The Wreckage (28 page)

The gelding was spooked by something, a noise in the crowd, a flash of light. The cowgirl was bucked from the saddle but the flag jammed tight in its holder near the stirrup. The horse bolted from the tent, the pole slapping at its flank like a whip. A surge of movement on the midway, a wave of voices roiling toward them and Mercedes turned in time to see the horse’s head shearing above the crowd. She put a hand on Marion’s arm before she was knocked aside by the animal’s shoulder, before her daughter was pulled down and dragged along by the undertow of the hooves pistoning the packed dirt.

She had no memory of her visit with Amina when she woke, only a heaviness in her chest that she recognized as Marion. Agnes was sitting in the reclining chair, asleep in the light of the television.

From the moment Bella was conceived, Mercedes thought of the pregnancy as a kind of compensation, as if the world was out to make amends for her loss. But on the night her water broke she lost her nerve. When Johnny carried her suitcase out to the car she refused to leave the house. “I can’t face it,” she said. “I can’t go through losing another.” She leaned into a contraction, sucking air through her teeth.

Johnny knelt in front of her, using both hands to wipe the tears from her face. “It’s not like you’ve got a toothache, Mercedes. For the love of Christ,” he said.

Once she’d come through the labour, the sense of reparation that accompanied the pregnancy returned stronger than it had been at the outset. She went so far as to forget the moment of doubt entirely and disputed it every time Johnny told the story.

Mercedes had gone to the Isabella Gardner Museum on the anniversary of Marion’s death each year, to look up at those ancient pictures as her daughter had. She meant Bella’s name as a quiet memorial to the lost child, a prism she thought might refract some of Marion’s light into the arrival of their second. Johnny had reservations about drawing such a direct line between the two but he could see Mercedes would have her way and let it be.

“Ag,” Mercedes whispered. “Agnes. Where’s Isabella?”

Her sister stirred in the chair.

“Where’s Bella?” she said again.

“I sent her home for a rest.”

“What time is it?”

She brought her watch up close to her face. “Eight-thirty. You slept through supper.”

Mercedes nodded to herself. There was something pricking at her mind, some unfamiliar pea niggling beneath the depth of Marion’s loss.

Agnes stood beside the hospital bed and took Mercedes’ hand. “Well now,” she said. “Here we are.”

“What the hell does that mean, Ag?”

“I don’t know,” she said, suddenly defensive. “Just. Here we are.”

“Two widows, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“Alone in the world.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“Abandoned by everyone they ever loved.”

Agnes said, “Were you always as saucy as this, Sade?”

She smiled. “I guess I always had it in me.”

“You haven’t mentioned him since you come home.”

“Mentioned who?”

“Don’t play stupid.”

Mercedes glared at her sister, trying to warn her away from the subject.

“He must be in your mind. Coming back here.”

“Johnny was a good husband to me.”

“I’m not saying anything about Johnny.”

“What are you saying, then? That I haven’t got over something that happened when I was sixteen?”

“Now, Sadie.”

“I barely knew him, Agnes. I can hardly remember …”

“If you were over it you’d have come home for long ago.”

They were quiet for a while, and that persistent niggle worked at her, Mercedes trying to pin it down. It came to her suddenly then, like a voice from the stars. “When I get out of here,” she said, “I want to go visit St. Pat’s.”

“Where?”

“St. Pat’s Mercy Home. There’s someone there I need to see.”

The Mercy Home was built on a small rise of land just north of Elizabeth Avenue. Mercedes talked Agnes and Bella into dropping in there as soon as she was discharged.

“Well who is it?” Agnes wanted to know.

“A woman I met while I was in St. John’s.”

“What kind of woman?”

“Just be quiet and drive, Ag.”

They spoke to a nurse at reception and then Mercedes asked her daughter and sister to wait in the lobby.

Bella lifted her arms and let them fall back against her sides. Agnes took her by the elbow and led her to a bench beside the window. “Your mother was always like that,” Mercedes heard her saying.

