Lily looks sharply across at Mercedes and tests her cautiously; “I saw how it happened.”
Mercedes returns the look. “Did he see you watching?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Don’t worry, Lily, he’ll never touch her again” — It’s on the tip of Lily’s tongue to say, “It wasn’t Daddy,” but she doesn’t. The fog has settled and they are in the midst of a soft void — it’s as though they’ve ceased to travel forward at all, the car just rocking gently side to side. Mercedes returns her eyes to the blind windshield — “I won’t let him.”
They crawl along in silence for a while. You can tell where the edge of the road is by reaching out through the passenger window till you feel the pine needles going by. Lily loses herself in this task but gives a start when something chilly alights on her other hand.
“Say a little prayer with me for Daddy, Lily.” And Mercedes closes her hand around Lily’s. “Let us ask God to forgive him.”
“Because he knows not what he does …” says Lily.
“Let’s say a decade of the beads.”
“Did you bring a rosary?”
“We don’t need a rosary, Lily. We have faith.”
But Mercedes needs to count something, so she counts the nubs of the wooden steering wheel, a nub for each whispered prayer, allowing them to slip beneath her fingers. One. By one. By one.
By the time Mercedes’ left hand has gone three times round the steering wheel, her other hand has drained the warmth from Lily’s and they both of them are cold. An increase in the pressure of their backs against the seat tells them that the road has started to ascend. The last strands of fog caress the car, releasing it back into time and space and night.
“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be —”
“Turn here.”
“That’s not a road, Lily.”
“I know.”
They lurch and rumble through squealing branches till the back of a truck appears in their lights. Mercedes feels her eyes and stomach go watery. She reads the name stencilled there, “Leo Taylor Transport”.
“He’s not a bad man, Mercedes.”
Their lights fade from the rear of the truck. They get out of the car. Mercedes has brought Daddy’s old pit lantern. She lights it.
It’s a sin for Lily to let Mercedes think it was Daddy who beat up Frances. But he has done it in the past. Surely truth can be borrowed across time without perishing. Shelf life, so to speak. Though Lily knows the man in the mine with Frances did not hit her, she is nevertheless worried. In the movies, when a girl is interested in a man she gets dressed up, powders her nose and puts on a little lipstick. But what kind of man is it for whom a girl would see fit to render herself more attractive by bashing in her own face?
Lily and Mercedes walk slowly, scraping their way through the woods, pinning back boughs for each other. Lily strains to spot the trail that Frances blazed in the trees that November day almost three years ago. She hasn’t mentioned the trail to Mercedes. After all this time, you’d never notice the marks unless you knew they were there. Frances carved each one with the kitchen scissors. Scissors have not changed since ancient history. The Egyptians had scissors and eyeshadow and jewellery and pet cats just as we do, it’s in a beautiful golden book that Lily got for Christmas from Daddy, Secrets of King Tut. But they didn’t have the wheel.
“Do you think the Egyptians had the wheel, Mercedes?”
“I’m sure I neither know nor greatly care.”
“I think they did but it was too holy to them to draw it. Or else they wanted to keep it a secret.”
Mercedes stops. “How much farther?”
“We’re halfway there.” They’ve just past the tree marked with an “R” — the fourth of seven letters, each spaced seven trees apart.
“After all,” Lily continues, “they worshipped the sun and the sun is round.” Lily counts seven trees and stops again.
Mercedes holds the lantern up to a gouge in the bark where Lily is peering.
“What are you looking at?”
“‘O’” Lily reads. Then turns to Mercedes. “We’re almost there.”
Mercedes knows only that her sister is being guided. She looks down into Lily’s eyes, and Lily feels her back open up like a book on either side of her spine, onto a dark and endless corridor full of something Mercedes craves. This is the look of Reverence. Like the look of Pity, it is frightening. But Lily has learned how to remain Lily while receiving such a look. She holds her eyes the way you might hold your arms when looking up at someone who is in danger of falling from a high place: still, steady, outstretched. This discourages the person from jumping and killing you both, for perhaps they just wanted to know there was someone waiting below to catch them. The way Lily looks when she calmly holds out her eyes in this manner is what the lookers of Pity and Reverence call “beatific”.
