April 1909, Schuetten, PA

We heel-toed our way through the kitchen, all moon shadowy dark this early in the morning, me first, Heinie following real close, past the hearth and the three stoves and around the two butcher block islands, over to a covered bin. I held the lid open so Heinie could pull out two empty potato sacks. Sister Irene would be up at six to make the oatmeal so we had an hour.

Heinie was a skinny kid who said he was a full eight years old but I was sure he weren’t a speck over seven. The nuns picked him up last year the day after my ninth birthday, after someone seen him wandering the bungalows eating from garbage pails in the middle of the night. His mother was dead on account of she froze stiff in a snowdrift outside the hotel taproom. His father was a tannery worker except Heinie said his mom never knew which one. I cut him in on a good deal only because he had the guts to lie to me about his age.

“Them dogs been crapping two full days since we last been out,” I said, my voice low. “Let’s go make us some money.”

I tugged at the knob of the heavy back door with both hands till it pulled open. In seeped a door full of night mist that settled thick and heavy on us, tickling my nose with the smell of drying creek mud and plants what rotted in it. We looked through the screen door into the grayness, all mixed in with dark swirls left over from a rain we got overnight.

“Looks creepy outside,” Heinie whispered, his eyes big as all-day suckers.

“Night fog,” I said. “Came up from the river. That’s all it is.”

“Yeah, but how do we tell the difference if there’s ghosts out there?”

I unhooked the screen door latch and told him to quit bellyaching then I pulled him outside by the shoulder when he didn’t move. We stayed put under the overhang of the back porch, potato sacks in our hands, me listening to crickets and frogs, him listening to who knows what. A full moon played peek-a-boo behind the clouds until it poked itself through and lit up the back yard. The shadowy mist what surrounded the orphanage was now crawling down the slope. If there were any ghosts mixed in there with it they were heading back to the river.

I hopped down the steps, reached my hand under the porch floorboards and pulled out two wooden spoons from a ledge. Time to get to work.

First stop was the Schuetten Hotel, opposite side of the road from the orphanage and down a bit, around a bend lined with maple trees. Pale yellow shingles, brown trim and four rounded corners what looked like small grain silos with windows. Real pretty in the daytime but now it was all tan and gray, the only light on it coming from the moon. Out front of the hotel the gray had a shine to it, sparkled up some since this was where the town cobblestones began. Sister Irene said folks often traded in their country smarts for city smarts once they stepped off the dirt and onto the brick, and weren’t it too bad their common sense didn’t always tag along for the trip.

A puddle of muddy rainwater made trickle-drip noises as it ran through a black iron sewer grate set flat in the cobblestone out front of the hotel. Heinie and me stepped slow around the grate, kept our eyes on the empty spaces between the bars, spaces I knew were wide enough for cats and other small critters to fit through if they got pushed hard enough ’cause I seen it done. We tiptoed past, listening for noises different than the trickle-drips, heard nothing else from underneath. We quickened up again till we were on hotel property.

We started at the far end of the back lawn and moved silent through the grass, keeping our eyes to the ground while we worked our way toward the hotel porch, bending, standing, bending, standing, careful where we tread. This time of year the sun got up about the same time Sister Irene did. A good thing, seeing as how the hotel owner wanted us to work when it was mostly dark and his guests were still asleep. Heinie spied a large pile a few feet ahead of him and hurried his skinny legs to get to it.

Oh-oh. Oopsy-daisy.

“Johnny,” Heinie whimpered, “aw Johnny, help me.”

Heinie’s lace-up shoes were a size too big so when his potato sack dragged underneath them the little goof’s legs got all tangled between burlap and leather. He pushed himself up from the dew-soaked grass. The right side of his face was now a brown smear. I got him to his feet.

“Pick up the shit with your spoon,” I told him, “not your face. Hold still.” Heinie held his nose and gagged, still not used to the dog shit business. With a few swipes of my spoon I scraped off most of what was on his face. I untucked my shirt and ripped off the tail then used it to wipe the rest of the mutt cake off his cheek.

On the hotel’s back porch a rocking chair squeaked over a loose floorboard then stopped its slow back-and-forth. The person sitting in it struck a match, his smooth black face lighting up behind the flame as he pulled hard at his pipe, the match held fast to the bowl end. Fat Cookie worked in the hotel’s kitchen.

“Thanks, boys,” Cookie said through little puffs of smoke. “The coins is where they always is.” He snapped shut his pocket watch then went back to his rocking. “Better hustle yourselves up. Forty minutes till your oatmeal.”

I sneaked up on a lawn angel that was really a stone birdbath and quick snatched the pennies out of her hand. I waved Heinie into the underbrush; we left the hotel property through a separation in the trees.

We doubled back across Schuetten Pass Road and came up on the church rectory’s lawn. Monsignor owned two well-fed bull mastiffs and with all the crapping they did, the town strays took to dumping here, too. I never much liked the Monsignor so his dog stuff stayed right where it was, all except for a few chunks I flicked into the open window of his horse carriage.

