The Son of a Certain Woman (34 page)

“McHugh says Percy has ordained himself,” Pops said. “He said he pretends to say the Mass on the Torbay bus every afternoon. McHugh says there’s nothing he can do because the buses are off limits to him and all the other teachers on the Mount. The bus drivers are supposed to keep order but all they do is drive the buses and ignore the children, whom Percy has goaded into calling him all kinds of things: Percy of the Parking Lot, Saint Percival the Merciful.”

“Percy, why can’t you stop telling lies?” my mother said.

I shrugged. “They’re not really lies. They’re just jokes.”

“You’re making a joke of
yourself
,” she said. “Making up stupid lies to impress children who aren’t half as smart as you.”

Still, I couldn’t stay away from the buses. I told the children I’d written a letter to the Pope, Pope Paul VI, and included with it a picture of myself, which had prompted the Pope to write me back to tell me that my stained face was part of God’s plan and that
one day the purpose of it would be revealed to me. I said he joked that I should take heart from the very fact that someone with a nose the size of his had been so successful. I said we were now writing each other about once a month and plans were being put in place for me to visit him one day and for him to be the first Pope to visit Newfoundland, where, if he had time, he would have dinner with the Joyces.

“Percy is pen pals with the Pope,” Sully announced loudly. “What do you and the Pope say in your letters?” I said it was mostly small talk because the Pope’s English wasn’t very good. I said my name in Italian was Percifico and his was Paolo, though I never called him that.

McHugh called my mother again and complained I was an even more compulsive liar than I had shown myself to be by my mistreatment of Francine. Now, however, I was lying almost exclusively about things related to the Catholic Church, which would not be countenanced.

My mother and McHugh had a conversation by phone that my mother recounted like this:

“His Grace still wonders if Percy might not benefit from professional help.”

“No. You know, His Grace seems to do more than his share of wondering, especially in front of you. Or is it really you who does the wondering? Is it part of your job to wonder for His Grace?”

“I can assure you that when I say I am quoting His Grace, I am quoting His Grace.”

“Quoting what he says in reaction to what you say, which, for all he knows, may not be entirely true.”

“You’re accusing
me
of lying?”

“It’s quite a life you’ve made for yourself, isn’t it, Brother McHugh? You never have to worry about getting the old pink slip some Friday afternoon. You’ve never in your life had to support yourself and you never will. Let alone support yourself and a child.
You’ve never been faced with having to do something about as pleasant as swallowing thumbtacks to keep your child from going hungry. I’d like to see you in the winter on a picket line, shouting ‘scabs’ at replacement priests and nuns and Brothers and singing, ‘We don’t mind a bit of snow, But Uncle Paddy’s got to go,’ while you tried to keep warm around a barrel of burning picket signs.”

“You think I have it easy.”

“I think that, if not for confession, the only thing between you and damnation would be a coma that lasted from cradle to grave.”

“You believe in confession?”

“There was a time when a woman would have been burnt at the stake for having a baby with a face like Percy’s, and the baby would have had its brains dashed out on the ground. And the Church would have presided over the proceedings. Did you enjoy the Classics Illustrated version of the Spanish Inquisition as much as I did when you were growing up? Maybe you’re just suffering from a bad case of historical nostalgia, Brother Those-Must-Have-Been-the-Days McHugh.”

Pops said, “McHugh says it’s the same in all the schools, all the grades. Anarchy. They’re all repeating Percy stories, Percy lies, Percy Joyce tall tales, all making fun of the Bible and Catholicism.”

I stood in the parking lot, in front of the fleet of buses, extended my arms and shouted, “Gentlemen, start your buses.” I was overjoyed that the drivers, even Cyril, now played along for a while, starting their buses at more or less the same time, grinning at me, cocking their heads in amusement at each other. I knew that I was playing the very sort of role my mother feared I would end up playing. But I felt that I wasn’t
really
playing it, just pretending to, doing a kind of send-up of it: the poor disfigured boy who had found a place for himself in the hearts of at least some of the students on the Mount, cheerful in spite of an allotment at birth that would
have embittered most, the irrepressible, inspiring Percy Joyce, who believed that there was goodness at the core of every heart.

