Bells Above Greens (6 page)

Kneeling in silence, a wall of a dozen suit jackets and wool sweaters ahead of me, I saw her across the aisle.  A doily capped her waved hair, the cascades pinned modestly at her shoulders.  She made all the motions, knelt at the right times, her lips whispered the Latin responses, her hands folded at her tucked chin throughout.  She appeared undaunted, deeply religious, her faith still whole. 

Peter used to say that leaving a bad impression with somebody was among the worst sins of a Catholic.  It sticks on the mind of the impressed until they question not only the impression, but the roots from where it grew.  To represent our Father in a bad light is the same as showing one how to be an atheist.  If there was an eleventh commandment, that would have been firecarved upon the stone.  I could hear Peter saying it.

Besides that, she had once belonged to my brother, maybe she still did, and the sin was magnified.

I passed the basket without dropping a dollar and I stayed seated during communion.  At the door, Father Donnelly shook hands with everyone on their way out.  He held my hand for a moment longer than a greeting, and looked at me.  He was young and smooth-skinned without a trace of a beard.  He must have shaved very close and it made him look younger.  I thought we might be in the same decade.

“Good to see you, Sam.”

“You too, Father Donnelly.  Excellent sermon today.”

He didn’t let go of my hand.  “What was your favorite part?”

I remembered his opening lines, the one piece that stuck in my head.  “The part about Jesus being a fan of Fighting Irish football.”

He released his grip on me and held his arms up to signal a touchdown.  A big smile appeared on his face and I could see the wheels in his head turning, an idea sparking behind his eyes.  “Wouldn’t that be something?”

I spent Monday’s class session sitting atop the wet bleachers.  She appeared on the sidelines, hidden under a raincoat and jotting down notes on a notepad. 

In keeping my eyes on her, I let my feet find their own way and slipped as I hopped off the bleachers.  I put myself into a half-run on the grass to regain my balance, my book and notepad leaping out of my hands as if they were a live thing, landing butterflied against the back of her ankle.  I sauntered on new feet to stand next to her with little dignity left.

Her immediate reaction was to ask if I was all right, and she knelt down to gather my books as she spoke.  When she stood and saw it was me, she was almost startled.  Her throat went up and down in a swallow.

“Hi,” I said with an uncomfortable grin.  It was the only word that came to mind.

“Oh.  It’s you.”

“It’s me.”

“I thought I might run into you some day.”

I nodded.  “How – how have you been doing?”

“I’m fine, Sam.”  She said my name with ease.  Like she had said it many times before.

“Sorry about everything.”

“Don’t be.  Are you hurt?”

“No, I mean, sorry about being rude to you earlier.  At Fort Wayne.  The bus ride?”

“I remember.  It’s okay.”

“Well, I hope I didn’t leave a bad impression on you.”

“You didn’t.  I’ve thought about you a lot since then.  You were hurting.”

“You’ve thought about me?”

“How could I not?  You’re Peter’s brother.”

“He would be furious with me if I didn’t apologize,” I said.  “I’ve thought about you too.  It’s been hanging over me all summer.  The way I acted.  I was angry about everything and I guess you were there to bear the brunt of it all.”

She didn’t say anything.  I thought I saw her lip quiver.  Her eyes were wet. The team grunted from the field behind her.

I cleared my throat.  “Anyway, I just wanted to set it all straight again.  You probably have an article to write about here.”  I motioned to the practice field.

“I’m done.  I have my quotes from the coach.”  She handed me my books.  “I see you have a journalism book.”

“Yeah, well the geology class had their lights off.”

She smiled.  “Will you walk me to my dorm?”

We went down the wet sidewalks to St Mary’s College.  I was getting wet in the steady drizzle, my hands in my pockets, and when I looked at her all I could see was a slender nose under her hood.  The campus was quiet, almost abandoned of the students who would normally eat lunch in the sunny grass or sit on the steps outside the buildings. 

“I almost didn’t recognize you without your uniform.”

“I know.  I blend in just as much with other students as I did with the other soldiers.”

She looked at me with a tender smile, a mask of happiness I thought.  She had a beautiful sadness.  “You probably don’t recognize me without my war paint on.”

