All Mother Teresa could think of were the good times in Virgil when she had first come to the US and discovered Canada. The shared family gatherings with the Mennon boys and the terrific hockey games played in an indoor arena with a snack bar. And that great day Meesh's pets, Jack & Thing, took the open class gold ribbon at the Virgil Stampede barrel race. Meesh had argued that "open class" meant just that but the judges disagreed and refused to award the prize to a dog and monkey team. There might have been a struggle had it not been for Terry Sawchuck, watching from the stands. Terry was on his way to Pop Kenesky's but stopped by Virgil for the Stampede. Thing's albino snakeskin chaps caught his attention. And when he heard the name Meeshaw, he knew he had finally found the famous Muskrat goalie with the snakeskin pads. The whole family, with Meesh and Jack & Thing, then travelled in Terry's bus to present Pop with a killer business proposition.

[Gummo] The following might help get Mother Teresa to Virgil, ON, although we might want to go back and catch up to what Lil told Bill when she picked him up from jail…
[Miller} Somehow this post gave me an anxiety attack. Not over the story line so much as the potential number of images to hang on all the handles. The search was successful, however, and in the process I discovered some tremendous new hobbies.

Mother Teresa tried desperately to stay afloat on a tidal wave of memories. She heard an echo of something cryptic her half-sister had said back in the old country when she was still a child. “You can flirt with the law, or you can flout the law. Either way, you’ll get flummoxed by the law.”

She remembered the young officer who came at the start of the war. He was going to help the mayor “get things in order”, apparently for the next thousand years. Teresa thought that was a pretty tall order, given the short attention span of most of the villagers, but if they could pull it off, more power to them. He was tall, blond, and muscular. They had good times together. They would talk about the future, which he believed belonged to him. The villagers referred to him sarcastically as the “kleine Oberleutenant” and played tricks on him. But Teresa stuck with him.

His final humiliation had come at the hands of the dark-haired wild-eyed new officer who arrived with a great deal of noise and mayhem from the east. He ran the Oberleutenant out of the village with a barrage of invective followed by a volley of a half-a-dozen-or-so well-aimed turnips as he chased him bare-assed across the frozen garden.

Her time with this new officer was a hazy recollection of cheap vodka, outrageous passion, and gloomy melancholy. The villagers called him the “Black Russian”, or the “Cuspidor Cossack”. He was unceremoneously replaced by a seedy little man called an “apparatchik” who wore a dark suit and came to organize the village into a “collective.” Teresa didn’t find him or his suit interesting at all. She thought his efforts to get the villagers to share cabbages probably wasn’t going to pan out.

By the time she finally slipped out of the village and made her way to Italy she was beginning to wonder about the officer class and law and order types in general. They came on strong, then let somebody else make fools of them. And once you got their uniforms off there was something about their personalities that gave you mixed feelings. Fortunately the carabinieri, with their outlandish costumes, were too silly-looking to be taken seriously.

After she emigrated to America and had six children with Arturo she was feeling settled. The bar kept her busy, and adopting Bill made her feel she was doing something useful with her life. That was until Deputy Chief O’Gready showed up. The attraction was immediate and overwhelming. But his undoing had come equally quickly with the toupee incident, and a vicious outbreak of acne that followed his gluttonous overindulgence in table syrup at the silver dollar pancake breakfast.

Mother Teresa thought lovingly of the old days in the old country when she would work in the garden, tanned back to the warm sun, bare breasts brushing the bean stalks, fingers plunged in the moist, rich earth. A new vision forced its way into her consciousness. She wanted nothing more than a garden of her own, where she could be on her own, and cultivate her vines and vegetables. An orange tractor would make it complete.