Mercy (20 page)

Castor hears the screams long before he can make out Renny’s house. Shrill and murderous—it’s Elsa, all right.

“Uncle Castor,” he says giddily, trying it on for size, then goes shaky, remembering his sister-in-law’s words, her lips pink and poisonous at his ear.
Look, it’s Uncle Castor. Run!

He stops dead in his tracks. Almost turns back but for the whiskey’s liquid hope. Start all over, he thinks fuzzily, just one big happy clan. He’ll hold the baby in his arms,
safe as can be, the way he held Renny the night he caught him from the sky.

He enters the yard now, reeling past the garden, moonlight down the rows and not a solitary weed to be seen. He breaks off a sprig of mint for his breath.

Renny’s house is nothing like the tinderbox they were both born in. It’s nothing like the series of yellow-papered boarding-house rooms the kid grew up in either, or the original shack Castor knocked together when they first arrived to claim their mother’s boggy land. His brother’s house is solid. The Devil himself couldn’t blow it down.

The front door’s hard under Castor’s fist. He hammers twice, but the sound gets swallowed up in Elsa’s hollering, so he tries the handle, finding it unlocked. Renny’s pacing by the hearth, almost running, tearing tiny laps around the braided rug.

“Little man!” Castor shouts, and Renny freezes, eyes lifting, jaw dropping down.

“Castor, what the—”

“Nnnnnaaaaagh!” Elsa bellows from somewhere down the hall, behind a bedroom door. Renny winces, lunging at Castor and spinning him on the spot, pushing him like a wheelbarrow out the gaping front door. He shuts it quickly after them, his eyes fixing on Castor’s ragged pant legs and bog-pickled boots. A roll-your-own twitches in his fingers, smoked halfway. He holds it out without speaking.

Castor takes the smoke shyly. “Little nipper, eh?”

“Ren-nnny!” Elsa’s voice rattles the windows. “Nnn-GAAAAAAHHH!”

Renny shrinks in the frame of the door. “How’d you know?” he asks finally, still not looking up.

“How’d I know?” Castor tries out a laugh. “You know me, little brother. How do you think?”

“RENNY!” Elsa’s voice could cut timber. “Is somebody there? Who’s there?!”

Renny reaches behind him to open the door a crack. “Nobody!” he shouts over his shoulder.

Castor lowers his gaze, Renny laying his overtop, so the two sightlines cross somewhere around their knees.

“Little man a daddy.” Castor chuckles, the sound falling all over itself in his throat. Then he zeroes in on Renny’s hand, the way it’s holding the door almost closed, with such a grip on the knob it looks as though the knuckles are in danger of breaking through.

“It’s all right, Ren.” Castor turns slowly. He stumbles on the first step but catches himself. It’s suddenly terribly important that he keep his feet, that he not let his little brother see him fall.

Renny catches up with him at the foot of the gravel drive. He’s got his hands behind his back like they’re tied there, a half-crazy smile on his pointed face. He pulls the left hand first, holds out a fat bottle of brandy, three-quarters full. “It’s all we got in the house,” he says sheepishly. “You know,
medicinal.”

“Thanks.” Castor takes it with a shaky hand.

“There’s an old bur oak just outside the back fence,” Renny says quickly. “You check it on Fridays. I’ll hang a little something up there, not too high. Fridays, okay?”

Castor nods.

Renny swings out the other hand. Dangling from his
fingers, a pair of tiny yellow boots. Castor’s eyes fill up and swim. “Elsa knitted ‘em,” says Renny. “You keep ’em. A keepsake, like.”

Castor holds out a crooked finger. Renny hangs the booties there by their laces, then turns to the house, letting out a strangled little laugh. “She’ll have a bird when she finds ’em missing.”

That boy could always run like the wind. By the time Castor can lift his head, Renny’s gone.

Mathilda comes to on an iron cot, surrounded by shrouded forms.
The orphanage
. The rest of her life never happened. She’s a child again, miserable in her narrow bed. “Not wanted,” she whimpers to the shadow who mops her brow.

“Nonsense,” the shadow replies. “All God’s children are wanted.”

Then pain. Mathilda panics, struggling against a dozen wiry arms.

“Lie back!” a superior voice commands, and she does, collapsing into a stupor of tears. The straw mattress jabs her, and for the briefest of moments Mathilda understands. She’s having the baby, the shadows are nuns. Her blood runs cold. They’re a different order—simple veils instead of bonnet-like coifs, brown habits girded with rope—but in the end it’s all the same. A circle of staring virgins watching her open wide. They’ll see the child come out, undeniable proof that she let it climb in. She tries in
vain to close her legs, all clarity washed away in a breaker of pain.

“Forgive me, Reverend Mother,” says a gentle voice. “I’ve seen her before, in Mercy. I believe she’s the butcher’s wife.”

Mathilda howls.

“That’s it,” says the Superior, “push.
Push!”

Her eyes wild and uncomprehending, Mathilda clenches her teeth and bears down.

“Is that true, now?” The old nun cups her hands over Mathilda’s bare knees. “Are you the butcher’s wife?”

Mathilda’s eyes bug out huge in her crimson face. “AAAARRRRGH!” she bellows as the baby crowns. “Father Day!” she screams, passing the head, and with the next breath, “AUGUST!”

The Reverend Mother’s face pops up dark and knowing from between Mathilda’s legs. “Good girl. Head’s out now. Shoulders next.”

Mathilda strains hard, feels it slip from her body and relaxes, spiralling into space. The old nun clears the mouth and cuts the cord, then lays the bloodied newborn in a waiting towel.

