Fall on Your Knees (48 page)

He takes a big breath and no sooner returns to his feet than “What if she’s fallen in?” He didn’t hear a splash, but then she slipped away so quickly, it could have happened before he stepped into the mine, either that or — he lights his last match, yes a wide pool, black water — she may have slid beneath the surface, intending all along to drown herself tonight. The match goes out. He lowers himself carefully to the floor, stretches out on his stomach and dips an arm down into the water, a prayer in his head, his heart full of dread, feeling around. Cold. Nothing. Something silky.
Oh Jesus!
He travels screaming over cinders, yanked along by a sudden vise grip round his wrist, down into the water, plunging head and shoulders, waist, his knees grab the lip as he clutches an unseen arm in both his hands, hauling her up along with himself, breaking the surface with a torrent the sound of a hefty rag mop.

She’s naked. He finds her armpits and lays her on the rough ground, she doesn’t answer, her eyes are closed, he can feel that, he fumbles for her mouth, opens it, gasps for his own breath — drowning people try to drown their saviours — slips a hand beneath her head and presses his mouth onto hers, opening the cut in her lip, he tastes blood and it reminds him of life, still warm, he breathes into her, she coughs and starts to cry.

“Are you all right, Frances, I didn’t mean to hurt you, honey, here.” He wants to tear off his jacket, shirt, wrap her up, but his clothes are soaking wet so he folds her in his arms instead.

“I’m sorry,” she cries, “I’m sorry,” and clings to him.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he pats her shoulder-blade.

After a moment her shivering subsides and she strokes the back of his neck, kisses his cheek, grazing his ear, “Thank you,” she rests her thigh between his legs and brushes his mouth accidentally with her lips, “sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

“Don’t leave me, please, I’m so frightened of the dark,” closer.

“I won’t leave you, but —” he’s embarrassed to find he’s hard, he didn’t know till now he wanted her, still doesn’t know, “excuse me,” and he moves to release her.

“That’s okay,” she whispers, kissing his mouth, moving next to him, “ohhh,” she says and her fingers sink into his shoulders. He pulls her a little closer without meaning to, she sighs again and reaches down, “that’s okay little Ginger Man,” her voice is so gentle, she undoes his pants and slides against him, “that’s okay …” and she says his secret name. He moans. Misery and desire, because with that she’s onto him and all around him and he can only move inside her.

Ginger’s private name must not be written down. It’s bad enough that Frances knows it.

When Mercedes’ hand uncovers Lily’s eyes, Lily sees her father lying bunched up at the foot of the stairs. The bayonet has landed a safe six steps above him. In retrospect, Mercedes calculates that he was highly unlikely to land anywhere near the blade, considering the position of his hand on the railing and its loose grip on the weapon at the time of the fall. Furthermore, he was sufficiently drunk to render the fall likely non-lethal. But Mercedes faces the fact that she merely pushed. And calculated later. She has not read Dr Freud. She takes no solace in the subconscious. She takes responsibility. She decides in that moment to stop her penance in the coal cellar. It appears to her suddenly as so much whining. Yes, she will confess this sin of pushing her father. But she knows now that no good act is ever unaccompanied by evil. That is what original sin has done to us. That is what makes us human. The necessity of sin itself is the cross we must bear.

God did not put me on this earth to stand by while my sister Frances is killed. Beaten is one thing. Wrongly touched is one thing. Stabbed with a bayonet is another. Push. Be strong enough to carry the burden of sin that goes with doing the right thing. There is only one saint in this family and I’m not it.

God has made Mercedes a judge. No one loves you for that. Not like a crippled child who’s prone to visions. Whom Mercedes prizes. Not like a fallen woman who makes people laugh. Whom Mercedes loves.

Mercedes is standing straight as steel, staring down at James. Brown-eyed people are popularly believed to be soft somewhere. And warm. Look again.

Lily walks carefully down the stairs in her bare feet, holding onto both railings. She bends over James. A line of spit runs from the corner of his mouth. She strokes his hair and gives him a kiss on the cheek. His eyelashes flutter. She looks up at Mercedes, and says, “He’s not dead.”

