Mercy (15 page)

“Father—”

“Bless me
Father,” he replies stiffly.

“I’m pregnant.” It’s the first time she’s said it aloud. “Did you hear me? I said I’m—”

“I heard you.”

“Well?”

“Well—” He pauses for what seems like forever. “There’s certainly no sin in that.”

“What?”

“ ‘Your wife shall be as a fruitful vine on the sides of your house,’ “he quotes distantly, “ ‘your children as olive plants round about your table.’ Psalm one hundred and twenty-seven. Perhaps you recall it from the marriage ceremony.”

“But—” Mathilda stammers, “but you know I’ve never been with him.”

“So you say.”

She’s struck dumb.

“Is there anything you wish to confess?” he asks coolly.

Her eyes fill instantly with tears. “Go to hell,” she whispers.

“What’s that, my child?”

“That’s right.” She presses her mouth to the lattice.
“Your child.”

“Back already?” Thomas is closing up shop when Mathilda returns.

She sets about helping without a word, pulling down the four wide blinds. He’s scrubbing the block when she rounds the counter and lays her cheek to his back. He freezes. Stands stock-still as she nudges him from behind—first her chin, then her small breasts, then her hips. She feels a tremor run through him, feels it double in strength when she presses her pelvis into his tree-trunk thigh.

“Now,” she tells him, and he turns slowly, one hand on the counter, steadying himself like a boxer at the ropes. She rubs her entire length down his, feeling him harden under his blood-spattered coat. He groans and stoops forward, lifting her as though she weighed no more than a spring lamb. “Now,” she says again as he pounds up the stairs,
“now.”

He can’t help but be a little brutal—a big man who’s been saving it far too long—but Mathilda wants it that way. She keeps her wits about her, remembering to yelp when he enters her, to clutch helplessly at his heaving back. Afterward, he won’t let go. He drops off with her locked in his arms, so she lies there breathing shallowly, watching the lengthening shadows climb the walls.

Later, when dark has fallen and Thomas has finally shifted in his sleep, Mathilda manages to wiggle free. She
rises and pads down the hall. Crying softly, she rocks herself on the toilet, willing her husband’s seed to drain away. It’s only the beginning, she knows. Having opened the floodgates, she’ll have to let him rage and flow. It hardly matters. There’s no reason to keep herself now.

She’s brought the faded little book with her. She can barely make out the words for trembling and tears, but she forces herself, whispering them aloud like a curse. “ ‘I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer.’ ”

She spreads her legs and drops the book into the toilet’s bowl. Reaches across herself to flush it away.

M
rs. Stitchen is a middling housekeeper, if that. After only a month in her care St. Mary’s has taken on a distinct pall. August runs a forefinger along the banister on his way down the rectory stairs, turning the fingerprint up fluffy and grey. Not that he minds a little dirt—he’s developing a new fondness for it, in fact. The hank of black hair that once fell to his eyes now sticks to his scalp when he rakes it back. Beneath his cassock he’s beginning to exude the undead odour of the pitifully poor.

It’s just that soap and water—even cold water—seem suddenly self-indulgent. All that fresh scent and foam, not to mention the dubious action of rubbing one’s body with a nubbly cloth. No, nothing wrong with a little dirt. It’s the new housekeeper’s mothering he can’t stand. She knows her place well enough not to badger him directly, but that doesn’t prevent her from drawing him a bath each morning, laying out an assortment of candied soaps, inquiring every other day where all his dirty laundry might be. He deflects her insinuations by ignoring them, finding this method singularly effective—except when it comes to the matter of food.

A broad, ample-bosomed woman, Mrs. Stitchen is deeply distressed by August’s hollow cheeks.

“You could use a good feed, Father,” she announced the moment she first crossed the rectory threshold, as though
Father
were the name of some neglected family pet.

“Thank you,” he began icily, “but I’m not—”

“Nonsense,” she called over her shoulder, abandoning her cases in the hall and cutting a beeline for the kitchen as though she could smell the way. “Sausages and eggs is what you—” And the rest was mangled amid a clanking of pans.

It took several mornings, but he wore her down to four slices of toast and a pair of hard-boiled eggs. The eggs took some doing.

