Mercy (32 page)

“Clare?” The teacher formed a cut-out in the open door. “Are you scared of the storm?”

She crossed the floor in a sheet of light, turned dark again as she perched on the bed. “Okay, Clare,” she told me. “Clare safe.”

She was such a gentle slope. I was tumbling—I could feel myself, Preacher—rolling toward the half-dug hole you’d abandoned in her chest.

She knew enough to fold back the covers and let me climb in on my own, but I could see how she ached to lay her cheek against mine, to stroke my small hands where they laced tightly across my chest.

I rocked myself after she’d gone. Made my three-year-old form newborn.

Too restless even to doze, Mary sits forward in her armchair and watches the Reverend dream. His bruises shimmer, the scratches rippling with the shift of his eyes. God only knows what he’s seeing. It could be any corner of Creation, any moment in time. Castor taught her that. The year she turned fourteen, he caught his only glimpse of the future—not in a vision, but in a dream.

“It was you,” he told her upon waking. His face was a misery. “You were painted all over with blood.”

She caught him staring at her throughout the day. “Strong as any vision,” he kept saying. “Stronger.” Later, he looked up between two bites of supper and told her she’d better stay home until he could be certain whatever it was had passed her by.

“Sure, Castor,” she said lightly, never dreaming he meant what he said. She was happy enough keeping to the bog, but there’d never been any talk about locking her up inside.

That night the dream returned. He kept at her about it the whole next day, begging her to stay in, ordering her, shadowing her whenever she set foot out the door. She laughed at him until he fell quiet, told him he was out of his tree.

The next morning she awoke to find a rope tied around her ankle. Following its length with her eyes, she found the other end fastened to a leg of the stove. At first she thought it was a joke, but only until she tried to untie Castor’s knots. His daddy had been a sailor, and it showed.

Castor’s bed was empty, and there was no sound of him moving around outside. Mary felt for the hunting knife
she kept under the mattress. Gone. She stood up and began searching to the limits of her tether. The cooking knife, his straight razor—he’d taken everything sharp in the place. She could have burned through the rope, only he’d thought of that too. There wasn’t a match to be found.

She sat down heavily on her bed and before long she was wishing evil on him, the leash making her think terrible things. Then it dawned on her—the walls, the ceiling, everything around her was made of glass. The cast iron pan was in its usual spot on the stove. She lifted it like a club and swung a vicious arc down the wall, snapping twenty bottle necks or more. The floorboards glittered. She dropped into a crouch, selected a jagged shard and started sawing.

She didn’t stop to pack, not even to change, just flung open the door and headed deep into the bog. Her mind blurry with rage, she ran an erratic course. One moment she was going to climb a tree and stay there for good, the next she was going to push through to the road and hitch a ride to who knows where.

After crashing through the bush for a good hour, she sat down on a hummock to get herself in hand. That was when she felt it—a nasty sliding sensation in her belly, oozing down to something sticky between her legs. She eased up her skirt and let out a yelp. There was blood leaking out of her insides.

She clutched at the moss to steady herself, then tore up two handfuls and stuffed them in her underwear. Her heart thundering, she stood up slow and easy. So far so good, except for the feeling in her gut, sick and fearful, coming in waves. She took a deep breath, and with it a shaky step.

Castor was home when she got there. She hauled open the door to find him pale as a ghost, standing in the pool of smashed glass.

“Mary!” he cried.

“You were right!” She lifted her nightgown and yanked out the moss, throwing it down at his feet. “I’m bleeding!”

She expected him to panic, grab hold of her, bellow and sob—do anything but break out in smiles.

“Christ, Castor!” She burst into tears.

“How old are you now, girl?” he said gently. “Twelve?”

“Fourteen!” she wailed. “I’m fourteen!”

He stepped toward her, glass grinding under his heels. “Fourteen, eh?” He took hold of her trembling hands. “Where does the time go?”

Carl starts awake to a night sound, an outdoor sound—only it’s coming from across the room. A single soft hoot. Ghostly, tentative, it lifts his neck stubble at its roots.

“Mary? Are you there?”

