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Chapter Two

Mercy and Reconciliation

Even now I don’t know, exactly, why I bullied Zach.

“Hey, Mat, Mat Schmalz—get over here!”¹

I recognized Zach out of the corner of my eye. I was surprised to see him at our twenty-fifth high school reunion in the summer of 2007.

I never even talked to Zach during our time at high school. Zach was part of my more distant past: the early 1970s, a time when I wore Toughskin jeans, flared at the cuffs and lazily hanging over my blue Keds sneakers. It was a time when I watched Kukla, Fran, and Ollie on Saturday mornings after Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids; it was a time when my favorite pastimes were playing army and exploring the woods behind my home. Zach and I had grown up in the same small town.

And Zach obviously remembered me.

I wondered how vivid and accurate his memories were.

I wondered whether Zach was planning to punch my face in.

I have a love/hate relationship with barbershops. Actually, the hate usually comes first. I just don’t like how I look in the large barbershop mirror: doughy, with a dimple in the middle of my chin. I especially don’t like it when the small mirror comes out so that the barber can show me the cut along the back of my neck.

All I see is me—reflected back infinite times.

I really don’t like that.

But I do like the feeling of leaning back in the padded chair. And I do like the smells—dangerous as they are for me: the vaguely alcoholic scents of after-shaves and solvents mingling with the fruity aromas of newly cut, shampooed hair.

I went for a haircut before the reunion, anyway.

It was a barbershop by a gas station—the barber had brown coffee stains on his shirt, and I could see yellow tobacco residue on his fingernails as he picked up the shears. He moved vigorously and I closed my eyes to savor the feeling of falling hair lightly touching my eyelashes and clumping on my cheeks and chin.

“How does it look?” the barber asked in a raspy voice as he held up the mirror behind my head.

The haircut was shorter than I expected—shorter than I had asked for. I grimaced when I saw the moles and blotches on my scalp revealed for all to see. It had been third grade since my hair was that short.

Zach, he was the other guy in the class with hair as short as mine.

At the check-in at the hotel lobby, people started to recognize me. In making small talk, I had to maneuver around the memory of the last time I had actually seen most of them: it was at a party over winter break during my sophomore year in college. I use the word “seen” advisedly since I don’t remember much of the night apart from crushing paper cups in my fist and popping balloons by stomping on them in my snow boots.

I started to feel uneasy, and I separated myself from the group.

Beyond the lobby there was a nondescript room where the cash bar had been set up. I passed through a set of sliding doors and couldn’t help but notice how my crew-cut head reflected unevenly in the plate glass.

I wanted to put as much space as possible between me and the bar, so I went outside to the patio. There was a bar there, too—really a cart, with a beach umbrella more for appearances than for actual shade. I walked to where mortared gray stone gave way to a lawn and then long-grass fields, hills in the distance glowing blue and purple in the setting sun.

There was a railing separating the patio from the lawn—I hung onto it for support. I turned my back on the bar and kept my eyes on the hills.

That’s where I heard Zach call my name.

The desks in our third-grade classroom weren’t arranged in orderly rows. It was 1972, after all—and in Massachusetts, for good measure—and some of the experimental attitude of that time had filtered down to elementary school. Zach and I sat next to each other in a group of six desks that faced each other to make a kind of large table. The whole class was arranged like that—islands in a cinder block and linoleum sea.

Zach and I worked together in math. And I had something that helped us out—a special pen. I remember it clearly—its black cap and nib, and its fat green barrel. You’d just turn the cap and the multiples of numbers would peak through circular holes nicely arranged in a row. I shared the pen with Zach in class, and I think I even let him take it home once.

Zach and I also ran for president together. 1972 was an election year, and Zach and I were on the Republican ticket. He was Spiro Agnew to my Richard Nixon. I don’t think we had to give speeches. We didn’t know much about public policy or the Vietnam War, and Watergate was yet to come. But we had an election in class nonetheless, with a big map of the United States accompanying donkey and elephant stickers for states won by Democrats and Republicans.

