Mercy (8 page)

“I’d’ve been about twelve,” he tells her with a wink. “You can see for yourself the ravages of time.”

Mathilda has waited patiently at the end of the line. Stepping into the stifling box, she lowers herself to the kneeler amid the countless odours of those who came before. She draws close to the screen, catching a whiff of male pungency from the other side.

“Bless me Father for I have sinned—” She hesitates, hearing him shift in his cassock at the sound of her lowered voice. “It’s been a month since my last confession, and since that time I’ve had—impure thoughts.” She plays with the hem of her dress. “And not just once, either.”

He takes too long to answer. Far too long. Sounds strangled when he finally speaks. “Yes, my child. And have you—”

“I can’t help it!” she cries. “It’s the Bible!”

“The—Bible?”

The matchbox rattles in her hand. She fishes out a redheaded stick and strikes it, illuminating the tiny book in her palm. She’s kept the page with a thin ribbon, something fairly safe to start with. Deepening her voice for the
part of the groom, she begins. “ ‘Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks—’ ”

The match dies against her fingernail, releasing a smoky, disquieting smell. Taking his silence as a kind of assent, she lights a second. “ ‘Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet,’ “she reads softly. And more softly still, “ ‘Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins—’ “The match curls up black and she shakes it out. She can hear him breathing now. “You see, Father?” she says. “I can’t help it.”

Still nothing but the hammering at her temples, the drag of his laboured breath. She’s reaching for another match when he forces a loud cough.

“Ten Hail Marys,” he wheezes.

“But, Father—”

His thin door opens and falls shut. Footsteps—measured, almost mechanical—carry him away.

August was taught the
Canticum Canticorum
as metaphor—Christ the groom, his spouse the One True Church.

Tossing in his sheets, he suspects it may in fact be what it seems
—The Song of Songs
, a fragrant comb of words steeped in the honey of sex. When sleep finally comes, he dreams of Mathilda’s mouth opening beyond the screen.

Dentes tui sicut greges tonsarum— Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn—

Of all the lines that might, it is this one that surfaces, her lips parting to utter it, both eye teeth revealed. Gleaming fangs turned fleecy and soft, they leap out, lead the others ewe upon lamb. The whole flock passes magically through the mesh, engulfing him in a woolly white stream.

He wakes with damp pyjamas, the hand a sticky phantom lying spent beside his deflating sex.

The male seed is the medium for original sin
. So Saint Thomas Aquinas taught, and though many dissented, August was never so sure. Thus was the Redeemer born of a woman undefiled, delivered guiltless, completely untouched by the stain.

August holds his palm to the moon’s weak light, staring at it as a murderer would, his colourless emission as damning as any blood. In his guilty, sleep-addled state, it seems his hand is thinning out, becoming translucent, a bony lampshade lending warmth to the lunar chill.

Corrosive
. The semen is eating his flesh.

He throws the covers aside and leaps to his feet, the offending member thrust out before him, its clumsy brother fumbling at the knob of the door. Three leaping strides and he’s in the bathroom, wrenching wildly at the grey-trunked faucet marked
H
. The tap belches and spits, then blasts a brownish stream. His good hand becomes a vise, closing to hold the other down while the temperature rises through pleasure to blistering pain. The hand turns a dangerous shade. Still he holds it under, defying all instinct, burning himself good and clean.

Halfway across the crowberry patch, Castor freezes, listening hard. After a moment it comes again—an unmistakable bumbling, a feathery-legged shuffle in the scrub. He grins. There isn’t a rock or a good-sized stick within reach, so he pulls the mickey from his belt and smacks it against his palm.

“Fool hen,” he calls softly. “Foo-oool hen.”

True to its name, the fool hen pokes its head out from behind a nearby spruce, flashing the red eye patch of a male.

“Hey, buddy,” Castor croons, “it’s only me.” He advances slowly, gripping the bottle around its neck. “You trust ol’ Castor, huh?” The bird blinks at him. “Maybe that ain’t such a good idea.” Two feet from it now, he halts. “Sorry, buddy.” The bottle comes cracking down. Castor remains bowed over the fallen bird, staring deep into his mickey, unable to move.

