Free A Song for Mary by Dennis Smith Page B

a fire alarm or something.
    Sister Stella looks so surprised, because everyone knows she wouldn’t hurt a fly.
    “My teeth hurt,” I say to her. “I have a teethache.”
    The class laughs at this, and I am laughing to myself, too, because there aren’t even any teeth there anymore where it hurts.
    Sister puts her arms around me and smiles at me. She tells me that I don’t have to read with the others, and then she starts them up again.
    Soon I forget all about the pain in my mouth because this Maria girl got me so interested in her life. She is called Blessed, which is not like when you bless yourself. But Bless-ed, which is kind of a title, and it is something that you have to get to be before they can make you a saint.
    This Blessed Maria had a very hard life in Italy. It was just around the time the automobile was invented, and the radio, but before the First World War. We are now getting all those dates right in class, and I guess that is why Sister is making everyone read this.
    Her father dies when she is a little kid, so she has no father, and her mother is very poor, so poor that they don’t have any food at all, and they look for scraps of food around the town. But Blessed Maria just smiles at everybody and always tries to make people happy, until one day a guy comes in and tries to rip her clothes off. She is only eleven years old, and she tells the guy that she would rather die than be impure, but the guy is crazy and he has a knife with him. He threatens her, but she tells him that she belongs to God. She is just eleven, and she stands up to this guy and tells him that she is with God—something, I think, that takes a lot of courage.
    This poor girl, I am thinking. She must have gone through so much more than what they are telling us in the pamphlet.
    “This is a very beautiful story,” Sister Stella says when the class finishes the pamphlet.
    And I guess it is, too, except that it is so sad when the guy kills her with the knife. They then sent him to prison for twenty-seven years, and the first thing he did when he got out of jail, because he talked to Blessed Maria one night in a dream, was to go to her mother and ask for her forgiveness.
    I don’t know if Blessed Maria’s mother ever forgave him. I guess she did, but the pamphlet didn’t say. I don’t think my mother would forgive someone if I was killed like that. Maybe she would if he became a priest or did a lot of penance, but she would have to say a lot of prayers first to get her in the mood.

Chapter Twelve
    M ommy has made me put on a tie, and Billy, too. We don’t have a real suit to wear, either of us, but we have on our best clothes, each in a white shirt, tie, school pants, which are the light gabardines, and a plaid lumberman’s jacket. I am wearing my old Klein’s-on-the-Square shoes which Mommy glued together when the sole fell off completely, but she keeps talking about going to Thom McAn’s to get new ones. Sometime soon, she says. I hope it is soon because the holes are getting to be dollar holes, and I have to change the cardboard every night. Billy and I never care much about the dime-sized holes, or the penny holes, the nickel holes, or the quarter holes, but when the holes get to be half dollars or silver dollars, it is hard to make the cardboard work right, and if it rains, it is like walking barefoot in the bathtub.
    Mike Shurtliff did not pay Mommy any money for washing and ironing his shirts for a long time, because he works in show business and hasn’t had a job. But he is our next-door neighbor and Mommy told him that she would do his shirts, anyway, and he could pay her sometime when he got the money. And today was the big day—that’s what Mommy said—the big payoff, because Mike gave her twice as much money as he owed her for the shirts. He got a good job on Broadway with a play about the death of a salesman. Mommy said we should celebrate Mr. Shurtliff’s good works, and so she is taking us out to dinner.
    I