Mercy (30 page)

It’s dark in the den, the loveseat less than comfortable, chosen solely for its pleasing lines. Lavinia’s head pulses with a sugar comedown. So she ate a few cookies, so what?

Her hand seeks the remote, bringing the wide-screen flashing to life. She mutes it instantly, flicking down through countless silent channels until her eye fastens on a head of golden hair.
Charlie’s Angels
. It’s one of the later ones, where Farrah’s gone off to drive race cars and Cheryl Ladd plays her little sister, Chris.

The angels are at a disco, probably trying to crack some kind of ring. Lavinia could turn the sound on and find out more, but it’s better this way, watching them without caring what they say.

Kate sweet-talks one of the bad guys at the bar, distracting him while Sabrina jimmies the lock on the club’s office
door. The brunettes may be necessary, but Chris is clearly the one to watch. She’s out on the dance floor, shaking her frilly red halter top and white hip-hugger jeans, plus a sweet slice of midriff between. Lavinia pokes an accusing finger deep into her own bloated middle. A
few
cookies? Try two dozen. And she nearly didn’t stop there—it had taken everything she had to leave the second batch cooling and come away.

Chris is doing the hustle on a pair of impossibly high-heeled strappies. Lavinia stares mournfully at the skeletal shoes, the feet inside them so supple, so
young
. Her thumb jumps to the power button and flicks it off.

Did you happen to know Jenny Swann?
The question hangs in the dark, just as it hung over the bed when Carl posed it the night before.

“Jenny Swann?” Lavinia rolled over to face him. “You mean Fran and Ted’s girl?”

He cleared his throat. “I believe so, yes.”

“Sure. She moved to Winnipeg after her mom died. Franny was never very strong—you know the kind of kid, always crying, always telling tales—” She halted, realizing she was dating herself. “How do you know Jenny?”

“What?” He was miles away. “Oh, she—she was a member of my congregation for a time.”

Lavinia’s mouth tastes suddenly sour. Pretty little Jenny Swann,
a member of his congregation
. And he just happens to want to build his dream camp outside her hometown? She nibbles a thumbnail. The VCR clock shows 2:23, but it doesn’t matter—Paula hardly ever sleeps. Lavinia gropes for the phone, hitting four on the speed-dial.

“Hello?” Paula answers after a single ring. She has the shopping channel on loud.

“Hi, it’s me.”

“Madame Mayor? Don’t you have to be up and running in a couple of hours?”

“Ha ha.”

“Hey, what’s all this I hear about a man?”

“What man?”

“Big shoulders, blond. Don’t play the innocent with me, Lavinia, I’ve known you too long.”

“Oh, him. He’s a colleague.”

“That what they’re calling it now?”

Lavinia controls herself. “Listen, Paula, what do you know about Jenny Swann?”

“Franny’s girl? She moved to Winnipeg.”

“I know that. What else?” No answer, save the babble of Paula’s set. “Paula?”

“Sorry, I had to write down a purchase number.”

“Paula—”

“Okay, okay. Jenny. Well, she was going to the university there, but I think she dropped out. Ted stopped talking to her when she joined some new church, but I guess she married a new daddy pretty quick. Might’ve even been the minister—I seem to remember something like that.”

“She’s—married?” Lavinia says softly.

“So I heard. That was a few years ago, though, so who knows. She didn’t make it home for Ted’s funeral, I know that. What’s all this about, anyway? Lavinia? Hello?”

Lavinia drops the receiver into its plastic depression. Begins worrying her blistered palate with her tongue.

The teacher had no idea how much her hands gave away, hanging orphaned between every pulled weed. The cordless phone lay beside her on the grass, bleached and silent as a bone.

Three dry days and the garden had cracked to show the lines along which it was made. Her hands on the hose, hairline fractures on their backs, too fine for detection by any but a caring eye. Fissures and faults. She was coming apart at the seams.

“He’s busy,” she whispered to herself. “He’s thinking of us,” she assured me. “We’re in his prayers.”

But it wasn’t nearly enough. She had to do something—anything—to take her mind off the phone.

