Mercy (13 page)

T
wo hours before Vera Nickels’s funeral is due to begin, August still can’t decide on what to say. He hunches over a blank sheet, his long fingers choking the pen. He never liked the woman. There was something in her gaze that went clean through his skin and poked about, as though she were charting his innards, every darkness he harboured, memory and deed.

Still, there’s no denying she had a fierce devotion to the Church. He nods sharply and scrawls the word
fierce
.

What else? She looked after him for a time, grudgingly but well. Looked after Father Rock too, don’t forget, not to mention Mathilda.
Mathilda
. He hasn’t laid eyes on her since—since before he left her the note. Her ox of a husband took care of the funeral arrangements, saying softly, “The wife’s beside herself, I’m afraid. Thought it best to let her rest.” August kept the desk between them, and by the end his hands had stopped shaking. There was nothing in Thomas Rose’s rather humbled demeanour to suggest he knew.
Best to let her rest
. But surely she’ll be at the funeral, pale and delicate in black, gazing up at him from the mourning pew.

He catches himself. The point is, the housekeeper took excellent care of her niece. By all accounts she went to a great deal of trouble to locate her older brother’s abandoned girl. August scribbles
abandoned
alongside
fierce
.

He’s distracted by a sound, something brushing through the fine-boned saplings outside. It would be only normal to look out, but the office window is set too high, designed to afford illumination only and not access to the countless diversions of the world.

Again the brushing. It’s almost human, only gentler, more at home among the trees. He pushes back quietly from the page. Steps first onto the chair’s creaking seat, then up onto the flat face of the desk. From its edge he can see perfectly—the long window divided in three, its middle pane centred on a white-tailed buck. He holds his breath. The animal is unspeakably handsome, its hide both glistening and dull, as though it were cut from still-wet clay.

It lowers its velvety antlers to a sapling poplar’s greenish bark, begins rubbing in short, nodding strokes. The thin tree trembles, shedding a yellow cascade. Tine by tine the fine brown velvet wears away, hanging crimson about the buck’s ears. Skinning itself, thinks August, a chill skipping along his spine.

The tree bark darkens. The buck’s true antlers emerge.

Mathilda sends Thomas to the funeral without her and burrows down sick in their bed. She’s not faking, either.
Every peal of St. Mary’s bell lodges like a hatchet in her skull, her gut churns bilious and sour.

She tells herself it’s the sin that’s making her ill—so much easier than facing his rejection, the death of their newborn love. She can’t even confess to make it better.
Bless me Father, for I had knowledge of you in the sacristy
. She squeezes her eyes shut. If only she could go to another church, one where the priest could still speak to her in the anonymous voice of God.

She could invent a friend in a nearby town, or perhaps even a reunion at the orphanage. The mere thought of travel is enough to exhaust her. In any case, to confess would be to wipe her soul clean, and isn’t the stain of him better than nothing?

The summer of August’s seventeenth year, the sky opened to hammer down hailstones the size of eggs. Broken-necked chickens went down scratching in their yards. All around Fairview, cattle bled from their backs, their skulls—one lost a big brown eye. Dogs and horses ran mad while the crops lay down and died.

August was caught out in it, wandering the fields. The hail tore his clothes, cut his scalp, then the backs of his hands when he laced them together to form a helmet of flesh and bone. He did the only thing he could—bent his body at the waist, threw his long legs out in front of him and ran. More than once he went down in a heap on the
ruined wheat, unable to keep his balance among the icy stones. When he reached the road, he found them bouncing, flying back up at him from the ground. He pounded on with his mouth clamped hard.

In town, every windshield had caved. The streets were deserted, not a sound but the thunder of hopping hail. Hands still glued to his head, August passed doorway after doorway—Thompson’s Fine Furnishings, the Ideal Café, the Sons of England Lodge—skidding onward to St. Paul’s.

The hailstones were like giant marbles on the church steps—he had to go down on all fours to make it up. Shuffling forward on his knees, he reached out for the door. His bleeding fingers on its handle worked like throwing a switch. Just as suddenly as it had begun, the hail came shattering to a stop.