She shifts in the armchair. “Right here.”

“I heard something,” he whispers urgently. “There’s something inside the house.”

It sounds again, the same inquisitive note.

“There!” He points sightlessly across the room.

Mary chuckles. “That’s Junior. She fell out of the owl tree last year, broke a wing. I made her a nest over by the window.”

“What?”

“I know. I would’ve snapped her neck if it wasn’t for the way she went all limp when I picked her up. At least they’re day hunters, so most of the time she lets me sleep through the night.”

“A nest,” he says a little too loudly. “You mean inside a cage.”

“A cage? What kind of a sick bastard keeps a bird in a cage?”

“Okay, but it stays there, right? In the nest?”

“Well, she hops around now and then. Sometimes she comes out on the porch with me. She’s chicken, though, hightails it inside at the smallest sound.”

“So it won’t come near me?”

“Huh? Don’t tell me you’re scared of a little owl with a bum wing.”

“Little
? Not if it’s anything like the one that came at me out there. Great grey, isn’t that what you said? I don’t imagine they call them that because they’re small.”

“Well, no, not for an owl. They’re mostly feathers, though. You wouldn’t believe how light Junior is.”

“I’ll take your word on it.”

She stands and moves away. The familiar scrape of a jar lid, more footfalls, and she takes hold of his hand, turning it palm up in hers. “Here.”

His thumb follows a smooth arc to where it breaks in a seam. It’s like the top half of a baseball, only hollow, almost weightless. He curls up his fingers. Something sharp presses into the pad at the base of the middle one, while the index and ring follow the rims of two vacant holes.

“That’s the skull of an adult male,” she says. “That’s as big as they get under all that show.”

As if in protest, Junior hoots long and low. Mary clears her throat and returns a perfect echo.

“Hey, that was good.” Carl feels the brush of Mary’s fingers as she retrieves the skull from his hand. “My mother could do a house sparrow. I used to sit in the peony bush under the kitchen window and listen.”

“How come?”

“Hmm?”

“Why did you sit in the bush?”

“Oh.” He flashes a pained smile. “No reason.” Except that it was the only way to hear her—she always stopped dead the moment he or Papa came anywhere near. “Any house sparrows in the bog?”

“No. Lincoln’s sparrow, though. Want to hear?”

“Okay.”

“Chip—chip—chip chip chip chipchipchipchip—” She builds to a frenzied tempo, transporting him to the depths of a wet thicket in spring. After a brief pause she breaks into joyous, burbling song. His mouth falls open. In his mind she sprouts feathers, her mouth curving out bright and hard.

“You like it?” she asks.

He grins openly. “I can’t believe it.”

“Here’s another one, listen.” She begins as though striking two small stones, then digs a hole of random notes, finishing with an unmusical, spiralling trill. “Know it?”

He shakes his head.

“Sedge wren.”

“Do another.”

“Okay, one more.” She falls quiet. Holds her tongue for so long he nearly speaks—only there’s a pregnancy to her silence, a preparing. She opens with a long low note of almost unbearable sweetness. What follows is unearthly, phrase upon phrase, the flowering of endless bells. He feels the swell of it in his chest, grows heartsick in the stream of her sound.

“Hermit thrush,” she says simply. “Sings at nightfall in a standing dead tree.”

“How—?” His voice comes out feather-thin. “Who taught you?”

“Who taught me?” She laughs. “The birds did.”

I was a hush in the teacher’s closet, scissors flashing in my hand. One after another I cut them away—glassy discs from her lambswool vest, golden domes from her coat, rolling pearls from her billowing blouse—each fraught with her current, imparting a tiny shock. They smouldered in my pockets, but I kept on until everything hung open, unable to close. Emerging from the shadows, I turned dark and light, patched like a thieving bird.

I laid the buttons out beneath my bed, sorting them by colour, by shape, by size. With each reordering came a little relief. The charge abated. I peeked out from the overhang blanket, watched it retreat like the tail of a storm.

T
he teacher’s crawled to the sofa and fallen fast asleep. She’s hugging herself. Try as I might, I can’t help but pause between pages and stare. “You-two,” says the time-bird. I shift my gaze as the teacher wakens. “You-two, you-two, you-two.”

