Page 238 - What They Did to the Kid

226 Jack Fritscher

sheet music. Forty-nine singing boys, minus me, had run down to
congratulate the new priests or to roam curiously among the guests.
Rector Karg, seeing the crowd receding, walked purposefully behind
the altar to the sacristy. I could hear him sputtering, roaring at find-
ing the seminarian sacristans drinking unconsecrated altar wine, on
this special day, right from the jug. Even some of the visitors noticed.
I was happy he screamed at everyone and not only me. I figured the
Pope knew Karg was crazy, and that made him infallibly crazy, and
made me suspicious of Papal Infallibility.
I pushed open an old door behind the organ pipes in the choir
loft. It led through a neglected attic stacked, creepy, with boxes of
dead priests’ effects, to another door that opened outside to a high
parapet on the upper church. A hot rectangle of sun spilled into the
dark cool of the attic. Pigeons cooed, flapped, flew up, and circled.
Swallows swooped to farther battlements or perched far below at
gabletop on the limestone crosses of Misery. The world fell down and
away from this upper porch, down the falling lines of stone, across
the slate-roof dormers, down the ancient red-brick walls to the green
firs and red cannas and cement walks dotted with visitors.
Men in suits stood near willowy girls in dresses that lifted and
floated in the spring breeze. Little groups crowded together, lined
up smiling in front of cameras, and surged in circles around newly
ordained sons. Junior seminarians, high-school boys in ironed black
slacks and starched white shirts, and college seminarians in black
cassocks with red sashes, moved through the throngs of visitors. All
the boys were on their best behavior. Rector Karg told us to act like
hosts to the visitors to Misery, because you never knew when one of
them might die and leave a bequest large enough to fund one boy’s
entire twelve years of education.
“Every boy must replace his scholarship,” Rector Karg said. “If
you can’t secure a bequest, you’ll have to repay Misericordia yourself.”
The threat was considerable because most priests earned no more
than a hundred dollars a month.
I stood on Misery’s rooftop looking down on the world below.
God Himself must have such a view, and from God’s perspective I
watched all those people down on the lawn. Unlike God, I could
not will them to move or not move, to wave or not wave, to open car

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