Mercy (16 page)

When there’s any post to speak of, Mrs. Stitchen lays it out on August’s desk, centred on the blotter like yet another unwanted meal. Today she’s culled a letter and set it aside—a pastel envelope smelling of spicy blooms, addressed in a loose, womanly hand.

August doubts Aggie actually perfumes her letters. It’s more likely just the touch of her fingers, the brush of her hair, even the lick of her tongue. It’s the scent she’s always worn, and like many in her walk of life she’s always worn too much. As a small boy August never dreamt his mother’s smell came from a bottle. He believed she exuded fragrance just as naturally as the purple bushes that marked the coming of spring in every Fairview yard. Except Aggie exuded year-round. And for some reason she was the only woman in town who left such a heady trail.

Men lifted their noses like dogs when she passed them on the street. Older boys asked confidentially, almost kindly, “What’s that perfume your mama wears, August? Sure smells nice.” They laughed when he told them shyly he didn’t know, but the laughter sprayed like nails, and he realized they meant to hurt him even before one of them hissed, “Wonder what she’s coverin’ up?” That was when August understood—beneath her sweet, shifting cloud, his beautiful mother stank.

During his seven years at St. Peter’s, Aggie wrote faithfully once a month, her letters arriving on or around the full moon. He was lonely enough to answer them promptly, even eagerly, until somewhere deep into the second term,
when he found himself summoned to the Rector’s office.

“Mr. Day,” the Rector began, “it has come to my attention that you have received certain letters. That is to say, letters of a certain kind.”

August’s heart shrank. Besides Father Felix’s two notes on St. Paul’s stationery, Aggie’s fragrant missives were the only correspondence he’d received. He’d read each one only once. He couldn’t risk keeping them for what little guilty comfort they might afford—Aggie was too easy in her language. She mentioned her customers often, sometimes even by name.
You know Tommy Weiss. Well he fell head over boots off the wagon again and whose doorstep do you think he landed on?
August absorbed every word, then burned the evidence—cremation in a pencil tin at the sill of his little window, ashes fluttering up into the dead of night. He’d never considered the possibility of steamed-open seals, his mother’s secrets already perused.

As if in answer to his thoughts, the Rector spoke again. “No one has read your mail, my son. You know we employ the honour system here at St. Peter’s.”

“Oh.”

The Rector planted his elbows on the desk and clasped his spotted hands, eyeing August along their knuckled range. “August, is there anything you wish to tell me?”

August sucked his lip miserably.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me
. And yet—
Honour thy father and thy mother
.

“Well?”

August tried to swallow and found his throat blocked by something the size of a fist. “I know she’s not perfect, Father,” he choked, “but she’s my mother. I’m all she has.”

“Your mother?”

“What? I mean, pardon me, Father?”

“Your mother sent you those—scented letters?”

“Yes. Why, what—? Oh.” August felt himself colour from the collarbones up.

The Rector’s hands relaxed and fell apart. His leaden mouth drooped into a smile. “We just assumed—the soft colours, the perfume—”

“I know.” August shook his head hard, as though the priest’s voice was hurting his ears. “I’ve told her not to wear so much.”

“What’s that? Nonsense.” The Rector chuckled lightly. “Now that we know it’s not a
sweetheart
, what does it matter how your letters smell?”

It matters. It’s possible, even probable, that Mrs. Stitchen has jumped to the sweetheart conclusion as well. Why else separate the letter like that? Why single it out?

Rage, sudden as a blood clot, explodes in August’s brain.
“The silly bitch,”
he says through his teeth, meaning first the cattle-hipped housekeeper, then Aggie, then all of them—the whole damnable sex. He yanks the bottom desk drawer out and sweeps the flesh-toned envelope into its mouth. Slams it shut with a thunderous clap.

After a blur of distance, Castor’s eye lodges in the cleaver’s gleam. The sheep hangs sightless, suspended by the tendons that worked its back hooves. Already skinned, its hind legs are hopelessly thin—it seems impossible that they and
two others could’ve borne such bloated weight. Its pelt hangs open like a coat, the breast muscles gathered in a stripy pink vest.