“Good. Now go to bed.”

Curled deep in the hope chest left open by James, Trixie hears Frances call her name and leaps out, padding down the stairs, across the hall and into the room Frances used to share with Lily. But Frances is not here. There’s just Lily kneeling at the window, her hands folded on the ledge, looking out. Trixie brushes the soles of Lily’s feet as Mercedes swishes past the bedroom door, the bayonet flashing in her hand. Up in the darkness of the attic, Mercedes dumps everything back into the hope chest as quickly as possible, pressing its lid down snug against air and moths.

Frances’s eyes burst open. She had a dream about Trixie just now. Frances was calling and calling her but Trixie was locked in a box and smothered. It was just a dream. Don’t move. Don’t wake this man who’s crushing me now.

Frances doesn’t want to have to stand up and lose any of his goodness down her legs. And she’ll have to stand up if he awakens because he’ll be clamouring to get out of here, wondering what in the name of God he’s done, and if he leaves she’ll have to go with him because she sure as shooting doesn’t intend to walk the five miles home. Not in what she hopes is her delicate condition. She’ll lie still for another couple of hours.

“Wiggle your toes.”

James groans and lolls his head. Mercedes pours more ice-water on his face and he uncrumples with a jerk.

“Good,” she says. She gets behind him, hooking her hands under his arms, and yanks him into a sitting position.

“Help me now,” she orders. He slumps onto his knees. She gets him standing, then hauls him like timber into the front room, where he collapses onto the couch and passes out again. She looks at him with her arms folded for a moment, then leaves and returns with a blanket. She tosses it over him.

Advancing steadily towards the front of her mind is the memory of what she and Frances can’t know together out loud. She has kept this memory on top of a pile of things at the back of her mind. Not buried. Right there where she can see it every time she passes the open door. But as long as she keeps it in the back room, she can believe that it belongs with the rest of the old junk. As long as she doesn’t talk about it, it can remain overlooked by amateurs and experts alike: the gilt frame covered with dust, the painting gummed over with neglect — who would guess what a piece of work lies dormant there.

But it has stirred. Torn itself from its frame, and now it’s coming closer and closer — stop. That’s far enough.

Mercedes takes the cap off the lemon oil and picks up her dust-rag. If she’s going to look at what just arrived behind her eyes, she has to have something to occupy her hands.

It was here in the living-room. The painting from the junk pile is called
Daddy and Frances in the Rocking-Chair
. But there never was a rocking-chair, in this room or any other. Just the pale green wingback. Mercedes’s white rag goes round and round, bringing up the mahogany sheen on the piano.

It was the night of Kathleen’s funeral. I got up because Frances was gone from our bed. You could see her imprint in the snow sheets and pillow. I looked out at the creek but she’s not there. Good. Maybe she’s gone downstairs for something to eat. She must be hungry by now, she hasn’t had anything but imaginary food for two days. I will go downstairs too, and make cinnamon toast. I pictured myself and Frances eating cinnamon toast and drinking cocoa at the kitchen table, but I didn’t put on my tartan housecoat or my slippers, which is how I know now I didn’t really believe in the cinnamon toast. Bad things happen when Frances gets out of bed. I’m not afraid of the dark. I had two long french braids. On my way down the stairs I heard a sound like a puppy. I walked down the stairs towards the light spilling through the front-room archway on the right. To the left is the dark kitchen and a smell like the inside of someone’s body. In the front room the reading lamp will be on, the yellow one with the pleated shade that stands over the wingback chair. I get to the archway. I was right, it is the reading lamp. Frances is there looking at me already. I wonder how long she’s been waiting for me. She had blonde ringlets then and no laugh lines. She’s sitting on Daddy’s lap, sideways, facing me. Rocking. He’s rocking her. But it’s not working, she’s wide awake. He doesn’t see me because he’s looking into her hair. His mouth is open a little, an upside-down new moon. He’s making the sound. The skin on his face looks pulled back by an undertow, his head is straining forward not to drown. His right hand hovers, barely touching the halo of yellow fuzz Frances gets from turning on her pillow, and his left hand is under and up her nightgown like a puppeteer’s. He says something I can’t hear, then breathes up hard through his nose, then “my little girl,” and the chewed-up word “beautiful,” then he shoves her down between his legs and pins one hand across her chest, the other one still operating underneath, they’re both facing in the same direction now but Frances turns her face to keep our eyes together. His head snaps back and he jams her up between his legs once, again, three times and a half, until he trembles at the ceiling. That’s when the fear goes out of him and he crumples around her and cries into her hair. Frances and I keep looking at each other until he falls asleep like that, then she crawls out from behind his arms and walks over to me. “It doesn’t hurt,” she says. Now I see a piece of him behind the narrow opening in his pants. I go get the crocheted comforter from the sofa and I put it over him without looking again, it’s rude to stare. Sizzling comes from the kitchen across the hall. I don’t like that smell of kidneys cooking. “Me neither,” says Frances. We go back upstairs to bed and I sing songs to her until I fall asleep. The next day, Frances sucked on dough and Mumma died in the kitchen.

