The Patron Saint of Liars (15 page)

I went back into the kitchen and Son ate his dinner while I cleaned up. When the serving platter slipped from my hands, he was there before it hit the floor. He caught it in one giant hand and laid it on the sink. "Sit down," he said, taking my shoulders and guiding me over to the chair. "You don't look very good."

"I don't feel so well, I guess." Sister Evangeline wasn't around. She had taken to drifting off somewhere after dinner.

"I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll clean up and you can sit and talk to me for a change."

"You've worked all day," I said, but made no move to get up. Son reached down and picked up my feet in his hands and set them lightly on the chair in front of me. There was something so familiar about the gesture that it made me shudder.

"You want to tell me what's wrong," he said, starting in on the dishes.

"This," I said, and pointed to my stomach. "It wears me out."

His face flushed and he turned away from me. "Then you shouldn't be working yourself so hard. You chase the other girls off, take it all on yourself. You've got to think about what's going to happen when you're gone. Sister's gonna need a new girl and now I don't know but what she won't be able to stand it. You've been with her all the time."

I had never thought about it, that what I was doing might not be what was best for Sister Evangeline. I looked down at my hands.

"Look," he said, "I'm not bawling you out or anything. I'm just saying give it some thought. You're not like the other girls, Rose." He stopped, the sponge in his hand was suspended on the plate. "You're half running this place now. Everybody's come to count on you, they're getting attached to you. Do you understand that? You're going to be leaving soon. They've got to be able to stand on their own once you go." He looked at me and for a minute I was sure he was going to say something else. He was such a big man. He was nearly as old as my father would have been if he were alive. The bib of his overalls was wet with dishwater by the time he put the last dish in the rack. "I need to go home now," he said, as if there was a reason to go, that someone might have been waiting for him that one night. "You just give it some thought. Don't let it bother you, just think about it."

"I will," I said.

After he had dried his hands and buttoned his coat he came and stood beside me. He reached out for a second, I thought to touch my hair, and then pulled back his hand. "You all right?" he asked.

"It's just been a long day," I said.

But the night was years longer. We went back to our rooms and waited under the covers for bed check. "Good night, God bless," Sister Bernadette said into the darkness, and we said the same to her. Once her footsteps were far away we got up quietly and went to Beatrice's room. The contractions came closer and closer, but there was still no baby. It seemed that Beatrice would scarcely catch her breath before another one broke over her like a wave. "Read to me," she said, and tapped the magazine on her bedside table. "I think this would be a good time."

All of her hardness had washed away. The pain had pushed a sweetness into her, made her nearly docile. I picked up the magazine. "You want the pool-of-blood one?"

"Definitely."

"'On the night of November 16, 1967, the body of Carrie Holcome, aged sixteen years, was found in an alley outside of Big Jimmy's Restaurant in Waco, Texas, by José Díaz, an employee of the establishment.'"

"This is going to give me nightmares," Angie said. "I can't stand stuff like this. Look, the hairs on my arms are up already."

"So when you have a baby you can hear what you want," Beatrice said, fading off into another contraction, which seemed ridiculously close to the last one.

"Read it," Regina said.

"'The coroner's report showed clearly that Miss Holcome had been strangled, possibly with a telephone cord, at approximately nine
P.M.
'"

"It's always a phone cord," Beatrice said dreamily, the pain having left for a minute. "Have you ever noticed that?"

"Jesus," Angie said, and covered her eyes.

"'But the detectives that arrived on the scene were quick to notice that Miss Holcome lay in a pool of blood, even though she had no cuts on her body. After careful analysis, it was discovered that the blood under Miss Holcome's body was not her own.'"

"You mean to tell me that somebody killed this girl, poured a bucket of somebody else's blood on the ground, and laid her in it? That's too sick," Angie said. "That's even worse than just killing her."

"Dead is dead," Beatrice said. "How can it get worse?" But then she went off again. The only noise she made was something like a squeak, high and thin. She was holding Regina's arm with both her hands now and I prayed to be away, to not see it.

