Any Bitter Thing (37 page)

Kyrie eleison
, he says, remembering again: Ray is dead. He is breathing hard, wiping his hair with his wrist, flicking dirt—mercifully dry and reeking of earth—from his thighs and knees.
Make the response, Vivienne.

Christe eleison
, she gasps. The shoveling sounds soft, sickening, as if he were digging into living flesh.

Kyrie eleison
, he says.

Christe eleison
, she responds, calmer now.

This feeling is not regret.

Such slow going. His back burns. Vivienne disappears, returning with a short-handled garden spade they have both used for transplanting lilies. She digs beside him, mute and focused. They breathe in tandem, wet with effort. Again, he forgets. He digs and digs, becoming nothing but a body in motion, a body at work, a body physically engaged, a body being used, a feeling he has not encountered in a very long time and it is not, even under these circumstances, an unwelcome feeling, for he keeps forgetting why this hole is being dug, the present moment keeps slipping, the woman sweating beside him keeps fading from view, he keeps believing himself elsewhere, transported moment to moment to different times and places in the way of a complicated dream that begs to be told next morning to the first willing ear.

He digs and digs, this hole becoming other holes: holes for outhouses, holes for irises, holes for animals—his mother’s beloved work horse, Charles Laughton; the dogs and cats, dozens of them it seems—holes of different depths and widths and always that suggestive smell of earth. A hole for a hawk he found inexplicably dead in the field, russet breast ablaze in the sun-buttered morning, talons relaxed and unsuspecting. He goes back there, admiring again that lovely raptor, its eyes dull but still beautiful.

Heaven might smell like this. He is knee high in the earth—a narrow hole, this one, more like a short trench, something for battle—knee high, then waist high, and then he startles awake, Vivienne abruptly and unspeakably
here
, in
this
hole, exhausted and panting, asking to get out, so he drops his
shovel—he is here now, in
this
hole—and helps her to higher ground, his hands sliding down her sweat-slicked calves. She crouches above him, up there on earth. For a moment—a single, nauseating second—he expects her to fill the hole with him in it.

Vivienne
, he says, coming to.
Think what we’re doing.
But she won’t. Staring down, she blocks the moonlight.

Eventually he scuttles out, roachlike, head throbbing, the hole smelling of worms and beetles and not the earthen perfume he wants to remember.

It’s too late
, she says, sweeping her arm over the hole, the night so bright she makes shadows.

This feeling is not revulsion.

He follows her back to the dooryard, where they retrieve Ray’s leaking body—muscles burled but horridly pliant beneath a filthy layer of shirt—and roll it into the hole like a carpet being dropped at the dump.

In nomini Patri
. . . He is crying now, drowning.

She strips off her spattered blouse, cleans her hands with the sleeves, and throws it into the hole. Then her skirt, and her shoes, a pair of moccasins she stitched with her own hands, the leather spackled with blood. She regards him, alert and urgent, her skin sheening, then reaches to unhook his rabat, his collar. She tears them from him, holds them over the hole in the earth, and lets them drop.

He looks down at their mingled clothes and vomits again.

This feeling is not disbelief.

She begins to scratch the earth with the tip of her spade, raking pine needles and spent leaves over their sin. But he is the one who knows how to fill a grave. This hole, again, becomes other holes; he fills and tamps, fills and tamps, places rocks to discourage animals, fills again, tamps again, then strews the ground again with broken branches.

That’s all
, she says. The moon has moved. He steals a glance at her half-naked body, dismayed to find the polished stone of her back clotted with healed-over scrapes, fading bruises.

At one time he could have shamed Ray Blanchard, threatened him, compassioned him into changing his ways. He had the power: God on his side. Or, God on one side; on the other, his own jealousy. And fear.

He did nothing then. Now, he helps her.

She floats across the shimmering ground, slips into the house, and returns wearing a housecoat and a clean pair of moccasins. In his shirtsleeves he misses the weight of his rabat and collar. Then it is over, the shovels washed under the outside spigot and brought to the shed; the ground hosed down and raked over.

This feeling is not surprise.

He wipes his face with his hands, glancing at the upstairs windows, and finds a fleeting shape there. He hopes it is Ray, forgetting again that Ray is dead. If Ray came downstairs it would be a relief. If Ray came downstairs and beat him senseless, it would be a relief. If Ray came downstairs, he would beat him in turn, one whack for every dent in Vivienne’s narrow back. If Ray came downstairs he would do the job himself and dig the hole again and it is shame he feels, shame for his friend’s scraped back, for not choosing to see until now.

This feeling is shame.

We have to get rid of the truck
, Vivienne says.

When she puts the keys into his hands their skin slides together; it feels like blood, though it is only the water they have used to wash off the blood. She tells him where to take the truck, where exactly, her mind working quick and merciless. It’s a place he knows only vaguely, thick with ticks and bramble, a path down to the quarry and then a steep dropoff to freezing water. Three teenagers drowned there decades ago, before the mills stopped dumping and the river rejuvenated itself. Local children
swim in the river now, the quarry a forbidden and forbidding place. She tells how to go to this place no one goes.

