“Who is she?” Mercedes asks the nurse at the desk.
“She’s my sister,” Ginger answers.
There is a blessing in all this, thinks Mercedes, looking at him. If Frances is pregnant, she is sure to miscarry as a result of the wound. He doesn’t look like a bad man. But the wife looks like a woman who could kill. Came to insult me on the pretext of Christian charity, left my home, hunted my sister down and shot her like a dog. She’ll pay. She’ll hang.
Adelaide looks away.
Mercedes rises. “Sister?”
The young nurse looks up from the desk; “Would you like more tea, Miss Piper?”
“May I use your telephone please?”
“Of course.”
Adelaide and Ginger wait and watch as Mercedes calls the police.
The head nurse tweaks the blood bag, tells Teresa, “Be brief,” and closes the curtains in accordance with Frances’s request. She withdraws to sit within earshot and arm’s length, poring over her racing form.
Teresa is surprised to see a cat curled at the foot of the bed.
“Frances. Teresa is here.”
The crippled girl with the sea-green eyes turns from whispering in Frances’s left ear to stare up at Teresa. Frances opens her eyes but doesn’t turn her head.
“You should go round where she can see you, ma’am,” says Lily.
Teresa crosses to the right side of the bed thinking how much Lily looks like her singer-girl mother.
“Teresa.” Frances’s voice is mostly air.
“Yes?”
Teresa reluctantly crouches down until she’s squatting at the side of the bed — she is not going to kneel, no matter what she has done. She looks into Frances’s close-up eyes. Hazel. Rather, brown with broken bits of green lodged or floating.
“Teresa. Tell me about my mother.”
“… I didn’t know your mother.”
“You came to her funeral.”
“Yes.”
“You must have known her a bit.”
“A little bit.”
“What did you know?”
Teresa takes a breath. “I felt sorry for her, that’s all,” and she is surprised to find sorrow in her throat. For whom? Someone she never even knew.
“You gave me a candy.”
“I did?”
“Peppermint licorice.”
“I don’t remember you.”
“I had blonde hair then.”
Teresa thought the blonde had been the other one, the one she’s just been praying with. “You were too small to remember that.”
“I remember everything.”
Frances closes her eyes for a moment, retaining the picture of Teresa’s magnificent face on the insides of her lids. Teresa waits. She looks for the little girl to whom she gave the candy. Frances opens her eyes again.
“And I remember you came and stood over my bed and touched my head so I wouldn’t be afraid.”
“I didn’t do that.”
“Who did, then?”
And Teresa does a nice little thing of the type she always meant to do but never did. “It was your mother, child.”
Frances closes her eyes till it seems she has fallen back asleep, then she smiles and says, “Thank you, Teresa.”
And falls asleep.
Downstairs, Mercedes paces with a gait slightly less formal than a military slow march. The reassuring footfall of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police interrupts the bagpipe lament in her head.
“Miss Piper?” He’s awfully young, isn’t he? “What seems to be the trouble?”
Mercedes arches one eyebrow slightly, foreshadowing the type of schoolteacher she is destined to become.
“My sister is in critical condition with a bullet wound inflicted by the woman you see sitting there.” She gestures without looking.
The Mountie looks at Adelaide and asks, taking out his notebook, “Is that correct, ma’am?”
Mercedes snaps, “Of course it’s correct, look at their clothes!”
And as she turns she finally reads their bloodstains and cross-references them with the spotlessness of the woman upstairs. “Oh my God.” Her scaffolding of pride collapses and her face falls so far that even Adelaide might begin to forgive her, but there’s no time for that because Mercedes is travelling up the stairs, leaving the Mountie at a bit of a loss. He turns to Adelaide, “Ma’am, I’ll have to ask you to come with me down to the —”
“In a minute, b’y,” she says, brushing by him and up the stairs.