The butcher’s black apron and boots give off a greasy shine. His right hand balled up into a fist, he divides the animal from its skin with short, gentle jabs, taking care not to tear the membranous fell. He’s smiling. Talking to himself—no, singing. Castor has no way of telling which song, but it’s something tender by the look in the butcher’s eye.

Left hand holding the pelt taut, he works it free of one hindquarter, then the next. Fists down to the shoulders, peels the skin to each foreleg where it’s split. Then the neck, knuckle and thumb, teasing until it loosens and gives way. The sides slip off nicely, but the rump takes time. He works his way gradually up to where the pelt clings about the root of the tail. The curved knife sudden in his hand, he carves around the anus, yanks up the bung and ties it off.

Freed from the stumpy tail, the pelt pulls easily from the back, falling loose to the nape, where it hangs like a fleecy cowl about the sheep’s head. Nothing left but to sever it from the skull and face. Moments before Castor’s eye pulls out, the butcher reaches again for his knife. Still smiling. Still moving his lullaby lips.

F
ather Shea specialized in teaching the art of the sermon, stressing the priest as God’s instrument, the invention through which He gave His divine music voice. August pictured himself part cello. Imagined the bow dragging mournfully across his hollow chest, pulling out chord after celestial chord.

Shea was an ugly brute—a barnyard face on a body the cassock couldn’t hide—but his looks fell away like a costume the moment he parted his thick lips and spoke. He began simply, as a rule. “A parish priest must be a man of faith.”

Anticipation rippled down the rows.

“And more. He must also be possessed of an ardent desire to
communicate
that faith.”

About there August closed his eyes. It wasn’t the words themselves—they were plain enough—it was the way they emerged, each breaking the seal of Father Shea’s mouth as though it were the silk of a cocoon.

“To communicate, one must be
in communion
, and to be in communion is to speak out from inside the words.” Father Shea paused. “The sense inside the sound, that’s what people listen for, that’s all they’re truly willing to
hear. Words are empty vessels without intention, without thought. Bring the thought to the very lips, d’you see, bring it further, fling it out.” He made weigh scales of his misshapen hands. “Every noun its measure, every verb its proper pace. Horses are not lemons, d’you see?
Horses.”

August could hear the source, the very sound
horses
grew out of, the beasts themselves giving rise to their name.

“Hum now,” Father Shea directed them suddenly, “all of you, try a few notes.” And they did, dissonance rearranging the room.

“Feel that? Now think of your head as a church. Try again.” This time he talked over their sound. “Let it echo through the chapels of your sinuses, high up into the vault of your skull. Keep your throat open—it’s the aisle, the passion rides up on a breath.” He silenced them with a sharp wave. “That’s when you’re really preaching,” he said into the hush. “When you can
feel
the Word resound.”

August is kneeling at the prie-dieu in his office, deep in evening prayer, when the buck returns. He halts mid-murmur, cocks an ear to parting bushes, an imagined lifting of hooves. Muffled through stone and glass, there comes a low, insistent baaing. He rises as though bidden, clambers quietly to stand again at the edge of his desk.

It’s not alone.

The doe steps prettily. She turns her eyes the buck’s way, liquid dark, and again the buck baas, lifts a hoof and
sets it down. She leads him into the open, the snowy yard unmarked but for the record of their steps. The buck bends his swollen neck as though bowing to the doe’s hind end, his antlers the hands of a man, the shape they assume when forming themselves to a woman’s ribs. The doe halts for him. Allows him to draw close, to mount her in a single fluid move.

More than two months have passed, yet for a moment August can feel her, the soft backs of her thighs, the curve of her hips where his fingertips dug in. His position seems suddenly precarious, as though the desk is tilting, threatening to throw him off.

In the between-tree shadows a shifting, a gathering of forms. Lost in the cloud of their own scent, the deer remain intent, unaware. August is no help. Even if he weren’t so light-headed, he hasn’t the bush sense to know.

A split second before it happens, the buck lifts his head, raising his antler-hands to the sky. They break from the trees—yellow, dappled silver, one liver-coloured with enormous paws. They are dogs and not dogs. Crossbred to be pets, beloved mutts, they’re losing fur in clumps now, their origins clearly visible in bared haunch-blades, ribs, fangs.

