Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 (45 page)

It’s always heavier on her face than in her hands, and she sags forward, shuddering under the weight.

She slides her hands into the thumbless mittens that are now permanently strapped to the rail. Marika won’t walk in until she uses their controls to type the all clear.

And she hesitates, just like she does every day.

No. This is love. And love requires sacrifice. Hers is just more tangible than most.

She steels herself, then types, “I’m ready.”

She feels the air change as the door opens, and there are hands strapping her into the mittens, trapping her in the chair until morning.

And as always, panic grips her with that realization.

But then hands and lips roam all over her, and she’s lost.

 

F
ather Leggett stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the three narrow stories of gray brick that was 207 East Charlton Street. Compared to the other edifices on Lafayette Square—the Colonial Dames fountain, the Low house, the Turner mansion, the cathedral of course—this house was decidedly ordinary, a reminder that even Savannah had buildings that did only what they needed to do, and nothing more.

He looked again at the note the secretary at St. John the Baptist had left on his desk. Wreathed in cigarette smoke, Miss Ingrid fielded dozens of telephone calls in an eight-hour day, none of which were for her, and while she always managed to correctly record addresses and phone numbers on her nicotine-colored note paper, the rest of the message always emerged from her smudged No. 1 pencils as four or five words that seemed relevant at the time but had no apparent grammatical connection, so that reading a stack of Miss Ingrid’s messages back to back gave one a deepening sense of mystery and alarm, like intercepted signal fragments from a trawler during a hurricane. This note read:

And then the address. Pressed for more information, Miss Ingrid had shrieked with laughter and said, “Lord, Father, that was two hours ago! Why don’t you ask me an easy one sometime?” The phone rang, and she snatched it up with a wink. “It’s a great day at St. John the Baptist. Ingrid speaking.”

Surely, Father Leggett thought as he trotted up the front steps, I wasn’t expected to
bring
a chicken?

The bell was inaudible, but the door was opened immediately by an attractive but austere woman with dark eyebrows. Father Leggett was sure his sidewalk dithering had been patiently observed.

“Hello, Father. Please come in. Thank you for coming. I’m Regina O’Connor.”

She ushered him into a surprisingly large, bright living room. Hauling himself up from the settee was a rumpled little man in shirtsleeves and high-waisted pants who moved slowly and painfully, as if he were much larger.

“Welcome, Father. Edward O’Connor, Dixie Realty and Construction.”

“Mr. O’Connor. Mrs. O’Connor. I’m Father Leggett, assistant at St. John for—oh, my goodness, two months now. Still haven’t met half my flock, at least. Bishop keeps me hopping. Pleased to meet you now, though.” You’re babbling, he told himself.

In the act of shaking hands, Mr. O’Connor lurched sideways with a wince, nearly falling. “Sorry, Father. Bit of arthritis in my knee.”

“No need to apologize for the body’s frailties, Mr. O’Connor. Why, we would all be apologizing all the time, like Alphonse and Gaston.” He chuckled as the O’Connors, apparently not readers of the comics supplement, stared at him. “Ahem. I received a message at the church, something involving . . .” The O’Connors didn’t step into the pause to help him. “Involving Mary?”

“We’d like for you to talk to her, Father,” said Mrs. O’Connor. “She’s in the backyard, playing. Please, follow me.”

The back of the house was much shabbier than the front, and the yard was a bare dirt patch bounded on three sides by a high wooden fence of mismatched planks. More brick walls were visible through the gaps. In one corner of the yard was a large chicken coop enclosed by a smaller, more impromptu wire fence, the sort unrolled from a barrel-sized spool at the hardware store and affixed to posts with bent nails. Several dozen chickens roosted, strutted, pecked. Father Leggett’s nose wrinkled automatically. He liked chickens when they were fried, baked or, with dumplings, boiled, but he always disliked chickens at their earlier, pre-kitchen stage, as creatures. He conceded them a role in God’s creation purely for their utility to man. Father Leggett tended to respect things on the basis of their demonstrated intelligence, and on that universal ladder chickens tended to roost rather low. A farmer once told him that hundreds of chickens could drown during a single rainstorm because they kept gawking at the clouds with their beaks open until they filled with water like jugs. Or maybe that was geese. Father Leggett, who grew up in Baltimore, never liked geese, either.

Lying face up and spread-eagled in the dirt of the yard like a little crime victim was a grimy child in denim overalls, with bobbed hair and a pursed mouth too small even for her nutlike head, most of which was clenched in a frown that was thunderous even from twenty feet away. She gave no sign of acknowledgment as the three adults approached, Mr. O’Connor slightly dragging his right foot. Did this constitute
playing
, wondered Father Leggett, who had scarcely more experience with children than with poultry.

“Mary,” said Mrs. O’Connor as her shadow fell across the girl. “This is Father Leggett, from St. John the Baptist. Father Leggett, this is Mary, our best and only. She’s in first grade at St. Vincent’s.”

