So I said to the parish’s new priest as I helped him take his suitcases upstairs to the second floor of the rectory, his room at the end of the hall, “Father,” I said, “when you have some time, I’d like to hear what it was like playing professional baseball.”
Father Duncan was in his early forties and my height, which was six feet tall, give or take. Dark brown hair, peppercorn eyes, and a face like that TV Beaver kid, except his nose was real prominent with a major right turn. His arms were thick but not long. His waist was wide, his pointed bony shoulders wider still. Wrists and hands were big, a few of his knuckles like snapped stogies, and every one of them large. Someone might have picked him for a boxer, a profession that’s never been kind to a man’s face or fingers. Next good guess could only have been what he once was, a baseball catcher.
Now he was a priest. There had to be something special happen to this man to make a change as drastic as that, and I knew a thing or two about drastic changes. For me it was when I met my Viola. Warmest, saintliest woman I’ve ever known. She studied to become a nun but changed her mind before she took the vows. Still did nun’s work afterward, helping at the church and visiting the prison, which was how she met me. We married soon after I got paroled, me the age of twenty-five, she three years younger, on the way to forty good years together. Lived a good chunk of them years in our house just the other side of Our Lady’s schoolyard, Viola working as one of the church housekeepers and me eventually as its lead custodian.
The parish buildings included church, convent, rectory and school. Kept us busy even though we were both almost retired. Soon as Father was unpacked I pointed out our house to him, visible from his window. A row home in the middle of the block, built in ’29 with the rest of the row homes that ran north as far as the river, after they’d knocked down the tannery’s bungalow housing.
“No time like the present, Mr. Hozer,” Father said, then moved around the right half of the room in his skivvy shirt. Before he got into the storytelling, I stopped him.
“Needn’t call me Mr. Hozer,” I told him. “Sounds too much like my father.” Adoptive father actually, which I mentioned. The bastard died at age thirty-six in an ice-fishing accident on Lake Erie. This I didn’t mention. “You can call me Wump, Father. Been answering to Wump since I was in my teens.”
“Then Wump it is,” Father said. He unfolded a cassock, eased right into his prior life. “The Phillies drafted me out of high school…”
Three Bridges was north and east of northeast Philadelphia. The man now known as Father Duncan had been a baseball legend in the Philly Catholic high school league. “Connie” Duncan. Star catcher and home-run hitter. Graduated high school, went into the minor leagues, and eventually got called up to the Phillies, late forties I think it was, but he lasted only two years. Couldn’t hit a major league curve ball. Was sent back down and never made it up again. Then shortly after he turned thirty, which was ancient for a minor leaguer to still be playing ball, there was this incident he was telling me now. Something that made the Phillies decide it was time for Connie Duncan to quit baseball. “You know about square pegs and round holes, Wump?”
Sure did. First part of my life I told him, when Mr. Hozer was trying to make a farmer out of me in Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, a small town near Pittsburgh. Farmer’s plough horse was more like it. His two boys by birth got sent off regular to school soon as I got there, left me to do all the goddamn work. When I hit my sixteenth birthday, I hitched a freight train back east. A month later, I was at work at the Volkheimer Tannery here in Schuetten, though they weren’t calling the town Schuetten anymore. Started calling it Three Bridges sometime after I got adopted. All them Germans wanted to be Americanized, and Schuetten was too German a name for them; means “to shit,” or something like it. But I didn’t say all this to Father, didn’t pick on the Germans or nothing. Hell, I was one of them. Or so I been told. And I didn’t use no curse words either. I was in a rectory talking to a priest, for Christ sake.
“Well then, Wump, maybe you can appreciate this.” Father said there was something just wasn’t right with his life. Wasn’t boredom, and had nothing to do with him figuring he wasn’t good enough to make it back to the major leagues. Said it was “not unlike a slap in the face, putting me on notice, telling me I had a purpose. And this purpose wasn’t knocking down baseball players at home plate.” So when they sent him back to the minors he’d started sorting things out, reading the Bible, that sort of thing.
Father said he was a real cut-up when he played ball, with the coaches, the fans and his teammates. Would tell the players jokes, pull pranks on them, do anything for a laugh. “Late one season we were in Albany,” he said, pulling his shaving kit out of a bag. Father rubbed his chin like he was deciding if he should shave again this late in the day. He should.
