Page 215 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 203

grew worse when I recalled that only saints heard voices, well, saints
and crazy people. So, knowing I wasn’t a saint, and estimating that
I wasn’t yet crazy, I should have been happy I wasn’t hearing God’s
voice.
I wanted to hear what the other boys heard, but I didn’t really
want to hear the voices of the boys themselves, because, as they
grew more mature, many of those German farmers’ sons became
hard silent dour athletic sergeants on the Misery construction crew,
or worse, porky gossiping biddies singing along with opera on ste-
reo recordings in the community room, where they auditioned boys
with perfect enough pitch and graceful enough hands to be picked
as cantors leading Gregorian chant in chapel.
The seminary was an institution, but I could not surrender to
institutionalization. I thought a priestly vocation was a personal
calling. I had found, vague as it was, a tempest of self that needed
protecting. I’d be content, as Sean O’Malley, S. J., had asked me, to
be a wee assistant priest in a wee parish in a wee town, living the wee
hidden life of the Carpenter Himself.
“You missed the comedy after supper,” Lock said. “Down by the
kitchen, Alfred Doney was sitting naked in his room, painting by
numbers, and everybody stopped in the stairwell. You could see right
in. The jackals in our class thought it was hilarious.” Lock leaned
casually against my door.
The Doneys, mother and son, worked in the kitchen. She really
had mother love to come to a place like Misery to be able to keep
him with her. Alfred was retarded and looked like Mickey Rooney.
He could have been any age, short, with vacant pink rabbit eyes and
a high-pitched voice. His hair was cut under a bowl like a medieval
monk. Mrs. Doney was as small as he, far older, with a shock of
steel gray hair also chopped like a monk. She was sharp and but for
Alfred would have taken the first bus out, migrating to some trailer
park down among some sheltering palms in Sarasota or Phoenix. We
were not allowed to speak to the lay help, especially this one female,
but Mrs. Doney repeated within all earshot, loud enough and often
enough for the dead to hear, that for us boys she had given up on
ever having her sunglasses, her beautician’s rinse, and her Mai Tai. I

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