waiting for me to answer. I think of all the things I’ve done that might be devil’s work but the only thing that comes out is about Mr Harding.
‘Father, this summer there was a dead man, a dead man who killed himself in his garage. I was the one who found him. I was thinking about that when I was supposed to be studying my Catechism.’
Father Lanshee looks at me. He has the censer lit now and it’s smoking. He has the holy-water shaker in his other hand.
‘Yes, I heard about that. He wasn’t Catholic, was he?’
‘No, Father. He was just Mr Harding; I think he was a Protestant.’
‘There could easily have been devils around a place where a man knew such despair so as to take his own life. That could be it.’
He comes to the step just over me. I put down my head. The smell of incense makes me sneeze but I’m holding it in.
‘You pray hard, Kettleson. I’m going to chase that devil straight on out of you. You’ll feel better after you’ve been
exorcised.’
He’s praying loud now and swinging the censer over one of my shoulders then the other. He does this while I say eight Our Fathers, three Hail Marys and make an Act of Contrition. I’m just starting with a ‘Glory be’ when he begins sprinkling me with holy water and praying louder. I’m so scared, black clouds keep coming down over my eyes. I’m expecting a devil to float in smoke out of my mouth or split its way out of my chest or my back the way it is in holy pictures. But nothing happens.
Father Lanshee stops. He puts the censer and the holy water on the altar. Then he comes down, tucks his hand under my chin and lifts me up.
‘Let’s pray that did it. But first you must apologize to Sister Anastasia.’
He turns my head with his hand. She’s still kneeling at the altar rail, shining-eyed.
‘Do you think the devil’s been exorcised, Father?’
‘We can’t be sure, Sister. But he should apologize to you first.’
He leads me back down to the altar rail, where Sister Anastasia’s still kneeling. He pushes me down on my knees. She looks at me, glinting, her lips all pulled together, almost as if she’s trying to keep from smiling.
‘Well, what do you have to say for yourself, Kettleson?’
‘I’m sorry, Sister. I didn’t mean it. I don’t know what got into me.’
‘I think it must be the devil himself made you do a thing like that, Kettleson. If I were you I’d stay here in church and pray for the rest of the morning.’
Father Lanshee is standing slightly behind me.
‘That’s a fine idea, Sister. Also, I don’t think he should serve mass again until we’re certain he’s himself. What do you think of that, boy?’
‘Yes, Father.’
I’m supposed to serve at nine-o’clock mass that next Sunday. It’s the mass all the kids go to; they sit in the center aisles, girls on the left side, boys on the right, with the little kids up front and the eighth grade in back. My parents know I’m serving this mass and will be there. How can I ever tell them that? I don’t know how I can tell them how I’ve been exercised either. The trouble is, I don’t even feel tired; that devil’s got to be in there still.
Father Lanshee and Sister Anastasia leave me alone in the church all morning. I’m supposed to say five rosaries with all the mysteries, and when I’m finished, keep saying the ejaculation ‘My Jesus mercy – my Jesus mercy.’ Father Lanshee lends me his rosary. It’s small, black, wooden beads, and he kisses the crucifix on it before he gives it to me. When the lunch bell rings, I can go home.
Sister Anastasia doesn’t tell anybody, at least any of the kids, about my being exercised and I don’t tell anybody either, not even Laurel. She’s too little to understand. I keep hoping God knows I didn’t mean it; that’s all that counts. He must know about how I am with metal in my mouth; the sisters tell us God knows everything, even some things we don’t know ourselves. After school I give Father Lanshee back his rosary. I hope maybe he’ll let me back in the altar boys, at least let me serve that nine-o’clock mass, but he doesn’t say anything.
Sunday when I’m supposed to be serving, I sneak off to Mr Harding’s garage and that’s where I find the kittens.
There are all kinds of alley cats in our alleys and packs of dogs, too. The kids around our way are awful mean to the cats. They don’t do much against dogs because some of them bite. But the cats mostly only run away. I used to think alley cats had shorter legs than most cats but they only look short because they’re always crouched ready to spring away if you come near. They have little hollow places behind their heads and between the tops of their legs on the back when they’re hunched down like that. When a cat’s all set to spring there’s almost no way you can catch it.
But Billy O’Connell showed me how you can always catch a cat if you just keep running long enough. They’re fast but they get tired out soon. Maybe they don’t get enough to eat from eating only garbage. Sure enough, though, he’d keep running after a cat in the alley where they had no place to go and he’d run them down finally. Usually, at the end, the cat would run into an empty garage, where Billy’d shut the door and corner them.
What Billy O’Connell likes to do with cats is climb up on somebody’s porch, one of the old ones with the steps still on them, and throw the cat through the air. He throws them any which way, and they spin right around and land with their legs spread out, then run off. He tells me he threw one out his bedroom window and it was the same thing. He wants to throw one from a roof someday. O’Connell has the idea cats can practically fly. He’d like to throw one out from an airplane sometime to see what happens.
You have to be careful with these cats because they all have fleas. It’s the fleas Mom worries about more than the cats, it’s the same with frogs and warts.
Sometimes the kids’d catch two cats and tie them together by the tails. Those cats would swing around in circles yowling, pulling against each other. I never did anything like that myself but I’ve watched. There are some mean kids around our way, all right, but probably they’re the same everywhere.
One of the worst things they do is pour gasoline on a cat’s tail and then light it. A kid up on Radbourne Road was doing that and burned himself so bad he had to go to the hospital; he almost died and now he has shiny wrinkled scars on his arm so he can’t open his elbow all the way.
When you light a cat’s tail, it screams even worse than they do at night when they’re fighting and making babies, only there’s no purring or cat baby-crying mixed in, it’s all just yowling and screaming. Most times the cat dies and somebody will find it in the back corner of a garage or under a porch when it starts to stink. But I’ve seen a few live. Gradually the black burnt bones that are left fall off a piece at a time until there’s only a tiny stump of a tail left. Usually fur grows over this part so those cats look like a cross between a cat and a rabbit.
That Sunday, I go off as if I’m going to church. I’d been awake practically all night, trying to get up nerve to tell my folks I’ve been thrown off the altar boys. But I couldn’t do it. So instead I go over to Mr Harding’s garage. They’d moved all his furniture from his house
