Frances is risen from the baby carriage now that Adelaide has ridden off on her bike. “Like a witch on her broom,” thinks Frances with a shudder. She has sent Lily home, claiming the need to “commune with nature”.
Part of Frances’s new health regime is moderate exercise. It’s hard to know what to believe about pregnancy when, in movies, miscarriages are a narrative convenience as close as the nearest flight of stairs, while in books like Great Pioneer Women the broads all fight bears and harvest corn right up to their accouchement. Frances has decided upon the happy medium of regular oceanside walks. Romantic heroines are always being ordered to take the sea air. Unless they are tubercular, in which case they are banished to the land where the blood oranges grow. Frances hasn’t noticed any tubercular tendencies in herself. In fact, with the conviction of her pregnancy her self-image has evolved into that of a much larger woman. Slow and curvaceous, with a bosom instead of a chest.
Trixie has come along for the walk. Something about her attentive behaviour, as well as the trotting gait necessitated by her missing paw, makes Trixie seem more canine than feline. And she is in the habit of casting quick glances up at Frances, checking in the way a dog does. They arrive at the edge of the cliff. Trixie follows as Frances traverses the stony slope, eschewing her former habit of skidding headlong on her hands and heels. At the bottom, Frances pauses and takes a deep salty breath.
She turns north and begins to stroll as though through warm water, or as though rhythmically across the endless wet sand of a beach she has never visited but would know instinctively how to tread. This kind of walking goes with her new hips, which have become what is commonly described as “child-bearing”.
They walk on. This is the best of the summer. Not yet eight in the evening, the sun has brought out the green of the ocean and bathed the sky in a soothing balm of fire. Days like this are so precious. Frances stops and looks out at the sea, which trembles at the caress of the sun. Mumma feels near … as though she had never gone away. Frances is feeling a familiar yet unnameably old feeling. One she hadn’t known was ever hers to forget. Happiness. Unlike her imaginary new body, this feeling is genuine.
Trixie looks up and sees Teresa standing on the ridge above. Backlit, Teresa is magnificently darker and brighter than ever. Seen from far below like this, her great height is higher still. In this light, at that height, everything becomes a precise charcoal line. Teresa’s body is a bold vertical stroke. Bisecting her middle is a horizontal line half as long as she is tall. Against the red-gold blaze of evening. Frances looks up and experiences an arrow through her heart at the crucivision. The arrow is love, its pain spreads outward and the pain is faith, the source that launched the arrow was sorrow. “Teresa,” thinks Frances, and her lips move around the name as she stretches her arms up and holds them out to the woman standing far above.
The horizontal line across Teresa revolves like the needle of a compass till it disappears into the vertical stroke of her body, and the next instant a shot rings out. Frances jolts through the air and onto her back against the gravel shore.
Precious Blood
No one knows just how much Hector understands, not even Teresa. She long ago ceased to look for signs of dear Hector, it being the only way she could come to terms with his loss. And besides, the doctor said Hector was brain-damaged into a cheerful vegetable. Although his only memories from before the accident are smell feelings, Hector has learned to understand English again the way a child learns, in nouns and verbs and concepts. He could learn to read again too if someone thought of teaching him. Unlike a child, however, he will never be able to speak the words himself. What’s left to him is the speech of dogs.
“Hey, hey, Hector, what’s the matter b’y?”
Old Wilf Beel has caught up to Hector’s wheelchair and pulled him to the side of the road. Hector makes his sounds and paws at Wilf’s jacket, his mouth foaming with panic, and Wilf asks, “Are you lost, Hector?”
Hector groans in frustration, then erupts into rage when Wilf actually points the wheelchair back homeward and starts pushing.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, b’y —” says Wilf. But Hector flails at the armrests and wrenches his head around in an effort to see Wilf.
“Did you want to go visit Leo and Adelaide, is that it, Heck?”
And Hector can only bob his head and beam joylessly to get the message across loud and clear, YES! JESUS CHRIST ALMIGHTY, YES!
“Oh, well, I don’t mind taking you there.”