“I was catching a game that didn’t matter, our team far back in the standings, and I wanted the road trip to end so I could get back home to see my folks, especially my sick grandmother.” He lathered up, began dragging a safety razor around his face while he talked about what proved to be his final game as a professional baseball player. It involved a mouthy runner on third base antsy to steal home, a throw from Father that sailed over the third baseman’s head, and something Father had slipped into his catcher’s mitt during a timeout moments before: a yellow apple. The runner didn’t think twice about whether the overthrow was an apple or a ball so he trotted toward Father at home plate. Father tagged him out, the real ball in his mitt. The ump gave Father an earful for pulling the stunt and tossed him out of the game. There was a bus ticket back to Philadelphia waiting for him when he got out of the shower. His baseball career was over.
Father picked out a light blue short-sleeved pullover for when he was done washing up. “Is there a regular supper time each night, Wump?”
“Six o’clock. So Father, if you don’t mind me asking—”
“You want to know what the slap in the face was that made me decide to become a priest. I made the decision that day. I was in my hotel room packing when I got a phone call from my grandmother. Nanny called me all the time while we were on road trips, even after she got sick. I told her I’d be home for good the next day, then I told her why.
“‘God has another purpose for you, Connie,’ she explained to me. She said I’d figure out what it was soon enough.”
“Is she gone now?”
“Yes. That was the last time I spoke with her. But here’s the thing.” Father pulled out his toiletries and lined them up on the dresser. “I called my folks that night to tell them I was coming home. My mother said they’d tried to reach me earlier in the day but couldn’t track me down. I laughed, told them they should always check with Nanny because she’d found me easily that afternoon. ‘Not possible,’ my mother said. ‘Nanny died this morning.’”
Father looked himself over in the dresser mirror, then flashed a slight smile in my direction. “Just one of those things that makes a person think.”
I’d heard stories like this before, from people who said it happened to an aunt or a niece or someone they knew at work. Never paid much attention to them. Sounded different coming from a priest. Creepy, quivery different. Almost like proof.
Father took his catcher’s mitt out of his bag. “I’ll let you in on another secret. Something small that never made it to the sports pages, and I haven’t mentioned in years.” He handed me the mitt and motioned for me to try it on. “But only if you tell me more about yourself.”
I said sure, then I pounded my fist into the mitt’s pocket a few times before I handed it back. Father placed it on a closet shelf. “I had a nickname when I played ball,” he said. “Not ‘Connie.’ That one’s been with me since I was a kid. The players and coaches called me ‘Trick.’ Wasn’t a stretch, mind you, considering the stunts I used to pull. Like I said, a small secret. So tell me, how did you come by the nickname ‘Wump’?”
This made me uncomfortable. The man had me in a corner, and it was like he knew he had me cornered, too, since he’d shared all this personal stuff with me. I liked him, so I decided to trust him with the truth.
“From the sound a crowbar makes when it hits a man’s head, Father.”
I was twenty-one, I told him, and the man I hit didn’t die. He was a taproom owner who lived above his bar. One night my buddies and me were burglarizing the place, and we woke him up. The owner had recognized me, so the cops caught up with us a few days later. “Ain’t proud of that, Father, and I paid my debt.”
I needed to change the subject. “So tell me, Father, what’s your given first name?”
I had it figured as Cornelius, like the great Philadelphia Athletics baseball manager Cornelius “Connie” Mack. I knew of no other Connies.
“My first name is Constantine. Yours?”
“Johannes. But as a kid I answered to Johnny.”
Dog shit has a natural chemical in it that helps soften animal skins during the leather-tanning process. I learned this from Sister Irene at the orphanage when I was eight years old, so here I was telling Father about it. The Volkheimer Tannery folks would give me money for it was what she told me, so I collected it in potato sacks and delivered it there each morning till I was twelve, around the time Rolf Volkheimer disappeared and was wrote off as dead. Rolf was the oldest of the three Volkheimer brothers, all partners in the tannery, at least until Rolf left on a trip to the old country—Bavaria, in the southern part of Germany, where it was mostly Catholic—and never came back. Soon afterward the Hozers adopted me. It was them who took me on a train out to their farm near Pittsburgh. Weren’t no orphanages where they lived, but lucky for them they had a Bucks County, Pennsylvania, uncle who told them about all the free child labor there was back East.
“Pittsburgh,” Father repeated through the doorway of the hall bathroom, one door away from his room.
“Yep. Like I said, Father, after the adoption I lived near there, till I was sixteen.”
Father was back in the hallway, clean-shaven, a blue shirt tucked into his pants, smiling and ready for dinner. “Once heard a joke about Pittsburgh,” he said. “In it the Devil delivers the punch line to some newly condemned souls. ‘Hell’s full,’ he says. ‘Go to Pittsburgh.’”
Haw. Father got that right. Good punch line, I told him. Damn good punch line.