On the other side of the maples we slipped onto the grounds of the Volkheimer bungalows, one story shacks with black and white smoke curling out their stovepipes, their front and back doors under hand-painted hex signs supposed to protect the people inside. From what, I never fully understood, but around here there were hex signs everywhere, on shacks and barns and stables, even outdoor privies, except most all the signs were faded and flaking off the curled up wood they’d been painted on. About fifty German families lived here, the shanties spread out north and west across the railroad tracks along the upper tip of town, and didn’t none of them families ever talk much about them, the hex signs I mean, least not to us orphans or other outsiders.

“Old charms for old evils,” was how Fat Cookie once put it, one outsider to another. “Can’t rightly say them signs been much help to these folks lately.”

Heinie and me traipsed two rows inside the settlement and stepped onto a small square grass patch we hadn’t had time to police the last few days. Hot-damn. Pay dirt.

We worked the area same as we worked the hotel lawn. A stray came out of nowhere, a rammy little brown and white rat terrier what chased us the last time we came through. He leaped onto the back of Heinie’s leg, started getting all pecker-happy with it. I grabbed the mutt by his tail and tossed him a good five feet, enough so Heinie and me could get a running start. The rat-dog landed and spun like he was ready to come at us again, except something stopped him; he stiffened on all fours. His bulging terrier eyes narrowed and he growled low like a cornered raccoon, his upper lip curled and showing teeth sharp enough to do what rat terriers been known to do, which was clamp onto and rip apart a rat’s head.

“Back up real slow,” I told Heinie.

The hair on the mutt’s neck and shoulders raised. It was then I seen something I’d never seen a ratter do before: he took a backward step. He snapped once then stiffened again.

“He’s gonna bite, Johnny.”

“No he won’t. He’s too scared. Keep moving.”

“Scared? Ratters don’t get scared. Scared of what?”

Behind us I heard a moan. We turned, and on the other side of the grass patch in the moonlight we saw a privy with its door open. Two bare legs were spread apart half in the privy and half out with a tumble of lady’s nightclothes above a pair of bent knees, the two bare feet attached to them legs digging their heels into a black mudhole just outside the door. Her feet lifted out of the muck and into the privy’s shadows then slapped against the inside of the doorframe on both sides, the wood creaking against the weight. Another moan told me this was for sure a girl or a lady in pain, with grunting low and deadened like her teeth were sunk into cloth. A few seconds later she squealed bad as if she was being split in half. The ratter kept his distance, growling and snapping until the lady quit her screaming and settled into another low moan. The terrier whimpered then turned tail and took off. Heinie and me were right behind him.

The dog found shimmy space under a garden shack but me and Heinie kept running till we got outside the bungalows, onto the path that went north, next to the foggy Wissaquessing River. The river was all swelled up and noisy as a rainstorm on account of the dam from the lake was open. A covered footbridge wide enough for buckboards and horseless carriages to pass each other took us across the river and emptied us onto the Volkheimer fairgrounds. Five minutes past the fairgrounds, we were on tannery property.

Knock knock. The brown metal door swung inward, its hinges squealing like scattering mice. A face rimmed with a blond beard appeared on the other side of the screen door.

“Goot morning,” the Dutchman said. “Chust in time, boys.” We stepped a few feet inside the door and dropped our sacks onto a cart. Heinie crinkled his nose from the smell.

“Wer da, Herr Glocker?” came from across the room and the other side of the tannery’s gurgling vats. It was Mr. Volkheimer’s voice, except Mr. Volkheimer didn’t show himself.

“It’s Dogshit Johnny,” the Dutchman answered, “und his apprentice.”

The Dutchman cinched my potato sack shut and raised it off the cart a few inches to check the weight by hand then did the same with Heinie’s. His eyebrows arched in our direction until a smile sneaked out through the machine grease on his beard.

“Vait here, fellas,” he told us then pushed the cart over to a water vat the size of a circus trampoline and emptied our sacks into it. When he got back he laid out our earnings on a worktable. Five pennies each plus two shiny red apples.

“From Herr Volkheimer,” the Dutchman said and turned us around by our shoulders so we were facing a wash basin. “Now clean your hands and spoons real goot then raus mit uch. If you hurry you can make it back in time for your breakfast. Und Herr Volkheimer says stay out of trouble.”

Heinie and me skipped down Schuetten Pass Road, kicking up dust and stones while we ate our apples, me poking fun at him. “Shoulda seen your face with that dog shit all over it. I thought you were gonna puke.”

“Wish you wouldn’t talk about it, Johnny,” Heinie said, his mouth full, “else I’ll upchuck this here ap—”

“Shhh.” I stopped him with a hand on his shoulder and pointed through the line of maples to another covered bridge. “Look.” We hurried over to a tree and poked our heads around its trunk.

