The Risk Pool (11 page)

When I took him the cruets, he was pale and perspiring, and it occurred to me he had not been sweating so profusely of late, which was odd, since the early August heat was the worst of the summer. I wanted to ask if he was all right, but as he poured the wine into the chalice, his Latin, though halting, was unbroken. And besides, during this portion of the proceedings all conversation was, by convention, taboo. When he placed the cruets back on the tray, there was nothing to do but return to my station at the foot of the altar. On my way, I glanced out into the congregation where my mother’s bright dress stood out, and she smiled at me, apparently aware that my serving a Sunday mass was an honor. On my padded kneeler, I touched the cool handle of the gold-plated bell, though it wasn’t yet time.

I removed the gold communion paten from its cloth sheath when the four long lines of communicants approached the railing. We began as always on St. Joseph’s side and inched our way toward the statue of the Virgin, which presided over the other side altar. Those kneeling waited a few moments after receiving the host, then made the sign of the cross and stood, their places immediately filled by other communicants. I was proud of the job I was doing, smoothly inserting the communion plate beneath each expectant chin without chopping any throats. There was a rhythm that took over after a while, and it became easier to follow my friend’s hand from chalice to tongue.

I was so intent on my job that I almost did not notice when one of the vacated places along the rail was taken by my mother. Seeing her kneeling there made me wonder if all the strange things in the world were going to happen in this one mass. During the years that we had been attending mass, she had never received Communion, and when I asked her why, all she had said was that she would when she felt like she was in the state of grace.
Catechism class had taught me the answer to that one, but when I suggested she just go to Confession and wipe the slate clean, she only smiled. But now there she was, and if ever a woman
looked
like she was in the state of grace, my mother did then. She looked as radiant as the virgin who stood above her, as different as could be from the woman who had shot out the windshield and front tire of my father’s convertible and then eaten Librium for two months to calm down. She had become softer, lovelier, almost younger, in her bright, sleeveless summer dress. Everyone in the church seemed to be looking at her.

As we receded from her along the Communion rail, her eyes followed us, and Father Michaels stumbled, then righted himself. His eyes no longer appeared focused and he began to have difficulty locating the tongues of the faithful. He looked like a blind man going on sound and touch, though I think I was the only one who suspected he was in serious trouble.

When we reached the far end of the communion rail, we started working our way back, Father Michaels doing the backing now, I following, toward where my mother knelt. The communion plate was spattered with his perspiration, and when he missed the tongue of an elderly woman I was ready and caught the sacred host. The old woman looked surprised, for I had brushed her chin. Then she saw the host, her host, soaking up perspiration like a sponge in the middle of the communion plate.

“
Corpus Domini Nostri Jesu Christi
,” I heard Father Michaels murmur, as if the host were still between his thumb and forefinger. But the look on his face was terrible. The old woman before us waited patiently, but the priest could only stare down at his own hand as if it had betrayed him. Finally, as if convinced that
she
was the one holding things up, the old woman made the sign of the cross and arose uncertainly, turning away from the rail.

Father Michaels took one step toward the retreating communicant and held out his own offending hand, as if to invite her return, but the communion rail was between them. He watched the old woman all the way down the center aisle. Then he met my mother’s half-lovely, half-alarmed stare, which shifted from him to me and back again, and for a moment it was as if we three were the only ones in the church, perhaps in the world.

When the spell broke, the priest turned back toward the high altar. I stayed where I was. It occasionally happened that there were not enough hosts in the chalice to serve all the parishioners,
and the altar boy was expected to remain at the rail to mark the celebrant’s place. And so I did, but not without misgiving, because I had seen the chalice and it was still half full. Father Michaels placed it in the center of the open tabernacle and then, for some reason, disappeared into the sacristy.

