Black Apple (21 page)

And now the young man had hanged himself in the Hilltop churchyard. She folded her hands on her chest and closed her eyes.
Sweet Jesus, be not his judge, but his Saviour.

Perhaps this third terrible death would signal the end of the monstrous cycle that had begun with the mysterious deaths of Father Damien and Sister Mary of Bethany—what was it, ten years previous, now? She must believe that.
For with Thee there is merciful forgiveness.
She hoped.

Crois en Dieu
, she admonished herself. She had trusted in the Lord since she was a toddler nestled between her two big brothers as Maman read them Bible stories. Throughout her childhood, the family had never sat down to a meal, no matter how meagre, without a prayer preceding it. She had been raised to believe that through God’s infinite mercy, anything was possible.

Maybe it was. The war had ended, after all, and the school budget had been modestly increased. And though the residential school system had its critics—she herself at times, she had to admit, and
oui,
Father Patrick certainly—though she had devoted a large part of her life to St. Mark’s Residential School with its illnesses, deaths, and chronic despondency, though there were grumblings among politicians about closing the schools—the Lord would surely reclaim her years of service—often frustrating, always challenging—and redeem them.
Crois en Dieu.
In due time, He would reveal her true purpose to her.

She opened her eyes and looked around. She could almost see how it would happen: a younger, more vigorous woman with love in her heart to take over the running of the school as she aged. And someone else—a younger woman appearing, as if out of nowhere, a guide of sorts, someone to set things right. She, herself, would contribute as mentor and superior. She had her role to play, most certainly.

The books. She had to finish the first half of the fiscal year if it killed her. So far the school year had been a difficult one, and something concrete had to be salvaged, if only neat paperwork and a balanced budget.

E
ACH NIGHT, THE
sun trimmed a piece of dark cloth from its hem. Ice melted in the schoolyard, and streams trickled by day, freezing at night. Rose Marie’s body diluted, seeping into the wood, brick, and plaster around her. Each season, it seemed, the school absorbed more of her.

One morning, just after Sister Joan’s clanging bell had broken her sleep apart, Rose Marie looked over to Susanna’s bed and saw the shadow sister collapse beside it, hands pressing the side of her belly.
“
He did this to me,”
she moaned.

She was everywhere now—Sister Mary of Bethany, or the ghost of Sister Mary, or
sta-ao
, whoever, whatever she was—always hovering in the dark corners of the dormitory or the bathroom, clutching her side as if in pain, muttering. But she was different too, less solid-looking than before, less human and active, but pervasive, ubiquitous. Rose Marie had to smile as she sank back into the mattress. There was no doubt that she was picking up Mother Grace’s vocabulary. As she closed her eyes, she heard Sister Mary’s voice drifting like a lost line:
He’s killing me. Now I’m going to kill him.

Her eyes flew open. She was about to hiss to the shadow sister,
“Go away!”
The words
you bitch
were stones falling through her brain and taking her back to that day in the barnyard with the chickens squawking and the man falling through the blue summer sky. As she looked over to Susanna’s bed, she saw the shadow sister’s form—little more than graphite lines wavering over the floor, a pathetic sketch of a life. Oh God, oh God, oh God.

She just couldn’t take any more. Not without Taki. She couldn’t put it off any longer. She would tell someone. She had to.

  *  *  *  

Instead of filing to chapel with the other girls after lunch on Saturday, Rose Marie ran up to the dormitory and opened the door to the wardrobe at the end of her row. She still wasn’t sure if she was ready to tell Father William about the shadow priest and nun, how the priest followed the nun, what he did to her, and what the nun was about to do—no, already had done years before—to him. She needed a private place to think. As she crawled into the cupboard, she heard two girls come into the dorm.

“So, what are you going to confess this time?”

“I’m going to admit that I’m in love with Peter Gift to the Sun,” a girl answered decisively. It must be Rachel, a senior who was always falling in love. Rose Marie was sure she recognized the characteristic thickening of her
s
’s.

“No, you can’t tell him that!” the other voice cautioned. Prissy First Rifle, Rachel’s best friend. “He’ll want you to quit him. Tell him you’re worried about your immortal soul.”

