Scars on the Face of God

by Chris Bauer

“You have to leave,” she said, her eyesight dropping to her fidgeting fingers and the rosary beads wrapped in them. She wouldn’t look at neither of us, tears forming on her blinking lashes. Behind the tears, I saw confusion.

  “Go. The two of you. Get out. Now.”

  “What got her so upset, Father?”

  We were at the end of the hospital floor, in front of the elevator. I leaned past him and pushed the button, seeing as how he was too preoccupied to do it himself, the wind gone out of his sails.

  “You should know better than to ask that, Wump. I heard her confession then administered last rites. You can take your pick which bothered her more.”

  I figured she was mentally prepared for the unction, seeing as she was the one who asked for it. And confession was supposed to make a person feel better afterward. Clean slate and all that, once you did your penance. Had to be something else.

  I settled on what it was.

  “You told her about all them adoptions, didn’t you?” I asked him. We got off the elevator, headed toward the hospital exit. “You told her there were a lot of them real soon after the old monsignor’s death. Couldn’t resist, could you, seeing as how she was alive back then. Wanted her perspective and all. Am I right?”

  “Wump,” Father said, pushing through the hospital entrance doors into a spring sun that was throwing off heat like it was high noon in midsummer, “give it a rest. Let’s focus on getting the old Bible downtown to the Cardinal.”

  Father shielded his eyes, looked for the faded red of my truck cab among the cars in the parking lot, pointed it out for himself at the far end, then said, “This is the end of the line for our detective work. All the loose ends are tied. In my book, anyway.”

  We were in the middle of the steamy blacktop when I stopped him short with a hand to his bicep, pulling at him so he faced me. “Here,” I said as my fingers reached into my shirt pocket. I slapped a yellowed prayer card into his palm. “In my book,” I told him, “there’s still a loose end or two.”

  Father looked the small death announcement over.

  “This card,” I asked, “was for her son, right?”

  “I suppose, Wump. Look, there’s no need—”

  “Tell you where I found it, Father: in the back of the Devil’s Bible. Except unlike most of them other infants whose prayer cards were back there with it, Mrs. Volkheimer’s son didn’t drown, in the sewers or the river.”

  “You don’t say.” He held the card out for me to take it back. I left him hanging.

  “Yep. The old photograph of the rededication of St. Jerome’s, the donations Rolf Volkheimer and those other wealthy town folk made for the renovations, these things make sense to me now.”

  “Stop, Wump.” Father resumed his walking. I followed on his heels.

  “Rolf Volkheimer was readying the orphanage for his own son, wasn’t he?” My voice trailed him but he could still hear me. “His wife was pregnant with their first child, but he didn’t want to believe the devil-book proclamation. So he hedged his bet by giving their son to a nun, so she could observe his behavior as he grew. Who better than a priest or a nun to recognize demonic behavior, right, Father? Except”—Father retrieved his hanky while we walked, ignored me while he wiped his sweaty neck—“except Rolf died, from a freak accident caused by yours truly. A few months later the old monsignor—the parish’s crazy pastor, the reason for the devil-child scare—he died, too. Old age. So one by one them firstborn infant boys who’d been made to live as orphans rather than be destroyed by the hysteria—the older ones, all of them watched real close by Sister Irene as they grew, just in case the proclamation was true—they started getting adopted, with Sister Irene and their parents the only ones who knew the real story. Then something unexpected happened. Sister keeled over at her desk. Heart attack.”

  “Wump—”

  “Mrs. Volkheimer was so very obedient, wasn’t she, Father? Just like most all them other misled parishioners of Monsignor Krause, all part of this fine German town of Three Bridges in this, the parish of Our Lady of the Innocents. Appropriate, huh, Father? The parish’s name, I mean.”

  He abruptly stopped in my path, the nostrils of his right-turn nose flaring like he was about to take a poke at me. “I said that’s enough, Wump, and I mean it.”

  “One last observation, Father, then I’m finished. As devout a Catholic as Mrs. Volkheimer was, Rolf couldn’t trust she wouldn’t rat them out and spoil the plan, so he kept the truth from her all those years. I’m right, ain’t I?”

