Mercy (5 page)

“Good evening,” August answers twice, as no sound makes it out on the first try.

“Cast’er widely,” it tells him, thrusting a filthy hand from its sleeve. The thick skin split at the peak of each knuckle, puckered in a row of ancient mouths. August chokes in the hand’s swampy smell, lifts his own but finds he can’t extend it, instead blesses the creature quickly with the sign.

“Oh yeah,” it says, grinning, “right,” then wiggles a scabby finger around its head and chest, the effect more a crazy spiral than anything resembling a Cross.

“Excuse me,” August whispers with what little breath he has left, turning on his heel and walking stiffly away. It calls after him, an animal sound he can’t make out, but he keeps his eyes fixed firmly on the end of the road. The Church of St. Mary Immaculate. Its many-petalled eye.

The housekeeper slaps dinner down in front of him, a white plate bulging with brownish lumps.

“Miss Nickels,” he says, careful to keep his tone offhand.

“Yes.” She hovers beside him, a little behind even, like a sentry. No matter, he’d just as soon not look at her face.

“I saw a man today.”

“Is that so?”

Sarcasm, plain and simple. Still, he wants to know, almost needs to. “A particular man,” he continues, “poor, perhaps fifty years old. Inebriated.”

She doesn’t answer right off. Lets him hang. “Squat fellow?” she says finally. “Built like a forty-gallon drum?”

“Yes.”

“Castor Wylie.”

Cast’er widely
. It was a name the man offered, not nonsense after all. “Is he Catholic?” August asks, feeling the housekeeper move away from him, drawn back to the kitchen, her dishes in the sink.

She snorts. “I shouldn’t think so.”

“Oh?”

“Wylie’s a Scotch name,” she calls over her shoulder, twisting the water on hard. “His brother married United.”

“His brother?”

She doesn’t hear. “In any case, Castor Wylie’s not likely to set foot in any church I know.”

“No?” August turns in his chair.

“Heathen as they come. Built himself a hovel out in the bog, all made out of bottles.”

“Out of what?”

“Lives out there like a savage.” She clanks a pot lid hard. “Calls himself
the Seer
, whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

Eight was too old for stuffed animals, August knew, especially if you were a boy. Still, they were all he had, so he set them on the table in a row—two moth-eaten bears, one toffee-coloured, one black, and a sad-eyed, blotchy dog.

Left alone in the house, he could think of nothing but the previous Sunday’s Mass. Father Felix had worn violet for Lent, his vestments a shade lighter but just as shiny as Aggie’s favourite robe. He had read from Galatians, “ ‘Cast out the slave-girl and her son, for the son of the slave-girl shall not be heir with the son of the free woman.’ “August felt the thoughts of the gathered faithful turn toward him. A few bold ones even turned their heads. Glancing up from the enormous lectionary, the old priest met August’s panicked gaze. He met and held it kindly with his own.

When she wasn’t wearing it, Aggie’s robe hung from a tarnished hook on the inside of her closet door. August only meant to check the colour, to see if it was as close as he thought, but the robe felt so mysterious to the touch, slithery and strangely cool. He got gooseflesh slipping it on.

Aggie always kept something to drink in the house, but it would be whiskey or beer, not wine. The closest thing August could find was strong tea gone cold in the pot. He poured it out into Aggie’s best cup—bone china with a little cottage painted on the side—then nibbled the corners off four saltines and arranged them on the matching saucer.

He did his best with what little he knew. He began by running his fingers under the tap and flicking water at his flock. Next he genuflected, signed himself with the Cross and began mumbling, now and then bending to touch his lips to the tabletop, or opening and raising his arms. He held a saltine up to the light and said an Our Father before swallowing it, elevated the cup twice to be safe before sipping the bitter tea. Finally, he fed the animals, or pretended to, palming the crackers and slipping them surreptitiously into his mouth.

He had to rush to get everything cleared away before Aggie returned with her shopping basket full.

“What’s this?” She laughed at him. “It’s a little big on you, don’t you think?”

Mortified, he cast his eyes down. The robe sagged from his thin shoulders in puckers and bags, entirely obscuring his form.