“Are you tired, Lily?” Mercedes asks gently, allowing Lily’s back to close up again.
“No. We’re almost there.”
And they walk on. “S.” And finally, “E.”
“Up there.” Lily points.
Mercedes raises the lantern to the sudden incline of the hill. “You’d better wait here, Lily.”
“No. I better come.”
They hold hands and traverse the hill. Unlike Frances, Mercedes paid attention at Guides and learned how to climb a steep hill without falling, how to swim safely across a current.
Mercedes knows that Frances is no stranger to men, she only wonders how Frances has avoided pregnancy for so long. But tonight is different. For Daddy to be upset, it has to be. “Different how?” Mercedes wondered, as soon as James was prone at the foot of the stairs. She has been going over that question and she has come up with an answer. It was Lily saying that Frances was not with “a bad man” that tipped Mercedes off. It must be that Frances is in love. Planning to elope with this man, whoever he is. But why elope? There must be some obstacle. The man must be married.
What would become of Frances, on the run with a man not bound by law to look after her? How long could anyone, man or woman, put up with Frances? Who else but Mercedes knows how to love Frances? And where would Frances and her lover be by the time he’d had enough? Hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away, maybe in another country. Frances stranded, without money or love, would die far from home. Mercedes can’t bear the thought. It burns her throat and salts her eyes. Dear Frances. My little Frances, alone, dying and no one there to love her because no one there remembers.
Mercedes bends to the hill, they’re almost there, “Hurry, Lily.” Thank you God, thank you Jesus, Mary and Joseph and all the saints, for Lily, who is divinely inspired. If Lily’s premonition proves correct and prevents Frances from running away, then that will be a miracle indeed. Time enough to contact the archdiocese once Frances is safely home.
The old pit lantern lights up the rim of the arch — torn earth, a fringe of tangled grass, a limestone gash and, within, the gleaming textures of the walls. Cave paintings would never last in here, too damp.
Mercedes calls softly, “Frances.”
Lily whispers, “The tunnel goes around a bend, then there’s a pool of deep water.”
Please God, let it be a good man.
They walk in.
“Frances.”
Frances will hide, Mercedes thinks, so she proceeds slowly, casting the lantern from side to side, examining every nook and cranny. Lily keeps her eyes on her feet, waiting for the yelp of fear when Mercedes sees the dead miner, the dead soldier. But it doesn’t come. As with so much else of what she remembers, Lily wonders, was it just a dream? Did that happen? Was that really me?
The corridor begins to curve to the left.
Frances has heard her name and shoves Ginger off her. He wakes, cold with misery, full of apology.
“Shutup,” she says. “Someone’s coming.”
She feels around for
the rock under which she hid her uniform.
“Stay here, Frances, I’ll go and see who it is.”
“It’s my sister and Christ only knows who else,” scuffling into her clothes.
He’s bewildered. The water of the pool was not as cold as this.
“Frances, I didn’t mean to take advantage of you.”
She laughs, hauling on her shoes.
This time they both hear her name.
“Sweet Jesus.” He feels for his fly and buttons up. Her footsteps start away. Ginger flails out and catches her biceps, so fragile.
“Ow.” She writhes but he won’t let her go.
“Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“What’s the matter with you, girl?”
“Get your hands off me.”
“I’m sorry I touched you, if I got you in trouble, if I hurt you —”
She laughs. He lets her go.
“Look” — she’s all business — “just forget about it. We both got what we wanted.”
“You wanted me to help you.”
“You did, thank you. If this doesn’t work then I’m probably infertile, since you obviously aren’t.”
At this he seizes her again, pinning her elbows against her ribs. “What do you mean?” He’s shocked by his own anger.
