“Why did she say look after me?”
Frances doesn’t take her eyes off Lily, she just says evenly, “Because she loved you, Lily.”
“… I love her too.” Tears.
Frances puts out a hand and barely strokes Lily’s long hair that’s never been cut. Then … “Okay, quit blubbering, let’s play.”
It is understood that Kathleen is not to be mentioned around Daddy, “because, Lily, it would hurt him terribly if you even said her name.”
On this particular evening, Frances has decided that the time has come to talk of other things. She reaches into her pocket and produces the key to the hope chest. Lily gasps.
“Don’t be so melodramatic, Lily.”
“What’s melon dramatic?”
“It’s stupid.”
“Oh.”
Frances repockets the key. “I made a mistake, you’re too young.”
“I am not!”
“Keep your voice down.”
Whispering passionately, “I am not, Frances, I won’t tell.”
Frances raises an eyebrow, shakes her head, mutters, “I must be losing my marbles,” and inserts the key into the lock. Raises the lid. The waft of cedar…. Frances gets a lump in her throat, blinks past it. Lily knows better than to ask.
“Close your eyes, Lily.”
“Okay.”
“There are things in here that you’re not ready to see.”
Rustle, rustle.
“Put your hand out.”
Lily does. “It feels silky.”
“It’s pure satin. Open your eyes.”
Frances holds what looks like a miniature wedding gown, gone a little yellow with age.
“It’s beautiful,” Lily breathes.
“It’s the christening gown. We were all baptized in it. Kathleen, Mercedes, me, you. And Ambrose.”
Lily looks up. “Who’s Ambrose?”
The thin white stripe appears across the bridge of Frances’s nose. It usually only appears when she’s laughing, but she’s not laughing now.
“He’s your brother, Lily.”
Lily stays perfectly quiet, looking into Frances’s eyes, waiting. Frances says, “Here. You can hold it.”
Lily takes the gown from Frances and cradles it in her arms, such a precious thing, an heirloom.
Frances says, “Ambrose died.”
Lily waits. Listens. Frances tells the story:
“On the day you both were born, a stray orange cat came in through the cellar door. It climbed the cellar steps. It climbed the front hall steps. It climbed all the way up to the attic without a sound. It came in here where you both were sleeping and it leapt into your crib. It put its mouth over Ambrose’s face and sucked the breath out of him. He turned blue and died. Then the orange cat put its paws on your chest and it was about to do the same thing to you but I came in and I saved you. Daddy took the orange cat and drowned it in the creek. Then he buried it in the garden. In the spot where the scarecrow used to be but now there’s a stone. I helped.”
Lily doesn’t move a muscle. Frances takes the gown carefully from her and calls, “Here Trixie,” making kissing sounds with her mouth, “Come on Trixie, come on,” until they hear the loping pad pad up the stairs and Trixie appears in the room, blink. You called?
“That’s a good Trixie, c’mere.”
Trixie comes. She always does when Frances calls. She found Frances three years ago. Trixie is pure black with yellow eyes. Although, who can say, maybe her missing front paw had a white slipper on it, we’ll never know.
“Frances, Lily, supper.”
“Coming, Mercedes.”
Downstairs, Mercedes pops her head out the front door, looking for Daddy’s Hupmobile. He had to do an emergency delivery to Glace Bay this afternoon. Someone needed twenty pairs of shoes right away. Mercedes is proud that Daddy works so hard, and always at night, just so he can look after Lily. Otherwise Mercedes would have had to leave school. Daddy drives all over the island delivering dry goods he picks up in Sydney. And often he makes boots all night in the shed. Mercedes has seen the reassuring glow of his lamp down there in the window, athough she would never dream of disturbing him — Daddy doesn’t like to be interrupted when he’s working.
