Benediction by Patrick Sean Lee (best books to read in your 20s .txt) 📕

Father, swinging the brass censer filled with incense. He glanced up at me briefly, and I was certain I saw him make a funny face before kneeling down at the foot of the altar.
     Mom was still in her pew, standing now, waiting piously for Father’s cue to kneel. We’d lucked out. For the time being it looked as if Jimmy and I would be left to our own devices. Turning to my best friend, I noticed with a great degree of apprehension that he had a pea-shooter stuck inside his lips, and a far, faraway devilish look on his face.
     “What are you planning on doing with that?” I whispered. Of course I knew. The question was, who would be the target.
     He didn’t bother to answer, but turned full-face to me instead, holding the shooter between his teeth, grinning.
     “Don’t do it!”
     “Why not?” he replied with a low laugh. Reaching into his back pocket, he pulled out a small cloth bag with a drawstring holding it closed, and another shooter. He handed me my very own hard plastic straw, then opened the bag. It didn’t contain the little vegetable pods like I expected, rather glistening little quarter-inch Wham-O BBs. I made the bad decision in that moment to join in on the fun, expecting that if we were going to get into trouble—and I knew we would—doing it with my favorite target shooting device would be the way to go. The question arose: should I pepper the broad butt of Mrs. Baumgartner, the bald head of Mr. Ignatio, or…? The possibilities were nearly endless. Jimmy handed me half of the little steel balls, and then we turned and knelt in an un-holy position, looking over the wall at the gobs of targets below.
     The inside of our church was unlike the great outdoors. From a spot beneath the Elm in the front of my house I could accurately hit Jimmy or Mickey if they showed their faces from behind the Lilac bush in front of the garage. Maybe fifty feet. Here inside the church, fifteen feet off the marble floor, I wondered how far the BB would travel, whose butt I could hit, and what its velocity might be when it met the victim. To find the answer I loaded up a cheek full of pellets and shot the first one straight up the main aisle, with no arc, at nothing in particular. It was kind of like the rocket we’d launched from Jimmy's backyard last week—invisible at first. But I saw with delight a tiny glint bouncing along just our side of the communion rail. I guessed it had gone maybe seventy-five feet before it hit the floor.
     Jimmy was busy with his own calculating, sizing up his first victim somewhere down below.
     “Wait!” I said just as his cheeks ballooned with air. “Let’s see who can nail X first.”
     Jimmy’s eyes opened wide. He laughed without exhaling his breath, closed one eye as he aimed, then let his first BB fly. The sound of his breath was a “Tuthhh”, and a second later we saw the glint again. The BB landed harmlessly in the red carpet, a foot to the left of X.
     “A little higher and to the right,” I mouthed with a laugh. Now it was my turn. I was pretty good with the weapon to begin with, having had hundreds of hours of practice, and now that I’d found its range here in the church, I was confident I could put one directly into the back of X’s kinky-curly-haired head. I let my missile fly with the hardest blow of my career. Not more than a second later I heard a faint “tick!”, the distinct sound of metal on metal. I’d missed him and hit, instead, the censer dangling from the chain in his hand. The noise startled him, and made him look down at the brass container. He turned his head farther to see what had made the sound. His glance stopped when it reached the carpet and stayed there for a minute or so. He turned, then, and looked up at us with a grin that showed every one of his gleaming, white teeth. Once again the congregation followed his eyes.
     Jimmy and I hit the safety of the floor and smothered our laughter. For sure my mom would be coming up the stairs with smoke and fire before we regained our composure, re-emerged, and took aim again.
     “Good shot!” he congratulated me.
     “I hit the damned censer!”
     “Yeah, I know. Weren’t ya’ aimin’ at it?”
     “No! I was going for his head…but I won’t miss next time,” I whispered, holding one hand over my mouth. “I need to raise the shooter a half a foot, I think. Blow just a little harder, too.”
     We rolled around on top of one another in fits of laughter for a while, and when it became apparent Mom was not storming up the steps, we poked our noses over the wall once again.
     “All’s quiet on the western front,” I whispered.
     “Yep. My turn,” Jimmy answered. He took aim and a deep breath. Father Blenker was in the act of turning the most holy receptacle on Earth containing a consecrated host—the monstrance—so that the church body could see it and partake in the special blessing it bestowed on all the gathered holy people. Jimmy let the BB fly at the same time, but his aim was way off. I’m dead positive everyone in the church—every child, every mother, even the hopelessly nearsighted—saw it course upward through the arms of the chandelier hanging fifteen feet in the air, slide gracefully downward in slow motion, and then hit the face of the small window-glass covering of the monstrance. Behind that now-cracked glass rested the body of Our Lord and Savior. We’d committed an unforgivable sin. We’d fired on the Son of God, Himself, but worse, we’d hit Him right between the eyes. The sound the BB made when it contacted the glass was not loud. But then again, it was cannon-like. A huge “OH!”, uttered in indignant unity, filled the walls of God’s house. Without exception, every single body turned to see what savage hiding in the choir loft had committed the sacrilege.