“Mmmm.” She sits up, opening her arms in a stretch. I grab the next drawing, snip hastily down the first of its lines.

I was still hitting myself, the blows more inevitable than deliberate. The teacher consulted her books, then dug in her closet and produced a round of pale bristles on a long wooden arm. Keeping her distance, she reached out to brush my elbows, my forearms, the backs of my rigid hands.

I sang to her strokes. I couldn’t help it—my blood thronged to the surface like minnows to the water’s skin. There had been no retribution, no mention even of ruined clothes. When she stopped, I laid my hand on her shadow, a dark bust on the table’s face. Her hair slipped forward. Burnished by the lamp, it curtained her eyes. It wouldn’t kill me. It was dead, after all. Rooted in her, true. A conductor, no doubt, but nothing like living flesh.

My fingers climbed. Closed. I held a hank of it in my trembling fist. The teacher didn’t breathe. Her hair crackled, and I let go. Felt the lack of it unfold in my hand.

Carl can’t get over the idea of it—Mary and her father stuck out here all on their own, with nobody but each other, year after year. Until the father passed on, that is. After that, Mary would’ve had nobody but herself.

“Mary,” he asks, before he has time to think better of it, “how old were you when your father died?”

“Eighteen. I came home with a bucket of cloudberries and found him curled up around a bottle on the floor.”

“I’m sorry.” The words seem feeble, inadequate to the sorrow in her voice. “Where was he—I mean, did you—?”

“Bury him? Sure.”

“Where?”

After a moment it dawns on him what her silence means.

“Out there?”

“What do you think I did, call in a doctor to tell me he was dead? Or a preacher maybe, or maybe the Mounties? Of course he’s out there. Probably all in one piece, too, still got that look on his face.”

“What did you tell people?”

“What people? Nobody ever visited him. A few of them noticed he was gone once I showed up in town, but even then all I said was that he’d disappeared. The Mounties
asked me a couple of questions when they got wind of it, but you couldn’t help feeling it was just for the books.”

“Surely they looked for him?”

“You got any idea how many ways an old drunk can die in the woods? How fast a body gets picked clean and scattered?”

“Scattered?”

“That’s what I said.” Her voice is suddenly at mattress level.

“What are you—” He’s silenced by a dragging sound from beneath the bed.

“Hold out your hands. Both of them.”

She lays something across his palms like a sceptre. His hands seek each other instinctively, walking inward along its gently arching shaft. They meet, then separate in search of its ends, the left tracing a gradual thickening to twin porous knobs, the right stumbling over a skewed and bumpy spool, an abrupt narrowing, and finally a ball like the bed knob on the four-poster he slept in as a child.

“Human?” he asks softly, his spine thrilling.

“I told you people have died out here. Know where it fits?”

Without a word he rotates the femur, laying it carefully atop his own.

“Bingo. Must’ve been a tall bugger. It sticks out a good inch past your knee.”

He gropes for the distal end.

“Seems skinny, too,” she adds, “even for a bone. Feel here.” She guides his fingers to a series of indentations around the centre of the shaft. “Teeth marks. God knows how far it was carried—it was the only piece Castor found.”

Carl worries the deepest pit with his thumb. “He found it?”

“Uh-huh.” She pulls the long bone gently from his grasp, shoving it away beneath him, slapping the dust from her hands. “A few weeks after I was born.”

The teacher was seated at the table, staring dry-eyed and desperate at the photograph you’d left behind. She possessed no couple shots, had to content herself with a portrait of you alone.

I gleaned certain drawings from my pile, crept up beside her and laid them out. Bits and pieces of you, Preacher—the pipe of an organ with a fleshy pink head, a slippery, sickle-shaped scar. She knew them in her fingers, if not in her eyes. It troubled her. Gazing deep into my wax mystery, she struggled to place your parts.

The morning paper lay unread atop the stack in the front hall—three weeks of news delivered and ignored. I fetched it. Dropped it banner-side up in her lap.

“What’s this, Clare?”