Mercy (26 page)

“Horseshit.”

“I assure you, Mayor Wylie and I are—”

“Screwing like rabbits?”

“W-what?” He forces a laugh. “For your information, Lavinia Wylie—”

“There’s nothing you can tell me about Lavinia I don’t already know. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, you came out here to get me to stop stirring up the shit, only you thought you’d find some old girl gone soft in the head. Isn’t that what Lavinia told you?”

He searches for a half-truth, coming up dry.

“You thought you’d just come out here and sweet-talk me or scare me, or whatever it took to get your way. Well, now you’ve met me, what do you think? You think you’re going to get me to stop nailing up those scrolls? No way, Reverend, no matter how many kids you hire to rip them down. You think I’m going to quit writing to the papers?” She chuckles. “Stroke of genius signing myself Mother Nature, eh? Nothing like birchbark to make them sit up and take notice. That’s the thing, see—they open those scrolls in their little offices and the smell of the forest hits them square in the face. Once they get a whiff of that, they don’t need anybody to tell them how much it matters.”

“Of course it matters,” Carl says evenly. “But we must remember to worship the Creator, Mary, not His creation.” For a moment he imagines his words have hit home. Until she speaks.

“You know something, Reverend, I never met Castor’s mother—she was long dead by the time I came along—but she was called Mary too. This was her land. Breed land, Castor called it. I guess most of what got parcelled out to the Metis was land the whites couldn’t use.” She pauses. “Until now, that is. Anyway, it was her land, and Castor’s, and now I guess it’s mine. It’s only a little corner of what you’re
after, but I’ll be damned if it’s any use to me with the bog torn out.” Her voice swoops in close. “It’s not happening, Reverend. You can kiss your blessed camp goodbye.”

The teddy’s a thin secret between Lavinia and her sheets. She squirms a little, feels a naughty scratch of lace. The colour suits her
—apricot glow
according to the catalogue, and for once they got it just right. Carl called her a peach the first time she wore it for him. Threatened to peel her and suck up the juice.

She reaches for the bedside clock. A quarter after twelve. Maybe he’s gone straight back to the motel for some reason. Or maybe something’s happened to him. He could be lost out there, or hurt. He could be—
Stop it
. He’d phone if there was a problem, she made sure he took his phone. He’s probably turning up the street right now. She’ll hear his car any minute, then the back door deadbolt as he lets himself in with her spare key.

She could pretend to be asleep. That way he could gaze at her from the bedroom doorway, take in her mussed-up hair, her glossy parted lips. Her thighs prickle with impatience. Surely they can’t still be talking. Even a preacher can only talk for so long, and as for Mary—well, really, what on earth could crazy Mary have to say?

Lavinia feels her heart contract.

It was rarely spoken of at home, and never when Mama was within earshot. The few times Daddy dared bring it up were when he came in to kiss Lavinia goodnight.

“You’re a lucky girl, Lovey, you know that? I never had a daddy to tuck me in, all I had was a brother.” That was usually the end of it—he’d kiss her on the forehead and leave her lying alone in the dark. One night, though, he took a deep breath and went on. “He was a good brother. Saved my life when I was just a few weeks old.”

Lavinia wanted to ask how, and why, and where the brother was now, but she was silenced by Mama’s dark shape in the door. “Time to go to sleep, Lavinia. Renny, let her sleep.”

Daddy sat perfectly still on the edge of the bed.

“Renny,”
Mama said again, and he rose stiffly and followed her out of the room.

Lavinia caught snippets of the argument that ensued.
Elsa, he’s my flesh and blood. You swore to me, Renny, you swore!
Then came a terrible sound, the report of the slamming front door. Lavinia lay trembling. Heard Mama let out a loud, racking sob.

Daddy must’ve heard it too. He couldn’t have made it far, must have been standing shocked and wretched on the stoop. He shut the door carefully on his way back in. Lavinia closed her eyes during the charged silence that followed, drifted off to the familiar rhythmic creaking of their bed.

All mention of the brother ceased. A couple of years later Lavinia got wind of the family shame at school. She fought her own battles, knowing better than to bring the matter home.

