The Risk Pool Read online

  In fact, my stand of pines was the coolest, prettiest part of the church grounds, and from the base of the trees you could look all the way up through the branches to the milk-white cross on the roof.

  “This could be the coolest spot in all Mohawk County,” my friend said, and it was true, he sweated hardly at all when we relaxed there. “Only a boy would be clever enough to find such a spot.”

  I didn’t see where it was all that clever, but I didn’t mind him saying so. I liked listening to Father Michaels talk, even though most of what he said was so odd I couldn’t figure out whether he was brilliant or simpleminded, though I feared the latter.

  “People forget to notice beautiful things,” he said, looking up through the dark branches at the circle of blue-gray sky. “They outgrow it, I guess. A man who lives in a house on the beach forgets to look at the ocean. A man with a beautiful wife is just as likely to wander off someplace and forget her entirely. God must think we’re silly people.”

  Then he added, “Except for you, Ned. You’re a wonder.” His favorite observation, the strongest evidence I had in favor of simplemindedness in my friend.

  My only other companion that summer was the groundskeeper, a man called Skinny, who wasn’t particularly, though he may have been once. Now he had a melon under his white t-shirt. Skinny was in his forties, his stubbled chin a mixture of gray and black. He did not take to me until he learned I would not only do his work for him but thank him for the opportunity. I had a terrible yearning to feel useful, and Skinny, who had yearnings of the opposite nature, wasn’t the sort of man to let me suffer when there was something he could do about it. Of all his duties he most disliked mowing the great expanses of lawn, something the Monsignor wanted done every fifth or sixth day. To Skinny, a lawn didn’t look so scraggly that a sensible person would notice unless it went untended for a good two weeks. His basic philosophy was that mowing lawns was perverse and unreasonable behavior to begin with, the proof of which lay in the fact that the grass grew right back again. He was not himself a religious man and had little good to say concerning people who saw God’s will in the everyday world, but if he had been the sort of man to see meaning in things, he would have concluded that God had never intended grass to be mowed. At least not by Skinny.

  In the beginning I just helped with the trimming in spots the mower couldn’t negotiate. Especially in the cool moist shade along the sides of the church and rectory, where the grass grew thicker. Unfortunately, the hand shears I was given were designed for a full-grown hand. I made little progress and was unhappy with the task. What I really wanted was to run the big power mower. By happy coincidence, what Skinny really wanted was the shade and the hand shears, for he suffered mightily under the broiling sun, mopping sweat from his forehead with the stretched sleeves of his t-shirt until they were ribbed with brown.

  “I don’t know,” he said dubiously, glancing at the rectory when I suggested we swap jobs. On the one hand, he didn’t want to be observed shirking his duties. On the other, he didn’t want to do them. This particular day he had a driving headache, and the very idea of starting the rattling engine of the power mower made him feel weak. There was a nice cool patch of ground on the far side of the church that needed his attention. It was well out of sight from the rectory and he kept a flask in the vicinity for company. He could even bring along the hand shears. “I don’t know,” he repeated, scratching his stubble.

  We decided, predictably enough, on “just this once,” a phrase Skinny found so reassuring that the next time the grass needed mowing he used it again. Each time he pulled the mower out of the shed he handed it over to me “just this once” before disappearing. I liked both the mowing and the idea that the whole thing was more or less illicit. Some morning the old Monsignor would look out the window and catch me at it, and that would be the end. It didn’t happen though, and after a while I caught on to the fact that when the old priest went upstairs after breakfast it was to take a long nap that lasted until lunch. My friend Father Michaels caught me behind the mower one morning and looked startled. He began to shout something at me, but when I waved at him happily, he changed his mind. He watched me though, until he was sure I was in command of the situation, then waved again and shouted something at me before getting in the parish station wagon and driving off. It looked like it might have been, “Ned, you’re a wonder.”

  There was other work too. Though he wasn’t much with lawns, Skinny earned his keep with flowers. His rough fingers moved expertly among the good plants, uprooting weeds with a deft, flicking motion. He never got confused, as I sometimes did. With a small hand spade he could turn earth without disturbing the tender roots, as if by intuition he could sense how far out and down they grew. He knew in advance if any growing thing was going to turn sick and often began to administer the cure before the first leaf turned yellow. After a while I began to learn some of the signs.

  I was surprised to discover one day that he knew my father. “Everybody knows Sam Hall,” he said.

  “He’s out west building roads,” I said, ashamed I could offer no other information about him.

  “He is like hell,” Skinny said. “He’s right here in Mohawk.”

  Home was only a few blocks from the church, but Father Michaels liked to bring me home in the afternoon. Sometimes he and my mother would sit on the porch and talk while I threw grounders. The day Skinny told me about my father, I wished the priest had just let me walk. He tried to get a conversation going, but I clammed up.

  We pulled up in front of the house as my mother was inserting her key in the door. She turned and flashed a big smile that encompassed me and my friend. There was nobody else on the street. I looked.

  “Patrick Donovan,” said my mother, in reference to Skinny, “is a fool and a drunk.”

