Prodigy With Hooves (short story)
My dad pulled our ‘54 Chevy up to the ticket booth and asked for two adults and four children’s tickets, not counting Paul and Tony in the trunk. The attendants only checked the trunks of teenagers, not suspecting a family man of skullduggery, but everybody we knew always snuck in a couple of older kids. Fifty cents was a lot of money in those days, especially for poor farmers who weren’t that far from The Great Depression. Mom and Pop took us to the Outdoor every Friday night. It was double feature night; “The Monster from the Black Lagoon” and “Invaders from Mars” were showing. My parents never ever considered whether horror movies were appropriate for my cute little brother Johnny Cake, aged four; me, Donny, aged six; and pigtailed Polly and angelic Bonnie, ages seven and eight, all prone to horrific nightmares.
My mom popped a couple of grocery bags full of corn, and we brought along our own Kool-Aid, so we never got to go to the concession stand, where they sold malted milks and French fries and Mild Duds and Baby Ruth candy bars and other good stuff I really wanted bad. We got to go in there to use the bathrooms, but we never bought anything. I saved my allowance for a couple of weeks, just so’s I could buy something from one of the pretty high school girls who served the customers and ran the cash registers, but my brothers and sisters were thieves and every time I cracked open my piggy bank, the money was gone. It didn’t do any good to tell my mother; she just told me I had to learn to hide it better. She didn’t really believe any of her children would steal from a little kid. But my brother Paul was seriously deranged. He would sneak across the river where the Mueller girls lived and peak in the windows. When he would return, early in the morning, he would tell us what he had seen. “Nekked women with boobies and everything,” he said. We knew he was lying, but how long would it be before he did something worse than peek into windows? He was a prime candidate for Red Wing, where they sent the reform school kids. My dad used to threaten to send us there when we were bad, which was like every day.
Anyway, my dad let the big kids out of the trunk with the people from the nearby cars blocking the view of Herman Workman, the clueless security cop. When it was hot we sat on the hood of the car and watched the show; you could still hear the speakers from there but not as well as actually being in the car. The previews, the shorts, and the advertisements took almost as long as the actual movie. My favorite was Abbott and Costello. Abbott was always pushing Costello around. I wanted to punch him.
Fifteen minutes later, the first feature started. “Invaders From Mars” was about these aliens who landed in this swamp where nobody could find their ship, and they would sneak out at night and inject their protoplasm, whatever that is, into unsuspecting ordinary people, right in the neck. I was already having nightmares and I hadn’t even seen “The Monster from the Black Lagoon,” which Tony said was even scarier. He’d already seen it twice. Not that I would see much of the monster anyway. “Hide your eyes!” mom would say, when the slimy green creature would limp out of the lagoon with mayhem on his mind. Usually he’d do something terrible to a curvaceous blonde. Blond women seemed to be especially unlucky in the movie world. Insurance salesmen, ministers, teachers, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, all fell prey to the invaders from Mars. Who could you trust if you couldn’t trust your grandmother? Dad fell asleep, tired from working two jobs. He worked at Lundy packing, butchering steers, when he wasn’t farming. He slept through all of the blood-curdling screams coming from his family on the hood of the car.
#
The night we saw the “Invaders from Mars” was September 1st; I would start first grade on Tuesday, September 5th, the day after Labor Day at St. Joseph Elementary School in Rich Prairie, Minnesota, and I didn’t want to go. Mom took me to see my teacher, Sister Larian, and she looked awfully suspicious to me, kind of like the people who had alien protoplasm shot into their necks in that movie. She had furry eyebrows and greenish-yellow eyes, and she wore a headdress my mom called a wimple. You’d think she’d get a rash on her neck wearing that starchy, stiff-looking contraption. If I didn’t go to first grade, I’d wind up in the gutter or working as a ditchdigger, my grandpa said. So I went, but I still didn’t like the idea, and I spent a lot of time in the library for throwing tantrums, Sister Larian’s term for my crying fits. She assigned me a “best friend” named Richie who called me a girl for crying. I hit him in the eye with a roll of nickels. Paul had seen the gangsters on the late movie use them and he told me, “If you ever have any problems on the playground, use these and they’ll never bother you again.” That’s probably how we got the reputation for being no goods. In Rich Prairie if your old brother was rotten, so were you. Once when we were playing Cowboys and Indians--Polly was always an Indian because of her pigtails--Paul got carried away in his role as Chief Thunderthud and lifted Polly‘s scalp. Thankfully, he’d used a scissors. He carried a hunting knife wherever he went, and a scissors wasn‘t really his style at all. Pop beat the snot out of him for that one. Poor Polly, she barely set foot in school before somebody would say, “Polly want a cracker?” She begged mom to let her change her name.
I got sent to see the principal for punching Richie in the eye.
Sister Gervais asked me why I did that, and when I told her, she said, “Oh that’s a terrible insult. I would have hit him, too.” She gave me a sucker and told me to use diplomacy next time. I said I would, although I had no idea what she meant. I loved Sister Gervais, but I never told her about the roll of nickels.
My mother must’ve felt sorry for me because once she came to get me right around noon, but she couldn’t find me; I was hiding in the bus garage. I’d been there since recess. Lou Muehlbauer, the multipurpose janitor- groundskeeper-bus driver, never locked the door, and the kids all knew it. I usually came out when it was time for my bus. I could tell when the kids ran out the front door pushing and shoving and yelling, “Free, free at last!”
