BETTER THAN HEARSAY

A Christmas Smile

By Michael Ryan

MY OLD HOMETOWN - Confession, they say, is good for the soul and while I’m not exactly sure where the soul is, it’s worth a shot.

This time of year, with Christmas and all, makes me remember my boyhood days, growing up in the Finger Lakes region of western New York.

There’s a stretch of road that is between Seneca and Cayuga lakes that is as pretty as any place on the planet, with the waters stretching out in the summer sun and hayfields ripening.

I grew up in a little nothing of a town named Willard that had a State mental asylum on one side of the main drag and all the houses, a couple of country stores and a rural post office on the other side.

My house was the only house on the mental asylum side, sticking out like a thumb just whacked with a hammer.

A lot of people made a thing out of it, that I lived “behind the fence” with the asylum patients, but it was as normal as apple pie to me.

The patients in Willard were wayward souls for sure. Even as a kid, I would notice their eyes looking attentively at me in one heartbeat, staring off into the unseen distance the next heartbeat.

I also knew an Irish gentleman named Joseph who confabulated with leprechauns although that’s a story for another time.

Willard had one road in and out. Going out, it led to the town of Ovid where I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church.

Being an altar boy is probably why I hate waking up earlier than 10 o’clock in the morning. My father used to rouse my brother and me at 6:15 so we could make it to the church for 7 a.m. mass.

The job had some perks. My brother and I would get let out of school sometimes to serve funeral mass (with all due respect to the dead).

One day, I was putting everything away afterwards and my brother hustled back to school, leaving me by myself in the church with its big stain-glass windows and three altars.

There was the main altar, where Sunday and weekday morning masses were held, and two side altars for baptisms and whatever.

So there I am, alone in the echoing holy chambers and for reasons I can’t begin to explain, I became transfixed with a four-foot crucifix.

The head of the Christian Savior was leaned to the right and there were blood marks on his feet and hands from the nails driven into them.

I’m not much of a carpenter, like he was, but I figured out how to unscrew one of the arms, looking around to make sure nobody was watching, and then tip-toed out of the building with the arm stuffed in my coat.

The plan was…I actually didn’t have a plan. I took the arm home and hid it in the cellar, going down to stare at it and rub my fingertips across the red paint and the thin fingers.

When the next Sunday rolled around, the family piled into the Ford and headed to church where the priest, following his way-too-long sermon, announced the arm was missing.

He said if anyone knew anything they could return it, no questions asked. I was positive he knew I was the culprit but he didn’t and I didn’t crack.

My brother, though, put two-and-two together because the priest said it had been gone since Friday and that’s when I was there alone so…

He interrogated me and I finally broke but we sneaked it back to the church and as far as i know, this is the first time the truth has been revealed.

It was a probably a sin, if a person is inclined toward such conclusions. I’ve always believed somebody up there, if a person is inclined toward such destinations, broke into a smile.