  It was later that same night, and I’d told her what Skinny said. She was never generous where Skinny was concerned, and my stories about him were always greeted coolly. It was true what she said, though. Skinny was always drinking or getting over drinking. But even so, it seemed to me that if he said Sam Hall was in Mohawk, it might be true. My father wasn’t the sort of thing you’d just imagine. I could tell that my mother was worried that it might be true, though she kept saying that it wasn’t and that Skinny was a malicious little snail. “Trust me,” she said. “If your father were in Mohawk, he’d be here tormenting us.”

  “Maybe he’s afraid you’ll shoot him,” I ventured, realizing as I said it that I resented her for wishing him away and for shooting his car. I had always been on her side, and it surprised me to feel annoyed with her. I hadn’t thought about my father or their conflict in a long time, but now, for some reason, when I recalled that afternoon over three years ago, her emptying my grandfather’s revolver into the white convertible seemed a little excessive. My attitude toward my father had changed subtly too. I remembered enjoying myself fishing with him and Wussy, though I still felt guilty about it. My mother had called it kidnapping and said whether I knew it or not I had been in grave danger the whole time, as my condition upon return—beat up, cut up, swollen, diseased—made abundantly clear. I had been reduced to such a sorry state in a mere twenty-four hours, she reminded me, adding that “People who hang around your father often require hospitalization.” She considered F. William Peterson a prime example, though it seemed to me that his hospital visit had more to do with teaming up with her than with my father.

  It was hard to find fault with her basic thesis, though. Sam Hall, as one of his friends remarked to me many years later, should have been issued with a warning label. My mother hated Skinny for having raised his specter. “Why do you employ that horrid man?” she asked Father Michaels the next evening when he brought me home from the rectory. Often the priest lingered a few minutes on the front porch before heading back to the dark rectory dining room and one of Mrs. Ambrosino’s heavy, complicated dinners.

  “I don’t,” my friend explained, “though I don’t see any great harm in the man
.”

  “You don’t see any great harm in anybody,” my mother replied petulantly. “You’d probably find much to admire in my husband.”

  “Now Jenny …” he said, and for a moment I thought he was going to reach out and take her hand.

  There may have been no great harm in Skinny, but the very next week I nearly got him fired. I was cutting the wide strip of grass between the church and rectory when the mower picked up a stone the size of a Ping-Pong ball. How it happened onto the sacred stretch of ground beyond the chain-link fence, I couldn’t guess, but there it was, and I saw it just as it disappeared beneath the mower. Instead of stopping—and I’m not sure I could have—I gritted my teeth and listened for a bang. I had picked up pebbles before and the clatter they made dancing around among the rotating blades was horrible. This time, however, there was just one modest thunk, then the normal sound of the mower. About two seconds later, however, there was the sound of shattering glass.

  At first, I did not connect the stone that disappeared beneath the mower with the hole in the stained-glass window on the second floor of the rectory. After all, the building was nearly fifty yards away, farther than I could have thrown a stone that size. I pulled the mower backward, examining the just-mowed area, hoping to discover the stone there on the ground, which would render the broken glass coincidental. No stone.

  The Monsignor had it in his hand when he came out. It had violated his bedroom, and the old priest was in no mood to marvel at the accuracy and difficulty of the shot, to me the single most impressive fact of the occurrence. Under different circumstances such long odds might have appeared miraculous, evidence of something other than natural law at work in the universe, for the round stone had plinked a neat hole in the red geometric center of the small window, a feat that a hundred stone-throwing sharpshooters couldn’t have duplicated given a hundred tries each. Unfortunately, this miraculous aspect of the event was lost on the Monsignor, whose horizontal matins the stone had interrupted. He was in his stocking feet, a fact I couldn’t get over.

  “Where is Mr. Donovan?” he wanted to know.

  That was a troublesome question. I didn’t doubt but that Skinny was asleep in the shade around the other side of the church. He had disappeared around the corner an hour earlier and one recent sweep of the mower had taken me close enough to see his work shoes, forming a V, pointed heavenward, jutting out from behind a bush. So I looked around, as if I expected to see the groundskeeper at my elbow and was surprised to discover him missing. “He was just here,” I said.

  The old priest squelched the still rattling motor, and the resulting silence was accusatory, like that of the confessional.

  “Kindly locate Mr. Donovan and ask him if I might have a moment of his time.”

  With that, he turned in his stocking feet and padded back to the rectory still clutching the stone.

  I found Skinny right where I had seen his shoes and he was in them, rubbing his eyes, awakened when the mower was turned off. “What’s going on?” he said suspiciously. He knew, of course, that the day would come when I would be discovered and he would have to explain why a boy was doing his work. He was prepared for that. He would shrug his shoulders and say, “How’s a kid supposed to learn?”

  “Monsignor wants to see you,” I told him.

  “Sure,” he said, blinking, trying to look wide awake. “What the hell. Why not.” He would bring the hand shears along as a prop.

  “I didn’t see the stone in time,” I said when we rounded the corner of the church and the rectory came into view.

  “Stone?”

