Mercy (22 page)

“Heavenly Father,” August pants, but the word cracks open inside him.
Father
. His own left before August was born, so the one memory he has can’t be real. It’s like a picture taken through the bars of his crib. It could be any man, except that August
knows
. His father has jet-black hair and a narrow back. A red plaid shirt, long arms hanging from its rolled-up sleeves.

And hasn’t August been the same—no earthly good, just a stick man turning his back? He stops, hands braced on his knees, bent gasping, almost retching, for air. His shoes and socks are gone, sucked off his feet by the bog.

Who’s my daddy?
He asked it only once. The boys at school had told him it was like when a stray bitch had a
litter—so many dogs got at her, sometimes even a coyote, there was no way to know for sure.

Aggie pointed up through the water-stained ceiling.
God’s your daddy now
. So that was him. Sometimes a checkered back through wooden bars, more often whatever lay on the other side of that enormous airy dome, staring down at him through its ever-changing eye.

August lifts his head, still panting. Which way?

He closes his eyes briefly, sees himself in full vestments, stationed at the baptismal font.
In nomine Patris
. Holy water thrice-poured, the baby’s tears, then the mother’s—yes, the mother’s tears, for close beside him stands Mathilda, her face flushed and happy in the red waves of her hair. Looking at her, August suddenly realizes, not just any baby,
my
baby, and he hugs it closer, bending his face to its innocent breath. All at once the rushing weight, the sweet burden of fatherhood.
Claim her
.

The ground is resilient for a few steps, then rotten, the sphagnum nothing but a surface to break through. Over and over he goes down, moss slapping him in the face like a sour sponge, and still he rises and slogs on, taking as straight a course as the trees allow, until even the trees won’t hold still. He freezes, watching them shudder in a spreading black circle, those closest leaning into him and away. This is it, he thinks numbly, this is what it is to be mad.

It’s not the deformed tree that catches his attention so much as the length of mottled cloth at its feet. Looped and wavy, it scrawls a long, indecipherable word across the moss. At its tail, in place of a period, the bloody approximation of a paw. Like a dog’s, only worse. August recognizes
wolf
in some ancient chamber of his brain.

He shuts his eyes. Sways on the spot, listening hard with his whole body, sounding the depths of the bog.

Nothing.

It’s what he should have expected. Both dead. Both in a state of sin—the baby unbaptized, the mother unabsolved.

He stoops to take up one end of the cloth, holds a dark patch to his nose and breathes deeply, the odour a downward pull, a pure opposite to the heady lift of wine. Slowly, ceremoniously, he feels his way along its knotted length, feeding it blotched and spattered through his hands. The far end is spotless but for a few clinging shreds of moss. Here he imagines he can smell traces of the baby’s skin, impossibly fresh. He straightens. Loops the tail back on itself in a noose.

August shins up the tree with ease, a kind of animal joy even, his body remembering how. He picks a dependable limb, glancing down to confirm that the height exceeds his own.

He sees all three of them during the short drop—his mother, Mathilda, the daughter he’ll never know. His neck snaps mercifully. His naked feet kick and swing.

Safe in the bottle house, Castor uses what little energy he has left to empty the dregs of Renny’s gift down his throat. The kerosene lamp flickers beside him, licking up through the last of the brandy, sending his eye bouncing off through the night. Not much out there. A host of trees. A dangling shadow, black and white.

He curls down over the blue-eyed infant in his lap. His breath hollows out, and soon boozy bubbles are slapping
against his lips. Extra-proof drool falls in long, glossy drops. Tainted and sweet, they splash softly on her delicate skull.

Mathilda staggers through endless underbrush, her nightgown a soggy tangle, part bog water, part fever, part blood. The wolf follows at a discreet distance, hanging back whenever she falls.

Nothing but trees. They’re inside her now, humped and shaggy, spreading roots in her belly, swaying crowns in the vault of her brain. If only it would cry. She could retrace her steps then, follow the thread of its plaintive noise. “Cry, baby,” she whispers. “Come on, cry.”

Out of nowhere, a clearing. She stumbles into its near-perfect circle, a subtle depression in the endless carpet of moss. “BABY!” she screams.
“BAY-BEEE!”

What seemed solid beneath her is not. There’s nothing to grab hold of when the bog opens and swallows her whole.

NOW
(one June night, 2003)

I
t’s after ten, but the teacher says nothing of bed. Instead, she follows my lead, sitting beside me with a second pair of scissors, cutting blank paper while I dismantle my drawings one by one. My precision frightens her. After all, I’m only three.

Seeing the care she takes with her empty pages, I fish out a drawing and pass it her way. She’s a quick study. Her blades mimic mine, parting the black borders that traverse the page, rendering five unique fragments, each with its own dark frame.

Every picture tells a story, true, but these are not pictures. Not yet.

