Fall on Your Knees (27 page)

They all laugh except Mercedes, who gets up and leaves the room.

“What’s the matter with her?” asks James.

Frances responds, “It’s her period.”

James winces, so sorry to have enquired that he fails to notice the inappropriateness of the answer. “Well … I’ll apologize. Who wants tea biscuits and molasses?”

Up in her room, Mercedes consoles herself with the family tree. She has been working on it for almost a year. It is a painstaking process. Whenever she has a new entry — whenever she has had the precious time to dig a little deeper in the Sydney library, or on those rare occasions when she has received a long-awaited reply from the provincial archives in Halifax — she carefully unrolls the large scroll of special paper on her desk. She fastens down the corners, takes out a pencil and a ruler and neatly draws a short vertical line beneath one of several long horizontal ones, under which she inscribes the latest name. And there it hangs, quietly suspended like a piece of desiccated fruit.

Mercedes’ patience for this task is unlimited. She plans to surprise Daddy with it. He never talks about his own family except to say they all died. Perhaps she can restore to Daddy a fragment of what he has lost.

After supper on this evening, Lily comes up to find Mercedes going over all the pencil lines in careful ink.

“Thank you for supper, Mercedes.”

Mercedes looks up sharply to see if Lily is being mean. But Lily is never intentionally cruel; Mercedes knows that and repents of her suspicion. She returns to her work and says merely, “Hmm.”

Lily approaches and looks over Mercedes’ shoulder, fascinated.

“How come it doesn’t look like a tree?”

“‘Tree’ is only an expression, Lily. If it looked like a tree then it would be art. This is a chart.”

“Like a map?”

“Kind of.”

“Is there treasure?”

“Each name is a treasure.”

“Where does it lead to?”

“‘Map’ is just an expression too. It doesn’t lead anywhere.” Mercedes relaxes back in her chair. “Well, maybe in a way it does. It leads into the past. It tells us where we came from. But it doesn’t tell us where we’re going. Only God knows that.”

“Where am I?”

“You’re right here on the same line with me and Frances and Kathleen, God rest her soul.”

“Where’s Other Lily?”

“She doesn’t appear here, dear.”

“How come?”

“She was never baptized.”

“But she was our sister.”

“Yes, and we love her and pray for her, but that’s not how it works on a family tree.”

“Where’s Ambrose?”

Mercedes looks at Lily. “Who’s Ambrose?”

Lily looks back at Mercedes. “Will you read me a story?”

“Of course I will, dear, you go climb into your nightgown and pick one out, I’ll be right there.”

At three that morning, Mercedes slumbers beneath a finger of moonlight. As usual, her door is an inch or so ajar — she has nothing to hide and plenty to listen for. The door begins to open silently. Mercedes’ eyes open. In time to see it swing to rest wide enough to admit a draft. Or a very small child.

“Who’s there?”

No answer. The soft, barely discernible pad-padding of tiny feet. Approaching the bed.

“Trixie?”

Silence. Trixie never visits her room.

“Go ’way, Trixie.”

At the corner of Mercedes’ eye, a whitish glimmer. Her blood cools. Not Trixie. Mercedes raises her head. The thing moves into the slant of moonlight. And there — oh Mother of God — an unholy infant. Swathed in a mockery of the first holy sacrament. Mercedes tries but fails to say, “Out.”

Dressed in the baptismal gown, stained with the Devil’s swart embrace.

“Out” — a cracked whisper.

Two yellow eyes.

“Out out out out,
ou-ou-t!”
straight from her bowels.

James bolts through the door, flails, finds and yanks the electric light chain to see Mercedes shuddering, staring, teeth bared, rosary at her chest.

“What’s happened?”

Mercedes speaks but her sobs snatch and tear the words; he grips her shoulders. “Look at me.” He shakes her. “Look at me.” She does. She pulls herself up and away from the void, then says, “I thought I saw something.”

He nods and sits down on the edge of her bed. There is, and is not, any such thing as a ghost. This house, for example: James, honest with himself, admits that there are places and times which he avoids in his own home. Not out of belief — out of that spot on the back of his neck that stirs now and then for no reason. That’s when he wishes he had the right to pray. Because that’s what the unquiet need. “Pray for us” is what they’re saying with their moans and midnight walks.