“Bless the bus, Percy, bless the bus,” the children chanted. “Bless the brakes, bless the steering wheel, bless the tires. Perform a miracle. Make Cyril sober.” One moment I was Christ, the next I was a priest, the next I was the Pope, the next I was Saint John the Baptist.

The Torbay children cheered, laughed, shouted. “Bless the other buses, Percy, bless the other buses.” I went from bus to bus as the children on each of the buses took up and modified the chant. “Bless us, bless the bus, bless us, bless the bus.”

I found a discarded tin can, filled it with ditchwater and, dipping a stick into the water, blessed the buses as I remembered Father Bill doing when he blessed our house. I made my way among the buses, blessing each of them, shaking water from the stick with a snap of my wrist, gaped at and for this sometimes rebuked by the drivers, in spite of whom I carried on. “Dear God,” I said, “banish the Evil One from the tires of this bus, and from the brakes and from the steering wheel as well. Dear Lord, don’t let this bus break down before it gets to Kelligrews. Banish the Evil One from the driver of this bus and from the boys of Brother Rice and the girls of Holy Heart, and save them from the agonies of Hell.”

“Bless us, bless the bus.” I became so caught up in their chanting exhortations I hardly knew what I was doing. I did and said whatever came to mind.

One of the boys shouted, “Go out on the street and bless the fleet, go out on the street and bless the fleet.”

Soon everyone was chanting it.

When there was a pause in the traffic, I went out to the icy middle of Bonaventure to the spot where the traffic cop stood each afternoon. He had yet to arrive, so I faced the parking lot, the fleet of buses, the red facade of Holy Heart behind them, raised my sceptre-like stick, benedictory fashion, and began repeatedly
to bless the fleet, flinging drops of water from the stick, which set the children on the buses and those still standing in the parking lot to cheering. Several drivers who were standing about in front of the buses, smoking, yelled at me. I dimly heard, “Get off the street before you’re killed by a car.”

“I baptize you all,” I shouted. “I baptize you all. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

Behind me I heard a woman shout from what sounded like the distance of the sidewalk, “You stop doing that, that’s a sin for you, Percy Joyce.”

I put aside the can and stick, clasped my hands, fell to my knees, then bent over and kissed the ground as if thereby to confer sacredness upon it as I had seen the Pope do on TV when arriving by plane in a foreign country. I wound up with a lump of road salt in my mouth and spat it out, and continued to spit to rid myself of the acrid taste. The motorists seemed to think I was spitting out of contempt for the Pope whom I had just imitated; they honked their horns and shouted in protest. I stood.

“Hey, get off the road,” a man said, stepping partway out of his gleaming green car, one foot inside, one on the street. Jubilant at the sound of the cheering, chanting children, I blessed him and gave him silent absolution, then genuflected in the middle of Bonaventure as if Holy Heart were a giant tabernacle. Suddenly I felt as much as saw that some boys had joined me in the space between the cars. I turned around. They knelt behind me on the pavement like some grade school congregation, blessing themselves, clasping their hands and bowing their heads. I had moved them to imitate me, to choose
me
, Percy Joyce.

“You little bastards,” the man said, but he stood behind the open door of his green car as if thereby to shield himself from us or to make possible a quick escape. “
Stop it
,” he yelled. He wore a fur hat and a long black overcoat. He was as red-faced as if he had spent his entire life protesting the very kind of blasphemy that he was
witnessing. Behind me, the boys stood and snowballs sailed past me as they threw them at him and at the cars, the snowballs spattering across windshields, hoods and hood ornaments, grilles and blinking headlights.

As I stood on the double white line in the middle of the street—the traffic on either side of me stalled, my newly acquired followers behind me, chanting my name—I looked up at the sky and held out my arms as if to embrace the end-of-time Rapture brought on by me, by my blasphemies and exhortations. From the corner of my eye I glimpsed one of the bus drivers start to run toward me. I managed to lower my arms before he slammed into me with the fervour and force of a man determined to head off the very conflagration I was trying to invoke. Slipping and skidding on the icy street, I got up, made for the far sidewalk, and started sprinting and sliding down Bonaventure on my clown’s feet to the renewed cheers of the children on the buses, some of whom blew the bus horns and noisily opened and closed the doors. I looked behind to see if anyone was chasing me and saw that the driver had slipped on the sidewalk and fallen down, arms out in front of him as he lay with his face pressed to the pavement. He slowly rose and limped back up the hill. Gasping for breath, I walked slowly down Bonaventure, wondering how long it would be before a phone call was made from Holy Heart to Brother Rice, and another from Brother Rice to 44. The faster the better, it seemed to me, for I couldn’t wait for everyone to learn of the mass subversion I had engineered, winning over to my side dozens, perhaps hundreds of children of whose lives I had made myself the focal point, the centre of attention, the object, it might even be, of their friendship and their loyalty.

