Naughty Father McVee

&;#65279; When I was child we attended St. Mary's church on Fort
Hill. Father McVee was a kindly old man who use to hand out candy to us
young ones when our parents weren't
looking. On Saturday afternoons in the summer he held little "Youth
Camps" at the rectory where he lived. There was usually about a dozen
of us on any given weekend. We would play games an talk about God, that
sort of thing. One day we were playing whiffle ball. We used a
"welcome" mat as home plate, a tree for first base, the bird bath for
second and one of the clothes line poles for third. Father McVee was
the umpire and I was pitching to Kevin Morton. Kevin could never hit
the ball, so Father McVee usually gave him a walk. This made me very
mad, because if a guy can't hit the ball he should be out. Period.
Well, I already had two strikes on
Kevin and I knew what father McVee was going to do after Kevin missed
the next pitch, so I casually bent over, as if wiping my shoe, and
picked up a rock. I hid both the rock and whiffle ball in my glove as I
took my stance. Father McVee was saying something encouraging to Kevin
which only made me madder. I grabbed the rock and went into my
wind up. I don't think I ever threw anything that hard in my life,
maybe it was the weight of the rock, I don't know. As the rock
approached Kevin, he swung and, of course, missed. Father McVee started
to say "Take a base, Kevin," but he never finished the sentence. The
rock hit him squarely in the
balls. Father McVee doubled over and fell to the ground and that is the
only time I ever heard him swear. He unleashed a string of obscenities
that to this day I still have not heard its equal.
Now that I think about it, we never played whiffle ball again, and a
few weeks later we stopped having "Youth Camp" all together.