“The fridge light is enough to make a snack, and you can eat good by the glow from the clock on the microwave.”
“Committing the sin of gluttony in the dark, were you?”
“The cellarer’s gotta be sure things are fresh, don’t he?”
As the abbey’s cellarer, Brother Knuckles purchased, stocked, and inventoried the food, beverages, and other material goods for the monastery and school.
“Anyway,” he said, “a guy, he eats at night in a bright kitchen that’s got no window blinds—he’s a guy tastin’ his last sandwich.”
“Even if the guy’s a monk in a monastery?”
Brother Knuckles shrugged. “You can never be too careful.”
In exercise sweats instead of his habit, at five feet seven and two hundred pounds of bone and muscle, he looked like a die-casting machine that had been covered in a gray-flannel cozy.
The rainwater eyes, the hard angles and blunt edges of brow and jaw, should have given him a cruel or even threatening appearance. In his previous life, people had feared him, and for good reason.
Twelve years in a monastery, years of remorse and contrition, had brought warmth to those once-icy eyes and had inspired in him a kindness that transformed his unfortunate face. Now, at fifty-five, he might be mistaken for a prizefighter who stayed in the sport too long: cauliflower ears, portobello nose, the humility of a basically sweet palooka who has learned the hard way that brute strength does not a champion make.
A small glob of icy slush slid down my forehead and along my right cheek.
“You’re wearin’ snow like a poofy white hat.” Knuckles headed toward the bathroom. “I’ll get you a towel.”
“There’s a bottle of aspirin by the sink. I need aspirin.”
He returned with a towel and the aspirin. “You want some water to wash ’em down, maybe a Coke?”
“Give me a hogshead of wine.”
“They must’ve had livers of iron back in Saint Benny’s day. A hogshead was like sixty-three gallons.”
“Then I’ll only need half a hogshead.”
By the time I toweled my hair half dry, he had brought me a Coke. “You come up the stairs from John’s Mew and stood there lookin’ up at the snow the way a turkey stares up at the rain with its mouth open till it drowns.”
“Well, sir, I never saw snow before.”
“Then, boom, you’re off like a shot around the corner of the refectory.”
Settling into an armchair and shaking two aspirin out of the bottle, I said, “I heard someone scream.”
“I didn’t hear no scream.”
“You were inside,” I reminded him, “and making a lot of chewing noises.”
Knuckles sat in the other armchair. “So who screamed?”
I washed down two aspirin with Coke and said, “I found one of the brothers facedown on the ground by the library. Didn’t see him at first in his black habit, almost fell over him.”
“Who?”
“Don’t know. A heavy guy. I rolled him over, couldn’t see his face in the dark—then someone tried to brain me from behind.”
His brush-cut hair seemed to bristle with indignation. “This don’t sound like St. Bart’s.”
“The club, whatever it was, grazed the back of my head, and my left shoulder took the worst of it.”
“We might as well be in Jersey, stuff like this goin’ down.”
“I’ve never been to New Jersey.”
“You’d like it. Even where it’s bad, Jersey is always real.”
“They’ve got one of the world’s largest used-tire dumps. You’ve probably seen it.”
“Never did. Ain’t that sad? You live in a place most of your life, you take it for granted.”
“You didn’t even know about the tire dump, sir?”
“People, they live in New York City all their lives, never go to the top of the Empire State Building. You okay, son? Your shoulder?”
“I’ve been worse.”
“Maybe you should go to the infirmary, ring Brother Gregory, have your shoulder examined.”
Brother Gregory is the infirmarian. He has a nursing degree.
The size of the monastic community isn’t sufficient to justify a full-time infirmarian—especially since the sisters have one of their own for the convent and for the children at the school—so Brother Gregory also does the laundry with Brother Norbert.
“I’ll be okay, sir,” I assured him.
“So who tried to knock your block off?”
“Never got a look at him.”
I explained how I had rolled and run, thinking my assailant was at my heels, and how the monk I’d almost fallen over was gone when I returned.
“So we don’t know,” said Knuckles, “did he get up on his own and walk away or was he carried.”
“We don’t know, either, if he was just unconscious or dead.”
Frowning, Knuckles said, “I don’t like dead. Anyway, it don’t make sense. Who would kill a monk?”
“Yes, sir, but who would knock one unconscious?”
Knuckles brooded for a moment. “One time this guy whacked a Lutheran preacher, but he didn’t mean to.”
“I don’t think you should be telling me this, sir.”
With a wave of a hand, he dismissed my concern. His strong hands appear to be all knuckles, hence his nickname.
“I don’t mean it was me. I told you, I never done the big one. You do believe me on that score, don’t you, son?”
“Yes, sir. But you did say this was an accidental whack.”
“Never offed no one accidental either.”
“All right then.”
Brother Knuckles, formerly Salvatore Giancomo, had been well-paid muscle for the mob before God turned his life around.
“Busted faces, broke some legs, but I never chilled no one.”
When he was forty, Knuckles had begun to have second thoughts about his career path.
