Mercy (18 page)

He takes her hand in his, holding it a little too hard. “Yes, love?”

“Do you know when I first noticed you?”

Her tone is almost tender. He swallows loudly. “No, when?”

“At the Labour Day picnic. You remember, you were stuck behind that table, slicing up ham.”

“Sure.”

“You were looking at me.”

He smiles sheepishly. “I was always looking at you.”

“Yes, but this time I noticed. This time I looked back.”

“You did?”

“You wouldn’t remember. You were distracted by the crow.”

“Crow? What crow?” Then it comes to him—the sudden weight of it landing, its claws flexing into the flesh of his scalp. He shudders, recalling how he bellowed and danced, how the bird lifted as suddenly as it had arrived, left him hopping amid a laughing crowd. “You saw that?”

“Yes.”

He laughs weakly. “I guess it was the meat. They’re carrion birds, after all.”

“Maybe, but it didn’t seem that way to me.” Her voice is barely audible. He has to lean in close to hear the rest. “To me, it seemed like a sign.”

“A sign?”

“Like when Our Lady knew to accept Joseph.” She closes her eyes. “Only with him I think it was a dove.”

“Oh.” Thomas chokes on the little sound. His wife’s hair glows like dark honey, ranging over the pillow in slow
streams. He touches a strand. “I always knew. From that first morning when I walked into town. Fourth Avenue looked empty except for you.”

It’s hard to read her face. That might be a strange kind of smile.

“Mathilda?” he says softly. “Honey, are you asleep?”

August hasn’t laid eyes on Mathilda since she told him, yet his image of her continues to evolve. She’d be six months along by now. Just as she no doubt grows large in the curtained bedroom above her husband’s shop, so too she expands in his mind.

He reads feverishly by the bedside lamp
—Or know you not, that your members are the temple of the Holy Spirit?—
then drifts off to dream of her lying huge and prone, a jungle-bound shrine, her belly its central dome. She’s marked all over with an ancient tongue, dancing characters and runic designs. Snakes coil thickly, looped like vines from the huge-leaved trees. One drops in a bright pattern. Slides a slow, scripted
m
over her stony thighs.

August wakes bathed in sweat, feels the small hot head thrusting up where the pyjamas have twisted painfully about his groin.

“Why, Lord?” he cries, the words taking shape before he can think them down. “A serpent built into me, embedded in my flesh?” He clasps his hands hard to keep them innocent. “It’s too much, Lord,” he howls softly. “It’s cruel.”

And if thy right hand scandalize thee, cut it off—

He thrashes his head from side to side. No. We are forged in His image. His to create and His alone to destroy.

For it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish—

No. No. Father Felix explained all that, remember?

With the April melt, Mathilda grows hungry for news of the outside world. Thomas delivers, bringing stories like bright garnishes on every plate—sometimes gossip from the shop, sometimes an item from the flimsy
Mercy Herald
. By early May he’s begun to tell her of himself. First the shadowy closeness of mother and home, then a little of his father, the yawning slaughterhouse, its windows casting slabs of light.

“I fainted, you know,” he confesses, “the first time I had to stick a pig.”

“You did?” Mathilda opens her heavy-lidded eyes.

“Sure.” He grins. “Hit the floor.” He leaves out the thrashing he got when he came to, the half-stuck animal shrieking on its side, the old man jamming the heel of the knife back into his shaking hand.

“I fainted once.” Her eyes fall closed again. He’s used to it now, the serenity of her lidded gaze. “At confirmation, I stood up too fast after taking Communion—at least that’s what everybody thought.”

He nods sympathetically.

“But that wasn’t it.”

“It wasn’t?”

“I had a vision,” she says quietly. “Just for a second, but for that second it was like my whole head flooded with light.”

“Boy,” says Thomas. “That’s something, all right. Was it—I mean, what did you see?”

Her eyes move like fish under their lids. “Christ.”

“Oh.”

“He was floating above me, you know, on the Cross. His face was far away, kind of blurry, but his feet were right over my head. They were so close I could’ve reached up and caught hold of the nails.”

Thomas searches for something fitting to say, but it’s like riffling through the closet of a man half his size.

“I told Father Rock about it after,” Mathilda says, opening her eyes.

“You did?”

“I went to see him in his office.”

