THEO
WITH THE TAPE from my old boxing kit I made the figure-eight strap between my thumb and forefinger, wrist and palm, again and again. Solid hands, solid fists. The boxing ring was a sacred place to me, a world you couldn’t take for granted, where a bell asked the questions, lies died—truth oozed out of every pore—answers stood bleeding but alive. It’s not unlike bowing before the altar, signing the cross, and the silent prayer. Kneeling beneath the ropes, praying to keep your chin tucked, hands up and feet on the floor—a sacred appeal. I had a sick love, a reverence for the place; the boxing ring, a house of pain where you left your problems for the day. I guess that’s the way some people feel about church—wish I did. What I did know was that the ring was the only place I ever felt any control, and as a kid surviving Da’s love one punch at a time—culminating in a boxing scholarship—I learned to stand firm on my own two feet.
With wrists wrapped snug, I tore the tape with my teeth, tied my gloves on for the first time in years, and let loose with an increasing rapid-fire barrage of strikes until sweat covered my body and the cartridge lodged in my hip throbbed like it wanted out. My adrenalin surged. When I looked up, Solomon stood next to his fire watching me. He nodded.
***
It was a long cloudy morning of calls and visits from parishioners. Some wanted to add their two cents about how they’d have beaten Toreck up, not realizing how short-sighted that solution was. And others congratulated me, forcing me to give my lackluster speech about how violence was no answer. Others asked about Suzy Wu, though few knew her very private family.
The Tuesday Bingo ladies, who consisted of the six Church Ladies and two other women from Nehalem, finished shouting “Bingo!” at noon, which they did so I would think they were actually playing Bingo and not poker. Then they cleaned up the basement recreation hall, set out flowers, strung garland for a wedding that was to occur that afternoon, and left. I stood on the steps trying to get rid of Mrs. Voigtle, who wasn’t much taller than the four-foot statue of Saint Francis of Assisi in the quad.
“Soon as I saw the paper,” she said as she handed me a pie with burnt crust, “knew you needed a homemade pie . . . I hated that bastard’s father, and Toreck’s just like ’im!” She clenched her bony, wrinkled fist and held it high. “Good on ya, Father Theo . . . Wham!” She threw her breathless punch into the air.
“Ohhkay,” I said. “Thank you.” It was the fifth apple cobbler delivered that day. She pivoted around, threw another fantasy punch, and prattled off to her rust-covered 1933 Dodge pick-up, where her balding cat waited on the dashboard.
Just then a grey 1950 Buick pulled into the parking lot. I turned to see a man in the driver’s seat watching us. Didn’t recognize him. He turned off the engine. When Mrs. Voigtle pulled out, he opened the door, stepped out, slipped on a wrinkled sports coat, and sauntered toward the church steps. Cop, maybe?
“Afternoon, Father Riley.”
“Afternoon.”
He climbed the stone steps and reached his hand out to shake. We shook, turned, and entered the rectory. He smelled of vinegary aftershave.
“Can I help you?” I asked as I placed the pie on the hall table, dipped my finger into the baptismal pool, crossed myself, and entered the chapel. He followed but didn’t take off his hat.
He cleared his throat and said, “Well, it’s about that Chinese girl you found—”
“You know I can’t comment on that.”
“Well then, it’s about your fight with a Toreck Sealy. You were a boxing champ, then a war hero. How’d the likes of Sealy get one over on ya, Father?”
“Read the papers. Make your own conclusions.” I set out six candles for mass.
“I have . . . and I think you’re a hero, again.”
“Who are you?”
He tipped his hat, his face eager and hopeful, “Hugh O’Neill from the Oregonian, sir.”
“I’ve said all I have to say.” I grabbed the box from behind the podium, tore it open, unpacked the new hymnals, and asked, “Bishop Doyle send you?”
“Listen Father,” he said. “I’d like to do a story on you, your war background. What happened in Korea? What was it like?” He held his cheap ballpoint pen over his pocket-sized pad of paper, hovering, waiting.
“Can’t say,” I said. “Guess you had to be there.”
“Did ya get that limp over there?”
I stacked the books and set out the unity candle for the wedding.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “There must be some comment, somethin’; some battle, some memory, somethin’ you can give me?” He slid a folded newspaper clipping out of his pocket.
“Something I can give you? . . . Hmmm,” I said, tightening my fist, swollen knuckles cracking. “Let me see . . . No, nothing. Thank you just the same.”
