James has either forgotten she’s there or doesn’t consider it of any importance. He yanks open the door of the cold furnace and tosses in a load of bloody sheets, douses it with kerosene and lights it. The sudden glow across his face startles even Materia and tears spring to her eyes, there is nothing sadder than the Devil. Tears spring to her eyes because in this light, in fire-light as in candlelight, the essential beauty of a person is evident. Candle-light is kind and caressing and therefore a natural companion to romance. The essential James is what the flames illuminate and it’s splintering what’s left of her heart, the sight of him as he was so long ago, the two of them alone in the hunting cabin out of season with his gift of his mother’s tartan blanket and the song and his bliss at the sound of her mother tongue, he loved her but she didn’t know she was supposed to save him, she didn’t know, she didn’t know, he must have fallen down and hurt himself just now because his face is dirty, he’s been crying and his cheeks are striped with blood.
He sprinkles a little more fuel onto the flames. Materia can’t stay by the furnace much longer what with it heating up like this. If he doesn’t leave soon she will have to move and betray her presence. But he shuts the pot-belly door and the glow dies down, his sweet agony disappears and is replaced by the shadows of the face she has come to know and Materia ceases to feel the lump in her throat.
As he heaves and shifts the weight of himself from one foot to another up the steps, Materia wipes the tears from her face with her sooty hands. She unwedges her body and drags it along the cinder floor behind her until she can stand up in it again, and goes back to being nothing but a pair of travelling eyes.
Before dawn, with Mercedes still sound asleep beside her, Frances opens her eyes and sees a black woman staring down at her. The woman reaches out and lightly strokes Frances’s forehead. She does the same to Mercedes, and then leaves. Frances falls back asleep. Candy. She dreams of candy.
The night is bright with the moon. Look down over Water Street. On the lonely stretch between where the houses end and where the sea bites into the land, a tree casts a network of shadow that stirs and bloats in one spot, as though putting forth dark fruit that droops, then drops from the bough. It’s a figure come out from under the branches and onto the street. It stops, drifting in place like a plant on the ocean floor. Then it travels again all the way down the street to the graveyard. It passes among the headstones that have flourished with the town, but it does not linger at the freshest mound. It continues to the edge of the cliff. There, it lies down on its stomach and places its neck upon the lip of the precipice, as though the earth were a giant guillotine. It looks straight out to the sea that stretches four thousand miles due east, and sings.
Is it possible that the Atlantic conducts the song across its waters until, thirsty and ragged, the song reaches the Strait of Gibraltar, revives a little with the refreshment of its own echo off the rock of ages and continues its journey, turning on its tattered axis all the way to Lebanon, where it finally loses momentum and rests in air for a moment before descending in soft arcs to the sandy shore below, to sleep there in peace and for ever, at last?
When Mrs Luvovitz opens her back door at three that morning she gets a fright. There’s someone in her garden. Just standing there at a slight tilt, as though blown that way by a wind that’s since died down.
Mrs Luvovitz woke up because she heard something. A woman singing, of all things. She couldn’t make out the words. It didn’t wake Benny. Hard not to think “banshee” — sometimes they wail, sometimes they weep or just sing softly, but their message is always the same: someone will cross over. By the time Mrs Luvovitz got her eyes properly open the singing had ended. But she looked out the front window anyhow — nothing. Just to be sure, she went downstairs and opened the back door, and that’s when she got the fright — a figure stood in her garden, with its back to her.
Fear turned to surprise the next instant when Mrs Luvovitz recognized the shape.
“Materia?”
Materia does not turn around, she does not stir. She is a ripe stalk planted in shallow soil, top-heavy, about to fall over roots-up. Just a baby’s breath will do it now.
Mrs Luvovitz walks between the beans and tomatoes until she is close enough to touch Materia’s arm. It is cool and smooth and plump. Materia’s hair is loose. It hangs in wiry black waves that just touch her shoulders. She’s wearing one of the loose cotton dresses that Mrs Luvovitz helped her sew, soft and favourite now with age, covered in faded wild flowers.