Silence. He hauled himself up slowly, turned and saw the pavement strewn with glassy, steaming stones. Faces came out of doorways, then feet, stepping gingerly, as though testing the solidity of the ground. August lifted his eyes. The sky was torn clean, almost blinding.

Father Felix was nowhere to be found. The church was deserted, yet August assumed his customary place, sliding quietly into the last pew. After feeling himself all over to tally up cuts and pulpy spots that would bruise, he eased down to the kneeler and began muttering whatever came to mind. An Our Father followed by a few Hail Marys. Several Glory Be’s. He even got partway through the Litany of the Most Precious Blood but couldn’t remember what came after “Blood of Christ, shed profusely in the Scourging.” Having run out of words, he reluctantly opened his eyes.

The light amazed him—shafts of it mid-air, pools on the floorboards or trapped among the pews, great unnamed shapes shimmering on the walls. Crimson lapped over cobalt, gold over living green. He knelt long enough to witness its movement, a glacial benediction blessing every surface it stained.

The window above his right shoulder depicted the feeding of the five thousand. He craned his aching neck and saw the scene for what it was—the crowd so many hungry shards, the shoreline broken, even Christ Himself a collage. Strips of lead held the elements in place, but it was the mounting, the holding up that allowed meaning to shine through.

Aggie was curled face-in on the parlour sofa when he got home.

“Where have you been?” Her voice came weakly through the cushions.

“Out.”

She rolled over. Her eyes were swollen, the greasy black pencil melted halfway down her cheeks. “August!” She scrambled to her feet. “Who did this? Who?!”

“What?” Then he realized what he must look like—black hair matted with blood, shirt ripped, skinny arms mottled pink and blue. “Nobody,” he assured her, “I got caught out in it.”

“What?” Her hands on his face like a blind woman’s.

“The hail. I got caught in the hail.”

She felt down over his sharp shoulders and squeezed his arms.

“Ow!”

She let her hands drop, stepped back and burst into tears.

“Hey,” he said, bewildered, “it’s okay. I’m okay.”

“N-no.” She backed up to the sofa and lowered herself slowly, wincing when her bottom touched down. She cried hard then, shoulders jumping, face in her hands.

August had seen that wince before. She had trouble walking after some of them, let alone sitting down. “Did something—happen?” he asked. “Did somebody—”

“Get me Our Lady.” She pointed toward the high corner shelf, then sat up a little straighter and started wiping at her eyes. August obeyed. The foot-high porcelain madonna was heavy. He needed both hands to lift Her down.

“Give Her here.” Aggie’s face was a streaky mask now. She looked up at him through the eyeholes, one hand grasping the Virgin firmly about the waist while the other felt up under the ceramic blue folds of Her robe. The stopper came out with a kissing sound. Then money, a rush of coins carrying bills with them, all colours, each folded in a tidy square. Aggie caught and pooled it in the lap of her dress. “I’ve been saving,” she said quietly.

August stared. It couldn’t have been easy. They’d been through the same lean years everybody else had—Aggie accepting a sack of cabbage at times, or a couple of fresh-killed chickens—back when the whole top layer of the prairie seemed to be blowing off, the two of them sweeping and sweeping, stripping the beds daily to shake out the filth.

She laid the hollow statue on the glittering pile, reached up and took hold of her son by his wrists. “This is for you,” she said, “so you can get out.”

He hadn’t known until that moment.

“Mother—” He knelt down to tell her, knowing it would be the happiest day of her life. “Mother,” he said again, “I’ve been called.”

August finds it by smell. Having unlocked St. Mary’s great front doors from the inside, he pushes them out into the morning. A foul sweetness hits him full in the face. Something dead in the bushes. He knows the odour well, having grown up where the land and all its creatures met the fringe of a prairie town.

He shakes his head. There should be someone to look after such things, a proper caretaker, not some once-a-week gardener to run the lawn down to scrub and hack mercilessly at the gnarled old grape. Certainly the priest has enough to concern himself with. Still, there’s no getting past it—the reek of death is no fit aroma for the stairway to the house of the Lord. He pinches his nose and descends.

