Mercy (23 page)

“Something?”

“Like a bird. Only huge.”

She says nothing for a moment. Then, “What colour?”

“The same colour as everything else. It was dusk.”

“Smart time for a stroll in the peatlands. Let me guess, you grew up in the city.”

He bristles. “There was plenty of light when I set out. And no, actually, on a farm.”

“Uh-huh. Did you hear it coming?”

He remembers the hush, more threatening than any cry or call. “Not a sound.”

“Great grey.”

“What?”

“Great grey owl. Silent flyer. Predators can’t hear it and neither can prey. It hears better that way, too—voles in the leaf litter, even down under the snow.”

“You think that’s what it was? A grey owl?”

“Great
grey.”

“Are they dangerous?”

“Dangerous?” She laughs. “Shit, Reverend, not half so dangerous as you.”

The teacher’s living room makes a fine studio. There’s little on the walls, little furniture even, to distract us from the task at hand. The plain dark rug is big enough for the both of us—the teacher cross-legged, I in my standard crouch. Above us on the bookshelf sits a small ticking chalet.

My scissor tips cross over a previous cut, freeing a crayoned fragment from the page. Shaped like a crude porthole, it shows a terrible scene—the barest of isles rising up from a troubled red sea.

Victoria General Hospital, south Winnipeg. Jenny Mann in a bed of roses and me in the white mound of her inside. Or not roses—something else, spreading crimson through the mint green sheet. Men and women, also green, masked panic and feet scudding like clouds.

I was the small self she hid inside, the one she couldn’t
live without. I howled when they pried me from her, and then, as though I were the stopper, my mother flowed out after me, dyeing the bed, the floor, red lapping at their cloudy blue feet. How could she have given rise to such a flood? One small blonde woman, lovely the way birds are when the cat leaves them curled at the door.

Where were you, Preacher? Were you praying for us, down on your knees in the Church of the Water of Life, that flesh-toned eyesore down the road?

No.

Shall I tell you where you were? Offer even a hint of how much I know?

You were fitting yourself into a hospital closet, with just enough room for the nurse you’d locked eyes with in the hall. She was dead on her feet, fresh from sixteen emergency hours—overdoses, a miscarriage, the inevitable nameless pains. Her hair was a dark twist to hold on to. You were heady with disinfectant, humming tunelessly to yourself
—hmm, hmm
—thrusting deep into her promising dark.

Twelve doors down, they’d torn me from your wife. What was left of her flowed wordlessly away.

“Let’s have a look.” Mary’s weight at the edge of the bed pulls the blanket taut across Carl’s belly. Her breath is warm on his face. “Hold still, I won’t bite.” She begins at his temples, pressing a slow, careful circle around each of
his eyes. Then withdraws her hands. “I’ll be back in a minute.” She stands and moves away.

“Mary, wait—”

A door closes behind her. He stares into his own inflamed flesh. It’s not a total dark—now and then a flicker comes through, making his head feel empty, like an abandoned cave.

Something rustles. From across the room there comes a low, definite scritching. A rat? Are there rats out here? Where is she, anyway? How long has it been? He sits up a little, begins silently to count. At seventy-five the door creaks open, her scent riding in on the night air—that and kerosene, as she brings the lamp close, expanding its red influence in his head. After a moment’s hesitation he reaches out, groping across a low table until his fingers enter the circle of the lamp’s heat.

“Careful,” she says. “I’ve got a knife here.”

His hand jumps back. She’s harmless by all accounts, but how can you ever be certain with the mentally ill? He catches a whiff of something new. “What’s that smell?”

“Guess.”

He draws a long breath through his nostrils, feels a ripple of longing, of loss. “It smells like—Christmas.”

“Close. Lie still, okay, dead still.” She makes a spitting sound.

He flinches. “What was that?”

“Hold still.”

“What are you doing?”

“You want to keep your eyes?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then shut your mouth.”

He takes a breath and holds it. Something brushes his
left eye. A shadow crosses his featureless crimson screen, repeating itself in soft, sticky strokes.

“What—?”

“Keep still.”
She sighs. “It’s resin. Black spruce sapling.”

Her touch is feather light on his tender lids. It’s bewildering—not pain exactly, more like a gentle reminder of his wounds.

