Good Graces

Chapter Twenty-five

I never did get around to telling Dave that he should take out the corn he planted in Daddy’s memory. He did okay for his first try. The stalks are tall and tassled. Fireflies are flickering around the leaves and the smell of the damp dirt is almost as strong as the smell of the cookies drifting over from the factory tonight.

When Troo comes trailing after me into our yard, she doesn’t sail past me like I’m part of the scenery the way she’s been doing. She sits down next to me on the glider, picks up my hand off my lap and squeezes it so hard, which is something she used to do back in the olden days when she got scared of one thing or another, mostly the boogeyman, who doesn’t seem to bother her in the least anymore.

With our sunburned shoulders so close together, we watch the breeze flutter the corn and remember the good old days. How I’d sit in Daddy’s lap on the back porch after supper, smelling hard work on his sky-blue shirt. He’d wrap one of his hands around a cold bottle of beer and his other arm around me and we’d listen to a baseball game coming out of the Motorola radio that would light up his face the same way dawn did when he’d head out to the fields on his red tractor like a conquering hero. I know that Troo is picturing how her and Daddy made mustaches out of the tassles and that he always grew maroon Indian corn just for her because it matched the color of her hair. When August came, acres and acres of his hard work would wave outside our kitchen window like we lived on the shores of a green sea. We all looked so forward to the first of the corn. The taste of a just-picked cob, the salty butter dripping off our chins. Daddy’s triumphant look when we told him it was the best we ever had.

Even with my sister by my side, I haven’t felt this alone since the night I waited for his car to come down our road back from the game at County Stadium. Troo is remembering the crash, too, but she’d never admit it, even if I say to her, It’s not true what everybody says about time healing all wounds. My heart… it feels like it’s permanently cracked, doesn’t yours?

“Sal, my gal,” Troo says, twining her fingers around mine. “I got a little surprise for ya. I was gonna save it, but I think… yeah, wait here.”

She goes to the garage and kicks two times on the door that Dave keeps trying to remember to fix. I can hear her rummaging around in there and then a long scraping sound on the cement floor and a few swear words.

After she switches off the light and the yard turns black again, she calls, “Close your eyes.” I can hear her grunt as she drags something across the grass. The nearer she gets to me, that rusty smell she’s had on her a couple of the times she’s snuck back into bed in the middle of the night gets stronger and stronger. “Okay.” Troo claps her hands just once. “Open saysme.”

Right in front of me, the moon catching it just right, is something else that I thought was long gone. I reach out and run my fingers across the worn-down green seat to make sure it’s not my imagination, but Daddy’s and my bench from the zoo feels real.

“But… I went back to look for it and it was gone,” I say. Those kids in Fatima who were paid the miracle visitation by the Blessed Virgin couldn’t have felt any more awestruck than I do. “I… I thought it got destroyed by the men with the bulldozers.”

“I know you did.” Troo is puffed up. “Mary Lane and me… we went and got it. Her dad told us they were just gonna throw it out, so we carried it all the way down Lloyd Street in the middle of the night so nobody would see us and blab the surprise. Onree let us keep it behind the drugstore for a while and then last week all three of us brought it the rest of the way,” she says. “Dave told me it was okay to keep it in the garage.” When I don’t get up right away because all the amazement I am feeling seems to have settled in my heinie, she shoves me on the shoulder and says, “Whatcha waitin’ for?”

After I get up from the glider and ease down in the middle of the bench, leaving the spot empty where Daddy always sat, Troo quickly curls up on the other side of me and says, “Feelin’ better?” She reaches up to pat me on the top of my head. “I sure am.” Of course she is. There’s just about nothing in the whole world that Troo adores more next to scaring the life outta somebody and bushwacks than having a plan and making it stick. “It’s good you’re sittin’ down. I gotta tell you something really bad,” she says.

She’s finally gonna come clean about her cat-stealing. They’re always telling us at church that confession is good for the soul so I should let her get it off her chest, but I’ve got Troo in one of her once-in-a-blue-moon generous moods. “Before you do that, could you do one more really nice thing for me?”

That catches her off guard. I don’t usually ask her for favors because the chance of getting one is too slim.

Troo says, “But… I need to… fine. I’ll go out to the new zoo to see that dumb gorilla with you, but if you start cryin’ and wavin’ at him, I’m warnin’ you, I’ll… I’ll…”

I hook a chunk of her hair that’s fallen in her eyes behind her ear and say, “That’s really sweet, but that’s not what I was gonna ask you.” I have thought this through already over ten times. I let it out in a rush so Troo can’t interrupt. “I want you to climb through our bedroom window, get Mrs. Galecki’s emerald necklace out of your sock and stick it back under her bed. Nobody’d have to know that you stole it.”

