Too Close to the Falls (37 page)

Then there were the
bad
girls. They were still too young to be really wayward since really bad girls talked to boys outside the post office or got into trouble of an unmentionable kind. I wasn't
ready for
that
sort of bad. There was little left for me in Lewiston except for the up-and-coming bad girls. The ones who were late for school, who didn't pay attention, the ones who Dolores said were “sassy” and whose future she referred to as “diggin' their own graves.” Miranda Doyle was one of those. She was two years older and one year ahead in school. I moved my chair to her grade for English and reading in the afternoon, and she and I often made fun of the characters in the books. She was a bad reader but she could be very funny about the characters and the situations in the earnest Catholic stories. I could tell that Mother Superior really disliked her and Miranda couldn't care less. That in itself was unusual and something I was beginning to admire.

I couldn't help but think that Mother Superior held it against her when Miranda showed up in an angel costume supposedly made by her mother for the Christmas play, an old white satin evening gown which said “Angel” in laundry marker across the front. Some of the other mothers were scandalized. I heard them talking about it as I helped my mother's Altar and Rosary Society put together the manger outside the church. Dolores got on the bandwagon saying there was no excuse for such behaviour. After all, the Doyles weren't poor. In fact they lived in one of Lewiston's larger homes. Instead of setting a good Catholic example to counteract her Protestant husband, Mrs. Doyle did things like put a Kleenex on her head when she couldn't be bothered to wear a hat to mass. My mother agreed with Dolores that these snubs in piety or “mere flippancy” were not good examples for her four daughters.
Flippancy
was a word I hadn't heard before; however, I liked the sound of it so I looked it up. “Treating serious things lightly.” Now, this word certainly reflected my new
philosophy and Miranda perfectly personified it.

Miranda was a beautiful girl who had black Rapunzel hair. When our whole school went to Frank Sturski's farm to learn about animal husbandry, we travelled in crowded car pools. Mother Superior made the girls place a phone book between ourselves and boys if we sat next to them or if we had to sit on a boy's lap in the car. I noticed the older boys from grade seven and eight pushed each other aside to get into Miranda's car pool and sit next to her.

She was flippant about Mother Superior's decrees and even the Ten Commandments. She asked strange questions that managed to upset Mother Superior. We read a short story about a boy whose father was a barnburner and Miranda said, “Thank God he didn't obey the ‘honour thy father and thy mother' commandment or we'd all live in ashes.” Mother Agnese couldn't get to her the way she had to me because Miranda had never really bought in. On top of her freedom from dogma, she could spot a human foible a mile away when, for most other people, it would only look like an irrelevant speck. How Miranda knew what made people tick, I had no idea; however, a friend who knew everyone's Achilles heel was an important ally.

Once, on our way home, we stopped into Reggie's Torpedo Submarine and Variety Store for wax fingernails filled with cherry Kool-Aid, and who was there buying bitters but Father Flanagan. Reggie, the proprietor, said to Father, “Oh, here is Elizabeth Taylor from
A Place in the Sun
,” obviously referring to Miranda. Father Flanagan put one arm on each of our shoulders and chimed in, “A-ha, here we have beauty and brains walking abreast.” I was thunderstruck with horror. My humiliation made me more stock-still
than a snake that plays dead. After all, no one cared about being smart. No one said, “Oh, isn't Elizabeth Taylor
smart
.” Stores sold makeup, not IQ points. To make this ignominy worse, there were older boys from the public school buying baseball bubble gum next to us and they laughed, obviously knowing who the pretty one was. I decided at that moment Father Flanagan would pay for that remark if it was the last thing I did, before departing for my eternity in hell. The upside of eternal damnation was that it made very little difference what you did wrong in
this
world.