Thomas turns the steer’s head face down, runs his blade along the inside of the jaw, loosens the tongue’s tip and severs the thick cords at its base. Then takes up the cleaver. A single sharp blow and the tongue comes free from the bone, dragging its fat behind. He drops it into a basin of water and for a moment it seems to swim, a scarlet fish dyeing its surroundings to match.

He got plenty of tongue as a boy. For the family of a slaughterhouse owner—albeit the smallest, most poorly run slaughterhouse on the yards—the Roses ate few prime cuts. Thomas Senior brought home discarded odds and ends, countless buckets of blood, meat too bruised to pass off on the buyers, often a knobby length of tongue. It was the only meat that made Thomas uneasy. He’d seen too many of them working hard in the mouths of terrified cows. His mother watched him choke it down, saying nothing until one of her husband’s nights away.

Nights away
. The old man crashing in at the crack of dawn, stinking of rye and days-old panties, ground-out butts and dirty hair. Thomas always blessed her in his
head—whichever poor, pissed-up girl had taken the bastard on, she’d given his mother a break.

It was on one of those nights that Sarah Rose decided to show her son a little trick. She laid the tongue her husband had left them in a bowl, pressed a small plate down on top of it, weighted it with a fat onion and let it stand.

Thomas retrieves the dripping tongue and scrapes it from tip to base. He can almost see his mother’s face before him, the secret little smile she flashed when she lifted that plate. The tongue had reinvented itself—it mimicked perfectly the curve of the bowl. She upended the red dome into a boiling pot, lifted it out pink, carved it at the table like a roast.

“Clever, hmm?” she said softly. “Now you eat up.”

And Thomas did, savouring the tongue, really tasting it for the first time, rich and potent against his own.

He comes back to himself, his knife stilled, the steer’s tongue lying limp in his hands. He hangs it over the basin by its tip and reaches absently for the saw. His hands know what to do. Open the skull. Lift out the hidden brain.

It’s only his second Sunday and already the crowd has thinned. From the foot of the altar August looks askance at his flock, every member lifting a hand to mirror his, as though he were manipulating them with dozens of tiny wires.

“In nomine Patris—
” he begins. From among a sea of gestures Mathilda’s hand breaches, the lace at her wrist like a ring of foam.

“—et Filii—”

It dives to her breastbone.

“—et Spiritus Sancti—”

Swims shoulder to shoulder.

“—Amen.”

For several long, fidgety seconds he forgets what comes next. The altar boy stares up at him anxiously, but somehow there’s room for only a single line in his head. Not even a line so much as a scrap, something left behind by high school English, the play he hated most for the crawling desperation it made him feel.

Juliet leans her cheek on her palm.

Lovesick in the bushes below, Romeo groans,
O that I were a glove upon that hand
.

T
homas kneads vigorously, the mixture sticky in his mighty hands. He’s read of a dozen variations but makes only one—his mother’s and her mother’s before. Nothing fancy, she taught him, hog’s blood and suet, oatmeal and onion, plenty of pepper and salt. He sells out fast every time. The Scots get a whiff of them on the boil and start circling the shop like dogs.

He fills the stuffer, forces the spout full and slips a length of hog casing over its snout. Turning the crank, he holds the casing in place, supporting the first two inches to be sure of a solid pack. The stuffing sinks down in the hopper, transformed into dark, drooping coils. Thomas flares his nostrils to the familiar—onion pungency, pepper, the comforting goodness of grain. Mere undercurrents in a river of blood.

Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s why, after three weeks of marriage, Mathilda still curls away from him in bed, still rises so early and slips away. There’s no getting rid of it, Thomas knows, it lingers no matter how you scrub. Not a bad smell exactly, just—powerful. Come to think of it, she does avoid the shop. She’s never even set foot in the killing
room. He lets out a sigh of relief, embracing the fresh excuse. It’s the blood.

It’s surrounded him ever since he can remember—puddling darkly, spraying bright up the walls. He’ll have to explain it to her.
It’s life
. You only have to stick a hog to understand, see how it shoots forth, how it ebbs suddenly as the heart surges its last. Lay your hand to the animal’s side and you can feel it leave. Any butcher worth his salt knows you’ll never manage a fast chill, a clean cut, without first ensuring a good bleed. Get the life out quick. Whatever’s left is yours.