The man on Mary’s bed is beautiful, in spite of his wounds. He’s still out cold, so for the time being she turns her attention to his clothes, rolling him deftly out of his shirt, slipping off his shoes and socks, tugging down his pants. A muddy fragrance rises from his skin. His legs are long and
firm, his chest smooth but for a diamond of gold and silver hair. Late forties, she estimates, younger than her, but not by much—she’ll be fifty-four come midnight. She stands back for a moment, staring. Then draws the blanket up his length and turns away.

She carries his wet things to the table, hanging his shirt and socks over a chair back to dry before invading the pockets of his pants. His wallet surfaces first, the leather damp like living skin. She turns it in the lamp’s low glare. No need to look inside—she knows perfectly well who he is, what he’s doing here in her bog.

She fishes out a ring of keys, then a rectangular electronic device, brushed metal and glass, cool against her palm. Upon closer inspection the number pad gives it away. She’s seen people talking into them in town—a teenage girl outside Harlen’s Pharmacy, throwing her head back to laugh, an older man scowling, steering his truck with the heel of his free hand. Mary holds the little box to her ear, then hunts for an
off
button to render it mute.

Last of all, she draws a broken compass from the right back pocket. He must have landed on it when he fell—its face has been damaged beyond repair.

After draping the pants over a second, mismatched chair, she takes up the lamp and crosses the room to gaze at him again. He looks much the same as he did when she found him, only then his head rested not on her pillow but on the corded roots of a spruce.

She bends over him for a closer look. His scalp has stopped bleeding, the fist-sized blotch no longer spreading through his gleaming hair. Both his eyes are swollen
shut, turning a glossy indigo-black. Like giant, blood-encrusted sutures, six deep scratches hold his eyelids closed. The two that cross over his pupils are longest, slashing down through his eyebrows and cresting the tops of his cheeks.

She’s never been one to flinch at the sight of broken skin. Castor was always scraping or gouging himself on something—her earliest memories include washing and binding his wounds. He never fussed. Even when she had to stitch him up, he just closed his eyes and nodded, as though she were telling him a story instead of leading a needle through his flesh. He was a lamb of a man. The only man she’d ever laid hands on, until now.

The Reverend Carl Mann drifts awake in darkness, tries to open his eyes and finds he can’t. “My eyes.” He struggles to sit up.

“Whoa,” comes a woman’s voice, “it’s okay, Reverend, you’re safe.”

“Who’s there?!” Half rolling out of bed, he lurches to a stand, upsetting something knee-height and wooden, sending whatever was on it smashing to the floor. Hot liquid scalds his bare feet. He dances and slips, crashing hard on something hairy and damp.

“Lie still,” the woman barks.

The pulse hammers in his ears. “Where am I?”

“Where do you think.”

It comes back to him in patches—driving north out of Mercy, leaving the car at the roadside, striding into the trees. “Are you—?”

“Bog Mary?” A smile creeps into her voice. “I am indeed.”

“What’s wrong with my eyes?” His hands seek them out.

“Don’t touch!”

He freezes. “What happened to them?”

“You tell me. They were like that when I found you. Lucky thing you went down close by—I had to drag you back here on that hide.”

He touches the bristling skin beneath him, feels his own crawl slightly in response. Then a sudden chill as he realizes she’s removed everything but his briefs.

“Your clothes were soaked,” she says, as if in answer to his thoughts.

He sits up carefully, the motion causing his face to throb. “I need a doctor.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes I do. I’ve got to get back to town.”

She lets out a snort. “Ever been in a bog at night, Reverend? You got pretty messed up in the twilight, never mind the dark.”

The twilight. It all happened so fast—a rift in the forest before him, a sudden, gliding shade. He took three, perhaps four stumbling steps back, snagged his ankle in the undergrowth and fell. Blackness came with the blow to his head, overlaid with an impression, the faintest suggestion of wings.

“Besides,” she goes on, “for the time being, you’re blind.”

He feels gingerly for his swollen eyes.

“I said don’t touch.” Her fingers clamp tightly around his wrists, relaxing only when he lowers his hands.
“They’ll be all right so long as you do what I tell you. Okay?”

He nods, taken aback by her strength.

“Good. Now get back up on the bed and lie still.” She gives him a hand up. “That’s it, now lie back. There.”

Her scent is overwhelming, a musky freshness, like lowering the car window beside a lake. It confuses him. Given what he’s been told, he would’ve expected her to smell unpleasant, even foul. She pulls a coarse blanket up over his legs, her knuckles barely grazing his thigh.

“My phone,” he says, remembering. “I had a cellphone in my pants pocket.”

“Well, it’s not there now. You going to tell me what happened out there?”

He hesitates, unsure whether she’ll believe him, whether he fully believes it himself. “I tripped.”

“Face first onto a set of claws?”

His heart skips a beat. If it marked him, it must have been real. “I thought I saw something. Before I fell. Something was—coming at me through the trees.”