And Wilf turns the chair around again and pushes Hector along, if more slowly than Hector was travelling under his own steam, at least in a much straighter line.
“Where’s Teresa at, eh Hector?”
Hector ignores the question but Wilf doesn’t notice.
Teresa is in a state of disbelief. Minutes ago she was gliding along the Shore Road on the bike, having got the hang of it in the course of eight or so miles. She caught sight of the figure on the beach below because of the bright colours it wore, kindled by the full light of the setting sun. The dress looked familiar. Teresa laid down the bike and walked to the edge of the cliff for a better look. The sight of the dress awoke an emotion detached from context. Sympathy — and… pity. Yes. She felt sorry for her. The woman who answered the door in that dress, oh, long ago, a blonde child at her feet, she was married to — it’s Materia Piper’s dress. A strip of goose-flesh streaked down Teresa’s left arm at the recognition of the dress and of the wearer, whose aimless rhythm and bearing also said Materia. There was a small black dog down there too, trotting at the woman’s heels. Did the Pipers have a dog back then, Teresa tried to recall as she slowly parallelled them along the cliff, the rifle threaded through her folded arms.
That poor woman…. Teresa always wished she had done some nice little thing for Materia, since she was the only person Teresa had ever met who truly seemed worse off than herself.
Teresa doesn’t believe in ghosts, nevertheless she expected any moment the figure to shimmer and disappear into ocean light.
“Perhaps it is a sign,” she thought, “asking me not to harm her daughter.”
And Teresa took pity on the woman who was not strong enough to live, but was strong enough to pierce through death to protect her child.
Teresa had resolved to go in peace when the figure ceased walking, turned and looked up at her. The Devil’s face housed in a shape of pity. Teresa watched Frances raise her arms in triumph, a mocking smile twisting her lips, and hiss the name “Teresa”. Teresa swung the rifle through a hundred and eighty degrees, caught it with her shoulder, aimed and fired. The demon jerked back and flopped like a rag doll.
Now Teresa is suspended with the smoking rifle floating out in front of her, trying to get ahold of what she’s done.
Hector is exhausted by the time he’s in Adelaide and Ginger’s kitchen.
“Hector, honey, just settle down now, we’re going to go find Teresa, okay?”
Ginger has already headed over to check Teresa’s house. It’s alarming. Hector does not go places unattended. But he won’t settle down.
“Hector, did something happen to Teresa?”
He shakes his head “no” in a way that’s understood only to those who know him. Then he nods his head “yes” twice as urgently till finally it dawns on him. He points. Up to the top of Adelaide’s kitchen cupboard.
“What is it, Hector? You want something? There’s nothin up there, b’y, what d’you want?”
He gives a series of frustrated groans but does not lower his pointing arm, though it begins to waver. Adelaide shrugs, moves to the counter and is halfway climbed onto it when she freezes in recognition.
“Oh Jesus, Hector.”
She turns and he nods solemnly, “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”
“Good boy, Hector,” she says as she grabs her sweater, “stay here with the kids,” and she’s out the door.
Teresa starts breathing again and the rifle regains its weight against her shoulder and in her hands. It’s done. Her hea
rt starts making a racket in an effort to wake up her mind. She reaches out, grasps the barrel in both hands and hurls the rifle end over end onto the beach below, where it discharges again in a hail of pebbles. This second shot is the one she hears, and it sets her running like a starting pistol in the ears of a sprinter. She pounds along the cliff, running and running, she doesn’t think where until she swings with the rail tracks towards New Waterford, and still all she knows is what she sees flashing by, not what she intends. Number 12 Colliery, colossally idle to her right, the little company houses, whipping by like telephone polls past a steamed-up train. She’s not running like a lady, she’s running like a champion. The next thing she notices is that she’s bounding up the steps of New Waterford General Hospital, and from this she surmises that she has come to get help for the girl she has killed.
Thundering towards New Waterford beside Ginger in his truck, Adelaide shouts, “Stop!”
It’s Hector’s bike lying near the tracks on the ocean side of the road. Adelaide hops down from the truck before it has rolled to a stop and dashes across. Ginger follows and joins her where she’s standing at the edge of the cliff staring down.
