It was the Fourth of July in 1970, an overcast Saturday afternoon, in my hometown, Saugus, Massachusetts. Ann and I were walking with our mother back from Sherman’s Market—after buying a last-minute package of hot dog rolls. My mother was pushing our old brown wicker carriage, as she had practically every day since 1959. The baby inside was Katie, the seventh in our family (not including Claire, who died the day she was born in 1966). The other kids—John Michael, Elizabeth, Joan, and Mary—were waiting for us in the back yard, playing Rundown or Kickball and watching my dad fume as he once again tried to light the charcoals in the rusted round off-yellow grill he had wheeled out of the garage.
The wind must have been blowing just right, because I remember smelling the ocean—the Atlantic, seven miles to the east. I remember worrying about the weather, and thinking about the ocean, that day because I knew if it rained that night, we wouldn’t get to go to the shore, to Nahant, and we’d miss the fireworks. I was six years old, and aside from the morning-time diversions at Anna Parker Field—digging with dozens of other kids for coins the grown-ups had buried in a mound of sand, hopping across the muddy ball field in the sack races, sitting in the bleachers watching the Little League playoffs—the Fourth of July to me was fireworks at night on the beach.
We walked the few minutes it took to get from Sherman’s to our big white house facing St. Margaret’s Church across Lincoln Avenue. We stopped at the cross walk in front of St. Margaret’s. Before we started across busy Lincoln Avenue, my mother reminded me, as she had so many times before, “Hold on to the carriage, Chris, and don’t move until I do.”
“I know, Mom!”
Ann was eight, way older than me. She didn’t have to hold on like a baby. She was getting ready to cross by herself, gauging the best time by watching the cars whiz by. I was watching Ann, and I was jealous. I wanted to be unleashed like her.
Then Ann ran, suddenly, confidently.
Before I really knew what I was doing, I let go of the carriage and ran too. It must have been the sight of her getting ahead of me, the thought of her having plenty of time to claim the prized yellow plastic corn cob holders, with real metal prongs, in the kitchen, while I was still clinging to Mommy like a goon. I wanted to be that free. I wanted those corn cob holders.
My father retold this story often enough that I accept his version as mine. I don’t remember the white car rounding the corner too fast, or the screech of the brakes, the car’s shiny front end bumping my chest so softly, the thud as my head hit the gray pavement. I was knocked flat, unconscious.
My dad told how the commotion brought the neighbors, the two parish priests in their black shirts and starched white collars, the other drivers and their passengers, all of them out into the street. My father, busy upstairs cleaning the lighter fluid off his shirt, heard the noise and came running outside wearing only a white undershirt and unbelted pants (an uncommon sight in Saugus in 1970). He used to tell this part slowly, how he saw from our front porch Father Hickey carrying me like a baby, limp, up the church steps. My mother was clutching Katie and crying, staying close to the priest, and four or five people followed behind. My father thought I was dead.
As I said, I don’t remember this part, but the story goes that they laid me on a pew in the rear of the church. Father Hickey prayed over me. No one called an ambulance.
Here’s what I do remember. I came to on the plush red-cushioned bench in our front hall. The hall was filled with people, talking and gesturing, and peering at me. I passed out again.
My dad drove me to the hospital, in Lynn, on the shore. He says we waited and waited; the emergency room was full of holiday victims. I recall very little about the hospital. The cold, cavernous X-ray room, the curtained exam table. The passage of the day into nighttime. Eventually the nurses sent us home. My skull was not fractured.
As we left the hospital parking lot and headed for home, we passed under one green light after another. My dad wasn’t talking, maybe because he could hear what I was hearing: the crackle of the Nahant fireworks overhead. Maybe he was thinking what I was thinking: My Fourth of July. Ruined. I strained to catch a glimpse of the brightness in the sky, pushing my sore head out the car window, but I couldn’t see anything.
The next day, we all went to Noon Mass together, as a family, crossing Lincoln Avenue when the off-duty policeman working detail waved us across.
After Mass, when the church was emptying of parishioners, Father Hickey called me aside, asked me to wait for him near the back pews. Someone turned off the vestibule lights while I waited; the organist peered down at me from the balcony, then disappeared. Finally Father Hickey returned, with his sparkly green vestments removed. He sat me down on the very last pew, kneeled next to me, and then carefully unbuttoned his black shirt’s top button and removed the white cloth collar from inside.
“The Lord was watching you, Chris. This is for you.”
I didn’t know what to say. I’d never heard of such a thing. What was I supposed to do with it? I couldn’t help staring at Father Hickey’s Adam’s apple, perched above his newly exposed neck hair. I took the collar in my hand, trying not to notice its dampness, the sweat stain along one edge. “Thank you, Father.”
Father Hickey ushered me out of St. Margaret’s, helped me across the street, and then waved to my mother, who was waiting for me behind our screen door. I ran past her, up the stairs to my room. I opened the closet door and laid the stiff white cloth in my cardboard box of special things, along with my collection of magic tricks and Duncan yo-yos.
