The Mermaid Chair (13 page)

“Knock, knock,” he said, his eyes filled with amusement.

I hesitated.
So he remembers me.

“Who’s there?” I felt immensely awkward saying it, but I didn’t see how I could
not
play along.

“Zoom.”

“Zoom who?”

“Zoom did you expect?” he said, setting loose an opulent laugh that seemed oversize for the joke. “I don’t think I’ve seen you since you were a girl. I hope you remember me?”

“Of course, Father Dominic,” I said. “I . . . I was just—”

“You were just reading my little book, and from the way you closed it, I’m not sure you liked it very much.” He laughed to let me know he was teasing, but it made me uncomfortable.

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“No, no, I liked it.” Neither of us spoke for a moment. I looked off at the marsh, embarrassed. The tide was receding, leaving plats of mud that looked tender and freshly peeled. I could see the holes of dozens of hibernating fiddler crabs, the tip ends of their claws barely protruding.

“Father Sebastian said you were looking for me. I believe you are in need of an autograph for your book.”

“Oh. Yes, that’s right. Would you mind?” I handed him the booklet, feeling caught in my little lie. “I’m sorry, I don’t have a pen.”

He produced one from inside his black scapular. He scrawled something on the inside cover, then handed it back.

He said, “This is a lovely spot, isn’t it?”

“Yes . . . lovely.”

The sea of grass behind us swayed with the breezes, and he shifted side to side beneath his robe as if he were one of them, a grass blade trying to get synchronized with the rest.

“So how’s our Nelle?” he asked.

The question startled me. The curious way he’d said
“our
Nelle,”
plus something in his voice, how her name came out softer than the other words.

Our Nelle.
Our.

“Her hand is healing,” I said. “The real problem is in here.” I meant to touch my finger to my forehead but involuntarily tapped the flat bone over my heart, and I felt the rightness of that, as though my finger were trying to tell me something.

“Yes, I suppose the heart will cause us to do strange and won-drous things,” Father Dominic said. He rapped his knuckles on his chest, and I had the feeling he was talking about impulses in his own heart.

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He’d taken off his hat and was plucking at the wayward pieces on it. I had a memory of him that day the monks delivered the washed-up debris from my father’s boat, how he’d stood at the fireplace in this very same posture, holding his hat, watching the board burn.

“Did you know she called the finger that she cut off her

‘pointing finger’?” I asked.

He shook his head, and his face—such an old, kind face—

changed a little, tightening and puckering in places.

I hesitated. Certain things were occurring to me in the moment—guesses, impressions—and I didn’t know whether I should say them. “What if she cut it off to relieve a terrible sense of blame?”

He looked away from my face.

He knows.

A ravine of quiet opened between us. I remember a mur-murous hum rising up like the swell of insects. It seemed to last a long time.

“Why did she do it?” I said.

He pretended I was being rhetorical. “Yes, why indeed?”

“No, I’m asking
you.
Why did she do it?”

“Has your mother said something to you to make you think I would know her motives?”

“She said she couldn’t talk about her reasons.”

He sighed, laced and unlaced his fingers. I was sure he was making a decision of some kind. “Jessie, I can only imagine how confusing this must be to you, but I can’t tell you anything. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

“Did she tell you something during confession?”

This seemed to catch him off guard, as if such a thing hadn’t
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occurred to him. He leaned toward me, wearing a gentle, knowing look, as if inviting a moment of intimacy between us. I thought for a second he might take my hand.

“All I’m saying is that maybe it wouldn’t be good for your mother if we delved into it. I know that’s just the opposite of what you might think—we’ve been brainwashed these days to believe we have to dig up every pitiable shred of our past and examine it half to death, but that doesn’t always turn out best for a person. Nelle wants to keep whatever this is to herself. Maybe we should let her.”

He pressed his lips together, and his face looked pained, pleading. “Jessie, I need you to trust me. Trust your mother.”