So many words. The teacher had checked out an armload, her table swam with coloured books. She laid one open, then the next, pouring herself out over the text. Meanwhile, I drew feverishly, no longer obscuring my work with a jealous arm.

She was learning me. Reading a passage and glancing up, threading the printed line to my face. She knew the term for it now. Her face clouded over with case histories—the hopeless ones, those lost in a walking death, those given up on, locked away. Then brightness. Occupational therapy. Speech therapy. Results. I watched the tug-of-war play across her face.

—You have to catch them young.

—He said no doctors, he’ll take care of it.

—When? Time is of the essence, it says so right here.

—She’s not your child.

—But she needs help. You have to get started when they’re young, while their brains are still soft. Break new ground, sow heavily. If nothing grows, go back and break ground again.

—No doctors.

—That’s right, no doctors. But he didn’t say anything about a washed-up nurse.

She lowered herself to my level, reaching out to cup and capture my chin. It hurt, that tender insistence, her leading my gaze, lifting me to meet her eyes.

“Clare, look at me. Look at me, Clare. That’s good. No, look at me.”

Child overboard. Her irises expanded to meet the horizon. Everything she’d ever survived went bobbing past—casks and timber, floating chests. Her monsters brushed past me on their way up from the deep. I shut down. Flipped one eye inward, the other out. Hummed like a transformer until her grip slackened and fell away.

Sitting up in bed, Carl stretches his arms out and back, his fingertips grazing a bottle’s cool mouth. Startled, he twists and explores the wall further, finding rough mortar collars around neck after glassy neck.

“Castor set them like that for insulation,” Mary explains, drawing near. “Every bottle holds a little pocket of air.”

He nods, withdrawing his hand.

“It took him over a year to finish the place, but it’s still solid today. It gets a crack now and then, but nothing a chunk of moss can’t take care of. The red stuff works best. It looks nice, too, like the walls are smiling at you.”

“Sounds very—unique.”

“He liked to follow a line of bottles with his finger, listing them off—Empire aqua pints, Brandon Brewing green. Over here he made a flower, amber quarts for the petals, suncast for the centre, green for the stem. Up over your head there’s a dark green star. Those are Melcher’s Red Cross Gin.”

Carl does a quick calculation, figuring nine bottles of beer, four of spirits to an average square foot of wall. “He really drank them all?”

“Except for the patch over the door, they were his mother’s. I guess she kept her medicines in them, tonics and teas. The bottles were all different shapes back then. Castor drew pictures of them for me, taught me the names. Here.” She takes hold of his wrist and turns it, begins tracing an outline on the inside of his arm. “Shoo-fly flask,” she says slowly, her fingernail describing its corners and curves.

He holds dead still. She pauses for a moment between drawings, but it doesn’t help—he’s too distracted to follow a straight line, let alone discern one profile from the next.

“Pumpkin seed.”

Her overlapping trails begin to tickle, even to itch.

“Jo Jo.”

He finds himself imagining the shape of her, wondering how well she’s built.

A second week had passed, Preacher, and this time you hadn’t phoned. Artists have known longest—the body is nothing more than a collection of basic forms. Your absence was affecting my cohesion. I was in danger of disintegrating, of degenerating into cylinders and spheres.

I’d felt it before, that urge to be held in one piece.

The living-room rug was cocoa brown, the largest block of colour in the teacher’s house. I lay down and took up a corner, rolled myself snug as a bug.

The pressure was pure comfort, so much simpler than a circle of arms. I grew calm, began quietly to hum. Hm hm
hmmm
hmm, hm hm
hmm
. I chose your favourite, Preacher.
Rock of aaaaa-ges, cleft for me. Let me hide myself in theeeeee
.

Mary might have gone on to say more, if only the Reverend hadn’t become so unnervingly still. Before the change in him made her lay down his arm and retreat wordlessly to her chair, she’d been on the verge of telling the story behind those old bottles—how Castor had to sift through smouldering wreckage to retrieve them, singeing his fingers on the few that had somehow survived the blaze.

Fifteen years old and your parents charred to coal. It would’ve been enough to drive any boy to drink, but there was more—the burden of mixed blood, an infant brother
to raise. Castor got a job running so-called prescriptions for the Roseville Pharmacy and took to sipping along the way. That led to driving temperance beer into Saskatchewan, only most of it was the real thing dressed up pretty for church. Before long he was running cheap whiskey down south.

