by John Fante
II
When Saturday arrived, the Kid had a chance to go to Confession, tell his sins, and return once more to the Road to Paradise and sanctifying grace. Sister Mary Joseph paused again. Everyone in that class was worried about the Kid now. We felt better when Sister said he did go to Confession that Saturday. Ah, but something terrible happened. He had been too long a companion of Lucifer. When he entered the confessional, a great fear came over the Kid. He simply couldn’t tell the priest he had swiped a ball glove. He was under the Devil’s spell. He coughed and stammered, finally giving up. The priest didn’t know the Kid was holding back, so he pronounced Absolution and made the sign of the cross. The Kid left the church bathed in sweat, and Satan laughed like a fiend, for Satan knew he had pulled a fast one on the priest.
But not on God, because that can’t be done. All night long the Kid thought of what he had done. His conscience gnawed like a fat rat, and he couldn’t sleep a wink. Before him yawned the jaws of Hell, and far behind him flickered the bright lanterns on the path to Eternal Bliss. Was this Kid doomed, or wasn’t he? Sister Mary Joseph took off her glasses and wiped them, and her face was set and kind of sad. From that we knew something awful was coming. She put on her glasses and spoke. It was tough on the Kid.
Concealing a sin in the confessional is bad enough and a mortal sin, but actually to go to Holy Communion afterward is the worst sin possible—a sacrilege. Sunday morning the Kid got up and walked bleary-eyed to Mass with his parents. They were pious, humble folks who always received Holy Communion on Sunday morning. Now the great test arrived. Would the Kid brave the shocking disappointment of his parents and not go to Holy Communion, or would he sink deeper into the grasp of Lucifer? The Kid was in a tough spot. If the Kid didn’t go to Communion, then his folks would know something was wrong, and after services they would make him come clean. That would mean the loss of his new ball glove, plus a shellacking from his father, who was a pious man with a horror of evil. But if he kept his mouth shut and went to Communion, he would fool his folks and still have the glove. Oh, yes, but could he fool God? That was the question.
And it was here that the Kid made his big mistake. So far he had deceived his friends, the priest, and his parents. Drunk with power, and deep in the spell of Satan, he now challenged the Supreme Being. And there, kneeling beside his humble parents, he made the decision which was to prove a fatal mistake. Sin or no sin, God or the Devil, he loved that ball glove. He decided that no matter what happened, he would go to Communion.
After the Consecration he walked down the aisle and knelt at the Communion rail. Side by side with his humble parents, he awaited the Blessed Sacrament. Would the priest know the black horror of that Kid’s soul? Would a miracle happen? Would God in His wrath strike down this sinner who had sold out to Lucifer? Nobody in the class could guess. It was Sister Mary Joseph’s story, and we couldn’t guess the end. But it certainly looked bad for the Kid.
The priest came down from the altar and gave Holy Communion to members of the congregation. The Kid’s mother and father received, bowing their heads in humility and piety. Then it was the Kid’s turn. He lifted his face, and the priest placed the Communion on his tongue. Nothing happened except that Lucifer snickered, and the Kid bowed his head. That is, nothing happened right away.
But after he got back to his pew, a slow change came over the Kid. He felt a stiffness in his bones, starting at his feet. It moved upward. It reached his knees. Then his waist. Gradually it crept to his shoulders. Now it was in his neck and heading for his eyes and ears. On and on it moved. Finally it covered him all the way. God had answered the challenge of Lucifer. The Devil didn’t sneer any more; he fled. For the Kid had turned to stone!
When we heard that, we were like stone too. The whole class was dead quiet. Than we realized Sister Mary Joseph’s story was over. She sat up there and smiled.
“And the moral of that story is this,” she said. “Always tell the truth, whether it be in the confessional or out of it. Avoid Temptation. Never harbor thoughts of stealing. Never tell little lies, or big lies, or any kind of lies. Be truthful to the very end.”
The class sighed. Some of us said pheeeew! We were sure glad that story was over.