“Soft-boiled feeds the blood, Father,” she insisted repeatedly, then, under her breath, “and if anyone’s blood could use it—”

“That is an old wives’ tale, Mrs. Stitchen.” He paused to let the insult sink in. “In any case, runny yolks sicken me. If you want to put me off eating altogether, you’re going about it the ideal way.”

The next morning two eggs rolled loose on his plate, the little silver cups nowhere to be seen.

Hard-boiled are easier to hide. He can peel them slowly while she watches, sprinkle each with salt, then set them aside and nibble absently on a corner of toast. When she returns to the kitchen momentarily—and she always does, for there’s inevitably a pie in the oven or stock on the boil—he slips one or both of the eggs into the pocket of his robe.

Mrs. Stitchen stared hard at the striped bathrobe the first morning he wore it to the table. “Protects the cassock,” he told her wearily.

The toast is tricky. No matter what he says, she butters each slice until it drips. He has to line his pockets with wax paper to keep the grease from bleeding through.

He takes his tea clear. “For the throat,” he tells her firmly, morning after morning.

“Then at least a little sugar, Father,” she pleads.

“I think not.”

It’s not that he eats nothing. Every few days he slips and wolfs a chicken leg or a wedge of pie, some animal part of him reaching for it, working his frantic jaws. Still, a chicken leg every few days isn’t much. Thin to begin with, August is growing gaunt.

It’s nothing so extraordinary. After all, the Church was built on the bones of men and women who cared nothing for their mortal flesh or, more accurately, who knew full well what evils the body harbours, and were more than willing to slip its chains. August will carve it away, every cluster of fat, every muscular string. No meat for a demon to feed on, no blood for the Devil to fire. Cell by cell he’ll chisel himself a new body—a saint’s body—one with luminous, paper-thin skin and creaking bones.

“Mea culpa,”
he says softly, slicing the eggs lengthwise before dropping them with a splash into the porcelain bowl.
“Mea culpa
—” He lets the toast float and soften.
“Mea maxima culpa.”
He grips the smooth handle, flushes and grins.

Father Charlebois was famous throughout St. Peter’s for his lectures. Legend had it he once delivered a series of talks on Saint Francis barefoot, a length of rope cinching his tattered robe, his voice bird-like in the shadows of his cowl. To teach the meaning of martyrdom he made a trip to the knacker’s for the dark, marbled eyes of a horse. “What does it take to follow in the footsteps of Christ?” He walked down the rows with the eyes on a large blue plate. “Sancta Lucia had her eyes plucked out, and still she kept sight of the Lord.”

For the very first class of August’s first year, Father Charlebois arrived with a white ram in tow, its head bowed under a pair of massive, curling horns. Without a word the little priest drew a long knife from his briefcase and turned to the class. One after another the young men’s voices dropped away.

“Who among you shall kill this beast?” he demanded.

Many shifted in their seats, but August remained quiveringly still.

“You realize it was a priest’s role to do just that,” Father Charlebois went on, “before the Lord God sent His Son, our Saviour, to this earth.”

The class relaxed a little, releasing a composite sigh. Only August held tight. He was seated at the back, old habits dying hard, but even so he could smell the animal’s greasy coat—feces and grass ground into something nameless, familiar and disturbingly rank. The ram looked up, pinned him with its dumb gaze and released a low, threatening bleat.

Father Charlebois’s child-sized hand shaped itself to the ridged spiral of the ram’s left horn. “Before the coming of Christ, this was all people understood. The slitting of throats, the charring of carcasses
—this
was how they worshipped, how they atoned, by sending their messages to God on a river of blood, a column of stinking smoke.”

Slowly, ceremoniously, he lifted the knife, presenting it as a knight presents his sword. The classroom was utterly silent, thirty seminarians suspended in autumn light.

“Sacrifice.”
The word rang out. “They understood that much, but what they were unable to grasp was the
kind
of sacrifice God required. The prophets knew, certainly, but who else?” Father Charlebois jabbed his knife heavenward. “That is why God gave us His Son.
His Son.”
He paused. “And Christ? Christ gave us Himself. What more can you give? Not a stand-in, not a scapegoat, but your
self.”
He lunged at them, gesturing from one to the next with his blade. “That is what God requires!”

