The Cape Ann (36 page)

As we sat around the kitchen table answering catechism questions, or took time out to slip into our white dresses and stand on a chair in the living room while Mama pinned up our hems, Sally did not speak one word of conversation. She didn’t act mean. She acted quiet.

I had some idea how she felt. Since Papa read my sin notebook on Friday night, I had not felt like talking to
him
. I had got over my anger. He did not believe that, and he kept teasing me and tickling me and winking at me and doing other things to make me smile, but I didn’t feel like smiling.

Mama was so busy sewing the communion dresses, she didn’t notice, or if she did, she assumed I was being quiet so as not to bother her.

Wednesday morning as I was leaving for school, Papa came out of the depot office and called to me. “Wait!”

He hurried across the platform.

“I have to go,” I told him. “I’ll be late for school.”

“I’ll give you a ride.”

I didn’t want him to give me a ride, but I climbed into the truck.

“You know that this is a sin, don’t you?”

“What’s a sin?”

“Treating your pa like this. You’re supposed to honor your father and mother. Didn’t the sisters teach you that?”

I nodded.

“Well?”

I didn’t know what to say. I guessed that he was probably right.

“Well?” he repeated.

“Well, what?” I asked. What should I say? I hated when he wanted me to say something and I didn’t know what.

He threw on the brakes, sending my lunch pail and school things flying onto the floor. “Get out!” he yelled.

I grabbed up my things as fast as I could and jumped down from the cab.

“You’re going to hell, little girl.” He gunned the engine of the old truck and spun away, leaving me standing in the street a long way from school.

Thursday afternoon after school, Mama took me to Lemling’s Photographic Studio to have my picture taken in my communion dress and veil, holding my new white prayer book and my new, white seed pearl rosary. Later she was to say of the portrait, “Doesn’t she look pretty? A little sad, too, like a saint.” A saint?

On Friday, as on Tuesday, Sally, Beverly, and I started legging it home from school to the depot, with Sally hanging half a block behind Beverly and me.

“Godsakes,” Beverly complained, “I thought she’d forget by now.”

“Should we tell her we’re sorry?” We turned around and started running back toward Sally. Sally stopped, backed up a few steps, then whirled and ran as fast as she could. Beverly was more fleet than I. She left me behind and chased Sally all the way to the playground, where Sally tripped on the bicycle rack and went sprawling on the gravel, skinning her knees and tearing her dress.

“Go away,” she screamed. “Leave me alone. Look what you made me do.” She held up her torn skirt. She was crying.

“We was going to apologize,” Beverly explained.

“We’re sorry we laughed the other day,” I told her. “We want to be friends again.”

“I don’t want you for my friends!”

She began gathering up her catechism and two or three workbooks that had scattered when she fell. Some arithmetic and spelling papers were snatched by the breeze and tossed in different directions. Beverly and I ran to fetch them.

“Leave my things alone.”

Sally pulled herself up and hobbled on her skinned legs, desperate to get her papers before we did, as if she didn’t want us even to
touch
her things. We handed her what we had retrieved.

“Don’t come to my house anymore,” she wept. “Understand? I don’t want you in my house ever again.” She limped away. “You both think you’re so good.”

“No, we don’t,” Beverly called after her, but Sally didn’t turn around or answer. “You got a real pretty house,” Beverly added. “Prettier than mine.”

“And you’re nicer than me,” I called.

Mama and I drove Beverly home after supper. The street outside Beverly’s house was not paved. There was still runoff in the deep ruts. Mama pulled the truck up on the forlorn bald area that was the front yard so that she and Beverly wouldn’t have to jump down into a puddle. Mama’s heels made a hollow, knocking sound on the boards that were laid down loose for a sidewalk.

The house itself, covered all over with tar paper, was about the size of the waiting room in the depot. Inside, the wallpaper, once pink and blue, was mostly brown from age and soil and leaks in the roof. Several pieces of linoleum, no two matching, covered the floor.

In the back there was an outhouse, and over to one side of the front yard, a pump for water. When I played at Beverly’s house, which wasn’t often, she let me pump water while she put her head under the spout and drank.

