Page 276 - What They Did to the Kid

264 Jack Fritscher

the best little boy in the world, up on the altar serving the priest at
Midnight Mass and ringing the altar bells and swinging the incense
in the faces of two thousand parishioners. Oh, Lord, I prayed, I can’t
trust anyone. They all hide their true feelings. They never really
cared what I did: go or stay. It’s Your birthday, but I’m the babe in the
manger. I withdrew. They all lied to me. We fell into a drifted bank.
My father, in tears, said, “If you had left Misericordia, ten years
ago, five years ago, but now, so close to Ordination.” My mother said
to my father, “Honey, Ryan didn’t know for sure till now.” Mother
and child. “Whatever,” my father said, “you want, son.” Kids my
age, Danny and Barbara Boyle, stared at me. I had run from them
after grade school. They never let poor Rudolph. I had not penetrated
to the deepest fraternities of Misery. Play in any reindeer games. I
was isolated, alone. Star of wonder. I had run from the seminarians
at Misery. Star of might. The huge gap I felt separating the clergy
from the laity was the same huge gap separating me from those
pietistic twits at Misericordia. They would never change from how
I left them. They lived to fight their tattling way up through the
ambitious pecking order of opera clubs, the cliques of the Gregorian
choir, and who was holy enough, with enough martinet snap, to be
the showy Master of Ceremonies at Ordination services. Guide us
with your perfect light. I was not Misericordia. I was not Peoria. I was
on my own.
Except for the draft board. The day after Christmas, I walked
into the Selective Service office and asked to change my exemption
from “1Y” for “theology student” to a regular student deferment.
“A deferment for a big, healthy, strong boy like you? With Krush-
chev running around? And Castro? Ha ha ha.” The lady who ran
the draft board had steel-gray hair combed back into a D.A. “I have
15,000 boys,” she said, “in Southeast Asia. Ha ha ha.” She typed up
a new draft card that said “1A.”
Some group was always wanting me to join up body and blood.
The huge snowdrifts across the flat land of the Midwestern win-
ter cracked. My life was a silent movie. I faced an ice floe of danger-
ous bergs: Misery behind, Peoria present, the draft board tomorrow,
girls forever. At Misery, my vocation was on the line. Ten days out-
side of Misery, my life was on the line. My draft card ticked in my

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