Ginger follows, then so does the Mountie. It’s been a rough couple of days for the rookie. Last night he broke the news to a woman of her husband’s death in a car wreck and she took it like a weather report. Today he failed to obtain evidence of illegal alcohol production and just now he nearly fainted — he can handle the sight of blood so long as he isn’t ambushed by it. He follows the procession up the stairs, determined to redeem himself with an arrest.
Mercedes is running now, slipping on beeswax, she reaches out and catches the doorjamb of the recovery room, propels herself through, sees the curtained bed at the far end standing like a draped chalice. She hurries towards it praying. There’s a sound coming from within. The head nurse sees the look in Mercedes’ eyes at twenty feet, rises, sets aside her racing form and catches Mercedes’ wrists before she can tear at the curtains. Mercedes starts breathing again under nurse’s iron gaze, and listens. Someone is singing. The head nurse releases Mercedes and gently parts the curtains.
Teresa towers over Frances, singing softly, a West Indian lullaby. One hand rests lightly on Frances’s forehead. Frances and Lily and Trixie are all asleep. Nurse and Mercedes look on and are joined by Adelaide, then Ginger, then the Mountie. “Now, what seems —” Mercedes silences him with a look.
Teresa finishes the song. She turns to the constable. “I’m ready to go.”
Lily and Trixie open their eyes. Teresa goes to move from the bed but is prevented by Frances’s grip on her hand. Frances, her face still marked from the self-administered beating of the day before, turns to her audience filling the parted curtains and speaks, “Mercedes?”
Why does Frances suddenly have an English accent, wonders Lily.
“I am truly sorry to have brought shame and anguish upon my family. Officer, arrest me, do your worst, for finding myself with child and without a husband, I betook me to the brink of the roiling deep where I did shoot myself. O, that I had died.”
Frances turns her face upstage and allows a sob to escape her. Then the nurse clears the sick-room. “Show’s over, folks.”
And that’s how Frances took Teresa’s hate away.
Nine and a half months later, Teresa gives birth to a perfect baby girl she calls Adele Claire. Adelaide was right. Hector still works.
Book 7
THE BULLET
Blessed Art Thou amongst Women
The head nurse’s stitches were a thing of beauty. They’ve been out for a month or so now, leaving only a shy smile below Frances’s ribcage on her right side. It is the sly widening of this smile that indicates forces at work within Frances. She strokes her belly and returns the smile, Hello.
Mercedes notes with approval, “You’re putting on weight.” Frances has just risen from the steaming bathtub and Mercedes has wrapped her in a big towel warm from the radiator. It’s the first of November but Mercedes has been burning coal since “the accident” in July, knowing Frances to be prone to chills. And Frances has permitted herself to be immersed, bathed and dried, docile as a drugged child.
It’s been so peaceful, Frances’s convalescence. She sits at the table without jittering and eats large meals. She smiles instead of grinning. She has ceased her roaming and spends the days under a light blanket on the veranda and, when well enough, strolling of an evening to the sea cliff with Lily and Trixie. Frances has become clean and soft, sweet to smell. And her face. It is fuller. Her eyes are calm, no longer furtive. The white stripe across her nose, emblem of glee, has not appeared, not
once. She has breasts. Ripe. At their centres, mauve haloes resolve into walnut erections, the only part of her body not in lush repose. And her hair-of-all-directions has begun to shine. A bonnet of crackling copper lights and pure blonde threads. Frances is pretty. Yes, that’s what it is.
“It’s been four months, high time I had something to show,” replies Frances, tranquil beneath the comb Mercedes is drawing through her wet curls. Mercedes stops, looks down and plucks a golden strand from the comb.
“Frances, that’s not possible.”
The nurse told Mercedes that, what with the shooting, nature would take care of Frances’s predicament. It would be like a particularly bad period. Mercedes has been waiting for Frances’s cramps to start, but Frances must have suffered in silence, because how could she possibly still be —
“Look at me.” Frances stands naked, serene on the bathroom tiles.