III
After school, Clyde Myers and I walked downtown. We fooled around, staring into shop-windows. The hardware-store window was chock-full of baseball supplies: balls, bats, and gloves.
“Let’s go in,” Clyde said. “We’ll say we’re just looking around.”
Clyde walked down one aisle and I walked down the other. The clerks didn’t pay any attention to us. There was a whole basketful of baseballs. I could have got plenty but I didn’t feel like it. At the back of the store we passed each other, and Clyde walked up my aisle and I walked up his. Then we met at the front door and walked out.
“Did you get anything?” Clyde said.
“No,” I said.
“Me neither.”
For quite a while we stood out front and stared at the baseball supplies in the window.
“Do you think that Kid was really turned to stone?” Clyde said.
“Nah,” I said. “It’s a lot of baloney.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a lot of bunk.”
“Well,” I said, “so long.”
“So long,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”
One of Us
MY MOTHER HAD JUST CARRIED the last of the supper plates into the kitchen when the doorbell rang. All of us rose like a congregation and rushed to answer the call. Mike reached the door first. He threw it open and we pushed our noses against the screen. There stood a uniformed boy with his cap in his hand and a telegram at the bottom of it.
“Telegram for Maria Toscana,” he said.
“Telegram, Papa!” Mike shouted. “Somebody’s dead! Somebody’s dead!”
A telegram came to our house only when one of our family passed away. It had happened three times in the lives of us kids. Those three times were the death of my grandfather, of my grandmother, and then the death of my uncle. Once, though, a telegram came to our house by mistake. We found it under the door when we came home late one night. We were all greatly surprised, for it contained birthday greetings to a lady named Elsie, whom none of us knew. But the most astonishing thing about that telegram was that it was not a death notice. Until then it did not occur to us that a telegram might have other uses.
When my father heard Mike shouting, he dropped his napkin and pushed back his chair. We at the door pranced up and down in excitement. In a paralysis of anxiety, Mother stood in the kitchen. My father walked with an important air to the door, and, like a man who had spent his whole life signing for telegrams, he signed for this one. We watched him tear open the yellow envelope so that the paper would separate enough for his heavy fingers to reach the message inside. He frowned at us and walked to the center of the living room, under the chandelier. He held the message high, almost over his head. Even jumping, we kids could not put our eyes upon it, and my little brother Tony, who was a shrimp and too little to read anyhow, climbed up the side of my father as if the man were a tree, and my father shook himself and Tony fell to the floor.
“Who died?” we asked. “Who died?”
“Down, down, my father said, like one speaking to leaping puppies. “Quiet, there. Down, down.”
Squinting his eyes, he folded the ominous yellow paper and returned to his place at the table. We trailed after him. He told us to go away, but we swarmed around his shoulders, and Tony climbed the chair rungs and burrowed his fingers into his shirt at the collar. My mother stood in the kitchen door biting her lips. Worry crushed her face. Her hands turned round and round like kittens under her checkered apron.
Breathlessly we waited. Breathlessly we tried to guess whom the sad news might concern. We hoped it wasn’t our aunt Louise, because she always sent us such wonderful Christmas presents. We didn’t mind if it was our aunt Teresa, though, because what good was she around Christmas time? No go
od whatever. All we ever got from her was a greeting card, and we knew it cost only a penny because that was the very kind our mother bought. If she was dead she deserved it for being so stingy.
Father shook himself from us. Emphatically he told us to go back to our places. My mother quietly took her seat. She held her small worried face between spread fingers like a woman gathering strength for an ordeal. She had many brothers and sisters whom she had not seen since girlhood, for she had married when yet very young. We could see that my father’s mind was reaching here and there to find the quickest and best way of releasing the sad shock when at length my mother was ready to receive it. She raised her face and looked at him with eyes opened all the way.
“Who, Guido?” she asked. “Who is it?”
“Clito,” he said. “Your sister Carlotta’s boy.”
“Dead?”
“Killed. He was run over. He’s dead.”