Sister Larian really hated me and not just for throwing tantrums. Whenever anybody did something wrong, she would look down at me and say, “You did it, didn’t you?” The problem was that I would turn scarlet red whenever she got angry. I didn’t want that alien inside her to go berserk and kill all of us poor little children.
Sister tried to teach us how to read. I found this excruciatingly boring since I’d been reading comic books ever since I was two or three. Sister taught us with these books about Dick and Jane and their cat Puff and their dog Spot. “See Dick run. See Spot run. See Dick and Jane run.” They were so dull, I began to develop a drool. If I’d written those books, I would have added a little bit of conflict. “See Spot foam at the mouth. See Spot bite Dick. See Dick foam at the mouth and bite Jane.”
Then there was religion class. Sister Larian taught us about the Garden of Eden and how Eve had tempted Adam into eating an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, and because of this, Eve had to go through the pain of childbirth and they both had to work hard for their bread. What I thought was really unfair was that God blamed the snake for everything, and he had to crawl around on his belly from then on. Every couple of weeks Father Murphy would show up to teach us religion instead of Sister Larian. He told us a bunch of hockey stories from when he played for Hill-Murray down in the Cities; he said he wasn’t much of a skater, and he really couldn’t shoot the puck, but the coach put him in the game as a goon to rough up the other team’s best player. He said he spent more time in the penalty box than on the ice. Father Murphy never mentioned God or religion. Once in a while he’d forget himself and light up a cigar. Sister had to tell him not to do that anymore.
When report cards came out I got a bunch of checks in deportment, whatever that was. Mom said it had to do with behavior. I also got a “C” in reading, which I thought was terribly unfair since I was the best reader in the class. I just didn’t like to read what Sister wanted us to read was all.
She was definitely an alien all right and she had to go. Paul had told me about a student teacher he had who quit right in the middle of the day, and he and his buddies tore up the classroom until Sister Gervais realized what had happened and put down the rebellion. I set my mind to make Sister Larian quit.
Since my brother Paul was the evilest person I knew, I went to him for advice. “You need some other rotten apples in your class,” he said. “When we ran that student teacher off, I corrupted everybody else and we started shooting spitballs and squirting each other with water guns. We even put a thumb tack on her chair and she sat on it. I swear she jumped so high she hit the ceiling; I thought I’d bust a gut laughing, but I think it was the stink bomb that did it.”
I tried to talk Richie into being my partner in crime, but he said I must have gotten that idea from my brother Paul, who his parents said would wind up in Stillwater one of these days. Stillwater was the state pen. There was one other possibility, Jane Schwartz, who talked to this imaginary person all the time, but I was more afraid of her than I was of Sister Larian. I would have to go it alone. The next day I peed on the floor. It didn’t phase Sister one little bit. She called the janitor, he threw some sawdust on the floor, swept it up and we were back to normal in a matter of minutes. She was an alien all right.
Next I passed around a note that said that Sister Larian was pregnant with Father Murphy’s child. That ought to get rid of her. Would you believe it; Jane Schwartz, of all people, during a lucid moment, ratted me out, and I had to apologize to Sister Larian and to Father Murphy. And they called my mother in to discuss my juvenile delinquency problem.
We got there around seven that night, and Father was just finishing his coffee after dinner. We sat by this roaring fireplace with these huge logs radiating heat, him in his recliner and us in these two armchairs across from him. He lit a cigar and said, “What do you have to say for yourself, Donald?”
“I’m sorry I got you involved, Father,” I said. “I did it because I hate Sister Larian.”
“What you did is slander,” he said. “If people believed that I’d have relations with a nun, my vocation would be over. Or worse yet, the Bishop could transfer me to Wisconsin.” He winked at my mom. She didn’t get it, but I was laughing inside. Father Murphy was another good egg. Maybe he would help me get rid of Sister Larian. Then I told him about my suspicions that Sister was one of those aliens who’d gotten the protoplasm injection in the back of the neck.
Father choked on his coffee and couldn’t stop laughing until he noticed the shocked expression on my mother’s face.
“I can almost guarantee that Sister Larian is not an alien,” he said. “Ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent sure I am. I can’t let you off scot-free, Donald. If we let all of our first graders disrespect the nuns, this place would be a jungle. Worse yet, no one would be willing to make donations to the church.” He winked at my mom again, but she was a hopeless case.
“I can help Mr. Muehlbauer rake the leaves,” I said.
“As punishment.” I loved raking leaves. Once you got them all raked into a pile you could jump off the truck into the pile, then you got to light them on fire afterwards. The smell of burning leaves was almost as good as the smell of the gasoline we used to light them.
“And you’ll copy a page out of the catechism,” Father said.
“But Sister hasn’t taught us how to print,” I said.
My mother gave me one of her Evil-Queen-from-Snow-White looks. I’d been writing almost as long as I’d been reading comic books. But she didn’t rat me out like that traitor Schwartz. “He’ll copy a page out of the catechism if I have to teach him myself,” she said.
Then Father brought out the Bible and made me swear on it that I’d never do anything like that again, and for good measure, he made me swear I would do everything in my power to be a model student.
Curses, foiled again.
#
Luck was with me, or so I thought. One day Sister Gervais was sitting in the back of the room observing our class when she caught me reading a Superman comic book. She also noticed I’d been doodling on my tablet, in longhand. She took me up to the second floor between the seventh and eighth grade classrooms, where she had her office, and we had another “discussion.”
“You’ll be excused from your classes for the next couple of days. I’m going to give you a battery of tests to determine your proper placement.”