Thomas pictures the towering, snowy-haired priest. Sees him pacing behind that immovable desk, shaking his big head silently, almost threateningly, while Thomas struggled through the lesson of the day. “What did he say?”

“He said I was imagining things.” Her mouth trembles ever so slightly. “I told him, no, Father Rock, I saw Him, I swear, but he said if I hadn’t imagined it, then I must be telling a lie.”

“He never.”

She nods. “He did. He said it was wicked of me. He said I was deceitful and vain.”

“Vain?”

“To try and make myself the centre of attention. To try and take the attention away from Him—the Saviour, he meant—on such a holy occasion.”

“The gall of him,” Thomas says angrily.
“The gall.”

She tilts her round face his way. “You believe me, Thomas, don’t you?”

There’s something new in her tone. Something, if he’s not mistaken, very much like need. “Yes, love.” He touches her cheek. She doesn’t flinch. “Yes,” he repeats firmly, “I do.”

It took a letter from Father Felix to arrange for August’s ordination to take place at St. Augustine’s in Brandon, rather than at home. The old priest picked Aggie up bright and early on the day, sat in her little kitchen sipping tea while she fussed with her hair, called out to remind her to go easy on the makeup and maybe put on something a little plain. She complied gracefully, emerging in a dark brown dress that clung like melted chocolate to her thighs.

Long past the blush of youth, Aggie still took effortless command of a room. August watched it happen—the turning heads on his fellow deacons, the sliding eyes on more than a few of the priests in attendance, though not, thanks be to God, the archbishop himself. August stared at the ground as he passed, but he could still feel her, a dark softness in the middle pew, strangely mighty, almost frightening in her way.

When it came time to prostrate himself before the archbishop’s throne, August did so eagerly. He knew the position well. Back home, he’d lain like that on the rippling grass or, in winter, face down in the snow. Not often.
He kept it for emergencies, nights when the rhythm of Aggie’s bedsprings threatened to split his skull, when he couldn’t bear to witness yet another heart-rending cry. He’d stumble out into the field that backed onto their house, sometimes in his pyjamas, boots and coat, sometimes just pyjamas and bony bare feet. It didn’t matter if he caught his toes in a dog hole or cut his heel on a curl of wire—nothing stopped him until he made it to the heart of that field. Once there, he’d flop down on his belly, spread out like a starfish and grab fistfuls of grass, or powdery, compacting snow.

Prostration was meant to make him feel helpless, he knew, humiliated even, but in truth he found it comforting. So comforting, he nearly forgot he was meant to be listening for the voice of God.
You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you and ordained you
. August strained his inner ears. Nothing. He waited so long, the parish priest cleared his throat, his echo approximating the hoped-for words. August rose to a dizzy sickness, the blood draining to pool warmly in his feet.

The archbishop’s hands settled heavily on his head, and he wobbled a little under their weight. Dozens of men had touched him there. Pudgy hands, sticky with sweat. Old, almost fleshless hands. Hard hands, a seemingly endless stream of railway men and farm hire snaking through town. They patted his head as though they were uncles or family friends, pressed pennies into his waiting palm.
Go get a sugar stick now—or a licorice whip, or a chocolate dollar—go on now, make yourself scarce like a good boy
. The man in the striped suit was no different, save for the value of his coins. Two whole quarters—enough for a stack of chocolate
bars, or more two-a-penny candy than August could hold. He opted for the latter, turning the front of his shirt up like a pea-picker’s apron, loading it with the most sugar his money would buy. He forced it all down, up to his eyes in the reeds beside Rat Creek.

All through his teens August washed his hair each and every day, ignoring Aggie’s talk of pneumonia, scrubbing until she swore he’d go bald.

“Tu es sacerdos in aeternum,”
the archbishop pronounced, and August felt himself sway forward as the pressure of those hands lifted away. It was irreversible, that phrase.
You are forever a priest
. He stepped back to don his chasuble, grinning like a bloody fool.

F
or months now, August has endured bowel seizures and blackouts, random nosebleeds and aching bones. Hunger and exhaustion are whittling him down to that simplest of instruments, a hollow length of reed. He can feel himself growing holier by the day, and so, it seems, can his flock. They sit forward in their pews now when he speaks, staring as though they can see clean up to heaven through his burning black eyes.

