The Roy Stories by Barry Gifford

about my age sitting on the ground leaning against a darker brown wall. A pair of red chickens were pecking in the dust next to his bare feet. I wondered if the chickens down there went for toes the way the turtles did.
    On this blizzardy Sunday morning, I walked to St. Tim’s with two of the three McLaughlin brothers, Petie and Paulie, and their mother. My mother and grandmother were Catholics but they rarely attended church; Nanny because she was most often too ill—she died before my ninth birthday—and my mother because she was so frequently away, swimming in turtle-infested seas. Petie and I were the same age, Paulie a year younger. The eldest McLaughlin brother, Frank, was in the Army, stationed in Korea.
    After the church service, which was the first great theater I ever attended, and which I still rank as the best because the audience was always invited to participate by taking the wafer and the wine, symbolizing the body and the blood of Jesus Christ, Petie, Paulie and I went to catechism class. Ruled over by Sister Margaret Mary, a tall, sturdily built woman of indeterminate age—I could never figure out if she was twenty-five or fifty-five—the children sat ramrod straight in their chairs and did not speak unless invited to by her. Sister Margaret Mary wore a classic black habit, wire-rimmed spectacles, and her facial skin was as pale as one of Dracula’s wives. I had recently seen the Tod Browning film, Dracula , featuring Bela Lugosi, and I remember thinking that it was interesting that both God and Dracula had similar taste in women.
    During instruction, the class was given the standard mumbo jumbo, as my father—who was not a Catholic—called it, about how God created heaven and earth, then Adam and Eve, and so on. Kids asked how He had done this or that, and what He did next. I raised my hand and asked, “Sister, why did He do it?”
    â€œWhy did He do what?” she said.
    â€œAny of this stuff.”
    â€œYou wouldn’t exist, or Peter or Paul, or His only son, had He not made us,” answered Sister Margaret Mary.
    â€œI know, Sister,” I said, “but what for? I mean, what was in it for Him?”
    Sister Margaret Mary glared at me for a long moment, and for the first and only time I could discern a trace of color in her face. She then turned her attention away from me and proceeded as if my question deserved no further response.
    Before we left the church that day, I saw Sister Margaret Mary talking to Mrs. McLaughlin and looking toward me as she spoke. Mrs. McLaughlin nodded, and looked over at me, too.
    The following Sunday morning, I was about to leave the house when Nanny asked me where I was going.
    â€œTo the McLaughlins’,” I told her. “To Sunday School.”
    â€œSister Margaret Mary told Mrs. McLaughlin she doesn’t want you coming to her class anymore,” said Nanny. “You can play in your room or watch television until Petie and Paulie come home. Besides, it’s snowing again.”

 
    Sunday Paper
    As he often did when I was about eight or nine and he still lived with us, Pops, my mother’s father, asked me to go for the Sunday paper. For some reason on this particular day I decided to go to the stand on Washtenaw instead of the one on Rockwell, taking the shortcut through the alley where the deep snow from the night before was still undisturbed, no cars having gone over it yet that morning. I was shuffling through the powder, kicking it up in the air so that the flakes floated about in the sunlight like rice snow in crystal balls, when I spotted the police cars.
    There were three of them, parked one behind the other on Washtenaw in front of Talon’s Butcher Shop. A few people stood bundled in coats outside Talon’s, trying to see inside the shop, which I knew was closed on Sunday. I stood on the opposite side of the street and watched. An ambulance came, without using its siren, and