Fall on Your Knees (50 page)

“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, what’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.

Over a late and unusually hearty breakfast, Frances reads about the accident in the
Cape Breton Post
. Jameel, well, that doesn’t much matter either way, her days as a booze queen being over, but Boutros — that is a relief. The way he looked at her. Not like the other fellas. Brooding, as if he wanted something she didn’t have for sale. What that could be, she could only imagine as rape.

“Are you sure you want more porridge, Frances?”

“Look Lily, that’s our cousin and our uncle by marriage.”

Lily refills Frances’s bowl and reads the headline, “‘Hero’s Death For Whitney Pier Man’”. The story reports that the brand-new 1932 8-cylinder Kissel swerved to avoid a carload of Congregation of Notre Dame nuns on their way back to Holy Angels from an evening spent at a massed choir practice.

“Mercedes was there!”

“So what, Lily?”

“Well she said Sister Saint Monica offered her a drive home but she said she wanted to walk, but if she’d taken the drive then the sisters wouldn’t have passed the car with our cousin and uncle in it and they wouldn’t’ve crashed.”

“Yeah Lily, and if a zillion invertebrates hadn’t died around here a trillion stupid years ago, we wouldn’t have a gravel driveway.”

Lily reads on. “It says the Mounties got to the car and knew someone else was driving because ‘Mr Jameel was lodged in the passenger side of the vehicle. Boutros Jameel was found on the rail tracks. After having crashed to avoid the nuns, he walked two miles towards New Waterford in the throes of death, presumably in order to fetch a doctor for his father.’”

Frances is thoroughly creeped. Imagine that enormous living dead man slouching towards New Waterford, set to heave himself on her with his dying breath. Just how hard it was for him to be killed is a measure of what she would have been in for if he had ever got his massive mitts on her.

The young Mountie guides his cruiser over a well-worn dirt track through the woods, following a crudely drawn map. Jameel was a half-decent businessman. He kept a strict account of all his transactions in a small leather-bound notebook that the Mountie found tucked in his breast pocket at the crash site. Jameel had been careful not to use any real names, however. His code name for James: The Enklese Bastard. The pencilled map leading to the distillery of The Enklese Bastard was an incautious but temporary measure — he drew it according to James’s instructions over the phone when Taylor quit.

X marks the spot, but when the young Mountie pulls up this morning expecting either to nab his man or to lie in wait, all that’s left of X is a charred patch of earth and some smoking planks. So much for
corpus delicti
. The Mountie turns round and heads back to Sydney. He doesn’t see the tan Buick sedan parked in a gully nearby.

“Is she going to holler rape?”

“No.”

The
Cape Breton Post
is on Teresa’s kitchen table. She and Adelaide have agreed that Ginger picked as good a time as any to quit Jameel’s. Hector is in his usual place, rocking. Teresa pours Adelaide more tea.

“What makes you so sure?” Teresa asks.

“‘Cause she got what she wanted, so she said.”

“What’s that?”

“A baby.”

Teresa is struck dizzy but doesn’t let on. She sits down carefully and commences to stir and stir her tea, asking, “Do you believe that?”

“If she timed it right, sure. You can tell if it takes, you know, I always could right from the first one.”

Adelaide feels bad suddenly because here she is talking to Teresa about how a woman knows when she’s pregnant, while Teresa herself is bound never to be so, though it’s what she wanted most.

Adelaide has always wondered how a head injury could injure a man’s sexual power. That steel bar never fell on Hector’s privates, his seed must be good as ever, and he’s not downright paralysed, just all over reduced. If it had been Adelaide, she’d have seen if he still worked, then she would have got a baby from him. Hector loves children. They could have managed. She and Ginger would’ve helped look after it. But Adelaide knows Teresa is different, altogether finer. She’s like royalty, the real kind, not snobbish, just innately fine. You can’t picture Teresa straddling a broken-down man for his seed. So if Hector still does work in that way, Adelaide’s certain Teresa hasn’t tested him out. Teresa’s in her forties. Soon she’ll be too old, if she isn’t already.

“Addy, what if it’s true?”

“Don’t worry, Trese, I’ve got something in mind.”

“Addy —”

“Trese, don’t ask, ’cause I’m not telling anyone beforehand, I don’t want anyone changing my mind this time or driving me all over hell’s half acre.” Adelaide gives Hector a pat on the head and goes home to get supper. “Thanks for the tea, girl.”

Teresa sees her to the door and returns to the kitchen, where Hector is staring up at the top cupboard with a worried look in his eye.

“Don’t worry, honey,” she tells Hector, “it’s still there.”