“My what?”

“Well, that’s what the crazy one tells him, that Rosary Mary, whatever her name is. I heard her once. Everyone else had gone and she went inside, so I put my ear against the confessional—”

“It’s Rose Marie, stupid. And shut up. She’s related to your cousin Esther.”

“By marriage only. And her dad, you know, he’s that medicine man, the one they call Blessed Wolf? Well, he moved away after her mum died and didn’t even take her.”

“Why don’t you confess you listened at the door of the confessional?”

“Yeah, sure. Father would kill me. Hey, I know, I’ll tell Father William I’m having impure thoughts.”

“About who?”

“About him!”

Rachel started laughing. “And what will I tell him?”

“Tell him you’re having impure thoughts too.”

“About him?”

“No. About Sister Margaret.”

Rose Marie, huddled in the closet, thought the girls would choke to death, they were giggling so ferociously. Even though they had stated plainly what she already knew—that many of the students thought she was nuts—she didn’t feel the usual sting of rejection. In fact, she had to bite her hand to stop from laughing out loud. It was way too long since she had heard any of the girls laugh like that. The way Mama had laughed, making Papa laugh, and then her, all three of them. The way she and Taki used to laugh, jumping and snorting, tears running down their cheeks.

“Girls, get down here now!” Sister Cilla’s voice blasted from the staircase.

Rose Marie could hear them rushing away, trying to muffle their giggles.

She’d wait a minute, crouched in the dark wardrobe. Then she’d go downstairs to chapel. She breathed deeply, smelling the musty stockings and underwear in the drawers under her, the nightdress hanging over her head. The toe of a shoe dug into her bum, but despite it all, she knew what she had to do. She’d tell Father William.

  *  *  *  

In the confessional, Rose Marie opened her mouth and let her words fall into Father’s ears. She told him about the shadow sister, how for seven years she had witnessed the young nun on the top two floors of St. Mark’s.

She heard Father William shift in his seat and scratch his beard. “Why have you never confessed this before?” he asked.

She smelled his sweat and his doubt.

“I
have
confessed it before,” she told him. “Father David didn’t believe me about Sister Mary of Bethany. But, Father William,” she rushed on, “now there’s someone else.”

“Yes?”

“A priest, a terrible priest!” Her voice quavered. She saw someone through the screen, not Father William, but a young man, face bloated, his neck raw, a rope—“Oh, God help me,” she murmured.

“Of course God will help you, child,” Father William said. His voice was soft, almost tender, and the young man faded away. “But you know, now that Father David has retired to the east, I am the only priest here, and I assure you—”

“No, not you.” She peered through the screen. It really was just Father William sitting in shadow, the edge of his beard half lit by the dim light on his side of the confessional. She was seeing too much, too many of the dead. Maybe she was imagining half of them. She had to get at least Sister Mary of Bethany’s story off her chest, and Father Damien’s too. Maybe that was her role. A witness to the dead. And maybe the discloser of secrets. “It wasn’t Brother Abe either. It was a ghost priest,” she whispered.

“A ghost priest.” He snorted. “Well, what can you tell me about this, this . . . ?”

“Black oily hair brushed straight back.” She closed her eyes to concentrate. He was slightly taller than the sister, but how tall was that? “Rusty eyes. He wears a ring with an
X
on it. And he has a cut on his cheek.” She swallowed. The words, which had come easily when she started the confession, were now clogging her throat. “Something ugly happened,” she said. “Disgraceful,” a word Sister Joan liked to use. She wouldn’t tell Father William that she wasn’t exactly sure what it was. She could hear him wheezing through the screen.

“I’m listening,” he said, suddenly intent.

“He jumped on Sister Mary of Bethany.” She pushed her words over the lump in her throat and kept her eyes lowered so she wouldn’t see the man with the swollen face and raw neck if he appeared next to Father William again. “He did something to her. She was in pain.”

A voice whispered in her ear, Mama’s voice.
Auntie Connie,
she said. And then Rose Marie knew.