“Like what?”

Bella turned her head and said, “We’re waiting, Mercedes.”

She took the elevator to the fourth floor, repeating the room number in her head. She went along the corridor slowly, looking in at each open door. It was like passing lighted windows at night, she couldn’t help herself. Gnarled creatures asleep in front of television sets or nearly buried under quilts in their beds. The home had a feel similar to the hospital, the same unnatural state of cleanliness and order. But an undertone of quiet resignation in place of the frantic bustle, the apprehension.

She hadn’t been able to think of anything but Lilly since her name and location had mysteriously come to mind. She thought of the last time she’d laid eyes on the woman, standing behind her shack with an axe in her hands. Walking up to Mercedes with her preternatural stare, touching her face and her belly.
You have the news you need
, she’d said. It was years later before it occurred to Mercedes she was pregnant at the time, though not even she knew it then.

A candystriper stood in Room 417 with her back to the door, tucking a shawl around the lap of a resident, blocking Mercedes’ view. She knocked gently on the door.

“Come in,” the girl said. “Show’s just about to start.”

“Hello?” Mercedes said.

The girl looked over her shoulder. “Thought you were someone else,” she said. “I’m just setting up Ms. Berrigan for her show.”

“Lilly Berrigan?” Mercedes said.

“That’s the one. Come in and have a seat.”

The candystriper went across to a tiny colour television on a dresser and adjusted it so the screen faced Lilly more directly. The old woman watching the girl with her tongue protruding from her mouth and a bemused look on her face, as if she hadn’t wanted a shawl tucked on her lap or the television adjusted and was simply humouring her.

“Hello, Lilly,” Mercedes said, coming into the room.

She looked up and nodded. “Hello,” she managed, barely above a whisper.

“I’m Kathleen,” the candystriper said, holding out a hand. She was over six feet tall.

“How long has Lilly been here?”

“Since before I got here, and I’ve been volunteering for seven years now. She was transferred over from the Waterford back in the eighties sometime.”

“The mental institution?”

“That’s right.”

Mercedes looked past her to Lilly, who was ignoring the two women altogether.
Wheel of Fortune
was just coming on, waves of tinny applause rippling into the room.

“She’s harmless enough,” Kathleen said. She turned to Lilly and raised her voice. “Aren’t you, my love?” She smiled at Mercedes. “Those sorts of things tend to go into a kind of remission as people age. Although she still has her moments.”

The candystriper’s cheerfulness was so overwhelming it made Mercedes feel tired, as if she’d spent too much time in full sun.

Kathleen glanced down at her watch. “He’s usually in before the show starts.”

Mercedes said, “Who?” It was an innocent question altogether.

“Her nephew.”

A ridiculous sense of being called flooded through her, the hand of God turning her this way or that. She felt calm and hollow and ready to be filled. “Her nephew?” she said.

“Yes,” the girl said on her way out the door. “Do you know him?”

The old woman was staring at the television, clapping the heels of her palms together as the wheel spun on the screen. Mercedes turned around twice in the middle of the room and then left without bothering to say goodbye to Lilly.

“Well,” Agnes said, getting to her feet when Mercedes came toward them. “Was she not there?”

“I want to sit for a few minutes,” Mercedes said.

“Are you okay, Mom?”

“Fine,” she said. “Fine. I just need a minute.”

Agnes said, “I’ll go get the car.” And she left them to sit in silence, Mercedes watching the front door, sitting up slightly each time it opened.

“What’s wrong with you?” Bella asked.

A man in a tan raglan and brown slacks came through the door. He was carrying a large Tim Hortons cup. A bald pate so dark and smooth it looked polished, a ring of white, white hair like a laurel around his head. A small constellation of age spots at the temples. The same peculiarly long, peculiarly handsome face. Mercedes watched him wait at the elevator and caught his eye briefly as he turned inside to punch the floor number. She watched the lights indicate the elevator’s rise to the fourth floor.

“Who was that?” Bella asked suspiciously.

