Wingshooters (8 page)

“Now
that
dog,” he said, nodding at Brett, “that dog wouldn’t have had any trouble. He would’ve thought the gander was playing, and body-checked him right back. Probably would have gone and tried to warm the nest of babies. Probably would’ve cuddled right up with the goose and the gander.”

Brett lifted his head and looked at us even more alertly; he knew we were talking about him. I gave him a ball to carry and helped my grandfather load our equipment back into the car. Brett’s eyes were already getting that bloodshot look they got when he was tired, and both of us were fast asleep by the time we hit the town limits. Then I felt Charlie jostle me. “Wake up, Mike, wake up!” He’d pulled into the Kmart parking lot, and I didn’t know why we were stopping until I smelled the bratwurst cooking; someone had set up a grill in front of the store. That woke me up fast and we tumbled out of the car. We each ate two brats smothered with ketchup, mustard, and sauerkraut, and my grandfather had a beer. After we finished he said, “Don’t tell your grandma—she’ll be sore at us for spoiling our appetites.” He gave me a crooked grin, a bit of sauerkraut stuck in his teeth. I felt like the luckiest kid in the world.

My sense of well-being lasted into the following day. I didn’t even mind that we were going to church, which normally would have filled me with dread. Church was the one thing we did for my grandmother; it was clear that our attendance was important to her. She was religious in a deeply felt, personal way that had little to do with conventional displays of belief or the expected social mores of church attendance. No, faith was something my grandmother harbored in private, like secret love. Sometimes I’d catch her reading the Bible when I came home from school, and she’d quickly slip it into a drawer. My grandmother’s feelings for Jesus were intense almost to the point of being romantic; the only times I ever saw passion in her face were when she looked at her carving of Him on the cross.

But she didn’t actually speak much about her beliefs; she just made us go to church, as if simply by putting ourselves in His presence, we’d grow to love Him, too. Charlie’s feelings about the church appeared to be more dutiful than religious, and although I believed in God, I did not believe, as my grandmother did, that He could redeem the sins of man. My grandmother didn’t try to shape my views herself, although she had, one day the previous spring, enlisted the efforts of her grandniece Geri, whose own brand of faith was more exacting, and who’d driven all the way over from Steven’s Point to try and save my soul.

“You have got to give your life up to Jesus, child,” Geri had said in her booming voice. She sat on my grandfather’s sofa, facing me, while he paced back and forth in the dining room. My grandmother had put me in her own recliner, where I felt tiny and enveloped; she had pulled a chair up in front of the television, which was turned on but soundless, and was looking back and forth between Geri and me.

Geri continued. “I’m only telling this to help you, Michelle. Your father ain’t done his job of it.”

I looked at a spot on the floor directly between us. But even out of the corner of my eye I could see her short, stubby body, her baby-blue suit, the plastic feather in her dime-store hat.

“Devote your life to Lord Jesus the Savior, and He will pull you out from the flames of oblivion.”

My grandmother broke in. “Now, Geri, don’t scare her.”

Geri looked at her. “Aunt Helen, I’m only trying to help salvage what’s probably already beyond salvaging.” She turned back and fixed me with a heavy expression. “You’re a half-breed, child, with dirty yellow blood, but Jesus can save you.”

My grandfather came storming into the living room. “Now wait a minute, Geri. You just hold off a minute. You don’t talk like that to my grandchild in my own damned house.”

She looked up at him, eyes flat. “Charlie, you may have no concern over the state of this child’s soul, but I do.” She turned to my grandmother. “He doesn’t have Jesus in him either, Helen.”

My grandfather leaned over her, fists clenched. “What the hell makes you think—”

“That’s probably why Stewart got confused,” Geri sniffed, ignoring him. “That poor lost boy. First he goes and marries a Jap, of all things. And then they have a child …”

“Now, Geri, I don’t think …” my grandmother said, rising.

“… and then he just runs off and
leaves
her.”

My grandmother stared at her, hurt and surprised. “But he’s coming back,” she said. “He’s coming back for her soon.”

Geri gave her a look of infinite patience. “Oh, Helen. Do you really believe that?”