“You split the twigs,” she says, “warm them till they bleed, mix the sap with a little spit. It’s the best thing for banged-up eyes.”

“Oh.” Sweet astringency settles like a wreath about his neck. He relaxes a little. “Okay.”

Preacher, that small pink muscle was the strongest you had. You were exceedingly fond of it, resting intimate in the rounds of your mouth. Did you think no one could see you, those times you stood at the mirror folding it between your teeth to show the underneath vulnerable veins?

I saw, Preacher. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen.

I remember the day you hit your evangelical stride. The words came up silver, riding your breath like an underground stream, leaping muscle and scale into air. They multiplied for you as they had for your Master, fanning out over the pews in great slippery shoals. The women turned hungry and shameless as seals, clapping their hands, rolling their wide sea eyes.

“ ‘They shall have the gift of tongues,’ “you promised,
talking of believers to those desperate to believe.
Yes
, the men nodded, and their wives sighed
yes
inside. Oh, for the gift of that tongue, thrust into their mouths, lapping endlessly between their thighs.

“ ‘Think how small a flame can set fire to a huge forest,’ “you quoted liquidly from the Epistle of James. “ ‘The tongue is a flame like that. Among all the parts of the body, the tongue is a whole wicked world unto itself.’ ”

The widowed organist thundered wildly through a hymn, after which you turned to the Old Testament, a bodice-ripper of a tale. Boaz, drunk in the barley, awakened to find Ruth at his feet. “ ‘I am Ruth,’ ” you announced, your voice softening to tell it, “ ‘your maidservant. Spread the skirt of your cloak over your servant, for you have the right of redemption over me.’ ”

The men smiled smugly, picturing girls curled like dogs at their feet. The women grew flushed and faint. Oh, to be mounted in the barley, in the barn. You spreading your cloak, shafting light and manure, the animal romance of it all.

Passing the halfway point on her circuit of town, Lavinia Wylie maintains her target pace in spite of the pain. Sometimes it eases when she runs, but tonight it’s rooted deep in her heel, branching up through her well-muscled calf.

It’s worst in the morning. She’s just as glad Carl has held on to his room at the motel, returning there every
night for the sake of appearances. It’s humiliating enough hobbling out of bed when she’s on her own—she doesn’t need him seeing her like that. Not yet, anyway. Not when the two of them are so new.

First-step pain
, Doctor Briggs called it when she went in to see him last week. “Plantar fasciitis,” he said bluntly. “Tough band of tissue runs along the sole, attached to the heel and the toes. Loses elasticity, gets irritated. All part of the joy of aging.” He pointed at her high-heeled pumps on the floor. “You’ll have to get off those things, get into some sensible shoes.”

“Not a chance.”

“Lay off the running, too.”

“Oh,
come on.”

“I mean it, Lavinia. Go swimming. Ride a bicycle.”

“I already swim. And I hate bicycles. Can you imagine a woman in my position wheeling around town like a little girl?”

Wheeling around town
.

Lavinia feels herself lagging and pushes a sprint. It’s been twenty years since she pushed Mama around Mercy in that chair, and the shame of it still burns.
It’s all in her head
, the doctors advised, as though Lavinia should take comfort in the fact that her mother’s legs were in perfect working order—that only her mind was no longer sound.

All through Lavinia’s teens and twenties, Mama demanded to be taken out in all weather and rolled around town.
Train Street!
she would shout, or,
Left here, left!
The dementia grew steadily worse, and by the time Lavinia turned thirty, she could no longer cope on her own. Then came a miracle of sorts. Shortly after entering the Mercy
Retirement Lodge, Mama lost all interest in the outside world. Lavinia drove to the dump with the radio on loud and the wheelchair in the trunk of her car.

Try stealing a man’s heart when you’re shoving a witless wonder down the road. It wasn’t that they took no notice of her—she often felt the heat of a male gaze on her firm brown legs as she bent to wipe Mama’s mouth or to pull a twig from between the spokes. But there was a world of difference between being watched and being wanted for a wife.

She sees herself running now, as if from one of the picture windows she races past—her burgundy windbreaker and little black shorts, the flash of her runners, the gleam of her freshly bobbed hair. Her stride is formidable, her breath even, controlled.
There goes Mayor Wylie. Doesn’t she ever get tired?

