Fall on Your Knees (21 page)

James tosses the scarecrow across the creek. It lands with a thud next to Frances, its neck bleeding straw, its legs splayed crazy on either side of the teeming wooden stake. Frances can feel the scarecrow looking up at her. It has no head but she can see its expression anyway, pathetic and sad: “Why did you do this to me?” Lying there like a dying soldier wanting to give her a message from his dying throat: the location of the enemy, a message for a loved one back home, a piece of a joke, a piece of a poem, the address of his childhood home crystal-clear, the memory of a boy drinking from a summer stream in a painting
or did that really happen, was that me?
Frances doesn’t answer. She looks away from the scarecrow even though she knows it may move if she doesn’t keep an eye on it. Her arms have congealed around the clammy little baby. She fastens her eyes on the scarecrow’s hat. The hat is lying next to Daddy. And Daddy is digging in the garden. With his bare hands.

James stops. It’s ridiculous to dig anywhere but in a sandbox with your bare hands, but in a New Waterford back yard it’s even more ridiculous, because there’s coal not far under the ground, even coal right at the surface in places. And rock. James is crying. He covers his face with his hands, streaking it with mud and soot and blood. He has never cried like this before, not counting early childhood. He’s in the war. Not that he is hallucinating himself back to the Front or hearing shells explode in his head or seeing chopped-up men, it’s not that conscious. It’s just that if you asked the layer of his self that’s in charge of assumptions, “Where are we now?” it would reply, “In the war, of course.” There is a water-filled trench. There is an unhappy man with bleeding hands. There is the body of a boy. Of course.

“Daddy.”

“No-o-o-o-o-o. No-o-o-o-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho.” Like Santa Claus, only sad.

“Daddy, I’m sorry.”

James quiets down a bit and rocks on his heels for a while, making only very small sounds, with his hands still covering his face.

“The baby’s cold, Daddy.”

James gets up, gasping, swaying a bit, every breath touching off a little moan. But they’re just the aftershocks of grief. He can function now, the chest-heaving will run its course like a case of hiccups. He looks across at Frances. He splashes through the creek and takes the live baby from her. Her elbow joints unsquinge like damp springs, and her arms levitate in giving up the child’s weight, while retaining its warm impression — a phantom baby she will feel in her arms for days to come. James gives her a light shove towards the house.

“Go to bed now, go on.”

“Don’t hurt her.”

“I won’t hurt the baby, go.”

Frances goes.

“Wait. Take off your nightgown.”

She peels it from her body and James takes it from her. She watches Daddy return to the garden, where he swaddles the infant boy in her nightgown and tucks him into the shallow earth.

Frances walks across the yard back to the house, savouring the novelty of the night air on her bare chest. Boys are the only ones who ever get to feel this. There’s a bright moon, her underpants glow white and she pretends to herself that she’s really a boy stripped down for a swim at Lingan. She skips across the back yard feeling light and free, and it’s not until she steps out of her damp underpants and snuggles down in bed next to toasty-warm Mercedes that Frances starts to feel cold and to shiver.

Down in the cellar, Materia is curled asleep on a pillow of ashes behind the coal furnace. She dreams of an expanse of quiet earth embroidered by drought, then a calm sea of sand. In her dream she is aware that kings and queens are buried in the sand. A wide blue river blinks in the distance. In the river there is something she needs. But the sand makes her sleepy. Sleepy like Arctic snow. It’s not the cold that makes you sleep yourself to death in the Arctic, it’s the smooth pallor of the landscape, and the desert has that same smooth pallor, though Arabic. It’s the whiteness, the sameness of everything, that makes you fall asleep out of life, parched or frozen and so so comfortable when you finally let it roll over your mind, like a rolling-pin over dough.

The latch on the cellar door thwacks open and the airborne part of Materia slams back into her body, her eyes opening on impact; she has fallen awake. His shoes squish heavily down the steep wooden stair slats. He stumbles a bit at the bottom because there’s no light down here and he hasn’t brought a lantern. Materia doesn’t move a muscle. She is a pair of eyes now, that’s all she is. A desert with eyes.

