Chapter V Pagan Babies

S. Keyron McDermott 209 Tyler St. Cascade, IA 52033

Chapter V Going Home I am a teenager by the time we leave St. Mary’s Home and Orphanage. I have my period and my boobs are growing – not as fast or as big as I would like -- but they are. It is May and school is about out. Mrs. Miller, our bland-faced social worker with the colorless hair pulled back from her face into a bun tight as an aerial artist I once saw hanging by her pony tail on the Ed Sullivan Show -- so that you expect to see little bubbles of blood at her hairline -- calls me into her office in the Catholic Charities wing the Thursday after my birthday. You can pretty well figure that somebody wearing a plain brown suit with a plain brown blouse and shoes, no jewelry and blood bubbling out of her hair roots is the sort who, if you go along with the program, no problem. Curtains, if you don’t. She hands me note embossed with the Catholic Charities logo like the statue in the circular drive at front of the Home and instructs me to give it to my teacher explaining that she will be picking me up at 2:30 on Friday. When I leave, I sneak a surreptitious peek at the letter: To the teacher of Shirley McDermott, Please excuse Shirley from classes Friday afternoon, May 15th. I will pick her up sometime after lunch. If you have any questions, please contact me at this office. Sincerely, Clara Miller, Family Social Worker

This could mean anything from TB x-rays to being accused of stealing. Though my instinct is that it has to do with Mom, but if you are forward and ask a person like Mrs. Miller about it, she writes on your record that you’re “aggressive,” “impertinent,” “insolent,” “prying” ”reticent,” “uncooperative” and a lot of other word-of–the-week words that don’t mean good things. I scout out Jan, who is in the kitchen doing her job: making baloney sandwiches for school lunches. She isn’t the chapel person anymore because Sister Cure d’Ars replaced Gorilla in January and now we rotate jobs every week. Everybody gets to do everything. First, I ask her if she is going anywhere Friday. “To school. Why?” I show her the note from Mrs. Miller, and I swear her to secrecy -- if it gets back to Mrs. Miller, I am in deep, dark, double Dutch. We discuss it and conclude I must be going up to Sunnycrest to talk to Mom, so I am really surprised when Mrs. Miller picks me up and Janice is in the car! I am cool and pretend this is biz as usual, but I’m even more surprised when heads out of town going west. As you leave the city of Dubuque and the Mississippi River, the steep bluffs and rocky prominences of the city relax and the land rolls out softly out into the green hills and pastures of the Eastern Iowa countryside. A serious rain had begun at noon, but has dwindled a half-hearted drizzle, and the pale spring sun is happily ducking in and out between gray-white cloud bunches. An illusive rainbow hide-and-seeks behind us in the east. We are all three silently riveted to the sight of the painfully beautiful land: deep green pastures like newly-laid carpet between the black as coal freshly plowed and planted fields; trees, eye-popping bright shades of yellow, blue green and lime, the

weeping willows swaying gracefully as a long-armed corps de ballet by the roadside. It has never seemed beautiful before, and I wonder if it’s only because we’re going home. As we drive Mrs. Miller explains: “Now, the reason I am bringing the two of you back to your house, is for you to take a long, close look at it and to think hard. The doctors say your mother is now free of TB, but her compromised condition means she is unable to do housework. The question is, do you think you two will you be able to?” “Oh, I am sure. . .” I begin, but she cuts me off. “Don’t be so sure. You need to assess the situation honestly. ” What do you want to bet she’s writing a report? I want to tell Jan, and warn her everything we do and say will be written down, but how while Mrs. Miller is listening? Before we know it, we pass the Twelve-Mile House and then Corsello’s drive-in at the edge of town at the pops into view and a minute later we are on Main Street passing Doc Armstrong’s office, then Freddie Becker’s, and McNally’s gas station and the old Chew Mansion East Side school. Under the water tower Mrs. Miller brakes and sticks out her arm. We’re waiting for Ed Hawkins’s pick-up with a pig in the bed to rattle around the corner in front of us and when he does, she turns right. The sight of the white house at the bottom of the hill, even though it looks deserted, makes me so happy, I want to hoot and holler, jump out of the car and run down to it. I glance back and see Jan leaning forward eagerly too. The big elms at the back shake their new green leaves excitedly when they see us. The lawn, with new grass struggling up through straw-colored tufts, looks as if nobody mowed last year. Mrs. Miller will write “scatterbrained” and “impulsive” if I jump and run around, so I sit pretending I am barely interested. We get out of the car and follow her along the