“Someone I used to know,” Mercedes said. “A long time ago.” She got up from her seat. “I’m ready now,” she said, still impossibly calm.

When they got into the car she said, “Take me up to Signal Hill.”

She’d intended to scatter Johnny’s ashes out on the headlands, as near the spot where he’d first drunkenly declared his love for her as she could remember. From the parking lot at Cabot Tower a wooden staircase angled down a hundred feet into a valley and a series of staircases stuttered up the opposite side. Isabella wouldn’t allow her mother do that much climbing so soon after her fall, and Mercedes decided to go down to the Battery above the Narrows instead. Bella went with her, refusing even to let her carry the shoulder bag herself.

It had been a calm day in the city but up on the hill the breeze was blustery and insistent, a faffering wind that jerked at their clothes from all directions. They stopped in the lun of the small stone building and Bella took out the urn, handed it to her mother.

Mercedes walked into the open, holding the container against her breast. She turned to all points of the compass to find a spot downwind but gave up finally, shaking out the container of ashes with her eyes closed. The grey dust kicked up into a swirl around her before flying off into the meadow grass and out over the water of the Narrows. She had to shake ash from her hair, brush it off her clothes.

Through it all she was unemotional, businesslike, as if she was fulfilling the terms of a contract on behalf of strangers. She found it impossible not to think Johnny had arranged all of this, that he planted Lilly’s name and location in her head somehow, knowing who would cross her path there. Her head a pinwheel of sparks every time Wish came into her mind and she pushed the thought of him aside. For fear of falling where she stood. To leave one more day to her husband before her life changed for good, one last time.

WISH

1.

H
ARRIS DIED IN
H
ALIFAX
just after the war, and Wish headed west again, travelling up through Quebec and into northern Ontario, where he worked a number of years in the gold mines of Cobalt and Kirkland Lake. Eight relentless months of winter but the weather never touched him. Riding the cage down the shaft, the temperature rising as the cables lowered them half a mile underground. Minus forty on the surface and the mine like a greenhouse, the air hotter and more humid the farther into the earth they travelled. It made him think hell was down there somewhere, as the Monsignor always claimed, if they could only manage to dig deep enough.

He kept to himself as much as possible. Found a bed among Québécois crews so he wouldn’t be burdened by the expectations of small talk, of casual conversations, arguments. He had a gaunt, ascetic look about him, and the Frenchmen called him
le moine
for his lack of interest in poker or dancing or the religiously observed weekly visits to local brothels. He worked as much overtime as the mines would give him and drank on his own when he wasn’t working. He kept his pay in a tobacco tin, along with Mercedes’ letters and picture and a few souvenirs from the war. Harris had pressed the Military Medal on him just before he died and Wish sometimes sat with it, drunk and alone in the bunkhouse, running a finger over the detailed profile of King George. The carefully kempt beard, the epaulets and collar of the military jacket. The king’s own row of medals on his chest.

In the early fifties Wish worked beside a man who’d lost an eye in the Korean conflict, and he got it in his mind to go back overseas. He jacked up in Kirkland Lake and travelled by train into the States. He was still twenty pounds underweight and failed the military physical, a possibility that had never occurred to him. He drifted aimlessly across the American Midwest then, taking odd jobs and handouts before he settled for a time in Chicago. He worked days as a rail mechanic in the Armour and Company Stockyards and six nights a week running the projector in a fifty-seat theatre on the outskirts of Canaryville, several blocks west of Bronzeville. He rented a single room in a boarding house near the theatre, furnished with an army cot, a table and two wooden chairs, a hot plate and a radio. On the walls he taped up half a dozen old posters he’d found in the projection booth.
Godzilla
and
Earth vs. The Flying Saucers
. Jane Russell lying back on a bed of hay in
The Outlaw
, one saucy stalk of straw in her mouth.
The Red Shoes. Force of Evil
. Rita Hayworth in
The Lady from Shanghai
wearing a backless black dress beside the tagline “You know nothing about wickedness.”

