Father Gaetano's Puppet Catechism - By Christopher Golden Page 0,1

of the priests from local towns had shared the duties that a proper pastor would normally have fulfilled.

Sebastiano studied this priest, sure that he had never seen the man before. Young, thin, and dark-complexioned, he wore round spectacles that perched on the bridge of his hawk nose. His black hair was neatly combed but might need to be cut. It was strange. Normally, Sebastiano felt afraid of priests, for they seemed to him to carry a dreadful power, and when they looked at him he feared that God could see him through their eyes, and that the Lord would not be happy with what He saw. Sebastiano tried to be a good boy. He wanted to think that if his parents watched him from Heaven, they would be proud. Priests often made him want to find somewhere to hide.

But this new priest had a nice face. Sebastiano could see even from this distance that he smiled warmly at Sister Teresa as the two walked the path between the church and the orphanage together. The priest seemed comfortable, as if he felt at home.

“What do you think, Pagliaccio?” the boy asked.

He pulled his gaze from the open window and turned toward the small shelf above his tiny desk, where Pagliaccio lay sprawled on its side, bright red yarn hair dangling over the edge of the shelf along with its arms. Sebastiano frowned and hurried over to rearrange the puppet into a sitting position, arms crossed in its lap. One of them moved you, the boy thought. The boys who shared his room knew that Pagliaccio was his and they weren’t to touch it. Sister Veronica had warned them after the last time, but apparently one of the other boys had ignored the warning. Probably Giovanni. He always seemed determined to do precisely the opposite of what the sister told him.

Sebastiano made a tutting noise, fussing with the puppet but unable to arrange it into a position that satisfied him. He picked up Pagliaccio instead and slipped his hand inside the wool sheath of the puppet’s body, animating the arms and the head, making its face turn toward him as if responding to his presence. Sebastiano smiled.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” he said.

Pagliaccio nodded, then executed a silent bow. Sister Teresa had helped him with the sewing but he had painted the clown face onto the puppet by himself. The nose seemed too red to him and maybe too large, but mostly he loved Pagliaccio.

Now that he had the puppet in hand, his thoughts went back to the young priest, with his beak of a nose and long, skinny arms and legs that added to his birdlike appearance. Sebastiano took the puppet back to the window and bent to peek outside again. He was disappointed to see that most of the nuns had already vanished back to whatever duties awaited them, and the priest had also departed. But then he heard a low male voice and he glanced straight down, just in time to see Sister Veronica escorting the man into the orphanage.

“Do you suppose he’s just another visiting priest?” Sebastiano asked the puppet. “Or is he the new pastor who is supposed to teach us about God and the Bible?”

The boy listened a moment, regarding the puppet earnestly, and then nodded. “Yes, I hope so, too. He doesn’t seem so stern. It would be nice to have a priest who doesn’t make us afraid.”

Sebastiano thought that if they had a priest who would be kind, who would talk to them, he might not feel so alone. None of the other boys even tried to understand him and the girls only seemed to be amused by his presence when they could kick or punch him and get away with it. They were girls, which meant they giggled and hid their smiles behind their hands, and he had the feeling that they meant no harm, but still it made him sigh and wish for someone to talk to besides Pagliaccio.

“Though you are a good listener,” he told the puppet, parroting something Sister Veronica had said many times. He liked that thought, that Pagliaccio was a good listener, and it made him think that as sharp as the nuns might be, they might actually be looking after him and the others, worrying for them in the prickly way he now associated with nuns.

The other children sometimes teased him because he did not hate the nuns the way most of them seemed to. The thought made