The fog was gone, and on the wide dirt path worn into the hillside was a lady in nightclothes wobbling past us, on her way down to the bridge. Seen men stumble out of the taproom walking straighter than her, each of them knowing where they wanted to go but the knowing not helping them much. In the crook of her arm was a bundle what looked like a fat cigar but was near as big as a market day satchel. Her nighttime bedclothes were unbuttoned halfway up, her white legs slimy wet in the moonlight, her bare feet caked brown with road dirt. It was her heels what were the filthiest, like they’d been dipped in pig flop. No, more like they’d been dipped in—

Yeah. The black mud what collected outside privies.

The bundle squirmed and mewed inside the cocooned blanket as she reached the bridge. She steadied herself by leaning against the bridge tunnel’s framing then disappeared inside.

We waited for her to step out of the tunnel on the river’s other bank. The sun pushed over the hill, the inky sky now turning blue as a baby blanket, the trees poking out of the gray-black night with long shadows attached to their trunks, including the one me and Heinie were tucked behind.

Heinie whispered. “Where’d she go?”

I shrugged. We poked our heads out to see better, our eyes watching both sides of the bridge. On our end the tunnel was shadowy-dark as a cave, its opening under another faded hex sign. More waiting.

The bridge window over the middle of the river flipped back on squeaky hinges, making us both jump. I squinted, the window now a black square in the bridge’s reddish-gray wall, nothing moving inside it. Suddenly two arms split the window’s darkness and heaved the fat cigar bundle through it like bath water getting tossed off a back porch. The bundle splashed into the choppy river and didn’t come back up. The window stayed open.

“Must be kittens, huh, Johnny? Want to fish them out?”

“Nope. River ain’t safe when the dam’s open.”

The river swallowed up the bundle and didn’t seem no worse for it, Heinie and me still staring at the water’s shiny twinkle-star surface like we’d been hypnotized. Suddenly a loud pop jolted us both, scattering squirrels and scaring the chirping songbirds out of the maples along the bank. A tiny puff of smoke drifted from the open window, and it was then I knew for sure the lady wouldn’t be coming out either end of the tunnel. Go, I told myself. Run.

The bundle the lady tossed into the river bobbed to the surface before I could move. Wasn’t more than a second before we heard it crying, then it went under again.

“Johnny, that ain’t no cat! It’s—”

Whatever Heinie said after that I never heard since my cap and shoes were already off and I’d gone over the side of the bank, into the chop. River was maybe six feet deep in the middle but I was only four-ten so it might as well been a mile. Water was cold and rough yet with all the runoff it was mostly clean, at least near the top. I took a deep breath, closed my mouth and ducked under the surface.

I wasn’t ready for what I was hearing, or thought I was hearing: a crying baby, clear and strong as a hungry newborn in the orphanage nursery, screaming like it was right next to me, like its little arms were waving around, looking to be picked up, but—

I was underwater so the crying shoulda sounded different, shoulda sounded like gurgles and glugs from when you swallowed too much lake water except it didn’t and I was getting scared and—

… the river bottom … filthy … not able to see—

… found something … cloth against my hand …

… other babies were down here … I could hear them screaming …

… they needed to stop … all them screaming babies needed to stop—

On the bank me and Heinie leaned over the bundle. It wasn’t making no more noise.

“Pull the blanket off his face, Johnny.”

I was shivering too much. Besides, I figured it was dead already. “You do it.”

“Okay. One, two …”

Heinie pulled at the blanket but didn’t say nothing after that, his voice stuck inside a scream.

I opened the bundle full up. “Jesus …”

I felt my stomach jump. Little arm and leg bones stuck through ragged strips of rotted baby skin, the only skin on the baby’s skull its mouth, its lips tiny and gray, its eyes what had no lids, scared and begging and real mad, and—

Shit … the lips … they moved.

Heinie and me rounded the bend a couple of hundred feet away from the river and weren’t neither of us gonna slow down one bit, no way, no sir, no how, unh-unh. I’d kicked the bundle hard for scaring me, kicked it right back into the choppy river, which must not have been a good thing ’cause I swear on the Bible and a nun’s crucifix that I could still hear that baby screaming right behind me like it was me who killed it, me who tossed it away, and me who wouldn’t let it go to heaven.

ONE

April 1964, Three Bridges, PA

So I said to the parish’s new priest, as I helped him take his suitcases to his room upstairs, second floor of the rectory, 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 is 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 real 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 what’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 afterwards, 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 from here north to 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 what 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, PA, 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 god-damn 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 any more. 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 the 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 men at home plate.” So when they sent him back to the minors he 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’d 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. “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. 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, PA 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 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 what 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 gray. He kept his suit jacket buttoned and his white 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 I 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 but was borderline retarded. 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. More slow than retarded. 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 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 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. Weren’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 flanneled up, everything during prison visitation designed to dull a person’s features. Except in Viola’s case there’d been one feature the atmosphere couldn’t hide: her beautiful gray-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 which stopped his 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. But 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 mid-scream and were gone.

When a priest drops a coin into a pay phone and says it’s an emergency, things happen. The police showed up and so did the City of Philadelphia’s 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.