Any Bitter Thing (36 page)

This moment returns to him as he pulls into Conlin from his all-night journey. Oriole Street swings into sight, identical trash cans silhouetted at the ends of identical driveways. Frannie—the kind, solid soul who married him—will be waiting, wanting to know how his niece fared after her accident, this niece she has never heard of, this niece whose name has not once crossed his lips. And he will have to go inside his clean, warm, predictable house to tell his wife the truth of where he has been.

After anointing her, after fleeting through the corridors and down the ziggurat of hospital stairways, he stands in the middle-of-the-night quiet, recovering his breath. He is still holding the angel, her gown aglitter in the parking-lot lights. Benumbed, he staggers to the car, praying for her. All those bandages! Those poor, spindly, encased limbs. That awful contraption, his little lamb on a spit.

He left his pills in the motel. What day is this? Has he been gone one day, or two? He puts the car into gear, intending to drive south as fast as he can without getting stopped.

North he goes. As he knew he would.

Approaching the valley, he recognizes the ridge along Route 9, a service station he always favored, a nursing home he once visited regularly. A field that used to be filled with cows is
now filled with driveways. Breathing in concert with the up-and-down road, he senses river, melting field, thawing ground. He looks for the shoe shop on the banks, the lights from third shift, and then remembers it has turned itself into a school.

God feels like a part of him that has been gutted and left to rot.

The town, as he rounds the long bend of the river, looks tucked into the glowering dark, innocent as a postcard. The diner abides, and Hinton Variety. Who would know him now, his hair so thin and gray, his face so thin and gray, thick, thumbprinted eyeglasses that express the mire of middle age?

Ears ringing with anxiety, he crosses the bridge into Stanton and creeps toward her address. Her silhouette, unmistakable, faces out from a lighted window, as if she has been waiting, exactly there, since the phone call. He gets out, looks up, strains to see through the tunnel of dark. She has become old, too: a softening at the shoulders, a rumpling in her once-starched frame; but her face still burns in that old way, he knows it even in this blackness. He can tell from here. They lock eyes—in the dark, even at a distance, they sense each other, two stranded souls in God’s stranded universe. Her head swivels slightly, an exhausted
no.
He retakes the wheel and eases away.

How still, this town that no longer knows him. He heads upriver, a tremor of disquiet working steadily through his body. He slows at the second bend, aware of the volume of his own breathing. The sign has been painted afresh. He cuts the headlights and inches down the curve of driveway, past the parish hall, past the church, stopping just before the clearing. He can just make out the tattered remains of the moon garden. It is only March. It is possible that someone has kept it up, that come May the candytuft will pop through, then the white tulips, after that the first of the astilbes. He longs to inspect it for signs of survival but he is too afraid.

In the turnaround squats an overweight American sedan, a classic priest car. A light burns in the upstairs hallway—possibly the same night-light he installed for Lizzy, a square of glass depicting a family of bears eating porridge. But probably not. In the agony of those first weeks of aftermath, he tortured himself with visions of the place being stripped of her—of them—her clothing, her crayon marks, their cookie toolkit, her socks in the mudroom, the porridge-eating bears that shaped the light.

Between the trees he catches a glint of river. That’s the spot, he thinks, suddenly knowing: the spot where the river is no longer only river, where ocean, just a few drops of it, begins.

He skulks along the perimeter, sheltered by the pines and a shocking growth of maple, poplar, and a single imperial oak, until he reaches the grown-over break in the trees. The shape of the shortcut survives amongst an undergrowth of maple suckers and brush. The farmhouse still stands. She no longer lives there but her presence does. He smells her: sumac and river, pine and earth.

Adjusting to the dark, he can just make out the roofline, the east-facing eaves, and if his eye travels down, steady, there it is: the back door, the little railing, a few flagstones that pass for a patio. He tracks the path to her house, stopping here. Here. Then here.

Then: here.

The tree limbs seem to point. The ground sinks a little. The needles gather more thickly here, or so he imagines. Then—as if God himself is watching, a bystander with nothing better to do than give directions—the clouds part and the moon makes a white connection from the middle of the sky straight to the unmarked grave of Raymond Blanchard.

When she unlatches the back door that night twenty-one years ago, he thinks it’s a dream, for he has fallen asleep in the blue
parlor chair and startles awake, confused. The day has been long with priestly duties and constant, engulfing thoughts of Vivienne in her lovely white dress with the red snowflakes. He finds himself in his chair, rabat and collar and jacket still on, Breviary collapsed on his lap.

Someone rattles the kitchen door and barrels into the parlor.
What
—? he cries, adrenalin already spilling. Vivienne. Her blouse oddly wet, her arms oddly blemished. Her face is somebody else’s face, everything shrinking around the stung eyes of a wild creature.

Father, hear my confession!
She throws herself at his feet, like Eve after eating the apple, looking nothing like the woman he held in his arms just an evening ago, his vows on the verge of breaking.

What’s happened?
he says.
Vivienne, get up.

Say you will hear my confession!

Frightened, he blesses her, inclines his head. He will hear her.

It’s Ray
, she chokes.

Ray is at sea. Has Ray been lost at sea?