Zach and I lost handily. Things were different for the real Nixon and Agnew—they won every state, every state except Massachusetts.

I acted up in school. My penmanship was terrible, so I’d throw my pencil. A letter came home from the gym teacher saying how I was failing: I had flat feet and “severe hand-eye coordination issues,” which was a fancy way of saying that I couldn’t catch a baseball. I remember one rainy day during a recess period inside: I busied myself by knocking down each and every chair in our classroom. I got sent to the office for that.

Zach would get on my nerves—and I told him so.

I didn’t like his haircut—it was too much like mine. I didn’t like his shirts, they were colorful and had fancy zippers—mine were usually a shade of blue or brown and I buttoned them right up to the top of my neck. I’d compare myself to Zach and say to him: “You look like a girl.”

There was a tower in the middle of the school playground and we third-graders would race each other to the top. I wanted to make sure that Zach would never beat me, so I’d kick him, wrench his hand off the ladder, or try to push him off if he got ahead of me.

Then there were other things that I said and did to Zach. But I can’t remember them.

But I do remember Zach’s response, one time, when I was pressing my attack.

“I hate you, Mat.”

I do remember that.

I’ll always remember that.

“Hey, Mat Schmalz, get over here!” Zach repeated.

I finally turned round. There was Zach—standing there, nearly level with the fringe of the bar’s beach umbrella.

His hair was close-cropped too—though there was a little more on the top of his head than mine.

No choice, I walked across the patio, looking down, measuring every step.

Zach’s eyes were bright, big smile on his face. He switched his drink from right hand to left, stretched out his arm—for a second, I worried that he was going to grab the nape of my neck.

Instead, he gently clasped my shoulder.

He said, “I am so sorry.”

I stood there, speechless.

“I am so sorry that I hit you in the fourth grade.”

“I deserved it,” I said—which was how I honestly felt even though I had absolutely no idea what Zach was talking about.

There were a couple of other onlookers standing around the bar, and so Zach explained. “Mat and I were doing a play in fourth grade.”

Evidently, we got into some sort of argument and Zach hit me.

“It was a chicken scratch kind of thing,” Zach said and held up his fingers, tensed and extended like a rooster’s foot.

I’d like to say that Zach’s description jogged my memory, but it didn’t. I can imagine what happened, though. It must have been when I was engaging in some sort of verbal violence against Zach: teasing him, ridiculing him, shaming him—all the while probing for more weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

And I finally pushed Zach over the line. I’m sure I wanted to get a rise out of him in some way and just got more than I bargained for.

But Zach was the one who felt guilty. He clasped my shoulder a little more tightly and said to me: “I’ve been waiting thirty years to tell you I was sorry.”

Sins are funny things—they have a long half-life. They hide, they wait, but they inevitably reemerge to get their own satisfaction—or our own comeuppance

Sin, of course, was a consistent feature of my Confraternity of Christian Doctrine classes—less formally known as Catholic Sunday school, though it was usually held on Monday evenings. As the Baltimore Catechism puts it, “Actual sin is any willful thought, word, deed, or omission contrary to the will of God.”² Although I couldn’t have quoted catechetical literature verbatim in third grade, I did see that what I was doing was sinful.

I knew what I was doing—even though I was a child.

But I did not fully understand what I was doing either. Even now I don’t know, exactly, why I bullied Zach. But what I can say is that Zach and I had that odd combination of similarities and differences that made connection and conflict possible. If I felt angry, unloved, frustrated, I found that I could make Zach share in those feelings.

At the reunion, Zach could have confronted me and told me how the wounds I inflicted on him healed, or did not heal, with time. He could have stuck to the dutiful small talk and perfunctory questions that so often characterize reunions and related functions like weddings and funerals. Zach could have ignored me altogether, very much like I might have ignored him if he had not pointed me out and called me by name.

But Zach chose to show me mercy.

The reunion continued with the whole class gathering round in a circle—it was time for awards: furthest distanced traveled, most times married, life of the party.

