I don’t know who was first to laugh, but from my vantage point, perched above the congregation, I saw students with hands clasped over their mouths, fighting desperately to keep from breaking into hysterics, most without success. After what seemed a full minute, Ernie set the bells down, cutting off the chimes. He looked like someone who had just committed a totally innocent mistake, but I knew better. I knew Ernie had rung those bells on purpose, even before he admitted it when we got home that afternoon. He said he knew Valerie and her friends had done something and deduced from my facial expression that they had switched the readings. Ernie had screwed up on purpose. Only Ernie Cantwell had the self-confidence to absorb the impending ridicule he had to know would result, not to mention Sister Beatrice’s inevitable punishment.
But his act worked. When I turned back to the lectern, I was no longer nervous, realizing that no matter how many words I fumbled or skipped, no one would be talking about anything except how Ernie had messed up on such a grand scale. I also realized something else. I didn’t need the readings. I’d performed the actual readings so often I had darn near memorized every word, and I could see them now, on the pages, with all my mother’s little pencil marks.
I paused as my mother and I had rehearsed and looked out over the red sweaters filling the front half of the church pews and then to the parents. My mother’s face beamed up at me, but now Ernie’s mother looked as downcast as she had that day she’d come to our home to inform us that Ernie had a learning disability. Her dejection made me realize the extent of Ernie’s sacrifice. When my eyes shifted to Sister Beatrice, she was scowling, her eyes blazing with fury. There would be hell to pay for Ernie.
I looked last to Valerie Johnson and gave her a subtle burning gaze that wiped the smile from her face and caused her to sit back in genuine fear.
“A reading from the book of Daniel,” I began. Valerie Johnson’s eyes widened, and she looked to Mary Beth Potts, who seemed equally perplexed.
My classmates had chosen the readings, and they all were expecting the classic story of Daniel in the lions’ den. I know this as fact because my mother kept the readings in a scrapbook, complete with her handwritten notes and pencil marks to cue my pronunciations, as we had practiced. As I recited the story of the king throwing Daniel into the pit of lions, and how God rewarded Daniel’s faith and devotion by sending an angel to protect him, I realized Ernie was my guardian angel and had been since that first day on the playground.
I completed the reading certain I hadn’t hit every word, but I had gotten close enough that no one noticed. Then I moved to the responsorial psalm. Again I paused, closing my eyes and seeing the reading in my mind’s eye. My eyes shifted over the crowd. Sister Beatrice’s face remained an angry mask.
“God is my shepherd, I shall not want.” I raised my palm, the gesture for the congregation to repeat the phrase, which they did in unison.
“God is my shepherd, I shall not want. Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”
As I neared the end of the psalm, I knew I could not allow Ernie to walk into that valley of darkness alone. I was determined to walk beside him, whatever the consequences.
The second reading was a short letter from Paul to the Corinthians.
“Brothers and sisters,” I began. “Paul was called to be an apostle by the will of God . . .”
I had also memorized this reading. The rest of the sentence read, to tell you the good news of Jesus Christ, of his virginal birth, death on the cross, and resurrection from the dead.
“To tell you the good news of Jesus Christ,” I proclaimed in a loud voice that reverberated from the speakers. Then I said, “Of his vaginal birth . . .”
If I had done the reading at an ordinary Sunday Mass, no one would have cared, but this was not a Sunday Mass made up of an adult congregation. The congregation was grade-school kids who still thought the funniest things in the world were the names given to the male and female sex organs. To say it in church was a mistake on a scale that trumped even ringing the bells at the wrong moment.