“Relax, buddy, I don’t want anything else from you. And I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.”
But he doesn’t let her go. His hot breath is on her face. He feels he could break her in two right this instant, just like that, and it scares him. Frances knows better. If a man is going to hurt you badly, the first blow will come within three seconds. It’s been over ten now, and he’s still just hanging on and heaving air.
“Come on, Leo. You liked it, I could tell.”
“I saved your life.”
“My fuzzy arse, you did.”
He falters, not wanting to take it in just yet.
“What about your daddy, you can’t go back, he’ll kill you.”
She goes all haughty and upper-crust. “My father has never laid a hand on me.” He lets her go. A light appears around the bend. Frances walks towards it.
He never does see who or how many have come for her. Of everything, perhaps he’s most ashamed of staying behind, cowering in reliance on her promise not to tell. But what would happen to his family if he were killed here tonight? Disgrace and destitution.
At the thought of his family, Ginger emerges from what seems to him now to have been a narcotic haze. There in the dripping mine, his head feels clear and whole for the first time in he doesn’t know how long. Since New York. His heart is heavy, leaking and frayed, but it is his own. He feels acutely present in every particle of his body and his body is more worn than it was last time he looked — like the body of a loved one, long thought dead, who returns looking older but so much more like himself than anything recorded in memory or photographs. He is filled with the joy and sorrow of the reunion with himself. Forgiveness.
The sun is about to show. The rifle jiggles on Adelaide’s knees and she can’t help a yawn. Teresa exchanges a look with Wilfrid Beel. Wilf says, “There’s a hunting cabin down this road I used to use, if it’s still there it’s a likely spot —”
“Never mind, Wilf,” says Adelaide. “Let’s go home, he’s probably there waiting on me by now.”
Teresa is relieved. They’ve been driving Addy around all night wearing her out with dirt roads, they drove halfway to Meat Cove, and it’s finally worked. Teresa wasn’t worried that their search would turn up anything. She just wanted to keep Adelaide away from the Piper house with that rifle. She’s got a short wick, her sister-in-law, God love her. No good telling her that Ginger wouldn’t touch that ghost of a girl with a ten-foot pole.
Adelaide is right. When they pull up in front of her house it’s light enough to see through the windows of the locked double doors that Ginger’s truck is safely inside the garage.
When Frances greeted Lily and Mercedes in the mine she just said, “Did you bring the car?”
Mercedes was so relieved she didn’t at first notice Lily straying round the bend whence Frances had appeared. “Lily, we’re going home now.”
“What about the man?”
“He has his own vehicle,” answered Mercedes. She did not wish to see what lay around the bend. It was enough for her that Frances was content to leave it behind.
Once home, Frances refuses to take a bath, “I had one last night.” When Mercedes tries her strong-arm matron thing, Frances resists like a cat, clinging hands and feet to the sides of the tub till Mercedes gives up. Then Frances washes her hands, her face and feet while Mercedes stands waiting with a fresh towel.
“Are you in love with him?”
Frances just snorts.
“Do you plan to see him again?”
“What, are you jealous, Mercedes?”
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Maybe you’re a lezzy, Mercedes, did you ever think of that? Have you tried it? Want to? We could.” Frances laughs without finding it funny, nothing seems that funny any more, she has a delicious tired feeling creeping up.
“Are you hungry?” asks Mercedes.
“Yes.”
“I’ll make us some cinnamon toast.” And she turns to leave.
“Mercedes?”
Mercedes pauses in the bathroom door but does not turn. Frances continues, “I’m going to be good from now on. I’m going to have a healthy baby.”
Mercedes takes a breath and lowers her head.
“Mercedes?”
“Yes?”
“Can we have cocoa too?”
“Of course.”
“Come in for a cuppa?”
Wilf and Teresa politely decline. Adelaide enters her house, dog-tired.