I was about to argue with him when he reached out and, cupping my cheek with his hand, smiled in an austere, resigned way. I don’t know why, but I didn’t pull away, and we stayed like that a moment before he turned and walked back toward the church, arranging his ragged hat on his head.

C H A P T E R

Fourteen

pq

Isat on the bench with my back to the marsh and waited until Father Dominic was out of sight.
What just happened?

He’d seemed so genuine. Earnest.
Jessie, I need you to trust
me.
It seemed as if I should. He was, after all, an old monk who told knock-knock jokes. Everyone loved him. More to the point, Kat trusted him, and Kat Bowers was no fool. It would be impossible to dupe that woman.

Confused, I stretched my neck backward, watching two ospreys lap a wide circle through the fog. What if Father Dominic was right? Could I make things worse for Mother by trying to understand her reasons?

My eyes fell on
The Mermaid’s Tale,
wedged next to me on the bench. I thumbed to the title page.
“Zoom did you expect?”

he’d written in peculiar slanted letters, then scrawled his name.

As I stared at it, it slowly dawned on me—I didn’t trust him.

I just didn’t. I believed inside that I
should,
and there were Kat and Mother up to their earlobes in trust for Dominic, but I couldn’t muster any of it for myself.

I glanced at my watch. It was just after eleven. I would have to get back soon and fix lunch for Mother, but I had a sudden impulse to slip inside the church and see the mermaid chair.

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The last time I’d seen it had probably been twenty-five years ago, right before I’d left for college. Despite the considerable time Mike and I had spent horsing around on it as children, I always associated it with my father—I suppose because he was the one who’d first showed it to me, who’d told me the story behind it, who’d loved the chair nearly as much as his boat. Mother, on the other hand, had wanted nothing to do with it.

It hadn’t always been that way. Up until Dad died, she hadn’t minded the chair at all. Year after year he’d been one of the men who carried the mermaid chair on its two-mile procession from the church to the ferry dock for the Blessing of the Fleet, something she’d encouraged. Typically the monks chose the more pious men, and Joe Dubois had been an absolute pagan, but somehow he’d always wheedled himself into the job. He simply believed, he said, in blessing shrimp boats; he didn’t care whether it was St. Senara, God, the monks, or Max the dog who performed the blessing. But I think it was more than that. While my mother loved Senara, the saint, my father loved her
other
nature—her life as Asenora, the mermaid.

The chair had round iron hooks on each arm for poles to slip through, and every April, early in the evening of St. Senara’s feast day, four men lifted the rods onto their shoulders and paraded the chair from the church, through the abbey gate, past the island shops, as if it were Cleopatra’s throne or the bier of a Greek god. I remember Mike and me marching beside our father the whole way, very brash and self-important—“peacocked,” Mother had said—and the islanders flowing out behind us, undulating over the road in a long bridal train of color.

Walking now toward the church, I thought about those radiant processions, the prayer read by the abbot as he sat in the t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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mermaid chair on the dock’s edge, his hand lifted in blessing.

And perhaps forty trawlers, not just from Egret Island but McClellanville and Mount Pleasant, too, moving past the dock, each one strung with colored lights, the water turning molten as darkness collected. After the boats were blessed, and the chair ceremoniously splashed with seawater, the islanders would toss Mermaid Tears—tiny pearl-colored pebbles—into the bay, as a way of honoring the mermaid saint’s sadness at leaving the ocean. Then the entire island would gather around tables of fried and boiled shrimp at Max’s Café.

Between the Net House and the church, there was a grassy area where the monks used to spread the cast nets on wooden racks and treat them with a coppery-smelling solution to keep them from rotting. The racks were gone now, but I could see a robed monk out there, tossing a bright yellow tennis ball to Max. His back was to me, but I noticed he was tall and that his hair was dark. When Max bounded back to him with the ball, the monk bent down and rubbed the dog’s head. It was Brother Thomas.

As I walked toward him, he turned, and when he recognized me, his face filled with what looked exactly like pleasure. He came over to me, holding the tennis ball, Max trailing behind.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt your game,” I said, trying not to smile for some reason, but I couldn’t restrain it. I felt a lavish sweep of happiness at the sight of him.