James runs his tongue over the dry bluish sheen of his lower lip and Mercedes notices how long his lashes are. He speaks to her — to her alone — oh it seems for the first time since she was a very little girl.

“Your grandmother. My mother. Saw something once. Or no. Heard.”

Mercedes waits. Daddy has never mentioned his mother to anyone but me, now, at this moment … and perhaps once long ago to Kathleen. Mercedes holds her breath, not to startle the moment. So fragile. All the fine things, anything not smudged, all things that can never wither but break so easily, that’s what he is.

“Music,” he says. “It was a sunny day. She couldn’t tell you what instrument or what tune, or even which way it came — whether in through the window, or right beside her. Just that she thought, ‘That must be what heaven’s like.’ It was that beautiful. So she knelt down where she was in the kitchen and said a prayer of thanks because she’d had that little taste, see? And after that she was never afraid of anything.”

Mercedes forms her small smile. She holds her tears in a reservoir. Tears could only dampen a moment such as this and set it to mildew, guaranteeing its decay.

A voice from the door. “What’s the matter?”

“Hey, little buddy.” James goes to Lily and scoops her up, Lily fastens her legs around his waist. She’s too big to be picked up, thinks Mercedes, answering, “I thought I —” but she catches Daddy’s warning look and revises her story; “Nothing, Lily, I rode the nightmare is all.”

“Did you see the
bodechean?”

James laughs at the old Gaelic expression. “There’s no such thing, who told you about the
bodechean?”

“Frances.”

Shut up, Lily, for once can’t you just shut up, but Mercedes says, “Frances was just teasing, there’s no such thing.”

“Mercedes, want to sleep with me and Frances?”

“No. Thank you, Lily.”

“Give your sister a kiss goodnight, Lily.”

They leave and Mercedes, thoroughly back to herself, rises and crosses to the centre of the room, douses the light and returns to bed in the dark, scornfully recalling the days when she believed that long-necked creatures resided beneath her bed waiting to bite her ankles.

She kneels at the side of her bed and starts the rosary. Just in time, because she felt the first inkling of the long-necked things just now, when her mind’s disdain wore off. Bedside kneeling in the dark is always the hardest, for imagine the things wrapping themselves around your upper legs. Pulling you under. Don’t imagine anything past that, nothing like that is going to happen as long as you say your rosary. With a pure heart. Mercedes despises herself for these childish superstitions, knows them to be groundless, but can’t stop the retractions in her thigh muscles all the same. These small flexings often lead to a dread feeling farther up that craves undoing, and it’s this feeling more than all the others that serves to remind one that — while there are no long-necked creatures under the bed, and the
bodechean
is merely a pagan notion — there is certainly a Devil.
Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen
.

Mercedes imagines her unknown grandmother bathed in sunlight, kneeling in thanks for the foretaste of heaven. Then she considers the visitation which she herself has just been vouchsafed. God gives us each something different.

Frances is in the cellar, holding a coal-oil lamp to the gap between the furnace and the blackened wall, where Trixie is wedged as far back as possible. Trixie’s lace bonnet is askew, her white satin gown a sooty mess. Earlier this evening, just before supper, she scrowled out of Frances’s hold in the attic and streaked down to the cellar for refuge. Cats don’t enjoy dress-ups. She stayed behind the furnace until the house fell silent. Then she crept out and up the stairs. To Mercedes’ room.

“Come on Trixie.”

Frances has to get Trixie undressed quickly, because if Daddy finds her like this again it will be into the creek with her.

“Trixie, please.”

Trixie vigorously licks her front paw and washes her face.

“Trixie,
taa’i la hown, Habibti
.”

Trixie looks up, then suffers herself to be hauled from the corner. Frances unties the bonnet. “You looked so pretty, Trixie.” And undoes the thousand buttons of the baptism gown. “Stay still, I’m almost—”

Trixie scratches the rest of the way out and bounds up the steps. Frances follows more quietly. When she reaches the top step, her lamp light splashes across Daddy’s shoes. Trixie is long gone, thank goodness; she’ll be back in two or three days.

James waits until Frances has washed and hung up the gown and bonnet.

