I would have to agree with him.
My sister says, “I…I swear. I didn’t know then that he had something to do with the stealing. I just wanted to return the favor, ya know, for him being so… oh, I don’t know.” I do. Father made her feel the same way Daddy used to. Number one on the hit parade. Not second fiddle like she sees herself now. “So after that, every time I went up to the rectory, I told him everything I heard Dave tell Helen about the burglaries and what I heard him talk about with Detective Riordan on the telephone. Father seemed so happy to hear that, but… but then he broke his promise and brought the annulment letter to Helen anyway.”
Because of mental telepathy, I know she was also thinking that if she fed Father tidbits about the cat burglar case it would make it harder for Dave to solve the case. He would have to spend more time on the job and less time with Mother and that might get her steamed enough to call the wedding off.
Oh, Troo.
After letting all that sink in, I say, because I’m itchin’ to know, “But what does any of this have to do with Mrs. Galecki’s necklace? How did you get a hold of it?”
“I’m gettin’ to that.” She taps off her ash. “On the Fourth, on my way up to Granny’s to get my Eiffel Tower costume, I stopped by the rectory and went through a window into Father Mickey’s office. I knew he wouldn’t be there, that he’d be over at the park helpin’ get everything ready for the parade. I was so mad, Sal. I… I was gonna take the belt buckle outta the drawer-I don’t know what I was gonna do with it, but when I looked for it in the desk, it was gone.” I am biting my nails over how brave she is. “So I searched around for something else I could take. I couldn’t believe it when I found Mrs. Galecki’s necklace stuffed behind some books. I didn’t know how Father got a hold of that either, but tit for tat. I took it.” Troo inhales her cigarette smoke up through her nose, which is so French. “I think he stills likes her.”
“Mrs. Galecki? Why wouldn’t he?” Sure she can be kind of annoying, sometimes she coughs for fifteen minutes at a stretch, but she’s still one of his flock.
“Not her,” Troo says. “Helen.”
She looks up and into the kitchen window. I hope Dave and Mother put cold water in a bucket for Ethel’s bunion feet and are saying uplifting things to her. If I was in there, I would sing about the ant moving the rubber tree because it’s got such high hopes. Ethel really likes that song. She sings it to Mrs. Galecki when she’s spraying her thinning hair tall with Aqua Net every morning.
“Before Mother started going out with Dave in high school, her and Father Mickey were hot and heavy,” Troo says. “Aunt Betty told me during rummy.”
“Yeah, she told me something like that, too.”
Up at the Five and Dime the same day she surprised me with the news that Father was from the neighborhood, Aunt Betty winked at me and said, “M.P.G. could give a girl the ride of her life. Ask your mother.”
I’ve got so many questions that I don’t know which one to pick. It’s like trying to decide which candy to buy outta the case at the Five and Dime. Troo looks so petered out, but I gotta know all of it if I’m gonna help her outta the jam she’s gotten herself into.
“Do you know how Father’s makin’ the altar boys be cats?” I ask. Even though we have fate in the Catholic Church, we also got free will. I’m not sure where one starts and the other takes over, but it seems to me that the boys could have told the priest that they didn’t want to steal.
Troo points up to the western sky. The stars tonight look close enough to put in my pocket and save for a rainy day. “The Big Dipper and the Little Dipper.”
Daddy used to say that they reminded him of us.
I squeeze her hand harder than she’s squeezing mine. “Tell me. How’s Father makin’ the boys steal?”
Troo says, “Artie told me down at Honey Creek on the Fourth that before he ran away, Charlie Fitch told him that Father threatened the altar boys. Told them that he’d kick ’em out of school if they didn’t steal for him.”
He can do that. Our pastor is the boss of everything, not only the church and the nuns, but the school, and everybody in the neighborhood.
I say, “But Charlie, he didn’t have a house of his own and there’s nothin’ good to take out of the orphanage.” When our Brownie troop went up to St. Jude’s to sing Christmas carols to those poor kids, the place reminded me of the dump near the farm.
Troo says, “You know that antique railroad watch Mr. Honeywell’s got? The one he’s always braggin’ about? Father told Charlie that the second after he got adopted he’d have to steal it and if he didn’t, Father would make sure the Honeywells picked another kid from the litter.”
Poor Charlie. He really was caught between a rock and a hard place. “Do you think after he ran away that he… um… got his head chopped off or eaten by a bear or-?”
“Jesus, Sal. Quit bein’ so fuckin’ weird,” Troo says. “Fitch is fine. He’s livin’ in the country in this place called Fredonia. Artie got a letter from him a couple of weeks ago.”
“Why’d he go there?” I ask. I never even heard of the place.
“Remember booger-eatin’ Teddy Jaeger?”
I nod. He’s kinda hard to forget.
“After he got adopted, him and Charlie became pen pals,” Troo says. “That’s where Charlie went to get away from Father Mickey. When he showed up at Teddy’s new home, the mother and father told him he could stay for the rest of the summer and help them sell vegetables outta their roadside stand.”
I don’t doubt that for a second. If those people were charitable enough to adopt finger-up-his-nose Teddy Jaeger, Charlie Fitch musta seemed like the guy from The Millionaire showing up at their front door.
After I think some more about everything she’s been telling me, I come up with one more question. “But why didn’t the altar boys just tell their mothers or fathers or… or the police that Father Mickey was makin’ them steal against their will?” We’re not exactly big on that kind of thing around here, we’re supposed to fight our own battles, but this is sort of a special situation where you might want to call in the cavalry.
“The altar boys are dumb, but they’re not that stupid,” Troo says, flicking her cigarette into the grass. “They knew nobody would take their word over a priest’s.”
She’s right, of course. Even if they gave confessions signed in blood. The boys also had to know that their parents would punish them within an inch of their lives just for saying something so bad about Father. No one would believe the four of us either if we wanted to tell on him. Mary Lane is a famous no-tripper storyteller and I have a problem with flights of imagination and Troo, everybody thinks she is the next Bonnie from Bonnie and Clyde, and Artie Latour, they’d say anything he heard from Charlie Fitch about Father Mickey was wrong due to him being a half-deaf mess.
Even Dave, who is the fairest person I know, wouldn’t take us seriously. He couldn’t believe us over Father Mickey even if he wanted to. It’s against his religion. If I got up off this bench and marched into the kitchen to tell him everything Troo just told me, he’d look helplessly across the table at Mother and she would say, “Get out the cod liver oil and a serving spoon,” or she might slap me across the face. That’s what she did when I told her that I hated God after Daddy died. And when Troo came home from school rubbing the back of her noggin, complaining that Sister Imelda whacked her so hard with the back of a geography book that she was still seeing the Canary Islands, Mother told her, “Take out the garbage.”
They can’t help it. The Lord thy God comes before all others and the same goes for anybody who works for Him.