It kept Renny in food and clothes, even if they moved around too much to keep him in school. Kept Castor in liquor, too. By the time Prohibition ended, he was a hopeless drunk. There was only one thing to do. The two of them found their way to Mercy and claimed what their mother had always told them was unlivable land.

Maybe, if Mary could tell it just right, the Reverend would listen, maybe even understand. He’s had losses of his own, after all—a dead wife and God knows what else he has locked behind those bars on his eyes. Men are good at secrets. It took a third untimely death, a blind stupor of mourning, to get Castor to share his pain.

Mary was eleven years old, frying up supper with him drinking quietly by her side, sitting close to the stove to keep warm.

“Ren,” he said suddenly.
“Renny.”

She looked up to find him staring deep into the bottle in his hand. Shoving the pan to the back of the stove, she knelt down beside him and laid a hand on his trembling knee. He began muttering, recounting the vision as he watched it unfold.

The whole thing took less than a minute. Renny swung down from the shunting train and hit the ground at a run, tearing a beeline alongside the rail. He flew past car after car, then leapt for a ladder to mount the train again. The
rung was slick with ice. It ran through his fingers like sand, his body hurtling beyond its purpose, twisting and slipping down between the cars.

Castor came back to himself with a terrible howl, leaping to his feet, nearly knocking Mary over on his way out the door. She went after him with his coat, but he was deep into the snowy bush before she even set foot on the porch.

What followed remained a puzzle for days, Mary coaxing the story out of him in babbled fragments and reassembling it in her mind. It seemed she had an uncle—or didn’t have one, not any more.

Castor knew there was nothing he could do for Renny—he’d watched the train wheels pinch his little brother in half—which was why he headed not to the tracks but to Renny’s house. Elsa made him knock until his knuckles bled. When she finally came to the door, she didn’t say a word, just stuck her face in the crack as though she was worried he might be carrying the plague.

“Elsa—” He could barely speak, he was panting so hard.

She brought a hand out to cover her nose.

“Mama?” the girl called from somewhere inside the house.

“Go to your room, Lavinia, and stay there till I say.” Elsa stepped out a little. “You get out of here now, you hear me?”

“It’s Renny,” Castor gasped.

She crossed her arms. “He’s at work.”

“I know.” He began to cry. “He slipped.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Renny slipped, Elsa,” he said, sobbing. “He’s dead.”

Her eyes opened wide. “Liar.”

“I’m not, I’m not.”

“Liar!” She began walking at him, saying a word for every step. “Filthy. Drunken. LIAR!”

By then she’d backed him down the stairs. “I seen it,” he pleaded.

“Where, in a bottle? You’re
the Seer
, isn’t that right? You
see
things?!”

“Yes,” he said, helpless.

“You’re CRAZY!” she screamed. “You get out of here now and maybe I won’t tell him what you said!”

She turned and took the stairs at a run, slamming the door so it shook in its frame. Castor looked up in time to catch a glimpse of the girl’s face at the window, then Elsa’s hand, yanking the curtain shut.

He was a good way down the road by the time the Mounties showed. Sinking to his knees on the icy shoulder, he watched their headlights disappear up his brother’s drive.

Out in the carport, Lavinia skirts the Land Rover and presses her hand to the deep-freeze, feeling it purr. The lid makes an unsealing sound as she lifts it, and she opens her sore mouth in response, letting it hang slack over the escaping cold. The freezer’s close to full, dozens of triple-wrapped packages stacked in tidy piles. She bends to read a few of the nearest labels
—Rib Chops, Top Sirloin, Grade A Boneless Breasts
.

Never mind her stomach, Lavinia’s eyes are bigger than her deep-freeze. No matter how much she already has at home, she can never seem to pass the meat counter by. She chooses the family pack more often than not, seduced not by the better deal but by the fresh promise of all those portions in a row. Even with Carl to cook for, she hasn’t thawed a single thing. Triple-wrapped or no, it’ll all be freezer-burnt before she gets the chance.