Vera takes to lying in. She leaves Father Day’s breakfast to Mathilda, even misses Mass, not showing her face until every last communicant has gone. Even then she moves laboriously, as though each swipe of her cloth causes a rending of something inside. Mathilda follows her, wiping up streaks of polish, erasing smudges from brilliant panels of glass.

It’s Father Rock, Mathilda tells herself, believing the grief will pass. After all, it’s only been a month and a half since the funeral, precious little time to the woman who fed him thrice daily, sat by the fire and listened to his sermons take shape draft by draft, sometimes even took a pull off his sweet-smelling pipe. Then there was the bickering—never vicious, just a biweekly sparring match to keep them in shape. Maybe one of Father Rock’s dogs chewed a curtain hem or stole a chop from the stove. Vera’d get up on her
high horse about it, and Father Rock would poke at her until she fell off. They were like an old married couple, really. Mathilda might’ve been an extra finger on an otherwise perfectly balanced pair of hands.

It was nothing she wasn’t used to. At St. Joseph’s, the Superior and her attendant sisters were drowning in children. In what had originally been an orphanage solely for boys, girls were still greatly outnumbered, and were appreciated most when neither seen nor heard. The underpaid help were even less attentive—the doorman, the shoemaker, the gardener—all far too busy or too bitter to notice a skinny, silent girl. Which left the chaplain and visiting archbishop, men whose longed-for gazes touched down rarely and were gone.

Vera’s come to a standstill beside the altar, leaning on her mop as though on a cane. “Aunt?” Mathilda says gently.

Vera clutches her belly.

“Aunt, are you all right?”

She expects the little woman’s head to snap round.
Of course I am
, she’ll say, or
What are you gawping at
? or even
Don’t I deserve a moment’s rest?
Mathilda expects anything but what she gets—her aunt’s face swivelling slowly, pale as a votive candle in its tunnel of glass.

“No.” Vera grimaces. “No, girl, I’m not.”

“Fetch Thomas,” Vera says, once Mathilda’s helped her back to the rectory, up the long, thin flights to her bed.

“Shall I fix you a bicarb?” Mathilda asks, tucking the blankets down.

“You ought to spend more time with him. Fetch him now. He’ll be a comfort to you.”

“Yes,” Mathilda says absently. “I’ll go for Doctor Albright.”

“Suit yourself.” Vera shuts her eyes. “It won’t do a stick of good.”

Doctor Albright has been practising too long to pull his punches. “It’s too far along,” he says firmly. “There’s nothing for it but to start her on morphine for the pain.”

“We understand,” says Thomas. “Thank you, Doctor.”

His arm is a burden across Mathilda’s shoulders. She fears it will buckle her knees.

There was something obscene about a feast. Every autumn, the Fairview Catholic Ladies’ Committee put on a fowl supper in the basement of St. Paul’s. There was always plenty of everything good—wild sage dressing, candied sweet potato, noodle ring. August overheard all about it at school. He probably could’ve attended. His presence would’ve been tolerated, just.

“Did you ever go to the fowl supper?” he asked Aggie the year he turned ten. “You know, when you were—younger?”

Her face went dead a moment, then pulled itself into a smile. “Never mind.” She messed a fragrant hand in his hair. “I’ll make us a fowl supper all our own.”

And so she did. The chicken was so big its breast touched the top of their little oven, so the skin there turned shiny and black. Aggie made his favourites—fresh buttermilk rolls
and corn on the cob—and the only green vegetables were cut up small and savoury, mixed with butter and breadcrumbs, and stuffed into the bird’s behind. August ate enough for two men—the one who’d left them and the one he would someday become. He was full to bursting long before dessert, but Aggie’s pie spilled sliced apples and raisins from its lattice top, and her face looked desperately on. He managed two fat wedges smothered in fluffed cream. Undid his top button and shovelled it in.

It all came up in a hot rush out back of the shed. He went down on his knees while Aggie washed up the dishes inside, barked like a dog until there was nothing but a froth of bile.

Not long after the fowl supper August began showing up early to Mass. Week after week he huddled at the back of St. Paul’s, watching the altar boy prepare from afar. He began to anticipate every step, the exact moment of genuflection, the precise order in which the candles came to life. It wasn’t fair. The altar boy was one of the schoolyard’s cruellest tormentors. He already had his father’s double chin—one of many dark profiles August had come to know.