Materia turns at the touch and Mrs Luvovitz sees the front of her. “Gott in Himmel.”
Materia stands in Mrs Luvovitz’s tub while Mrs Luvovitz washes her. They’re in the kitchen with the fire going. The water is black with coal-dust and blood. Materia’s dress is on the floor, the front of it is a scab, it will be thrown out. Mrs Luvovitz washes her gently, no scrubbing, no cloth, with her soap-sliding hands only, as though Materia were a newborn. It’s a milky skin Materia has, not in colour but in texture, all curves, compact muscle under a soft sheath. Materia doesn’t say anything. All the effort and anxiety of distinguishing one thing from another drained away for ever, all distances now equal—Mrs Luvovitz’s face and the Cape of Good Hope, Materia’s own warm body and the rest of the world.
Mrs Luvovitz has sent Benny to the Piper house to find out what in God’s name is going on over there. When he arrives he finds James in a clean white shirt making tea, at three-thirty a.m. The house is very warm, hot. Kathleen is dead upstairs under fresh linen. There’s an infant girl asleep in a crib by the stove.
“I’m sorry for your trouble, James.”
“Thank you, Ben. Will you have a drink?”
“Cuppa tea.”
In the morning, Mercedes awakens next to Frances and sees a black smudge on her little sister’s forehead. It looks like ashes from the fireplace. Mercedes licks her finger and cleans it off. Frances sleeps on. While dressing, Mercedes notices a similar smudge on her own forehead. She wipes it away. Frances wakes up.
“Mercedes, I dreamt that the lady who gave me the candy came into our room last night.”
“What lady?”
“The dark lady. She touched me.”
Mercedes knows that it was the Devil and that they were protected by the rosary. The Devil would leave a coal smudge on your forehead. It would be like him to mock what the priest does on Ash Wednesday. And it couldn’t have been Our Lady. Everyone knows Our Lady is pure white in a blue dress.
“It was just a dream, Frances.”
“She was beautiful.”
Mercedes says a silent prayer for her sister.
“She’s my fairy godmother,” says Frances.
Mercedes puts the rosary around Frances’s neck and goes downstairs to help Mumma make breakfast. Frances curls up on her side and shivers.
Daddy is waiting for Mercedes in the kitchen. He has made porridge for her. She sits down at the table.
“Good morning, Daddy.”
“I need you to be a big girl, Mercedes.”
He looks at her. They have the same eyes, though hers are brown. Their faces are of sandstone, though hers is tinged with olive. Mercedes understands that the worst is coming and unfolds her serviette, placing it neatly on her lap. She’s glad she took special care with her braids this morning.
“Your sister Kathleen has been taken away from us.”
“Has she gone to New York City?”
“She’s gone to God.”
A gap opens up in Mercedes’ stomach. She bridges it by picking up her spoon. “Thank you for breakfast, Daddy.”
“I need you to look after your mother.”
“Is Mumma sick?”
“No. But she’s very tired. She’s just had a baby.”
“Oh.” Mercedes shows her teeth politely and gets her first permanent wrinkle. “A boy or a girl?”
“Another little sister for you.”
“Oh.” The second permanent wrinkle.
“Mum
ma is very sad about losing Kathleen. She’s too tired to look after the new baby.”
“I’ll look after it.”
“That’s my girl.”
“Don’t worry, Daddy.”
The Official Version
She endured the most severe trials with a calmness, fortitude and resignation which are the best proofs of the innocence of her life.
EPITAPH, HALIFAX CEMETERY
Materia had done the Roman Catholic thing; the mother had died. And James, of course, had not been in attendance at the birth and had therefore been in no position to apprehend the danger or to intervene. So there was no inquest, and the examining doctor and the undertaker kept the details to themselves and their wives.
One child was born.