Mercedes is proud they have an automobile, athough she knows she should only be grateful. Here it comes, right on schedule, long and boxy, bobbing over the ruts. And here come the girls down from the attic; it looks as though supper will be on time for once. Tonight it’s an old Cape Breton recipe that Mercedes got from Mrs MacIsaac: ceann groppi. That’s Gaelic for “stuffed cod head”. It’s taken Mercedes all afternoon, she sincerely hopes Daddy will be thrilled: take a big cod head, take a lot of cod livers, scrape off the iffy bits, take rolled oats, cornmeal, flour and salt, stuff the head through the mouth, holding it with a finger in each eye. Boil.
James tosses his cap onto the halltree hook and says, “Come and hit the ivories, Mercedes, I feel like cutting the rug with my best girl.”
Mercedes smiles at Daddy and proceeds obediently to the front room, forced to wait dinner after all. Tortured as though by tacit conspiracy involving her entire family. She sits at the piano and grits her teeth at the sound of Lily giggling and running to Daddy. Mercedes opens the old Let Us Have Music for Piano and plays.
Lily places her left foot on top of Daddy’s right one, her right one on his left, and they dance to “Roses of Picardy”.
Until finally “I’m starved,” says Daddy. “What’s for supper, Mercedes?”
Supper.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” says Frances.
Even James. “I’m sure it’s delicious, Mercedes, but I have a hard time eating with my dinner looking me straight in the eyes.”
They all laugh except Mercedes, who gets up and leaves the room.
“What’s the matter with her?” asks James.
Frances responds, “It’s her period.”
James winces, so sorry to have enquired that he fails to notice the inappropriateness of the answer. “Well … I’ll apologize. Who wants tea biscuits and molasses?”
Up in her room, Mercedes consoles herself with the family tree. She has been working on it for almost a year. It is a painstaking process. Whenever she has a new entry — whenever she has had the precious time to dig a little deeper in the Sydney library, or on those rare occasions when she has received a long-awaited reply from the provincial archives in Halifax — she carefully unrolls the large scroll of special paper on her desk. She fastens down the corners, takes out a pencil and a ruler and neatly draws a short vertical line beneath one of several long horizontal ones, under which she inscribes the latest name. And there it hangs, quietly suspended like a piece of desiccated fruit.
Mercedes’ patience for this task is unlimited. She plans to surprise Daddy with it. He never talks about his own family except to say they all died. Perhaps she can restore to Daddy a fragment of what he has lost.
After supper on this evening, Lily comes up to find Mercedes going over all the pencil lines in careful ink.
“Thank you for supper, Mercedes.”
Mercedes looks up sharply to see if Lily is being mean. But Lily is never intentionally cruel; Mercedes knows that and repents of her suspicion. She returns to her work and says merely, “Hmm.”
Lily approaches and looks over Mercedes’ shoulder, fascinated.
“How come it doesn’t look like a tree?”
“‘Tree’ is only an expression, Lily. If it looked like a tree then it would be art. This is a chart.”
“Like a map?”
“Kind of.”
“Is there treasure?”
“Each name is a treasure.”
“Where does it lead to?”
“‘Map’ is just an expression too. It doesn’t lead anywhere.” Mercedes relaxes back in her chair. “Well, maybe in a way it does. It leads into the past. It tells us where we came from. But it doesn’t tell us where we’re going. Only God knows that.”
br /> “Where am I?”
“You’re right here on the same line with me and Frances and Kathleen, God rest her soul.”
“Where’s Other Lily?”
“She doesn’t appear here, dear.”
“How come?”
“She was never baptized.”
“But she was our sister.”
“Yes, and we love her and pray for her, but that’s not how it works on a family tree.”
“Where’s Ambrose?”
Mercedes looks at Lily. “Who’s Ambrose?”
Lily looks back at Mercedes. “Will you read me a story?”
“Of course I will, dear, you go climb into your nightgown and pick one out, I’ll be right there.”
At three that morning, Mercedes slumbers beneath a finger of moonlight. As usual, her door is an inch or so ajar — she has nothing to hide and plenty to listen for. The door begins to open silently. Mercedes’ eyes open. In time to see it swing to rest wide enough to admit a draft. Or a very small child.
“Who’s there?”
No answer. The soft, barely discernible pad-padding of tiny feet. Approaching the bed.
“Trixie?”
