Mercy (10 page)

“Oh, now.” Bending to slide open the display-case door, Thomas feels his trousers bind painfully at the crotch. He selects the best piece. “How’s that one look?”

“Gorgeous.”

He’s keenly aware of her gaze, feels it prickling on his shoulder as he tears off a sail of brown paper, on his forearms as he wraps up the leg.

“How much will that be?” she asks, unclasping her purse.

“On the house.” He hears himself say it, a silent panic thrilling in his chest.

“Why, Mr. Rose.” She plucks the little parcel from his hand. “How can I ever repay you?”

He should make a joke of it, he knows, say something—anything—to ground the charge that crackles between them. Instead, he watches her turn and scrape slowly across the tiles. Even grins when she flashes him a wave from the door.

Mathilda presents her aunt with a spoonful of applesauce, but Vera turns her face away. “Tried to take him,” she says bitterly.

“Come on now, one mouthful.”

“Take him away.”

“Who?”

“Who?”
Vera comes close to shouting.
“Him
. Father Rock.”

“Oh.” Mathilda gives up for the moment, setting the jar and spoon aside.

“Those McGintys wanted to take him away.”

“Only to the funeral parlour, Aunt.”

“Beauty parlour, more like. Did they think I’d let them do him up like some kind of doll? Lipstick on a man like him?”

“Don’t excite yourself.”

“Not on your life.” Vera’s eyes glitter. “There were those that were against it, I know, but there wasn’t anybody going to lay that man out but me.”

“Hush. You did a fine job, too. He looked fine.”

“First time I ever saw a man without his clothes.”

“Without his clothes?”

“I had to wash him, didn’t I? Get him into his vestments. Got to look your best when you meet your Maker, Mathilda. Smell your best, too.”

“Yes,” Mathilda stammers, “of course.”

“He had to be dead, my one and only naked man.” Vera smiles ruefully. “Those dogs of his were good as gold. I was going to put them out while I did it, but they all just lay down
around the bed with their chins on their paws. Just about the only time I’d seen them all quiet.”

Of course she let the dogs stay. Mathilda indulges in a moment’s resentment, recalling how she tried to help that day, how Vera snatched the basin from her hands and slammed the bedroom door in her face. She feels a wave of grief. Not simple mourning—more the acute misery an overlooked child experiences at the mention of the favourite’s name. Father Rock’s dogs. A chaotic mass about his legs, the old ones dying in their baskets, now and then a new puppy for the pack. He was always touching them, sweeping his broad hand down a rippling back or resting it on a panting head.

“No better way to know something than to clean it.” Vera digs under her pillow and produces a square of pale blue flannelette. “This is the cloth I washed him with. I made sure to wipe his face last.”

“Miss Nickels?” August raps lightly on the housekeeper’s bedroom door. “It’s Father Day.” He hesitates when she doesn’t answer, then opens it a crack. “Miss Nickels?”

Her mouth gapes like a cave. He fears she may be dead, then spots the flick of a pulse in her stringy neck. “Miss Nickels,” he whispers, “I’ve come to administer the Holy Sacrament.” The room smells of breath and urine, of flowers gone rank in the vase. He breathes a sigh of relief when she doesn’t stir, draws back and silently closes the door.

It’s hot at the top of the rectory stairs, more of a landing than a hall, with a single small window and three dark, glossy doors. The one to the bathroom hangs ajar, leaking antiseptic scent. The third—the one that faces the house-keeper’s—is closed. August stands perfectly still, listening for movement in the house below. Nothing. He fits his palm to the glass doorknob, closes his eyes and twists.

The room that was Mathilda’s is even more cramped than her aunt’s. August sets his Communion case down on the child-sized desk and steps to the window, looking down on St. Mary’s northern wall. The Stations of the Cross progress two per painted window
—Jesus Falls the First Time
sharing a frame with
Jesus Meets His Mother, Jesus Falls a Second Time
alongside
Jesus Speaks to the Women, Jesus Falls a Third Time
paired with
Jesus is Stripped of His Garments
.

