Amen's Boy. William Maltese

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СКАЧАТЬ was a great treat to be out at night, and the only time Father Terry would schedule Blueberry Hill Bayou was on Saturday evening. Between time in counseling with father, and the times we went to Blueberry Bayou and even other trips, I began to spend lots of time with him almost daily.

      Mass was at 6:30 in the evening, and I would stay awake for the drive to the mission chapel, but often was very sleepy on the return trip to Assisi. My drop-off was just a block from the church; sleepiness had the power to make me forget that I was trying to act strong and like an adult. The little boy would come out, lean on Father, and he would pull my head and shoulder into his side, and put his arm over my neck, pulling me to him in a warm hug. In the winter, it was great. I’ll never forget how, when we drove over the rolling hills and even up and down rather steep hills, I saw the dashboard lights on. It was a sort of magical, greenish, dim light that made me think of space ships in the movies. The radio dial was illuminated, and I vividly recall hearing a song that for some reason was my favorite in those days, “Let Me Go Lover” by Joan Weber.

      I watched the speedometer on the dash, with its green and red pointer set about at forty-five miles per hour, and I knew the speed limit was sixty. I figured that Father Terry was like me, enjoying being out in the car more than sitting at home. I imagine I served about a hundred Saturday night Masses. The congregation was always the old fishermen, their wives, sons and daughters, but what I loved the most was that they were all in blue jeans and T-shirts, boots and other clothes not usually seen in church. The altar was special also, because just three years before, when Assisi was renovated, the old wooden altar was sent to this chapel on Blueberry Hill Bayou, St. Anselm’s. It was my favorite altar, wood painted white, carved with a jig saw to make it seem like marble, curled in the form of fancy altars. It was just like you could see in photographs of Rome.

      I would sometimes have a small amount of wine after Mass, as that was the custom with Father Terry, because he said the wine gave him stomach acid. He wished I’d drink the extra, so we wouldn’t have to dispose of it in some liturgically proper way. With a few tablespoons of burgundy wine in me, I was a content little boy, with my best friend. I felt nothing could harm me, and we liked just being quiet together.

      There were times we went to the camp, and not just one of the camps, but to various camps, where some of the parents of the kids in my school had built “summer homes.” In reality, they were rustic, just fishing camps, in the cooler woods near the bayou and lake. Father Terry seemed to have keys to most of the camps of the people in Assisi Parish, and was told he could use the camps anytime. Now and then, he and I would stop at one of the camps, turn on the water pump and have a drink of water and sit, listening to the night sounds.

      CHAPTER SIX

      FREE RANGE KID

      I didn’t spend all day long masturbating before I got called into Father’s office. I admit that it took increasingly more time each day to satisfy my sexual desire, but I was still able to think, play, and daydream. I liked ice cream and pie, and loved to swim, run shirtless through the forest, sometimes in the dappled sunlight that came through the canopy of trees above, sometimes in the rain. The palmettos grew everywhere, and with my bayonet I got from the Army Surplus Store—Mr. Jeansonne, the butcher, sharpened it to a razor edge. I could chop a palmetto stem with one whack and harvest a wonderful parasol, either for shading myself in the open fields, or for deflecting rain in the forest. Always nature spoke to me vividly: everything had magical proportions.

      I adopted the habit of playing in the woods as a small boy, no older than seven. I’d been taught to fish, row a boat, build a camp fire, pitch a tent, dig a latrine, and shoot both rifles and shotguns by the time I was nine. I owned my first bayonet secretly, I admit, and kept it buried, wrapped in a waterproof seal container I made from an old torn raincoat. I got my own shotgun when I was ten, but I had to hunt with my elders. However, once I’d learned gun safety and how to never point a gun in the direction of any person, I could be left to hunt in a small stand of trees hiding from the birds and squirrels. I could only shoot when a shell, which my dad said cost about ten cents, was sure to bag at least ten cents worth of blackbirds for a gumbo, or squirrel. Daddy told me not to shoot unless I could get several birds with one shot. I sat totally still beneath the tree where he parked me. I’d wait, then birds would accumulate on the limbs above me, and when there were five or six I’d shoot. I shocked them the day I killed thirty-seven blackbirds. It was a massacre, and from then on I never really shot any animals unless peer pressure forced me to hunt. Mother tried to make us a blackbird gumbo, but the muskiness of the dark bird meat, so tough from flying from the northern to the southern part of the continent twice a year made for something like Firestone Tire Soup with rubber bird-meat. Bleah! We ate the sweet potatoes and the fruit salad and then we somehow forgave ourselves for wasting seven shotgun shells worth of bird. We were grateful we didn’t have to taste that again.

      I never brought my gun with me into the woods behind Assisi, however; not unless it was the pellet rifle or gas canister operated pellet pistol, or a B-B-Gun. I had three of those. We were careful not to shoot any animals we didn’t need to eat or protect ourselves from. It never occurred to me to shoot a big water moccasin charging out of the water towards my nine year old feet. I just took the gun and ran like hell!

      I had a friend who went to the seminary with me. He was a loyal classmate and friend for three years too; my Science and Mechanics Illustrated friend from grade one, until our junior year in high school. Matty was a blondish, reddish-haired guy who seemed to forever be sweating on his upper lip, excited about something all the time like when he found out that girls and boys didn’t all have “wee-wees.” He came running, story and all. Then he would bring me, if he could, to the next public showing of the little babies in the bathtub at his aunt’s house and we saw for ourselves the “cracks”—I worried how girls kept water from flowing into them through that crack. I really never could figure it out. By the time I was old enough to understand the dynamics, I had already embraced the fact that for me, in the future, there would only be a vow of celibacy.

      Matty and I were “Commando Cody” and “Flash Gordon.” Sometimes I’d be the alien in shiny gold lame but really all I had to wear was some silver paint on a cut-up rain coat—we seemed to have a lot of old plastic raincoats. I guess the best costume we ever had was one we made with a staple gun from my dad’s office. We took his chamois skin, car drying-off deerskin, and cut it into tutus for covering our fronts and butts like Indians in the cowboy movies. We had the real thing, deerskin flaps in front and back. I had no notion of how to make a jock or support for our privates, and left the inside of the flap naked intentionally—another of my schemes to see everyone’s “privates.” It worked, too; not only did they have to get naked to put costumes on, they had to let the wind blow on the flaps and I saw everything. The only thing was, I got tired of seeing my best friends at age nine. There were some kids that we couldn’t get rid of, our babysitting chores, and they were uninteresting, like newts.

      I caught hell for chopping up the beloved chamois skin. It must have cost plenty money, because my dad never bought a replacement. When I was told to wash the car, no longer did I have the big, golden fleece of a deer skin to wipe the car dry. I had to use rags, towels, torn dresses, or underwear that had holes. I think that was the first time I remember seeing my father cry, in true dejected sadness, at something I did. Maybe his dad had given him that chamois; anyway, his dad wasn’t around anymore. I didn’t know I could cause an adult such devastation. In ignorance, a person can generate a lot of misery.

      I do remember that Matty had a foreskin. I had no idea what that thing was, and it was a little noodle to me.

      I was always sure everyone loved the woods; it was hard for me to understand why other boys didn’t want to play there. First of all, I have to confess something: I was a “free range kid.” At eight, I was going into the uncharted lands of the forest off Steam Liner Road. It was a wide, dust and gravel rural highway that went from behind the school and church buildings to the forest, across the bayou, and then about thirty miles to the smelly СКАЧАТЬ