I cringed.  “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

We walked a little.

“I saw you in church yesterday.”

She was not surprised.  “I saw you too.”

“I was going to speak to you then but I thought it would be easier out here.  More welcoming for conversation, I guess.”

“Everyone is welcome in church.”

“You know what I mean.  Just less intrusive.”

“I was glad to see you in church.  I thought maybe you would stop going.”

We turned a corner and St Mary’s Lake was in front of us.  I shrugged.  “I can’t say that I didn’t think about it.  Catholic guilt makes me go.”

“What a wonderful tool of the church.”

“You don’t have any trouble with going, do you?” I asked.

“Of course I do.  Or I did, anyway.  But when your faith is broken the only cure is more of it.”

“I guess.”

We stopped in front of the lake and a cool breeze whipped my jacket lapel. 

“I saw you at the funeral,” I said.  “Seems like that was such a long time ago now.”

“They gave you the flag,” she said, fighting the waves in her voice.  “I used to go see him after that.  I want to still.  But it makes you so sad to see the stone sitting there in the dirt.”

“I used to go to ask him questions.  I always ended up in tears because I felt I would not live up to his expectations.”

“It’s easier for me to talk to him in a prayerful way.  The same way I talk to God.  Is that strange?”

I shook my head.  “He mentioned you once.”

She looked at me, fully in the face this time, her cheeks red and angular under her hood, her chin disappearing slowly into the shadow.  She had removed her glasses and her brown eyes gained a new sadness about them.  A window to a soul in repair.

“Just a few days before we were to come home,” I said.  “He was excited to introduce us.  I guess I messed all that up.”

“I wish he had told me about you.  You look like him, you know?  Not a striking resemblance, but it’s there underneath.”

“I know.”

“He would be happy that we met.”

We let a moment of silence pass as the lake shivered. 

“Do you know how it happened?” I asked.

She put her head down and all I could see was her nose again.  She breathed a whisper.  “No.  I’m afraid to find out.  I’ve dreamed that it was doing something brave.  Like saving another soldier.  Like saving his brother.”

I watched the water. 

“Were you wounded?” she asked. 

I did not want to spoil her vision of Peter’s bravery by telling her that he was killed in a routine patrol after the war had already been called to an end.  I didn’t want to tell her but I did not want to lie to her.  To Peter.  “No,” I said.

“Don’t tell me.  But say he was brave.”

“He was very brave,” I said.  I was still watching the water then, and I could actually see myself there as if I was spying from a dozen yards away.  “I wanted to be just like him.  I’ve always wanted to be like him.  Maybe the worst injury for a soldier to have is to not even be wounded when you have a brother who was killed.”

“Don’t do that to yourself, Sam.”  She spoke very quietly.  “Don’t put yourself in pain.”

We walked on, an unspoken agreement made between us to leave that spot of conversation, that memory, and move away.

“How did you meet him?”

She smiled finally and that dimple showed up again.  “I was writing sports articles for the school paper.  I approached him outside the stadium after the Michigan game that year.  He was bruised and sweaty, wearing a torn tshirt, and his hair was sticking up where the holes were in his helmet.”

“And you fell in love at first sight,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.  She did not need any help to feel better.  Her memory of the moment brightened her face.

“He was so nice to me.  Some of the players are so tired after a game they can hardly stand.  Peter spent nearly an hour and a half talking to me that day.”

“That’s longer than the actual game.  Must have been a great article.”

“We spoke for only five minutes about the game.  He asked me to come to the next game and cheer for him.  He must have known that I attended all the games anyway for the paper, but he still invited me.  I thought it was the sweetest thing.  I still have the article I wrote.  I quoted him in it and I cut it out and kept it.”

“I’d like to read it some time.”

“He was a great player.  I attended all three of his games before he shipped out.  He was leading the team in tackles at the time.  Everyone thought he was going to be an All-American.  He was always the first out of the locker room.  I was so excited to see him.  He would run right past the news stations and
Tribune
reporters and come right up to me.  I was just a journalism student writing for the school paper.”

“And now you write sports for the
South Bend Tribune
?”

