Mercy (4 page)

“Bless me Father,” she begins, “for I have sinned.”

He mumbles the blessing in response, his hand floating up to sign her with the Cross.
Sausages
. The butcher must have made a fresh batch. She could be wearing a garland of them, so undeniably strong is the smell.

They were August’s boyhood specialty, served up by themselves on those nights when his mother was too worn out to cook. He’d push a chair up to the stove and stand on the seat, pricking and turning them, feeling them spit back at him from the heavy black pan.

“Since my last confession, which was four weeks ago, before Father Rock—well, anyway, since that time, I accuse myself of these sins …” She trails off.

At seminary, sausages were the rarest of treats. Short, wrinkled fingers, they were a poor substitute for the fat, farm-style links of home. Even so, they inspired such a fierce desire that August thought it best to give them up. He became known for stoically rolling his portion to the rim of his plate. His fellow seminarians waited for this signal, surrounding him like young warriors, brandishing their shiny forks.

“I told a lie, Father,” Mathilda says finally.

“A lie?”

She couldn’t have chosen a more disarming scent. August would bottle it if he could, anoint himself daily, lift his scented inner wrists to his nose.

“To my husband.”

“Oh.” The sound thickens in his throat.

“I had to,” she blurts. “I didn’t want him to—I couldn’t bear—on our wedding night—I just had to lie.”

“I see.” Two tiny words are the most he can choke out. His inner picture of her alters dramatically, the butcher’s dark handprints lifting from her flesh, leaving it suddenly, startlingly pristine. The thrill is undeniable. It winds, bone after thorny bone, up his spine.

“Is it a sin, Father?” she asks softly. “I mean, I know about the lying, but the other—”

“Well, no, not exactly.” He swallows, gets hold of himself and tries again. “But you understand that marriage is a sacrament—that the
act
of marriage is, well, sacred.” The words ring hollowly in his head, bounce around his sinuses, the hidden flaps and recesses of his throat.

“But it’s not a
sin
?”

Eagerness in her tone. He feels panicked, a small clawed thing surrounded by fire. “Cast your mind back to the ceremony,” he says quickly, “to the words of Saint Paul. ‘Just as the Church is subject to Christ, so also let wives be subject in all things to their husbands.’ ”

“Yes, Father,” she presses, “but what about all the women who
wouldn’t
, who died because they wouldn’t? Didn’t God make them saints?”

“Those women were different. They weren’t married, for one.”

“What about the Virgin Mary? She was married to Joseph, and God loved her best of all.”

“I—” He falters.
Virgin
. No longer blue and serene, the word mutated into something forbidden the moment she gave it voice.

“I feel,” she whispers, “like I mustn’t. Not with him. I feel like it’s
wrong.”

He should contradict her, he knows, build a tower of Scripture, ring it round with holy tradition and invite her inside—but he doesn’t.
Virgin
, is all he can think. Virgin.

“Three Hail Marys,” he croaks, forgetting she has yet to say the act of contrition.

“Is that all?”

“That’s all.” He retreats into the absolution, lowering himself into the Latin as into a dark and familiar pool. “Go in peace,” he concludes, returning reluctantly to his mother tongue.

When she stands, the creases of her dress fall open to release a fresh waft of pepper and sage. His glands respond, producing two thin streams to well up shamefully beneath his tongue.

Thomas wakes with a diagram in his mind—parts provided, some assembly required. Mathilda’s slender back is turned, swathed in a thick white nightgown. She was at church for most of the afternoon, unresponsive at the dinner table, asleep before he could switch off the light. He traces her shape with his eyes, feeling himself twitch and begin to stiffen beneath the sheet. Surely her time will be finished soon.

Ashamed, he turns his eyes to the ceiling, forcing his thoughts back to where they began. The hog in the locker should be plenty chilled. There’s church in the morning,
so he can’t do it then. Besides, why wait when the picture’s so vivid in him now?

He steals down to the shop. The locker’s a great relief. He stays inside long enough to cool his blood, then shoulders the carcass, lifting the gambrel stick free of its hooks.

It’s not long before he breaks a fresh sweat, sawing and trimming, inspiration driving him hard. He’ll mar the meat in places, but it can’t be helped—now he’s started, there’s no going back. He carves his components, then carries them to the refrigerated front case for display. It takes some rearranging—he has to remove two of the barred shelves to make room.

