Page 42 - What They Did to the Kid

30 Jack Fritscher

“You got a jock?”
“You know,” Peter motioned, “a jockstrap. A bag for your bowl-
ing balls.”
“Sure,” I lied. “Sure I got one.” I didn’t know what they were
talking about.
“Good,” Hank said. “You better. Because if you don’t, when you
die all maimed up, Saint Finger will wave his Peter at you. Or is it...
hell, I never can keep it straight.”
I wanted to change the subject because this was impure. I had
only been at the seminary three hours, had watched my family
drive off in our big blue Hudson, and people who were going to
be priests were talking impure. “Where’d you say you were from in
Pennsylvania?”
“What’s it to you, Pee-oh-ree-ahh?” Hank said. “Up yours, I
guess.” He ran off, leaving Peter staring at me.
“Pittsburgh,” he said. “Ever been there?”
“This is as far East as I’ve ever been.”
“Hank always did like a good pimping,” Peter said. “Why not
let’s go inside and see who’s here?”
We walked from the garden out across the playing fields. Intense
blue sky outlined the huge red brick buildings. I was seeing Miseri-
cordia Seminary for the first time. The green bronze cap of the bell
tower pointed twenty stories high, up and over the hive of buildings
at its foot. From miles away, people could see the gold cross on top
rise above the surrounding Ohio woods and farmland, a tower of
German Catholicism on the American prairie.
Below the imposing tower, gray slate roofs covered all the build-
ings, including the high-vaulted chapel roof from which, Peter said,
a mason had fallen and been killed during construc tion in 1907.
Lower, but tall at four stories were the buildings with classrooms
on the first and second floors, and dormitories above. The door-
ways and windows were framed in limestone set into the red brick.
The refectory where we ate was a huge Gothic building with leaded
glass windows. Miles of long corridors and tunnels connected all the
buildings exactly like my father’s best friend, a Mason, had predicted.
The Gibraltar-like front-entrance building where the priests
lived, each in a small apart ment, continued, Peter said, “the formal

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