Mercy of St Jude (6 page)

Lucinda, frantic, called for a taxi to take her home. When it pulled up, Sadie Griffin got out of the front seat.

“Whatever is the matter, girl? You looks awful,” said Sadie, standing in such a way that Lucinda could not get past her. “Bad news from the doctor?”

“Please, Sadie…”

“It's not Dermot?”

“Derm? No, he's fine.”

“Your father? Mercedes?”

Lucinda blew out a sharp breath. “Beth's gone to town in an ambulance.”

She pushed her way past Sadie and into the car. Still, Sadie held the door open.

Lucinda yanked the door from Sadie's hands and told the driver to hurry. He sped off, leaving a spray of gravel behind him, along with Sadie clutching her bag on the curb.

Once home, Lucinda jumped into the truck. It wouldn't start, just as it hadn't that morning, and Dermot wasn't around to coax it back to life. Lucinda flung the keys out the window and across the yard.

Annie, who had been watching from the doorway, came out. “What's up?”

“It's Beth. She's in trouble.”

Annie shrugged, at fifteen more brazen than ever. “So what else is new?”

Lucinda turned on her. “Don't you care your sister's baby might be dead? She's gone to St. John's in an ambulance and all you can do is mouth off.” She glared at Annie. “You're worse than Mercedes, God help you.”

Annie couldn't move. She couldn't think past the fact that Beth really was in trouble and her mother thought she didn't care. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean it.”

“I just don't know how to stop it from happening.” Lucinda made a strange sound, somewhere between a moan and a cry. “I got to go after her.”

Annie remembered Lucinda's pregnancy two years before, how sad her mother had been when she'd returned from the hospital empty-handed. She wished her father was home but he'd left two days earlier on one of Murphy's boats and would be away at least a week. And Callum had gone to St. John's with Mercedes the day before.

“Maybe we can borrow Uncle Frank's car?” Annie suggested. “I'll go with you.”

Frank Hann was a miserly sort, but there must have been something in Lucinda's voice when she called him. Within minutes, he was there with the car.

Lucinda drove off, her foot heavy on the gas. Annie watched through the passenger window as the jagged landscape whipped by, the tough evergreens interspersed with rocky outcroppings and barren patches of land. In the distance, a dense fog hid the horizon. Annie hugged her coat closer against the fall air whistling through the crannies of her uncle's old car.

As she walked into the hospital, Annie thought she understood why Mercedes refused to enter one. The waiting room smelled of body fluids and antiseptic, of sickness and death. She tried not to breathe too deeply.

She watched her mother's fingers flying over her black rosary beads, her lips whispering feverishly. Annie had knelt through hundreds of rosaries, pretending to pray, angry with her mother for making her do something Annie professed to be a waste of time. Now, she put her hands together.

Finally, Luke was walking towards them, his face drenched with tears.

“Oh, dear God. Luke, what happened?” The fear jumping out of Lucinda's voice terrified Annie. “How's Beth? How's the baby?”

Luke stared numbly at her. “Beth is okay, but the baby…he's gone.” Then he whispered in a voice that didn't quite believe what it was saying, “He's dead.”

Annie's skin shot up with goose bumps. Beth's baby would not have been baptized and so would not be free of original sin. Annie envisioned an endless line of tiny souls drifting within a vast empty space, stuck in Limbo, hanging around with no place to go, no home, no fluffy clouds, no Jesus to belong to.

Lucinda sat Luke next to Annie. “Stay with him, okay. I've got to go see Beth.”

Lucinda wasn't gone long when Annie heard a noise down the corridor. When she looked up, she was surprised to see Mercedes hurrying towards them.

“How is everything?” Mercedes' voice was rushed and anxious. “How's Beth?”

Annie tried to speak but instead started to cry. Mercedes touched her cheek and gestured for her to move over. Then she put her arms around Luke and held him.

Annie imagined Lucinda holding Beth and comforting her just as Mercedes did Luke. Annie could not remember the last time she'd felt her mother's arms around her.

There was a whispering sound next to her. She glanced over.

“Dear God, forgive me,” her aunt prayed. “I am so sorry, so very sorry.”

In that moment Annie forgot her own misery. Never before had she seen such a picture of pure grief.