sidewalk next to the ratty, matted lawn and up to the front door. She fumbles in her purse for the key, locates it in a plain, white envelope, unlocks the door and motions us in. Inside, is a double whammy. First, a whack across the face by an awful musty smell, then the shock of how shoddy, shabby and small it is. The smell sticks in my nostrils like a blood clot after a nosebleed and makes it hard to breathe. None of the chairs match the linoleum or the curtains in the living room. No carpet, rugs, fancy lamps, ash trays or vases. Looking at Jan, I can’t tell what she is thinking. I wander through the dining room, into the kitchen and then the pantry and open a cupboard door. Nothing but a chipped battered set of canisters with dented lids. I struggle the top off the sugar, and it’s empty. So is the flour. “We need flour and sugar, and . . . ah groceries,” I say, figuring then she will write in the report: Shirley is observant and able to anticipate household necessities.” I open a couple other cupboards and say to Jan, “We got to go shopping.” “No kidding, it’s totally empty,” she concurs. We head upstairs on the steep, narrow, noisy steps. It is a fresh jolt to see how small, ugly and dusty the bedrooms are, that the bedspreads and the curtains don’t match either. I recall the bright fushia and blue Ginny’s room at Our Lady of the Woods and thank God she is thousands of miles away in Italy. Imagining her, my stomach aches with an embarrassment that fuels my doubt. “The people who live here don’t do much dusting,” I laugh. Though it isn’t funny, I hope it keeps Mrs. Miller from noticing the cast-off furniture and how frayed and faded chenille bedspreads and homemade quilts are. In addition, it will also inform her we know what housework is required.

“Have you seen the bathroom?” “It doesn’t work; Daddy didn’t. . .” “You didn’t look,” she gestures around the corner. In the smallest of the four rooms upstairs, before he died, Daddy had installed a bathroom, but never got it connected. I flush the toilet and whish – it works! Someone had finished my father’s work! I turn on the faucets, but nothing came out the H side, so we still had no hot water. I tell Mrs. Miller sounding adult-serious, “We have gotten attached to flush toilets at St. Mary’s.” Not to mention going to ballets with Woodie big sisters, I think. “The doctors are satisfied the lesions on your mother’s lungs are healed. In other words, she is no longer an active TB case, and therefore it is no longer necessary for her to be in Sunnycrest. However, she is unable to do any heavy housework – scrubbing, sweeping, hanging clothes. . .” Catching her drift I say, “Kneading bread?” Janice adds: “Ironing.” Mrs. Miller nods. “What I brought you out here to find out is if you feel you are grown-up enough to take care of this house.” “I was 13 years old last week.” “Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen or twenty-six or forty-six, this house represents a lot of work.” Looking at Jan, she continues, “And you’re only eleven. Laundry for six people is no small matter.” “There are two of us,” I emphasize.

“But you have shown yourself to be very uneven -- quite responsible at times,” she pauses, “Well, let’s just say, less so at others.” “I would rather scrub floors here than there.” I say. “Besides, the dining room at the Home is lots bigger,” Jan says. “Everything is bigger,” I add. “Yes, but there you have help -- the staff does the laundry, hallways, and windows – here. . .” she pauses and I’d bet she had sat in meetings with the doctors arguing the same thing. “My littlest brother is growing up in a strange big city without any of us,” I argue passionately.” “And this is our house, not somebody else’s,” Jan says, following my lead. “Yeah, it’s easier to clean your own house.” Mrs. Miller smiles indulgently, and I conclude we’ve said the right things. All the way back to Dubuque, I gaze out the window mesmerized by the contrast of green pasture-islands shimmering in the black-fields sea, so I don’t have to talk. I had said the right things, but I am dogged by my reservations. Yes, it is home and I want to be there, but I hadn’t remembered it being so small, smelly, shabby and awful! How could Edie and I keep it clean by ourselves, plus bake bread, do laundry and go to school? When we get back to the Home, we two go immediately down to the Little Boys and Little Girls and tell Wally and Colleen where we have been. They are wide-eyed and happier than I expect and we swear them to secrecy. I had wonder if they too won’t be so attached to their friends, flush toilets, unlimited hot dogs and store-bought breakfast rolls, they might not want to go home, but I am wrong. I am only one with doubts.