Silence. Trixie never visits her room.
“Go ’way, Trixie.”
At the corner of Mercedes’ eye, a whitish glimmer. Her blood cools. Not Trixie. Mercedes raises her head. The thing moves into the slant of moonlight. And there — oh Mother of God — an unholy infant. Swathed in a mockery of the first holy sacrament. Mercedes tries but fails to say, “Out.”
Dressed in the baptismal gown, stained with the Devil’s swart embrace.
“Out” — a cracked whisper.
Two yellow eyes.
“Out out out out, ou-ou-t!” straight from her bowels.
James bolts through the door, flails, finds and yanks the electric light chain to see Mercedes shuddering, staring, teeth bared, rosary at her chest.
“What’s happened?”
Mercedes speaks but her sobs snatch and tear the words; he grips her shoulders. “Look at me.” He shakes her. “Look at me.” She does. She pulls herself up and away from the void, then says, “I thought I saw something.”
He nods and sits down on the edge of her bed. There is, and is not, any such thing as a ghost. This house, for example: James, honest with himself, admits that there are places and times which he avoids in his own home. Not out of belief — out of that spot on the back of his neck that stirs now and then for no reason. That’s when he wishes he had the right to pray. Because that’s what the unquiet need. “Pray for us” is what they’re saying with their moans and midnight walks.
James runs his tongue over the dry bluish sheen of his lower lip and Mercedes notices how long his lashes are. He speaks to her — to her alone — oh it seems for the first time since she was a very little girl.
“Your grandmother. My mother. Saw something once. Or no. Heard.”
Mercedes waits. Daddy has never mentioned his mother to anyone but me, now, at this moment … and perhaps once long ago to Kathleen. Mercedes holds her breath, not to startle the moment. So fragile. All the fine things, anything not smudged, all things that can never wither but break so easily, that’s what he is.
“Music,” he says. “It was a sunny day. She couldn’t tell you what instrument or what tune, or even which way it came — whether in through the window, or right beside her. Just that she thought, ‘That must be what heaven’s like.’ It was that beautiful. So she knelt down where she was in the kitchen and said a prayer of thanks because she’d had that little taste, see? And after that she was never afraid of anything.”
Mercedes forms her small smile. She holds her tears in a reservoir. Tears could only dampen a moment such as this and set it to mildew, guaranteeing its decay.
A voice from the door. “What’s the matter?”
“Hey, little buddy.” James goes to Lily and scoops her up, Lily fastens her legs around his waist. She’s too big to be picked up, thinks Mercedes, answering, “I thought I —” but she catches Daddy’s warning look and revises her story; “Nothing, Lily, I rode the nightmare is all.”
“Did you see the bodechean?”
James laughs at the old Gaelic expression. “There’s no such thing, who told you about the bodechean?”
“Frances.”
Shut up, Lily, for once can’t you just shut up, but Mercedes says, “Frances was just teasing, there’s no such thing.”
“Mercedes, want to sleep with me and Frances?”
“No. Thank you, Lily.”
“Give your sister a kiss goodnight, Lily.”
They leave and Mercedes, thoroughly back to herself, rises and crosses to the centre of the room, douses the light and returns to bed in the dark, scornfully recalling the days when she believed that long-necked creatures resided beneath her bed waiting to bite her ankles.
She kneels at the side of her bed and starts the rosary. Just in time, because she felt the first inkling of the long-necked things just now, when her mind’s disdain wore off. Bedside kneeling in the dark is always the hardest, for imagine the things wrapping themselves around your upper legs. Pulling you under. Don’t imagine anything past that, nothing like that is going to happen as long as you say your rosary. With a pure heart. Mercedes despises herself for these childish superstitions, knows them to be groundless, but can’t stop the retractions in her thigh muscles all the same. These small flexings often lead to a dread feeling farther up that craves undoing, and it’s this feeling more than all the others that serves to remind one that — while there are no long-necked creatures under the bed, and the bodechean is merely a pagan notion — there is certainly a Devil. Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen.
