The Accidental Siren

3.3 Saintly Ms. Grisham

Sunday.

Political correctness didn't exist in 1994. Livy was “black,” Whitney was “handicapped,” Danny B. was “deformed,” and my new chum Dominique was “Mexican” even though his parents were from Puerto Rico. If Dom had been an alter boy ten years later, the PC Police would call him an “alter server.”

He was a tiny boy with a smooth face and a gap between every tooth. He looked seven years old but swore he was ten. “I figured it out last year,” he told me in the opulent seclusion of the cathedral's cry room. “There's a vent above the second stall in the boy's bathroom--”

“You crawl through the vents?”

“Heck no! They're too small. But one day I'm hangin' a rat in that stall and I hear voices, so I finish up and stand on the seat. And what do I hear? Mrs. Crenshaw is confessing her sins. She's tellin' Father Stevenson how she got bit by a snake in the Walmart garden center--which is already big gossip in the congregation--and that she was the one who put the snake in the rosemary plant and jabbed it 'til it bit her.”

“Why would somebody do that?”

“To sue the pants off Walmart!”

“What does this hafta do with--”

“It's hard to stand on the toilet and I can only hear every other word, so when Mara came along--” Dominique paused and traced a cross on his chest, “--I figured she'd hafta confess eventually, right? So I get the idea to use my super-sonic listening gun that came with the science kit I got for my birthday. I sneak it in under my robe, then stand on the toilet and push the microphone way back in the vent, then I put on the headphones and pretend like I'm peeing. And boy oh boy, I can hear it all! Just like I'm right beside 'em in the confessional.”

“Did you hear Mara?”

“It's two months before she makes a confession on a Sunday that I'm serving. But then I see Ms. Grisham shove her in that box with Father Stevenson so I hang up my robe, hook up my super-sonic hearing gun, and listen to the whole sha-bang.”

“Un-stinkin'-believable,” I said. Although my fairytale was still on hold, I had convinced my parents that--whenever I found a new camera--I would need a scene in a medieval church. On the first Sunday of summer vacation, Dad dropped me off at The Holy Trinity Cathedral of the Dunes on his way to morning coffee.

It was imperative that Mara didn't catch me spying--I needed to distinguish myself from the real zombies--so I had ducked behind a plaster column and eyed her from the back of the church. The girl sat in the sagging crook of Ms. Grisham's arm in the first row. She wore an ivory gown with an ivory sash, and her hair was crimped in rosy waves that tickled the hymnal on the back of her pew. Behind her, a boy leaned forward and sniffed her neck.

I first noticed Dominique as he shuffled down the center isle in a delicate procession of boys in white robes. Some held brass spears with candles and crosses; Dom swung a smoking bowl from silver chains like a pendulum. They all wore wooden crosses around their necks and red sashes over their shoulders. 

The congregation watched the parade in silence.

As the altar boys approached the front of the sanctuary, the little Mexican began to fall out of sync. He veered to the left and his fancy bowl began to swing faster and faster in a whirl of white smoke. He swayed right to rejoin the procession, but his head was turned and tilted. I followed his eye-line across the church; sure enough, he was fixated on the little girl in the first pew.

The other boys lifted their feet for the two steps up to the pulpit, but Dominique--too distracted to notice--bumped his toes into the bottom step, dropped his bowl with a clang and puff of soot, and knocked over the kid with the cross.