His eye settles in the arc of a morphine vial. St. Mary’s housekeeper sits propped up in bed, worrying something shiny in her hands. At first Castor thinks
rosary
, but as the necklace slips her grasp, he catches sight of a fine gold chain, then a hinged heart the colour of a new penny. She opens her mouth in what must be a cry of frustration, snatching it back up from the quilt.

He knows the locket well. His eye landed there once, saw naked poplars through the rectory’s kitchen window, watched the housekeeper’s raw hands plunge into the steaming dishpan, the niece’s pale arm reach in close for a teacup to dry.

The housekeeper’s lips move in a muttered curse or prayer. The little heart’s a tadpole in her fingers, a determined, slithery force. Finally, she gives up on her hands and wedges it like a nut between her teeth. It surprises her, springing open in two shallow halves. Only one side holds a picture, too small for Castor’s eye to make out. She gazes at it for a moment, then begins picking at its edge with her nail.

In an instant he’s back in the bog. The fool hen lies senseless at his feet, its black breast turned to the sky.

“Take them.” Vera shoves the only jewellery she owns into Mathilda’s hands. “Take them now.” Her eyes narrow. “That way I know for certain they’ll go to you.”

Both chains are simple, plated gold. The locket is red gold, smooth and strangely plain. It pales beside the crucifix, white gold and fully two inches long, the hanging Christ so finely wrought Mathilda can make out the stringy muscles of His thighs, the heart-rending hole in His side. She lowers the Cross onto its back in her palm, the way the soldiers must’ve lowered it after He died. Stroking Him tenderly with the tip of her finger, she looks up to find Vera’s eyes have glazed over with the drug.

Mathilda unclasps the thin chain at her neck and lays her confirmation crucifix aside. Vera’s is so much more solid—somehow deeply adult. She tucks it inside her dress, feels its cool back meet her skin.

It swoops forward as she bends over the little book.
A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me
. She smiles crookedly.
He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts
.

Her eyes are mirrored signals flashing code from the pews. Try as he might to look elsewhere, August meets them upon entering, and again after the Gloria’s adoring refrain.

“Dominus vobiscum,”
he says throatily, extending his arms, believing he can distinguish her clear, steady voice from amid the congregation’s reply. He flings his gaze wildly over the flock, and still it returns to her, her moon-shaped face serene, a fit setting for the unearthly reflections of her eyes.

Later, during the minor elevation, he is again distracted, this time by the smarting of his burnt palm against the chalice’s curvaceous stem. Impatient with himself, he calls up images of the Saviour’s spilled blood—the stitchwork forehead, the hammered holes, the wound in His naked side. It works, if only for a moment. Behind him, Mathilda’s impassioned recitation of the Our Father rises head and shoulders above the rest. He takes a breath and soldiers on, praying earnestly for protection.

His long fingers snap the host in two, place a half on the paten and crumble a corner off its twin to dissolve in the wine—as the faithful are absorbed into the Church, he was taught, as they doff their individual skins, becoming one in the bloodstream of Christ.

“Agnus Dei—”
He solemnly addresses the Lamb, begging for mercy, begging for peace. After the prayers before Holy Communion, he inclines toward the altar and strikes his breast, wincing.
“Domine, non sum dignus—”
He repeats the profession of humility three times, thinking miserably, I’m not worthy, it’s true.

Since his first Communion, August has savoured the host, looking forward eagerly to ingesting the corporeal fact of the Lord. The doctrine of transubstantiation posed no problem, no mystery even—he could taste Christ’s presence in that fine wafer, his palate discerning the very purest of flesh.

Now, nearly weightless, the Blessed Sacrament falls like an imaginary blow on the budding surface of his tongue.
Insubstantial
. No ripeness, no resilience, no reward. He clasps his hands carefully, but instead of praying, he wills his throat to close, his saliva to run dry. It’s no use. Despite all his best efforts, the host melts and slips softly away.

Shaken, he mumbles insensibly, uncovers the chalice and sweeps the powdery crumbs from the paten into the sacred cup. His hand stings terribly. He drinks shallowly from the Precious Blood, raising the spotless cloth to wipe any trace of his lips from the rim.