“She had a baby growing in the wrong place. He did that to her, and now she wants to kill him. I think, Father William, she might have, well . . . asked him to meet her there, in the barn.” She remembered the small, high door on the side of the barn and a hand outstretched. “I think she pushed him from the top of the barn.”

Finally, she had said it out loud.

Silence.

She was afraid of what would happen now, but she had heard Mama’s voice. Mama was with her. From time to time.

  *  *  *  

Mother Grace didn’t look up when she heard the rap on her door. The faltering knock of a faltering man, she thought as she signed her name in a flourish to the supplies order. Surprisingly, today her hands didn’t ache at all.

“Come in.” Two tentative footsteps came across the floor. She looked up—into the face of Rose Marie Whitewater. “I was expecting Father William.”

“Father William told me I should come tell you, Mother Grace. What I saw. What happened.”

“Yes, Rose Marie?” The girl looked different, Mother Grace thought, though she couldn’t put her finger on how, exactly. “Don’t be nervous,
chérie
. Sit down and tell me what on earth you are talking about.”

“Father William said I should tell you about my
Visitation.
”

The last word was forced, louder than the others, a word Rose Marie obviously was not familiar with. One Father William had, no doubt, supplied.

Rose Marie studied her small hands, and when she looked back up, her expression was calm, though her sentences were rushed. “Sister Mary of Bethany is always in the dorm and now Father Damien is too. They were dead, but they couldn’t leave.”

Heavens! Mother Grace blinked. The dear girl must have heard about the events of that terrible summer ten years before!
Mon Dieu
, she had done everything she could to prevent rumours and speculation. If any of the students returning in the fall asked where Sister Mary of Bethany was, she had instructed the sisters they were to be told she had gone east. Other than that, there was to be no further talk of the incident, lest the students overhear.

“What, dear child, do you mean?”

“Please listen, Mother Grace. Father William wants me to tell you what I told him in confession.”

“All right.” She sighed impatiently, yet she had to admit, her curiosity was piqued.

“The sister and the priest wander through the dormitory. I see them and others too—girls mostly, who died here. I’ve seen them so many times and—”

“Ghosts?”

“Yes, Mother Grace.”

Mon Dieu!
After Sister Mary of Bethany’s mysterious death, several students and two of the sisters had sworn to seeing her in the dormitory, Sister Lucy being one of them. And poor Lucy had never been the same since.
Nom d’un chien,
wasn’t it enough to endure the unexpected deaths of two religious without having ridiculous stories to contend with, she had thought at the time. “Surely the figure of Sister Mary of Bethany is nothing more than the product of fear,” she had cajoled Sister Lucy.

She pressed fingertips to her temple. Was this the beginning of a blasted headache? To this day, Sister Lucy refused to enter the girls’ dormitory. At first Mother Grace had tried to reason with Lucy, then to shame her. Finally she had admitted defeat and given her only duties that could be performed in the laundry room, the sewing room, the kitchen, or classrooms.

“Maybe Sister Mary of Bethany was supposed to meet Father Damien in the dormitory,” Rose Marie continued. “I don’t know, but she was there and, oh, Mother Grace, he snuck up on her. He attacked her! She slashed his face with a paper-cutting knife. She had a baby growing in the wrong place.”

“What a tale!”
What nonsense
, she thought. Wincing, she opened her mouth to say more, to dismiss Rose Marie’s story as “silly superstition,” to admonish her. While very bright, Rose Marie was also highly strung.
Oui
, and at one time she most certainly would have been convinced that Rose Marie was delusional. But a full year after the deaths, on a late-summer evening when she was checking supplies in the dormitory, a sister had slipped behind her, quick, moving only as the young do, and she had turned and—
Mon Dieu!

Later that night, as she sipped brandy in her office, she had wondered what exactly she had witnessed. The white apron, drawn-up skirt, and familiar face made wretched by despair were still sharp to this day, far too sharp in her mind. At the time, she had wondered if her vision was merely the manifestation of her own disillusionment, her spiritual fatigue. Eventually that’s what she had convinced herself. Now she examined Rose Marie’s expression, and the girl looked her straight in the eye.

“It’s true,” Rose Marie said evenly. “She pushed him from the barn.”