Mercy (17 page)

When the meat falls away from the bones, everything gets chopped in together—apples, peel off, oranges, peel only,
lemons, whole. He doesn’t cut corners. The famous candied citron, a whole sack of sugar, top-grade molasses, enough suet to grease up a cow—it all goes into the big black kettle, and before long, magic billows out from beneath the lid. It’s heart-rending. Exotic yet familiar, the smell of both home and away.

He stirs the pot six times during the course of an hour, then ladles the steaming contents into sterile glass, finishing each jar off with a little ceremony—two tablespoons of brandy more than good enough to drink. He’s screwing the last lid down when he hears Mathilda moving around above him. Her footsteps halt at the top of the stairs.

“Thomas,” she calls plaintively, “what’s that I smell?”

He’d planned to make tempting little tarts, but Mathilda can’t wait that long. She sits up in bed, digging her soup spoon into the still-warm jar. Soon she’s shovelling the mincemeat in, dropping glossy blobs on the lace neck of her nightie, sporting a dark circle around her lips. “Oh, Thomas,” she moans more than once, the blood flaring in his lap so he has to look away.

The spoon scrapes bottom, and before she can ask, he’s bounding down the stairs for a second jar. She’s gorging. She could make herself sick, but the thought never occurs to him, and if it did, he wouldn’t give a damn. Her hunger thrills him. He perches at the edge of the bed, watching her gobble and wolf, his heart dancing like a drunk in his chest.

Somewhere in the bottom third her pace slackens, the spoon dangling instead of digging between bites. He takes it from her fingers and scoops deep into the jar. Her eyes are glassy. “Open wide,” he whispers lovingly, and she does.

A
s the snowdrifts deepen, August passes through torpor to a kind of jumpy blur. Finding himself unable to sleep for more than a few hours a night, he takes to prowling, his dress woefully inadequate to the bitter cold. He leaves by the rectory’s back door, turning away from civilization to the scrub and poplar forest west of town, keeping his bearings by the glint of St. Mary’s modest spire.

Early one December morning, after countless half-circles at the end of his tether, he finds he has finally walked himself numb. He halts, realizing dully that he must turn back or freeze. Still, he stays rooted to the spot, as though waiting for someone—or some
thing
—to arrive.

Exhausted, he draws the lids down over the icy balls of his eyes. When he lifts them, the gloom is parting, folding open in two enormous muted wings. He hasn’t time to cry out. The owl plunges into the snow barely a yard from his boots, struggles for a moment and sits up with a beakful of wriggling fur. Three blinking gulps and the kill disappears. Wings elongating like shadows, the great bird lifts soundlessly, swimming up from the forest floor with
measured, sensuous strokes. August strains his eyes, but even staring, he can’t pinpoint the moment it vanishes from sight.

He almost turns, almost departs without noticing what’s left. The owl’s impact cast in the snow—wings splayed out for drag, facial disc feathery about the curve of the beak. The talons go deepest, thrust forward as though lowered from the belly itself. August stoops closer. Even something of the nameless prey. Three round drops, a scarlet ellipsis on the snow.

Mathilda is his and his alone. For two months now she’s kept her bed as ordered, refusing to see anyone, claiming she’s too worn out to face a soul. Christmas season or no, Thomas doesn’t even think of hiring a nurse. Instead, he takes on afternoon help in the shop.

He’s a parlourmaid on the stairs, up and down, the pink flush of service in his cheeks. She’s eating like a farmer now, growing thick under the blankets as well as round. She’ll tolerate the odd potato or handful of peas, but most of her demands are for meat, four or five meals a day, with sausage rolls or Cornish pasties to hold her between. Thomas buys her a little brass bell and drops everything to answer its call. More than once he leaves a customer hanging—ground round half wrapped, a pile of chops teetering on the stainless scale.

That first Christmas at St. Peter’s, August found himself among those chosen to ride out beyond the city limits and gather evergreen boughs. He and a dozen others hunkered down in the truck’s bed, their backs vibrating against its slatted sides.