Mercedes imagines her unknown grandmother bathed in sunlight, kneeling in thanks for the foretaste of heaven. Then she considers the visitation which she herself has just been vouchsafed. God gives us each something different.
Frances is in the cellar, holding a coal-oil lamp to the gap between the furnace and the blackened wall, where Trixie is wedged as far back as possible. Trixie’s lace bonnet is askew, her white satin gown a sooty mess. Earlier this evening, just before supper, she scrowled out of Frances’s hold in the attic and streaked down to the cellar for refuge. Cats don’t enjoy dress-ups. She stayed behind the furnace until the house fell silent. Then she crept out and up the stairs. To Mercedes’ room.
“Come on Trixie.”
Frances has to get Trixie undressed quickly, because if Daddy finds her like this again it will be into the creek with her.
“Trixie, please.”
Trixie vigorously licks her front paw and washes her face.
“Trixie, taa’i la hown, Habibti.”
Trixie looks up, then suffers herself to be hauled from the corner. Frances unties the bonnet. “You looked so pretty, Trixie.” And undoes the thousand buttons of the baptism gown. “Stay still, I’m almost—”
Trixie scratches the rest of the way out and bounds up the steps. Frances follows more quietly. When she reaches the top step, her lamp light splashes across Daddy’s shoes. Trixie is long gone, thank goodness; she’ll be back in two or three days.
James waits until Frances has washed and hung up the gown and bonnet.
Upstairs, Mercedes finishes the rosary. Even as she screamed, her mind had already identified what she had seen, but it had to wait for her body to catch up. The apparition explained, however, is not expunged. It was a demonic vision whatever the earthly agency. God works in mysterious ways, but the Devil’s ways are even more arcane and often spiced with the absurd. Some would say funny. Mercedes would not. Funny is a fat lady playing the ukelele. Funny is a man dressed up as woman in a Gilbert and Sullivan musical. Funny is not a crippled black cat got up like a devil baby in the family christening gear at midnight. Frances is a vessel. Like that morning before Mumma died and Mercedes and Frances both had coal smudges on their foreheads and Frances said she w
as visited by a “dark lady” in the night. Please, dear Mother of God, hear my prayer and accept the offering of thy holy rosary for the preservation of the soul of my sister Frances, amen.
No sooner is Mercedes back in bed than the light slices on again and she squints up to see Frances’s head bobbing and lurching, he’s got her by the back of the neck, Punch and Judy.
“Now apologize to your sister.”
Mercedes looks away. She can’t stand it when Frances grins with a bloody lip.
Later, when all is calm, Mercedes slips into the room overlooking the creek. She crawls into bed and spoons around Frances’s chill back and encircles her thin waist. On the other side, Lily feigns sleep. All the sisters tucked up in one bed — this wonderful thing only ever happens these days on sad occasions. Frances has had another talking-to from Daddy, Lily knows that.
Mercedes feels ease. This is as close as she gets to a state of grace, curious as she knows this to be. It’s a mystery. To experience the gift of peace with your bad sister in your arms. Nothing can get you now, Frances, te’berini.
Mercedes casts a net of thought prayers over Frances’s sleeping form, lighter than air, than gossamer wings, finer than the finest silk to keep my little sister safe. Hush baby, sleep, thy mother tends the sheep….
The Family Tree
Three and a half weeks later, Mercedes has unearthed another fossil. It was beached beneath a quarter-inch of dust on a forgotten page of a crumbling chapel registry. Another name. Perfectly preserved in its desert grave, waiting to be exhumed and grafted onto Mercedes’ family tree; granted eternal still life in a meaningful context.
Late at night when all is blessedly quiet, when she’s got a moment to herself alone, she sits at her desk, straightens her spine and begins to unscroll the family tree. She squints as though against a sudden light — it’s … unscroll a little more … what is it? A riot of golds and greens and ruby-reds swirls and ululates across the page, what is it? … scroll it slowly open all the way and … where there was once a sober grid etched in ink with loving and dispassionate care, there is now a swaying, drunken growth, a what, a tree! A tree. Yes, she can see that now, it is in fact a tree.