  Father lowered his head, resigned to a truth that seemed larger than the both of us. He looked at the prayer card again then unclenched his teeth. “I did say something to her about those adoptions. It was to take the edge off the guilt of the decision she’d made those many years ago, at age nineteen, to destroy her own child. So young, so barely out of her childhood, carrying this burden for so long, and not able to confess it until now. So to answer your question, Wump…”

  Father raised his head, and I knew this was a good man, because I saw in his eyes the suffering of his flock, and his frustration at not being able to ease it. Father said finally, “I’ve only succeeded in having her trade in one kind of guilt for another. Yes, she never knew her child might have survived.”

  The announcement back in my pocket, we both walked. I wanted to go to her now, but knew I couldn’t. I wanted to go back into the hospital and sit with her, put my arm around her fragile shoulder, tell her it was okay, that what was done was done. Tell her she’d had little choice but to follow her faith, duped by a scare manufactured by some religious fanatic who probably wouldn’t have recognized the devil from John F. Kennedy. She’d decided on what had to be done, and to offset it, her husband, Rolf, had done likewise. And if God was anything like these religious leaders painted him, he’d forgiven her.

  Father slowed his pace and stopped. His jaw slackened and he let out a low, kick-in-the-pills grunt, one that pulled me back into the here and now. So deep in the muck of all this bullshit, I hadn’t realized we’d arrived at my truck. Father groaned. “Goodness. For the love of Christ—”

  The passenger side window had been busted in, a jagged edge protruding like an iceberg from the deep. Broken glass crunched under Father’s wingtips as he moved closer to the window. He twisted the now unlocked handle on the passenger door, and I unlocked the door on the driver’s side. The devil book was gone.

  24

  One thing we learned from the lady at the hospital information desk when we went back to question her: soon after Father Duncan and me showed up, another priest had asked for Mrs. Volkheimer.

  “Older than you,” the woman said to Father. Then, looking my way: “Around your age but with black hair. A full head of it.” She told us the priest had gotten into an elevator but came back down quickly, within minutes, then left the hospital.

  I turned off the truck’s ignition. It was near two o’clock. Father and me were a few car widths away from a squared-off layer of windblown trash and leaves that took up nearly a full parking space behind the rectory, the trash settled and fused together after months of sitting undisturbed under a car. From sometime in early winter and up through yesterday, Monsignor Fassnacht’s tan Chevy Impala sat on top of this trash. Now the car was gone.

  Father climbed out of the truck, shaking broken glass crystals off the seat of his pants in the process. “Just so you know,” he volunteered, brushing off his hands, “when I speak with the Cardinal, I intend to tell him about your part in discovering the message inside that Bible, Wump. As long as you don’t mind.”

  Big fucking deal. Like there’d be a prize or something for finding it. I said fine, it was up to him, but I knew things like this didn’t never see the light of day again once the Church finally got hold of them. Of course that assumed we could get it back. “I suppose you and him got a whole slew of things to talk about,” I added.

  Things like visions and infants dying and infants orphaned, and how it seemed like God hadn’t
much cared about the welfare of this little town back then, not to step in and fix it all.

  “I suppose I do,” he said. “But I wish I had something to show for it.” He leaned back inside the passenger side window, his hands folded, the underside of his jacketed forearms pressed against the ledge. A broken glass chunk still attached to the chrome window trim snagged his sleeve. He pulled the glass piece off, placed it on the truck’s front seat, and asked if I needed his help replacing the window. I was thinking a plywood insert would handle it, followed by a trip to the junkyard for some replacement glass after Easter, so I told him thanks, but no. His eyes lingered a moment on the empty space next to me on the front seat.

  “It’ll turn up, Father,” I offered. “Something tells me we ain’t seen the last of that book.”

  “Hope you’re right.”

  Me, I didn’t share the sentiment. Sometimes a person needed to be careful about what he hoped for.