Mercedes looks. And blushes with a prickly flush. No good pretending she has been looking after a child. She has been washing, stroking, feeding, drying a woman who is blooming like a hothouse rose. The nipples look ready to burst and scatter seed, the russet pubic hair hangs proud like a bunch of grapes. A fig leaf would not do in this case — ripe and uncooked, pink and grainy as that fruit, Frances’s whole boatful of genital cargo, from lip-wrapping-lips to clitoris in the prow, is in constant rockabye motion in response to the new deeper tides of her body. She is almost always somewhat aroused, can feel her soft-sided barque opening, closing, taking on water from within. Her body is making love to itself. Until now, Frances had no idea what all the fuss was about.
For once, Frances is stripped of irony. She is in the presence of something bigger — namely Herself. Or at least the self implied by her new body. This is how the Blessed Virgin visits us. She inhabits our own flesh and makes love out of it. Nothing is ironic in the moment of first love. And Frances is in love. With her body, and what it is bringing forth.
“Frances. You couldn’t still be pregnant. Not after what happened.”
Frances replies, “Especially after what happened.” She takes her white nightgown from the radiator and slips it on over her head, saying, “Thank you, Mercedes.”
Mercedes aches after Frances leaves the bathroom. Suddenly bereft, she sinks to the floor and leans her cheek against the enamel tub. The last of the water sucks down the drain and, before she knows why, her tears are flowing. It’s the same grief that’s been waiting, bottled, against the day of Frances’s death. Why has it been uncorked and sampled now? “Frances … my little Frances.” Mercedes manages to get the bottle stoppered, hurriedly fumbling as though unaware that it is a magic bottle, capable of refilling itself eternally.
She splashes cold water on her face and realizes she cried because Frances really has gone away — her Frances, that is. This new Frances says thank you; is careful of her health, looks forward to being a mother. My Frances is not a mother. My Frances is a child. Naughty but so dear. My child.
James has had his first stroke. But no one knows it, not even James. He just looks, and feels, older. One side of his face has slid a bit on its foundations. His left eye now always slightly sleepy, the left side of his mouth permanently triste. And he can’t make a good fist with his left hand. A state of “just woke up” along that whole side of him.
The stroke itself was actually a pleasant, if strange, experience. It happened after he torched the still in the woods that day of the disasters four months ago.
James soaked the still in gasoline, lit it and ran. The thing blew sky-high, which is why the young Mountie found little more than smouldering earth. Perhaps it was the boom that triggered James’s stroke — set a delicate patch of artery wall to trembling till it caved in and flooded a small surrounding area of his brain. Neurons drowned.
When he awoke, he was disoriented as to time. He noted the sun was in the same place as it had been when he ran and dove from the explosion. He got up and walked a few steps before the new imbalance of his body caught up with him and he fell to the left.
James had plenty of reasons to feel dizzy at that particular moment, considering all he’d recently been through. The idea that he might have had a small stroke would have seemed absurd to him. Overkill. He picked himself up and walked carefully from tree to tree until he reached the exploded fringe of the clearing, then he got down and crawled to the blackened spot on the ground where his industry had been. It was cold. That was how he knew at least twenty-four hours had passed.
He fell asleep. Or passed out. He opened his eyes next on a sky full of stars and a high new moon. For a moment he had no past. He was no one, no man. He was the clear night air. The next instant, however, he was a pit full of memory. Corroded shapes of used-to-be things, now twisted beyond recognition. He got onto his hands and knees, his head a wrecking ball, blind with pain. Molten glue sludging through the veins of his left side where his blood should flow. The right side of him had its first taste of dragging the left side like a wounded comrade as he struggled to his feet and, with his right hand, gripped a tattered sapling for support. He stayed there long enough for the sap to fuse his hand to the slender trunk and he left a layer of skin behind when he freed himself and staggered on.