  I wished I had it to show him. The window was still too far away and the hole too small to see from where we stood, and Skinny had stopped in his tracks when it became clear the situation was more complicated than he had imagined. It took me several minutes to make him understand what had happened, because he could see where the mower was sitting and he doubted it was possible. (At least somebody had a proper appreciation of the miraculous.) “What would a stone be doing there?” he kept asking, probably to waste time. He did not want to face the Monsignor.

  He not only did not want to, he flat refused to do it. For a while he paced up and down in the shade, then gave up and went back to where he had been sleeping and began to clip the border with the hand shears. He stayed right there until it was time for lunch, and then he made me fetch his lunch pail.

  Mrs. Ambrosino met me on the back porch. Clearly, she had been sent to see if the groundskeeper was in sight. She approved of Skinny even less than she approved of me, refusing even to let him into the kitchen for a glass of water. She’d known Skinny Donovan forever and he’d known her, too. As far as Mrs. Ambrosino was concerned, Skinny wasn’t too good to drink out of the hose if he got thirsty. “Where’s he hiding?” she said.

  I pretended ignorance.

  At the table in the dark dining room, the two priests were already seated. The younger was saying grace, though he looked up when I came in. The Monsignor always studied his own folded hands until they made the sign of the cross. I slipped quietly into my chair, hoping that when the prayer was concluded the Monsignor would not notice I was there. Most days he didn’t.

  The table was full, as usual. In the center was a large white soup tureen in the shape of a dove, leaking steam. Nearby, a large platter of cold cuts, including rare roast beef, spiced ham and salami, was surrounded by bowls of salads, condiments and two loaves of bread, one light, one dark, on separate silver platters. The Monsignor lifted the lid from the tureen and peered inside suspiciously. Mrs. Ambrosino hovered nearby, anxious to assist. “What is that floating?” he wanted to know.

  “It is a wedding soup,” the good woman explained, without precisely answering his question. Having discovered that “The Father” often ate little more than a shallow bowl of broth at the noon meal, she had taken recently to serving “heartier” soups. “The meatballs are made with the finest veal,” she added.

  The Monsignor frowned when the ladle came up full of meatballs, pasta, assorted vegetables. “No one at this table is contemplating matrimony that I am aware of,” he said, and proceeded to ladle carefully just the stock into his bowl until a shallow puddle formed there. When a meatball plopped in by mistake he speared it with the outside tine of his fork and plunked it back into the tureen before sending the whole apparatus to the younger priest, who at that moment looked unusually pale and failed to notice its approach. The Monsignor accepted a single slice of dark bread from near the heel and massaged a small dab of butter into it methodically.

  “Mr. Donovan is unavailable for consultation?” he said without looking up.

  Mrs. Ambrosino was staring at me maliciously, as if she would have liked to prevent the soup tureen’s arrival until the matter of my worthiness to receive it had been decided. Where soup was concerned, my method was the Monsignor’s in geometric reverse. I would shamelessly search out her finest veal meatballs like rare jewels. Or at least I would have on a normal day. At the moment I was a little too nervous to conduct my customary feed.

  “He might be clipping over on the other side of the church,” I said. It was sort of a compromise statement, true but phrased without the conviction that would initiate an immediate search.

  “He no doubt imagines that his services cannot be terminated if he himself cannot be found,” said the Monsignor, which struck me as pretty sharp. It was Skinny’s flawed plan in a nutshell.

  “I doubt your mother would approve of your operating heavy machinery,” the old priest continued, still not looking at me. “After all, you are only a boy, and not a very large boy at that. If you happened to be injured, we could be held legally liable. We could be sued. As it is, the rectory has sustained damage, though that is not the issue.”

  He then discussed the price of stained glass so thoroughly that I thought perhaps it might be the issue after all.

  “Operating a powerful mower is a hazardous occupation, as Mr. Donovan is well aware,” he went on. “A paperbo
y in Poughkeepsie was killed last summer when a stone flew across the street and knocked him off his bicycle. You can appreciate how your mother would feel if I had to inform her this evening that you had been killed while in our care. Knowing the sort of man your father is I doubt any of us would be safe, assuming he could be located and informed.”

  Had it been anyone but the Monsignor I might have taken up one or two issues. Though hardly a skilled debater or thinker, I remember wanting to point out that the dead paperboy would still be alive had he been pushing the mower instead of delivering papers across the street. Indeed, the present circumstance, viewed objectively, suggested that the Monsignor himself, indoors and nearly fifty yards away, had run a greater risk than I. If one insisted on drawing a moral from the stained glass window and the dead paperboy, it might have been that life was quirky at best and that being careful wasn’t much of a guarantee.

  I don’t know what Father Michaels thought of the Monsignor’s logic, but when he heard the remark about my father, he colored and quickly came to my defense. “I think Ned just wanted to help. He’s not the sort of young man who just accepts hospitality without giving something back,” he said quietly. He didn’t look up either, and the conversation, one of the longest ever conducted at table that summer, was made the more bizarre by the fact that nobody looked at anybody else. “His mother was pleased when I told her how much he was helping out around the rectory. Ned and his mother are fine people.”

  “Then you were aware the boy was operating machinery?”

  “The mower? Yes. I thought you were as well. He passed right in front of the library window last week when we were discussing consubstantiation.”