But she goes to the back room to fetch the stepladder, intending to take a look just to be sure. Teresa is not one to clamber on kitchen counters.

Adelaide has told no one of what she intends to do. She has forgiven Ginger. She has forgiven Teresa for taking her off the scent last night. But it has been demonstrated that, in this matter, she can trust only herself. She has planned it carefully and this time no one is going to stop her.

Just after supper, she gets on her bicycle with the long wicker baskets attached to the sides. When her business was thriving she could carry whole bolts of fabric in them. Today she carries something else in one of them. She rides the Shore Road to New Waterford. The beginnings of a beautiful sunset.

Adelaide could wait three months and find out if Frances really is pregnant before doing what she means to do. But what’s the point? If she’s not pregnant she’s likely to start harassing him again. Coming around. The most disturbing part of Leo’s disturbing story was that Frances knew Adelaide’s secret name for him. She’d practically have to have been in bed with them to know that. And a girl who would inflict an injury on herself, risk drowning to get what she wants — wouldn’t such a girl also use blackmail? Accuse Leo of rape if he doesn’t give her what she wants? Adelaide pumps the pedals harder, ignoring the blazing sky to her right and the sparkling water to her left.

Mercedes is walking home from her talk with the priest. He has agreed to inform the bishop. His Grace will then decide whether it is appropriate to interview Lily with regard to the growing list of remarkable events — without, of course, letting Lily know the reason for his inquiry. Mercedes lifts her face to the slanting sun. Everything has turned a ruddy gold, God’s blessing at its most gentle, “all’s right with the world.” The calamities of Frances have peaked just as Lily’s sanctity is at its most evident and Mercedes is grateful to find herself up to handling both. Tomorrow she will go to confession and obtain absolution for wronging her father.

When she gets home she is disturbed to see that the car is still gone, and she withstands a wave of dread at the sight of Sister Saint Monica waiting for her in the front room. Mercedes knows Sister Saint Monica via the massed choir, where they struck up an immediate, if formal, rapport. But “bad news” is all Mercedes can think at the sight of wimple and robes at this particular moment. Lily has shown the sister in and given her a cup of tea and a date square. Mercedes seats herself in the wingback chair and gently dismisses Lily, steeling herself to receive the news of her father’s death.

But no. It’s something else altogether. Sister Saint Monica was at the wheel when Boutros went careering across their path to his death, and she had seen, moments earlier, Frances in a truck with a coloured man.

“I meant to tell you immediately, Mercedes, but the accident temporarily removed it from my thoughts.”

Mercedes confides in Sister Saint Monica as to Frances’s likely predicament.

“God forgive me.”

“Sister, you are blameless in this situation.”

But both women know that no one is blameless.

“Had I reacted swiftly, it is likely Frances would not have succeeded in putting herself in the way of temptation.”

“Sister, I would not have burdened you with this knowledge, except for the fact that I must make plans for Frances and I don’t know where else to turn for sound advice.”

“Of course.”

It’s the least Sister Saint Monica can do. There is much to discuss. At what point Frances ought to leave New Waterford, the place of her lying-in…. “I’ll arrange for the convent at Mabou. They have an excellent infirmary.”

The knowledge that it is to be a coloured child is most useful in determining its future. First of all, there is now no question of keeping it. Illegitimacy is a terrible but invisible blot, whereas miscegenation cannot be concealed. Neither mother nor child deserves to live thus doubly stained. Such is the charitable view. Therefore, the second issue becomes the selection of an appropriate orphanage, bearing in mind that adoption is unlikely under the circumstances, for how many good Catholic white families would be willing to take a coloured child? Particularly if it turns out to be a male child. As to good Catholic coloured families, there are few, that community being predominantly Anglican on the island and Baptist on the mainland. And perhaps it’s as well, thinks Mercedes, for doesn’t that branch of the human family commonly have difficulty raising its own children, never mind those of other people?

“Thank you, sister.”

Sister Saint Monica glides down the street in black and white, past Adelaide on her bike. Adelaide can’t for the life of her imagine how anyone could take a vow of chastity, then she flashes on Teresa and has no trouble picturing her as a nun. She lifts the lid on her wicker basket to check her cargo as she dismounts in front of the Piper house.

Back at Teresa and Hector’s, the rifle is gone from on top of the kitchen cupboard. Hector is beside himself, making squeaks that generate a little drool down his chin, all his language in his eyes. Somewhere inside his head he’s still all there, but moved into a cramped rear apartment overlooking the old brain. Teresa tries to reassure him. “Hector honey, now settle down, everything’s going to be all right.”

“Mercedes,” calls Lily from the front-room window, “there’s a lady coming up the walk.”