Page 71 - Demo

%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 59choosing him our class president the fourth day of our freshman year, and everyone realizing by the fourth month what a mistake that was.%u201cI came back with some educational reading materials.%u201d He opened his suitcase, which hadn%u2019t been unpacked. %u201cRemember the clipping Rector Karg posted on the bulletin board last month about the Hungarian Revolt?%u201d%u201cI read about it over the holidays,%u201d I said. We saw no newspapers September to June. Television sets were so new and expensive that no priests at Misery had television, and even if stores had given sets away, television was too worldly for us to watch. The radio in our recreation room could only be turned on, by a priest, with permission, for sports or opera broadcasts.%u201cLook at these,%u201d Porky said, producing a notebook pasted fat with clippings like nothing personal I ever had hidden in my little old shoe box of souvenirs from the world. %u201cThe Commies shoved the rebels through meat grinders and washed them out through the sewers. Look at this one, Madam Meatball. She shoved glass rods inside the men prisoners and broke the rod so they felt like they were dying when they urinated.%u201d%u201cThat I didn%u2019t read,%u201d I said. Could printed words about bad women cause impure thoughts like dirty pictures?%u201cGlass rods like chemistry class?%u201d Dempsey asked.%u201cThat%u2019s nothing.%u201d Porky retrieved the notebook.%u201cThe sins committed in a country%u2019s name,%u201d I said.%u201cYou bet your sweet life,%u201d Porky agreed. %u201cMy brother was in the War and he says the Nazis nailed American soldiers to trees right through the groin.%u201d%u201cStop,%u201d I said.%u201cThen tied wire around their waists to jeeps and drove away.%u201d%u201cGod!%u201d Dempsey breathed.%u201cDo you guys know any more about this stuff?%u201d Porky was breathing through his mouth.%u201cIt sounds like the sufferings of the saints in The Roman Martyrology,%u201d I said. Every noon, as we sat looking down at our meal, a priest read aloud how the early Christian martyrs were tortured and killed. Saint Agatha had her breasts torn off one day, and by the next lunch, forty Roman soldiers who had converted to Christianity were left exposed to die naked on a frozen lake. %u201cAll of them perished,%u201d the Martyrology said, %u201cexcept for one soldier who renounced Christianity and then died anyway in a bath of tepid water.%u201dSuddenly, the room shook.