He moves quickly, ever conscious of the leaking cold. Down on his knees, cheek pressed flat to the glass, he mounts cut on cut, shoving skewers to hold them in place. Rectangles of jowl pile up to make the bench. The sawed-off hind shanks form a base, tapering down into the two back legs. Fix the trotters for front legs, then lay out the long keyboard of the loin, a cross-section of spine branching down into dark and light ribs. Build up the body behind, rolled picnic stacked on rolled Boston butt. Spareribs stand up for an open soundboard, and before them a white sheet of wax paper, folded into a book of notes.

Thomas slides the door closed and skirts the counter for a look. He glows in the case’s green light and in the spread of his own beatific smile. “Imagine, ladies,” he murmurs, “the dance of tiny hammers on strings.”

The turnout for August’s first Mass is impressive, though he has yet to discern the weekly communicants from those come to gawk at the new priest. The front pews are stacked with small-town gentry—women with shiny pink lips and tightly laced children, soft men with rigid backs. The altar boys have most certainly been culled from their ranks, one fat and sly, the other nervous, unusually small. The scene might have been grafted entire from August’s hometown, only in Fairview he wouldn’t be standing before the altar. He’d be sitting alone like always, down the end of the very last pew.

He spots the housekeeper five rows back. She’s served him every meal he’s eaten for nearly a week, but somehow her name never comes to mind. Only “the housekeeper.” He can feel her narrowed eyes on him. Earlier, when he entered on the heels of the fat boy, he was certain her face twisted in what could only be called disgust.

Beside her, Thomas Rose is wedged into the pew as though penned. And beside him, Mathilda—so still in contrast to her husband and aunt, so fine, as though she were formed of a different element, something exceedingly rare.

August turns back to the altar, bending to read the Epistle, the gradual, the tract.
“Munda cor meum,”
he solemnly intones, “ac
labia mea
—” In preparation for the reading of the Gospel he begs God to cleanse his heart, to purify his lips as He once did those of Isaiah, sending an angel to scorch the prophet’s lips with a lump of burning coal. It’s one of August’s favourite parts—the muscular descent, the fiery mass in that immortal hand. He opens
his mind to the vision, his lips parting, inviting the brand of God.

It doesn’t come. In its place, a memory—part pressure, part temperature, part taste. His mother’s kiss. Full on his small mouth, welcome yet overwhelming, often a little too open, too moist. He would’ve been seven or so when he began to suspect it wasn’t right, but as always he chose not to speak. Instead he reasoned with himself. It wasn’t Aggie’s fault. Her lips came in contact with so many mouths, they were bound to get a little confused.

His Latin is their little secret, spoken huskily, for her ears alone. When he switches to English, it’s almost more than Mathilda can stand—his parables take flight, sending her to the vault and back, grasping after light and air. It all culminates in Communion, his fine fingers laying the host on the tip of her tongue.

“Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam.”
He whispers it like a promise, but the lineup shuffles forward, urging Mathilda on. She mutters an amen, then trails after her husband’s broad back, the bread of heaven melting to the roof of her mouth.

On the way out, Thomas pumps Father Day’s hand as though he were trying to draw water up a well. “Fine sermon, Father,” he says heartily, then links arms with Mathilda and draws her away.

At the foot of the stone steps he tilts his head to chuckle in her ear. “Couldn’t follow a word of it. Even the
English. The parts I could hear didn’t make a damn bit of sense.”

Mathilda’s mouth falls open.

“Not a patch on Father Rock.” Vera stalks past them, her face livid, as though she’s in pain. “Mumbles like a schoolboy. No fire in him. Not an ounce of steel.”

“Hmm.” Thomas nods.

Mathilda bites her tongue. Literally. Traps it writhing between her teeth.

Late on the Sabbath morning, Castor sags down at the base of a black spruce, fitting its skinny trunk to the hollow of his spine. His head lolls to one side. His ass is wet. He balances a half-dead soldier in his crotch.

He’s got no say over the visions, never has had. His eye leaves when it pleases, taking his outlook wherever it will. He tried to explain it to Renny once, back before the kid went soft for a rope of golden hair.