He was living at the edge of what was known as the Black Belt on the city’s South Side. Hundreds of Negroes passed through Canaryville on their way to and from the stockyards where they worked beside Poles and Lithuanians on the killing floor of the slaughterhouses. The only black person he knew by name was Magnolia Cooksey, who came to the theatre after the last show of the night to sweep up the spilled popcorn and scrape bubblegum off the bottoms of the seats. He didn’t know how old she was. A youngish face, but there were rich veins of grey threaded through her black hair. She sang to herself as she worked her way along the aisles. She had the most prodigious behind of any person he’d ever encountered.

Wish drank from a flask throughout the evening shows, sitting opposite the projector until it was time to change reels, watching the grey V of light flicker into the hall, the muffle of dialogue outside the room barely decipherable. He was quietly drunk by the end of the night and he took exaggerated care in shutting down the projector and putting away the reels. Before leaving, he put the room into meticulous order, straightening chairs and film canisters and the trash can, like a man trying to conceal evidence of a struggle.

He looked in on Magnolia on his way to the exit. She was never more than a third of the way to the front of the room by then, always the last to leave the building. She’d started work at the theatre around the same time he had and was just as new to the city. Her southern accent gave that much away. He felt some affinity with her for that, for the sense he had of her place on the outskirts of the world they found themselves in.

“Goodnight, Magnolia,” he called to her.

“’Night, Mr. Furey, sir,” she said.
Mistuh
and
Suh
is how it sounded in her mouth. “Y’all have you self a good one now,” she said, without raising her head from the aisle.

The accent was completely foreign to him and at the same time there was something in her soft-vowelled drawl that reminded him of the way people spoke home in Newfoundland. An ease with words, an effortless deviation from the straight and narrow. He loved to hear her talk, even though it brought on a ragged homesickness he hadn’t felt since his first days in the camps.

“Thanks, Magnolia,” he said.

He woke in the mornings without an alarm and fixed himself tea and a breakfast of beans warmed on the hot plate, eating from the can as he stood at his window, looking down on the early traffic. If the weather was halfways decent he walked to his job at the stockyard, otherwise he took the El.

In the evenings he ate at a diner across the street from the theatre, sitting alone at the counter with a handful of newspapers he’d taken at random from a stack the waitresses piled on the shelf over the coat rack. He drank three or four cups of coffee along with a plate of steak and eggs while leafing aimlessly through the papers. There was nothing in particular he was interested in, other than distraction. He started with the sports section when he could find it and from that moved on to entertainment pieces, movie reviews, gossip columns. The front section was always a last resort and he did little more than skim the headlines or the captions when there was nothing else to read.

It was always the same waitress working the counter, a woman at least twenty years his senior. The blue nametag pinned over her breast said
Ingrid
. Her accent was German or Austrian and he guessed she’d arrived in the States as a teenager, sometime between the wars. She wore a wedding ring and he assumed she had hooked up with an Irishman to be working so far from Lincoln Square. But he never asked her for details and never offered so much as his name to her. She called him and many of her other regular customers Joe. She never let his cup go dry. At 6:20, he placed a twenty-five-cent tip under his plate and walked across the street to set up for the early show.

On Sundays he had one afternoon matinee to run and the rest of the day to himself. Most often he spent it lying on the cot while darkness fell, the radio tuned to a ballgame at Comiskey Park, burbling away to itself like a child left alone in its crib. He hated the dead time and smoked away the hours, lighting one cigarette off the other, counting them aloud in Japanese. He’d forgotten almost everything else of the language, but the numbers still came to him effortlessly.

Nishino caught him and Anstey smoking a few weeks after their time in the solitary cells. They were lying underneath the barracks near the still when the interpreter called them out, ordering them into the push-up position. Nishino sent a guard to find Osano and they waited there, holding themselves arm’s-length above the ground by their fingertips. When Osano arrived he was ordered to beat Wish while the interpreter went at Anstey. Bamboo canes across their backs and upper thighs, the sound like a bat striking the baseball squarely in Comiskey Park. Line drives. The civilian guard swinging with the intensity of a man who lived in fear of finding himself on the ground with the prisoners. It was the end of whatever Osano could do for Wish. That was the message the interpreter was sending.

