Precious Blood(65)

It was the grace of God that Judy had asked for her cigarettes after Andy Walsh had died. If Judy hadn’t, Peg would have ended up puffing away in a pew, no matter what kind of scandal she caused in the rest of the congregation. Now she hesitated between the tea and the cabinet and chose the cabinet, reaching up among the blue and white Chesterware plates for the carton of Trues she had left there, just in case. She had delivered nine children and every last one of them had been overdue, but you never could tell. A premature one could come along at any time. That was why she always bought her cigarettes the day she knew the rabbit had died.

She found a pack of matches in the drawer next to the stove and tucked them, along with the cigarettes, into the pocket of her apron. Then she picked up her tea and went into the family room.

There had been a time, soon after Andy’s death, when the dying had been all she’d been able to think about: Andy stretched out behind the altar, his face turned toward the congregation, his hands thrown up above his head. She had moved to a seat on the center aisle to get away from that face. She had found it too hard to look at and too terrible to think about. Even with an aisle seat and no view of the body, she had had to fight off waves of nausea worse than any morning sickness she’d ever experienced. Her heart had been beating so hard and so fast, she’d thought she was going to put herself in premature labor. She kept remembering Andy kissing her on her mother’s doorstep the morning after the sophomore-junior formal. It had been seven o’clock in the morning and they had been out all night. While everyone else on the street was wandering around in pajamas and robes, they were still in full formal dress. She was still wearing her crown. At one point in the evening, she had promised Andy she would never take it off. Winning it had been such a surprise. Until then, it had always been Kath who was elected Queen of things. After that, it was always Peg.

Peg put her tea down on the family room coffee table, took out her cigarettes, and lit up. If she’d had to come home to an empty apartment, she’d probably still be brooding about Andy and Andy’s dying. There would have been nothing to stop her. Instead, she’d come home to find work to do and, being conscientious, got down to doing it. The work had taken her mind off her shock and steadied her. Then her sister had brought her children home, and Joe had come in from work, and the news had come over the radio. There had been so much to do and so little time or energy to do it with, she’d had no room to indulge herself in emotional obsessions. Little by little, she had started to think.

It was true that Andy Walsh had been a tease, and a twit, and a lunatic. It was not true that his lunacy was in any way random. He could sometimes be haphazard in small things, like the homilies he gave on El Salvador and Nicaragua. His large-scale outrages had always been carefully planned to create an effect. There had been all that nonsense with consecrating the oat bran muffins at the CYO Mass. The papers had made it sound like sheer whimsy, but it hadn’t been. Andy had been making a point—or thought he had been making a point—about idolatry. He’d been giving homilies for a week beforehand about how Catholics tended to show more respect to Christ’s flesh than they did to His person. Peg suspected that Andy hadn’t really believed in transubstantiation, but that was beside the point. The point was that he’d never done anything really abominable without a reason.

Starting from there, it was an easy step to the realization that there must have been a reason for the goat. Just having the animal in the church was enough to give the Cardinal a heart attack. Andy would have known that. Therefore, Andy had brought the goat to accomplish something.

Thinking it through like this had made Peg very pleased with herself. It was as if she were the heroine in one of the murder mysteries she liked to read, where ordinary housewives beat the police at finding out who had stabbed the local septuagenarian librarian. Unfortunately, once she had decided that Andy had had a purpose, she couldn’t seem to get any further. What purpose? She’d expected him to wash the goat’s feet, in protest against the Church’s dictum that he could not wash the feet of women. Instead, he hadn’t washed anyone’s feet at all. Then she’d thought he was going to give the goat Communion  , but that line of speculation had hit a brick wall. What for? She’d read a story once that St. Francis had fed Communion   to the birds, and the Church hadn’t excommunicated him.

It was while she had been washing dishes after dinner that she’d thought of something else. The idea had seemed so right, and so obvious, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it first thing. She should have thought of it back in church, when she was looking at those books. Well, she’d thought of it now. That was why she had come into the family room, to see if she could find—