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Charlie interrupted to praise the borscht, saying, “This here is in the nick of time. My belly’s been thinking my throat’s been cut.”
The former pastor asked while laying down cutlery, “And how are you and Manuela faring?”
“She’s with child. See, we got this here picture took.” Charlie was wearing a gray, caped Civil War sergeant’s coat that was called a surtout and he found in its inside pocket a ferrotype of himself sitting in his finest dancing clothes and, in the fashion of the time, displaying his six-gun and Winchester ’73, looking again like a gloomy Edgar Allan Poe as his unsmiling common-law wife stood next to him, one hand formally on his left shoulder and the other gently riding the balloon of her belly.
“Very laughly,” Grzelachowski said. “I am exceeding happiness for you.”
Tom craned his neck to see and said she didn’t look all that pregnant.
“Old picture. She’s as big as a wish now.”
“Is nine months the usual?” Tom asked.
“Oui, mon enfant,” said Padre Polaco as he sat across from the Kid. They ate in silence until he finally got out, “You have a birthday soon?”
“November twenty-third.”
“That’s today!”
“Then I have reached my majority.”
“Aged twenty-one,” Tom needlessly said.
Padre Polaco regarded Tom with pity, then returned to the Kid. “So, no clemency yet?”
“I got Judge Ira Leonard working on it. But the governor’s in New York and avoiding me. I’m heading to White Oaks from here to hash out some legalities with Ira.”
Wagging his finger but smiling, the ex-priest said, “You are afflicted with the general problem of disregarding the distinction between meum and tuum.”
The Kid frowned.
“Latin for ‘mine’ and ‘yours.’ Old seminary joke.” The padre lifted up and looked over the Kid’s head to Billie Wilson as he yelled, “Ho there! I’ll hang dogs on you if you steal from me!”
The Kid hated the fatherly whine in his own voice as he turned and asked Wilson, “Oh, wha’ja do?”
Padre Polaco rose from the rough-hewn table and rushed the petty thief.
“Nothin,” Wilson explained to the Kid. “I was just holdin it in my pocket. Seein if it fit. I got money.”
Padre Polaco forced his hand inside Wilson’s overcoat pocket an
d retrieved a Waltham watch in a gold case. “Shame on you!” he scolded.
Anticipating an uproar, Charlie said, “We better eat up, Tom.” They both began hurriedly spooning borscht and slurping down wine.
The Kid said, “You were gonna pay him for it, weren’t you? You just had more shopping to do?”
Wide-eyed with innocence, Wilson told the ex-priest, “Yes! My family’s festive and I have Christmas things to get!”
Padre Polaco examined the price tag. “Thirty-eight dollars. You have it?”
“Here,” Wilson said and found a folded hundred-dollar bill in his trousers.
The Kid sighed. “Don’t take it, Padre. It’s worthless.”
Grzelachowski squinted at the note in the lamplight and felt the texture of the paper before holding it over the hurricane lamp and letting the counterfeit bill brown and blacken and flame into ash.
“Hey!” Wilson said, but it was late and halfhearted.