“What?!” Troo flies up off the bench, flapping her arms, legs going every which way. “What… what are you talkin’ about? Who told you I stole it?”

“I… I…” Nobody did. I was just so sure, but now… the look on her face, she can’t fake that one. That’s her genuine, you-better-not-be-callin’-me-a-liar-or-I’ll-sock-you-in-the-breadbox look. “Didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t!”

“Then who did?”

“That’s what I’ve been tryin’ to tell you, if you’d shut up and listen!” She is so agitated, she can barely get out, “Father Mickey. He stole the necklace.”

“Trooper,” I say, shaking my head low and slow. She’s mad at him, and trying to shift the blame onto somebody else the way she always does when she gets caught doing something bad. Father Mickey couldn’ta snuck into Mrs. Galecki’s bedroom to take the necklace because Ethel’s got eyes in back of her head. But then I remember that’s not exactly true. She isn’t watching every minute of every day. When Mrs. Galecki goes down for her long afternoon nap, Ethel leaves to do grocery shopping at the Kroger or over to the drugstore to get the medicines. During one of Father Mickey’s visits would be another good time to get those errands done.

Still flapping, Troo says, “I thought you already knew about… Mary Lane bragged that she filled you in when she ran into you up near church, didn’t she?”

I nod. Reluctantly. She’s gonna blow a gasket when she hears me admit that.

“Goddamn it all! That bigmouth Lane, she’s always trying to prove she’s better than…” My sister is pacing fast in front of the bench, punching her fist into her hand. “I was gonna tell you all about the altar boys and Father Mickey and… and the rest of it over at the Latours’ last night, but you never showed up and now-”

“Shhh, shhh, you gotta lower your voice. They’re gonna hear you.” I point to the house. The kitchen curtains are closed, but the light is on above the sink so we can see the outlines of Dave, Mother and Ethel sitting around the table. “Why don’t you…” I pat the bench.

Troo takes her time, but when she sits back down, she shoots me a hurt look that you never see much on her face anymore and takes one of her L &M’s from her shorts’ back pocket. I almost ask her for one. Cigarettes might smell like a cat box, but they seem to round the rough edges for everyone and I think I’m going to need a little smoothing.

“I bet Mary Lane didn’t tell me everything,” I say. “Start at the very beginning.”

Troo strikes a match, thinks about that for a minute and says, “The first time I went up to the rectory for my extra religious instructions, the doorbell rang and when Father Mickey went to answer it, I did, ya know, what I do.” She means she snooped like she always does in Mother’s dressing table and my notebooks and Nell’s closet and only God knows where else. “I pulled out the drawers of Father’s desk and in the top two there was only notebooks, but in the bottom one, I found Mr. Livingston’s fancy silver belt buckle.”

I gasp. “Did he… did Father catch you looking through his stuff?” The thought of him coming up on her from behind the way Bobby did last summer makes the whole backyard feel like it dived underwater. I can barely breathe.

Troo shakes her head and says, “By the time he came back from paying the paper boy, I was already back in the chair memorizing the parts of the missal he gave me to learn.”

“Didn’t you wonder what he was doin’ with Mr. Livingston’s buckle?” I ask.

She shrugs. “I figured Father found it in church or something and was goin’ to give it back, but then I heard that it’d been stolen and I… I didn’t know what to think.”

My sister has gone pale. I dab the sweat beads off her forehead with my fingertips. I don’t want to upset her more than she already is and she can get snooty if you push her, so I’m going to try and let her unravel what she’s got to tell me in her own time.

“After that first visit, Father and me never studied religion again.” Troo lets out the longest exhale. “We played hangman and tic-tac-toe and he made me cherry Kool-Aid, but mostly… we talked.”

“You talked? About what?” I ask, finding that a little hard to believe. Priests don’t usually have conversations with kids. They just tell them they’re going to hell if they aren’t good and obey their parents and stuff like that.

Troo says, “He seemed so interested in me, Sal. He wanted to know what I thought about this and that. Like the Braves. The neighborhood. We talked about everything. Even Daddy.” She takes an extra long drag off her L &M. “I told him how much I hated Dave and how mad I was at Helen and…” She probably cried, but she’d never tell me if she did. “He gave me a hug and promised that he’d make sure that Mother never got the annulment letter and… I believed him.”

The heart of the matter, that’s what this is.

Troo says, “That’s how come when Father asked me to keep my ears open around Dave and report back to him what was goin’ on in the cat burglar investigation, I told him I would.”

“Didn’t you think that was kinda weird?” I ask. I sure do. Usually when somebody asks her to do anything she tells them where to go.