Beside him, the ceiling slopes claustrophobically to a skinny bed. Its bedclothes are gone, no doubt washed and folded away. The grey-striped mattress is perhaps two inches thick. Dead centre, three stripes wide, there lies the ghost of a bloody stain.

Mathilda’s face is flushed, her hand dancing fitfully where the white nightgown gathers in folds at her lap.
Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south
— She halts. It’s a hot night, but the bathtub’s fat lip is cool through the cotton at the backs of her thighs. She can hear Thomas snoring, loud enough to carry through two doors and the stretch of darkened hall between.

“ ‘Blow upon my garden,’ “she reads aloud, “ ‘that the spices thereof may flow out.’ “The hand has a will of its own. It works steadily, drawing up the nightgown like a blind, tucking it aside. “ ‘Let my beloved come into his garden—’ “She inhales sharply. The book drops. Lands splayed open wide on the tiles.

“Bless me Father for I have sinned. It’s been four weeks since my last confession.”

“Yes, my child?” His voice is strangely removed, as though he’s piping it in from elsewhere.

“And since that time it’s gone beyond thought.”

“Yes?”

“I touched myself,” Mathilda says quickly,
“there.”

Again the shifting cassock, the sound a priest makes when he squirms. “And was there—volition, my child?”

“No. Well, yes. It was my hand. My hand was—doing it before I knew what was happening.”

He clears his throat abruptly. “I see. Yes.” He hesitates, begins again. “You know that Christian marriage is the embodiment of Christ’s espousal to His Church—”

“Yes, Father, but—”

“—and that the act of marriage was created by God for the sole purpose of procreation, and is permitted only within the sanctity of the marriage bond—” His voice wavers.

“I know, Father.”

“Good.”

“It’s just—I was lonely. In that way.”

Amid the silence, the sound of him swallowing hard. “You’re a married woman,” he offers weakly.

Her voice comes back plaintive as a child’s. “I was lonely.”

He responds the only way he can. “Do you repent of your sin and promise faithfully never to sin again?”

From there they slip into the ritual dance—contrition, penance, absolution, position, advance, retreat. This time it’s Mathilda’s turn to bolt.

Once outside, she steadies herself against the heavy church doors. She’d been feeling all right—contrite even—until he spoke that word.
Sin
. It was the way his tone softened around it. The way his authority bowed.

It’s business as usual the following week—August laying the host on Mathilda’s tongue, Mathilda laying his meals on the table. For the most part she keeps out of his way, absenting herself when he ministers to her aunt, giving him few chances to avert his eyes. Once, backing down the stairs with the bucket and mop, she’s certain she hears his long step halting, arrested for a moment in the hallway below. And once, she makes so bold as to straighten the parlour with him in it.

“You don’t mind, do you, Father? I won’t take long.”

He nods tersely and returns to the book in his hand. She moves about, smoothing doilies, plumping cushions, aligning books. Father Rock’s grim-faced portrait has gone askew. She grabs the gilt frame in both hands and guides it back.

“How is your aunt today, Mrs. Rose?”

His voice is a cool breeze at her back. She turns.

“She’s—weak, Father.”

He looks past her. “She must draw strength from the Lord,” he says after a moment, bending again to the written word.

Come Saturday, Mathilda takes her place quietly at the end of the confessional line. No one bats an eye—it seems fitting she should go last, being a servant in the house of the Lord. Once inside, she draws her dress up to meet the padded leather bare-kneed. This time she makes no pretence of confession. She doesn’t ask for his blessing, merely draws the book from her brassiere, drags a match along the striking strip and reads.

“ ‘Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.’ “There again,
Lebanon
. Mathilda pictures dark-skinned bodies wrapped loosely in sheets, the sheen of sweat, unknown spices piled high in coloured bowls.

She licks her fingers to pinch out the match. He sighs. Relief? No, regret, she’s sure of it. She strikes again. “ ‘How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter!’ “She pauses, thinking she may have heard the softest of groans. “ ‘The joints of thy thighs are like jewels,’ “she rushes on, “ ‘the work of the hands of a cunning workman—’ “The flame eats a hole in her finger pad and she cries out, dropping it to smother in the folds of her dress.

“Are you all right?” His voice is urgent. “Are you hurt?”