Kathleen looked lovely, God rest her soul, so young and lifelike. Just as though she were asleep. They buried her in white, it should have been her wedding dress. The influenza, you know, there’s not a family on three continents hasn’t been touched by it. And her with her God-given gift and her whole life ahead of her.
Everyone knew that Kathleen was pregnant and that she died of the child. You’d have to be an idiot not to have figured that out, what with the girl’s hasty home-coming and incarceration in the house. But the thing you do in a case like this is go along with the idea that the child is the offspring of its grandparents. Everyone agrees to this fiction, and the only people who’d breathe a word of the actual facts to the illegitimate child are those who are so malicious to begin with that they are easily dismissed as liars. As in truth they are. For the beneficent lie tells the truth about the child, which is “you belong to this community,” whereas the malicious truth-tellers use fact to convey a lie, which is “you don’t belong”. This is an imperfect system but it’s the prevailing one. And as the years go by the facts get eroded and scattered by time, until there are more people who don’t know than people who do.
Mahmoud Mourns
Mahmoud never wants to see Materia or her husband or her children or any evidence of them ever again. The only communication he’s had with the Piper family for the past nineteen years has been the business arrangement with James, and they’ve both done well out of that while never once coming face to face. But that’s over now.
Kathleen was the one Mahmoud invested in, was proud of, but he ought to have known that exposing the girl and her gift to the world was exactly prostitution. She went out and reaped the wages of her parents’ vanity (in the case of James) and stupidity (in the case of Materia) and wound up a tramp. It’s what happens. Where did she do it, who did she let do it to her and how often, who was it, some Anglo dog son-of-an-enklese-bitch with no respect for people’s daughters, or worse, a Jew, New York is full with them, or worse, a coloured man — likewise thronging in that city — and once that’s in the blood it sleeps there for generations until you least expect it, where was her father when his daughter was being ruined in the worst city in the world, where people mate like mongrels? And now a bastard in the family, another girl to boot, my son-in-law is truly cursed. Bad from the beginning, bad in the end, I wash my hands.
Mahmoud is enraged to find himself choked with tears as he looks at the lily-white girl in the casket with her copper hair spread out around her. He’s never seen her up close before. And he fumes that they would dare to send her to her grave in white, in white they would send her to God who sees all! “And there’s my idiot daughter at the organ. I should have broken her fingers at birth. I should have dismantled the piano and shot the bastard, Piper. I was merciful and look at the result.”
Mahmoud scans Mercedes and Frances sitting scrubbed and gleaming in the pew next to James, who looks positively bleached in his black suit, “If he’s smart he’ll have the older one in a convent and the younger one out of the house and married before her first period, damn them all to hell.”
The Rocking Chair
James takes his last drink on the night of Kathleen’s funeral. It’s after midnight when he comes in from the shed, sits down at the piano in the front room and plays. The opening bars of “Moonlight Sonata” and many other pieces.
Upstairs, Mercedes awakens when the music stops. Frances is not in bed. Mercedes sits up and looks out the window, expecting to see Frances down at the creek again, but no. Mercedes leaves the room and pauses on the landing looking down. There’s a light coming from the front room. And something else coming from the kitchen — a smell. It’s late at night but Mumma’s cooking kidneys for a pie. Daddy’s favourite. Mercedes takes one step down. Two steps. Three. And stops to listen … a little sound like a puppy. Mercedes thinks of the kittens in the creek the other night and shudders. She doesn’t like it when Frances goes roaming in the dark. She wishes everyone would just stay in bed at night. She wishes she were back in her own cosy bed too, but she is the eldest now. Mercedes places her hand lightly on the railing and descends towards the light spilling over the bottom of the stairs. She rounds the archway of the front room and stops.
It’s all right. Frances is alive alive-o. She is in the rocking-chair with Daddy. It’s funny that Frances seems already to have been looking at Mercedes even before Mercedes arrived in the doorway. It’s Daddy making the puppy sound. He is sad because Kathleen died. He needs his other little girls all the more now. Frances is sitting nice and still, not squirming for a change. Mercedes waits until the rocking-chair stops and Frances slides from Daddy’s lap to join her in the doorway. As they walk upstairs hand in hand Frances says, “It doesn’t hurt.” Mercedes says, “I don’t like that smell of kidneys cooking.” And Frances says, “Me neither.”