I had not even made it from the porch to the front room when my mother came out and threw her arms around me.

“Percy, what have you been
doing
?” she said. “My God, you’re drenched in sweat, you’re as hot as an oven.” She felt my forehead,
then put her face close to mine and looked straight into my eyes as if to spy out there the answer to her question. Out of breath but still exhilarated, I pushed past her into the house, where Pops was pacing about the front room.

“I’ve been getting calls from both Brother McHugh and Father Bill from the Basilica,” he shouted at me. “You strayed onto public property. You caused a traffic jam on Bonaventure. No one seems to know what you thought you were up to. Word of what you did is all over the Mount!”

“You’ll be all over the Mount if you raise your voice to him again,” my mother said. “Perse, Perse, they said you were standing in the middle of the street with all the traffic around you. You could’ve been hit by a car standing there in the street like that.”

“They always stop the traffic around that time to let the buses out.” I was still out of breath. “You should have seen me, Mom, you should have seen me. You should have seen all the other kids. They were cheering like I scored the winning goal.”

“Father Bill—” Pops began, but my mother interrupted, “I’ll handle this, Pops.” She turned to me. “What really happened?”

“The boys and girls on the Torbay bus dared me to cure them, so I did.”

“What do you mean ‘cure them’—cure them of what?”

“Not
really
cure them. I just did this.” I made the benedictory sign of the cross. “Then the ones on the other buses dared me, so I cured them too, one bus at a time. And then they dared me to go out onto the street and cure all the buses at the same time. Like blessing the sealing fleet, a boy said. So I did it. Lots of times. As many times as I could before one of the bus drivers came running after me and tackled me. But he didn’t hurt me.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes, but you should have seen me, Mom. Everyone was shouting out my name and all the girls were watching me and—”

“I’ve never seen McHugh worked up like this. People have
complained to the Basilica, to His Grace, to the principal of Holy Heart. People are saying Percy’s out of his mind,” Pops said.

“That’s
enough
, Pops. But Perse, you
could
have been hurt, hit by a car.”

“That’s not the
point
,” Pops shouted. “The two of you shouldn’t be pissing off McHugh no matter how unlikeable you think he is. I wouldn’t care about upsetting him or His Grace or Father Bill if I didn’t have to care, but I
do
. And so do you and Percy.”

My mother waved her hand dismissively. “It was just a joke. A joke that got a bit out of hand. When I was in school, I wouldn’t part with a candy unless someone let me put it on their tongue. Percy is only fourteen years old.”

Pops was pacing back and forth, his hands shoved into the pockets of his lab coat. “It wasn’t just a joke. It got everyone worked up and made them laugh. They were laughing
at
you, don’t you understand, Percy? Will you never understand? They were making fun of you. The joke was on you.”

“No it wasn’t,” I said bitterly. “The joke was on Uncle Paddy and McHugh.”

I stormed off to my room, lay in the upper bunk and hit Saint Drogo in the face, over and over, pounding the wall with my fist. Stupid, ugly, fucking saint. They didn’t make him a saint until long after he was dead. What good did that do him?

The next day, as I walked up the Curve of Bonaventure toward St. Bon’s, boys genuflected in front of me and blessed themselves. Others asked if I would let them touch the hem of my blazer. Girls trailed after me, saying, “Bless me, Percy, for I have sinned.” Making a megaphone of his hands, a grade eleven boy from Brother Rice announced that Percy Joyce would be hearing confessions in the bathroom of a bus from three to five that afternoon. I would walk on water at three, turn water into wine at three-fifteen, calm the
ocean at three-thirty, be crucified at four o’clock and rise from the dead at four-fifteen. I clasped my fists and shook them in triumph above my head. Triumph, mock triumph—what was the difference when the only alternative was to be ignored?