Mercy (9 page)

The boys began to smile now, relaxing their formation, a few of them whistling approval through their teeth. August held back. Arabia was underwater, nowhere to be seen. The two buddies were already climbing out, one with the look of twisted cable, the other hard in his own way, more like the rock they stood on, substantial and smooth. The boys elbowed each other to let them pass. Finally, a white cloth sphere surfaced on the far side of the creek, more than a little way down.

“Hey, boy,” Arabia called out, and it was perfectly clear which boy he meant. “Ain’t you comin’ in?”

So August did. Took the rock at a run and launched himself flailing into the creek. It took him in whole. With a sucking, silty rush it drew him down until his feet met snaky weeds, then pushed him gently back up to the air. Back on the rock, the others were following Arabia’s two buddies like ducklings, trying their best to stand out from the brood.

August stayed in, partly because Arabia did too—each of them a little apart, submerging to pull through the water,
surfacing to let the water pull at them—but mostly for the feel. Smooth enough on the face of things, the creek was strangely alive below. It touched him all over—his chest and legs, his hands and throat, even the patch of new down at the small of his back. He turned that patch to the mild current, felt the shorts flatten to his behind while they billowed out bag-like in front. The water reached up through the leg holes, stroking him
there
.

Suddenly Arabia was hauling himself out, the other two shaking water from their hair. August struck for the rock—he wasn’t waiting to find himself unwelcome once they’d gone. Back on dry land, his body lost its fluid grace, returning to the unwieldy collection of bones he’d come to know—with one small but immeasurable difference. The same boy who had pointed before now pointed again, though this time he aimed lower, as though his finger’s trajectory was meant to pierce August through the belly rather than the eye. They stared—the boys, then the men—every one of them bent his gaze to the swelling in August’s shorts. His hands came together to shield it. He looked up to meet grin after wicked grin.

“What’re you starin’ at?” Arabia reached up to untie the undershirt, uncovering a mass of coal-black, curling hair. The armpit hair that matched it bled out over his chest before narrowing to divide his belly with a line. “Never had a hard-on, I guess.” He wrung out the water. “Must be babies still.”

August watched the pointing hand fall, then the turned-up corners of all those grinning lips. Arabia pulled the damp undershirt on, drawing it slowly over his shoulders and down his front. “That means you’re a man, is all,” he
told August, and the other two nodded and smiled. Then, like a team of workhorses, they turned as one body and started away up the bank.

August struggled into his pants. Around him the boys were getting fidgety, the railway men above them now, nearly cresting the bank.
A man
. He knew better than any of them what that meant.

There were those who preferred the back door. August watched them out his narrow bedroom window, so many shadow puppets against the shed—the postmaster’s jabbing chin, the blacksmith’s nose, a certain town councillor’s jowls. Then there were those he didn’t have to spy on, the ones who came brazenly up the front steps, who knew to wait if Aggie’s tasselled shade was down, and often did so on the porch, helping themselves to beers from the cooler. Sometimes, during the harvest, there’d be two or three of them waiting their turn. Men with no wives, or wives in other provinces, or wives who wouldn’t dare open their mouths to complain.

August didn’t stay with the boys, and he didn’t follow the railway men either. Instead, he scrambled up the far side of the old willow and started running, following the creek’s cutting shape away from town.

He kept on long after the stitch took hold in his side. When he finally reached the bluff, he dropped to his knees in the poison ivy patch and, like a dog in any carcass it finds, began to roll. Saint Benedict threw himself into the nettle bed to fend off the demon lust—August knew this for a fact, one of many he’d swallowed whole from the pages of Father Felix’s books. But even there, down on his belly among the venomous leaves, he could feel himself
growing hard. There was nothing to do but stand. And once standing, to run.

Back at the house, Aggie was lying down in the parlour with a cigarette between her lips and a pink washcloth draped damply over her eyes. August ignored her, stalking through to the kitchen, where he dragged the carving knife from its shallow drawer.

“August,” his mother called out, “be a love and stick the kettle on.”

He didn’t answer, didn’t comply. Instead, he laid the blade flat against the fly of his pants and, with a slow chopping motion, slid it down.

