He hung up and went to retrieve the fly from his biretta. ‘Sorry about that folks, kinda busy here… well. So this is little Roderick! How ya doin’, fella?’ He shook hands with the robot.
‘Don’t be shy, kid, we’re all on the same team here. God’s team.’
‘Oh.’
‘Look, I know you probably feel awful about getting benched over at the public school, but we don’t hold that against you. Over here, nobody’s second-string, see? We’re all in there, giving it all we got. You play ball with God, and you can bet your a — your bottom dollar he’ll play ball with you.’
‘That figures,’ said Roderick. Ma seemed preoccupied with the view out of the window.
‘Ha ha, what I mean is, here at Holy Trin we’re like a team. Myself and the sisters are like coaches, you kids are the players. And all this—’ His gesture took in wall pennants, a tennis-racket in its stretcher, a bag of golf-clubs, skis. ‘All this is just a training camp, see? For the big game. The big game is when you leave here, my kid. The big game is life. You want to play to win, right?’
Roderick nodded.
‘Great! Now you run along while your mother and I talk over a few details. Go out and look over the playground, we got the works: regulation baseball and softball diamonds, gridiron, tennis, lacrosse,… Now Mrs Wood, let me put you in the picture here, we don’t usually take kids in mid-season, term I mean, glad to make an exception if you can manage the full year’s tuition. I understand the boy’s not Catholic. No, well then if you want him kept out of religion classes there’s an exemption fee too. Then the fees for basic gym-gear, uniforms, locker, use of the field and gym-equipment, oh yeah and books. Now I’m talking in the neighbourhood of…’
Sister Olaf was a large woman with a face like a peeled potato. She put Roderick in the advanced reading and arithmetic classes, but rookie religion. Everything seemed easy until they came to the catechism.
‘Who made you?’ she asked James, the first boy in the row.
‘God made me.’
‘Why did God make you?’
‘To know, love and serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him in the next.’
‘Who made you?’ she asked Roberta, the next girl. Roberta answered in identical words, as did Anthony and Ursula.
‘Now Roderick: who made you?’
‘Me?’
‘Come on, you must know the answer by now. It’s right there in the book.’
‘Sure but I—’
‘What?’
‘Well I’m not sure.’
‘Well! Who made James and Roberta and Anthony and Ursula?’
‘God, I guess.’
‘Who made you?’
Behind him, Catherine whispered, ‘God, stupid.’
Roderick turned round. ‘Well maybe God made you, but I’m pretty sure Dan Sonnenschein made me. Him and some other men in a laboratory. See they—’
‘That’s enough!’ The face became a creased sweet potato. ‘You may get away with disrupting classes over in the public school, but not here. I want you to sit in that corner over there until you remember who made you?’ And though he sat in the corner for an hour (while Sister Olaf explained how Caesar Augustus was taxing the whole world…) he could not work out any other answer.
She sent him to see Father O’Bride.
‘Sit down, kid, just got this package to open — oh no. Will you look at that?’ He spread one of the white t-shirts over his desk. The red letters across the chest read, Holy Trinity Hellbats.
‘Last darned time I do business with that crook, with all his discount stuff from Iraq or is it Iran — I’ve had it. You know, ever since those Jesuits sank all that money in fake oil stock in Texas, everybody thinks we’re all suckers. Priests aren’t supposed to know the first thing about dollars and cents, I guess. Has he got a surprise coming, wait’ll I stop his darned cheque — Well now what is it, kid? Making trouble for Sister Olaf already are you?’
‘No sir I mean no Father, see it’s just this Baltimore catty kisum, like where they ask who made you. Sister thinks I oughta say God made me, all I said was maybe He made the people but he didn’t make the robots.’
‘Robots, eh?’ Father O’Bride had very pale eyes that didn’t blink much. ‘What’s this, something outa these crappy science fiction movies you been seeing? Boy, if you didn’t have this disability you’d be in the gym right now doing fifty laps, we’d find out who made you if we had to take you apart.
‘But, you’re lucky. I’m giving you one more chance.’ He searched among the t-shirts and tattered copies of sports magazines until he found a catechism. ‘I’m giving you one more chance before I turn you over to — well, somebody else.’ He opened the book. ‘Now tell me: Who made you?’
‘Dan Sonnenschein and some other guys, in this lab—’
‘For Pete’s sake, who made this Dan whatsit?’
‘I don’t know — God?’
‘God. And if God made him and he made you, then he was just the instrument of God’s will, right? My mother and father brought me into this world too, but I still know God made me.’
‘Yeah but—’
‘No buts. Look, if a guy hits it out of the park nobody jumps up to cheer the bat, do they? Same thing, the bat is just an instrument of the batter’s will. Get it? I mean who made the home run, the batter or the bat?’
‘Well God I guess if he made the—’
‘Okay, fine. You get the point. Now—’
‘Only if God made Dan and Dan made me, who made this God?’
‘RIGHTY-HO!’ The book hit the desk and tumbled off, taking a few Hellbats to the floor. ‘BUDDY BOY YOU HAVE JUST EARNED YOURSELF A TICKET TO SEE THE MAN HIMSELF!’
‘The…’ Excitement made Roderick hurt all over. He couldn’t work up the words to ask who this man might be.
A big hand clamped down on his shoulder. He was half-dragged, half-carried down the hall, downstairs, past Sister Mary Martha (still polishing the same spot on the floor) outside and across the street where in the vanilla slush he could see the marks of a tractor tyre, a lost mitten, the marks of another tractor tyre. Everything was so clear, full of, of clearness. To God’s house? No, past it to the rectory, a black brick building with snow in the yard, and black weeds sticking up out of the snow. Roderick thought he recognized a withered sunflower (Ma had told him the story of Vincent, who put his ear to the sunflower to hear the roaring of the sun inside, and instantly his ear was burnt away) and into the black hall where he was made to sit on a black chair and WAIT JUST WAIT BUDDY BOY while Father O’Bride went off through a polished black door.
The thing about Vincent was, he wanted to paint the sun inside the golden sunflower and it drove him crazy, and now everybody was crazy about cheap reproductions of his paintings which they thought looked good in their kitchens.
Roderick looked at the cheap reproduction over his head. It showed a woman at a piano, with a gold ring hanging in the air over her head. She was looking up too, maybe at the ring or maybe just at some other cheap reproduction.
Ma would never look at a cheap reproduction, not even when Pa tried to show her La Divina Proportione with pictures by Leonardo Da Vinci when he said about the seed spirals in the sunflower and how they were Fibonacci numbers, getting closer and closer to the divine proportion but only an infinite sunflower could be God, and she said That’s all you know, God wears an infinite sunflower in his buttonhole every day, a fresh one every day from his own garden, God is an infinite reason. Yes but the divine proportion is an irrational number said Pa, see it’s the sum of one plus one over one plus one over one plus… Ma didn’t care, all ones are one, mathematics is just a cheap trick where everything’s a copy of something else, like those Fibonacci numbers 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5, 3+5=8, and so on with 13, 21, 34, 55, where did it all get you, no wonder poor Vincent went stark staring irrational trying to paint the blazing sum I mean sun you’ve got me doing it now and all those cheap reproductions they copy everything sometimes I think you and I are just cheap copies of something somebody read somewhere, ‘prints’ they like to call them, ‘prints’ when that awful woman in the Ladies’ Guild kept saying she really liked her prints, I thought she meant her dog, but no, there she was with sunflowers copied from sunflowers Vincent copied from sunflowers copied from the sun…