The Risk Pool

autumn, leaves were raked every day, and when people came to mass on Sundays in October they often remarked that leaves knew better than to fall where they were not allowed. The Monsignor considered himself both a good priest and a successful one, and he enjoyed the idea of a well-stocked table, in contrast to which his meager grapefruit might be fully appreciated.
    After breakfast the old priest usually retired and Father Michaels often had visits to make in the community. As often as not, I was left to my own devices. The grounds within the chain-link boundaries of Our Lady of Sorrows were extensive and lovely. There were several trees that I yearned to climb, but I knew that such deviant behavior would have been frowned on by the Monsignor, whose tolerance of my mere presence seemed precarious enough. A stand of tall pines along the back fence behind the church provided cool, dark shade, and most days I sat beneath them on a blanket of pine needles reading about the wonderfully improbable adventures of two teenage boys on an island populated exclusively by the world’s foremost scientists, who were given to inventing things like ray guns that first got the boys intoand then out of trouble. Sometimes when he returned from his duties Father Michaels would join me and we would listen to the breeze high up in the pines and I would tell him what was new on Spindrift Island. “Ned,” he would say, “you’re a wonder. Who else would think to go around
back
of a church?”
    In fact, my stand of pines was the coolest, prettiest part of the church grounds, and from the base of the trees you could look all the way up through the branches to the milk-white cross on the roof.
    “This could be the coolest spot in all Mohawk County,” my friend said, and it was true, he sweated hardly at all when we relaxed there. “Only a boy would be clever enough to find such a spot.”
    I didn’t see where it was all that clever, but I didn’t mind him saying so. I liked listening to Father Michaels talk, even though most of what he said was so odd I couldn’t figure out whether he was brilliant or simpleminded, though I feared the latter.
    “People forget to notice beautiful things,” he said, looking up through the dark branches at the circle of blue-gray sky. “They outgrow it, I guess. A man who lives in a house on the beach forgets to look at the ocean. A man with a beautiful wife is just as likely to wander off someplace and forget her entirely. God must think we’re silly people.”
    Then he added, “Except for you, Ned. You’re a wonder.” His favorite observation, the strongest evidence I had in favor of simplemindedness in my friend.
    My only other companion that summer was the groundskeeper, a man called Skinny, who wasn’t particularly, though he may have been once. Now he had a melon under his white t-shirt. Skinny was in his forties, his stubbled chin a mixture of gray and black. He did not take to me until he learned I would not only do his work for him but thank him for the opportunity. I had a terrible yearning to feel useful, and Skinny, who had yearnings of the opposite nature, wasn’t the sort of man to let me suffer when there was something he could do about it. Of all his duties he most disliked mowing the great expanses of lawn, something the Monsignor wanted done every fifth or sixth day. To Skinny, a lawn didn’t look so scraggly that a sensible person would notice unless it went untended for a good two weeks. His basic philosophy was that mowing lawns was perverse and unreasonable behavior tobegin with, the proof of which lay in the fact that the grass grew right back again. He was not himself a religious man and had little good to say concerning people who saw God’s will in the everyday world, but if he
had
been the sort of man to see meaning in things, he would have concluded that God had never intended grass to be mowed. At least not by Skinny.
    In the beginning I just helped with the trimming in spots the mower couldn’t negotiate. Especially in the cool moist shade along the sides of the church and rectory, where the grass grew thicker. Unfortunately, the hand shears I was given were designed for a full-grown hand. I made little progress and was unhappy with the task. What I really wanted was to run the big power mower. By happy coincidence, what Skinny really wanted was the shade and the hand shears, for he suffered mightily under the broiling sun, mopping sweat from his forehead with