A collective shudder ran off in waves from the centre aisle.

“Before the coming of Christ, the priest offered the victim to God. But Christ was both priest
and
victim. He didn’t perform the sacrifice, he
became
it. The action acted on the actor. Perfect circle, perfect offering, perfect rite!” With that, Father Charlebois laid down the knife. “None among you shall kill this beast, because those days are gone. You’re the rams now, boys. That’s what we’re doing here—get it?”

August dreams a banquet, soaking his pillow in drool. The table is broad and soft. Dead centre lies something the size of a turkey, crisp and brown, flecked stuffing spilling out from its end. Potatoes burst their skins beside Christmas oranges piled high, two or three of them partially peeled. A jellied salad, jellied ham, custard trifle in a cut glass bowl. All this and more—yet it’s the bread he desires, round and simple, its crust inscribed with the slash of a knife.

He takes it in his hands, tears it and, like the egg in an Easter loaf, finds a baby August curled at its heart. His infant self is naked, belly smooth and drum-like, sex a shelled peanut, limbs creased and dimpled at their joints. The little legs stir and, in stirring, grow together as though fused. One limb now, it pales visibly, hangs quivering from the infant’s tiny hips. Horrified, August drops the bread, only to have it bounce back at him from the table’s quilted expanse. He wakes a split second before the baby-loaf hits him in the face.

The invisible worm—

Again, high school English, the only poetry—excepting Holy Scripture—he’s ever known. How is it now? He reaches down into his memory and hauls up the line, squinting hard in what little starlight his window allows.
The invisible worm that flies in the night in the—howling storm—has found out thy
—what? It’s no good. The snatch of verse circles and skips back to its beginning, spinning scratchily in his troubled brain.

T
homas’s prayers have been answered. St. Mary’s new housekeeper has been into the shop many times now, a stout, talkative woman, fond of a fatty cut. Mathilda says nothing of the change—she’s simply home. Ever since her aunt died, she’s been a constant labouring presence about the place, sewing new kitchen curtains, hanging wallpaper in the flat, sticking her head deep into the oven and scrubbing long after any grease can be seen. She’s even taken to standing beside Thomas behind the shop counter, weighing while he wraps, accepting money while he trims to order with a smile. In his bliss Thomas fails to notice how reserved his regular customers have become.

She gives herself to him whenever he asks now, but never like the first time, when she came to him in the shop. She probably frightened herself. Truth is, she frightened him a little too, her passion was that fierce.

He’s wrapping two nice pork chops for Elsa Wylie when Mathilda falls. It’s just as though somebody’s shot her, the way her body lifts up a little before collapsing in a heap. Blood on her blue dress. Thomas crouches over her, helpless. Elsa, normally strong-minded to a fault, drops her
shopping basket and begins to cry. Old Mrs. Kimball steps out from behind her. A nurse in the Great War, she rounds the counter and takes command.

“She’ll keep it for now,” Doctor Albright stage-whispers, drawing the bedroom door closed. Thomas hulks before him, a poor fit for the hallway, shifting like a steer in the chute.

“Keep it?”

“The baby.”

“The—?”

“You didn’t know? Never mind, young thing like that, no mother to teach her, she probably didn’t know herself.”

Thomas blinks rapidly.

“She’s pretty weak.” Doctor Albright squints through his glasses. “Any idea what’s sapping her strength?”

“She won’t eat right,” Thomas mumbles. “I keep telling her.”

“What do you mean,
right?”

“Well, not much.”

“Uh-huh. And?”

Thomas’s face is a misery. “She won’t eat meat.”

“No meat?” A smile cuts into the doctor’s cheeks, but he arrests it, bends it down into a thoughtful frown. “Well, that won’t do. No sir. You’ll have to see if you can’t tempt her.”

Thomas nods. “Yes, Doctor. I’ll try.”

“Good. Even so, it’ll be touch and go. I’m putting her on bed rest for the whole of her term.” He lays a hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “Between you and me,” he says hoarsely, “she could lose the little nipper like that.”