We four return to Cascade in the Home station wagon as we had left in it. Only it is early one muggy, overcast late May day after Cathedral school is out for the summer. The windows are open, the place smells like Spic and Span, and there isn’t a speck of dust. Just like the day we left, my Aunt Dolores is there. She, Aunt Viola and my cousins have cleaned. The eight rooms of house at the bottom of water tower hill are still shabby, but they are dust-free, and I’m glad to be home. Plump as an overstuffed pillow, Mom is there, too. We hug and kiss her and everybody runs around crazy-like, galloping up and down the steps running in an out as if getting acquainted again. The kids run across the road and climb the oak tree and return to report there are mulberries already! Then Wally and Colleen run down to the beaver dam and see two babies. “Mom, where’s Denny, I thought he was coming too?” “Oh, he is, but your Uncle has to take a few days off work because Eva doesn’t drive. I’m hoping we can get this place housecleaned, plant some garden and into a routine first.” She looks at me concerned, runs her hand through her hair the way she used to, grave but not gray because she is so pink and fat from being in the sanatorium. A year there has cured her TB, but not her tendency to worry. When my aunts leave Mom says “The Catholic Charities people were reluctant for us to come back here. They said you were too young. I insisted, but now that I see all there is to do, I . . . “ “Aw, Mom, don’t worry. You should have seen the dining room we scrubbed every night at the Home. It was big as this whole house,” I say with a grand, careless

wave realizing as I do, that there were a dozen of us scrubbing that floor, this only looked small to us by comparison to huge dormitory and playrooms. “Child, do you understand that I can’t do a thing. Not a thing? I can’t even walk upstairs.” “Then you won’t even know if we don’t make our beds!” I laugh. “Even if nobody ever looks upstairs, the washing and bread baking alone. . .” she moans. “Speaking of that, you better show me how to make bread.” I had already discovered the best remedy for fear – get busy. “Yes,” she agrees, “it is still early enough to allow the dough to rise twice and again in the pans.” As I crumble the yeast, she explains hot water kills it, but cold doesn’t work, it must be lukewarm and muses, “We’ll start the serious housecleaning tomorrow.” After the bread is mixed, kneaded and set in the sun to rise, we make lunch, get the kids back up from the beaver dam and eat. Next, we unpack and sort our clothes into winter and summer, what fits, what doesn’t, what can be passed down next year and what has to go in the rag bag to be used for patching. When that’s done, I punch the bread dough down, and Wally and Colleen start on the lawn. After that, we open the trunks, fold our wool winter clothes with mothballs and transfer the summer ones to our drawers. Before we know, it is time to cook supper -- our favorite, goulash with crumbled up hamburger, macaroni and a jar of tomatoes from the basement along with a quart jar of green beans we had canned the year before we left. Opening the jars and seeing them empty, Mom begins lamenting that we have no garden, and though we point out there are

several quarts from previous summer, we also know they will never be enough for the coming winter. Fortunately, when she picked up groceries, she found some left-over onion sets, seed potatoes and some neglected, leggy- looking tomato plants that hadn’t been bought when most people put their gardens in. After supper Mom shows me how to form the dough for loaves, buns and roll out cinnamon rolls and we set them in the late day sun to rise. We take a chair outside for her to sit on, and get the spade, the garden rake and the lawn mower out of the shed. Wally finds some grease and oils the mower because it’s really hard to push. We take turns mowing, spading and pulling weeds and raking a place for the vegetables. Wally doing most of the heavy work, but we are all helping. Mom shows us the best way to do stuff, but you can see one or two pushes of the lawn mower and she’s whipped. “With any weather luck, we’ll have Early Girls in August,” Mom says, comforted by the sight of the newly planted tomatoes. “Canning -- at least all the prep work – is something I can do.” “Too bad, we didn’t get any chickens,” Wally says his voice thin with regret, and I poke him because I don’t want him to remind her of that stuff, “it was my last year.” He may be unhappy, but I am dead glad we have arrived too late to get in on the Great Baby Chicken Give Away at Dahlem’s Feed Store. Every March they gave away a dozen baby chicks to any kid under ten, and this was Wally’s last year. Mom always said, “the great chicken give-away is an ingenious spring device to stimulate the demand for chicken feed in summer.” March in Iowa is too cold for baby chicks outside, so we always had three or four dozen of them huddled around the oil burner in the kitchen. They’re cute, but they stink and they’re stupid. One time Colleen and Wally were fighting