“August?” Aggie called.

He could feel the leafy poison in his blood, the itch spreading out to open him in a patchwork rash.

“Honey? Are you all right?”

The knife clattered to the floor. Aggie pulled off the washcloth in time to catch the back of him, his angry hand slamming the door.

He was winded, his legs jelly, by the time he reached St. Paul’s. “I—have to—huh, huh—confess,” he wailed like a stuck bagpipe, his mouth inches from Father Felix’s face. Then he sprinted for the stuffy box.

It was some time before the two came to understand one another, Father Felix questioning softly, August weeping wretchedly, scratching like a primate between replies.

“My son,” the old priest said finally, “this is no great sin. Becoming—excited is, well, inevitable. It’s what you do with that feeling that matters.”

“It is?”

“It is.”

“But, Father, don’t you ever feel like you’d be better off—you know—without it?”

“Without it, my son? You mean desire?”

The word flared hotly in August’s ears. “No,” he muttered urgently, “I mean
it.”

Father Felix drew back from the lattice. “August, you haven’t been thinking of—?”

August didn’t answer.

“Now, August,” Father Felix began severely, “you remember the words of Saint Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, ‘But now God hath set the members every one of them in the body as it hath pleased him.’ ”

“But—”

“He also wrote, ‘And such as we think to be the less honourable members of the body, about those we put more abundant honour; and those that are our
uncomely parts
, have more abundant comeliness.’ ”

August sniffled. “But he didn’t mean the
body
, did he, Father? He meant the Church.”

“Well, yes,” Father Felix admitted. “The Church is a body with Christ at its head. But you mustn’t forget, August, Christ was also a man. He had all the—parts you and I do. He too was created in the image of God.”

“Yes,” August assented miserably. “But didn’t Christ—”

Father Felix waited a moment before asking, “Didn’t Christ what?”

“Didn’t he say, ‘—and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’?”

The priest shook his head hard in the gloom. “Eunuchs in the figurative sense only. He meant celibates, my boy, priests.”

“Oh.”

“Listen to me.” Father Felix sat forward again. “He meant spiritual eunuchs, August. Real eunuchs aren’t even allowed to become priests in God’s Church.”

“They aren’t?”

“No, they aren’t. It’s like free will. How can God be sure you want Him if you haven’t any other choice?”

Choice
. August felt himself nodding, calm coming over him like a spell.

“Do you see, my boy?” Father Felix said anxiously.

“Yes, Father.” The reply was honest, absolute. “I do.”

O
n her hands and knees behind the altar, Mathilda reaches around the thick base of the crucifix, her cloth returning full of dust.

One of the worst places, that
. Vera took her on a tour of St. Mary’s dirt traps not long after Mathilda first arrived. Taught her how dust was just a soft word for filth, how it was everywhere, riding invisible currents, eddying, bedding down thickly in its favourite haunts.

Mathilda wipes until the cloth comes back spotless. Satisfied, she drops it into her cleaning box, feeling absently down the front of her dress. The crucifix hangs loose, but the locket’s smooth back adheres to her sweat-dampened chest. She frees it and, on a whim, unclasps the chain. It would be normal to open it—press the tiny button that holds the two half-hearts closed—but Mathilda already knows it’s empty. Maybe Aunt Vera kept Father Rock’s tiny portrait in there, took it out to have with her when she dies. That thought is sad enough, but anything’s better than imagining the locket forever void.

Mathilda has only two photographs of her own. The first was a parting gift from the Grey Nuns, a fuzzy group shot that shows them assembled at the leafy border of the orphanage
grounds. Each mouth is grim, each forehead marked with the black fold of bonnet that mimics a widow’s peak. Layered, immovable, the women who reared her resemble nothing so much as mountains, a range of them seen from the plain.

The second is a good deal clearer, a dual portrait taken in a cluttered Winnipeg studio shortly before Vera bustled Mathilda onto the train to take her, as she so blithely put it, home. Mathilda’s nine-year-old face is a blank, round from bone structure alone, not a morsel of flesh to spare. Her bobbed hair has been carefully, almost painfully combed, her dark dress ironed so it shines. She stands with a thin hand clutching the arm of an enormous wingback chair. Strangely, it is the chair that most draws the eye, so oversized and ornate as to make Mathilda’s grave little aunt seem an exhibit of sorts, something one might come upon in the musty bowels of a museum.