Battery? Placement? It didn’t sound good. Was she thinking of sending me to Red Wing instead of that pervert Paul?
But it was just a bunch of multiple choice questions on reading, vocabulary and social studies, which I knew a lot about from watching the news with my Grandpa. I was so high in reading, at the twelfth grade level, that I thought about protesting the “C” Sister Larian had given me on my report card, but I figured I better shut up for once and see where this was headed.
“You must’ve been very bored,?” Sister Gervais said.
I hung my head trying to look humble, a very hard thing for me to do. My brothers call me “Einstein” because I know all the answers on the quiz shows on television.
“You’re intelligent enough to handle at least fifth grade work, but we don’t want to stunt your growth socially, so we’ll be moving you up to second grade. At least they’re studying longhand and arithmetic.” My grandpa had taught me all the arithmetic I needed when we took our produce to the farmer’s market. I had to know how to make change. The town ladies always made a big fuss over me, and I got to keep some of the change to buy comic books.
“Sister Norman will be your new teacher.”
Sister Norman was about six feet two in those funny grandma’s shoes they wear, very skinny with a moustache. I hated her on sight, and she gave me reason to the first week I was in second grade.
Kids on the first bus who got to school early had to go to daily mass. The first and second graders sat in the front pews. One day I was the only one in the first row, and I just could not follow the mumbo jumbo going on up at the altar. I started day dreaming and before I knew it, I was sliding up and down on the armrest. I had no idea I was even in church.
Sister Norman had been watching what I was doing. Looking back on it, I’m surprised she didn’t grab me by the hair, drag me outside, and burn me at the stake, but for some reason she waited until mass was over and Father Murphy and the big boy servers were gone. Then she slapped the snot out of me, right in front of God and everybody. “What you did was a sacrilege,” she said. “I’ll teach you to profane the house of God.” My ears were ringing by the time she was done and I had to sit in the library the rest of the day. I told on her, but it only got me another beating from Grandpa who thought the nuns could do no wrong. I didn’t speak to him for a week.
#
Meanwhile my sisters had started noticing boys, one boy especially. He was a big boy, a very big boy, who shaved and everything. He was first year teacher, Mr. Quade, who taught grades three and four in public school. There was no public school in Rich Prairie; as a result, there were two sets of third and fourth grade classrooms at St. Joseph’s, something you would never see today. We couldn’t afford the book rent so the girls had to go to public school. Polly, “the inky baby,” who was born two months early, weighing two pounds dripping wet, had to stay in the incubator at the hospital for a week before she could come home. She was shorter than all of the other kids in her class with a pixie cut, but she was almost as smart as me, although she never got to skip a class like I did, and I never let her forget it, let me tell you. Anyway, she wrote all over her notebooks things like, “I love Mr. Quade,” and “Polly and Jim,” Mr. Quade’s first name. She even wrote, “Mr. and Mrs. James Quade,” on the back. These days Quade would have been investigated for child abuse. When Paul saw this, he threatened to tell everyone in Rich Prairie, including Mr. Quade, and blackmailed her into doing his chores for a week. It was his job to throw down silage, a pretty tough job for a little girl. I should tell you this before I forget. Paul never did get sent to Red Wing, but he did grow up to be an insurance agent and a lifelong conservative Republican. I would‘ve preferred he go to Red Wing. It would have been less embarrassing. Tony, on the other hand, has the kind of job every kid would give his eye teeth for, stunt man in Hollywood. Polly is a pediatrician, ironically never married, and angelic Bonny, the mother of five, is a manager at a supermarket in Des Moines. Johnny stayed on the farm, but he raises Angus steers instead of milk cows.
Polly’s crush must’ve been catching because I fell in love, too. Her name was Carol Tomlinson and her mom had put her hair up in sausage curls. I thought she was Marilyn Monroe. When Valentine’s Day rolled around, I gave her a valentine. It’s not what you think. I didn’t go to the store and buy a special valentine for Carol. Our mothers bought them for us, and we had to give everybody in the class one, but I did pick out a special one for Carol. But I came down with pneumonia (we had no heat upstairs where we all slept, only an oil burner in the living room) the day we handed out valentines, so I missed my chance. I felt so bad about not giving her a valentine that when I got back to school after a week’s absence, I left the crumpled valentine on her desk. Now she knew. We spent the rest of the year having staring contests. I never spoke to her, not even once. I never even said hello. Actually I’m rather surprised she had anything to do with me, me being a first grader in actuality, but if my school pictures are any indication, I was a pretty cool looking cat, if I do say so myself. Rather like a junior version of Tyrone Power.
#
Sister Gervais took me out of class when the others were studying reading. She felt guilty about not moving me up to the fifth grade where I belonged, and she gave me books to read like TOM SAWYER, and HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Those hellions reminded me of Paul. She also gave me this book entitled THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER about these two boys who could have been twins. The pauper was the prince’s whipping boy. That meant that whenever the prince did something wrong, like call his sister ugly names, the pauper had to take his beating. What a novel idea. I could go for that. When I got rich and famous, Paul and Tony could be my whipping boys.
Sister Gervais was a lonely old lady under that black uniform with the wimple and the big rosary hanging from her neck. She told me she was originally from South St. Paul, where they had the stock yards. “I was almost as smart as you are,” she said, “I wanted to be a lawyer, but my mother died when I was only twelve, and my dad couldn’t take care of all of us children by himself, so he sent me to the convent. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if my mother would have lived.” There were tears in her eyes. I got a little misty myself.