We got to the bottom of the stairs just as Monsignor Fassnacht pushed through the rectory’s front door, his wide-brimmed hat in one hand, his brass-knobbed walking stick in the other. He dropped them both on the tufted vestibule ottoman, the walking stick rolling onto the floor. The parish’s newest novice, Harriet, slipped in quietly behind him, picked up the walking stick and the hat, put them in the vestibule closet, then returned to the parlor. Viola told me Harriet needed looking after, she was so shy. Hailed from the Appalachians in West Virginia. She sat straight-backed in a parlor chair, white blouse, buttoned-up collar, black skirt below her knees, bright blue eyes that followed the monsignor. The man could have at least thanked her, but he wasn’t known for that.
Monsignor smoothed back a full head of straight black hair with his palm, shot a small wink in Harriet’s direction that perked her face up, then he was done with her. He gave himself the once-over in the vestibule mirror. “Settled in, Father Duncan?”
My hair is as white as a bleached bedsheet, but Monsignor Fassnacht, same age as me at sixty-five, showed no signs of silver. He kept his suit jacket buttoned and his white priest’s collar tight around his hefty jowls. He brushed past me to sidle up next to Father, who told him yes, he was settled in and comfortable. Not sure if Father noticed, but Monsignor and me weren’t on speaking terms.
“Welcome, then, to Our Lady of the Innocents,” Monsignor said. “I know you’ll find the work here rewarding. A lot of second-, third- and fourth-generation Germans in the parish. Hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, God-fearing types. And our grade-school baseball team”—he patted Father’s shoulder—“could use the guidance of a former professional baseball player.” Monsignor draped an arm over Father and led him into the dining room. “I am ravenous. Let’s see what Mrs. Gobel’s cooked up for us tonight, shall we?”
Suppertime for me, too. I dug into my shirt pocket for my pencil stub and notepad, then leaned onto the rectory’s reception desk to jot down a list of a few thingamajigs the convent needed. Been little call for any hardware the past couple of days, which meant Leo, a certain young helper of mine, hadn’t earned any extra spending money, least not from me. Leo was the most ambitious twelve-year-old I’d ever met, his enthusiasm bright as a 100-watt bulb, his smarts considerably dimmer. Liked following me around between convent and rectory, in and out and back and forth, looking to do errands. Best to be ready for when Leo caught up with you, which was why I was making the list. Otherwise he’d ask about every item Muehler’s Hardware carried, aisle by aisle. I pulled open the rectory’s front door.
What a surprise. “Hello, Leo.”
“Hi, Wump!” Leo said, his mouth and nose staying busy with giggles and snorts and what could have passed for a baby cooing. Never seen a kid get so excited about hardware. “Muehler’s is open late tonight. They got specials on paint and paint products, bug sprays, and cans of hand soap. I seen the signs in the window.”
“Yes, I know, son. Here’s my list. And hello to you too, Teddy.”
Seeing big Teddy Agarn with him surprised me. Leo usually brought Raymond on errands. Raymond was thirteen and a lot worse off than Leo. Blind since birth and in a wheelchair. He could hear but was a mute. Couldn’t walk, couldn’t get out of the chair. Couldn’t clean up after himself. Sickly, too. Leo got errand money from the nuns at the orphanage for tending to Raymond, but I knew he’d do it for nothing.
“Raymond’s sick in bed today, so I asked Teddy.”
Teddy was the same age as Leo but a head taller and had already filled out. Lived with his father and grandmother, went to Our Lady’s school, had been held back twice. Leo and Raymond, on the other hand, were both orphans. They lived at St. Jerome’s Home for Foundlings across town, next to the river. Same orphanage where I’d spent my first twelve years.
Leo labored through the list. “Ceil-ing paint, one gal-lon. Paint roll-er, nine inch. Paint thin-ner, one quart.” His mouth stayed open after he was done talking, slobbered some. His sandy hair always looked mussed. “Gonna do some painting, Wump?”
“Good guess, son. Yes.” We started down the walk, away from the rectory’s front door. Leo had a forward lean near as bad as a ship’s bowsprit. He bounced up next to me, asked, “The new Father all unpacked?”
I told him yes. Teddy fell in behind us.
“I helped him with his bags today, Wump,” Leo said, beaming. “He needed help from the taxi, so I helped him to the front door of the rectory.”
“It’s good you were here, Leo. Nice, friendly priest, Father Duncan is. I like him.”
“Yep. Me too. And tricky. Right, Wump?”
This stopped me. “Did you say ‘tricky’?”
The curb to the rectory’s front door was no more than fifty feet. There just wasn’t enough time for Father to get into any baseball stories or nicknames with him.