and knocked over the chair barrier, and this flood of yellow runs peeping and pooping all over the house. Something about running causes baby chicks to poop and poop and poop and poop. What a mess! What a stench! We had to catch them all and put them back, then move everything to one side and Mom had to scrub up the poops. Then take off our shoes and clean them because you can’t have everybody tracking chicken poop all over the house. After that, we had to move all the stuff from one side of the kitchen to the other, to get the poops they dropped there. I mean, it was after ten o’clock that night when we finally finished. Standing there, I can feel my face turn bright red thinking about Jud or Jude or Cathy Rooney or God forbid! Ginny knowing about our chickens. Just the smell alone, the whole house. I put my hands over my face for the humiliation of it. “What’s wrong?” Mom asks. “Aw nothing. I was just thinking about the time the kids let the chickens loose all over the kitchen.” “Well, hopefully they’re grown up enough now that we won’t have that kind of nonsense anymore.” The bread rises while we’re planting and mowing and Mom comes in and shows me how to light the oven with a wooden kitchen match, so I don’t blow it up. Soon the smell of bread mingles with the May air and the scent of the earth we are now spading for the vegetables and the grass we have mowed. It smells so glorious, and where we have mowed looks so great, and Mom is so pleased with us that suddenly, I’m thrilled too. The sunset begins to streak the western sky improbable shades of pink, blue, and purple like a bunch of wild sprite kids experimenting with a giant package of crayons or colored markers. These are the longest, loveliest days of the year and after 9 p.m., when we can

no longer see to mow, dig and rake, we go in, retrieve my perfectly browned batch of rolls, buns and loaves from the oven and everybody gets a hot fresh roll with butter. Maybe it’s my imagination or maybe just arrogance ‘cuz I made them – or mostly – but honest-to-God, I believe they taste better than store-bought! ♦ In the June days that follow we systematically tear each room in the house at the bottom of the water tower hill apart, wash and starch the curtains and string them on stretchers, wash the windows, walls and woodwork, scrub the floors and clean all the drawers and air out the mattresses. Mom takes off the quilt protectors, we wash them and the bedspreads. I complain to Mom that we just straightened our drawers when we returned, but she insists we didn’t wipe them out or put new paper in them, so they aren’t “clean”. Sometimes it takes better part of a week to do a room. Every other day, we bake bread because store-bought is too expensive and there is no way to make homemade look so smooth or cut it so thin, no matter how hard you try. I miss the cushy life we had in the Home: never having to worry about whether the potatoes were peeled, boiled, boiled dry, done, too done, mushy or falling apart. If the hamburger we had would be enough for five people. You have to be constantly on guard cooking – it’s like art, ballet and photography – far, far easier than it looks! Janice’s friends Jeannie Crowley, Debbie Coohey and Marion Simon flock around once they hear we are back. Wally has friends too: Carly Dolphin and the Noonan boys invite him to go fishing and sleep out in tents, Colleen’s friend Joyce lives on the corner, but I have no one. Never popular to begin with, going to an orphanage put me out of the running with what few friends I might have had. On sultry summer nights, they say you

can hear the corn grow and sometimes, I sit in the outdoor toilet alone and listen to the corn growing in Fangmann’s field behind the house and wish I were the nice type. Eventually Mom finds somebody to give her a deal on a couple dozen pullets, an extremely smart move because now we are welfare and it is ADC checks and what seems like tons of corn meal, flour and the powdered eggs. The flour isn’t really white and makes everything you bake course and gray-brown. For weekends we mix it with some well-milled bleached from the store, so our bread isn’t so dark, flat or heavy, and reconstitute the powdered milk by mixing it half and half with store-bought whole, so it’s drinkable. The powdered egg packages say “Use like real eggs.” Well, you could, but don’t kid yourself, cakes made with powdered eggs are flat and taste funny. There is nothing like spherical orbs fresh from a hen that is like a real egg. Occasionally, there is meat in the commodities box, but not often, though always good Cheddar and real butter. Commodities peanut butter comes in Crisco-like cans, with two inches of oil on the top and practically solid ground peanuts at the bottom. It takes Paul Bunyan muscles and a hefty putty knife to stir, so Mom doesn’t even try. We have “diarrhea” or “constipation” peanut butter depending on whether we’re at the top or bottom of the can. We envy people who can afford homogenized Skippy and Peter Pan in jars, ham sausage sandwiches, bananas and hostess cupcakes for lunch and hide our homemade bread sandwiches our lunch bags as we eat at school. Occasionally Mom lets us make cookies. Several nights a week we have corn meal mush and Johnny Cake, and I know Mom is worried sick that we aren’t eating enough meat and are growing up dumb because there are always articles in magazines people give her and experts talking on the radio about it. We mix up a gruel of corn meal, vegetable table scraps and feed it to the