The teacher had seen one of my drawings. After nearly two months of hugging them to my chest and sidling past her with teeth bared, I’d marched right up to her, waved one like a flag, watched her eyes open wide.

She hovered as the last of your flock took their reluctant leave, then dragged you to the schoolroom, where the drawing lay in wait on her desk. I was rocking. Riding the red horse with its whinnying face to the wall.

“It’s Clare’s, can you believe it? And no doubt there are hundreds like it. She smuggles a bunch of them out of here every week.”

“Hmm.” An innocent sound, enough to show you were listening, nothing more.

“It’s almost expressionistic,” she rushed on. “Can you believe the composition, the precision? It’d be incredible for a twelve-year-old—but for three?”

“Hm.”

Confused by your lack of enthusiasm, she tried again. “The images are so compelling, especially that middle one. I almost feel as though I’ve seen it before.”

Like all of them, the page was divided into five. Each black border enclosed an image somehow incomplete, cut to size by the absolute line. The centre block showed a waning moon, blue and glassy in a pinkish sky.

“These are not a child’s drawings, Carl.” She swept a hand toward the crude scribbles she kept tacked to the wall. “See any difference?”

Of course there was a difference. I held my crayons like I
meant it. I bore down hard, wore my tools down long before the others did, with their vague ideas and even vaguer hands.

“Carl?”

Something was troubling you, Preacher, comprehension just below the horizon, the rusty birdsong before the dawn. It was that thin, icy slip of a moon. You’d never seen it, but you knew it all the same—the knowing somehow shameful, almost incestuous—the way it hung as though hooked into that fleshy sky. It was a very particular blue, that moon, like a surfacing vein—a little milk, a little rose.

It would come to you. Later, when you were alone, it would come with an ulcerous twinge, your gut taking a bite of you from inside. You’d turn your back to the mirror, drop your pants and find it gleaming on your own behind.

And then you’d remember.

Wild Bill
. He was your papa’s prize coloured German, a shit-brown billy goat with a little black smile, black trails beneath his eyes and a bristling black ridge along his spine. Eel-backed, they called it. His coat was like long sick grass, as if he’d grown up out of the dead corner where your papa dumped turpentine and old motor oil, any poison he could find.

He was the scourge of your tender years—his sideways yellow eyes, the way he stood up like a man to tear leaves from your mother’s fruit trees, the stink of him.

He pissed in his own mouth to stroke it through his coat when the neighbours brought their nanny goats round. She-goat after she-goat, Wild Bill circling, lips drawn to show his ochre teeth. He mounted them like they were boulders. Raising himself up like a conqueror on the last thrust, planting his front hooves on their backs.

His chain-link tether was too long, your papa forever uprooting and moving the peg before you could be sure of its reach. Thinking he was still penned up for the night, you crept into the yard. A low bleat was the one warning you got. You took to your heels, kicking up chicken feed, shinning up the old ash tree seconds too late. Wild Bill reared up on his flinty hooves, goring you with a dirty horn.

Maybe it wouldn’t have scarred so mirrored and blue if your papa hadn’t heard you scream.
Yellow
. He bent you over his knee, spoke it slow and broken to the beat of the strap
—yel-low, yel-low
—while your mother stood watching, unconcerned. The wound opened wide, took a month to stop weeping and heal.

Recognizing the scar, you realized I’d seen it. You couldn’t begin to understand how—all you knew was that I’d caught sight of your bare backside and the Lord only knows what else. So quiet, so caught up in my drawing. You’d never dreamt I had eyes for you.

What would I draw next? What had I already drawn, stashed away like ammunition, so many charges and rounds? The teacher was right. It wasn’t healthy to be happy doing one thing.

You took my crayons. Hid every last one of them away.

The Reverend hasn’t spoken since Mary put him in his place. She imagines touching the hard line of his mouth, insisting with her fingers until it buckles into a genuine
smile. She could almost feel sorry for the poor mayor. Imagine looking to a mouth like that for love.

Not that Lavinia deserves much sympathy. Mary can scarcely believe the same blood runs in their veins. Their encounters may have been few and far between, but the first set an unforgettable tone.

At seven years of age Mary had never even heard tell of her cousin. Normally loose-lipped to a fault about the inhabitants of Mercy, Castor had kept mum on the subject of his little brother’s family, knowing Mary would be curious, and that her curiosity could only lead to pain.