On rare occasions Mathilda removes these two photographs from her top dresser drawer and lays them out side by side. Before and after. A precise document of the break at the midpoint of her short history, the halfway mark in her life so far. To the left of these two she places the picture she doesn’t have, the one she so definitely refused.

It was her first morning in the rectory, the first morning she’d ever awoken in a room of her own. Dawn was breaking, and already she was scrubbed and dressed, seated at the kitchen table in a cloud of porridgy steam.

“Here.” Vera thrust the sepia square at her with a jabbing motion. “It’s the only one I’ve got. You might as well have it.”

Mathilda didn’t reach for the photograph as her manners prompted her to. Instead, she folded her hands carefully in her lap and allowed herself a lingering, fretful glance.
The boy looked to be about twelve. Hands thrust deep into the pants pockets of a wool suit, hair rearing up out of the shape it had been licked down to, he eyed the hooded camera with scorn.

“It’s your father, girl.” Vera waved the photograph so the boy vacillated before Mathilda’s eyes.

“Yes.” Mathilda looked down into her bowl.

“You don’t want it?” her aunt said sharply.

Mathilda twisted her hands. “No,” she said. “No, thank you.”

Coming back to herself, Mathilda shifts on her knees, suddenly aware of the floor’s unyielding nature against her bones. She’s about to rise when something dark catches at the top of her eye. Not five feet up the back of the huge wooden Cross there’s a small pit. It’s no deeper than a fingertip, which is more than deep enough to provide a hiding place for grime. It’s filthy. How is it possible she never noticed it before?

She wraps her finger in the cloth and pokes it into the pit, twisting as though she’s cleaning an ear. It comes out black on the first few passes, then brownish and finally clean. Mathilda sits back against her heels, spotting the necklace on the floor at her knees. In her ardour, she’s allowed it to drop. The chain lies separate, having snaked free of the locket’s loop during the fall.

She plucks up the small, coppery heart. Without a thought in her head she runs a hand up the Cross’s back until her middle finger dips down into the pit. As though cast to order, the locket fits snugly into place.

Thomas slaps a forequarter of beef on the cutting block, outside up. It’s twelve ribs long, the thirteenth left behind in the hindquarter, like the one Adam gave up so God could build him an Eve. Thomas fingers the edge where it should be. Imagine constructing a human body around nothing but a single rib
. A woman’s body
. Just think of it—they were buck-naked, the two of them, and without an ounce of shame. In the two months since he married her, Thomas has only ever seen Mathilda fully dressed, or draped in that white nightgown of hers, the one that brushes the floor when she walks.

Of course, the no-shame arrangement only lasted until that business with the snake and the tree. He never liked that part. From the first time his mother read him the story, he thought God had gone too far, making them self-conscious like that, the fig leaves and all, making them hide. Having seen so many animals without their skins, Thomas knows damn well what naked means. Beauty. Muscle and bone. The secrets of Creation laid bare.

The door jingles behind him, making him jump. He turns to find Pauline Trask in a too-tight dress, splotchy white flowers on a background of navy blue.

“Mr. Rose.” She drags her pointy heels across his floor.

“Mrs. Trask,” he replies, and then, without thinking, “You’re looking well.”

“Well?” She gives her handbag a little swing. “I’m many things, Mr. Rose, but
well
isn’t one of them.”

“Oh?” He flushes, wiping his hands on a cloth.

She drops her eyes and smiles, a crooked canine slipping
out from between her lips. Her fingertip traces along his counter, as though she’s drawing in spilled salt. “Is that chicken nice and fresh?”

“Very nice.” His eyes skip to her flowery front and away. “Came in this morning.”

“I’ll take two good legs. Oh no, what am I saying, Albert won’t be back until tomorrow night. Better just give me one.” She looks up. “Go ahead and leave the thigh on—no point watching my figure when he’s never around to notice.”