I stood shoulder to shoulder with Zach—we didn’t win anything this time either.

What Zach did was merciful because he canceled a debt that I owed him. But he also did something more: he focused on our relationship—not just as we experienced it back in third and fourth grade, but also as we were experiencing it then and there. The mercy was a prelude to reconciliation, reestablishing a bond that was broken decades ago.

As the evening wound up and then wound down, I found myself circling back to Zach many times. We talked about work, about our families, and we mourned recently deceased classmates from our elementary-school days. Throughout our talks, Zach never mentioned once that I had bullied him.

Part of reconciliation is letting go—and I suppose Zach thought it was bad form to hold onto something negative about me from a time when we were kids. But there is something about the way we behave as children that prefigures the way we behave as adults. Our childhood cruelties often fester and metastasize into wounds or cancers that never fully heal. That’s one reason I felt so guilty and ashamed about my treatment of Zach—it pointed to the person I could become with a drink in my hand.

So, I have to confess that I was glad that Zach didn’t call me out for being a bully. I felt relief, and freedom. And I sat back and rested in that experience, letting it wash over me.

“Mat, it’s Zach.”

Zach had taken the initiative to call me. A couple of weeks earlier, I sent him an e-mail and apologized outright for bullying him in third grade.

It had been eight years since the reunion.

Mercy—like sin—is a funny thing. It also has a long half-life.

I’m not against apologies—I offer them quite liberally, actually. But I didn’t apologize to Zach when I had the chance at the reunion. Being shown mercy is humbling; it exposes you and reflects back your vulnerabilities. I think I was feeling a little too exposed and vulnerable at the reunion to take the step that I should have taken in apologizing to Zach.

Apologies often cannot undo pain; but they can acknowledge it. Part of the cruelty of bullying is that the bruises it leaves are on the inside—it’s a hidden form of violence, shrouded by shame. At the reunion, Zach showed he overcame his own shame and vulnerability—and his mercy to me finally proved stronger than the shame and vulnerability I carried inside myself. Reconciling with Zach meant that I had to reconcile with my own self by taking responsibility for my actions, even though many years had passed. Mercy and reconciliation can lead to freedom and to new beginnings. But that freedom and those new beginnings do not include a free pass to forget.

Face to face with Zach once again—albeit virtually, on the telephone line—I repeated my apology: “Zach, I just wanted to tell you again how much it meant to me that you reached out at that reunion where we met a long while back. You apologized to me for giving me a hard time, when I should have been apologizing to you. I’m really sorry that I was such a bully.”

“Well, you know my grandmother always taught me to turn the other cheek,” Zach said, and then he chuckled. “If my grandmother had been allowed to be a priest, she’d have been the pope.”

I laughed. Then I asked, “Do you remember running for president together back in third grade?”

“Oh, now you’re really asking me to clear the cobwebs,” Zach said, neither confirming nor denying my memory of things.

“We’re much older now, Zach, aren’t we?” I said. “Time is passing.”

“It’s the moments that matter—not the hours or the minutes,” Zach reflected.

There was a pause and Zach added, “Back in third grade, I knew I could always talk to you.”

Another pause. “And you’d listen—sometimes.”

I laughed again.

“Just remember, I’ve always thought of you as a friend,” Zach reminded me.

I smiled to myself as I hung up the phone. Zach’s number was displayed on my handset—I made sure to write it down.

Suggested Questions for Discussion

1. What mindset and emotions can lead to bullying?

2. Do you agree with what Zach said in apologizing? Do you agree with him not calling the author out as a bully?

3. What do you think about how the author handled his meeting with Zach and why he acted the way he did?

4. How can mercy enable reconciliation between two people?

Suggested Questions for Private Reflection

1. If you were bullied as a child, or can imagine having been, what would it mean to bring mercy to that experience?

2. If you were a bully, or can imagine having been one, what could you do to reconcile with those whom you bullied?

3. If you were both bully and bullied—or again, can imagine such a situation—can you reflect on the relationship between the two?