At long last he removes the ciborium from the tabernacle and lifts its arched lid, exposing the hosts for the Communion of the faithful. The moment of veneration is fleeting.
Ciborium
, he thinks, from the Greek for “the seed cup of a flower.” Reaching inside, his scalded fingers begin to throb.

R
at Creek ran deep the year August turned thirteen, rising up in its gully to form more of a river than Fairview had ever known. Just where the muddy turn of it came snaking into town, the water pooled to meet a flat outcropping of rock. Normally good for nothing, the rock made a natural pier, a black magnet for teenage boys.

August could hear them from where he sat sinking into the old horsehair loveseat his mother had finally relinquished to the porch. Their sound splashed up out of the coulee and washed toward him across the side field—the laughter boyish, cresting at times into a squeal or an abandoned yelp, then shifting to something deeper, a bellowed threat, the tried-on shout of a man. August listened to them day after day, poring over the latest book he’d borrowed from the church office, all the time telling himself he couldn’t possibly care less.

Then one day—a day so hot he felt the bare soles of his feet would ignite—he stood and pivoted toward their swimming sound. He knew what awaited him. As far back as he could remember, he’d been resolving to give up trying to fit in.

There were six of them, all around August’s age. He watched them from behind the old willow that had its roots spread out crazily down the bank. They were jumping in one after the other—cannonballs, scissor-legs, awkward, splashy dives—disappearing and bobbing back, stroking hard for the outcropping and hauling themselves out, as though there were no pleasure to be had in the water, but only in breaking its surface, in feeling it rush up around you and swallow your yelling head. From where August was standing, they made a circle of sorts, their brown bodies rotating in a wheel.

Until one of them chanced to look up.

“Hey!” The boy’s fat finger rose to inform. “It’s him. It’s that son of a
bitch.”

Burnt necks swivelled.

“What’cha doin’ out, sonny?” said another. “Your mama got a
gentleman caller
?”

Yes, thought August, your father. Didn’t speak it, though, kept his tongue. He’d learned long ago there was no right answer, just as he’d learned they couldn’t chase him if he could force himself never to run, or that it was no fun for them to beat on something that wouldn’t fight back and wouldn’t even cry.

Now it was almost always just words, and even those lacked their former force. As little boys they had understood how wrong, how downright evil it was for a woman—no matter how lovely, and even then they knew she was—for a woman with no husband to receive
paying
gentlemen in her home. Now those same boys could feel manhood beginning to colour their blood, and the change made them not so sure. Some of the wilder ones made it their
business to pass close by Aggie’s place on their way fishing. Some even stole into her backyard to slide silk stockings from the line—stockings they would press to their faces, even to their bare bellies, once they were safe in their beds.

Still, the
son
of a woman like that—

They left off jumping into the creek. When the last boy hauled himself out dripping, they spread out in a line, hardening their bodies to make certain August understood.

They were like one of those cut-out garlands, six little figures in a row. August looked down through the spaces between their legs and saw the water, six muddy triangles of cool. Maybe, he thought slowly, if I walk upstream a ways, I’ll chance upon a better place.

He turned to go, but instead of the wide field his eyes met three big, bare chests—more brown, rippling triangles, only these were turned tip-down. Two of the men had soiled undershirts hanging like tails from the hips of their pants, but the middle one had his tied in a headdress, Lawrence of Arabia—style. Their hands and heavy work-boots were black with grease. Railway men. August stole a look at their hard faces, figuring the middle one had been to see Aggie for sure.

“Ain’t you goin’ in, boy?” Arabia’s hand came down on August’s thin shoulder, black hair steaming from the pit of his arm.

“I—I—” August stammered.

“C’mon.” The hand spun him lightly, and then August was slipping down the bank with Arabia right behind him, to where the other two were already stripping to their shorts. Arabia reached up to tighten the shirt’s knot, then
unbuckled his belt, motioning for August to do the same. Together they stepped out of their pants, and then the four of them tossed their clothing onto the bushes and walked out onto the coveted face of the rock. The boys broke and parted like a gate. Arabia’s two buddies strode through like it was their birthright and jumped in tandem, throwing up a watery wall. But Arabia was different. He took his time, nodded hello to both sides, then pressed the palms of his hands together and followed his fingertips through the air, parting the surface with his nails and sliding into the creek like a knife through chocolate cream.