“Keep the child warm,” she says briskly, “the mother quiet.” She wads a towel up between Mathilda’s legs, then washes her knotted hands with alarming speed, drying them in her habit’s folds. “Pray,” she instructs her charges. “I’ll be back just as soon as I can.”

O
nly when he’s back in Mercy—when he’s pulled up and braked out front of the rectory he calls home, cut the lights to let in the dark and cut the engine to let in the quiet—only then does August fully realize his mother is dead. It’s as though the past days’ events have been following him in a convoy, and are now piling into his back end with impact after impact—screaming rubber, wailing steel, exploding glass.

Wreckage.

The night drive there along poorly kept roads, this time feeling more than one furred body flatten beneath his wheels—seeing no deer, though, not a single, solitary deer. He hadn’t returned Father Felix’s call, knowing just how the old priest would put it—not a word of reproach, just the simple truth—
she’s gone
.

The top half of the casket stood open to display a powdery, cotton-packed approximation of her face. The once full lips were painted candy-floss pink, a little-girl shade Aggie wouldn’t have been caught dead in—except she was. August never got a look at the space where her breasts had been. The funeral parlour had fitted her up with a stuffed bra.

Father Felix departed from tradition, choosing to read first from Judges—Samson eating honey from the lion’s carcass—
out of the strong came forth sweetness
. Next came the Gospel of Saint Luke, how Christ let the woman who was a sinner cry on His feet and dry them with her hair, then kiss and anoint them with salve from an alabaster box. “ ‘Many sins are forgiven her,’ “read the old priest, ‘ “because she hath loved much.’ “The final passage came from Saint John, Christ saving the adulterous woman who was to be stoned. The Saviour stooping to write with His finger in the dust, then straightening, saying,
He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her
. Then, almost casually, stooping to write again.

Father Felix spoke the service softly, as there was only August to hear. Even the organist had begged off with a headache, so when the two priests sang Aggie’s favourite hymn, their voices rose unaccompanied to the vault.

Stabat Mater dolorosa

Juxta crucem lacrimosa—

August knew the English well
—at the Cross her station keeping, stood the mournful mother weeping
—but translating it to himself didn’t help. The sound was all he could understand. Stabat Mater.
Stabat
.

He bashes his forehead three times hard against the steering wheel, then slumps against it and finally weeps, crying first like a man, each sob something broken or torn, then like a child, surrendering, letting it rattle him like a window in a storm.

He wakes to a muted hammering, lifts his sore head slowly, orienting it toward the sound. Through the passenger-side
window he can make out the glow of the flagstone path. Beyond the last stone, a slight figure, arms up over its head, pounding hard on the rectory door. A moment more and a panicked Mrs. Stitchen yanks it open wide, flooding the front stoop with light. A covered head, dark cloth falling in folds to the ground. August leans out across the empty seat beside him and rolls down the window for a better look, as though the glass was affecting his vision, somehow warping a normal human silhouette into the shape of a nun.

He sits back, confused. It is, of course, one of the Poor Clares from the monastery just south of St. Antoine. But their visiting chaplain is Father Beaubien. Perhaps something’s happened to the old Franciscan, or perhaps an extraordinary confessor is required. Either way, August has no choice but to step out of the car.

Mrs. Stitchen points over the nun’s shoulder, singling him out like a suspect in a lineup. “Oh, Father,” she calls anxiously, “you’re back—”

The nun whirls, her veil flying out to flap in Mrs. Stitchen’s face. “Father Day.” Her voice carries like the tolling of a bell. She hurries forward to meet him halfway on the path, each of them landing on a flagstone like a frog on a pad. “Father,” she says in a low voice, “there is a woman come to us at the cloister.”

“Yes?”

“A woman with child.” She looks up into his face, her eyes sweeping left to right, as if over a printed page.

His mouth works hard to make a sound.

“I delivered the infant,” says the Reverend Mother. “A healthy girl.” She hesitates before adding, “The mother is asking for you.”

The sound he finally manages approximates no known word.

She reaches up for his shoulder with a hooklike hand. “She’s in danger, Father.” Any doubt she may have had dissolves in the look on his face. “Take the northbound road out of town, it’s the first turnoff on the right once you’re through the bog.”

“The bog?” he stammers. “But what—how will I know—”

“The trees change.” She fixes him with a loaded stare. “They start looking as though they’re getting enough to eat.”

He nods dumbly.

Her hand turning him now. “I’ll send the doctor on after you.” Looking down at her sandals, she releases her grip. “I’ll give you a head start, Father, fifteen minutes before I go to the husband.”

August breaks for the car, no thought for what might be required of him—holy water, holy oil, holy bread. He goes empty-handed, an ordinary man.

The baby mews softly, bandaged to Mathilda’s belly with a length of torn and knotted sheet. She can’t trust the bicycle—it’s a wild animal beneath her, her blood darkening its spindly back. Besides, she can see headlights down the long lick of road. They’re coming for her. She dumps the bike in the rushes and lumbers into the raggedy trees.

August brakes late, spraying gravel up the monastery doors. He leaps from the car, hauls on the bell rope and hauls again, then mashes his face to the carved emblem, his eye too close to comprehend its form. He falls in when the door opens, a young sister half-catching him, softening the blow his knees receive.

“Oh, Father,” she wails, “I only went for more towels, she was bleeding so, and—oh, oh, she’s got the baby—oh, Father, I can’t see how she could have ridden it, but the bicycle’s gone!”

August doesn’t waste time answering. He struggles to his feet, takes the steps at a leap, hits the ground at a run. The Plymouth is too cumbersome, too unfeeling—he’ll use his own two legs to chase her down. When the cassock cuts into his stride, he tears it off, hammering on in T-shirt and trousers while it soaks up filmy water in the ditch.