For many silent moments my mother sat like a statue in gingham. Then she lifted her face to that place she believed contained life eternal. Her lips were distended as in a kiss of farewell. Her eyes were too grieving to stay open.
“I know his little soul is beautiful in the sight of God,” she whispered.
He was our cousin, the only child of Uncle Frank and Aunt Carlotta, my mother’s oldest sister. They lived in Denver, thirty miles south of our small town. Clito was but a day older than our Mike, second in age among us kids. Clito and Mike were born in the same Denver hospital ten years before. They were brought to life by the same physician, and—wonderful thing!—the two boys were remarkably similar in face and form. Among the many members of our scattered clan they were always referred to as the Twins, for they were inseparable when our family lived among the Italians of North Denver three years before, and, though they often quarreled, there seemed a deeper kinship between them than between Mike and me, or between Mike and Tony. But, three years before our family had moved from Denver to the small town in the mountains, and Mike had not seen his cousin since then.
These were the reasons why, in the silence after my father had spoken, my mother stared so passionately, so possessively at Mike, her eyes slowly beginning to float. Mike felt her gaze. He was yet too young to realize the tragic significance of Clito’s death, but he felt my mother’s eyes upon him, as if to draw him into them, and he fidgeted nervously, glancing at my father for clarity and sustenance. My mother pushed back her chair and went into the bedroom. We heard her lie down, and then we heard her sobbing.
“I bet Clito’s in Heaven,” Mike said. “I bet he didn’t have to stop off in Purgatory.”
“Sure,” my father said. “He was a good boy. He went right straight to Heaven.”
My mother called from the bedroom.
“Mike,” she called, “come here to Mamma.”
He didn’t want to leave the table. But he looked at my father, who nodded, and then he got up and went hesitantly away. We heard my mother draw him beside her upon the bed, and we heard the wet, violent kissing of his face and neck. We heard the wild sound of smacking lips and my mother’s possessive moans.
“But it ain’t me!” Mike was saying. “See! I’m not dead.”
“Thank God! Thank Almighty God!”
After my father left the table, the telegram lay open at his place, one corner of it in the salad bowl, the yellow paper drawing salad oil into itself like a blotter. We kids dove for it. I got it first and held it above me, out of reach of my tiptoed sister Clara’s clawing fingers. I climbed up on my father’s chair and held the paper almost to the ceiling. My sister climbed right up on the chair beside me. Over my head I read the message while she hung on and my little brother Tony tugged at my pants in an effort to dethrone me.
“Let me read it!” he shouted.
“You little fool!” Clara said. “You can’t read yet! You’re not even in school.”
“Yes, I can too! You don’t know everything, so there!”
The message read: “Clito struck by truck while riding bicycle. Died this afternoon four o’clock. Funeral Sunday three o’clock.”
I let it go from my fingers and it floated zigzagging toward the floor. Clara and Tony fell upon it and instantly it was in shreds, all over the floor. The commotion on the linoleum brought my mother and Mike in a hurry from the bedroom. My mother saw the shredded telegram lying about, and, drying her eyes with the hem of her apron, she said: “I didn’t get to see it. How did he die?”
“He was run over by a bicycle,” I said.
My father was in the front room, reading the paper.
“No,” he corrected. “The boy was run over by a truck.”
“No, he wasn’t,” I said. “He ran into the truck.”
“The truck ran into him.”
So, with constant interruptions, we lost all conception of what had actually taken place. Before long I was insisting that our dead Clito had been riding in the truck bed, the bicycle at his side, and that he had fallen out when the machine struck a bump in the road. My father was quite as inaccurate. He said that little Clito had been knocked down and killed by a man riding a bicycle. Now we were guessing recklessly. Even Tony had an interpretation to offer. He insisted that he too had read the telegram, but he said that Clito had been killed by a German aviator who dropped bombs from an airplane. In the confusion nobody had anything more to offer.
Then Clara said: “Maybe you’re all wrong. Maybe he was run over by a motorcycle.”
In despair my mother asked if there was any mention of a funeral.
“Tuesday.”