There was a heavy silence for one moment, two. Then my grandfather thrust his finger toward the door. “Get out,” he said evenly. “Get out of my house.”

She glared at him, kissed my grandmother, and left through the front door. Neither of my grandparents moved. I looked past them at the television, where a lumbering, muted Elvis Presley sweated and sang, heaving in his sideburns and his bright white suit. We heard Geri’s car start up, heard it pull away.

“Crazy bitch,” Charlie said when she was gone.

But whatever Charlie thought of Geri or of my grandmother’s faith, he never argued about going to church. The morning after we played baseball, I put on a pair of clean pants and a blouse—I never wore a dress—and met my grandparents in the kitchen.

We drove to church and found that Mass was being held outside, in the park across the street. This made me think the same thing I had thought during the summer—that I liked God better when the weather was warm. I saw a few of my classmates, including Missy Calloway and Brady Grimson; but while they noticed me, they didn’t say hello. Several other people saw me, frowned, and steered their children away.

We found Uncle Pete and Aunt Bertha under a tree about forty feet in front of Father Pace. I was surprised that they had gotten there ahead of us. Uncle Pete was usually late for everything, to the annoyance of the women, but it was impossible to really get angry about it because he was always so cheerful, so happy to tell you about the great half-inning on TV or the fishing hole he’d found or the project in the woodshed that had made him lose track of time. But he was there before us that day, and when we approached, he pinched my cheek, slapped Charlie on the back, and moved over to make room for our chairs.

Church was not my favorite place to spend a Sunday. I don’t know whether my resistance had to do with the Mass itself, or with how the church leadership had responded to my parents and me. My father still believed in God, I knew, but his faith had changed, or maybe his God had, to one who cared about the poor and unfortunate and who welcomed all His children. That was not the God worshipped in Deerhorn. When my parents had tried to come to Mass during one of their visits, a deacon had told them in no uncertain terms that the church did not acknowledge their marriage. And the first time my grandparents had brought me to church the previous year, that same deacon had informed them that I wasn’t welcome. This news wasn’t exactly taken kindly by my grandfather, who’d pressed the deacon on his reasoning, and then, upon hearing that my mother’s non-Christian background made me ineligible to be a Catholic, had responded—right there in church, loud enough for the whole congregation to hear—that the deacon’s pro-nouncement was “bullshit.” The result was that I stayed for the rest of that service and was allowed to come back the next week. My grandparents never spoke to that deacon again, and now rarely even spoke to Father Pace. But they were Catholic, and there was no other Catholic church in town, so they still took out their money when the collection basket came around, and still showed up for ten o’clock Mass.

A few minutes after ten, Father Pace stepped up and adjusted the microphone. He was a tall, thin man, with dark hair that sprouted from the backs of his hands and thick eyebrows that looked like living creatures growing out of his forehead. He didn’t smile much, not even during the meet-and-greet session after the service was over, and he was not—if this is any measure of how people thought of him, or didn’t—the subject of conjecture or gossip. His sermons were usually long and dry, too abstract to hold my attention; I’d look around and be relieved to see the other kids falling asleep or poking the ground for insects.

That afternoon, though, after the usual preliminaries and a short reference to the Bible, he looked out at the audience as if trying to make contact with everyone in the park.

“Sons and daughters, brothers and sisters,” he began, “we are living in a time of extraordinary change—a time when the proper roles of men and women are being upended, a time when communism is spreading unchecked, a time when the American way of life is being threatened by enemies both inside and outside of our borders. We are living in a time, my friends, when faith itself is under siege. Sometimes change is difficult, sometimes it is necessary, and sometimes it’s just plain wrong.”

People shifted in their seats, unsure where he was going but mildly interested.

“And the latest travesty is occurring as we speak. Our Irish brethren in Boston have had a storm set loose upon them by the Godless decrees of judges and politicians.”

Now, the shifting and whispers stopped and the entire crowd was paying attention. In the distance, I could hear the sounds of traffic, but nothing—not even the squirrels—was making any noise in the park.