We went on like this through the night, close but not there. The pool of blood was something from meat, steaks, I think, that had been thrown into the alley from the kitchen door. It was the girl's boyfriend who'd killed her, dropped her there because she would not say she loved him, or so he said in his confession. He knew nothing about the blood.

"What a hoax," Beatrice said. "I thought it was going to be better than that."

We stayed awake all night. Even if we drifted off for a second, we were awakened by Beatrice every seven minutes, then five, then three. She did not call out, but the fact of every contraction pulled us to her bed. By the time the sun came up I was half out of my mind. I had crossed the line from exhaustion to being so completely awake I was aware of every time I blinked my eyes. I was suddenly afraid of everything. I didn't know how we could get through breakfast, I didn't know how we would ever get back any peace in our lives. It was as if everything was ruined now. It could not be reversed. The night we lost would never be regained.

At five-thirty that morning Beatrice started to move in her bed, pulling up her legs and twisting her head from side to side. "This is it," she said.

But we were wrecked. Angie started to cry, her hands were shaking. I got up quickly, quicker than I had in two months, and went down the dark stairs and through the dark corridor past the kitchen. I knocked on the door at the end of the hall. "Sister," I whispered, "help me."

A voice asleep but not tired like my own called me inside. There was a small old woman in the bed, short and round beneath her blanket. She sat up and started looking for her glasses. Her hair was completely white and it fell halfway down her back. She had on a flannel nightgown with a row of forget-me-nots around the collar. "Rose?" she said.

I could not get over the sight of Sister Evangeline, who was not a nun but any woman in her bed. "I need help," I said.

She clicked on the little lamp beside her bed and we stared at each other in disbelief. "Oh, Lord," she said, "look at you."

I looked down and saw my hands were shaking like Angie's. 1 felt like I couldn't stand up. "Help me," I said.

She got up and covered her head and immediately looked like herself again. I was so relieved to see her face framed inside the coife. It made sense to me now. She pulled on her bathrobe and went into the bathroom and got a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Then she went through the kitchen, picking up a stack of clean dishtowels, a ball of string, and her favorite knife, the one with the black handle she used for cutting tomatoes.

"I wish you girls hadn't done this," she said, not with anger, but as a matter of fact. "It's been a long time. I don't imagine it's something you forget, but I'd rather, well, that doesn't matter now. This is what we have to do and we'll do it."

We climbed back up the stairs and went into the room. In the few minutes I was gone everything had changed. Beatrice had crossed the line. The contractions counted for something now. Regina had taken on a new clarity. She seemed alert and calm, wiping off Beatrice's forehead with a damp washcloth. "You're fine," she said sweetly. "Everything is fine."

"I've never done two," Sister Evangeline said. "I don't even think my mother did two." She washed her hands in the sink again and again until I thought her skin would bleed.

"I don't think I'm going to be able to keep quiet about this much longer," Beatrice said.

"It doesn't matter, sweetheart," Sister Evangeline said. "You sing out if it makes you feel better. You're too far along to move now. You're going to have your way." She peered down between Beatrice's legs and slipped two fingers inside her. "Right there," she said, "all ready to go. Two fine boys. The next time you push. Next time you're ready, you get one out."

"I don't want to do this," Beatrice said, and took short breaths. Angie came and stood beside me, and we held to each other like drowning men. Only Regina seemed completely calm, whispering and sponging, staying right on the bed beside her.

What can I say about this? I had never seen a birth. I'm not sure I had ever really imagined it. It was like a movie that made you close your eyes and then open them again, until you were unable to either watch or look away. I remember that birth had a smell as heavy and salted as blood itself, and I remember that Beatrice never cried out, even after Sister said she could. It was a point of honor. She said she would be quiet start to finish and she was.

"There's so little to do," Sister Evangeline said, easing out the first shoulders. "They do it all themselves."

When I saw that first wet fish, its slickness, its blue cord, I pressed my hands against my stomach. The gates were open now to every longing Angie talked about late at night. This baby. My baby. To think I would be in a hospital asleep and when I woke up she would be gone. Never gone. I thought, never, never.