He unfolded the newspaper clip. What now?
“This is a picture of you, right?” he asked, and then read, SERGEANT T. RILEY FROM OREGON ESCORTS CATHOLIC NUNS AND KOREAN WAR ORPHANS.
He held it out to me. I’d avoided that photo for years. My spine stiffened.
“This nun, these kids,” he said studying the grainy photo, and then glancing up at me, holding out the clipping. “You helped them. Where are they now?”
The children’s dark eyes emerged from the grainy picture—for a moment I swear they all moved. We were in Pusan. I in uniform, my M1 strapped to my back, tying shoelaces for two sisters. One was seven, and the other five years old. They had never seen shoes that tied. One of the girls held up her foot smaller than the palm of my hand for me to lace. “Teo,” she called to me, (all the orphans called me Teo) “tie shoe.” Then she smiled and placed her tiny hand on my shoulder. The following day we were ambushed, she and her sister killed.
I grabbed a church pew to balance myself. My stomach rose to my throat.
“Father—”
“Good meeting you,” I said catching my breath. “Take a pie when you leave.” I nodded to the rectory table where the other pies were lined up like offerings at the altar.
“Father Riley, I think you did the right thing. I think—”
“You know what I think?” I said, turning to face him square on.
“No,” he said, eagerly pressing his pen to his expectant pad. “Please, tell me.” His brows arched high above his hungry grey eyes. The newspaper clipping was already tucked away.
“I think you should take the pie on the far left. It’s from Mrs. B. She makes the best crust in town. She adds rum to the apples. It’s good.”
His eyes narrowed and his brow knit into one thin line across his forehead. “So, Father,” he said as he glanced at his notes. “You went to Korea in 1950, flew with the 187th, you did some serious shit, then for some reason you were charged with protecting a group of Korean orphans, then ended up a POW, then in a hospital in Germany for a year, then home in fifty-four. How’d a war hero end up taking priest vows and hiding out in Portland for over a year, and how’d that same war hero end up in a podunk town like Manzanita?”
“Long story.”
“Well, I got the dates, but I need that long story to go with those dates.”
“When I understand that story, you’ll be my first call.”
“But Father. You should be careful.” He slapped his pad closed and shoved it back into his pocket. “Some stories find a way of writing themselves.”
“And so goes the history of the world,” I said, continuing to stack the books.
He flicked a speck from his hat, yanked it down on his head, and stomped out. As soon as the heavy wood door slammed shut, he came back through. “Rum, huh?” he said and grabbed Mrs. B’s buttery tart. He tipped his hat, said, “Thanks for the pie, anyway,” then slithered out the same way he slithered in.
He wasn’t unlike that photographer in Pusan who was there that day to photograph dead bodies, eager for the paycheck they represented.
A reporter—most certainly Bishop Doyle “taking advantage” of a situation. He’d write what served them both. I didn’t care.
The chapel went quiet. The stench of the reporter’s aftershave lingered near the altar. Did I have a comment? What comment could sum up how I didn’t recognize what mattered in life until meeting the children in that photograph? And how none of it mattered until I wrote about it in my letters to Andréa. How nothing had any value until I told her? How Toreck was an easy problem to solve. And how on some days apple pie was the only answer that made any sense.
My hands trembled as I organized the pulpit, dusted the gold cross on the altar, opened the Bible on the lectionary, placed a black ribbon where I’d be reading for the wedding, and closed the cover. Weddings were the worst part of my job; all that transitory bliss. Funerals were easier—well, not easier, but at least unspoken, because there really are no words for the loss of a love. And unlike the transitory bliss of a wedding, a lost love was etched into faces at a funeral, a truth that would live inside those left behind forever. No words required. I could relate to the unspoken foreverness of it all. I could relate to funerals. But I couldn’t relate to weddings.
The image of that news article burned inside me as did the images of many dead or discarded children of Korea—all the ones I couldn’t help, couldn’t feed or protect. I felt as helpless then as when the Mc Murtrys held me down while they murdered Kiernan.
I set out the bread plate and wine chalice for the Eucharist liturgy, then turned and twisted with a right step on the wrong nerve, which sent fire through my hip; spasms ran up my back and down my thigh. I dropped into the chair behind the podium, my collar drenched in sweat. It took two years to get that image out of my mind. But there it was again.