“I was just passing time with Max until day prayer and mass,”

he said.

There was a moment of silence in which I looked off at the trees, then back to find him watching me with the faintest accumulation of a smile. I thought of my dream, the two of us on the
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raft in the ocean. The images had come to me repeatedly over the last two days—his cowl falling back to reveal his face, his hand touching my cheek, sliding beneath my back. I felt self-conscious thinking about it in his presence. As if it might show through.

I abruptly dropped my gaze to the ground, where I saw his boots sticking out from beneath his robe, caked with dry mud from the marsh.

“My work shoes,” he said. “I’m the rookery monk.”

“The
what?
”

He laughed. “The rookery monk,” he repeated.

“And what is that?”

“The state pays us to take care of the rookery—it’s a protected refuge—so one of us is designated to go out every day and keep an eye on it.”

“You don’t make cast nets with the others?”

“No, thank God. I was terrible at it, plus I’m the youngest one here, so I got the outdoor job.”

Max had been sitting patiently, waiting. “One more,”

Thomas told him, and sent the ball sailing into the air.

We watched Max for a second as he ran full speed through the haze.

“What does a rookery monk do, exactly?” I asked.

“He keeps track of the bird population—not just egrets but pelicans, herons, ospreys, most all of them. In the spring and summer, he counts and measures egret eggs, checks on the nests, the hatchlings, that kind of thing. This time of year is not so busy.”

I could smell a fragrance coming from him. It was, I realized, grape jelly.

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“So you watch birds.”

He smiled. “That’s the biggest part of it, but I do other things—inspect the oyster beds, collect water samples, whatever’s needed. The Department of Natural Resources has a checklist for me.” Max came bounding up with the ball in his mouth, and Thomas took it, tucking it inside his scapular. “Max usually goes out in the boat with me,” he added, stroking the dog’s back.

“I can tell you like the job,” I said.

“To be honest, I think sometimes being out there on the creeks is what keeps me here.”

“I know what you mean. I grew up on the creeks. My brother and I loved the birds. We used to go out in the rookery and watch the male egrets do their mating dance.”

I’d blurted this without thinking. And it would’ve been nothing,
nothing,
just stupid conversation about birds, if, realizing what I’d said, I hadn’t drawn in my breath, making that small, rasping sound of surprise. Redness washed up my neck into my cheeks, so of course he knew I was reading something sexual into what we were doing. I wanted to turn and run off, the way Max had done.

He was looking at me intently. I’m sure he knew what I was thinking, but he was kind, and he tried to smooth it over. He said, “Yes, I’ve seen it many times. It’s beautiful the way they snap their bills and elongate their necks.”

The truth was, I’d been snapping my bill and elongating my neck for the last five minutes.

“I’ve told you what
I
do,” he was saying. “What is it
you
do?”

I stood there trying to make myself appear very straight and proper. I didn’t know how to say who I was or what I did. What
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did
I do? Keep house for Hugh? Paint scenes in little boxes and arrange a collage of objects inside them? No, I couldn’t even claim that anymore. And Dee had grown up and gone away, so I couldn’t say, “I’m a stay-at-home mom,” in that cheerful way I used to.

I said, “You know, I was really on my way to see the mermaid chair. I shouldn’t keep you.”

“You’re not keeping me at all. Come on, I’ll walk you over there. Unless you want to be alone.”

“All right,” I said. I knew he’d detected the change in my demeanor, and I didn’t know why he was being persistent. Did he want to be with me, or was he merely being hospitable?

He touched my elbow, guiding me onto the path that led around to the church, the same small, common gesture he’d used with Mother, but the pressure of his hand on my coat sent a current flying through me.

The church was deserted, filled with a throbbing silence. We eased along the nave between the choir stalls, moving past the altar into the narrow ambulatory behind the apse, where we paused at the arched entrance to a tiny chapel.