At the Communion rail we all awaited his return, and when the organ stopped, the church was still, except for some nervous rustling. There’s no telling how long I would have remained there at the rail if one of the other boys had not retrieved me. The back door of the sacristy was flung wide open, and the other altar boys were clustered just inside, framed in the light, looking out across Skinny’s well-tended floral cross, past the rectory, past the bakery, past the boundaries of our collective imaginations, for we never dreamed anything like this could happen.

The most famous man in the history of Mohawk County was Nathan Littler, the town father. The junior high school, the hospital, and the city hall were all named after him, and there were statues erected to his memory on the long sloping lawn in front of the junior high and the terrace of the Mohawk Free Library. Nathan Littler never exactly did anything, he just had money. A lot of it he left to the city. About the only thing in Mohawk that wasn’t named after him was Myrtle Park, and that was named after his sister.

A considerable body of myth surrounded Myrtle Littler when I was growing up. Local legend had it that she had been very beautiful and very unhappy. She died when still a young woman without revealing the great secret of that unhappiness. Now, over a hundred years later, her ghost haunted the great park at the center of Mohawk, searching for someone to share her terrible secret with. Those she told died. No one knew why.

Her park was large and rambling, and the town had grown around its steep slopes on three sides, the new highway forming its northern boundary on the fourth. Its thick woods were allowed to go untended, and its macadam paths allowed to conform to the terrain, winding and turning back upon themselves. Two streets entered the park—one from the east, one from the west—but each dead-ended less than a hundred yards from the stone pillars that marked the entrance. Sometimes people in Mohawk grumbled about the park, which cut the town off from itself. Some places were less than a half mile apart, but with the park in between they could be reached only by going around. Every time there was trouble in the park the city council debated whether to cut down a swath of trees and blast a tunnel through the rock, but it was just talk and everybody knew it. The tanneries—the town’s lifeblood—conceded to be in temporary decline before the war, began to close down after its completion, victims of foreign competition and local greed. While the men who worked in the shops waited for them to reopen, the owners, those who hadn’t moved to Florida with their profits and the faith of Mohawk’s men and women, were working diligently to keep other industry out of the county, thereby ensuring that Mohawk would remain destitute even in the midst of postwar prosperity. There certainly was no money to squander on dynamiting the hillsides.

The summer of 1959, the year I turned twelve, I loved to lose myself in Myrtle Park’s dark winding paths. Even on the sunniest days, the park was cool and shady, the macadam trails and dirt paths just right for biking. In the daytime, patches of sunlight revealed isolated gazebos back among the trees, and at night these were reportedly used as lovers’ hideaways. I wasn’t allowed in the park at night though. In fact, my mother wasn’t keen on the idea of my being there anytime, but the big twenty-six-inch bicycle that mysteriously appeared on our porch liberated me. When I waved goodbye to my mother and promised not to go too far (how far was that?), she could only wave back and hope. Since Father Michaels had walked out the sacristy door and down the street nearly two years before, my mother had scarcely left the house. Rumor had it he had been gathered up and sent somewhere, to Phoenix, or Santa Fe, or one of the other places my mother talked long distance with and dreamed of moving to. Now, except for work, she stayed put. We ordered our groceries
from the only market in town that delivered and quit church cold turkey, both of us.

The bicycle was just sitting there one morning, and we figured it had to be from my father because there wasn’t anybody else. Aunt Rose had gone out to visit the national parks and not returned, authorizing a local real estate company to sell her property and send the money to an address in Aspen, Colorado. After the bicycle arrived, I kept expecting a convertible to pull up in front of the house any day, but none did. Once two men in a black car came and knocked on the door, wanting to know how they could get in touch with my father. They said he’d come into some money. My mother offered to hold on to it for them, but they said they had to give it to him personally.

One day when I was downtown I heard somebody yell. “Hey! Sam’s Kid!” and I recognized Wussy standing out in front of the pool hall. I was glad to see him, and he looked just like I remembered. He was even wearing the same kind of shapeless hat, though this one wasn’t decorated with fishhooks. We shook hands. His was large and brown. Man-colored.

“Good-lookin’ bike,” he said.