“Oh my Lord.”
Trixie is curled around Frances’s head. She has spent the ten minutes since the shooting painfully kneading Frances’s scalp with her never-trimmed claws. Two people have come sliding down the hill and now they’re crunching towards her and Frances.
At their approach, Frances repeats the words she has been mumbling, “Ow. Trixie, stop it.”
Frances’s eyes have gone to slits, the only colour on her face is her tiny nose mole, she has become scrawny once more, a little woman in a big dress.
In each hand there is a stone of equal weight. It is time for sleep.
“Should we move her?”
“We ain’t got much of a choice,” Adelaide replies.
It’s hard to know where the wound is and therefore where to take hold and lift her up because there’s so much blood. Trixie keeps kneading and for once she can’t stop talking. Ginger slips his arms under Frances and lifts her carefully. She’s so clearly not faking this time that he wonders again how he could possibly have bought her earlier performances. He decides to give himself a break and admit that she is a great actress. Adelaide picks up the rifle and they start back up the slope. Trixie follows, her eyes full of mendicant pleading. She watches the truck pull away, then streaks across the field for home.
Frances bleeds into Adelaide’s dress with her feet resting across Ginger’s knees. He tries for a compromise between speed and smoothness.
Teresa has been given a cup of tea in the front hall of New Waterford General Hospital. The head nursing sister was the first to come across her. If it had been that nice young intern from away, the hysterical woman would have been given a shot in the vein instead of a cup of tea. The head nurse, however, has noticed that, whether they drink the tea or not, the mere act of reaching out to receive something that must not be spilled seems to have a profoundly calming effect on all but the downright insane.
“Now dear, if the girl is dead, why does she need an ambulance?”
Teresa balances the teacup in both hands and puts her first real sentence together since the shooting, “There’s a chance she may still be alive. She’s down by the shore. She’s been shot.”
This is an example of how tea can work better than narcotic oblivion.
The head nurse rises immediately and swishes away to get the ball rolling. Teresa adds, “I shot her.”
Nurse hears her, thinks, “First things first,” and keeps walking towards Emergency.
The wasted ambulance is dispatched in time to narrowly avoid a collision with Ginger’s truck, Ginger having abandoned smoothness in favour of speed. Frances’s eyes have started to go fishy, and though Adelaide and Ginger have been shouting to her throughout the brief drive, Adelaide had no way of knowing that pricking Frances’s scalp might keep her from slipping away.
Teresa has raised the teacup to her lips for a first sip when Adelaide breaks through the front doors and hollers, “Can we get some service around here?” Two young nurses run to support Adelaide, who is soaked in blood, and she snaps, “Not for me!” She swivels to indicate Ginger coming through the doors carrying Frances, and catches sight of Teresa hunched in a chair against the wall, drinking tea. The head nurse returns on silent shoes. She has a trained eye so she walks past Adelaide without turning a hair, takes Frances from Ginger’s dripping arms and carries her to meet the gurney now hurtling towards them powered by the two younger sisters. Nurse lays Frances down on the move, they ram through a set of swinging doors and disappear into the operating theatre.
Luckily the head nurse was in the war. She has a way with bullet wounds.
This time, Lily hasn’t a clue where Frances might be. Ambrose has not come through. Mercedes shoos Trixie from the wingback chair to find a smear of blood in her place. Still wet.
“Trixie, come back here.”
But everyone knows cats don’t come. Mercedes searches the house till she finds Trixie in the cellar between the furnace and the wall. If anything has happened to the cat, Frances will be devastated.
“Come here, Trixie.”
No.
Mercedes reaches but Trixie scurries farther back. Mercedes goes up to the kitchen and returns with a saucer of salted kippers, but that’s the bait Frances always used to get Trixie in trouble.
Lily joins in the effort. “She might come if you speak Arabic.”
Mercedes has a kink in her neck. “Oh for heaven’s sake, Lily —”
“Trixie. Inshallah.”
Trixie puts forth a paw.
“Trixie,” says Mercedes, “taa’i la hown, Habibti … ya Helwi.”
