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ordered—my mother to have me baptized. “Round number two of the basilica missionaries,” my mother called them, remembering the priests who had tried in vain to convince her to have me baptized just after I was born. My mother never let them in, even though they roared so loudly the neighbours came out on their steps to watch and listen to them. Father Wallis, the tallest, brawniest priest I had ever seen and the only person I had ever seen who was completely bald, beat on the locked door as he roared: “That boy must be baptized. His very soul depends on it. What if he should perish in his bed tonight? What then, Miss Joyce? What would happen to his soul?”
    “Go away,” my mother said to him through the front door. “We have all the guilt we need right here in this house.”
    “What a sacrilege it is that a boy born on the feast day of Saint John the Baptist has yet to be baptized.”

JIM JOYCE
    F OR a while I believed that my father was killed in a car crash when he missed the turn at the bottom of the Curve of Bonaventure, which was as steep, and in the winter often as icy, as a bobsled run. We lived halfway down the hill where the street turned sharply across from Brother Rice. Instead of a front yard fence, we had, courtesy of the city, a concrete traffic barrier, the Block, that was meant to stop any vehicle that didn’t make the turn. I was as unconvinced of the need for it as my mother was that it could stop a car until the winter night a Vauxhall crashed into it long after we had gone to bed, not budging it an inch, the crumpled car pointed straight at the front of our house, its drunk driver having fallen asleep behind the wheel.
    The explosion and vibrations of the crash shook the windows of the house, rattled dishes in the cupboards, upended lamps. Shards of glass and metal flew up and over the Block, clattered like shrapnel against our windows, embedded themselves in the clapboard.It seemed like just the sort of dramatic, spectacular re-entrance into our lives that Jim Joyce should make.
    According to Pops—the only one from 44 who joined the neighbours when they went out to investigate—the driver was all but unmarked. I watched everything from the front room window, the crowd, the police, the ambulance, the flashing lights, the stretcher bearing the man whose every inch but for his face was covered by blue blankets. A face, I noted, that wasn’t the colour of mine, but then neither was my mother’s. I watched until all that was left were a few people standing around, staring at the Block, talking and smoking cigarettes and stamping their feet to keep them warm.
    “Cars,” Pops said for days afterward, chuckling as if in scorn of newfangled contraptions that would never catch on.
    “Yes, Pops, cars,” my mother said. “You’d have one if you weren’t such a cheapskate.”
    “I don’t have a driver’s licence,” Pops said.
    “It’s not something you’re either born with or you’re not,” my mother said. “You can
get
one.
I
have one.”
    “I have a perfectly good pair of legs.”
    “You’re not still living in that godforsaken outport where everything is close to everything else.”
    The Block. Whatever reassurance I had gained from its success was more than undone by the fact that I now knew the Block
was
necessary, that it really was all that stood between us and out-of-control cars. That the Block had worked once was no proof that it would work again. For many nights afterward, I knelt on the front room sofa and watched the headlights of every car that came down Bonaventure, in part keeping vigil for Jim Joyce, who I believed was the dead-looking man beneath the blankets, and in part dreading that another car would ram the Block that, for all I knew, would not hold up a second time. The lights of the cars shone straight into the house, getting brighter and brighter until, just short of the Curve, they swerved and disappeared. Each carseemed certain to continue straight into