“My father gave it to me,” I said, hoping fervently that it was true, or that if it wasn’t, Wussy wouldn’t know.

“You look a little better than the last time I saw you,” he said, as if it had been only a few days and not five years. “Your old lady still shooting at people?”

I told him that he and my father had been the last, that she didn’t even own a gun anymore. He looked relieved, as if he’d been on the lookout for her all along and was glad he could give it up. I wanted to ask him about my father, but I couldn’t think of a way. Having dropped his name in connection with the bike, I didn’t want to admit I wasn’t even sure if he was in Mohawk.

“Some men came by last week,” I told him, explaining about the money they had for my father.

Wussy was interested. “Big guys? Black car?”

I said yes.

“If they come by again, tell them he went up to Alaska to work road construction.”

“Alaska?” I said, my heart falling.

“Right,” Wussy said, but he must have noticed how disappointed I was. “He’ll be back pretty quick,” he said. “You’ll look
up some day and there he’ll be. That’s the way with Sammy. It don’t do no good to wait.”

We said goodbye and I climbed back on my bike.

“You ever go fishing?” he called after me.

I shook my head no.

“Too bad,” he said. “You were an alright fisherman. Patient, too.”

So, I took Wussy’s advice and stopped waiting. One day I’d look up and there he’d be, I told myself. As it turned out, the direction was the only thing Wussy got wrong.

Most of the labyrinthian dirt trails in Myrtle Park ended up in somebody’s backyard if you followed them far enough, but there were so many and they were so complex that you could get all turned around, and by the time you came down out of the maze you’d be on the opposite side of town from where you thought you were. One of my favorite trails wound through the densest part of the park ending at the edge of a steep dirt embankment, at the foot of which was a shack with a sheet metal roof that gleamed in the sun. In the clearing around the shack were high mounds of junk. There were stacks of bald tires, car bodies without hoods, rusted hubcaps, foaming car batteries, splintered wooden ladders, broken sheets of fiberglass, brown bed springs. It was interesting to look down from the top of the embankment at all that junk, because a lot of it you couldn’t even identify and it was fun to see if you could figure out what it had once been used for. Sometimes stray dogs found their way into that clearing and sniffed among the mounds, looking for the right place to lift a leg. When you tossed pebbles down from the embankment, they believed in God.

One afternoon, not long after I ran into Wussy, I stopped along the embankment and leaned my bike up against a tree. There weren’t any dogs to convert, so I just sat. It was quiet and cool, and you could barely hear the cars that whizzed by on the invisible highway beyond the trees. Still further, about a mile away on a hill of its own, a white jewel of a house sparkled in the sun. Green lawns sloped down into the trees on each side. There had to be a road to get up there, but you couldn’t see it. Sometimes I wondered what the view must be like from there. I was willing to bet you could see all the way to the river.

I collected pebbles until I had a small pile. When there weren’t any dogs, I selected at random some target below and tested my marksmanship. Today, I selected the open window of a rusted-out DeSoto. The angle made it a challenge. Most of the pebbles just plinked off the roof. After a while I ran out of pebbles and started to unearth a rock at my feet. It had looked tossable until I started to uncover it and saw that the rock was about the size of a softball and far too heavy to throw with accuracy. I doubted I’d even be able to hit the roof of the shack directly below, a target I had always spurned as unchallenging.

The rock hit near the peak of the corrugated roof like a gunshot, then banged down into the rain gutter. The reverberation had not even died when the door of the shack blew open and a man came out on a dead run. He didn’t look up into the park or anywhere. He just ran, and if he hadn’t been headed in the opposite direction, I’d have been running too, because the last thing I expected was for somebody to be inside that shack. At first I thought the man was trying to catch whoever threw the stone and was confused about the direction the attack had been launched from. But as I watched him tack left, then right among the mounds, head down, even as he hurtled fenders and sharp, ragged fiberglass, I realized he wasn’t chasing. He was running away. He looked back over his shoulder just once before he disappeared into the trees.