Snow Globes and Hand Grenades (20 page)

“In France, a little town called La Salette,” Father Ernst said, “two children named Melanie and Max were watching after some cattle in the hills when a ball of light appeared and it opened up and there she was, sitting with her face in her hands crying.”

Patrick looked over at Tony, who still had his head down. Somehow, they had really got to him. If only Mimi were here, she would cheer him up. Patrick looked over at Mimi's empty desk and wondered what she was doing right now. Mimi was probably watching TV, laughing at some show, and having a great time after faking a sick day to get out of the investigation. That Mimi had an easy life. She even got to miss this boring lecture.

“Our Blessed Mother told them she was holding onto her son's arm and praying for their village to stop being bad. And do you know what they were doing?”

No one knew. No one moved.

“They were doing the same things we all do,” Father Ernst said, “We're no better. The men were cursing when they pushed their heavy carts, and only a few old ladies in the village went to Mass on Sunday. Everyone else mocked religion. They worked on Sunday like it was another day. She warned them that unless people changed, bad things would happen to the village. Crops would fail. People would go hungry. She told them to warn the villagers to change before it was too late.”

Jimmy Purvis raised his hand.

“Yes?” Father Ernst said.

As one of the Gang of Five who had run away in fifth grade, Jimmy was a tough customer. He wasn't sold on the story. “That's a nice story, Father, but did they get any evidence?”

“Evidence?”

“You know, a photograph. I thought maybe, if these two kids really saw something, they'd run home and get a Kodak to take some snapshots.”

“Oh, no, this was 1846. Cameras weren't even invented.”

“I see.” Jimmy nodded his head and didn't say any more. He looked at his watch.

Father Ernst cleared his throat and walked around a bit, holding his chin in his hand. Then he turned to the class. “No one can prove these things, but to me, they have the melody of truth. It's a proof you can hear with your heart. Does that make sense?”

No one said anything. It was almost time for lunch and stomachs were empty.

“Well, think about what happened to Melanie and Max,” Father Ernst said. “Think about what they would tell you if they were your friends here at school and they knew about what someone did to the statue in this parish of the same Blessed Mary who appeared to them with such concern for their souls, and the souls of their whole village.”

Father Ernst walked out. It was time for lunch. But Miss Kleinschmidt wasn't there to dismiss them. With just a few days left under her authority, some of students got up on their own, retrieved their lunch bags from the cloak room, and headed out the door to walk down to the cafeteria. Others followed. The whole class emptied out like a graduation, because it was time and they were hungry.

A SINGLE FAT RAINDROP fell on the cheek of the unchanging, ever motionless gold statute of Mary on the church roof. Then another. And another. Tony and Patrick's class was sitting down to lunch in the basement cafeteria when the tornado siren sounded in the distance. It was a low, howling note that rose up the scale to a solid wail. Everyone heard it.

“Tony,” Patrick whispered sitting next to him, “You OK? What happened?”

Tony refused to speak. He ate his cold meatball sandwich and stared forward. Outside the school, the gusting wind bent trees, whipping leaves across the playground. First graders dropped kick balls and sprinted through the cold rain for the door. Mothers' Club volunteers standing at the door waved them in. Sister Mathilda was pacing back and forth in her harness attached to the clothesline—with one corner of her black eye patches unpeeled—keeping an eye on the little children before she would take shelter herself.

Sister Helen turned on the microphone in her office and every speaker in every classroom turned on with a red blinking light.

“Attention everyone, this is the principal,” she said, “This is not a drill. The National Weather Service has issued a tornado warning for St. Louis County. Everyone file calmly out of your classrooms and walk slowly down to the cafeteria.”

The fear of death fell on the school. Children seeing the sideways rain
and trembling tree branches through the windows got up from their desks to run for the basement. Lightening flashed. The school lights flickered out. There was stumbling and screaming in the hallways.

Sister Mathilda unhooked her harness from the clothesline to go inside. Just a few more days and her escape would be a matter of parish gossip:
So she really did it? She was smarter than we thought. Yes sir, they'd say, old Sister Mathilda was too smart to be forced into some retirement home. We had her all wrong.

“Help!” It was a child's voice.

Sister Mathilda ripped her eye patch off and before she could put it in her pocket, the wind tore it from her fingers. It skittered across the playground.

“Help me.”

She looked around. The voice sounded like it was coming from over near her Cutlass. She hurried over to find a first grade boy hiding alone between the parked cars. She grabbed him by the arm. “Get up, son.”

She tried to pull him up, but he was scared limp. So she reached in her pocket for her rosary pouch, unzipped it, and drew the Cutlass key out like a sword. Opening the door with rain blasting her face, she picked up the boy and tossed him in like a load of laundry. Then she got in and slammed the door. Hail the size of mothballs pounded the car and bounced across the parking lot. The wind picked up. The Cutlass rocked. “Buckle up,” she yelled. He couldn't even do that, so she clicked him in tight.

Inside, hundreds of students streamed down the steps into the cafeteria. In an effort to maintain calm, the fourth grade music teacher, Miss Olgers, started strumming “My Favorite Things” on her guitar. But a sudden surge of sixth graders knocked her over and the guitar was crushed underfoot.

“Everyone stay calm,” the principal called out through a bullhorn. “We're in the safest place possible.”

Just then a kitchen fire erupted, as a cook watching the chaos had neglected a pan of breaded fish sticks frying in lard on the gas stove. The flames danced over the fish and into the air four feet above the frying pan. A quick thinking cashier in charge of milk and pretzel stick sales turned off the burner and poured chocolate milk on the conflagration. The dying fire hissed and cursed and filled the cafeteria with a sickly, burnt chocolate smell.