Sister Norman still thought I was the devil, and she really resented the fact that I got so much special attention from Sister Gervais. One day she called me Mr. Smartaleck for disagreeing with her definition of a republic. I called her a beanpole, and she hit me in the mouth so hard that she cut my lip. This time I told my dad, and he came to school loaded for bear. We met with Sister Gervais, Sister Norman, and Father Murphy in Sister Gervais’s office. “If you ever touch my boy again, I can’t guarantee I won’t do something violent,” he said.
She was apologetic, said she’d lost her head. No second grader had ever called her a name. Unfortunately nobody had told Dad that I’d called her a beanpole, and I got another beating when I got home, this time with the belt.
Sister Gervais and I had another heart to heart about the Sister Norman incident. “A lot of homely girls go into the convent,” she said. “Then there are those who think they have a guaranteed spot in heaven if they join. Sister Norman is both of those.” We laughed laconically.
She then had me write a story about the incident. Therapy she said it was, so it wouldn’t fester and make me bitter toward the church. I was already bitter toward the church, but I didn’t tell her that. After the therapy essay, which ran to five thousand words, not counting the drawings, I got in the habit of writing every day, even at home. Before I knew it, I was writing full length novels. The first one was entitled “The Monsters from the Black Lagoon,” and it was about this boy who went to a Catholic elementary school in a small Minnesota school who had to deal with these nuns who were possessed by aliens. In order to be fair I put in a few good nuns like Sister G. who tried to save the boy from these horrible zombie-like creatures. “Perhaps you want to keep this somewhere where Sister Norman and Sister Larian won’t see it,” Sister G. said after reading it. “And you might want to use pseudonyms for the ladies.” Sister Gervais and I were working through this vocabulary book, but we hadn’t gotten to that word yet. “Isn’t that a lie?” I said. She said that this was poetic license. Lying was okay when it was in the service of great literature.
Meanwhile I was having trouble on the playground. I was now the glass geek, and I got beat up regularly, roll of nickels or no roll of nickels, hoodlum brother or no hoodlum brother. I was also pretty lousy at sports. You can be smart if you’re good at sports, but if you get picked last for every game, behind even the German kid with the club foot, you get the stuffing beat out of you, and they hit you where it doesn’t show. Father Murphy noticed I wasn’t feeling too good and started teaching me how to box.
He must’ve been lonely, too, because he started showing up for my “enrichment” sessions with Sister Gervais. I learned my multiplication tables in one afternoon. I learned long division in two hours. I memorized “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” after reading it once. Sister Gervais said she thought I had an eidetic memory. They both began to look for a better school for me. “Perhaps the brothers at Cretin High School in St. Paul,” Sister suggested or “St. John’s Prep near St. Cloud.” It was a lot closer. Eventually I went to St. John’s for high school. Father Murphy got the money from the vocation fund for poor kids who wanted to be priests.
We didn’t just talk about books during my enrichment sessions. The other kids were starting to prepare for their first confession and first communion and neither Father nor Sister trusted that devil Sister Norman to teach me. I felt like Jesus among the wise men at the temple. When we talked about three persons in one God, I looked at them askance. Then there was the virgin birth. “The protestant kids say Jesus had a brother named James,” I said. “How come Jesus was God and James got the short end of the stick?” I asked.
“Ah, James was like John the Baptist,” Father said. “John the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus and James was one of the apostles; however, the Catholic church does not teach that James was Jesus’s brother.”
“That must have been pretty tough if James really was Jesus’s brother, especially if he was an older brother, taking orders from a snotty kid. And what about poor Judas Iscariot?” I said. “Why should he spend eternity in hell when it was preordained that he would give Jesus up to the Romans? Somebody had to do it?”
“If he’s in hell, and we don’t know for sure that he is,” Father said, “It’s because he hung himself. Everyone has a chance to repent. That’s why we have the sacrament of confession.”
I told them I’d read a chapter out of Tony’s biology book from high school, and it said that man evolved from the apes. “We sort of look like monkeys, and we have fingers like they do, and they kind of laugh like we do. I think that’s probably the way it happened.”
“God works in mysterious ways,” Father Murphy said. “The church now teaches that God the Father set evolution in motion.”
“I don’t believe in the tooth fairy,” I said. “And I stopped believing in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny when I was three. I don’t think I believe in this Jesus person either.”
“People were tortured and put to death during the Middle Ages for denying that Jesus was God.”
“Another reason not to believe,” I said.
Both of them looked like they were in the presence of a boy with horns and hooves, but neither “The Exorcist” or “Rosemary’s Baby” had been released yet, so I was safe for the moment.
To give them credit, neither of them went over the deep end and called in the Jesuits. They just tried harder, and since I liked them both so much, I pretended to be influenced. I went to my first confession and took my first communion and was a practicing Catholic until the Ecumenical Council destroyed my faith for good. I figured that if the Latin mass was good enough for two thousand years, why change?
I must’ve had an influence on Father Murphy, because, after he retired from the priesthood, he married his high school sweetheart. Sister Gervaise and I stayed in touch and sent each other Christmas cards (There are some religious traditions that I find charming; I also like the music and still attend high mass occasionally just to hear the choir sing) until the day she died. I went to her funeral. Sister Larian and Sister Norman were there. They were dressed in civilian clothes and looked like little old ladies just back from the beauty parlor; they even wore flowered dresses. Gone were Sister Larian’s furry eyebrows and yellowish-green eyes. Gone was Sister Norman’s mustache. Both of them pretended not to remember me. “You know, you have so many students through the years,” Sister Norman said. “You can’t possibly remember them all.” They’d denied me the pleasure of bragging about being a physics professor at the University of Minnesota despite their efforts to brand me as a no good. But I think they knew very well who I was. Sisters aren’t supposed to lie.
