The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace Read Online Free PDF

something.
    On Holy Thursday the week before, he’d stormed into our sixth-grade class in the middle of reading lab and sent Sister Christine and all the girls to the multipurpose room. His face was red, the veins in his neck sticking out.
    “Vich one of you boys stole wine from the sacristy?”
    I had that reflexive moment where I felt sure I’d done it, started to raise my hand, but we all knew it was Ricky Flynn. He’d tried every trespass on the list. Ricky didn’t fess up so we all got the usual twenty Hail Marys. Then, instead of storming out, Father walked slowly to the blackboard and picked up a piece of chalk. We watched as he scribbled:
    The Sacred Seed of God
.
    Through his thick tongue, he spoke.
    “Ven you grow from a boy to a man, Got gives you the seed of life. In each drop there are a thousand hopeful Catholics. After the sacrament of marriage in the sacred act of intercourse they will race to find the egg inside a woman. The fastest one will penetrate the egg, be born and baptized into the one true church. This will happen in Got’s own time.”
    It was stunning to hear him speak of this. To hear that human beings are inside of seeds inside of us. His good gray eye (the other was glass) wandered across our frozen faces.
    “Your genitalia are for procreation. Do not abuse. If you do, you abuse Got. A mortal sin.” With that he dropped his chalk and marched out the door.
    “You want some more milk, hon?”
    “No thanks, Minnie.”
    There was the sound of a key in the front door. Minnie stiffened. George dropped his coat on the hall floor and headed for the fridge.
    “School called. They said you ditched third period.”
    George glanced around and gave Minnie a filthy look. She fondled her trigger.
    “Wait until your father comes home.”
    “He doesn’t give a shit.”
    “George!” she cried, moving toward the basement door. “Dinner’s at six,” she said as she disappeared down the steps.
    “Come on, Marsh!”
    We jumped on our bikes and flew past the shoebox-shaped houses and out onto the dirt trails that twisted their way along Cherry Creek. Plump as he was, George was poetry on a bike, leaping off jumps and zooming down the paths like a jackrabbit. I nearly killed myself trying to keep up. I’d cracked my head open twice already, gotten stitches and scars. I wore them like merit badges, proof of being a boy. We zigzagged through the elms and aspens, their branches scribbled against the sky. Buds were everywhere but the leaves hadn’t burst yet. We’d just turned the clocks forward and you could feel, folded in that extra hour of light, the promise of summer. Of schools closing and pools opening. The late afternoon sun was strong, poised high above the Rockies, like a blazing whole note.
    Finally, worn out, we dropped our bikes and slid down the steep path right to the creek’s edge.
    “You got to lean into it,” George said, all out of breath. “You’re afraid of everything.”
    “Am not.”
    “Are too.”
    He threw a punch toward my stomach. I flinched.
    “See,” he said. “See how you are?”
    “What?”
    “
Nervous
.”
    I leaned back and watched the muddy creek, picked up a rock and threw it as far as I could. It smacked into a tree on the other bank.
    “Hey, George? Where’s all this water go?”
    “Joins the Platte, the Missouri, the Mississippi . . . dumps into the Gulf of Mexico, I think.”
    “Wow, all that way?” I stared at the current. “It’s like Virginia Vale is connected to the whole planet by Cherry Creek.”
    “Don’t get weird,” he said.
    I turned and watched the rise and fall of the purple lettering—
Led Zeppelin
—written across George’s big chest. His black T-shirt was too small,
Zeppelin
stretched to the limit. His blond hair was damp, curled at the ends with trickles of sweat. He had brown fuzz on his lip; it had gotten thick lately. He told me how he was planning to use his new razor soon. I was waiting for all of that. The hair