Upstairs, Mercedes finishes the rosary. Even as she screamed, her mind had already identified what she had seen, but it had to wait for her body to catch up. The apparition explained, however, is not expunged. It was a demonic vision whatever the earthly agency. God works in mysterious ways, but the Devil’s ways are even more arcane and often spiced with the absurd. Some would say funny. Mercedes would not. Funny is a fat lady playing the ukelele. Funny is a man dressed up as woman in a Gilbert and Sullivan musical. Funny is not a crippled black cat got up like a devil baby in the family christening gear at midnight. Frances is a vessel. Like that morning before Mumma died and Mercedes and Frances both had coal smudges on their foreheads and Frances said she was visited by a “dark lady” in the night. Please, dear Mother of God, hear my prayer and accept the offering of thy holy rosary for the preservation of the soul of my sister Frances, amen.

No sooner is Mercedes back in bed than the light slices on again and she squints up to see Frances’s head bobbing and lurching, he’s got her by the back of the neck, Punch and Judy.

“Now apologize to your sister.”

Mercedes looks away. She can’t stand it when Frances grins with a bloody lip.

Later, when all is calm, Mercedes slips into the room overlooking the creek. She crawls into bed and spoons around Frances’s chill back and encircles her thin waist. On the other side, Lily feigns sleep. All the sisters tucked up in one bed — this wonderful thing only ever happens these days on sad occasions. Frances has had another talking-to from Daddy, Lily knows that.

Mercedes feels ease. This is as close as she gets to a state of grace, curious as she knows this to be. It’s a mystery. To experience the gift of peace with your bad sister in your arms. Nothing can get you now, Frances,
te’berini
.

Mercedes casts a net of thought prayers over Frances’s sleeping form, lighter than air, than gossamer wings, finer than the finest silk to keep my little sister safe. Hush baby, sleep, thy mother tends the sheep….

The Family Tree

Three and a half weeks later, Mercedes has unearthed another fossil. It was beached beneath a quarter-inch of dust on a forgotten page of a crumbling chapel registry. Another name. Perfectly preserved in its desert grave, waiting to be exhumed and grafted onto Mercedes’ family tree; granted eternal still life in a meaningful context.

Late at night when all is blessedly quiet, when she’s got a moment to herself alone, she sits at her desk, straightens her spine and begins to unscroll the family tree. She squints as though against a sudden light — it’s … unscroll a little more … what is it? A riot of golds and greens and ruby-reds swirls and ululates across the page, what is it? … scroll it slowly open all the way and … where there was once a sober grid etched in ink with loving and dispassionate care, there is now a swaying, drunken growth, a what, a tree! A tree. Yes, she can see that now, it is in fact a tree.

Coloured in with crayons. Every ancient name has been obliterated by a shiny red apple, each right angle beguiled into a serpent twist of bark; each vertical stroke has evolved into a leafy stem bearing fruit. The largest apples strain the lower boughs all in a line. These are the only apples with names, printed in an awkward childish hand: “Daddy,” “Mumma,” “Kathleen,” “Mercedes,” “Frances,” “Other Lily,” and “Lily”. The Mumma and Kathleen apples have little golden wings and the Other Lily one has silver wings. Trixie’s black face and yellow eyes peek out from a high branch amid emerald leaves. Meanwhile, at the base of the trunk, grass sprouts on the surface of the earth and a little blue creek flows by all innocent of the continued drama below, for a cross-section of the earth reveals tree roots thrusting down and branching out into the surrounding soil studded with glistening chunks of coal and worked by a sightless army of worms. And there, nestled among the pale subterranean branches, is a golden chest encrusted with diamonds. Buried treasure.

Mercedes’ tears fall and bead on the shiny wax colours of the new revised edition of the family tree. She has never cried so bitterly or so quietly in all her life.

People have been known to go grey or snow-white overnight due to a fright or a sudden loss of all joy. But Mercedes’ hair simply fades. Frances sees it happen. She was thinking of sneaking out of the house when she passed Mercedes’ door and saw her light.

“Mercedes? … Are you awake?”

Mercedes is slumped over the desk, perfectly still. Has she died? Turned to stone? To salt? “Mercedes?” Frances approaches, leans down and looks. Golly Moses. How long has she been like this? Her gaped-back mouth all tight and wrinkled at the corners, her eyes crunched and seeping, perfectly still. Frances touches Mercedes’ shoulder and Mercedes takes a big gulp of air, emerging from her silent picture to cry in a real-life way.