Requiescat in Pace

by Charles Brice

My cousin Frankie was visiting with his straightlaced,
super-Catholic, draconian, disciplinarian, pipe smoking,
Hitler-mustached, father and his brainless, perfumed,
rosary-thumbing, cigarette smoking, bourbon drinking mother.

Frankie’s dad was Mr. Neon in Seward, Illinois.  By gosh,
he was successful, moneyed, and merciless: the reaper
of justice meted out to daily mass attendees and titanic
tithers. Somehow, Frank and I wound up on Pershing Avenue

walking /jabbering about Mickey Mantle and that terrific
Yankee team when we came across a dead dog.  At eight-
years-old I had no idea what breed it was, neither did
ten-year-old Frankie but, as good Catholic boys, what

we knew and felt was that the crushed canine deserved a
proper Catholic burial like the one provided to Frankie’s
Uncle Terry who, a drunken causality of Korea,
drove off the road to his death near Torrington

the year before.  So, Frankie grabbed the departed’s
front paws and I gripped his back paws and we began
the half-mile procession to my backyard under
a July blaze in ole’ Cheyenne.  When we got the

deceased to our destination, we were shocked at
the absolute repulsion displayed by our parents,
especially by Mr. Neon Super-Catholic whom
we expected would have at least admired our devotion

to the rituals of the one true apostolic faith.  Instead
my mother immediately immersed me into the most
secular of baptismal fonts — our upstairs bathtub.
I assumed that the same fate had befallen my cousin

Frankie, but when allowed into our basement, where
Frankie and his parents were billeted, I discovered that
a different denouement had been in store for Frank.  He’d
been ordered to find a branch in our backyard that

could serve as a switch.  I glimpsed him, briefly,
standing in his underwear with welts, bloody and raw,
across his thighs, flogged by his father, as Pilot
had flogged Jesus — and twice as holy.