Altarboy novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Index Cards
Fintan teaches him the system of cards that keeps Father on track, and the alb fitting turns into something neither mentions, until Halina Pelc sits in the front pew.
Nobody in the pews noticed.
Kaz knew that because he watched them the whole Mass, afraid to look at anything else.
Forty old people knelt and stood and murmured in Polish and English, and not one of them gave the altar a second glance.
Father Cyril picked up the right words from Kaz's whisper.
By the Gospel, he was himself again.
By the end, he blessed the congregation with a flourish, and one of the widows in the front row dabbed her eyes and said it was the best homily in years.
Kaz carried the candles back to the sacristy and set them down with shaking hands.
Fintan was waiting beside the vestment press with his arms folded.
"You did that on instinct," he said.
"I did it because he started the funeral rite."
"I put the card in the book."
"He didn't look at the card."
"He never looks at the card." Fintan rubbed his forehead. "That's the problem."
He took a stack of index cards out of his jacket and slapped it on the oak counter.
Each one was covered in square block capitals, in black marker, in the hand of a man who had made lists his whole life.
SUNDAY. GREEN. GLORIA YES. CREED YES. FIRST READING PAGE 41.
"One card per Mass," Fintan said. "It goes inside the missal under the ribbon. I check it every night. Father reads it if he's calm. If he's not calm, I'm in the front pew with my hand on my knee, and that means stop."
"What happens if he's still wrong?"
"Then I do a cough."
"A cough?"
"Everybody in this parish has learned that cough."
Kaz picked up a card.
"You've been doing this alone for two years."
"Don't."
"I'm just saying."
"Don't say it like it's sad." Fintan took the card out of his fingers. "It isn't. It's a job."
"It's sad."
Fintan looked up at the ceiling, hoping for help from it.
"Take off the alb," he said.
"What?"
"It's two sizes too big. You tripped on it going up the step. Take it off."
Kaz pulled the white robe over his head and stood there in his hoodie with his hair standing up.
Fintan came around the counter with a pincushion strapped to his wrist.
He knelt on one knee, and Kaz had to hold his breath.
The big man's hands were extremely careful.
He pinned the hem, one pin at a time, with a tailor's patience, the scarred knuckles brushing the back of Kaz's calf.
"Hold still," Fintan said.
"I am holding still."
"You're vibrating."
"It's cold."
"It isn't cold."
It was not cold.
The sacristy radiator hissed beside them, and Kaz felt heat rise from his neck to his ears.
Fintan stood.
He was close enough that Kaz could smell wood glue and soap on him.
He lifted the cloth at Kaz's shoulder, frowning, and drew a pin through it.
His knuckle grazed the line of Kaz's throat.
Neither of them looked at the other.
"Where did you learn to sew?" Kaz said, to say something.
"My da. He was sexton here thirty-four years. He did the altar linens himself because the Sodality's stitches offended him."
"There's a picture of him on the wall."
"There is."
The photograph hung by the door, in a plain frame, of a big man in a suit that was too small, holding a ring of keys.
Fintan had his jaw.
"He died two years ago," Fintan said. "I was in Philadelphia."
It was the first time he had said it to anyone with a face.
Kaz did not say sorry either.
He said, "You talk to him in the box."
"Yes."
"Does he talk back?"
Fintan's mouth did something complicated.
"No," he said. "He never did. That's why I like it."
The last pin went in.
"Done," Fintan said. "Don't breathe in. Don't sit. Don't bend."
"You're a terrible tailor."
"I'm a perfect tailor. You're a terrible mannequin."
Kaz laughed.
It came out of him by surprise, a short ugly laugh.
It was the first time he had laughed since the lawn.
Fintan's eyes went to his mouth and came away fast.
He picked up the cards.
"Sunday nine o'clock Mass," he said. "Sit in the sacristy until I come for you. And Kaz."
"What?"
"Thanks for this morning."
He said it to the card in his hand, not to Kaz's face.
Kaz spent the rest of Saturday in a state he could not name.
He ate the sandwich Fintan left outside his door.
He slept again on the cot with his mother's tin under the pillow.
He woke at dawn on Sunday because the old pipes in the wall were knocking, and he lay there listening to someone moving through the church below.
Heavy boots on the stone.
A bucket.
A mop.
Someone was already awake and working.
By the nine o'clock Mass, the church was fuller.
Kaz stood in the sacristy doorway in his pinned alb, one eye on the nave, waiting for the organ.
The widows sat in their usual rows, six little gray heads in a line.
Fintan stood at the back wall with his hands clasped.
And in the front pew, directly under the pulpit, a woman in a navy wool coat sat very straight with a clipboard on her knee.
She had a silver bob and a face like a locked door.
She was not supposed to be here until Wednesday.
She looked up at Kaz, and she smiled, and he had never in his life been so afraid of a smile.
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