Ginger has made tea and tea biscuits, and he is freshly bathed and changed. He says to his wife, “Addy, I’m going to tell you everything, and then you can tell me if you want me to leave.”
“Gimme a cuppa tea first, Leo.” She sinks onto a kitchen chair with a physical relief that would make sense if she had spent the night walking instead of driving.
By the end of his story Adelaide’s freckles are more prominent than before, but that could be because she’s tired. He breaks the silence that follows with “You want me to go?”
“No.”
“I can only stay if you can forgive me, otherwise there’s no point.”
She looks at him across the tea. It’s as though a mist had cleared from his face. He’s back. She gets a retroactive shiver at the thought of how he’s been lost and wandering in a wilderness not his own.
“Can you forgive yourself?” she asks.
“I think I have. Because, you see, she’s gone right out of me.”
“I believe you.”
“But do you forgive me?”
“That’s what I said.”
“You said —”
“I forgive you.” She never cries. So when she does, the tears are hot pepper.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
She wraps him up with her long muscles, graceful bone blades, reddish halo. “Don’t ever leave me.”
“I never, never will.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
She runs a hand over his half-inch of soft rough hair, squeezes his shoulders, loses her narrowness in the fold of his belly and feels her back supported by his arms, which are as strong as they look. They hold each other and think about all their children and feel in themselves no limit to what they can make together, what they can give to each other. She slips her hands onto his hips. Upstairs the baby awakens. Morning.
A New and Glorious Morn
Across town, Camille makes her first pot of tea as a widow. The word isn’t in yet about her son but she knows about the loss of her husband. A very young Mountie banged on the door just before midnight. She hadn’t been going to open up for him, thinking it was a raid; then she figured, wha
t’s the difference? It’s not as though her husband has kept her in the style to which a successful gin-slinger’s wife might reasonably expect to become accustomed. So she opened up and the Mountie said with a long face, “I’m sorry, missus, but I have some bad news for you.” Then he came out with the anticlimax of a lifetime.
The first of Camille’s sons to arrive home had difficulty opening the front door against the weight of her steamer trunk.
“Ma, what’s going on?”
She lumbered down the stairs with a hatbox in one hand and a suitcase containing her wedding gown in the other. “Your father’s dead, I’m going home.”
Now Camille fixes a cup of tea the way Pa likes it and carries it up the stairs to his bedroom. It’s dawn. He doesn’t know she’s here. She’s going to surprise him.
Mercedes sits on the piano bench and watches James until his eyes snap open at dawn. It’s a habit he got in the war. She takes a reading on his position.
“What do you remember from last night?”
James blinks, crystal-blue and innocent.
“Wake up,” she says. The last thing Mercedes wants right now is to see him as a tousled little boy. He jerks to a sitting position, where he finds his headache waiting for him. It tightens over his scalp and he ages the forty years back to reality.
“What happened?” he asks.
“You got drunk and fell.”
He winces and looks at the floor. Then he remembers, “Where’s Frances?”
“Frances is sleeping, sit down.”
He’s fully awake now and has registered Mercedes’ unaccustomed tone. He looks at her, and sits back down slowly. “What did I do?”
“You tried to touch Lily.”
His hands fly up to keep his shattered face from spilling onto the carpet, a moan oozes out between his fingers. Mercedes feels a twinge of compunction, then thrusts the point of her lie under and up, “I had to drag you off her.”
He doubles over, caught in the ribs, his moan turns to a squeak. Mercedes gives quarter. “She didn’t wake up.”
His head starts shaking no behind his hands, he leaves the sofa without straightening up, to do so might be to lose his guts, and he staggers out of the room, out of the house like that. Mercedes hears the car engine start. If her father chooses to drive himself over a cliff, so be it. And if Mercedes burns an extra millennium in purgatory as a result, that’s simply the cost of doing business with God. The bottom line is that she has rescued Frances. Finally. Mercedes is neither a saint nor a sinner. She is somewhere in between. She is why purgatory was invented.