“Ah, one of Sister Consolata’s charges. How old are you, Mary?”

Still lying in the dirt, Mary thrashed her arms and legs, as if making snow angels, but said nothing. Dust clouds rose.

Her father said, “Mary, don’t be rude. Answer Father’s question.”

“I just did,” said Mary, packing the utterance with at least six syllables. Her voice was surprisingly deep. She did her horizontal jumping jacks again, counting off this time. “One. Two. Three. Five.”

“You skipped four,” Father Leggett said.

“You would, too,” Mary said. “Four was hell.”

“Mary.”

This one word from her mother, recited in a flat tone free of judgment, was enough to make the child scramble to her feet. “I’m sorry, Mother and Father and Father, and I beg the Lord’s forgiveness.” To Father Leggett’s surprise, she even curtsied in no particular direction—whether to him or to the Lord, he couldn’t tell.

“And well you might, young lady,” Mr. O’Connor began, but Mrs. O’Connor, without even raising her voice, easily drowned him out by saying simultaneously:

“Mary, why don’t you show Father Leggett your chicken?”

“Yes, Mother.” She skipped over to the chicken yard, stood on tiptoe to unlatch the gate, and waded into the squawking riot of beaks and feathers. Father Leggett wondered how she could tell one chicken from all the rest. He caught himself holding his breath, his hands clenched into fists.

“Spirited child,” he said.

“Yes,” said Mrs. O’Connor. Her unexpected smile was dazzling.

Mary relatched the gate and trotted over with a truly extraordinary chicken beneath one arm. Its feathers stuck out in all directions, as if it had survived a hurricane. It struggled not at all, but seemed content with, or resigned to, Mary’s attentions. The child’s ruddy face showed renewed determination, and her mouth looked ever more like the dent a thumb leaves on a bad tomato.

“What an odd-looking specimen,” said Father Leggett, silently meaning both of them.

“It’s frizzled,” Mary said. “That means its feathers grew in backward. It has a hard old time of it, this one.”

She set the chicken down and held up a pudgy, soiled index finger.

“And what’s your chicken’s name, young lady?”

She flung down a handful of seed and said, “Jesus Christ.”

Father Leggett sucked in a breath. Behind him, Mrs. O’Connor coughed. Father Leggett tugged at his earlobe, an old habit. “What did you say, young lady?”

“Jesus Christ,” she repeated, in the same dispassionate voice in which she had said, “Mary O’Connor.” Then she rushed the chicken, which skittered around the yard as Mary chased it, chanting in a singsong, “Jesus Christ Jesus Christ Jesus Christ.”

Father Leggett looked at her parents. Mr. O’Connor arched his eyebrows and shrugged. Mrs. O’Connor, arms folded, nodded her head once. She looked grimly satisfied. Father Leggett turned back to see chicken and child engaged in a staring contest. The chicken stood, a-quiver; Mary, in a squat, was still.

“Now, Mary,” Father Leggett said. “Why would you go and give a frizzled chicken the name of our Lord and Savior?”

“It’s the best name,” replied Mary, not breaking eye contact with the chicken. “Sister Consolata says the name of Jesus is to be cherished above all others.”

“Well, yes, but—”

The hypnotic bond between child and chicken seemed to break, and Mary began to skip around the yard, raising dust with each stomp of her surprisingly large feet. “And he’s different from all the other chickens, and the other chickens peck him but he never pecks back, and he spends a lot of his time looking up in the air, praying, and in Matthew Jesus says he’s a chicken, and if I get a stomachache or an earache or a sore throat, I come out here and play with him and it gets all better just like the lame man beside the well.”

Father Leggett turned in mute appeal to the child’s parents. Mr. O’Connor cleared his throat.

“We haven’t been able to talk her out of it, Father.”

“So we thought we’d call an expert,” finished Mrs. O’Connor.

I wish you had, thought Father Leggett. At his feet, the frizzled chicken slurped up an earthworm and clucked with contentment.

 

The first thing Father Leggett did, once he was safely back at the office, was to reach down Matthew and hunt for the chicken. He found it in the middle of Christ’s lecture to the Pharisees, Chapter 23, Verse 37: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!”

Mrs. O’Connor answered the phone on the first ring. “Yes,” she breathed, her voice barely audible.

“It’s Father Leggett, Mrs. O’Connor. Might I speak to Mary, please?”

“She’s napping.”

“Oh, I see. Well, I wanted to tell her that I’ve been reading the Scripture she told me about, and I wanted to thank her. It’s really very interesting, the verse she’s latched on to. Christ our Lord did indeed liken himself to a hen, yes, but he didn’t mean it literally. He was only making a comparison. You see,” he said, warming to his subject, to fill the silence,“it’s like a little parable, like the story of the man who owned the vineyard. He meant God was
like
the owner of the vineyard, not that God had an actual business interest in the wine industry.”