The Risk Pool

before us waited patiently, but the priest could only stare down at his own hand as if it had betrayed him. Finally, as if convinced that
she
was the one holding things up, the old woman made the sign of the cross and arose uncertainly, turning away from the rail.
    Father Michaels took one step toward the retreating communicant and held out his own offending hand, as if to invite her return, but the communion rail was between them. He watched the old woman all the way down the center aisle. Then he met my mother’s half-lovely, half-alarmed stare, which shifted from him to me and back again, and for a moment it was as if we three were the only ones in the church, perhaps in the world.
    When the spell broke, the priest turned back toward the high altar. I stayed where I was. It occasionally happened that there were not enough hosts in the chalice to serve all the parishioners,and the altar boy was expected to remain at the rail to mark the celebrant’s place. And so I did, but not without misgiving, because I had seen the chalice and it was still half full. Father Michaels placed it in the center of the open tabernacle and then, for some reason, disappeared into the sacristy.
    At the Communion rail we all awaited his return, and when the organ stopped, the church was still, except for some nervous rustling. There’s no telling how long I would have remained there at the rail if one of the other boys had not retrieved me. The back door of the sacristy was flung wide open, and the other altar boys were clustered just inside, framed in the light, looking out across Skinny’s well-tended floral cross, past the rectory, past the bakery, past the boundaries of our collective imaginations, for we never dreamed anything like this could happen.

7
    The most famous man in the history of Mohawk County was Nathan Littler, the town father. The junior high school, the hospital, and the city hall were all named after him, and there were statues erected to his memory on the long sloping lawn in front of the junior high and the terrace of the Mohawk Free Library. Nathan Littler never exactly did anything, he just had money. A lot of it he left to the city. About the only thing in Mohawk that wasn’t named after him was Myrtle Park, and that was named after his sister.
    A considerable body of myth surrounded Myrtle Littler when I was growing up. Local legend had it that she had been very beautiful and very unhappy. She died when still a young woman without revealing the great secret of that unhappiness. Now, over a hundred years later, her ghost haunted the great park at the center of Mohawk, searching for someone to share her terrible secret with. Those she told died. No one knew why.
    Her park was large and rambling, and the town had grown around its steep slopes on three sides, the new highway forming its northern boundary on the fourth. Its thick woods were allowed to go untended, and its macadam paths allowed to conform to the terrain, winding and turning back upon themselves. Two streets entered the park—one from the east, one from the west—but each dead-ended less than a hundred yards from the stone pillars that marked the entrance. Sometimes people in Mohawk grumbled about the park, which cut the town off from itself. Some places were less than a half mile apart, but with the park in between they could be reached only by going around. Every time there was trouble in the park the city council debated whether to cut down a swath of trees and blast a tunnel through the rock, but it was just talk and everybody knew it. The tanneries—the town’s lifeblood—conceded to be in temporary decline before the war, began to close down after its completion, victims of foreign competition and local greed. While the men who worked in the shops waited for them to reopen, the owners, those who hadn’t moved to Florida with their profits and the faith of Mohawk’s men and women, were working diligently to keep other industry out of the county, thereby ensuring that Mohawk would remain destitute even in the midst of postwar prosperity. There certainly was no money to squander on dynamiting the hillsides.
    The summer of 1959, the year I turned twelve, I loved to lose myself in Myrtle Park’s dark winding paths. Even on the sunniest days, the park was cool and shady, the macadam trails and dirt paths just right for biking. In the daytime, patches of sunlight revealed isolated gazebos back among the trees, and at night these were