She pulls the seared finger from her mouth and presses it to the screen. His lips touch down like lightning, swelling through to kiss it better in tiny bulging squares. Then he’s gone. She can hear him running, his black oxfords clattering like hooves.

A
ugust was fifteen the summer Aggie believed she’d finally found their ticket out. Ernie Payne was seventy if he was a day, once something big in the next town over, now rattling around his fancy house like the last biscuit in the tin—wife buried, kids flown off, foundation beginning to give way. Ignoring his night blindness, he’d driven the long road to Aggie’s on a tip and presented her with the remnants of his desire. Half a dozen such trips and he’d been moved to declare his love—an old man’s love, passionate and possessive as a child’s.

Aggie could scarcely believe her luck. “I hardly have to do a thing,” she told August, laughing.

Ernie took them away to a fellow Elk’s cottage on the lake. They played family—Ernie the mildly cracked patriarch, Aggie his keeper, August the hollow-eyed teen. Aggie wore new cotton dresses sprinkled with flowery prints, shopped for groceries in the nearby town, prepared whatever sweet or greasy concoction Ernie craved. She kept the cottage neat as a pin, herself too, as though all those years she’d gone around with her dark hair coming loose, she’d been dying to wear it smoothed and fine. Of course,
underneath all that tidiness lay Ernie’s needs. August got to know the look in the old man’s watery eye, went out wandering before he was told.

Brushing through a lakeside clearing one heated afternoon, he found himself surrounded by large, thin-winged flies. They cleared the way as he passed, lifting in shimmering waves, then sifting down to rest again among the nodding grass. They were legion. He found them clinging to bushes and trees, silvering a broken fence, a pile of discarded tires. Up close he discovered their loveliness, so many slender abdomens arched like lyres. Each one emitted the faintest all-over pulse, a minute, insistent surge, which, viewed en masse, set the whole field swimming like a sea.

At the Treat Shack, August accepted his heaping cone, laid Ernie’s shiny coins on the counter and, quite against character, heard himself ask, “What are they?”

There could be no doubt to which
they
he referred. The flies were so thick on the sky-blue clapboard, the treat lady had to thrust her fat hand out through a little door in the screen, scoop up the money and yank it back.

“Fish flies,” she answered, pulling a sick face. “I guess you’re not from around here.”

“They’re beautiful,” he murmured, to himself as much as her.

She snorted. “Not for long.”

There were more than enough rooms in the cottage for August to have one of his own, but he chose to remove himself, bedding down in the musty canvas tent he’d set up at the foot of the sloping yard. The fish flies covered it now. No longer a pasty yellow, his little home winked like mica in the gathering night. He left the door flaps rolled up so he could
watch them on the screen, and beyond, the undulating body of the lake. He dreamt of wings, thousands of them, a soft translucence caressing him head to toe. Woke sweating, bewildered, his boxer shorts plastered to his thighs.

The tent was besieged. He didn’t dare step out for fear they would swarm him, so he let the shorts grow gluey against him, buried them shamefully early the next morning among the sand willows that sprouted from the beach.

The fish flies didn’t drink blood or suck sap or gnaw great, gaping holes in the trees. There wasn’t time. They were born, they mated, they died. Before long the ground was black with them. Aggie swept dark piles off the porch, thick bands marked the tide line, the lake grew a bobbing, blemished skin. They rotted like anything else. For a week August walked in misery, inhaling their carrion stink.

When Ernie fell down dead of a stroke while shaving, it came as no great surprise.

Mathilda saws three thin slices from the loaf and butters them with care. Dipping the ladle into the soup pot, she fishes for the prettiest chopped vegetables, the heartiest chunks of beef. After arranging the bread in a fan shape around the bowl, she carries Father Day’s lunch to the dining-room table, where she’s already laid a perfect place. She smiles at the sound of the front door. In the two months since she took over Vera’s duties, he’s never once been late for a meal.

She retreats to the kitchen, one ear cocked to the scrape
of his chair. Leaning into the stove, she pours a dipperful of soup through the strainer, collecting the amber broth in a cup. On her way up the stairs she pictures him eating—dunking the bread so it softens, closing his lips on the spoon.