If you enjoyed "Prodigy with Hooves," Dave Schwinghammer's novel, SOLDIER'S GAP,is available on Amazon.com.
My mom popped a couple of grocery bags full of corn, and we brought along our own Kool-Aid, so we never got to go to the concession stand, where they sold malted milks and French fries and Mild Duds and Baby Ruth candy bars and other good stuff I really wanted bad. We got to go in there to use the bathrooms, but we never bought anything. I saved my allowance for a couple of weeks, just so’s I could buy something from one of the pretty high school girls who served the customers and ran the cash registers, but my brothers and sisters were thieves and every time I cracked open my piggy bank, the money was gone. It didn’t do any good to tell my mother; she just told me I had to learn to hide it better. She didn’t really believe any of her children would steal from a little kid. But my brother Paul was seriously deranged. He would sneak across the river where the Mueller girls lived and peak in the windows. When he would return, early in the morning, he would tell us what he had seen. “Nekked women with boobies and everything,” he said. We knew he was lying, but how long would it be before he did something worse than peek into windows? He was a prime candidate for Red Wing, where they sent the reform school kids. My dad used to threaten to send us there when we were bad, which was like every day.
Anyway, my dad let the big kids out of the trunk with the people from the nearby cars blocking the view of Herman Workman, the clueless security cop. When it was hot we sat on the hood of the car and watched the show; you could still hear the speakers from there but not as well as actually being in the car. The previews, the shorts, and the advertisements took almost as long as the actual movie. My favorite was Abbott and Costello. Abbott was always pushing Costello around. I wanted to punch him.
Fifteen minutes later, the first feature started. “Invaders From Mars” was about these aliens who landed in this swamp where nobody could find their ship, and they would sneak out at night and inject their protoplasm, whatever that is, into unsuspecting ordinary people, right in the neck. I was already having nightmares and I hadn’t even seen “The Monster from the Black Lagoon,” which Tony said was even scarier. He’d already seen it twice. Not that I would see much of the monster anyway. “Hide your eyes!” mom would say, when the slimy green creature would limp out of the lagoon with mayhem on his mind. Usually he’d do something terrible to a curvaceous blonde. Blond women seemed to be especially unlucky in the movie world. Insurance salesmen, ministers, teachers, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, all fell prey to the invaders from Mars. Who could you trust if you couldn’t trust your grandmother? Dad fell asleep, tired from working two jobs. He worked at Lundy packing, butchering steers, when he wasn’t farming. He slept through all of the blood-curdling screams coming from his family on the hood of the car.
#
The night we saw the “Invaders from Mars” was September 1st; I would start first grade on Tuesday, September 5th, the day after Labor Day at St. Joseph Elementary School in Rich Prairie, Minnesota, and I didn’t want to go. Mom took me to see my teacher, Sister Larian, and she looked awfully suspicious to me, kind of like the people who had alien protoplasm shot into their necks in that movie. She had furry eyebrows and greenish-yellow eyes, and she wore a headdress my mom called a wimple. You’d think she’d get a rash on her neck wearing that starchy, stiff-looking contraption. If I didn’t go to first grade, I’d wind up in the gutter or working as a ditchdigger, my grandpa said. So I went, but I still didn’t like the idea, and I spent a lot of time in the library for throwing tantrums, Sister Larian’s term for my crying fits. She assigned me a “best friend” named Richie who called me a girl for crying. I hit him in the eye with a roll of nickels. Paul had seen the gangsters on the late movie use them and he told me, “If you ever have any problems on the playground, use these and they’ll never bother you again.” That’s probably how we got the reputation for being no goods. In Rich Prairie if your old brother was rotten, so were you. Once when we were playing Cowboys and Indians--Polly was always an Indian because of her pigtails--Paul got carried away in his role as Chief Thunderthud and lifted Polly‘s scalp. Thankfully, he’d used a scissors. He carried a hunting knife wherever he went, and a scissors wasn‘t really his style at all. Pop beat the snot out of him for that one. Poor Polly, she barely set foot in school before somebody would say, “Polly want a cracker?” She begged mom to let her change her name.
I got sent to see the principal for punching Richie in the eye.
Sister Gervais asked me why I did that, and when I told her, she said, “Oh that’s a terrible insult. I would have hit him, too.” She gave me a sucker and told me to use diplomacy next time. I said I would, although I had no idea what she meant. I loved Sister Gervais, but I never told her about the roll of nickels.
My mother must’ve felt sorry for me because once she came to get me right around noon, but she couldn’t find me; I was hiding in the bus garage. I’d been there since recess. Lou Muehlbauer, the multipurpose janitor- groundskeeper-bus driver, never locked the door, and the kids all knew it. I usually came out when it was time for my bus. I could tell when the kids ran out the front door pushing and shoving and yelling, “Free, free at last!”
Sister Larian really hated me and not just for throwing tantrums. Whenever anybody did something wrong, she would look down at me and say, “You did it, didn’t you?” The problem was that I would turn scarlet red whenever she got angry. I didn’t want that alien inside her to go berserk and kill all of us poor little children.