“The eye won’t set down just anywhere. There’s gotta be a good host, see, something with a shine to it, bit of a curve to give back the light. A bottle cap, maybe.”

His little brother just sat there with his mouth open. He knew how to listen back then.

“Sure, it happens when I’m drinkin’,” Castor went on, “but that ain’t sayin’ much.”

Renny nodded.

“Seems like maybe the liquor sets me off. The look of it, I mean, not how much I get down my throat.” He paused.
“Partway down a bottle, if the eye’s goin’, that’s when it’ll go. I never been set off by an empty. There’s gotta be something left.”

Who knows if the boy understood. No way to ask him now.

“It’s a cruel wrll,” Castor mutters to himself. “Cruer woll, cluel wrol, cruld roe. Hee hee.” He composes himself drunkenly, parting his lips in earnest to try again. Only something distracts him—whiskey lapping in the bottle, his own stupid mug in its side.

His eye comes loose, shoots out over trees and blooming weeds, slips down through a crack in the foundation of St. Mary’s church. It finds a home in the husk of a flaxseed, one of not many left in the cache.

Close by, in a nest of fine, dry grass, a mother deer mouse hunkers over ten wriggling pups. The cache has sustained her through winter—nearly a gallon of seeds dutifully stashed—and now the season of food has returned. If she doesn’t get eaten, she’ll eat hearty for months. Wildflowers and spiders—if she’s lucky, a salamander or two.

For now, she’s laid low with milk, surrounded by nuzzling pups.
Ten of them
. Seven would do better, grow up stronger, have more of a fighting chance. The mother too would grow strong, produce more milk, if she took three of them for meat. She touches her quivering nose to the smallest one, sniffs closely and opens her jaws.

T
he calf isn’t the fattest, being the offspring of Sally Gray’s one and only sack-of-bones milk cow. It’s lame, too, well and truly hobbled by a gash in its right hind leg. There’ll be waste, all right. Who knows, the whole thing might end up in the grinder, sell the best of it in patties, the rest in the next batch of mixed sausage.

Thomas paid premium for the calf. Walked around it nodding, saying, “That’s a fine animal, Mrs. Gray. I’d be happy to take her off your hands.” What else could he do? A young war widow, struggling to hold on to the farm. She had eyes like a spaniel’s. Besides, he was doing fine for himself. Better than fine. He could afford it.

Calf stunning takes a light touch. Thomas lifts the hammer, then pauses, his free hand reaching out of its own accord to caress the beast’s forehead, the spot where the hair curls softly like that of a small child.

A memory wakens in his fingers. He was all of thirteen, with a full pen of veal calves to drop. Having laid down his sledge, he stood rubbing the first calf’s brow, whispering to it, falling headlong down the wells of its eyes. Thomas Senior approached soundlessly. His fingers closed like a
handcuff around Thomas’s stroking wrist. “This is the killing floor, boy.” He squeezed so hard Thomas could feel the blood slow in his veins. “Not the goddamn petting zoo.” The calf bawled, and all around them men looked up from their work, grinning. Thomas Senior shoved his son aside, hoisted the hammer and felled the calf. The men gave a guttural cheer. He’d hit it hard enough to kill a heifer. Hard enough even to down a steer.

Thomas continues stroking until the calf closes its eyes. Then swings tenderly, the blow landing precisely where his fingers have been.

The butcher’s propped open his door. August drops his eyes to the ground, but not before catching a glimpse of Thomas Rose’s powerful back, his sweat-stained undershirt a pale continent beside the brown-and-pink mass of a partly skinned calf.

August walks softly, passes unseen. There’s a warm evening wind. He kicks up a cloud of reddish dust with each stride, the colour enveloping him, casting his thoughts back to the animal’s dangling hide. What good is a skin when it can be split down the middle like that and peeled away? The thought halts him in his tracks. There was a Pope—John XIV, he’s almost certain. They flayed him for his faith, his power too, no doubt. Dragged him skinless through the cheering crowds.

From the hollow doorway of Mercy Hardware a figure
emerges, lurching jaggedly across the walk. “Ee-evening, Father!” Its breath is an overproof blast, one eye closed up in a puffy blue pocket, the cheek beneath it raw, as though grated on an unforgiving road.