Sister Evangeline tied string in two places on the cord and drew her knife through what connected Beatrice to her son. Her hands were fast and sure the way they'd never been in the kitchen. She turned him over and loosened the fluids from his throat and he cried as his mother had not. Regina took him from Sister's hands and carried him to the sink with complete certainty and Beatrice laughed, as loud and coarse as she ever had in her life.

The second one was not free, as Beatrice's grandmother had told her, but it came more easily. Beatrice turned her head to the side. The light sounds she made seemed almost like desire, as if things had come full circle, and her face again contorted the way it had that night nine months ago. Regina gave me the first baby so she could take the second. She had wrapped him tightly in a pillowcase. His was a face one minute old. A face more exhausted than my own.

Mother Corinne came in just as the second cord was being cut. She looked at the knife and the blood across Sister Evangeline's blue terry cloth robe. You could tell by her face that at first she simply didn't understand, thought that what had happened revolved somehow around that knife.

"Evangeline," she said.

"It came on her so fast," Regina said. "She just had them. She was fine and then she just had them. I woke up Angie and Rose and they got Sister Evangeline. There was no time at all."

"Why didn't you come to me?" Mother Corinne said to me. She was furious. The blood had soaked through the mattress, onto the carpet.

"I was asleep," I said. "I just went to Sister Evangeline. I couldn't think. By the time she got up here to see what was wrong it was all happening."

Regina was washing out the baby's eyes, rinsing the blood from his open mouth. Girls started coming down the hall. Suddenly the world was up and pressing into the room. Every pregnant girl come to see her fate, and Beatrice laughing, laughing, a son in each arm. Sister Bernadette came and Mother Corinne told her to call for an ambulance. It would take an hour to arrive at least. Sister Evangeline pressed down into Beatrice and kneaded her abdomen until the afterbirth pushed out, and then she scooped it up in her hands and carried it to the wastepaper basket to throw it away.

***

I followed Beatrice to the door of the ambulance and then followed the ambulance down the road. It was snowing hard and the tires slipped a little as they turned. Maybe someone called to me and I didn't hear them or maybe they didn't call. It was as if everyone was wandering blind and I happened to be the one who went outside. Or maybe other girls were outside. If they were, well, what could I do for them? I had lost my capacity for worry, had used up every ounce of worry I had in me over the last twenty-four hours. Beatrice, Angie, Sister Evangeline, poor Regina. I should have been worried for them, but instead I watched the ambulance fade into whiteness, until all I could see were the red lights, spinning, and after a while, not even them. I pulled my bathrobe closer to my throat. I had put on my shoes at some point, because I saw them there. I knew it must be cold, but all I felt was wet.

Without worry to protect me, every thought that came into my mind received real attention. For the first time I saw myself clearly, waking up in the hospital the next morning alone. I would not be brave like Beatrice. I would not win those few hours. Even if I could, they would not dent my need. I could go back to Thomas. He would take me still, I was sure. I could make the drive, brush the snow off my car. How amazed he would be to see me like this, how he would fall to his knees to have me back, both of us back. Or I could go to my mother's, who would hide me from Thomas, or back to Billy's in Arkansas. I could go someplace where I could keep this baby. I saw those good parents crying. "Our girl," they'd say. But there were other girls for them. Saint Elizabeth's raised them, rich, fertile fields of babies. I was through with giving things up. I wanted something of my own.

I kept going through the snow, as if the place I was going was someplace I had to walk to. My feet got heavier as the snow started caking to my shoes. But I couldn't see where I was going. It was white in every direction and the dark lines around the edges could have been trees or hotels or towns. I should have been worried about that, too, but like I said, I just couldn't. I was thinking about the candles, about all the years I waited for my sign from God. I thought about it long and hard, and then I made a decision.

"I'm not counting that one," I said. "I took it the wrong way. There hasn't been a sign. I was really good, You know. For a long time. You shouldn't forget that."