Sister tried to teach us how to read. I found this excruciatingly boring since I’d been reading comic books ever since I was two or three. Sister taught us with these books about Dick and Jane and their cat Puff and their dog Spot. “See Dick run. See Spot run. See Dick and Jane run.” They were so dull, I began to develop a drool. If I’d written those books, I would have added a little bit of conflict. “See Spot foam at the mouth. See Spot bite Dick. See Dick foam at the mouth and bite Jane.”
Then there was religion class. Sister Larian taught us about the Garden of Eden and how Eve had tempted Adam into eating an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, and because of this, Eve had to go through the pain of childbirth and they both had to work hard for their bread. What I thought was really unfair was that God blamed the snake for everything, and he had to crawl around on his belly from then on. Every couple of weeks Father Murphy would show up to teach us religion instead of Sister Larian. He told us a bunch of hockey stories from when he played for Hill-Murray down in the Cities; he said he wasn’t much of a skater, and he really couldn’t shoot the puck, but the coach put him in the game as a goon to rough up the other team’s best player. He said he spent more time in the penalty box than on the ice. Father Murphy never mentioned God or religion. Once in a while he’d forget himself and light up a cigar. Sister had to tell him not to do that anymore.
When report cards came out I got a bunch of checks in deportment, whatever that was. Mom said it had to do with behavior. I also got a “C” in reading, which I thought was terribly unfair since I was the best reader in the class. I just didn’t like to read what Sister wanted us to read was all.
She was definitely an alien all right and she had to go. Paul had told me about a student teacher he had who quit right in the middle of the day, and he and his buddies tore up the classroom until Sister Gervais realized what had happened and put down the rebellion. I set my mind to make Sister Larian quit.
Since my brother Paul was the evilest person I knew, I went to him for advice. “You need some other rotten apples in your class,” he said. “When we ran that student teacher off, I corrupted everybody else and we started shooting spitballs and squirting each other with water guns. We even put a thumb tack on her chair and she sat on it. I swear she jumped so high she hit the ceiling; I thought I’d bust a gut laughing, but I think it was the stink bomb that did it.”
I tried to talk Richie into being my partner in crime, but he said I must have gotten that idea from my brother Paul, who his parents said would wind up in Stillwater one of these days. Stillwater was the state pen. There was one other possibility, Jane Schwartz, who talked to this imaginary person all the time, but I was more afraid of her than I was of Sister Larian. I would have to go it alone. The next day I peed on the floor. It didn’t phase Sister one little bit. She called the janitor, he threw some sawdust on the floor, swept it up and we were back to normal in a matter of minutes. She was an alien all right.
Next I passed around a note that said that Sister Larian was pregnant with Father Murphy’s child. That ought to get rid of her. Would you believe it; Jane Schwartz, of all people, during a lucid moment, ratted me out, and I had to apologize to Sister Larian and to Father Murphy. And they called my mother in to discuss my juvenile delinquency problem.
We got there around seven that night, and Father was just finishing his coffee after dinner. We sat by this roaring fireplace with these huge logs radiating heat, him in his recliner and us in these two armchairs across from him. He lit a cigar and said, “What do you have to say for yourself, Donald?”
“I’m sorry I got you involved, Father,” I said. “I did it because I hate Sister Larian.”
“What you did is slander,” he said. “If people believed that I’d have relations with a nun, my vocation would be over. Or worse yet, the Bishop could transfer me to Wisconsin.” He winked at my mom. She didn’t get it, but I was laughing inside. Father Murphy was another good egg. Maybe he would help me get rid of Sister Larian. Then I told him about my suspicions that Sister was one of those aliens who’d gotten the protoplasm injection in the back of the neck.
Father choked on his coffee and couldn’t stop laughing until he noticed the shocked expression on my mother’s face.
“I can almost guarantee that Sister Larian is not an alien,” he said. “Ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent sure I am. I can’t let you off scot-free, Donald. If we let all of our first graders disrespect the nuns, this place would be a jungle. Worse yet, no one would be willing to make donations to the church.” He winked at my mom again, but she was a hopeless case.
“I can help Mr. Muehlbauer rake the leaves,” I said.
“As punishment.” I loved raking leaves. Once you got them all raked into a pile you could jump off the truck into the pile, then you got to light them on fire afterwards. The smell of burning leaves was almost as good as the smell of the gasoline we used to light them.
“And you’ll copy a page out of the catechism,” Father said.
“But Sister hasn’t taught us how to print,” I said.
My mother gave me one of her Evil-Queen-from-Snow-White looks. I’d been writing almost as long as I’d been reading comic books. But she didn’t rat me out like that traitor Schwartz. “He’ll copy a page out of the catechism if I have to teach him myself,” she said.
Then Father brought out the Bible and made me swear on it that I’d never do anything like that again, and for good measure, he made me swear I would do everything in my power to be a model student.
Curses, foiled again.
#
Luck was with me, or so I thought. One day Sister Gervais was sitting in the back of the room observing our class when she caught me reading a Superman comic book. She also noticed I’d been doodling on my tablet, in longhand. She took me up to the second floor between the seventh and eighth grade classrooms, where she had her office, and we had another “discussion.”
“You’ll be excused from your classes for the next couple of days. I’m going to give you a battery of tests to determine your proper placement.”
Battery? Placement? It didn’t sound good. Was she thinking of sending me to Red Wing instead of that pervert Paul?
But it was just a bunch of multiple choice questions on reading, vocabulary and social studies, which I knew a lot about from watching the news with my Grandpa. I was so high in reading, at the twelfth grade level, that I thought about protesting the “C” Sister Larian had given me on my report card, but I figured I better shut up for once and see where this was headed.