The buck hasn’t time to disengage, the dogs attacking as though he and the doe are one body, a giant, two-headed deer. Less organized than wolves, the pack forms a snarling patchwork, one tearing at the doe’s belly, two fastening into haunches, the largest sinking its teeth into the buck’s thick neck. August yells pure sound—a warning after the fact—then stands whimpering, his hands clenched and helpless at his sides. The brawling mass traverses his window
third by third—the buck goring the yellow dog, tossing it yelping through the air, others leaping back from the doe’s slashing hooves.

All at once the knot loosens and lets go. The little black dog, thrown to the poplars, rebounds off a trunk and lies stunned. The mottled grey drags a cracked foreleg. The yellow bitch slinks open-bellied into the bush. Of those left standing, the pale-faced show blood while the dark ones appear innocent and clean. The pack dismantled, these few pace at a safe distance, silently working their jaws.

The deer come apart. Stand quivering, then turn the torn flags of their tails and run. None give chase. The battered dogs dissolve back into the shadows that brought them.

“Dogs,” August tells the empty office. “Dogs?” Then it dawns on him. The question surfaces every so often on his parish rounds.
Those mutts ever turn up? Ever see anything of Father Rock’s dogs?

The buck was brought in field-dressed, heart and lungs left in, chest and belly cavity spread open with sticks. The hunter’d done a messy job at the throat but declared it didn’t matter, he wouldn’t bother mounting a head that small.

“Fine animal all the same,” he went on, patting its torn rump. “Reckon he drained out nice, cut him with the head downhill.”

“Yes,” Thomas answered tersely. He felt strangely protective of the carcass. “I’d best get on with it,” he said, turning his back. “You can come for the meat tomorrow.”

Lying on its side now, stripped of hide, head and hooves, the buck is almost womanly—fifteen or so, before life’s hardness starts turning them soft. Thomas grows forgetful as he works, continually misplacing his butcher’s terms, thinking
deer
instead of
venison, breast
for
brisket, thigh
for
ham
.

He loves game meat. It has such flavour—too much for some. Colour too. It’s the oxygen, of course, more red blood cells in an animal that gets to run. But isn’t that just another way of saying freedom? Isn’t it the wildness that transforms their very fibres, the fact that they can’t be owned?

Thomas lifts the deer’s tenderloin from its hiding place along the spine. Such a delicacy. He wraps it with painstaking care.

Even after the hunter’s picked up his meat, Thomas can’t get the idea of venison out of his mind. His mother made mincemeat with it once and only once, following a recipe she’d clipped from a neighbour’s discarded magazine. Thomas Senior had always been a skinflint when it came to home and hearth. When he got wind of what all went into the mixture, he blew his top.
Lemons! Candied citron—just what in the hell is that? Christ, woman, look around you, does this look like the fuckin’ Ritz?!

He was right, too. No matter how Sarah Rose tidied and cleaned, the house was a dump, sprung up like a weed among the stockyards so the stink had them pinned on all
sides. Summer days it got so thick even the lifers could smell it. More than smell—at times Thomas felt he could bite off a chunk, chew and swallow it like a mouthful of shit.

But that mincemeat. It might have been the only time the house smelled sweet, the only time he breathed long and deep there on purpose. She made it on a Sunday so Thomas could stay home with her after church and help. He did so gladly, chopping and stirring, not resting until the very last quart was capped.

She surprised him by leaving a cup or so in the bottom of the pot. She cut slices from a dense white loaf and plastered the warm mincemeat thick. The taste matched the smell—surpassed it even. His tongue was transformed, a fat butterfly landing on bloom after bloom.

Thomas begins to plot. They’ll have some of the ingredients at Conklin’s, and the rest can be ordered in. He slips out of his apron, taking his coat from the hook by the door. On the way out he flips his little clock-faced sign.

He has no trouble getting his hands on the meat—so many of them kill for the sport alone. The last of his special order arrives care of Conklin’s delivery boy. The kid leans his bike up against the shop window and enters triumphant as a hero returned, holding up a bag of bright oranges and a flagon of vinegar, tarragon waving like a pondweed inside. Thomas over-tips the boy, then sets about getting the venison on right away. He covers coarse chunks with water, adding a kitchen-string posy of celery, parsley and bay.