Page 294 - What They Did to the Kid

282 Jack Fritscher

sifted down through the ring of cyclone fence. Men in blue twill
stood smoking near the time clock, jowls grizzled from the third
shift, but scrubbed fresh in the workers’ shower.
I waited near them, glad to be in from the morning cold, listen-
ing to their words, trying to find what was to be expected in another
new segment of my life. I would make a go of this, the same as my
new school. I had to know what I was. I had to push myself in every
direction. I had functioned well in the sweet security of the Church,
claiming I had a vocation only God could under write.
I had to know if I had self-reliance, on my own, nothing mystical
to fall back on. No terrible sweet ecclesiastical security to remove
the ordinary tensions of existence. I willed to worry about food and
a roof. Every new meeting made me further incarnate in the world.
I watched the men each push his timecard into the clock.
Chunk-ping! They were faces marked by their lives, same as every-
one else. On Ordination days when the new priests’ brothers came, I
always wondered at the telling differences life, not heredity, wreaked.
Two brothers with the same bland faces as babies grow up marked
with a difference, because the one sells used cars and the other says
Holy Mass. The lay brother’s skin is different, creased in premature
lines, like my brother Thom’s, about mouths and eyes that have
tasted and seen and coped with the stress of real life. If it weren’t for
their vocation, I knew seminarians who’d stand in this same line,
chunk-pinging their days like their fathers and brothers, not getting
plumper in rectories claiming to be gourmet chefs. They flashed
the ID of their priestly vocation like a passport exempting them
from the slow-ticking clock on the factory wall. No one, not even
Rector Karg, Papal Chamberlain, not even the Pope, the new one,
Paul VI, could tell if they were palming off a forgery of a vocation.
Where spirituality leaves off and social climbing begins is a thin red
passive-aggressive line.
I was led deep into the innards of the plant, a movie set right out
of Metropolis that I’d seen at the Chicago Film Society. In the sec-
tion producing malt syrup only the center of the rooms was lighted.
The walls receded into murky darkness. Half the malt building was
storied, floor above open floor, with the steel skeletal anatomy of
the cannery. Empty tin cans rattled down forever, cause and effect,

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