The road veers right, becoming patched and potholed as it enters the northernmost section of town. It’s her least favourite stretch. The sad-sack houses with their scrubby little yards, half of them littered with toys. Not a mile beyond their rooftops, the menacing silhouette of the bog.

He’s out there. She’s told herself she won’t worry, but why else is she running at this hour when she normally goes at first light? He left over three hours ago, driving off after an early dinner with her compass in the pocket of his pants. She warned him it wasn’t safe, wasn’t worth it in any case, but he remained adamant about the need for action. The spread in today’s
Globe and Mail
was proof—that woman could cause them no end of trouble if she wasn’t made to see sense.

At an empty lot between houses, Lavinia jogs on the spot, facing the bog with her eyes shut tight, imagining it ripped away. Finally, a clean horizon, a chance to develop
her town. Heartened, she sets off on her bad foot. He’ll be back soon. She’d better get home and showered, get into that teddy he likes.

I was riding the red horse—mane of yellow yarn, yellow yarn—rocking. The Sunday school teacher was brand new, and already she was following you like a lamb. The two of you paid me no mind.

“She gets upset during my sermons,” you confided, explaining me in so few words. “Can’t sit still, it seems.”

But I could, Preacher. We both knew I could sit still without blinking far longer than any normal child.

“You’d be doing me a favour,” you told her, “a very personal favour, if you could sort of, well,
take her on.”

Doing you a favour. She was clearly taken with the idea, but you went further, bowing your head, your voice softening like chocolate in the sun. “Since my wife died, Clare’s mother, well, it’s been hard.” You looked up suddenly, gathering her in your eyes. “Very hard.”

“Of course,” she murmured.

You closed the net. “Well, Cathy, what do you say?”

Already she was Cathy. Catherine on her church membership form, where you’d first learned she was once a nurse, Catherine to the congregation, but Cathy to you. Said slowly, achingly, so she could feel herself rolling over in your throat.

“Of course,” she blurted. “Yes, of course.”

Your hand found her waist, outrageous yet expected, as natural as life and death. It rested there a moment before lifting away. At the door your voice thinned out, strained through a boyish grin. “You’ll find she’s a bit fussy about touching. She doesn’t really like to be held.”

Wide awake in her armchair, Mary listens to the night beyond her walls. Sound travels erratically in the bog—glancing off standing water or smothering in moss, angling a thin course through the trees. Because of this, she can only guess at the wolf’s proximity to the house.

It looses a second echoing wail, and this time the Reverend hears it too. He claws at the blanket, lets out a restive, whimpering snore.

“Hush.” She leans out to quiet his hand with her own. It’s a natural enough fear. She herself suffered a particular terror of wolves as a small child, until Castor cured her with an elixir of words.

At the age of five she was well accustomed to being left on her own. Normally she felt safe inside the bottle house, but that night the moon was huge, the bog resounding with howls. She tried everything—singing to herself, even pushing dried mushrooms into her ears—but nothing blocked out the sound. By the time Castor made it home, she’d taken refuge beneath her bed.

He didn’t try to lure her out. Instead, he turned the wick up in the lamp and lay down where she could see him on the floor.

“There’s this town, see,” he began, folding his arms behind his head, “and they’re gettin’ terrorized by a big old wolf. One by one he’s pickin’ ’em off, and you can bet the ones he hasn’t got a hold of are shittin’ their pants. Nobody can kill it. Anybody stupid enough to try gets found with not enough meat left on ’em to feed a cat. That’s when Francis shows. He’s got no gun, no knife even, but you think that stops him? No sir. He marches barefoot straight through town and out the other side into the woods, and nobody gets in his way, ’cause every one of ‘em’s thinkin’, thank Christ, the poor bastard’ll fill up that wolf’s belly for another day. Shows what they know. Francis finds the wolf in no time, and it’s a big bugger, make no mistake. He walks up to it and starts talkin’, and before long the wolf’s got a grin on its face. Francis heads back to town, blows ’em all away just by not being dead. You gotta feed him, he tells the crowd. Put meat out for him every day and he won’t harm another soul. He’s not bad, says Francis. He’s hungry.”