  I entered the church through a side door near the rear, let myself into Our Lady’s sacristy. One large room, nearly square, brightened by light oak furniture and oak wall trim, all the wood lacquered, the place brightened even more by arctic white wall paint on every other paintable surface. The room had a heavy feel to it, loaded down by plated gold and silver accessories and bulky furnishings: a grandfather clock with an embossed moon face, its three brass weights near as big as gym dumbbells, the weights attached to the ends of thick chains; an antique oak desk with wide legs, its clawed brass feet the size of lion paws; a prayer missal resting on a spindly book stand, the stand seeming too flimsy, the chunky prayer book the size of a large photo album with a thick letter-and-symbol title on its red cover embossed in, lo and behold, still more gold.

  And plenty of crucifixes. Some sat on the tops of polished yellow-gold scepters each as tall as a shepherd pole, all kept in a stand in the corner, used for special occasions like High Mass. Another crucifix extended like a paperweight across a pile of papers on the oak desk, was maybe the size of a kid’s school ruler, and contained a relic of a German saint. Four other twelve-inch crucifixes were in plain sight, centered on each of the walls, metal-on-wood crosses leaning slightly forward as if Christ’s body was ready to bleed on anyone standing directly in front of it. After the vision I seen at the orphanage, I kept my distance from all of them.

  On the wall separating the sacristy from the church’s main altar were twin oak armoires side by side. Two parish priests meant two wardrobe closets with two sets of vestments, plus any other personal belongings the monsignor or Father Duncan wanted to store here. I told myself the reason I stopped in was to make sure them Stations of the Cross props and costume items Sister Dymphna and me gathered up were where we’d left them, in the room that mirrored this one on the other side of the church altar. Truth was, I wanted to look around.

  Last two places I poked my nose into were the wardrobes. First one I opened had a red sweatshirt hung on a hook on one side, and on the flat bottom a leather catcher’s mitt and a pair of Converse sneakers. The barrels of two upright baseball bats were visible behind the vestments hung on the armoire’s cross pole.

  “Bet your baseball locker looked like this too, huh, Father?” I said to no one before a little chuckle escaped my piehole. Just to make sure, I ran my hand around the bottom of the wardrobe, deep into the back, figuring there was no telling where the devil bible might turn up.

  No such luck.

  I pulled on the wooden handles for the front doors to Monsignor Fassnacht’s wardrobe, but they didn’t budge. I pulled harder. The doors weren’t normally locked, so what the hell was the problem—

  Pop. The doors were just stuck. I poked around inside, high and low, but there was nothing incriminating in here either.

  To quote them Saturday afternoon TV cowboys, the kind of day I’d had made me feel like a horse that had been rode hard and put away wet. And I was hungry.

  Viola’s keys and handbag were on the small table next to our front door. This wasn’t normal, Viola being home now in the middle of the afternoon. Also wasn’t normal to see her things left out like this neither, seeing as how she scolded me when I did it.

  “Viola, honey, where are you?”

  No Viola in the kitchen or basement. I went to the upstairs steps, called her name again, made the climb. She was in bed, the covers up to her neck, eyes closed, hair in her night bonnet.

  “You feeling okay, sweetie?”

  “Just very tired,” she said, her eyelids heavy; she’d been asleep. “The Sisters said they would finish my chores. Would you like me to make you some lunch?”

  I told her no, of course not, I’d fend for myself. “Get some rest.” I climbed in bed next to her, stayed there until she drifted off.

  I called her doctor, told him I didn’t like what I saw. This wasn’t like her, sleeping in the middle of the day. And what about them blood tests, Doc?

  “Relax, Mr. Hozer,” he said. “Folks are entitled to naps as they get older…No, no answer on those blood tests yet, maybe tomorrow. You mustn’t worry…”

  I stayed home the rest of the afternoon.

  The flu or maybe an intestinal virus was what she had, me and her decided, since half an hour later she was hugging the hopper, vowing never again to eat breakfast scrapple or Lebanon bologna cold cuts or chicken noodle soup, her three meals for today.