“You must’ve been very bored,?” Sister Gervais said.
I hung my head trying to look humble, a very hard thing for me to do. My brothers call me “Einstein” because I know all the answers on the quiz shows on television.
“You’re intelligent enough to handle at least fifth grade work, but we don’t want to stunt your growth socially, so we’ll be moving you up to second grade. At least they’re studying longhand and arithmetic.” My grandpa had taught me all the arithmetic I needed when we took our produce to the farmer’s market. I had to know how to make change. The town ladies always made a big fuss over me, and I got to keep some of the change to buy comic books.
“Sister Norman will be your new teacher.”
Sister Norman was about six feet two in those funny grandma’s shoes they wear, very skinny with a moustache. I hated her on sight, and she gave me reason to the first week I was in second grade.
Kids on the first bus who got to school early had to go to daily mass. The first and second graders sat in the front pews. One day I was the only one in the first row, and I just could not follow the mumbo jumbo going on up at the altar. I started day dreaming and before I knew it, I was sliding up and down on the armrest. I had no idea I was even in church.
Sister Norman had been watching what I was doing. Looking back on it, I’m surprised she didn’t grab me by the hair, drag me outside, and burn me at the stake, but for some reason she waited until mass was over and Father Murphy and the big boy servers were gone. Then she slapped the snot out of me, right in front of God and everybody. “What you did was a sacrilege,” she said. “I’ll teach you to profane the house of God.” My ears were ringing by the time she was done and I had to sit in the library the rest of the day. I told on her, but it only got me another beating from Grandpa who thought the nuns could do no wrong. I didn’t speak to him for a week.
#
Meanwhile my sisters had started noticing boys, one boy especially. He was a big boy, a very big boy, who shaved and everything. He was first year teacher, Mr. Quade, who taught grades three and four in public school. There was no public school in Rich Prairie; as a result, there were two sets of third and fourth grade classrooms at St. Joseph’s, something you would never see today. We couldn’t afford the book rent so the girls had to go to public school. Polly, “the inky baby,” who was born two months early, weighing two pounds dripping wet, had to stay in the incubator at the hospital for a week before she could come home. She was shorter than all of the other kids in her class with a pixie cut, but she was almost as smart as me, although she never got to skip a class like I did, and I never let her forget it, let me tell you. Anyway, she wrote all over her notebooks things like, “I love Mr. Quade,” and “Polly and Jim,” Mr. Quade’s first name. She even wrote, “Mr. and Mrs. James Quade,” on the back. These days Quade would have been investigated for child abuse. When Paul saw this, he threatened to tell everyone in Rich Prairie, including Mr. Quade, and blackmailed her into doing his chores for a week. It was his job to throw down silage, a pretty tough job for a little girl. I should tell you this before I forget. Paul never did get sent to Red Wing, but he did grow up to be an insurance agent and a lifelong conservative Republican. I would‘ve preferred he go to Red Wing. It would have been less embarrassing. Tony, on the other hand, has the kind of job every kid would give his eye teeth for, stunt man in Hollywood. Polly is a pediatrician, ironically never married, and angelic Bonny, the mother of five, is a manager at a supermarket in Des Moines. Johnny stayed on the farm, but he raises Angus steers instead of milk cows.
Polly’s crush must’ve been catching because I fell in love, too. Her name was Carol Tomlinson and her mom had put her hair up in sausage curls. I thought she was Marilyn Monroe. When Valentine’s Day rolled around, I gave her a valentine. It’s not what you think. I didn’t go to the store and buy a special valentine for Carol. Our mothers bought them for us, and we had to give everybody in the class one, but I did pick out a special one for Carol. But I came down with pneumonia (we had no heat upstairs where we all slept, only an oil burner in the living room) the day we handed out valentines, so I missed my chance. I felt so bad about not giving her a valentine that when I got back to school after a week’s absence, I left the crumpled valentine on her desk. Now she knew. We spent the rest of the year having staring contests. I never spoke to her, not even once. I never even said hello. Actually I’m rather surprised she had anything to do with me, me being a first grader in actuality, but if my school pictures are any indication, I was a pretty cool looking cat, if I do say so myself. Rather like a junior version of Tyrone Power.
#
Sister Gervais took me out of class when the others were studying reading. She felt guilty about not moving me up to the fifth grade where I belonged, and she gave me books to read like TOM SAWYER, and HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Those hellions reminded me of Paul. She also gave me this book entitled THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER about these two boys who could have been twins. The pauper was the prince’s whipping boy. That meant that whenever the prince did something wrong, like call his sister ugly names, the pauper had to take his beating. What a novel idea. I could go for that. When I got rich and famous, Paul and Tony could be my whipping boys.
Sister Gervais was a lonely old lady under that black uniform with the wimple and the big rosary hanging from her neck. She told me she was originally from South St. Paul, where they had the stock yards. “I was almost as smart as you are,” she said, “I wanted to be a lawyer, but my mother died when I was only twelve, and my dad couldn’t take care of all of us children by himself, so he sent me to the convent. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if my mother would have lived.” There were tears in her eyes. I got a little misty myself.
Sister Norman still thought I was the devil, and she really resented the fact that I got so much special attention from Sister Gervais. One day she called me Mr. Smartaleck for disagreeing with her definition of a republic. I called her a beanpole, and she hit me in the mouth so hard that she cut my lip. This time I told my dad, and he came to school loaded for bear. We met with Sister Gervais, Sister Norman, and Father Murphy in Sister Gervais’s office. “If you ever touch my boy again, I can’t guarantee I won’t do something violent,” he said.
