Page 261 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 249

PeterPeterPeter returned to say the Mass for the Dead over the cof-
fin of his brother. Their father, who had once been a boy at Misery,
sobbed on the arm of their sobbing mother. The choir and the sine-
cure of Gregorian chanters made the hymn “Dies Irae, The Day of
Wrath,” into pure opera.
Rector Karg preached that death was God’s will. “You should all
be happy that Hank is in heaven, having died in the state of grace,
a good seminarian. He will never be a priest, but he is God’s new
saint.”
All the boys were whimpering, but I cried out in real despair.
He’d fub duck, but somehow he’d won. Saint Hank.
Ka-boom.
Even so, tonguing my new teeth, I loved the mud flowing
through his death.
Now that was irony!

The next morning, two boys, smoking cigarettes in the attic
where Karg stored dead priests’ stuff, found Father Polistina, Mis-
ery’s mystic, hanging, dead, naked, from a rafter, swinging above
an overturned chair. The rope around his neck was the rope he had
worn for years wrapped tight three-times around his waist, knot-
ted every six inches, to rub his skin raw and calloused for penance,
to remind him always under his clothes of the suffering of Christ.
Karg buried the overworked Polistina, his kind, without ceremony,
always, under cover of night, kill themselves, and he was never men-
tioned again.

October 22, 1963

At table in the refectory, eight of us sat at supper laughing and talk-
ing over a pupgullion of noodles and boiled meat.
“Can you guess,” I said, “what happened a year ago today?”
Ski stared straight ahead. Minus Hank.
“It was a year ago today,” I said, “that Gunn first let us listen to
the radio while we ate lunch and supper.”
“It was a month ago today,” Ski said, “that Tank disappeared.”

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