Mama saw Beverly to the door, carrying the communion dress, all pressed and hung on a hanger, ready to be worn. Charlie opened the door. Mama said something and disappeared inside for a minute.

Then, “I’ll see you Erhardts tomorrow,” Beverly called out the door as Mama teetered down the unstable board sidewalk to the truck.

“Well, I hope the dress stays clean till Sunday,” Mama sighed, pulling herself up into the truck. “That’ll be a miracle.”

“Did Mrs. Ridza pay you?”

“Beverly’s dress is a present.” She started the engine. “I’m buying my way into heaven,” she said with a laugh, “a few cents at a time. Don’t wrinkle Sally’s dress.” Turning the truck around in the
middle of the washboard street, Mama headed across town to the Wheelers’.

At Sally’s, Mama waited a long time on the front stoop. There were no lights on downstairs. She rang the bell a second time. At last the door was opened by Mr. Wheeler. He took the dress from Mama, thanking her.

“You’ll be at church for the First Communion?” I heard Mama ask.

“Yes. Oh, yes.” He nodded, backing away, slowly closing the door. “Oh, yes.”

While I was dressing for bed, Mama made popcorn.

“Are we going to study for confession?” I asked, standing in my nightie beside the stove.

Mama shook her head. “We’re going to read a story.”

“Can we look at a house book instead?”

We curled up on the couch with a couple of house books, one of them the same as that from which we’d cut out our Cape Ann. Beginning with the first plan in the Cape Ann book, we paged through, explaining aloud to each other what features were appropriate for us and which were silly or costly or ugly or simply inexplicable. Reaching #127—The Cape Ann, we exclaimed, “Isn’t this a darling house?” and “We could live in this one, quite nicely,” and “Here’s where we’d have a bed of lily of the valley.”

When Mama turned out the bedroom light, the great stone weight of confession settled down on my chest.

I WAS AWAKE, REHEARSING
confession in my mind, when Papa came home from playing cards at Mr. Navarin’s house. Mama was asleep. After the ten o’clock news on WCCO, she had gone to bed, leaving a small light burning in the living room.

Papa came into the bedroom, smelling of beer and cigarette smoke. I liked the smell. It reminded me of Boomer’s Tavern and other happy places. I lay perfectly still, feigning deep sleep.

Papa stood for several seconds beside the crib, hands resting on the rail. At length he whispered, “Good luck, kid,” and tiptoed out to the living room, where he sat down on the couch and read the morning paper.

I resumed rehearsing confession. There was so much to remember. Sister said that if you forgot one little sin, it would be all right, if you really tried hard to remember and make a good confession. But, she’d added, you couldn’t leave something out, pretending to yourself that you’d forgotten. If you did that, your soul would be blacker than before, and you wouldn’t be able to take communion. And if you took communion
anyway
, you were in the worst trouble of your life.

But how could you be sure that you’d sincerely forgotten the omitted sins? How could you be sure you weren’t doing such a good job of kidding yourself that you’d made yourself believe you’d forgotten when you hadn’t? I tossed restlessly and began again, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

During catechism class we practiced confession. Sister sat in the priest’s cubbyhole. The class lined up in the pew outside, and one by one, quailing and scratching and pulling our knuckles, we slipped into the cubbyhole on the opposite side of the partition. It was dim inside. In the wall between Sister and me was a little hole maybe a foot square or less. Sister slid aside the door covering the hole. On the other side, she was indistinct, a hulking shadow. I thought, what if that isn’t Sister? What if it’s the Devil?

“Well?” she said impatiently. “Well?”

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession. I have committed these sins.” I hesitated. I wasn’t supposed to tell
Sister
my sins, was I? This was only a rehearsal.

At long last and somewhat irritably she whispered in a voice audible halfway to Main Street, “Say fifteen Our Fathers and fifteen Hail Marys for penance. Now say an Act of Contrition.”

I broke at once into an impassioned Act of Contrition. No one was ever so contrite as I, pledging, “Oh, my God! I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, who art all-good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to confess my sins, do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”

“When you say it for Father, don’t say it so loud,” Sister told me.

