Mercy (6 page)

When the warning bell tolled, Father Felix followed the cruel boy into the chancel.

“Introibo ad altare Dei,”
said the priest, and August mouthed along to the acolyte’s reply. He knew well enough what the dead words meant.
To God who gives joy to my youth
.

He went early to confession as well, preferring to avoid the craning looks of those who stood before him in line.

“It’s not me, Father,” he whispered hoarsely, having finally worked up the nerve. “It’s my mother.”

Father Felix exhaled audibly.

“Father, I’m worried for her soul.”

“My son,” the old priest replied, “you cannot confess another’s sins.” He hesitated. “Perhaps you could offer up a prayer to the Holy Virgin.”

“Yes.” And August resolved instantly to do so. From now on, his candy money would buy candles in his mother’s name, no matter how badly he craved something sweet. Still, if a sin went on unrepented, unconfessed—

“You’re a good boy, August,” Father Felix said. “A good Catholic. You’d make a fine altar boy—”

August’s heart leapt.

“—but we both know the kind of uproar that would cause.”

“Oh. Yes, Father.”

“I want you to know something, August. As far as I’m concerned—as far as God is concerned—any time you need someone to talk to, even if you just need somewhere to feel safe, you are always welcome in the house of the Lord.”

“Okay,” August whispered, unable to trust his voice.

“Do you know who Saint Felix was, my son?”

“No, Father.”

“Patron saint of those falsely accused.”

“Oh.”

“I want you to listen to me now,” Father Felix said gravely. “While your mother is indeed living in a state of sin—” He paused. “—she is nonetheless a good woman. Can you understand that?”

“But, Father, she doesn’t even go to church.”

“She used to. I baptized her in this church.”

“But—”

“August, your mother has her reasons for staying home while you’re attending Mass. The truth is, if she ever tried to set foot in this church, her fellow Christians would drive her out.” Again the priest’s long, weary sigh. “Do you understand?”

“I—think so.”

“Good. Now, have you anything to confess?”

The next morning at the Communion rail, Father Felix looked him dead in the eye. The host fell thickly on August’s tongue, and he could swear the old priest muttered the
Corpus Christi
twice. He knew it was breaking the rules, but he held his tongue down low on the way back to his seat and, once there, lifted his hand to cover a false cough. The top wafer was slightly soggy but still in one piece. He held it tightly the whole way home.

He made Aggie close her eyes and hold out her hand. “Father Felix sent it.” He placed the damp host on her palm. “For you.”

Her eyes opened wide and welled up shiny. Right there in the kitchen she went down on her knees. August watched his mother cross herself slowly and lift the Eucharist to her mouth. Watched her tongue come out to meet it like a cat’s.

Mathilda avoids Thomas gracefully, each day a series of evasions, variations on the central gesture of turning her
back in their bed. His breakfast lies alone on the table, a pan lid keeping it warm. She’s reaching for the back door when he appears.

“Off again?” He looms in the kitchen doorway, forcing a smile. “I thought they were getting a new housekeeper.”

“They are.” She fiddles with the knob. “Soon.”

“When?”

“Thomas—”

“No.” He draws himself up. “No, Mathilda, it won’t do. Tend to your aunt by all means, but there’s no reason for you to be doing her job. You’ve got to let all that go.”

“All that? You mean my faith?”

“You know that’s not what I mean. I mean—giving your life to the Church. So there’s nothing left.”

“For you, you mean.”

“Well, yes.” He reddens. “Is that a sin, for a man to want to see his wife more than five minutes a day?”

She doesn’t answer.

“I asked you a question, Mathilda.”

“It’s polishing day,” she says quietly.

“What?”

“It’s Wednesday, polishing day. I have a lot to do—”

“Damn the polishing!” Thomas bellows, Mathilda staring at him as though two black horns were sprouting from his brow.

“Thomas!” Crossing herself swiftly, she yanks open the door. “Cleaning St. Mary’s is a sacred duty. The Church is the
Body of Christ.”

His jaw works on its hinges. She leaps over the threshold before he can summon a reply.

T
ucked up tight against his massive desk, August shuffles his notes for the week’s sermon, reordering them yet again. His mind has been truant all afternoon. The moment he sets it to work, it slips back to the rectory, where a muted drama unfolds.