“Every evening on the news,” Father Pace continued, “we see horrific scenes of Catholic children being forcibly bused to schools in the darkest corners of the city. We see white neighborhoods being infiltrated by whole busloads of outside forces.”

I sat up straighter now myself. I knew what he was talking about—I too had watched the images of busing in Boston, the protests, the angry and violent crowds. But what Father Pace was saying was at odds with what I had observed. Is this really how he saw things? Did other people think this, too?

“What’s at stake for these Irish people, these good Catholics,” he went on, “is more than just a question of whether their children can attend their local schools. What’s at stake is their ability to
define their own lives
.”

He leaned into the microphone and his voice boomed across the park. “No one but
God
should determine how we lead our lives. We have every right to decide who we live among, who we worship with, and how we educate our children. People were made differently for a reason—
a reason
! Those judges and politicians in Boston, those heavy-handed liberals, have forgotten that simple truth.
And now we’re facing a similar threat right here in Deerhorn!
”

He stood up straight and scanned the crowd, his large hands gripping either side of the lectern. Now everyone was rapt, including the children.

I couldn’t believe what he was saying. I couldn’t believe what was coming from his mouth. While Father Pace would occasionally comment on current events, from the PCP overdose of the pharmacist’s oldest son, to the young women who were taking advantage of the sinful new law allowing the murder of unborn babies, to the robbery scandal involving the fire department, to the happy return or sad loss of soldiers who’d fought in Vietnam, this seemed different, like he was challenging his entire congregation. And he kept on going.

“In Boston, the Catholic parishes are accepting families whose children need a refuge from the public schools. We believe this is a generous and appropriate response. Some of you have already moved your children to our school, and I want you to know that more of you are welcome. And likewise, I’m calling upon our good Catholic doctors in town to take on a few more patients, so that people won’t have to go to that Godless clinic.”

He lowered his head now, his eyes nearly closed, and spoke in a firm, soft voice. “We may not be able to control the circumstance that has been thrust upon us, but we
can
control our response to it. None of you has to sit there and take it.”

And he went on to invite people to approach him after Mass if they wanted to enroll their children in the Catholic school. Then he began his regular sermon. It didn’t seem, though, that anyone paid very close attention. The crowd was abuzz with his unexpected pronouncement and no one could stay still.

I couldn’t believe that Father Pace had talked about the Garretts. Without ever mentioning them by name, without even speaking the words Negro or black or teacher or nurse, he’d made his position—and the position of the church—very clear. I didn’t understand how he could do this—how he could reconcile his usual words of doing right in the eyes of God with the stance he now condoned. But considering his church’s reaction to my parents and me, I suppose I shouldn’t really have been surprised.

Maybe if I’d been older, I might have had a better sense of how unsettled people were by all the changes going on in the country. Maybe I might have understood how what was happening in Boston was having effects that rippled all the way to Deerhorn. But the nightly images I saw on the news confused me more than anything. The sight of buses full of black children being pelted with rocks, of white children walking nervously through hallways full of black faces, of police in riot gear being taunted by white youths with baseball bats and hockey sticks, of the Irish city councilwoman speaking about the coming race war, felt as far away to me as the images of the disgraced president stepping off his plane, of the bombings in Cambodia. I did not understand what all the fuss was about. I couldn’t comprehend why people were so upset, or what exactly they believed was at stake. It seemed strange to me even then, when I was a child, and I’m not sure that my perception would have been any different if I’d been twelve or seventeen instead of nine. What I might have had with age, though, was a greater appreciation for the seriousness of people’s reactions. What I might have had with age was a healthier sense of fear regarding what was possible.

Later that afternoon, I ran into the Garretts. I’d been doing nothing in particular, watching the Packers game so I could be in the same room as my grandfather, when my grandmother asked me to go to the market to buy some milk and ice cream. The main strip of town, which included Jimmy’s Coffee Shop and Earl Watson’s gun store, was about six blocks away. The market, a small, five-aisle store that was the town’s main source of groceries, was at the near end of Buffalo Street, across from what used to be the Sears building and was now some kind of storage place for discarded old appliances.