Wasn’t she a good one to talk, I thought, pushing aside the curtain of the confessional and heading toward a pew near the altar. Genuflecting, I slid in and knelt down. Fifteen Our Fathers and fifteen Hail Marys. Sister must think I’d been pretty wicked to give me that much penance.

Halfway through the Hail Marys, I realized that I hadn’t actually confessed. I had it all to do over, and this time with my unending and heinous list of crimes included. Quickly I rattled off the remaining Hail Marys and left, as Sister had said we might when we had completed our penance.

Passing up the aisle, I noted that Sally had left. She hadn’t spoken to me or looked at me this morning. Beverly, paste white around the gills, was waiting to enter the confessional. Her eyes were glazed, and she did not see me.

Following lunch, of which I ate almost none, I dug my sin notebook out of the bottom of the wardrobe where it was hidden under Mama’s shoes.

Papa was in the kitchen eating blueberry pie. He might remain there for some time; it was never busy in the ticket office on weekends. I tucked the notebook inside the bodice of my dress and crossed my arms over it.

“Where are you off to?” Mama asked when she saw me heading to the door.

“Outside.”

“How come you’re walking so funny?”

“Stomachache.”

“Maybe you should lie down for a while.”

“I think I should walk.”

“Suit yourself. Just remember, you have to be back at church at three.”

“I’ll remember.”

“Wait a minute,” Papa said.

I pushed the screen door open with my elbow.

“I said wait a minute.” He thrust his chair back and turned to me. “I thought maybe you’d like to sit on my lap and help me finish this pie and ice cream.”

“No, thank you, Papa.”

“‘No, thank you, Papa’? Since when do you turn down pie and ice cream?”

“Let her go, Willie. She said she had a stomachache.”

“You stay out of this. This kid got mad at me the other night, and she’s been holding a grudge ever since. I don’t like people who hold grudges and neither does God. I just want to make sure she tells Father Delias that she’s been holding a grudge against her pa. Don’t forget to confess
that
when you’re tellin’ him the other two thousand sins,” he told me.

“Shut up, Willie.”

“I told you to stay out of this.”

“I’m not staying out. She’s my kid as much as yours. Go on out and play, Lark.”

“You stay right where you are, if you know what’s good for you,” Papa warned.

Mama was greasing an iron skillet before putting it away in the cupboard. She stopped running her fingers over it and held it in front of her, never taking her eyes off Papa. “Go on, Lark.”

Papa stood, throwing back his chair. “What the hell is this?” he screamed. “It’s always you two against me. If people in this town knew what I put up with, you wouldn’t walk down the street like a goddamned duchess.”

He stood looking at Mama, the skillet in her hands. Then he swept his plate and coffee cup off the table. They flew across the narrow kitchen, the coffee taking off, out of the cup, landing on Mama’s skirt and running down her legs.

Absently, Mama reached down and brushed the dripping coffee from her leg, her eyes still fixed on Papa.

“I work damned hard and you know it!” he went on. “But does anybody around here ever thank me for it? Hell, no. I’m just the damned fool who brings home the bacon for you to squander on presents for an idiot and … and a lot of fancy clothes I can’t afford.” Papa started to cry. “One of these days I’ll kill you. But first I’m gonna tell people what you’re like so they won’t blame me.”

In a voice I could barely hear, but whose intensity seared the air, Mama told him, “You get out of here, you sonofabitch, before I kill
you.”
She slowly raised the iron skillet.

Through his tears, Papa cried, “That’s right. Turn the kid against me and run me out of my own house.”

Mama made a menacing gesture with the skillet, and Papa
twisted away, pushing me aside and rushing blindly out the door. The sin notebook fell onto the floor at my feet.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession.”

From the pocket of my dress, I pulled the folded sheet of paper on which I had earlier compiled my list of sins, according to commandment. After Papa had hurled out of the house, I had hiked a mile into the country on the railroad tracks, and sat down in quiet and privacy to prepare the list from which I now began reading, twisting sideways to catch the meager light that filtered in around the confessional curtains.

“I don’t think I broke the First Commandment, Father. I think I broke the Second Commandment about twelve times.” It was hard to say precisely. I knew I’d whispered the Lord’s name in vain a number of times when I was angry. Usually I said it into a pillow.