The housekeeper’s taken to her bed, the cancer so far advanced even the doctor was shocked—how had she been up and about at all, let alone still attending to her duties? August could have told him. With help, of course, the help of a loving and devoted niece.

Now Mathilda works alone. Each morning, August awakens to the sound of her arriving early to make him breakfast. Standing at the bathroom sink, he draws the razor slowly down his cheeks, listening to the pipes moan as she fills the kettle for tea. He dawdles while dressing, emerging from his bedroom only after she’s mounted the stairs to relieve the night nurse and see to her aunt.

She’s up and down those stairs all day. He’s caught glimpses of her through the parlour’s glass door, bearing watered milk or a wash basin, clean syringes or weak beef tea. All that, and she somehow manages the rectory chores
before noon, prepares a hot lunch, then crosses to the church with her cleaning box in hand. Day after day, August finds his meals steaming in the empty dining room, as though they’ve been laid out for him by some otherworldly force.

Of course, she can’t stay on long-term. Married or not, she’s too young and—well, people would talk. As soon as her aunt passes, he’ll have to arrange for someone new. He should do it now, really—she’s running herself ragged—but the idea pains him. No, he decides, better to wait awhile. It might seem as though he’s rushing the housekeeper along.

He walks a hand across the green desk blotter, halting at its cushioned edge. Mathilda’s been here recently, last evening perhaps, while he was out on his rounds. The desktop gives off an underwater gleam, papers layered and frilled, the paperweight an enormous black pearl. He shakes his head hard, grabs a random sheet from the pile, grips it in both hands and stares. His leggy scrawl swims. Hopeless. He needs a walk, that’s all. A little air.

He catches sight of her on his way out. She’s standing close by the altar, so close she could lean her hip lightly against it. Her hands move over the monstrance, the left cradling, the right rubbing vigorously to bring out a shine.

The first time Father Felix showed him the monstrance at St. Paul’s, August heard
monstrous
, and so it seemed to a little boy—the spindly leg of its stand, its spiky head, the pale, translucent pupil of its eye. He learned the proper term soon enough, but it wasn’t until seminary, bent over the fat OED, that he discovered the diverse etymologies of the words.
Monstrous
from the Latin
monstrum
, meaning “portent.” Monstrance from
monstrare
, “to show.” Still,
the two remained twinned in his mind, and he found he could never quite strain all the horror from his awe. It didn’t help to find out that, while it now exposed only the host, the monstrance had its origins in those reliquary cylinders that displayed the bodies of martyrs—either whole or in gruesome parts.

Mathilda draws close to the lunula and breathes on the glass, following with a flick of her cloth. August bristles. Surely such intimacy is improper—a mother licking her thumb to rub dirt from a growing boy’s face. He should say something. He will. Only now, she’s no longer cleaning. She’s just standing there, gazing ardently at the body of the Lord.

Vera reaches out from beneath the covers and grabs Mathilda’s hand. “Lord,” she croaks, “you’re an oven. How can you be so warm, girl? I’m frozen through.”

It’s high eighties in the shade. Mathilda’s been rubbing ice along her wrists.

“Hah.” Vera laughs weakly. “I guess you’ve still got blood in your veins.” Her face contracts with a spike of pain. “Ahnnn,” she moans, but when Mathilda reaches for the needle, Vera stops her hand. “No,” she says, “not yet.”

“All right.” Mathilda sits back helplessly. After a moment she begins stroking the pale crustacean that was lately her aunt’s right hand. In a single bedridden week Vera’s seen more than a decade’s decline.

“Fourteen,” Vera says wonderingly.

“What’s that, Aunt?”

“I was fourteen when I took over St. Mary’s. The year Mother finally took to her bed with what they used to call nerves. My father was long gone by then. Yours too—he didn’t wait for eighteen before shaking the dust of this town from his shoes.”

Mathilda’s stroking hand stops short.

“Easy now,” says Vera. “It’s not him I’m getting at with all this. Not my own father, either. They were useless, the pair of them.” She sniffs. “On her better days Mother used to tell me how they were both away on the traplines up north, how they’d be back with a couple of fine fur coats for us any day. Poor fool.” Vera’s mouth softens. “Father Rock came on the year after I took over. From the moment he clapped eyes on me, he took me for his pet. That was something, too, not that he was a hard man, but to most he was never what you’d call warm.”