“Kinda,” Troo says, puffing away. “Until he explained to me that the reason he was so interested in the burglaries was because he studies wrongdoing. He told me it’s important to know thy enemy.”

I would have to agree with him.

My sister says, “I…I swear. I didn’t know then that he had something to do with the stealing. I just wanted to return the favor, ya know, for him being so… oh, I don’t know.” I do. Father made her feel the same way Daddy used to. Number one on the hit parade. Not second fiddle like she sees herself now. “So after that, every time I went up to the rectory, I told him everything I heard Dave tell Helen about the burglaries and what I heard him talk about with Detective Riordan on the telephone. Father seemed so happy to hear that, but… but then he broke his promise and brought the annulment letter to Helen anyway.”

Because of mental telepathy, I know she was also thinking that if she fed Father tidbits about the cat burglar case it would make it harder for Dave to solve the case. He would have to spend more time on the job and less time with Mother and that might get her steamed enough to call the wedding off.

Oh, Troo.

After letting all that sink in, I say, because I’m itchin’ to know, “But what does any of this have to do with Mrs. Galecki’s necklace? How did you get a hold of it?”

“I’m gettin’ to that.” She taps off her ash. “On the Fourth, on my way up to Granny’s to get my Eiffel Tower costume, I stopped by the rectory and went through a window into Father Mickey’s office. I knew he wouldn’t be there, that he’d be over at the park helpin’ get everything ready for the parade. I was so mad, Sal. I… I was gonna take the belt buckle outta the drawer-I don’t know what I was gonna do with it, but when I looked for it in the desk, it was gone.” I am biting my nails over how brave she is. “So I searched around for something else I could take. I couldn’t believe it when I found Mrs. Galecki’s necklace stuffed behind some books. I didn’t know how Father got a hold of that either, but tit for tat. I took it.” Troo inhales her cigarette smoke up through her nose, which is so French. “I think he stills likes her.”

“Mrs. Galecki? Why wouldn’t he?” Sure she can be kind of annoying, sometimes she coughs for fifteen minutes at a stretch, but she’s still one of his flock.

“Not her,” Troo says. “Helen.”

She looks up and into the kitchen window. I hope Dave and Mother put cold water in a bucket for Ethel’s bunion feet and are saying uplifting things to her. If I was in there, I would sing about the ant moving the rubber tree because it’s got such high hopes. Ethel really likes that song. She sings it to Mrs. Galecki when she’s spraying her thinning hair tall with Aqua Net every morning.

“Before Mother started going out with Dave in high school, her and Father Mickey were hot and heavy,” Troo says. “Aunt Betty told me during rummy.”

“Yeah, she told me something like that, too.”

Up at the Five and Dime the same day she surprised me with the news that Father was from the neighborhood, Aunt Betty winked at me and said, “M.P.G. could give a girl the ride of her life. Ask your mother.”

I’ve got so many questions that I don’t know which one to pick. It’s like trying to decide which candy to buy outta the case at the Five and Dime. Troo looks so petered out, but I gotta know all of it if I’m gonna help her outta the jam she’s gotten herself into.

“Do you know how Father’s makin’ the altar boys be cats?” I ask. Even though we have fate in the Catholic Church, we also got free will. I’m not sure where one starts and the other takes over, but it seems to me that the boys could have told the priest that they didn’t want to steal.

Troo points up to the western sky. The stars tonight look close enough to put in my pocket and save for a rainy day. “The Big Dipper and the Little Dipper.”

Daddy used to say that they reminded him of us.

I squeeze her hand harder than she’s squeezing mine. “Tell me. How’s Father makin’ the boys steal?”

Troo says, “Artie told me down at Honey Creek on the Fourth that before he ran away, Charlie Fitch told him that Father threatened the altar boys. Told them that he’d kick ’em out of school if they didn’t steal for him.”

He can do that. Our pastor is the boss of everything, not only the church and the nuns, but the school, and everybody in the neighborhood.

I say, “But Charlie, he didn’t have a house of his own and there’s nothin’ good to take out of the orphanage.” When our Brownie troop went up to St. Jude’s to sing Christmas carols to those poor kids, the place reminded me of the dump near the farm.

Troo says, “You know that antique railroad watch Mr. Honeywell’s got? The one he’s always braggin’ about? Father told Charlie that the second after he got adopted he’d have to steal it and if he didn’t, Father would make sure the Honeywells picked another kid from the litter.”

Poor Charlie. He really was caught between a rock and a hard place. “Do you think after he ran away that he… um… got his head chopped off or eaten by a bear or-?”