The hospital that serviced St. Jude was located in Harbourville.
Many citizens of St. Jude, Sadie Griffin included, felt
the facility should have been located in their town, which, at almost
four thousand people, was the largest in the area. They resented
having to travel four miles for medical attention. Sadie,
who had never driven a car, did not like having to spend three
dollars on a taxi to have a doctor examine her feet.

Witch! God, I'm some sick of her. Sick to the death.

Sadie slammed her purse onto the chair.

Frigging Lucinda. Practically knocked me over yanking that car door shut. I hadn't grabbed that fence post, I'd been face down in the dirt.

She flung her coat on top of her purse. “Make you sick.”

“What's wrong?”

Sadie spun around. Gerard was studying at the kitchen table.

“Frigging Hanns.”

What's he doing home?

“Oh Ma, they're okay.”

“Okay? How can you say that, the way them brothers acts? Picking on you all the time, calling you names. Especially that no-good Aiden.”

Little prick, shouting at my boy, “Queery Gerry, your father's a fairy.” And then hurling rocks at him. Gerard got the mark on his lip to this day.

“Sure Ma, that's years ago. I don't pay him any mind nowadays.” “Like to pay him a piece of mine. Just like I did that Frank with his hand in the collection plate. I told Father, indeed I did, but he said there wasn't much he could do, my word against Frank's.”

A Griffin's word against a Hann's more like it, I felt like saying. But sure it weren't Father's fault, I knows that.

“Ah, what odds about them,” Sadie said. “Why you home, anyway? Thought you had work to do for Herself while she's away.”

Sadie knew it would annoy him to hear her refer to Mercedes as Herself. She didn't care. She'd had quite enough of the Hanns for one day.

“She left me a note saying I better study for my test instead. She paid me anyway, said it was a bonus or something. She's really good to me, you know, Ma.”

“A right martyr.”

If he starts in about what a saint Mercedes is, I'll throw up. I'll lose that lovely piece of meatloaf I had for lunch before that frigging Lucinda tried to rip the hand off me. It'll go right down the toilet. It really will, I swear to God.

“… don't think I should take that money, though,” Gerard was saying.

“That one got lots of it, she won't be missing a few dollars.”

“I don't know how she even knew about the test.”

“Must have been that Annie told her. You're in the same grade, sure.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Gerard said, looking down at his books.

What's he gone so red in the face for?

Sadie laid her hand on his forehead. “You okay?”

“Just hungry.” He shifted so that his head moved from under her hand. “Where were you?”

“Over at the hospital getting them bunions looked at.”

“Can they fix them?”

“Huh? Oh, the bunions. Never mind them. They were just after taking that Beth Hann off in an ambulance. That young Annie might not get to be a aunt after all.”

Hope he's not coming down with something. Can't always tell with the forehead.

He brushed the hair out of his eyes. “Why were you so mad when you came in?”

Sadie remembered Lucinda's pinched face and how she'd pulled the door from Sadie's hand. “Nothing important. Let me get you something to eat and a cup of tea.”

He smiled at her. “Thanks, Ma.”

Look at that face. Them lovely white teeth, them big brown eyes. Most handsomest smile I ever did see. Hit the jackpot with him, I did.

“That'd be great,” he said. “I'm starving.”

Sadie smoothed his hair, letting her hand linger on the back of his head. He didn't pull away this time.

To hell with the Hanns.

1999

Gerry looks at his watch. It's only ten thirty. He puts the lone teabag into the pot and pours boiling water over it. As he reaches for the cups, he feels his mother's hand catch his arm as she staggers slightly on her way from the bathroom.

“Steady on there, Ma,” he says, putting his arm around her.

She squints up at him, then pokes at his lip, as if the action might make the scar disappear. She'd been furious when she'd first seen the cut. Gerry hadn't told her that Aiden Hann was responsible; Sadie, as always, had her own sources. He hadn't told her it was partly his own fault either, even though he suspected she would have been proud of him. It was the morning before the Halloween party at school, and Aiden, who made a habit of picking on anyone he deemed beneath him in the pecking order, started in - was Gerry dressing up as a fairy, how many costumes did he have in his closet, did he want a mop so he could come as his mother - calling Sadie a fishwife and a charwoman and getting increasingly revved up as people started to pay attention. Gerry usually ignored the taunts and left wherever he was as fast as he could, but that day he'd had enough. He stopped, turned around and smiled directly at Aiden. “Better than being a th-th-th-thief,” he said. Aiden's face went purple. He bent down, grabbed a rock and whizzed it straight at Gerry's head. Before Gerry could get over the shock of having his lip slit open, Pat stepped in and hauled Aiden away.

