Page 254 - What They Did to the Kid

242 Jack Fritscher

They said, If priests don’t know, who does? I envied them. I suspected
their particular answers lay in themselves particularly.
Irony, the sin of irony, if irony is a sin, was rusting the edges of
my soul. The other seminarian, probably Hank’s spy, the pipeline to
PeterPeterPeter, told me so. God! What must Vatican politics be like
at Saint PeterPeterPeter’s Basilica in Rome!
The people pulled at my black cassock in the poor parish church,
tugged at my Roman collar on the street, shredded my soul to bits
seeking the Jesus-comfort in me. They took Communion on me,
and the other priests, and left satisfied, for awhile, until some next
great hunger called them back.
“A priest,” Father O’Farrell said, “needs a spiritual life. Anyone
dedicated to public service needs a spiritual life to survive.” Very
Jack. Very Kennedy. Ask not!
The work was hard. Very hard. Self-effacing. A priest’s work is
not about the priest. A priest must be all things to all men. A priest,
who is truly another Christ, must remember eventually he will be
crucified. A priest must give the people everything, including the
hammer and nails. Black or white made no difference when life
squeezes a person down to scary questions about what happens when
we die, or worse, fearful terrible questions about what happens when
we do what we have to do to survive in dirt and poverty and crime.
I got what I wanted. An element of blank. I became some black-
dressed Jesus-blur, a two-hundred-pound old lady, nice old lady,
regarded maybe more kindly than the older priests in residence,
because I was a young seminarian, help me, she begged, a terribly
serious white boy, my son done gone, a jokey transient peckerwood
novelty, cleaning her up from excrement, of the long hot summer
that peaked in the heat of August, changing the sheets. The priests in
the house, remembering Dempsey pretending he was cleaning up Jesus,
were kind that I was not up to their speed in civil rights experience,
a future time exists, she said, when you are already dead, even though
I had marched with them and The Woodland Organization, learn-
ing on foot in the streets the words and rhythms and meaning of
“We Shall Overcome,” and sat in at Mayor Daley’s office, where
the marble floor was cool, cooler than the humid air, she was the old
religion of conjure voodoo, until the police dragged us out, women and

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