Over the coming years his fellow seminarians would do more than ignore him. They would call him Professor, mimic his hunched walk, knock his books to the floor. One Passiontide they would go so far as to string him up in the gymnasium, weave his arms and legs into the knotted climbing net, and leave him hanging there, head down. For now, they were content to talk around him, laugh across him, shout hymns at the passing moon. Even as August marshalled his spirits and lifted his voice, he remained separate, a sad tenor standing out from the choir.

Ordinary people looked up from the store-lit streets as they passed. Young men in uniform saw
St. Peter’s Catholic Seminary
on the truck’s door and scowled at them, a cargo of cowards. Young women turned up their faces, discerned handsome from worthless, offered smiles. A few of the seminarians smiled back, one lifting his black-mittened hand in a wave. August cast his eyes down. Won’t last the year, he thought, and felt briefly warm inside.

He was close to frozen through by the time the truck turned down a dark side road and shuddered to a stop. They piled out like cattle, stamping their feet, nostrils flaring to the crystalline cold. Each was issued shears, a basket,
an electric torch. They waded into the snow-choked ditch on command.

“Not too far,” Father Gillis warned. “Fifteen minutes and the horn brings you back.”

Most paired off, but August struck out clumsily on his own. It wasn’t long before the snow muffled the others’ voices, lending them the cadence of children playing far away. Then August was the one and only man, surrounded by the tall, well-meaning bodies of trees. He switched off his torch. The snow gleamed about his boots, about the scabby grey trunks of the pines.

On the fields around Fairview the sky had stretched him, often empty but for the eerie plainsong of a hawk. Here the treetops huddled to form a socket for the moon.

I’m free, he thought suddenly, looking up like a rabbit from its hole.

By second year, August had given up trying to join in during afternoon recreation. Instead, he spent the time bent in study or in prayer. He was in chapel so often he could feel the skin thinning out over his elbows and knees, the scented wood wearing at him, opening invisible holes through which the Holy Spirit might enter, or, better yet, through which his own imprisoned soul might one day flee.

When not praying, he read voraciously—Butler’s
Lives of the Saints
, the
Summa Theologiae
of Saint Thomas Aquinas,
The Dialogue
by Saint Catherine of Siena, anything at all by the incomparable Augustine. My namesake, he told himself dreamily, knowing full well it wasn’t so.

Aggie had told him often enough the story of his naming,
of his coming into the world. She was out walking by the Olsons’ back fallow, up to her waist in a field of their wheat. “I carried you high,” she liked to brag. “Still had a better figure than most in this town.”

It came on sudden, so sudden she sat down hard, flattening a circle of wheat around her. “Sure I had a little pain before that,” she told him, “but I just put it down to gas. That’s how come I was out walking, I was trying to work it out.” She always laughed before the next part. “Worked it out all right. There was no stopping you once you decided. I barely had time to get my knickers down.”

She had to bite through the cord, her teeth the only sharp instrument at hand. There was nothing to wrap him in but the dress on her back, so that was what she used. Night had come down hot and dry by the time she had the strength to walk home, so at least it was dark when she emerged from the tall grass in nothing but wet panties and a bra.

“Anyhow, that’s how I named you. Late summer baby born in a field, no better word than August for that. Besides,” the story rounded off, “it’s kind of like Aggie. Got a bit of yours truly in the sound.”

Mathilda can feel herself expanding by the day. It’s more than her condition. At three and a half months the baby’s a compact ball, rising modestly while the rest of her spreads out. Thomas is partly to blame. He looks in on her even when she hasn’t rung, his face an open rib cage, displaying
his ardent heart. “How’s my queen?” he asks. “Hungry?” Puffy and immobile, she finds herself powerless to resist.

It’s just as well she’s been confined to her bed. Never mind the fact that she’s already outgrown everything but her nightgown—the truth is she couldn’t bear to drag her dead love and its consequence around town.

Yet her own mother must have done just that. She too carried a mistake, the work of that errant boy in the picture, the one with the unruly hair.