Trixie slinks forward.
Mercedes examines Trixie on the kitchen counter — “Te’berini” — daubing the blood with a damp cloth until it becomes clear “There’s no wound.”
Lily picks up the bloody cloth and touches it to her tongue. Mercedes shoots her a sharp look. Lily tastes and says, “I think Frances is in trouble.”
“Oh God,” thinks Mercedes as the dry sobs fight for air, “I will do my best, O Lord, but when will you let me rest?”
Mercedes calls the hospital, then grabs her hat, “Stay here, Lily.”
“When’s Daddy coming home?”
But Mercedes is already out the door.
Mercedes falters at the sight of the Taylor truck parked out front of the hospital. She enters and comes face to face with Mrs Taylor and a man who must be her husband, as well as an unknown woman with her hands folded round a teacup.
“What happened?” Mercedes asks, standing at attention with her back to the grief-green wall. Teresa is lost in a prayer world of her own. Mercedes pegs her as a good woman. The only one un-streaked with blood. My sister’s blood.
“She’s been hurt,” Adelaide answers. “We found her and brought her here. I’d have called you but there’s been no time to think.”
Mercedes turns to Adelaide, whose cotton dress is spattered scarlet with guilt. “You can tell your story to the police,” she says, forcing the tremor from her voice, “Once you’ve thought it through.”
Teresa starts praying audibly. Mercedes closes her eyes and joins in the prayer. She does not allow herself the luxury of tears. Tears won’t keep Frances here. Mercedes’ stomach is spuming, her throat is in spasm. She recedes from the turmoil of her body, to that uncontaminated place just above her brow where prayer is forged. Prayer will keep Frances here.
A young nursing sister from reception appears.
“Your sister is still in surgery, Miss Piper. Would you like a cup of tea?”
When the young nurse returns with three more steaming cups, Mercedes is seated next to Teresa. They are holding hands, praying silently together, eyes closed, heads bowed. Adelaide takes the tray from the nursing sister and thinks to herself, “I could write a book. I really could.”
Lily arrives carry
ing a carpet-bag. Ginger notices the black tail trailing out from between its wooden handles. He gets up and gives her his chair.
“Thank you, sir.”
Lily places the carpet-bag on the floor beneath her chair. It stirs slightly. Adelaide and Ginger exchange a look. Lily doesn’t ask about their bloodstains. She will know soon enough if she has two sisters, or one. Mercedes has heard Lily’s unmistakeable clanking entrance but she doesn’t open her eyes. She does not wish to leave hold of her unknown partner in prayer. This good strong woman. You can feel the power of her faith.
The thing about an abdominal wound is the blood loss. The head nurse has performed some lovely field surgery on Frances but timing is everything and now it’s touch and go. Nurse comes out to the motley crew waiting in reception and asks Mercedes, “What’s your blood type, dear?”
At the far end of the recovery room, Lily has got an IV tube growing out of her right elbow, feeding a bloated bag that hangs from a metal stand and sprouts a second tube that runs into Frances’s hand. Mercedes is standing straight as a virgin soldier at the foot of the bed staring at her sisters. The white curtains are pulled back from the bed since the room is empty of neighbours.
Frances hasn’t moved, her eyelids haven’t fluttered during her silent meal of blood. Mercedes is trying to think what else to promise God in exchange for Frances’s life when it occurs to her that Lily’s third miracle may be under way. But no, don’t think of it, don’t admit pride, ambition, into the sick room, pray only. Mercedes treads softly the fifty feet to the door and leaves so as not to disrupt Lily’s work.
In reception, Mercedes’ and Teresa’s hands are praying together once more. A young nurse places a hand on Mercedes’ shoulder because she has twice failed to hear her own name. Teresa looks up at the touch.
The nurse says, “Your sister is awake, Miss Piper.”
Mercedes jumps up but the nurse continues, “She’s asking for a woman called Teresa.”
Teresa rises, lets go of Mercedes’ hand and follows the nurse up the stairs. Mercedes watches Teresa ascend the stairs and wonders how it is that Frances knows her.