Father—

He barely hears the rest. A few wild words and she gets off her knees, breathless, leaving a stain on the floor.
Hurry up, Father! Bring the sacrament!
She pulls him out of the chair, into the kitchen,
Hurry up! Hurry up!
as he reaches for the small leather case. She seizes his hand and pulls him out the door and over the steps and into the yard toward the part in the trees.
He came back
, she gasps, running ahead of him now, flinging the words back over her sweat-soaked shoulder.
He came back, Father! I didn’t mean it, I couldn’t help it!

Why is she calling him Father? Already he disbelieves what she has confessed to him. He expects to find anything at the end of this path, anything but the thing she has told him to
expect. He expects Ray. Ray at the ready. This will be the man-to-man he has so often dreaded. Ray Blanchard swaggering out of the house. With a shotgun? A broken bottle? One of those hooks that go on a boat?

Running behind her, eyes fixed on the sweaty trailing wisps of her hair, God forgive him, he chooses. Running, disoriented, running into the lane in the middle of the night only because she has commanded him to, he chooses her.

The Blanchards’ lights are out but the moonlight bears in. Ray Blanchard lies face down in the dirt at the edge of the moon garden, limbs splayed. He looks like a starfish that might have washed up on one of his stinking decks, some untouchable, dead thing.

What happened? Vivienne! What happened?

Quiet!
she yips.
Parle pas si fort! Someone will hear you!
She glances at her dark windows, then clutches at her shirt front as if she means to rip it off. She does the same to her hair; he has never witnessed such a quaking; it reminds him of the religious ecstasy he has long envied but only read about.

He is quaking, too. He reaches down, says something to Ray: drunk, he tells himself, smelling alcohol and piss, Ray Blanchard drunk again, he tells himself, willing the thing in front of his eyes to become something other than what it so obviously is. The shovel thrown sideways like a spent bullet. The viscous puddle beneath Ray Blanchard’s cursed skull.

What in God’s name?

Father, give him the sacrament.

The flowers in her moon garden, identical to his but profuse even in autumn, do not sway. Their cupped white faces watch him.

He turns the man over: ruined face, nose bloodied and flattened from a hard fall forward. He examines the mashed jaw, slides his hand along the neck where nothing pulses.

Please, Father
, she says. Her crying recalls the winnowing of birds in flight.
I require you to make the prayers.
She sounds more French, farther away, with each uttered word, like a fresh immigrant unfamiliar with the ways of her new home.

He unzips the leather case, removes the vial of oil. He anoints Ray Blanchard’s caked forehead, speaking in Latin, his voice no more substantial than a flittering candle. From the case he takes a tiny book,
The Golden Key of Heaven
, given to him at seminary by an old priest who saw the potential of vocation in a young, eager man. The book is a relic, obsolete even when it was first given to him, but he opens it now, thumbing blood onto the onionskin pages. He finds his place and unleashes a torrent of Latin, reading by the unrelenting moonlight.

How did she do this, a woman no bigger than a bird? He scrambles to his feet and vomits into the white, white flowers.

She wipes his mouth with her hand, and he smells blood.
Help me, Father.

Her body turns into a trick of the eye, changing under scrutiny. Her arms, no bigger around than young branches, are finely strung with muscle; her hands, used to shoemaking and hot water, knot with power as her fists close.
Help me.

She picks up the shovel by its bloody head.
Take this.

For God’s sake, Vivienne. Call the police.

They’ll take my children
, she hisses.
They’ll put me in jail.

Vivienne. Take hold of yourself.

I didn’t mean it, Father. He missed his boarding. He came back. He tried to pee on my flowers.

Still she is calling him Father.

The police will understand
, he says.
Everyone will understand, Vivienne. Everyone knows about Ray. You have nothing to be afraid of.

A lie. He knows this is a lie. Here is Ray, eyes milky and half open. Caught from behind and hit. And hit. And hit and hit and hit and hit and hit. His wife’s blouse puckers with blood.

She holds up the shovel. He avoids her eyes, tucking his little book and leather case into his breast pocket. She places the shovel between his hands, curls his fingers around the handle, and he follows her into the woods a few yards off the path, an untamed spot strewn with sticks and branches.

Nothing holds. The night is too bright; there is both a stillness and a pulsing that alters his senses, makes walking feel like swimming, speaking feel like thinking. He forgets that Ray is dead, then remembers. Then forgets. He is holding a shovel, shocked, perhaps
in
shock, but not sorry. An unfamiliar emotion buzzes through his buzzing head, like an insect that has been present for a very long time but is just now making itself known. He does not know what this feeling is, only what it is not.

This feeling is not sorrow.

I’m begging you. Father, I’m begging you.

He clears a spot and begins to dig, reciting the Burial Absolution. This he knows by heart.
Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei . . . Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.
He whispers, digging, trying to stay the boiling in his head.

This feeling is not pity.

His muscles remember the work of the farm, a boy’s pride in helping his father and uncle dig by hand the furrows of his mother’s vegetable patch, the foundation for the new root cellar. The smell of turned earth fills him, now, as then, with a confusing wistfulness, a nostalgia for something that has not yet happened. He bends down and up, down and up, each short breath slicking back at the end in a half-fulfilled cry.