He dropped carefully to his knees every so often when gravity got the better of his new inner-ear alignment. He’d hang his head to let a fresh wave of blood assault his brain. It hurt like hell but it was the only way to avoid fainting. Sometimes he’d fall farther with the weight of his head, from his knees onto his hands, his left hand failing to open on impact, taking the stony earth on bare knuckles. After this moment’s rest, the healthy soldier would lift the wounded one back up and continue the next few yards, the right palm seeping blood, the left hand torn at the knuckles.
His car was a hundred yards from the site of the still. He had covered twenty-five when dawn broke. Then he slept. Or passed out.
But the stroke itself was blissful. He had a dream, only more so. He saw his mother. He was a grown man just as he is now:
As in other dreams of her, she is accompanied by distant but everywhere music. An old-fashioned tune on the piano, ineffably sweet and full of meaning, unnameable and yet as familiar as the beating of his own heart. He knows his mother is in the music. His tears well up and fall, refreshing him. He is in a clearing of bright green woods. Not pine, not dark like around here, but old deciduous growth, tall and embracing. There is a birch tree among the oaks and elms. He knows this is his mother. He looks at the white bark of the tree and recognizes her dress.
He lies down, curled beneath the birch, and he hears her voice, Hello. He knows that if he turns to look into her face she will go away, so he concentrates on a blade of grass before his eyes, and she speaks to him, calling him by his Gaelic name, Hello, Seamus. Mo ghraidh. M’eudail. His tears soothe his face, parched to kindling.
He speaks to her. He tells her he is sorry. He feels her hand, cool on the side of his face. He knows she is healing him, but he also realizes that with this she is preparing to send him away from her, “No!” He feels she is condemning him back to a hell he can’t quite recall, “No!” He opens his eyes.
Then shut them against the sun. And resumed his journey to the car.
Try as I like to find the way
I never can get back by day
Nor can remember plain and clear
The curious music that I hear.
“If Daddy is dead, it will be up to me to look after this family.”
It was dusk of the day after the shooting. Frances was in the clear thanks to the nurse who’d seen worse, but James was still missing. Mercedes was allowing the possibility of her father’s death to surface in her mind. She was sitting on the veranda, watching the street and peeling a pomegranate — an extravagant impulse, purchased from an old West Indian woman at the corner of Seventh Street.
“If Daddy is dead, I’ll have to start teaching. I’ll sell his tools.”
Mercedes was reassured by her logical train of thought,
though a little startled by the caboose: “If Daddy is dead, we’ll be better off.”
She bit into the sweet wine cluster. “If he isn’t dead” — for Mercedes had to face this possibility too — “my job will simply be more demanding.”
By the time she discerned the outline of the Buick behind the headlights, Mercedes’ plans were firm enough to withstand the recognition. She observed the car creep along in second gear, genuflecting at every pot-hole in the street, and her first thought was “I’ll have to learn to drive.”
She folded her arms and watched as the car pulled into the driveway and jerked to a halt. As its lights died, she saw James’s head loll back and his mouth fall open. A moment later she heard him fumbling for many seconds with the door handle. It opened and he got out. In the falling dark, she saw him descend slowly to his knees. He walked like that up the stone path to the veranda.
The one thing Mercedes hadn’t counted on was that her father might return a penitent. Such a thing might interfere with her plans. She had no energy left to be the daughter of a good man. She had only energy enough to be the head of this family.
By the time he reached the steps and began to drag himself up them on all fours, she was near enough to hear the effort in his breath and realize that he was not penitential but merely sick. She had assumed he didn’t see her so she jolted in her skin when he spoke, “Hello my dear.”
He was by now in a heap against the front door. Her reflexive mortification was replaced by the cool sense that it was just as well to have everything in the open between them. Yes, I watched you fall and did not stir to help.
James raised his eyes and looked at her. His eyes had turned younger, bluer. Or maybe that was only an illusion created by his face having got older. Mercedes couldn’t see that yet, all she saw was that his eyes looked young and half his face was in shadow. It wasn’t until she saw him under electric light later that night that she realized it wasn’t a shadow at all, at least not in the usual sense.