“Yep. He gave me a dime for carrying his bags, but I had to pick which hand. I picked the wrong one but he gave it to me anyway. That Father sure is tricky, huh?”
I nodded. We got to the alleyway behind my house, where I had to turn left and he and Teddy had to go straight. “Be careful crossing Schuetten Avenue, fellas, especially where they’re digging out for the new restaurant.”
I lingered a moment and watched as the two of them reached the corner. They looked both ways, then crossed the street.
A coincidence was all it was, Leo calling Father Duncan by his baseball nickname. Had to be.
Viola always kidded me about how my hair was thinning on the crown, around my cowlick. It would be like hers soon, sparse enough on top to see some scalp. Salt and pepper, the two of us were, mine a wavy white, hers black from a weekly rinse at the hairdresser’s and kept in a tight bun that covered her thin spot. I used my comb before I opened the front door.
When I first met Viola there were prison bars between us. Aside from the soft, full features of her face, there’d been little other sense that she was even a woman. As a volunteer she dressed the way the prison screws told all the female volunteers to dress, in clothing that did little to reveal a woman’s charms. Wasn’t like she would have vamped it up anyway, considering how close she came to becoming a nun. Even still, I was lucky to have met her that way, in that environment, surrounded by iron and concrete and low yellow lighting and her all flannelled up, everything during prison visitation hours designed to dull a woman’s features. Except in Viola’s case there’d been one feature the atmosphere couldn’t hide: her beautiful soft-green eyes. Her greatest gifts, those eyes were, so cheerful, so full of calm and compassion, and so able to make me relax on the spot, with just one glance. I learned a great truth the day I met Viola, something some men go entire lifetimes without ever discovering: To sincerely love a woman you must first love her eyes. And if her eyes loved you back, you were truly blessed.
I smelled supper from the door stoop. Baked macaroni and cheese.
How would Viola’s eyes be tonight, I wondered. For the forty years of our marriage they’d been full of life, so large and warm and bright. When our son, Harry, got sick last year, they started fading. When he died in February they nearly died with him. I reckoned the past two months my eyes hadn’t fared much better, but around her I did my best to keep them bright enough so she saw in their reflection just what she meant to me.
“Hi, sweetie,” I called to her. I made my way into the kitchen where she stood in front of the stove, stirring a pot. I planted a big one on the back of her neck, moved in behind her and wrapped my arms around her waist, me looking to stir up a pot of a different kind. I pulled her close, whispered something naughty in her ear. She blushed then reached her cupped hand back to pat my cheek.
“If I’m not too tired,” she said, and the smile in her voice tried to find its way to her eyes. I hugged her tightly, told her it was okay either way, and the truth was, it was. Okay if she was too tired, me knowing how the parish housekeeping chores been taking so much out of her lately. Okay otherwise, just in general.
“No corn on the cob today, Johnny,” she added. Viola wouldn’t call me Wump; had never liked my nickname. “Too dear this time of year. Tonight it’s canned. And tomorrow night, too, until the price comes down.”
I was scraping the dinner dishes into the garbage strainer in the sink when the doorbell chimed. Viola left the kitchen to answer it.
“My goodness, Leo, look at you. Johnny, come here.”
Leo stood full of mud on the front stoop, some of it caked, some still dripping, brown up to his waist, and he was shaking. I got up close to him. The boy smelled like a sewer.
“Teddy fell in, Wump!” Leo said, panting. “Slid down the side of the hole for the restaurant, right to the bottom. We were on Schuetten Avenue, carrying the paint and he was talking to me, telling me about his dad, the tannery, stuff like that, then all of a sudden there’s no more Teddy, and I see he’s in the big hole, in water and, ah, yucky stuff, up to his belt. That hole wasn’t like that yesterday. I helped get him out, but I couldn’t get him to leave with me.”
“Get me some blankets and towels,” I told Viola.
We wiped Leo down real quick, then draped a blanket around him; he stopped shivering. I told him to get into my truck, a faded red and crusty brown ’52 Willys pickup that was still a workhorse even though it looked like the river had burped it up. Before we could pull out, I did a double-take. Out for an after-dinner walk was Father Duncan, his cleric’s collar back on under a zipped-up spring jacket. I quick told him what happened and he got into the front seat of the truck beside Leo. Schuetten Avenue was four blocks away.
Teddy was still at the site. Light from the street lamps on the avenue showed us the excavated hole, about sixty by sixty, one half deeper than the other, the drop sharp. The deeper section was like a swimming pool, the back half just puddles. “Yucky stuff,” Leo’s description of the slop the hole contained, just didn’t do it justice. Not by a long shot.
