a thick braid with its dark brown vein threaded through it, the braid brought forward under her chin, resting beneath her weathered but perky face.
“Another wonderful day, isn’t it, fellas?” she said, not taking her eyes from the brightness showing through the window. When me and the father stayed quiet, she answered herself. “Such fine, warm weather for April. No accounting for my garden, of course, which is in desperate need of a good rain.”
“You shouldn’t be out of bed,” Father said, looking her over, the hem of her flowered nightgown visible from beneath a baby blue cotton robe. Her Easter-yellow slippers didn’t reach the floor. I figured Father was doing what I was doing, which was sizing up what it would take to put her back into bed without tangling her up in the hospital tubing. “I was told you had a coronary,” he said. “Look, why don’t you move back over—”
“You hush now, Father, I’m fine where I am,” she told him. “It happened a little after midnight. I thought it was just the hospital food keeping me up, but the darned equipment I’m hooked to said otherwise. My doctor says it was a mild one, so it’ll be one more day here in intensive care as a precaution, then another day or two in the step-down unit for more observation. They’ll release me, God willing, in time for Easter.”
She lifted her right hand from the chair’s armrest, not very high, but enough for her to curl every finger into her palm except for her pointer. She delicately aimed her finger in my direction. “And don’t either of you figure on trying to carry me over to my bed. I’ll get back into it in a minute. I just want the sun on my face.”
It didn’t look like she was in any danger at the moment, and listening to her defiant little speech made a person think she could live forever. I found a chair for Father and placed it next to hers, nodded for him to sit. He accepted and set his bag on the slate windowsill. “I’m here to administer the sacrament of Extreme Unction,” he told her.
“Of course you are, dearie,” she said, her blue eyes brightening to go with a small, sly smile. “And to hear my confession.” She told Father she sent her family home this morning so they could get some sleep, then had a doctor make the call to the rectory.
Father opened his bag and removed his orange-and-gold prayer stole with swirled red embroidering, kissed it reverently, and placed it around his neck. Mrs. V waited with her age-spotted hands in her lap, her fingers stiff and cupped some from arthritis, and narrow as twigs on a dead tree. Father placed her one hand atop the other, then took them both into his own. His glance at me said I should leave. I wandered off toward the nurses’ station.
The adoptions, the devil bible—I was pretty much all stoked up from th
e past few days. I paced the floor, hands behind my back, one work boot in front of the other, a slow march back and forth in front of the nurses.
A riveting tension started in the back of my head, spread to my neck and shoulders as the hate welled up in me. My upper back sizzled, my brain scatter-gunning its way through memories and events old and new, trying to resolve who the bad guys were.
Old Monsignor Krause. As the parish’s nineteenth-century patriarch and a German immigrant, he had started the hysteria. Some called him a visionary. Few other than Sister Irene knew him for what he was, a doomsday prophet who shepherded a flock of frightened, poor, and all-too-faithful immigrants.
And all those murdering parents who, at the monsignor’s direction, drowned their firstborn baby boys, the parents convinced, as he’d been convinced, it was something needed doing.
The parish’s current pastor, Monsignor Fassnacht. A predator and borderline lunatic.
Religion itself. Too often it was about human sacrifices done out of reverence for the Almighty. “Tests,” God called them, with people killing other people just to see if they’d do as they were told. As lame as a plough horse working a rock quarry, this kind of reasoning was, and I wouldn’t never buy it.
And my adoptive parents. Only people worse than them abusive bastards were my real parents, whoever they were. Screw them. Screw them all. Maybe it was time for a change at the top. Maybe it was time to give some other supreme being a shot at making sense out of all the shitty cards so many of us been dealt, maybe even have him reshuffle the whole goddamn deck.
Calm down, old man, I told myself; you’re talking nonsense.
I gave Father Duncan ample time to hear Mrs. V’s confession and perform her last rites. As I neared her bed I heard her shooing Father away, her pleasant tone gone, replaced with what? Anger? Despair?