Back in bed with Frances cuddled once more at her side, Mercedes starts to feel afraid. And a bit sick to her stomach although she can’t understand why. She rises, goes over to the wash-basin and throws up. It must have been that smell of kidneys cooking that got her upset, because why was Mumma making meat pies in the night? And are there really places where people put children into pies and eat them? It’s a sin to think that about Mumma. But Mercedes can’t help it. She knows there couldn’t really be a baby in the pie, but she also knows that whenever she loses track of Frances, bad things happen.
The First Holy Sacrament
“Daddy, where’s Mumma?”
“I need you to be a big girl, Mercedes.”
The first thing James did after dragging Materia’s body up to the bedroom was run and get the priest — not for Materia, too late for her — for the baby girl. James has caught on: there is a God. There is a Devil — necessary evil. You may be cursed, but at least God has a plan for you.
The alternative to believing is buckling under the weight of irredeemable guilt and the meaninglessness that used to be your free will; ceasing to function; and that is not an option. He has a family of motherless children depending on him.
He sent the priest on ahead, then ran for the doctor.
The baby girl is on fire with poliomyelitis. Or “infantile paralysis”. You don’t have to be an infant to get it.
The house is quarantined. It doesn’t make much difference, there never having been many comings or goings. But now it’s official. The doctor has taken his pot of black paint and slapped an X on the front door as he has on so many others. Every day, people spit on their thresholds front and back, declaring, “No disease in my house!” but the charm has lost its power. There’s disease everywhere.
Stealing centre stage from the regular cast of diphtheria, TB, scarlet fever and typhus is Spanish influenza. You don’t have to be Spanish to get it. In 1918 and ’19 the flu kills millions more people world-wide than the war did. Many believe the disease spread from the rats that fed off the corpses in the trenches.
The graveyard has sprouted afresh with little white crosses carved with cuddlesome lambs. Children have been hit particularly hard. Mercedes has just finished first grade. She goes to Our Lady of Mount Carmel School and up until the summer holidays she had to wear a white surgical mask to class like all the other children, so as not to sp
read germs. “Miss Polly had a dolly who was sick, sick, sick, so she called up the doctor to be quick, quick, quick.” All through town, groceries are left at the bottom of front yards along with the milk, no one wants to get near. Even doctors and nurses are dropping like flies. Coal deliveries are carefully monitored: if a coal cart delivers a load you never ordered, look out, someone’s going to leave your house in a box. If a black horse stops in front of your house for no reason, start praying. If a white horse comes in the night, forget it.
The doctor stands on one side of James, looking into the crib. The priest stands on the other. He is wearing his vestments and holding cruets of holy water and oil. James has no idea that the infant has already been baptized. He doesn’t know that’s what Frances was doing out there in the creek, he just knows she’s bad. As for the night of Kathleen’s funeral — well, he won’t be touching another drop of anything stronger than tea from now on.
The priest will baptize the baby without picking her up because to move her at this point in her illness would be very dangerous. He asks James, “Who will stand as godfather for the child?”
“I will,” says James, since there’s no one else but the doctor in the quarantined house, and he’s a Protestant.
The Holy Roman Church has been waiting for James all along. He thinks back to his own forced baptism years ago when he married Materia. He stood defiantly with his head unbowed while a priest mumbled words over him, “The voice of the Lord is mighty. The voice of the Lord is majestic. The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon….” He endured it as a sham. But now he knows there are no accidents, only tests. The Church is full of examples of men like him, who thought themselves damned and yet were saved. Men equal parts monster and martyr. And through one last act — perhaps occurring invisibly and deep within the heart at the hour of death — they were saved. Even sainted.