She nodded.  “Just Notre Dame sports.  Readers are mad about Notre Dame sports.  It wouldn’t have mattered to Peter if I was a reporter for a big paper or a small one.  When he came out of the locker room he always looked around for me.”

“He was nice like that.  He made everyone feel good about themselves,” I said.  “I always tried to be
manly
like him, you know?  I wanted to be as strong as he was but he was always nice to people too.  Gentle, I guess is the word, and he wasn’t afraid to show it.”

She gave a shy laugh.  “He was so rough-looking after that first game.  Like he won the entire game by himself.  I didn’t expect how outgoing he was.”  She nodded.  “Yes.  Gentle is the word.”

“You knew him for a month before he shipped out?”

“Yes.  It sounds funny now, but it could have been a day and that was all we needed.  He wrote the nicest letters to me.  You learn a lot about a person through letters.”

“That’s exactly what he told me.”

“Did he?  It’s true.  You see who a person truly is by the words they write.  There is no shyness in a letter.  Every word was exactly how he thought it inside.  I used to check my mailbox five times a day for his letters.  They would always come all at once.  A couple week’s worth of his letters.  I would respond to ten of his with one of mine.  I wish I wrote more to him.”

“It was enough.  I’ve never seen him so excited.  He told me he didn’t know if you would let it amount to more.  Your relationship.  He told me that.”

“Really?”  She looked at me with big eyes, still in love with Peter.

“Yes.”

She walked up the steps to her dormitory.  I stayed at the bottom.  She turned to face me, her expression suddenly twisted in sadness, her hands wringing together.

“Why didn’t he tell me about you?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “Maybe he didn’t want to be embarrassed if you didn’t wait for him.”

She looked over my head to the wet greens behind me, the pale trees shedding their summer wear. She looked back at me and her eyes were wet again.  Her hair swirled about her face and she fixed it behind her ears with gentle fingertips.

“How did you get your bruise?” she asked.

I put my fingers under my eye.  “Just games with the boys.  Boys will be boys, right?”

She came down the steps and gave me a hug, her chin on my shoulder, pulling me in with a motherly hand on the back of my head.  “Come and see me again, Sam.”

“I will.”

I felt good then.  A weight had lifted and I was trudging forward in the world.

At the door, she turned one last time.  “Sam?”

I twisted my shoulder back around.  “Yeah?”

“I would hardly call Pat Carragher a ‘boy.’” 

Chapter Eight

Winter came early the following weeks.  The snow piled high and stayed there for days, melting slowly and forming an icy crust that held your weight for a moment before breaking through. 

Roads became slick with ice in the evenings, the snow piled black at the curbs.  Cars slid slowly through stop signs, and children shoveled driveways for a dollar.  Students walked to class with their chins tucked in scarves, flipped coat collars at their red cheeks, clouds billowing from their mouths, fumbling their books through mittens.

When the snow melted, the bleak cold was still there, crawling in your nostrils, numbing your ears.  From the rooftops of South Bend, Emery and I worked between classes.  Wind-whipped trees shook the air with thin, stretching arms and bare fingers.  Hammer strokes took on an echoing clatter sound, and the bells of Notre Dame gained in volume as the rest of the world muted all around.

“I’m seeing that girl,” Emery said in a crouch, shingles spread out before him.

I straightened my back and worked my shoulders.  “Who?”

“That cheerleader.  The brunette.  Her name is Claire.”

“No kidding.  How did that happen?”

“I waited outside her classroom until she came out.”  He looked at me.  “That makes me sound like a stalker, doesn’t it?”

I took off my gloves to breathe into my cupped hands.  I rubbed them together.

“Well, I don’t care if it does,” Emery said, his frozen breath swirling around his head.  “Between you, me, and the hammers here, I
was
stalking her.  That’s the only way to meet a girl out here.  But if she asks you about it, it was mere coincidence.”

“Of course.”

“She likes to ice skate.  I’m hoping the lakes take their time in freezing over because I can’t skate worth an Indian nickel.”

“All those theater classes and you can’t skate?”  I crouched against a wind gust.  “I thought you’d be pirouetting over the ice like an angel.”