What he failed to understand was how lonely she was, how badly she needed a friend. Even when he was home, he was often too worn out or too wasted to play. On the day in question he lay fully dressed on his bed, tipping a bottle to his lips and staring up through his vault of mortared glass. Mary tugged at his sleeve, even whined a little, then gave up and went looking for somebody her own size.

She took nothing with her. Heading south on one of Castor’s many trails, she followed it further than ever before, breaking branches to mark her passage, losing all sense of time. Eventually spruce gave way to poplars, poplars to swaying grass. Beyond lay the shape of a town. She had long known of Mercy’s existence but was still shocked to see so many houses crowded together, and not one of them glittering like home.

She approached stealthily, pushing her way into a bank of snowberries that bordered the grounds of a huge red house. At the time she paid little attention to the building that was the Mercy United Church—she was too busy watching the girls who were playing in its yard. All three
had on pale, frothy dresses and shiny black shoes. The short, yellow-haired one was running the show, riding around in a make-believe coach while the other two shouldered its weight. “Gee-up!” she kept screaming at them. “Geeee-up!”

Mary caught a whiff of them when they circled close—flowers held too tightly and too long. The smell made her anxious, but she’d come too far to turn around and go home. On their next pass she steeled herself and stepped out from the hedge. The three of them stopped dead and stared.

In the heat of their combined gaze Mary caught an unflattering glimpse of herself from the outside. She was wearing one of Castor’s old shirts for a dress, chopped at the sleeves and cinched with a strip of hide at the waist. Her feet were bare. Her hair hung to her elbows in dark, tangled skeins.

The leader wore hers in two tight, shiny braids, each with a red ribbon at its tail. They fluttered defiantly as she stepped forward between the other two. “Who are you?”

It was a bewildering question, one Mary had never heard. She gave the only answer she could think of. “Mary.”

“Mary?
That’s it? No surname?”

Mary stood motionless, unsure. The horse-girls giggled.

“I guess we’ll have to give you one.” Yellow-braids thought about it for a moment and smiled.
“Contrary
. That’s it. Mary. Quite. Contrary.”

More giggling. Mary was the wild kid among the townies—she knew that—but somehow it seemed as though she were the tame one, brought up soft while they’d been sharpening their claws. “Okay,” she said finally.

“Okay? Mary
Contrary? Okay?”
Yellow-braids turned to her horses and they started whinnying for her, holding their bellies and rolling their eyes. Mary took a step back.

“Hey!” said Yellow-braids, spitting almost, then abruptly sweet. “You wanna play?”

Mary was powerless in the face of such an invitation. “Okay,” she heard herself say. “Sure.”

“Good.” Yellow-braids gave her a smile. “Franny,” she said to one of the horses, “gimme your scarf.” Franny untied the pink band that was holding back her hair. Yellow-braids circled behind Mary. “Shut your eyes,” she ordered, and just like Franny, Mary wordlessly obeyed. She felt the scarf drop down over her eyes, then sharp little knuckles knotting it at the back of her head.

“Can you see?” Yellow-braids demanded. “And don’t you dare lie.”

“No.”

Mary felt hands on her back. “We’re playing Blind,” Yellow-braids said in her ear. “You have to trust me. I’m your guide.”

Mary could hear the horses stifling themselves.

“Get back, Franny,” Yellow-braids barked. “You too, Paula, get out of Mary Contrary’s way.” She said the name differently that time, her tone protective, as though she were speaking of someone she loved. The last of Mary’s misgivings dissolved. She melted back into those hands and allowed herself to be pushed around.

Yellow-braids went slowly at first, telling her when to lift up her feet. “There’s a rock here, Mary, step over it, that’s right.” After a while she sped up and started taking sharper turns, but Mary was too elated to mind. Running
without her eyes was like flying. She let her arms rise up in their sockets, placing her faith in the air.

The tree trunk caught her full in the face. Sheet lightning flooded her skull, then blackness, until a tugging at the blindfold dragged her back. Yellow-braids stood over her, the scarf hanging limp in her hand. Franny was blubbering, Paula blinking, stunned.