chickens, so we also have eggs and the occasional chicken for Sunday dinner and Mom feels better. I secretly figure this is why she doesn’t want Denny to come back home. At Aunt Eva’s in Chicago, he is undoubtedly eating more meat than us. All she has to do is write a letter and tell them to bring him back, and I know that is why she doesn’t. It makes me angry, but I am not sure at whom, you can’t be mad at the commodities. When she finally does write, we work diligently without much complaining to get the place spiffed up. (As if a three-year-old boy would notice!) By the Fourth of July weekend, the yard is completely mowed, the house mostly cleaned, and from the look of the lettuce, tomatoes and onions in the garden no one would know what a late start we got. Yeah, we hadn’t finished all the housecleaning, but then, does anybody ever? Needless to say, we were all dying to see our baby brother.

Finally about 3:30 that Tuesday afternoon, my aunt and uncle maneuver their ocean liner of an Oldsmobile into our yard, and a thin, apprehensive-looking boy gets out of the back seat. I know it is Denny because he has the same white hair and blue eyes, but he isn’t a baby anymore; he is a kid. It’s disappointing, as we want our baby brother back. Though you can see he really likes playing with us, and my cousins did too. We have more interesting stuff than Chicago like the beaver dam. Wally had once seen them drop a tree. They are trying to build their dam big enough to make a lake and flood Louie Fangmann’s corn, so he’s always taking it out but they are always building it back up. Wally warns everybody to be super quiet, tiptoe and don’t talk, but when our cousin Pat steps on a mushroom that he thinks is a live thing, he screams. That’s city kids for you: goofy and spooky. The guard beavers whack the water with their tails and they dive

under. Then Denny starts crying because he thinks they are gone forever. Wally explains there’s no need to cry, they’ll be back soon as they think the coast is clear. We return to the house for a while, and sure enough, the beavers are back beavering. My uncle Walter gives us nickels and dimes to ride the Ferris wheel and play the carnival games in the Legion Park across the street. Janice and Wally save theirs for bicycles. Jeannie Crowley’s Dad gave her two dollars, and she pays for Jan, so she gets to ride and saves her money. Talk about a lucky stiff. The next morning all of us, get up at dawn and go over to the park and look for money and she finds a whole dollar! What did I tell you? We always look around the beer stand and nobody can figure out why people like getting drunk so much because it makes them butter fingers and they drop their change. When it comes time to leave later in the day, and my aunt and uncle got into the car without him, Denny looks terribly sad and Aunt Eva looks like she is going to cry herself. Who could blame her – a cute little boy like Denny? Now I feel as sad for them as I did when we were leaving for St. Mary’s. Next thing we know, summer is over and know we are back in school again. Right as winter sets in, when the warm days are done, Mike Henry gives me his paper route because he is already a freshman in high school and paper routes are a grade school job. I am delivering the Des Moines Register, which is not as good as the Dubuque Telegraph Herald, because the TH has twice or three times the customers and gets delivered after school, when it is warm. The TH carriers make more money, have more subscribers closer together and don’t have to get up before six, but it is really hard to get one of those routes. It is a special pain on Saturday because after we heat the water and