Like the rest of her, Mathilda’s mind is getting soft. It returns time and again to the dancer, lingering, allowing questions long held at bay. How far along was she when Jimmy Nickels bolted? Three months? Six? Did she curse the life in her belly, or did she perhaps take comfort in it? A little piece of him broken off inside her. A consolation prize.

A
ugust loved Latin—such musical precision, a perfect system through which to divide and conquer the world. He thrived within its bounds, just as he thrived within the tolling structure of the seminary day. St. Peter’s broke life into pieces and portioned it out. For the first time in his life August began to feel secure.

Until.

Late one night, in the heart of the grand silence, there came a moaning through the wall beside his bed. Someone else might have thought the moaner was ill or in the grips of a nightmare, but August was all too familiar with the sound of sin. He lay frozen in his bed, just as he’d lain frozen the night he heard his mother being killed.

She’d cried out over and over, and the thing that was murdering her must’ve had more than one head, because it answered in the voice of a bull, then a coyote, then a bear. August heard it leave by the slamming back door, then a hush, and he knew with a childish certainty she was dead. The next morning, Aggie folded down his quilt to find him curled at the foot of his little bed. “Wake up, sleepyhead,” she said softly, and he opened his eyes and screamed.

Now, as he buried his head under the pillow, his neighbour moaned louder, as though it were somehow fundamental to his release that he be overheard, that he not arrive at his whimpered climax entirely alone.

August found himself looking out for the young man at morning prayer. Even though they’d slept separated by a wall for three years, August knew him only by sight, never having bothered to remember a name. The neighbour had the look of an invalid about him—watery eyes, fine cheekbones, flaxen hair. The mouth he’d moaned through was pink—it formed itself sweetly, almost girlishly, around the words of supplication and filial love. Watching it move, August felt a sickening response in his groin.

Not long after his arrival at St. Peter’s he had chosen the flamboyant Father Charlebois for his spiritual adviser. Their next tête-à-tête wasn’t scheduled for two weeks, but August wasn’t sure he could wait that long. He requested a special session and spilled his contaminated guts. When he finally grew quiet, Father Charlebois seized hold of his hand, sandwiching it only partially, as his own were so pitiably small.

“My son,” he began gravely, “there are times when a Man of God must do battle with the Prince of Darkness.” He lowered his voice, as though they might be overheard. “No weapons, you understand.
Hand to hand.”

August nodded. He knew all about combat—what it meant to be shaken so your tongue slapped in your mouth, kicked blue and breathless, shoved face down in a filthy ditch.
What happened?
Aggie bending over his latest wound, her hair loose, fingers greasy with the flowery salve she was rubbing into his knuckles, his cheek, his knee. The answer always a lie.
I tripped. I fell
.

He’d fought back at first, slight though he was, but it only brought more of them piling on. In the end there seemed to be little use in defending his mother’s honour—after all, everything they said or sang about her was true. He realized it lying on his stomach with a larger boy’s knee in his back. The ditch water he lay in was hopping with chorus frogs. A blue-spotted salamander stared out at him from a snarl of weeds. Surrender, he thought, play dead. And it worked.

Father Charlebois’s eyes were burning. “You never know when he will strike, August. Even after years of faithful service, Satan can come at you like a rabid dog, and when he does, there’s nothing to do but beat him back!” He released August from his grip and sat back, his smile almost disgusting in the way it cracked open and spread. “Remember the war in heaven, my son.”

August looked up, bewildered. “But Father, those were angels.”

The priest’s finger shot out like a striking baby snake. “The point is,” he shouted happily, “we won!”

With food in her belly and the radiator on high, Mathilda yields easily to the ever-present temptation of sleep. Her eyes flutter open on January then February light, the growing swell of herself beneath the quilt and, very often, Thomas jammed up against the bed on a small wooden chair.

On St. Valentine’s Day he sits waiting for her to awaken, a heart-shaped box of chocolates folded to his chest. At length she stirs, peering out at him through her lashes.
“Thomas,” she murmurs, as though talking in her sleep.