James has either forgotten she’s there or doesn’t consider it of any importance. He yanks open the door of the cold furnace and tosses in a load of bloody sheets, douses it with kerosene and lights it. The sudden glow across his face startles even Materia and tears spring to her eyes, there is nothing sadder than the Devil. Tears spring to her eyes because in this light, in fire-light as in candlelight, the essential beauty of a person is evident. Candle-light is kind and caressing and therefore a natural companion to romance. The essential James is what the flames illuminate and it’s splintering what’s left of her heart, the sight of him as he was so long ago, the two of them alone in the hunting cabin out of season with his gift of his mother’s tartan blanket and the song and his bliss at the sound of her mother tongue, he loved her but she didn’t know she was supposed to save him, she didn’t know, she didn’t know, he must have fallen down and hurt himself just now because his face is dirty, he’s been crying and his cheeks are striped with blood.

He sprinkles a little more fuel onto the flames. Materia can’t stay by the furnace much longer what with it heating up like this. If he doesn’t leave soon she will have to move and betray her presence. But he shuts the pot-belly door and the glow dies down, his sweet agony disappears and is replaced by the shadows of the face she has come to know and Materia ceases to feel the lump in her throat.

As he heaves and shifts the weight of himself from one foot to another up the steps, Materia wipes the tears from her face with her sooty hands. She unwedges her body and drags it along the cinder floor behind her until she can stand up in it again, and goes back to being nothing but a pair of travelling eyes.

Before dawn, with Mercedes still sound asleep beside her, Frances opens her eyes and sees a black woman staring down at her. The woman reaches out and lightly strokes Frances’s forehead. She does the same to Mercedes, and then leaves. Frances falls back asleep. Candy. She dreams of candy.

The night is bright with the moon. Look down over Water Street. On the lonely stretch between where the houses end and where the sea bites into the land, a tree casts a network of shadow that stirs and bloats in one spot, as though putting forth dark fruit that droops, then drops from the bough. It’s a figure come out from under the branches and onto the street. It stops, drifting in place like a plant on the ocean floor. Then it travels again all the way down the street to the graveyard. It passes among the headstones that have flourished with the town, but it does not linger at the freshest mound. It continues to the edge of the cliff. There, it lies down on its stomach and places its neck upon the lip of the precipice, as though the earth were a giant guillotine. It looks straight out to the sea that stretches four thousand miles due east, and sings.

Is it possible that the Atlantic conducts the song across its waters until, thirsty and ragged, the song reaches the Strait of Gibraltar, revives a little with the refreshment of its own echo off the rock of ages and continues its journey, turning on its tattered axis all the way to Lebanon, where it finally loses momentum and rests in air for a moment before descending in soft arcs to the sandy shore below, to sleep there in peace and for ever, at last?

When Mrs Luvovitz opens her back door at three that morning she gets a fright. There’s someone in her garden. Just standing there at a slight tilt, as though blown that way by a wind that’s since died down.

Mrs Luvovitz woke up because she heard something. A woman singing, of all things. She couldn’t make out the words. It didn’t wake Benny. Hard not to think
“banshee”
— sometimes they wail, sometimes they weep or just sing softly, but their message is always the same: someone will cross over. By the time Mrs Luvovitz got her eyes properly open the singing had ended. But she looked out the front window anyhow — nothing. Just to be sure, she went downstairs and opened the back door, and that’s when she got the fright — a figure stood in her garden, with its back to her.

Fear turned to surprise the next instant when Mrs Luvovitz recognized the shape.

“Materia?”

Materia does not turn around, she does not stir. She is a ripe stalk planted in shallow soil, top-heavy, about to fall over roots-up. Just a baby’s breath will do it now.

Mrs Luvovitz walks between the beans and tomatoes until she is close enough to touch Materia’s arm. It is cool and smooth and plump. Materia’s hair is loose. It hangs in wiry black waves that just touch her shoulders. She’s wearing one of the loose cotton dresses that Mrs Luvovitz helped her sew, soft and favourite now with age, covered in faded wild flowers.

Materia turns at the touch and Mrs Luvovitz sees the front of her.
“Gott in Himmel.”

Materia stands in Mrs Luvovitz’s tub while Mrs Luvovitz washes her. They’re in the kitchen with the fire going. The water is black with coal-dust and blood. Materia’s dress is on the floor, the front of it is a scab, it will be thrown out. Mrs Luvovitz washes her gently, no scrubbing, no cloth, with her soap-sliding hands only, as though Materia were a newborn. It’s a milky skin Materia has, not in colour but in texture, all curves, compact muscle under a soft sheath. Materia doesn’t say anything. All the effort and anxiety of distinguishing one thing from another drained away for ever, all distances now equal—Mrs Luvovitz’s face and the Cape of Good Hope, Materia’s own warm body and the rest of the world.