wash the clothes and hang them out, I have to scrub the kitchen floor (because you can’t help slopping water with a wringer washer) and then collect for my paper route. A few customers like the Hotel and Jack McNally pay in advance, which is good because then there are fewer places to collect Saturday. Mom and the kids help me deliver on Sunday in the car because more people take the Sunday paper and they are so heavy, they wouldn’t all fit them in my bag and would have to go back downtown to fill then people wouldn’t get their paper until afternoon and be cranky. I am sometimes late for school, because by the time I eat breakfast and walk back across town, it’s already 8:30. Some days I don’t think I am going to make it through the winter: what with hanging clothes and delivering papers my feet and hands are always frozen stiff. The only time it is great is Christmas because I get loads of tips – which I use to buy Christmas presents for everybody -- and candy, mainly boxes of chocolate covered cherries. After we eat our goulash or corn meal mush or cheese sandwiches, we pass around the box. They are like sweet eggs – the chocolate shell cracks, when you bite into it and the sweet white stuff spills deliciously out and around your mouth, last there’s a cherry in the middle like a sugar yoke. Sister Mary Magdeline is our eighth grade teacher. You’d think she might cut me some slack and not mark me late every single time I am, because she knows I have a paper route and to help at home, but she does. We call her “Pinchers” because she is thin as a ruler and mean as a pinch bug with these long bony fingers that grab a person by the back of the neck and paralyze them. Every morning and afternoon during Advent, she collects money for pagan babies after prayers and the pledge of allegiance. After lunch as well, because a lot of kids live close enough to walk home for lunch and could bring

money back. It was the seventh grade against the eighth grade and everybody in the winning class would get a special St. Francis holy card -- very cool with a picture of St. Francis with all the animals around him on a piece of beautiful parchment or heavy colored paper. On the front of the holy card under the picture of St. Francis surrounded by animals is a little bio: “St. Francis of Assisi, the son of a rich Italian merchant, was a wastrel as a young man. A ferocious wolf began terrorizing the town, so Francis went up into the hills to find it. When he did, he made the sign of the cross and the wolf became tame. St. Francis is the patron saint of animals, and he did many other good works in his life including starting the Franciscan brothers and the Poor Clare sisters.” She passes one around so we can see it and everyone wants one because they are perfect to keep your place in a book or to flip back and forth between the regular normal parts of the mass in the middle of your missal and the parts that change in the front. “Pagan babies, of course, don’t have the good luck all of you had – to be born into a good Catholic family,” Pinchers tells us. “When they die, they will live for eternity in Limbo, never be admitted to the presence of God. So it is really important that we support the Catholic missionaries who will convert their parents to the one true religion, and who will baptize their kids, so they can go to heaven.” Sister tells us they will also “instruct them not to run around nude the way African savages do, paint their faces, and listen to their witch doctors . . .” which makes me think of the Headshrink of St. Mary’s Home and Orphanage and smile. However, my class doesn’t contribute as much as she would like and one day she becomes quite put out. Since we barely have money to eat meat so we don’t grow up stupid, I have only given a couple nickels and a dime to the pagan babies and don’t worry about it.

Sister looks at me and says, “Pay attention, Miss McDermott, stop day dreaming” Then she glances around the room, frowns, sighs and continues: “I am very, very disappointed with the seventh and eighth grade classes. You are the two oldest groups in the grade school. You should be setting the standards for the lower grades, but instead I find that all the rooms but the first and second grade are ahead of us. Shame on you! Shame on every single one of you. I am personally embarrassed for every single solitary one of you. And,” She glances at several of us in turn, “. . . I happen to know several of you have money because you have jobs.” What she doesn’t know is, I think, I am trying to save up for a bike. God himself knows I need one – if you have a paper route that stretches from Lucy McNally’s to Lehman’s Auto and to the stockyards and back, you need a bike. I have signed up for every bike raffle as many times as they would let me, done a half dozen storm heaven novenas, but it’s always somebody, who already has a good bike who wins. After the last time, I started to wonder what God is doing, if he is even in heaven. I know this is wrong, but I just can’t help it. “At least,” Sister Magdeline scoffs sarcastically, “the seventh grade has made a better effort than the eighth!” and with her veil swinging and beads rattling insistently, points to the $12.56 written under words, 7th Grade, Pagan Babies in the farthest, highest point of the slate board running across the front of the classroom. Then crosses dramatically past her desk to the right side of the room, where we eighth graders sit in three rows of eight each, knocks her knuckles insistently against the board just under where the monitor Kay Peiffer has written $11.09 and says, “This-is-just-plaindisgraceful. Just-plain-disgraceful.”