Mathilda’s image comes to him less often now—at times bridal, at times heavy with child. Either way, his body is too wasted and wrung out to respond.

In spite of this, he finds he can feel spring in his veins. The mild evenings trouble him, as do the sticky buds, the opening of countless green eyes. Sack of bones that he is, he feels his pulse quicken to the change. Though somewhat less wretched, he finds himself more restless than ever before.

Come nightfall, he prowls an ever-widening loop. He recognizes landmarks now—a jutting stone here, there a tree struck by lightning, one half living, the other mere remains. On the night of June the first, he looks up from his wanderings to find he can no longer make out St.
Mary’s spire. Strangely, he feels not panic but an inhuman sense of calm. He presses on. Low scuttlings through the leaf mould underfoot. Now and then something louder—larger—a greater displacement of space. The buck? he thinks hopefully. Then a slinking shadow-thought—the dogs?

“The Lord is my shepherd,” he whispers, feeling the truth of it, His holy presence somewhere very close by, leaning heavily on a luminous staff. “Lead me, Lord,” he croaks to the trees, then nods and hastens forward, deep into the burgeoning dark.

Singing. Not far, by turns raucous and thickly sweet. He weaves toward it through the brush, recognizing neither words nor tune, but the voice as one he’s heard before.

Castor Wylie’s built himself a twiggy fire. He’s dancing a jig of sorts in the space cleared by a fallen tree, one hand waving aloft while the other grasps a fat, sloshing bottle about its neck. “Father!” Castor bellows mid-leap, even though August feels sure he’s stationed himself where he can’t possibly be seen. “Hey, Father!”

August peers out cautiously from behind his bushy pine. Castor hops and reels closer, tilts the whiskey to his mouth and does a little caper to swallow it down. “Father Daytime, right?” A yellow stream escapes his lips, winding a course through his patchy, mouse-grey beard. He stops dead. Lets his short arms hang and stares up into the night sky. “Pretty dark for
Daytime,”
he says solemnly, then cracks up, snorting, slapping his thigh.

“It’s Day,” August says weakly.

“Okay.” Castor nods, grinning. “Day.” He turns and jumps the little campfire, then lowers himself into a teetery
crouch, motioning for August to do the same. “C’mon in, Father.”

And for some reason August does. He holds his palms out to the fire, his knees going off like gunshots as he squats.

“You’d snap easy,” Castor says mildly.

August picks up a forked stick and prods the coals. “You live around here?”

“Too close to town for the likes of me. I got a place out on the bog.” He thrusts the whiskey bottle out across the pitiful flames.

August waves it away, but the bottle remains. “No, thank you,” he says, and still the whiskey hangs before him. “I don’t want any.”

He looks past the bottle to find the old drunk’s eyes have grown milky skins. Scrambling backwards, he crosses himself frantically, as though beset by a cloud of blackflies. Yet, on second glance, Castor seems peaceful, almost miraculously still. No Christian, to be sure, but perhaps no worse. August suddenly remembers the Shepherd, recalls being led to this place.

His gaze somewhere deep in the glowing liquor, Castor speaks. “There’s a woman—”

August stiffens. “No,” he answers loudly, “no woman.”

“A woman,” Castor insists. “Long dark hair.”

“I told you, there’s no—oh.”
Dark hair
. August swallows a sigh. The poor sinner’s hallucinating, harmlessly mad. August lowers his head in sympathy, like a neighbour at a wake.

“Nobody’d touch ‘er,” Castor mumbles. “Not a soul.” His cracked mouth hangs open for several moments before adding, “Cut ‘er tits off. Both of ’em, clean off.”

August looks up as though called. Saint Agatha, Virgin Martyr. Not a hallucination, but a holy vision.
Calls himself the Seer
. August squeezes his eyes shut hard in hopes of seeing her too. “Where is she?” he whispers hoarsely. “Is she here?”

After what feels like forever, Castor’s soft answer sounds in his ears. “Far.”

“Yes,” August mutters, feeling foolish, “of course.” Away across the ocean, back through an ocean of time. It was a Roman prefect who wanted her, who cast her into a house of ill repute when she had the temerity to call herself a bride of Christ.
Nobody’d touch ‘er
. She emerged from the brothel unmolested, such was her natural dignity and grace. So the prefect had her hung upside down on a pillar. Had her breasts twisted off like pears.