  Viola slept fine overnight. Got up only once, which was at least three times less than usual. Me, I didn’t fare so well with all the crap I’d seen yesterday. Spent a lot of the night awake, thinking some about Viola, some about this town.

  I choked down a bowl of corn flakes and milk rather than ask her to scramble eggs for me. She gave me a peck on the cheek, said she’d be fine, and pushed me out the front door, reminding me the church needed me, today being Good Friday and so close to Easter.

  25

  Warm apples and cinnamon grabbed my sniffer soon as I entered the rectory’s kitchen. Mrs. Gobel’s old country strudel, from scratch. I told her I’d have some soon as I finished shoveling up the trash the absent Monsignor’s car had been protecting in the parking lot. I asked if no car meant there was still no Monsignor.

  “Ja. No Monsignor Fassnacht,” Mrs. Gobel said from her seat at the kitchen table, a hot tea steeping in front of her. “I checked his room, ja. The door vas unlocked. His bed was still made from yesterday.”

  Her tired smoke-blue eyes lingered on mine as I took a seat across from her. They were smaller today, her eyes, deeply inset, and her cheek sagged. She seemed sad.

  “You okay, Mrs. Gobel?”

  “Ja. But Monsignor Fassnacht, he’s not okay, ja?”

  “He’s having a hard time. It might just be because him and the new Father don’t get along.”

  “Ja, that’s for sure, but it is more. He is…” She paused, lowered her eyes to her teacup.

  “He’s what?”

  “I think he is leaving,” she whispered.

  “Leaving?” I said, whispering back at her like most folks did when whispered to. Then, in a normal voice, “Leaving what? The parish? The priesthood? What?”

  “Both. The religion maybe, too. There is writing on his mirror.”

  The writing was in the soft marking-pencil red teachers used to score tests, crushed into the floor-length mirror hung inside the monsignor’s closet. It said, On the quadrillionth day the Scorned One rose to scar the creator’s splendor. Third Testament, Metamorphosis 1:1.

  And beneath it, Duncan, thou shalt rot in heaven.

  Mrs. Gobel waited for me at the bottom of the steps. “Has Father Duncan seen it?” I asked her.

  “Ja. He’s on his vay to tell the Cardinal about it.”

  Her eyes turned sadder. “Your vife just called. She is looking for you. She needs you to come home right away.”

  We cried together, Viola and me, and for a long time. Now the only one still crying was me.

  We sat on our couch, Viola dressed in a housecoat, the collar tied up neatly with a small pink bo
w, her covered arm feeling gentle as a sparrow’s wing on my shoulder. What a loving, wonderful arm this is, I thought. If only it could stay there, on my shoulder, forever.

  I leaned forward, my elbows digging into my knees. I lowered my head into my hands.

  My Viola. My wonderful, wonderful Viola.

  I’d gotten home by the time her doctor arrived, and in a voice as tired as an old priest giving absolution, he told Viola and me the results of her blood test. She had leukemia, and it was going to kill her.

  Viola smoothed out both suspender straps on my shoulders, fussed over me the way I liked her to. “There’s a comfort in knowing how the end will come, Johnny,” she said, patting my shoulder again like a mother does a hurt child. “And I have my faith. I am truly not afraid. You mustn’t be afraid either, my dearest.”

  But I was.

  The clock. Last time I glanced at it, on the wall above the hi-fi cabinet, it was nine-thirty; now it was nearly two in the afternoon. I heard the phone ring a few times.

  Viola’s affairs were in order, she’d already told me. So, too, had been Harry’s, ready for when the time came. Mine were as well, but none of it had been my doing. See, around this house I always did what came natural to me, which was use my hands. If something needed building, I built it; when something broke, I fixed it. Viola, she handled everything else; the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning, everything about the family. Including the affairs of the sick and dying, like our insurance, and our wills, and our burial plots. Some parts I didn’t have an interest in or the patience for, others, the stomach. No matter now. When the time came, she would rest next to Harry, and me next to her, the three of us in beautiful Bountiful Gardens Cemetery, which was next to the parish cemetery, both graveyards on the edge of town.