As we walked home we donned our wax lips and fingernails and tried to convince Lloyd, the traffic guard who Roy had said wasn't “the sharpest tool in the shed,” that they were real nails and we had just been for a manicure. Miranda, obviously mulling over what had happened in Reggie's, suddenly got angry, saying that Father Flanagan had no right to say she was stupid. “I was waiting for him to tell those grade-eight boys that I'd failed grade four. Why doesn't he just give us a hair shirt and some ashes?” As we took off our fingernails, bit into the wax, and drained the Kool-Aid, she added as an afterthought, “Anyway, who cares? He's a drunk.” I assured her that he wasn't a drunk. The only drunk in our town was ol' Jim and even his son, young Jim, didn't speak to him. Neither did his wife, Marie, the retired madam who lived above the Buena Vista Motel. “You know, for being smart you're awfully stupid. I've noticed that about you before. This town is crawling with drunks. You don't have to be legless and sell pencils and wind-up frogs to be a drunk. You can even have a job, be a mother, be a priest, or even be the mayor. You know how many housewives souse it up while we're parsing sentences? What do you think Father Flanagan was buying bitters for — his personality?” I
had no idea what bitters were. Instantly reading my confusion, Miranda rolled her eyes back into her head. “God, what do I have here — a kindergarten? What! You think Father Flanagan can help himself?” I knew there was something to this because my mother had referred to his “affliction” as “a weakness for the sacramental spirits.” Miranda continued in exasperation, “If we spiked his holy water on a Sunday morning, he'd be feeling no pain by noon.” We exchanged glances. The deed was done. All that was left was to work out the details.

Actually, quite a bit of planning went into the plot, and unfortunately it took a week of daily mass to achieve perfect timing. We had to know which holy-water font he used when he blessed himself. Finally we established his pattern of always using the one below the sign that read, “Wash not only thy face but thy iniquities.” We worked out his movements: one, in the front door; two, dip into the right font with its swollen flaccid sponge soaking up the stagnant holy water and then bless himself — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; three, kiss his crucifix. Aah — the taste of vodka. He was dead in the water, and ultimately pickled in alcohol.

Miranda called me late Saturday. She'd gone to confession, making sure she was the last in line, drained the holy water into a milk bottle, substituted the vodka, and scuttled home.

I had agreed to this plan with a great deal of bravado since I couldn't imagine that it would go anywhere. After all, why would a man make a fool of himself in front of all his parishioners because he tasted vodka on his crucifix? What would then “force” him to drink more? As far as I was concerned it didn't add up. Besides, Miranda talked a good line, but the fact remained she was in the sparrow reading group while I was in the cardinals.

By Saturday night I realized the plan was executed, which was farther than I thought the whole thing was going to go. In case the deed came off as Miranda had planned, we needed an iron-clad alibi if we were ever suspected. I called Miranda, who said we didn't even need an alibi. As proof of this she drew upon Perry Mason. If there is no proof that you did it or there wasn't a confession, they can suspect all they want. They can't prove a thing. We went through elaborate promises to one another that no matter how they tortured us we would never confess. Miranda seemed to understand a lot about interrogation. She said they would separate us and say that one of us had confessed. Even if we were interrogated separately we should never believe the interrogator.

I said, “Well, they wouldn't lie.”

She said, “Of course they would. After all,
we're
lying.”

That really scared me. I felt as though the whole plot had grown beyond me and was still multiplying like a virus. Anyway, I assured myself that it would never succeed, and if by some fluke it did, they would suspect boys, probably the older boys or even Protestants, who had vandalized the church.

My family filed into our regular pew in our usual iron-clad order. The parishioners' names were typed and slotted in shiny brass rectangle frames on the end of the pew. I grew up in the third row on the right side. Miranda's family — well, her sisters and mother — were farther back from the altar on the left. I insisted on going to twelve o'clock mass, assuming Father Flanagan had blessed himself plenty by then.

The gospel all went without a hitch. I shot Miranda an I-told-you-so look over my shoulder. She shot back the contented smile of the Cheshire cat. Then Father Flanagan got to the sermon.
He started out talking about using the bingo money for an air conditioner — uninspiring, but not unusual; he then began meandering until fifteen minutes later he was red-faced, banging the pulpit, rocking the goose-necked lamp, shouting in full Irish lilt, “. . . the church bulletin doesn't tell you, does it . . . No! no! it doesn't.” Bang! “Is it better to reign in hell than rule in heaven? The bloody Limeys have reigned over the Irish for how long,
how long
?” He was screaming now, looking at all the terrified faces in the pews lined up like rows of potatoes in a field. He continued, “I'm no jejune Jesuit, all thought and no grounding. I'm a man, a man with roots in the Irish turf — a simple parish priest — but what am I made of? Irish soil. Irish blood and toil,
that's
what.” My mother whispered “for heaven's sake” to my father, who simply patted her hand.