“Jesus, Sal. Quit bein’ so fuckin’ weird,” Troo says. “Fitch is fine. He’s livin’ in the country in this place called Fredonia. Artie got a letter from him a couple of weeks ago.”

“Why’d he go there?” I ask. I never even heard of the place.

“Remember booger-eatin’ Teddy Jaeger?”

I nod. He’s kinda hard to forget.

“After he got adopted, him and Charlie became pen pals,” Troo says. “That’s where Charlie went to get away from Father Mickey. When he showed up at Teddy’s new home, the mother and father told him he could stay for the rest of the summer and help them sell vegetables outta their roadside stand.”

I don’t doubt that for a second. If those people were charitable enough to adopt finger-up-his-nose Teddy Jaeger, Charlie Fitch musta seemed like the guy from The Millionaire showing up at their front door.

After I think some more about everything she’s been telling me, I come up with one more question. “But why didn’t the altar boys just tell their mothers or fathers or… or the police that Father Mickey was makin’ them steal against their will?” We’re not exactly big on that kind of thing around here, we’re supposed to fight our own battles, but this is sort of a special situation where you might want to call in the cavalry.

“The altar boys are dumb, but they’re not that stupid,” Troo says, flicking her cigarette into the grass. “They knew nobody would take their word over a priest’s.”

She’s right, of course. Even if they gave confessions signed in blood. The boys also had to know that their parents would punish them within an inch of their lives just for saying something so bad about Father. No one would believe the four of us either if we wanted to tell on him. Mary Lane is a famous no-tripper storyteller and I have a problem with flights of imagination and Troo, everybody thinks she is the next Bonnie from Bonnie and Clyde, and Artie Latour, they’d say anything he heard from Charlie Fitch about Father Mickey was wrong due to him being a half-deaf mess.

Even Dave, who is the fairest person I know, wouldn’t take us seriously. He couldn’t believe us over Father Mickey even if he wanted to. It’s against his religion. If I got up off this bench and marched into the kitchen to tell him everything Troo just told me, he’d look helplessly across the table at Mother and she would say, “Get out the cod liver oil and a serving spoon,” or she might slap me across the face. That’s what she did when I told her that I hated God after Daddy died. And when Troo came home from school rubbing the back of her noggin, complaining that Sister Imelda whacked her so hard with the back of a geography book that she was still seeing the Canary Islands, Mother told her, “Take out the garbage.”

They can’t help it. The Lord thy God comes before all others and the same goes for anybody who works for Him.

Completely tuckered out from all this telling, Troo drops her head into my lap and stares up at the sky. I am feeling ashamed of myself as I pet the top of Daddy’s and my bench. When Troo disappeared outta our bed those nights, I thought at first that she was out looking for Greasy Al. Then I was positive that she was stealing. I was so sure she was up to no good. It never crossed my mind she could be up to good.

Troo asks, “You believe me?”

“Yeah.”

My sister lets out a sigh that lets me know that’s a real load off her mind.

“Mary Lane told me that Mr. Fazio is a gangster and she thinks Father owes him money for gamblin’,” I ask. “Do you think that’s true?”

My sister says, “I know it is. I didn’t understand what I was seein’ when I went through Father Mickey’s desk drawer, but in those notebooks I found… there was a long list of all these numbers with dollar signs and dates. They had to be bets. Uncle Paulie used to have a notebook just like that. Remember?”

I didn’t until just now. It was blue. He always had it with him before the crash. When he was a bookie and not a pin setter. So many times, I watched him slide it in and out of his back pocket where he keeps his Popsicle sticks now.

Troo says, “I… we can’t let Father get away with this. Not just for lyin’ to me, but the altar boys and… everybody in the parish. He betrayed all of us, Sal. The same way Judas did Jesus.”

I know where she’s headed and it’s not down the straight-and-narrow path. Father Mickey is who I suspected Troo was going after with a vengeance because he got Mother the annulment, but now she’s got even more reasons to balance the scales.

I bring my face down to hers and use my strictest voice. “I know what he did was bad, but you can’t go after him. He’s a priest. What if he-”

Troo cuts me off with, “I already decided.” She’s got that steely glint in her eyes. “I got me a plan.”

Those are the exact same words she used when she told Mary Lane and me last summer that she wanted to go after Bobby Brophy and we all know how good that turned out. Troo probably already figured out a way to cut the ropes on the heavy crucifix that hangs above the altar so it will come crashing down on Father while he’s saying Mass or maybe she’ll knock him over the head with an incense burner or hide a cherry bomb in the sacristy or…

“You with me?” she asks.

Even though I know whatever revenge scheme she’s come up with to get back at Father Mickey doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Miami Beach, I stroke her hair and tell her the way I always do, the way a good sister should, “Always and forever.”