Mrs Luvovitz has sent Benny to the Piper house to find out what in God’s name is going on over there. When he arrives he finds James in a clean white shirt making tea, at three-thirty a.m. The house is very warm, hot. Kathleen is dead upstairs under fresh linen. There’s an infant girl asleep in a crib by the stove.

“I’m sorry for your trouble, James.”

“Thank you, Ben. Will you have a drink?”

“Cuppa tea.”

In the morning, Mercedes awakens next to Frances and sees a black smudge on her little sister’s forehead. It looks like ashes from the fireplace. Mercedes licks her finger and cleans it off. Frances sleeps on. While dressing, Mercedes notices a similar smudge on her own forehead. She wipes it away. Frances wakes up.

“Mercedes, I dreamt that the lady who gave me the candy came into our room last night.”

“What lady?”

“The dark lady. She touched me.”

Mercedes knows that it was the Devil and that they were protected by the rosary. The Devil would leave a coal smudge on your forehead. It would be like him to mock what the priest does on Ash Wednesday. And it couldn’t have been Our Lady. Everyone knows Our Lady is pure white in a blue dress.

“It was just a dream, Frances.”

“She was beautiful.”

Mercedes says a silent prayer for her sister.

“She’s my fairy godmother,” says Frances.

Mercedes puts the rosary around Frances’s neck and goes downstairs to help Mumma make breakfast. Frances curls up on her side and shivers.

Daddy is waiting for Mercedes in the kitchen. He has made porridge for her. She sits down at the table.

“Good morning, Daddy.”

“I need you to be a big girl, Mercedes.”

He looks at her. They have the same eyes, though hers are brown. Their faces are of sandstone, though hers is tinged with olive. Mercedes understands that the worst is coming and unfolds her serviette, placing it neatly on her lap. She’s glad she took special care with her braids this morning.

“Your sister Kathleen has been taken away from us.”

“Has she gone to New York City?”

“She’s gone to God.”

A gap opens up in Mercedes’ stomach. She bridges it by picking up her spoon. “Thank you for breakfast, Daddy.”

“I need you to look after your mother.”

“Is Mumma sick?”

“No. But she’s very tired. She’s just had a baby.”

“Oh.” Mercedes shows her teeth politely and gets her first permanent wrinkle. “A boy or a girl?”

“Another little sister for you.”

“Oh.” The second permanent wrinkle.

“Mumma is very sad about losing Kathleen. She’s too tired to look after the new baby.”

“I’ll look after it.”

“That’s my girl.”

“Don’t worry, Daddy.”

The Official Version

She endured the most severe trials with a calmness, fortitude and resignation which are the best proofs of the innocence of her life
.

EPITAPH, HALIFAX CEMETERY

Materia had done the Roman Catholic thing; the mother had died. And James, of course, had not been in attendance at the birth and had therefore been in no position to apprehend the danger or to intervene. So there was no inquest, and the examining doctor and the undertaker kept the details to themselves and their wives.

One child was born.

Kathleen looked lovely, God rest her soul, so young and lifelike. Just as though she were asleep. They buried her in white, it should have been her wedding dress. The influenza, you know, there’s not a family on three continents hasn’t been touched by it. And her with her God-given gift and her whole life ahead of her.

Everyone knew that Kathleen was pregnant and that she died of the child. You’d have to be an idiot not to have figured that out, what with the girl’s hasty home-coming and incarceration in the house. But the thing you do in a case like this is go along with the idea that the child is the offspring of its grandparents. Everyone agrees to this fiction, and the only people who’d breathe a word of the actual facts to the illegitimate child are those who are so malicious to begin with that they are easily dismissed as liars. As in truth they are. For the beneficent lie tells the truth about the child, which is “you belong to this community,” whereas the malicious truth-tellers use fact to convey a lie, which is “you don’t belong”. This is an imperfect system but it’s the prevailing one. And as the years go by the facts get eroded and scattered by time, until there are more people who don’t know than people who do.