The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell(6)

“Why, I turned around and gave him a closer look,” she’d say. “Then I told him, ‘There’s nothing wrong with his eyes. God made them that color. They’re extraordinary.’”

Following Mass, my mother also did not hesitate to present me to Father Brogan. A petite man with a white beard and thick Irish brogue, Father Brogan hid his shock—it was not possible that he did not notice. According to my father, the priest scooped me into his arms, lifted me overhead, and pronounced me to be “a fine lad indeed.”





7

In my thirteenth month, I took my first step, or so I was told. I found no snapshot to document this momentous occasion in the photo album labeled 1958. I do know that I took this step at home during a weekday, prompting my mother to stage a reenactment when my father arrived home from work so he could capture it on camera. Some months after my mother died, I found a cardboard box containing canisters of film in her attic. In the grainy, silent film documenting that day, I’m standing in a diaper with wobbly legs and clutching the corner of our living room coffee table. My mother is also in the film, clapping her hands and silently coaxing me to let go, without success. It seems that I had become distracted by my mother’s rosary, alternately slapping the beads on the table or shoving them in my mouth and drooling. My mother, sensing an opportunity, took the rosary from me and dangled the silver cross just out of my reach.

“Walk for Mary,” she mouthed on the film. “Walk for Mary, Samuel.”

And that was when I responded, though not with my first step. In those black-and-white frames, my mother suddenly stopped clapping. Her eyes shifted from me to the camera a fraction of a second before my father dropped it. By the time he had recovered, I was in mid-walk, reaching for the dangling crucifix, a feat completely overshadowed by what had been my first uttered word.

“Mary,” I’d said.

To my mother, of course, this was solid evidence to support her conviction that God had a divine plan for me and my red eyes. If someone had told her that someday white smoke would rise above the Vatican before the proclamation of my name as pope, she would not so much have batted an eye. She immediately went to work to ensure that when that momentous occasion did occur, I would not embarrass her, as I did each time she took me to buy a new pair of shoes and I revealed holes in my socks. By age five I could recite the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be, which meant I could recite the rosary. This tutelage often occurred at night, with me holding my own rosary and mimicking her devotion, and just as frequently on trips to kneel before that statue of the Blessed Mother in the alcove of the church.

“Prayers are like coins deposited in a piggy bank, Samuel,” my mother assured me. “Save them until you need them for something important.”

And so I would silently recite the rosary and deposit my prayers in my prayer piggy bank, comforted by the knowledge that they would be there when the need presented itself, which would be much sooner than I anticipated.





8

While I do not specifically recollect my enrollment at OLM, like my birth it is a story I heard often enough to tell with authority of fact. A newspaper article in the scrapbook marked 1963 also helped fill in the blanks, and what I cannot document I can deduce from a profound understanding of my mother and her steadfast and unyielding insistence that her son would receive a Catholic education. And God help anyone who got in her way.

The envelope from OLM’s admissions office arrived in our mailbox the week before the start of the school year. Both that envelope and the letter it contained became keepsakes in my mother’s scrapbook. Though the paper has yellowed and the typewritten font has faded, I remember the envelope my mother pulled from our mailbox as having been a bright white. Almost as bright as my mother’s smile that afternoon.

“Isn’t this exciting, Samuel?”

Her smile quickly faded upon reading the letter.

“We are sorry to advise that your application for enrollment in the first grade at Our Lady of Mercy has been denied.” Unfortunately, Our Lady of Mercy did not have enough spots for every applicant.

That evening, after we’d finished dinner, my mother handed my father the letter along with a cup of coffee. Upon reading it, my father placed the letter facedown on the kitchen table, momentarily stumped. “The public school is very good,” he’d eventually said with some degree of caution. “Given Samuel’s . . . condition, perhaps it’s better not to draw attention to the situation. He can attend CCD, and of course there is no better religion teacher than you.”

My mother added two lumps of sugar to his coffee and poured the cream in his lap. To his credit my father hardly flinched. He simply excused himself to change his pants. The son of Madeline Hill, whose first uttered word had been the name of the Blessed Mother of Jesus Christ, would not attend public school. Of this my mother was quite certain.





9

The following sun-drenched Monday morning, my mother dressed me in the school uniform she had purchased in anticipation of this big day—a short-sleeved white shirt, navy-blue pants, and a red sweater. We drove first to the church, where we knelt in the alcove before the Blessed Mother.

“You might want to consider opening your prayer bank,” my mother suggested, but after years of saving I couldn’t bear to do it. Instead I mentally pulled the rubber stopper on the bottom and shook out just one or two.