When Nishino stepped back from the job, Osano let up as well. Wish allowed himself to relax enough to draw a full breath and the interpreter caught him with the toe of his boot, just below the ribs. He dropped to the ground, trying to breathe around the foaming knot of pain, rolled onto his side to vomit. It was a week before he was able to pass urine after that kick. A month longer before he could piss standing up.

Wish blew smoke rings at the ceiling, watching the tight circles drift and break apart. He drank beer all Sunday evening as well, keeping them cool in a bucket of water beside the cot, lining the empty bottles along the windowsill above the bed. When he finished his twenty-sixth smoke of the night he got up to turn off the radio and strip out of his pants and shirt.

He woke first thing on Monday morning without an alarm.

In the summer of 1955 Wish fell in with a woman named Jane Adams. They met at the theatre before a Friday-night showing, Jane waiting in line at the concession stand as he passed on his way to the toilet. She waved enthusiastically when she caught sight of him and then stood with her hand held awkwardly in the air, as if she had mistaken him for someone else. She was wearing a turquoise-blue dress with crinoline under the wide skirt. Dark red lipstick and mascara and her brown hair was done up in curls. It seemed overly elaborate for the place, he thought.

“Armour and Company, right?” she said to him.

She worked on the line at the stockyard, packaging lard and smoked meats, one of the few jobs in the entire process reserved for women. She had seen him on the El several times and they had gotten off at the same stop.

“Do you come to the shows often?” she asked him.

“No,” he said, and then smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I work up in the projection booth. I haven’t seen you here before, have I?”

“I was going up to the Aragon Ballroom. Supposed to meet some of the girls on the line.”

He watched the colour coming into her face.

“First time in years for me,” she said. “Since before the war. When I got up there I was a nickel short the admission. Too late to get all the way down here on the El and back. But I was all dressed up.” She lifted her arms away from her body. “Didn’t want to waste the effort.”

“Well,” Wish said. He was dying for a piss, shifting back and forth on his feet. “Enjoy the show.”

He saw her on the El twice in the next few weeks, her brown hair straight and hauled back into a severe ponytail. She was widowed by the war, a mother of two boys. Her husband had been killed in Italy, she said. She asked him if he liked to dance.

“I don’t mind a scuff,” he said, and she looked at him blankly. “Yes,” he said. “I likes a dance.”

They went to the Ballroom on a Sunday evening. She wore the same turquoise-blue dress, her hair done up in the same curls. The Tiny Bradshaw Orchestra was on stage, playing swing and big band tunes rooted to a heavy backbeat that packed the dance floor. Wish knew only jigs and square dances and he felt lost in the anthill of motion. Jane took him off into a corner, away from the busyness, to teach him how to jitterbug, how to do the Lindy Hop. It was the grip of her hand in his as she swung away, it was how she caught his eye over her shoulder before looping back like a fishing line between casts. It was the sway of her breasts beneath the fabric of the dress. It was her hand at the small of his back turning him this way or that.

They went back to his single room and Jane waltzed him across the tiny space toward the army cot. They’d both been sneaking nips from his flask through the evening and they nearly tipped into the table as they went. Jane reached behind her back to unhook the dress without taking her mouth from his, letting it drop to the floor around her feet. The room was illuminated by the streetlight outside the window and he leaned back to look her up and down as she stepped out of the ring of material, turning away from him to drape it over the back of the chair.

Jane looked over her shoulder. “You all right, Wish?” she asked.

He nodded as she came across the room to him and slipped her arms around his back. She put one leg through his and lifted her thigh into his crotch as she kissed him.

She caught her breath when he pushed inside her the first time, as if she’d been cut, and he raised his head to look at her.