The Risk Pool

off countless bar stools, even off women. But that afternoon, when he was sober and full of new life and aching love for his long-neglected boy, his leg stiffened when he thought he had reached the bottom of the stadium stairs, and though he had misjudged where he was by inches, his leg shattered like a dry twig, the separated bone driving up into his groin. He immediately went into shock and died before the doctors at the hospital to which he was finally taken could diagnose the problem.
    If Father Michaels had not explained the moral of the story, I would have missed it, for it seemed to me that the man’s mistake in judgment had been to sober up when his natural state was clearly an alcoholic trance. But my friend explained that God had generously given his father the opportunity to die in the state of grace, and to allow the two of them a wonderful afternoon and its memory. He went on to explain that his father’s memory probably had more to do with his becoming a priest than any other single factor. Even viewed thus providentially, God’s design, though unmistakable now that it was pointed out to me, appeared to me a trifle convoluted, though I was hardly an expert. It just seemed that if He wanted disciples, His method with Saint Paul on the Damascus road was cleaner since it involved just the man in question (unless you counted the horse), not the beating of the man’s wife or the prolonged torture of his son, or any other innocent bystander to effect the conversion. Nevertheless, Father Michaels and I were bound by mutual sympathy, and he was of the opinion that even if my own father never showed up again, he would very likely continue to shape my life. I should be thankful for him, and for the brief time I’d spent with him, even if he didn’t seem like so very much of a father.
    My new friend also encouraged me to be thankful for my mother, whom he regarded as an extraordinary woman, not just as a gunfighter, but as someone of courage and endurance, who accepted what she couldn’t change, who did the work of both a mother and father, who did whatever was required of her without complaint. He could tell all this from the altar, just by looking at her, though she usually sat halfway between the vestibule and the altar in the darkest section of church beneath the fifth station of the cross. She never took Communion, a fact that was much puzzled over and commented on among the sparse congregation. Neither did she go to Confession. She was a contradiction, oftenattending weekday morning masses, which were not required, without ever, to use the terminology of Sister Matilda Marie, who taught catechism, “partaking of the Mass, His Body, His Blood.” How odd she looked, now that I think back on those days, kneeling there in the nearly empty church, first light just painting the stained-glass windows, among the dozen or so elderly women with fleshy throats and gnarled fingers tracking noisy rosary beads. But my mother, I suppose, was also a widow of sorts.
    I never gave her much thought until Father Michaels said what an extraordinary woman she was. I loved her, I suppose, but the way ten-year-olds love, arrogantly, aloofly, without much urgency. She was the constant in my life; she made sure I had clean underclothes in the top drawer of my dresser, that the meat in the freezer got defrosted in time for the dinner she would have to cook when she got home from the telephone company.
    Father Michaels wanted to know all about our life together, so I told him, understanding only then in the telling just how unusual that life was. When I explained our daily routine, he guessed immediately my mother’s most pressing concern—the approaching summer. Something would have to be done with me when school let out. I was nearly old enough to be self-sufficient—to make my own sandwich at the noon hour—and nearly mature enough to be trusted. But not quite. Though quiet and studious and shy by nature, I was beginning to show signs that troubled my mother. I admired Elvis Presley, for instance. Especially his hair. Neither the man, his hair, nor his music seemed worthy of admiration to my mother, who forbade me to carry the slick black Ace comb in my hip pocket, the purpose of which was to subdue a stubborn un-Elvislike cowlick. No, I needed looking after. In the past we had relied on Aunt Rose for July and August, but this year she had hinted she might like to go away for the summer, explaining that she had not been