Three steps into the caraganas he parts a bushy clump and draws back. It’s formless under a faceted blanket of flies—formless, that is, but for the points of two chipped and yellowed horns. Disgust bottoming into horror, he tears a leafy switch and swats at it, seed pods rattling a fine black rain. The flies lift in a greasy cloud. Skinned of its hide, the goat’s head is somehow both more and less human. The eyes are wide open, one staring whole, the other pecked to a jelly. Both are raw about the rims, as though irritated by a flood of tears. Something’s
eaten a half-moon from the upper lip, exposing the stumps of an animal sneer. It’s the last thing August sees before the flies regroup in a darkly jewelled mass.

Around him the bush grows murky, confused. August sits down hard, raking his fingers through feathery leaves on the way. Only one man in town would have a goat’s head lying about—certainly only one who could skin it with such skill.
He knows
.

In seminary they studied the faithful of the world. To his amazement August learned of practising Catholics who, though they venerated the Holy Virgin and Her Son, went about their lives in the Old Testament way. These were the kind of men who left the heads of livestock to say they had called. August hammers at his forehead with the heel of his hand.
Keep thee far from the man that hath power to kill
.

The butcher knows, all right. What other possible explanation?

One
. A thought like a voice.
One other explanation, far worse. One other with an affinity for goats
.

Dread bubbles up from the soil around him. August sniffs his sleeve, his fingers, finds the head’s stench clinging to him like smoke. With no thought for who might see him, he scrambles to his feet and explodes from the bush, taking the church steps like a man possessed.

Castor’s tried several vantage points over the years, but the alder thicket is the best by far. It’ll stay dense enough to hide him until at least mid-October, and it’s on a little rise, so he
can see all three outbuildings, a couple of boxcars and a good portion of the platform.

He’s been waiting for over an hour. He doesn’t need much, just a glimpse, enough to assure him his little brother’s alive and well. He wouldn’t be fool enough to approach Renny. Not after what happened two years ago, the last time they came face to face.

The new station was only half built then, a timber framework open to the stars. Castor prowled around its periphery until he found what he’d come for—sacks of lime, cement and sand, piled like pillows on the ground. They turned out to be heavier than he’d bargained for, but the moment he spotted the wheelbarrow, it was problem solved—he could manage three of them now, even make it back for a second run.

He was bent over a sack of sand, grunting like a boar, when a pair of coverall legs appeared. Holding his hands out in surrender, he straightened. There wasn’t much light, but he would have known that silhouette anywhere. “Ren!” He let out a sigh. “You scared the pants offa me.”

“Shhh!” Renny crouched down, pulling Castor after him. “You been drinking?”

“Just maintenance.”

“Christ, Castor, what’re you doing here?”

“What’s it look like?” Castor grinned, but Renny wasn’t laughing. “I need a proper house, Ren, the shack’s fallin’ to shit.”

Renny turned his face away. After a moment he stood and hoisted a sack of cement onto the barrow. Then another. Then turned on his heel and ran.

Castor takes hold of the nearest alder’s trunk and closes his eyes. He opens them just as Renny steps out from the
station’s side door, lifting his hand in a wave. Castor turns his head in time to see his brother’s wife swing a silver lunch pail in reply. Elsa’s hands are purple up past the wrist. She must still be working at the jam factory, bringing Renny his lunch on her break.

It’s strange she hasn’t quit that place and had a kiddie by now. It made sense while Renny was overseas fighting, but the war’s been over for three years. Maybe she
can’t
have them. Castor flashes on the time his eye landed in their bathroom faucet. Elsa hunched over on the toilet, bawling. Down around her ankles, the crumpled panties fair ruined with blood.

Renny jumps down eagerly from the platform and meets up with her at the first switch. He ignores the lunch pail and takes hold of her hand, drawing close to whisper in her ear. She gives him a glare, but not a real one, because a second later she whispers something back. His face splits wide open in a grin, and he turns and pulls her after him, like a boy leading his mother to a bullfrog in the grass. When they come alongside an open boxcar, he lets go of her hand a moment, just long enough to vault himself up on deck. He reaches down to haul her up after him, the two of them disappearing behind the heavy sliding door.