We moved toward Teddy, me as fast as my legs would carry me, Father high-stepping it a lot faster. Teddy was shivering something fierce; when Father got there he draped a fresh blanket around him. Father looked at where Teddy pointed, in what was left of the water.
“Sumpin’s under there,” Teddy said. “Sumpin’ crunchy, on the bottom. I was stepping on it. Then Leo got a board and I climbed out.”
We all looked but couldn’t see what he was talking about, the muddy water below us in the shallower half still foamy in spots. The place stunk to high hell, like rotten eggs mixed with a hundred years of raw sewage. Then something yellow-white and round and smooth as an overturned bowl poked through the tan foam, to our left. The foam kept dissolving, enough so a second bowl was visible. Then a third, over to the right, and a fourth, and a fifth, except now it was obvious they weren’t bowls.
They were skulls. I stopped counting.
My legs weakened, some from a smell bad enough to water a person’s eyes, some from seeing all these jumbled-up bones and skulls bunched in spots around the hole’s floor. But mostly it was from a childhood memory so gruesome it snatched at my sanity for a moment. I steadied myself, listened hard, and waited for the screams I knew were coming, girded myself for the screams and whimpers I was sure no one else would hear because they weren’t there to hear them the first time.
Voices gathered, tinny, squealing voices like tiny birds, chirping and jabbering from inside this hole, on its floor, the chirping starting to swell up. I could feel it, could feel them, here they come…
The noise slammed and held me like a siren, assaulted my eardrums, was more earsplitting than my nightmares. I would have screamed if I’d had the breath.
…no heaven no heaven NO HEAVEN—
I willed myself to breathe, willed myself with eyes squeezed tight to not move, to not turn, to not run because this time, at my age, there could be no running. No way, no sir, no how, unh-unh.
—whywhywhyWHY—
I held my ground. The voices snapped in midscream and were gone.
When a priest drops a coin into a pay phone and says it’s an emergency, things happen. The police were now here and so were some city waterworks and sewer maintenance folks. Father talked with a cop, the both of them sidled up to a water company fella who studied a blueprint, other long rolls of blueprints under his arm.
I told Teddy and Leo they needed to call it a night. Leo humored me with an “okay,” then did what he wanted anyway and wandered over to where Father made conversation with the fella from the water company. I was left with Teddy.
“God was watching over you today, son. You’re one lucky young man.”
“Yeah. Right. Lucky,” he said. It wasn’t a sarcastic answer, just Teddy’s way of processing what you told him. He sneezed. “I gotta go. Grammy will be worried. My daddy may be, too.”
He was right about his grandmother and her worrying. I knew her; she was a good woman. I knew Teddy’s father, too. The man was drunk this time of night.
Father Duncan motioned me over to him. “This fellow is a water department supervisor, Wump. Says he might know what’s going on with this hole.”
The guy was in light blue coveralls with a hardhat, thirty years old maybe, slight build, big Adam’s apple, glasses. “These fucking restaurant people,” he said, then caught himself and turned real sheepish toward Father Duncan. “Sorry, Father. These, ah, idiots bought this acre and the one behind it from the city, were told they could sink their hole toward the back of the second lot, to the left. So where did they put it? In the front of the first lot and on the right, which is close to a water main. But it still should have been okay because that’s not what they hit.”
Hadn’t heard nothing about any skulls so far. The guy looked down Schuetten Avenue as its amber streetlamps timed on around the avenue’s curve, spring’s lengthening days not yet figured into the mix. “I’m waiting on someone from the main office,” he said. “He’s bringing older maps. This hole looks like it’s been dug into what used to be a storm sewer tributary. One that was filled in and rerouted. They did some of this around here, way before my time.” He turned to me and looked me over. “But probably not before your time, huh, Pops?”
I boxed in prison, knocked out men in and out of the ring for far less than what this guy just called me. This water department asshole had better watch his mouth.
The city engineers were rigging up lights. At the front of the hole for the restaurant, straight down from street level, was a wall of brick at least thirty courses high and a few courses deep. A chunk of it was missing. Looked like the steam shovel operator stopped just short, probably hadn’t even known the wall was there. With most of the dirt on this side of the brick gone, part of the wall had buckled. On the other side I could see some vertical black bars, six inches apart or so. Grating for a large sewer or storm drain. The debris on the floor of this hole had come through those bars. Bones and skulls, and fragments of both. The skeletons of fifty or more bodies was my guess.
I looked up Schuetten Avenue to an intersection, squinted to confirm the name on a signpost for the cross street. I knew what was in this hole, now that I was sure of my bearings.
Baby skeletons, every last one of them.