“You don’t say,” Mathilda mumbles, but Vera takes no notice.

“ ‘Brilliant,’ he used to say, when he saw the glow I got on those candlesticks. ‘Like the gold along the roads of heaven, Veronica.’ “She pauses, her eyes shining. “You remember that, Mathilda? How he called me Veronica sometimes?”

“Yes, Aunt.” Mathilda remembers all right. She tried out the pet name herself once, only to be told sharply never to utter it again. It was strictly between the two of them, like a hundred other things.

Vera smiles secretively. “ ‘I’d better watch out, Veronica,’ he used to say. ‘Our Heavenly Father may just scoop you up to keep house for Him.’ “The pain comes again, and this
time Vera’s face caves in on itself. “Oh,” she gasps, “I loved him! Even then I was sick with love!”

Mathilda gapes. Her aunt gestures wildly to the bedside table, the inadequate remedies there.

Vera sleeps a little after the needle, wakes with a wildness in her eye. “We never touched, you know, not that way.” She shakes her head fiercely. “Not once.”

“Of course not,” says Mathilda.

“Not that I didn’t think about it.” Vera giggles suddenly, a schoolgirl sound, strange in her ruined mouth. “I did, you know. You won’t believe it if I tell you.”

“Yes, I will.”

“It was a dream I had.” Vera would blush if she had the blood for it. As it is, her face smoothes out, momentarily transformed to marble, a carving of someone very young. “It was kissing, that’s all—him kissing me, and me parting my lips and kissing back.”

Mathilda shifts on her chair.

“I dreamt it nearly every night,” Vera goes on. “After a while it got so I was dreaming it in the daylight too, you know, playing it out in my head.”

Mathilda nods.

“I was in the confessional one day, the penitent’s side, polishing up the leather. Maybe it was the smell of Father Rock in there, I don’t know, but the dream came on terribly strong. I kept pushing it away, rubbing it into the kneeler, the seat, but nothing would make it go. I switched cloths and started wiping the screen, and that’s when I got the idea.”

“The idea?”

“More like a voice, really, speaking to me.”

“A voice? You mean—?”

“Who,
Him?
I doubt it. It didn’t seem like one of His.” Vera grins darkly. “But I did what it said. I took out the screen.”

“You what?”

“You heard me. I pried out the moulding, and then I could see the screws. I had a butter knife for scraping grease from tight places, so I used that. It took a while, but I got every last one of them out.”

“But,” Mathilda stammers, “but it’s there. You put it back.”

Vera holds up a finger. “It
looks
like I put it back. The moulding comes free with a fingernail. The screen’s held in with two screws, not even twisted all the way.”

“But why?”

“Why?” Vera shrugs. “So I could take it out whenever I wanted.” She turns her face to the window’s sharp light. “So I could sit in there and look through the frame. And imagine his lips coming through.”

Mathilda’s heart throws itself about in her chest. “Did he ever—” she asks. “I mean, I know he was a priest, but didn’t you ever wonder if he felt the same?”

“Wonder? I know he did.” Vera’s shrunken hand fights its way under the quilt, fumbles with the sheet and emerges with the smallest of books. It’s no larger than a matchbox, well thumbed, bound in leather that used to be red. Though untitled, the front cover bears a golden design—the busts of a doe and buck, simplified and stylized, gracefully entwined.

“My twenty-first birthday.” She hands Mathilda the
tiny book. “He made me a cake, believe it or not, fresh strawberries and cream. We ate the whole thing, too, just the two of us. Mother kept her bed.”

“And he gave you this?” Mathilda measures it against her pinkie. “For a present?”

“He left it in the pocket of my apron.”

“You’re sure it was him?”

“Look inside.”

On the fly-leaf Mathilda finds two cramped handwritten words.
For Veronica
. She strokes the first yellowed page, not daring to open it further.

“It’s from the Bible,” Vera says. Mathilda moves to hand it back, but her aunt’s fingers spring up like a wall. “You read it,” she cries. “Read it and tell me he didn’t feel the same!”

While Vera dozes fitfully, Mathilda fondles the little book. She averts her face before finally opening it, as though something might leap at her from the page. And leap it does, the moment she takes courage and turns her eyes to the diminutive text.