She was apologetic, said she’d lost her head. No second grader had ever called her a name. Unfortunately nobody had told Dad that I’d called her a beanpole, and I got another beating when I got home, this time with the belt.
Sister Gervais and I had another heart to heart about the Sister Norman incident. “A lot of homely girls go into the convent,” she said. “Then there are those who think they have a guaranteed spot in heaven if they join. Sister Norman is both of those.” We laughed laconically.
She then had me write a story about the incident. Therapy she said it was, so it wouldn’t fester and make me bitter toward the church. I was already bitter toward the church, but I didn’t tell her that. After the therapy essay, which ran to five thousand words, not counting the drawings, I got in the habit of writing every day, even at home. Before I knew it, I was writing full length novels. The first one was entitled “The Monsters from the Black Lagoon,” and it was about this boy who went to a Catholic elementary school in a small Minnesota school who had to deal with these nuns who were possessed by aliens. In order to be fair I put in a few good nuns like Sister G. who tried to save the boy from these horrible zombie-like creatures. “Perhaps you want to keep this somewhere where Sister Norman and Sister Larian won’t see it,” Sister G. said after reading it. “And you might want to use pseudonyms for the ladies.” Sister Gervais and I were working through this vocabulary book, but we hadn’t gotten to that word yet. “Isn’t that a lie?” I said. She said that this was poetic license. Lying was okay when it was in the service of great literature.
Meanwhile I was having trouble on the playground. I was now the glass geek, and I got beat up regularly, roll of nickels or no roll of nickels, hoodlum brother or no hoodlum brother. I was also pretty lousy at sports. You can be smart if you’re good at sports, but if you get picked last for every game, behind even the German kid with the club foot, you get the stuffing beat out of you, and they hit you where it doesn’t show. Father Murphy noticed I wasn’t feeling too good and started teaching me how to box.
He must’ve been lonely, too, because he started showing up for my “enrichment” sessions with Sister Gervais. I learned my multiplication tables in one afternoon. I learned long division in two hours. I memorized “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” after reading it once. Sister Gervais said she thought I had an eidetic memory. They both began to look for a better school for me. “Perhaps the brothers at Cretin High School in St. Paul,” Sister suggested or “St. John’s Prep near St. Cloud.” It was a lot closer. Eventually I went to St. John’s for high school. Father Murphy got the money from the vocation fund for poor kids who wanted to be priests.
We didn’t just talk about books during my enrichment sessions. The other kids were starting to prepare for their first confession and first communion and neither Father nor Sister trusted that devil Sister Norman to teach me. I felt like Jesus among the wise men at the temple. When we talked about three persons in one God, I looked at them askance. Then there was the virgin birth. “The protestant kids say Jesus had a brother named James,” I said. “How come Jesus was God and James got the short end of the stick?” I asked.
“Ah, James was like John the Baptist,” Father said. “John the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus and James was one of the apostles; however, the Catholic church does not teach that James was Jesus’s brother.”
“That must have been pretty tough if James really was Jesus’s brother, especially if he was an older brother, taking orders from a snotty kid. And what about poor Judas Iscariot?” I said. “Why should he spend eternity in hell when it was preordained that he would give Jesus up to the Romans? Somebody had to do it?”
“If he’s in hell, and we don’t know for sure that he is,” Father said, “It’s because he hung himself. Everyone has a chance to repent. That’s why we have the sacrament of confession.”
I told them I’d read a chapter out of Tony’s biology book from high school, and it said that man evolved from the apes. “We sort of look like monkeys, and we have fingers like they do, and they kind of laugh like we do. I think that’s probably the way it happened.”
“God works in mysterious ways,” Father Murphy said. “The church now teaches that God the Father set evolution in motion.”
“I don’t believe in the tooth fairy,” I said. “And I stopped believing in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny when I was three. I don’t think I believe in this Jesus person either.”
“People were tortured and put to death during the Middle Ages for denying that Jesus was God.”
“Another reason not to believe,” I said.
Both of them looked like they were in the presence of a boy with horns and hooves, but neither “The Exorcist” or “Rosemary’s Baby” had been released yet, so I was safe for the moment.
To give them credit, neither of them went over the deep end and called in the Jesuits. They just tried harder, and since I liked them both so much, I pretended to be influenced. I went to my first confession and took my first communion and was a practicing Catholic until the Ecumenical Council destroyed my faith for good. I figured that if the Latin mass was good enough for two thousand years, why change?
I must’ve had an influence on Father Murphy, because, after he retired from the priesthood, he married his high school sweetheart. Sister Gervaise and I stayed in touch and sent each other Christmas cards (There are some religious traditions that I find charming; I also like the music and still attend high mass occasionally just to hear the choir sing) until the day she died. I went to her funeral. Sister Larian and Sister Norman were there. They were dressed in civilian clothes and looked like little old ladies just back from the beauty parlor; they even wore flowered dresses. Gone were Sister Larian’s furry eyebrows and yellowish-green eyes. Gone was Sister Norman’s mustache. Both of them pretended not to remember me. “You know, you have so many students through the years,” Sister Norman said. “You can’t possibly remember them all.” They’d denied me the pleasure of bragging about being a physics professor at the University of Minnesota despite their efforts to brand me as a no good. But I think they knew very well who I was. Sisters aren’t supposed to lie.
If you enjoyed "Prodigy with Hooves," Dave Schwinghammer's novel, SOLDIER'S GAP,is available on Amazon.com.
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