She alternately fixes me and several of my classmates -- Sandy, Jeannie, Monica Kenny, Richard -- in gaze of pure contempt. “There are any number of you people who have paper routes, baby sit, shovel walks and are paid for household chores.” We are all squirming in our seats. Kenny is covering his face because he has terrible acne and the nun’s tirade is making him feel like fresh new pimples are popping out even as she speaks. Jeannie is slouching down in her seat because she is too tall and it is making her feel more self-conscious. “Worst of all, some of you receive allowances for which you do absolutely nothing.” She raps her knocks on the edge of the large oak desk to punctuate the phrase as she repeats it, “Ab-so-lute-ly nothing.” Then locks on Robert, who we all know gets a an allowance from his mother for keeping his room clean, and never does because he likes it messy – it’s homier that way he says. Robert is fidgeting like a first grader. She mostly ignores the country kids Phyllis, Helen, Steven and Richard because she thinks farm kids have to do chores they don’t get paid for. “I have absolutely no insight into what makes some of you people so extremely niggardly, parsimonious Scrooges when it comes to the crying needs of the poor, neglected souls of Africa. . . The nuns and priests who have vowed poverty, chastity and obedience, simply haven’t the wherewithal to support this work, or I am sure they would, as they have already generously dedicated their whole lives to it, so the money must come from you. It must come from good Catholic people.” I feel ashamed of myself and wish desperately that I had a lot of money to give.

“On the other hand, I am confident I know where some of your money goes: You are spending it on rock and roll records, pop, and candy. Now I feel about an inch high. Maybe Mr. or Mrs. Goetzinger tells her that almost every morning I take a quarter out of my paid-ahead fund and after I deliver the west side, on my way back through town, I stop there, warm up and buy a glazed jelly doughnut and a candy bar to eat while I walk the rest of the route.. Sandy reaches into her desk, pulls out her pencil case, unzips it and fumbles around among the pencils, pens and erasers, pulls fifty cents out and zips it closed. She raises her hand, Sister nods to her, she rises from her seat, walks to the front of the room and drops the two quarters into the round metal former Lord Albert tobacco can with pictures of emaciated African children glued on it. While the two coins are still clinking and rolling Sister comes to our side and changes the zero to a five: $11.59 on the board. Sandy’s face is a wide smile of relief returning to her place. While she is doing this, Kenny Dolphin has been rummaging in his pants pocket. He raises his hand, receives Sister’s nod, goes to box folding up a dollar bill and slips it in. “Now,” she says changing the one in our total to a two, “that is a whole lot more like it. I am sure God will bless your sacrifice.” Meanwhile on the seventh grade side, Sue Devaney has leaned down and removed her shoe, out of which she takes a dollar bill. Sue is the adopted of Orland, the undertaker, and his wife Mame, who has only one adopted sister and they are rich. She sits up, raises her hand and Sister acknowledges her. She runs to the front of the room as if eager to keep the eighth grade behind. Just as eagerly on her heels comes Peggy Otting, about the only only child in town, receives the nod, and brings up another dollar. Next is

Danny Dolphin, whose father has a bar on Main Street and everybody knows – including Sister -- that his dad pays him to put beer in the cooler and take out the empties. On our side of the room, suddenly Phyllis, Patty, her cousin Corky, Judy and Bob all unearth nickels, dimes, quarters and even dollars in their pockets, pencil cases, and books. Raising our total to $15.74 brings a another salvo of change and bills from the seventh graders and in turn Mike Howard, Dick Noonan, Peggy Otting and Mary Ann Kramer cough up, as do Alan and Dave. I raise my hand and ask, “Sister, may I please go to the cloak room?” “Yes, certainly.” I leave the classroom and immediately turn left into the long, narrow room where each of my classmates’ coats hangs on a hook under his or her name our lunches in paper bags on the narrow shelf above our coats because it is no longer cool to carry a lunch pail. In the left hand pocket of my coat, under my well-used handkerchief, I find the envelope with Jack McNally’s $6.20 for December. He pays in advance because he has too many customers on Saturday. I return to the classroom with the envelope, and feel like a hero stuffing the five-dollar bill into the Pagan Baby can. That, of course, brings more donations from the seventh grade (Danny must have a whole roll of bills in his pocket) and before I finish I have given the other dollar and twenty cents, and soak up the looks of admiration I get from my classmates. Walking home, I realize if Mom finds out she is going to be furious. I am taking the money for morning treats out of the paid-ahead subscriptions, getting two extra papers because Nina Mortensen has died and Josie Lane left after Thanksgiving for Florida. It seems every time I get a new subscription, I lose an old one. Today, I have given Jack McNally’s

entire month’s subscription to the Pagan Babies. The most you can make on such a small route is four or five dollars a week and I am not making half that. I am angry at myself and Pinchers. ♦