She starts down the path to the rectory.
I’ll wait in the kitchen
, she says.
In case Lizzy wakes up.

What about—

My children sleep like the dead.

The truck smells of oil and fish and alcohol and other, far worse things that he probably only imagines. He vomits again on the way to the quarry, slowing down, veering the truck as he aims the stream on the passenger-side floor. Twice he swerves against the wooded shoulder and fishtails back toward the yellow line. The floor moves weirdly with things he recognizes: empty bottles, a rattling can of WD-40, a rag that used to be a shirt; and things he doesn’t: stout hexagonal bolts that attach to equipment he wouldn’t know how to run, a heap of stray wire that looks too heavy to manipulate by hand. By the time Chummy Foster spots him, he not only drives like Ray Blanchard, he feels like Ray Blanchard, entombed in the cab of a truck that reeks of all form of human futility and contains a welter of unreadable objects.

He drives the sixteen miles to the place she has marked in his mind. A yellow property stake, a turnoff to a road that is no longer a road. He gets stuck once, twice, pushes the truck out of a shallow divot and then meets a deeper one in the gummy terrain, pushing with all his will and crying out, then simply crying, unable to believe he has found himself at this unimaginable moment.

The truck won’t budge. Ten feet from the plummeting edge of the quarry, the truck stalls willfully in place. He feels watched, senses Ray smirking just beyond sight in the murk of trees, arms folded high on his packed chest, a genie released from a bottle.

He pushes again, feeling hairless, thin and mincing, ineffectual as a girl. The growl that comes from him then sounds
both ancient and freshly ignited, wholly foreign; out it comes, aimed at the truck of Ray Blanchard, this immovable object, this stinking hunk of chrome and sheet metal with its clanking unreadable cargo, this infuriating machine whose every crack and rattle has for years existed as background sound and half-glimpsed motion, its throaty, gunning, gravel-spitting arrivals and departures enduring and everpresent, a scornful counterpoint to his own spinsterish comings and goings. Shame gives way to fury. He roars from low, low in his throat, drops his shoulder into the ass end of this clattering heap, and pushes hard enough to hear a muscle tear, but it moves, the thing moves, and his hatred moves with it, to the edge of the quarry, over the lip, into the dark and voiceless water.

His rage subsides and sickness sets in. His child slumbers back at the rectory, amongst his doilies and padding cats, believing herself safe. He prays that tonight will not be a night of a nightmare, that she will not fling herself down the stairs and find him gone and Vivienne sitting in the parlor like a zombie in a clean housecoat and blood drying in her hair.

It is not until he walks out to the road and faces the star-filled sky that he wonders how to walk the sixteen miles back to the rectory. Surely he will be seen. He can’t think, mired in the present tense as if in the throes of prayer, or sexual communion.

Slow headlights appear down the road; he ducks into the trees. The car creeps to a stop and the lights flash, on and off, on and off. Pauline, in her red Firebird. He steps into the road, half hoping to be run over. They don’t speak until she pulls into the Blanchards’ driveway.

She did the world a favor
, Pauline says. Then she gets out and disappears into the house.

He goes around back, where the dooryard appears unravaged, a puddle beneath the water spigot the only sign. He heads down the lane, holding his breath as he passes the new grave, then enters his own kitchen.

They face each other. He is filthy and sweating. He can smell himself.

We can’t
—, she begins.
We can’t ever be
—

She looks scraped out and ruined.

People would put the two and two together
, she says.
They would make the assumptions.

He blinks at her, trying to find her former face.

She says:
They would think I killed Ray for you.

He watches her go, her hand on the latch, her foot at the floor, her body moving through space that vanishes the instant she enters it. In his kitchen, all around him, signs of beginning: the shiny bookbag packed with Lizzy’s first homework of fourth grade, her school shoes neatly placed beneath a folded sweater.

He takes in these things, then blunders outside and slips down the path and stands vigil on the ground near the grave. Blood rushing, he explains to his heavenly Father.

He makes his case: bad man. Bad husband.

He must add: human being. Child of God.

He makes his prayer for the dead.

Weeks stutter by. The dead man ransacks his dreams, poisons his appetite, loots his daily Mass. The stony rage he felt at the quarry is gone, and remorse moves in. He is sick with it.

Every day safely passed drops another stitch from his life. He feels unmasked, unclothed, unable to look the children in the eye.

His conscience becomes a live and writhing thing, and he braces for punishment. He will take what he deserves.

It is believed that Ray Blanchard left for parts unknown after leaving Gus Fournier’s boat crew a man short. He’ll come back when he’s good and ready, which may be never, and good riddance anyway. Nothing changes; Ray’s absence goes largely unremarked. Except among the children. They want to know where their papa has gone. Why does he stay away so long? If he is not at sea, then where? They cry all the time.

Lizzy, too, cries now, so sorry for her friend. She recalls Ray’s dancing. He was a good dancer, Father, remember how he danced?

The children whimper in his dreams. All night long.

He stops eating now, begins instead to be eaten.