Patrick got under the cafeteria table facing Tony and put his hands on Tony's shoulders.

“Tony, please tell me. What happened? What did they say to you?”

Tony told him about the photograph, the one of Patrick kissing Mimi. “I won't get in the way,” Tony said. “But I can't be your friend anymore.”

Patrick took his hands off Tony's shoulders, and Tony scooted away and disappeared into the crowd.

The tornado cut across the nunnery yard and pushed over a row of cars. The Cutlass flipped upside down. Sister Mathilda and the boy hung tight in their seat belts.

“It's all my fault,” she told the boy.

The Cutlass rolled sideways, like a Hot Wheels car, turning over twelve times before it bounced off the fence down by the priest's house and came to a stop on all four tires.

“Are you all right?” Sister Mathilda asked the boy.

“I think I wet my pants.”

The new car smell was gone forever. The Cutlass was mangled and dented, the roof flattened, the windows cracked—it was no longer road worthy.

Just as fast as it struck, the tornado moved on. The playground was now bright with sunlight. Sister Mathilda creaked open her door. It was fifteen degrees cooler. Drenched tree branches drooping over the playground fence dripped water into the glare of puddles.

“C'mon, let's go.” She unbuckled the boy and they both got out. His hair was flecked with glass crumbs. She brushed them out. They looked at the school and the church and the gold statue on the roof. Mary gleamed bright in the sun. Everything was OK. Sister Mathilda knelt on the blacktop to give thanks. It was her first non-complaining prayer in a long time. Waking up from a nap, Father Maligan flung open his bedroom window to survey the aftermath.

“Hey, Sister Mathilda, whose car is that? Is there a storm coming? You need some help finding your way?”

She waved no thanks to him and mumbled to herself as she got up. “I can see just fine.”

AFTER THE STORM, the lights came back on in the school and the students walked back upstairs to their desks. Only the boy who took the carnival ride of death in the Cutlass got to go home early, and that was because he had wet his pants. A tow truck came and hauled away Sister Mathilda's wrecked escape car to take it to the auto graveyard. She went into the church to pray some more. Father Ernst and Detective Kurtz suspended their investigation for the rest of the day, sparing Patrick the follow up interrogation he dreaded was coming. They wanted him to dread it.

Same thing the next day. Patrick sat in his desk waiting to be summoned, taking occasional glances at Tony who was still not talking to him. Not calling Patrick in for more questions was Detective Kurtz's idea. He knew it would make Tony think Patrick was no longer a suspect, that they'd pinned the caper on Tony.

With the door to their interrogation room shut all day long, Father Ernst and Detective Kurtz reviewed the case they had only three days left to solve. Kurtz set up an easel board and used a black marker to draw diagrams of a pyramid with Patrick, Tony, and Mimi at the top. It was Mimi, they theorized, who was at the very top—and it was Mimi they wanted to interview again. But her desk was empty for a second straight day.

Home with a low-grade fever and a glass of Alka-Seltzer, Mimi lay in bed, but couldn't fall asleep because there was a piano tuner downstairs. He would hit a note over and over, tightening a wrench on a bolt attached to a wire to get the note in tune. Mimi got out of bed and drifted out in her back yard in her pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers. It was sunny and mild, the day after the big storm. She could still hear the piano tuner, so she walked along engrossed in her real problem—how to handle the possibility she was pregnant. This fear pressed on her chest like a thousand-pound piano. She had told no one.
How could she?
Lost in thought, she walked onto the golf course, oblivious to the fallen tree limbs from the storm and the businessmen in the distance hitting balls.

“Four!” a golfer yelled.

Mimi walked on with her hands held behind her back reviewing all her troubles as a golf ball thumped in the wet grass at her side. She picked it up with a vacant look on her face and wandered down the fairway, playing catch with it lightly while she concentrated.

“Just three days to graduation,” she thought. “Just three days to graduation.”

Her mind stretched like a piano wire wrenched tighter and tighter ready to snap. The note kept plinking in her head while she walked.
Plink, plink, plink, plink, plink …

Just three more days. Just three more days.

Then the note stopped.

Her mind was in tune.

She knew what to do. Pretend she wasn't pregnant. Just fool herself. That's it. Just forget it. Forget it for three more days until school was over. If she were pregnant, she'd find out in the weeks ahead. If she weren't pregnant, it wouldn't do any good to worry about it now. Not now, with the snow globe crisis she had promised to help Tony and Patrick with. They had saved her life from the hand grenade and she had to stick to the plan they made for the next three days. After that—school would be over and she could figure things out. For now, she resolved to play out the lie of not knowing anything about the case, and blaming it on Mary. When the school year was
over she would be free to think about her future either at Holy Footsteps or Holy Shit Academy.

An angry golfer on a cart zoomed up alongside her and braked to a stop, skidding in the mud. “Hey young lady, that's my ball,” he said.

Mimi blinked and noticed something odd. She was in her bathrobe, holding a golf ball, standing on the golf course talking to a strange man.

The golfer stared at her. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what's wrong with you?”

Mimi handed him the ball, apologized, and coughed a little into her hand. “I'm sorry, sir, I'm home sick today.”

“Maybe sick in the head.”

Mimi burst out laughing. It was the best she'd felt in two days. Her face got red coughing as she bent over shaking with laughter.

The golfer looked warily at her and got back on his cart and drove away.

Mimi tightened her bathrobe belt and fixed her hair. She turned to walk back home and decided if the investigators at school would ask her anymore questions, she should act a little sick in the head, so they, too, would want to drive off and leave her alone with her troubles.