     Our goose was cooked. Father stared up at us, and then calmly turned and set the monstrance back onto the altar. After he had inspected the damage to the glass, he folded his hands and must certainly have been engaged in saying a prayer of damnation on our account. Before he could turn back around and march down the aisle in our direction, I caught the ghost-like, rapid appearance of someone in black robes out of the corner of my eye. The Grim Reaper; the answer to Father’s angry prayer (and Frank's). Jimmy had sunk to his butt on the floor with a look of, “Oh shit, now I dunnit,’” on his terror-streaked face. The figure whooshing down upon us wasn’t my mother or the Reaper, I thanked God, only Sister Mary Carmelita. After the thrashing we received at her hands, though, I began to think my mom’s appearance would have been much better, and Death come to take us straight to Hell less painful. I had no idea nuns could use their open hands like deadly weapons, especially little teeny blacked-robed people like Sister Carmelita.
     Jimmy covered his head with both arms and took his wailing like a coward. I remained seated, fully exposed, and humbly took mine, remembering how the martyrs had brave and peaceful-like come to their ends. Unlike them, I deserved my fate, even though it was Jimmy’s straw and lousy aim that had condemned us.
     Within seconds, the entire congregation, it seemed, packed into the loft, and at the forefront was you-know-who with her Missal locked and loaded in her hand, ready to take up where Sister left off. The pious silence had gone a-walkin’ when the people rose and departed their pews, and now it was a boiling pot of a hundred different voices calling for our heads. My mom’s voice, however, was the most distinct…and the most fury-filled.
     “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Skip! Get your rear end outside…” And on and on and on. I obeyed, and she beat me silly all the way down the stairs and through the horrified crowd that had gathered like the mob following Jesus along the Via Dolorosa. Shame. Self-loathing. But damn, I thought, Jimmy’s BB really had been something to behold!
     Right behind Mom and me, Sister Carmelita had Jimmy by his ear with one hand, dragging him out of the loft, and she was thrashing him good some more with the other. We were not-very-gently led outside and deposited at the far end of the church on the ground outside the convent. There, we were given another round of tongue-lashing and physical abuse by our captors in skirts, and instructed to sit tight until Father Blenker arrived to crucify us. All the while, Mom vacillated between shrieks of Banshee anger and bouts of uncontrollable crying.
     Father Blenker soon enough walked around the front corner of the church alongside my dad. The crowd parted like a wave, and quieted down as Pop and Father B made their way toward us with the stern, impassionate looks of judges. When they’d gotten to within ten feet of us I heard the door of the convent open, and so I turned, though I can’t precisely remember just what I expected to see. Sister Mary Dolorine stepped onto the landing with an apron draped around her robust midsection. I’ll remember until the day I die, though, the look of confusion and soul-sadness that befell her the moment she understood that something terribly wrong had occurred, and that I was mixed up in it. More so than having participated in the shooting of Jesus, humiliating my parents, and having been flogged, the pain of seeing her peering down at me in shock finally brought me to tears. I was certain I’d lost the love of the one person in this world whose heart was as pure as gold. In that moment I would have welcomed a vengeful bolt of lightning from the hand of God.

     As it happened, in time, the loggerhead of disgust, disbelief, wrath…and bouts of corporeal punishment came to an end. I was escorted back and forth to school each day, locked in my basement bedroom in the interim for three entire weeks. Not spoken directly to, but spoken directly at, by both Mom and Pop. Jimmy was expelled for the remainder of the school year, and I was forbidden to even look in the direction of his house for all eternity. The list of demands and recriminations was endless.
     Father Blenker forgave us both that evening of our sin, and as he was the emissary of Christ on earth, I was relieved beyond words by his compassion. Sister Mary Dolorine quietly took me farther under her wing and into her pure heart, but Sister Mary Carmelita remained at the ready whenever I crossed her path.
     Summer was just around the corner. I knew my dungeon captivity would eventually come to an end, and the hope of seeing Jimmy again some day stayed strong. I vowed, though, to conduct myself much differently when we met on that distant day. I intended to rescue him from his penchant for getting into trouble, and lead him back onto the pathway to Heaven. Looking back, I think God had other plans.