“What were we talking about?” Sadie says now, rubbing her chin. “Right, Father James. Yes, indeed, fine man he is. He'll be doing a baptism soon too. That Cathy Green went and had the baby.”

Cathy Green is not his mother's favourite person. To start with, she's Annie's best friend; on top of that, she's Violet Green's daughter. But Gerry has always liked Cathy. For a while, she was the only one who knew about him and Annie. Annie. He's finally seen her again. If only it hadn't taken Mercedes' death to make it happen.

“Cathy's life sure has changed,” he says. “A year ago she was still going out with Cyril. Now she's a mother and married to someone else.”

“Poor son of a bitch, he is,” says Sadie. “Didn't take that Cathy long to get knocked up. Probably afraid he'd get away too. Cyril's the lucky one there, I tell you.”

“Come on, Ma, don't. Anyway, everything go okay?”

“Baby's still in hospital.” She wrestles with the lid on the beets.

“What happened? Did you talk to Mrs. Green?”

“You knows that Violet. Thinks her daughter's the first ever gave birth—”

“Ma!” He takes the jar from her and opens it. “What's wrong with the baby?”

“Ah, nothing. Low blood, bad blood, something like that. Out soon, I'm sure.”

“I hope it's okay. That'd be awful if anything happened.”

“Yes, awful. Unless it's soft in the head. Or retarded.”

“I mean, how do you ever get over it when something happens to your baby?”

“Go on, they're usually fine, sure. Unless you're a Hann.” She proceeds to cut thick slices from a fresh loaf of bread.

“Dead babies all over the place. Hanns thinks only Griffins deserves dead babies, or retarded ones.”

Gerry notices that she has managed, as she so often does, to twist the conversation around to the Hanns. And he, as he so often does, ignores it. “Mrs. Green must be some worried about them.”

Sadie grunts. “I was there the other day and that Violet was on the phone for ages, talking to the nurse and the doctor and heaven only knows who, probably the priest and the nuns, God himself even. Swear no one else ever had a problem. Yapping away while I scrubbed her dirt. Blathering on about that Cathy. Thought she'd never shut up. I said nothing, kept my head down the toilet and did my job. Let her rattle on. Don't know for hard times, that one don't.”

“Don't be like that, Ma.” His mother can really act the bitch when she's in the mood, or when she has a few drinks in. And even though he knows she's a good person deep down, she can be hard to take when he's so tired.

“Like what?” Sadie throws out her hands in righteous innocence, still holding the oversized bread knife. “I'm only just saying what's the truth. That crowd don't think of nobody but theirself.”

They're only words, no sticks, no stones, just words, he tells himself. Close your mind and eat something and go to bed out of it just like always. But he can't. Does it have to do with seeing Annie again, he wonders, with being reminded of his mother's role in what happened? Is that why he is suddenly so attuned to, and irritated, by her, despite the fact that he has long forgiven her that role?

“They're good people, Ma. You might not like them, but that's no reason to go around slagging them all the time.”

“Hah, good people my arse.”

“Please, would you just—”

Her free hand springs up. “Don't be telling me, mister. I knows them way better than you. Been putting up with the likes of them all my frigging life. I got the goods on that lot. Hanns are no better than us.”

“Hanns? I thought we were talking about Cathy Green.”

“Greens, Hanns, no difference to me. Thinks they're so good, looking down their noses at us. Butter wouldn't melt. Still I don't hold no grudge, no sir, not me. Live and let live is my motto. Do the right thing by your neighbour, the right thing be done back to you. How hard is that? Lucinda, spiteful bitch. Leaving her own family off the invite list. So we're not kissing cousins. No reason to snub her snotty nose at me. No, sir. Keeps on doing it, though, again and again. Bloody Hanns.”