Mother Superior took this opportunity to scuttle into the sacristy and signal to the bewildered altar boys to ring the communion bells, jarring our chief potato-head into Pavlovian action. The second he heard the tinkle, he dutifully tottered down from the pulpit and returned to the altar to serve communion, not without shouting over his shoulder, “Remember the bell tolls for thee.” The altar boys nodded in cajoling silence.

The phone call came within hours of the holy water episode, which would soon enter Lewiston folklore, and I was the one to take a bath. Was it our sudden devotion at daily mass that was the tipoff to Mother Superior, or divine inspiration? We'll never know. As we pulled up in front of the rectory, my father slammed the car into park before coming to a complete stop, jolting us both forward. Ashes fell on his shirt and he said between a bitten cigar end, “This is worse trouble than I've ever been in my entire life
and you're only a girl and not yet old enough to babysit.”

I didn't think the whole incident warranted such a rumpus, but as Mother Superior and Father Flanagan stood in the cold hallway that smelled like old cabbage, I had the distinct feeling I was in a minority. Father Flanagan patted my father's back as if to say, “Don't worry, Jim McClure, she's only a bad seed — you'll still get to heaven.” When we hit the front parlour, Miranda, my partner in crime, was slouching on a couch. She always lucked out — I knew her parents wouldn't show up. She smiled at me as if to say, “This is big trouble, but when you get right down to it, who cares?”

Once we were all seated, and Father Flanagan asked Mrs. Skelly, his club-footed housekeeper, for some “liquid refreshment,” he began droning something along the line that this latest incident was only the tip of the iceberg. I took this opportunity to survey the room for damage control. Mother Superior looked the most outraged. While Father Flanagan ran off at the mouth, she only looked straight ahead. The corners of her starched wimple never moved. She was saying the rosary. Bead after treacherous bead moved through her fingers at exactly the same rate. She was definitely the wild card here. After all, she had to sober him up and cover for him — not an easy task, given the circumstances. Now she wasn't even listening to him.

I have laughed hard in my life but never as hard as Miranda and I laughed when we had gotten together at Reggie's after the drunken sermon. I had laughed so hard I swaggered into the Wonder Bread, permanently denting it. We were both crying and breathless when we agreed the best part was when he said he was
soil
. Miranda, an actress at heart, beat her chest the way Father had and adopted the perfect Cork accent, which was much more
pronounced when “under the influence.” Instead of yelling at me about the flat Wonder Bread, Reggie got caught up in the fun, saying his favourite part was the slight to the Jesuits.

My triumphant reverie was broken by Father Flanagan saying, “Kate, this is your last chance. Now, with God as your witness, do you understand your transgression and can you ask God's forgiveness?”

“Yes.” That was easy.

Mother Superior began in a bloodless tone, the kind she used when speaking for God and going for the jugular. She spat out each word just as each rosary bead had been left behind. Even Father Flanagan looked a bit sheepish.

“Since God is our witness, we must act as His holy orders command,” she said, addressing Father Flanagan. “I have devoted my life to God and the Catholic Church. I am in charge of hundreds of souls that are awaiting God's message. Catherine McClure and Miranda Doyle have thwarted my vocation and I won't have it.” She whispered as though it was too awful to enunciate, “What shame your guardian angels must feel at this moment.” Back to her regular voice, she said, “This is not our first conversation of this sordid nature, is it Father Flanagan?” Father sat there looking like a stunned bird. “I run a Catholic school, a temple for young souls, and just as Jesus expelled the merchants from his temple in justified anger, so must I expel Catherine and Miranda.”

Expel?