“Monday.”
“Friday.”
“Wasn’t it Sunday?” Clara said.
While we quibbled hopelessly, my mother and Mike gathered up the bits of yellow paper and pieced them together on the table.
II
After supper my mother wouldn’t let Mike go out. The rest of us did, but Mike had to stay in the kitchen with her. He could hear us shouting in the front yard, and he cried and kicked the stove, but my mother was never so firm. Even my father was surprised. When he walked into the kitchen and told her she was crazy and unreasonable, she turned on him, her eyes still crying, and told him to go back to his newspaper and mind his own business. Sucking a toothpick, he stared at the floor, shrugged his shoulders, and then went back to his reading.
“But, Mamma,” Mike said over and over, “I’m not the one that’s dead! See?”
“Thank God. Thank Almighty God.”
That evening Uncle Giuseppe and Aunt Christina came to our house. Aunt Christina was the youngest sister of my mother and Aunt Carlotta. She too had received a telegram. My mother dried her wet, dish-watery hands when she saw Christina enter the front door, and the two women locked bosoms in the dining room and stood there crying. My mother put her nose into Aunt Christina’s shoulder and sobbed, and Aunt Christina sobbed and stroked Mother’s hair.
“Poor Carlotta!” they said. “Poor Carlotta!”
Nobody was watching Mike in the kitchen. He saw his chance and sneaked out the back door. He ran around the house and joined us in the front yard. Our cousins, Aunt Christina’s two kids, had come with her, so the whole bunch of us got up a game of kick-the-can.
My mother forgot about Mike. She and my father and Aunt Christina and Uncle Giuseppe sat in the front room, talking about Clito’s death. The two women sat side by side in rocking chairs. My mother still held her dish towel, and she let her tears splash into it. Aunt Christina cried into a tiny green handkerchief that smelled of carnations. Over and over they said the same thing.
“Poor Carlotta! Poor Carlotta!”
My father and Uncle Giuseppe smoked cigars in silence. Death was the supreme mystery to these people, and the women feverishly resigned themselves to the workings of the Almighty. But the men clung to those ancient platitudes, ancient as the mind of man. Since he was not a son of theirs, the passing of the little boy did not move them noticeably. They were sorry he was dead, but they were sorry only because it was t
he proper thing to be, so their sorrow was etiquette and not out of their hearts.
“Ah, well,” my father said, “you never know. Everybody has to go some time.”
Uncle Giuseppe’s dark head and screwed-up lips agreed slowly.
“Too bad,” he said. “It’s too bad.”
“But he was so young!” Mother said.
Wistfully my father answered: “Maybe he’s better off.”
“Ah, Guido! How can you say that? How do you suppose his poor mother feels? And poor Frank?”
“A man never thinks what’s in a woman’s heart,” Aunt Christina said. “No, they don’t know. They never will know. Men are so selfish.”
My father and uncle stared at their cigars in dismal confusion.
“Well,” my father said, “all I know is we all have to go some time.”
Uncle Giuseppe was trying hard to feel grief. He closed his eyes and said, “No. We never know. Tomorrow, the next day, tonight—next year, next month, we never know.”
“Poor Carlotta,” my mother said.
“Poor woman,” Aunt Christina said.
“Too bad for Frank,” my father said. “He’ll miss the boy.”
Uncle Giuseppe sat in a helpless way, uncomfortable in a straight-back chair. Many times he looked at the ceiling and walls as though he had never seen them before. Then he would examine his cigar, as though that were a curious object too. My father sat more at ease, since this was his house. He sat with his cigar between his teeth, his feet spread stiffly in front of him, his thumbs in his sweat-stained suspenders, his eyes squinting to evade the curl of cigar smoke. He would have liked to say something different on this subject of death, but there was nothing new he could think about.
“The best of us have to die,” he ventured.
“How true that is,” my uncle said.
My Aunt Christina blew her nose many times and then wrung the tip of it until it was as red as a radish. She was a stout woman who tried but never could cross her fat little legs.