The piano is a mirror but Mercedes is not staring at herself, she’s staring at her father passed out beneath the crocheted blanket.

“Mercedes?”

“What are you doing up, Lily?”

“Is Frances home yet?”

“No.”

“Are you worried this time?”

“Yes.”

“I know where she is. Ambrose told me.”

Lily can’t tell Mercedes how she knows where Frances goes when she doesn’t come home. That would mean tattling on Frances for scaring the pee out of her that day at the old French mine when they were supposed to be at Brownies and Guides. It would also mean revealing that it was Frances who told Lily about Ambrose in the first place, and where he lives now and what he does at night. If Mercedes finds that out, she might start treating Frances as though she too were special to God. Frances wouldn’t like that. She might run away. Or worse, if Mercedes finds out that Ambrose is a gift from Frances, she might think Ambrose is evil.

Mercedes knows Frances is bad but loves her anyway, because however hard it is to be the good one in the family, it is harder still to be the bad one. Lily understands that. Who in the world does Lily love more than Frances? Not even Daddy. Who in the world does she fear more than Mercedes, whose cocoa tin has filled twenty times over against Lily’s fourteenth birthday, when they will journey to Lourdes along with throngs of other special people who come to bathe in Our Lady’s own creek and leave their specialness behind for ever? Lily has promised herself, her little leg, that — number one — she will never let it be cut off. And — number two — she will never let it be obliterated by a miracle. The idea of betraying so valiant a limb, which has carried and marched beyond the call of duty. To say, here is your reward: to cease to be — to become, instead, a false twin for the good leg. Her bad leg is special because it is so strong. Lily has learned, however, that to others it is special because it is weak. No one, not even Our Lady, will get their holy waters on her little leg.

I can’t tell Mercedes the true history of Ambrose, thinks Lily. Mercedes loves me because I’m special to God. If she thinks I’m special to the Devil, I might have to run away. I saw through the cracks in Mercedes’ fingers how Daddy wound up at the bottom of the stairs.

“Where?” Mercedes has no expression on her face.

Lily looks up at Mercedes and the bump appears faintly in her forehead. “Ambrose says not to worry. It’s not a bad man she’s with.”

Lily is fairly sure that at least the latter part is true. Daddy was away at work today, Mercedes was off cleaning the sacristy at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church and Lily was in her room starting a diary — “Dear Diary, Allow me to introduce myself” — when Frances ran down from the attic and past the bedroom door, where Lily caught a glimpse of her and cried, “Frances!”

But Frances clattered down the front hall stairs, catapulting over the last five steps, hitting the floor with a thump and a spring to the door. Lily took the stairs as fast as she dared, “Frances, what happened to you?” stumbling and clinging to the railing halfway down. “Frances!” cried Lily.

“Fwances!” she mocked back, yanking open the door and turning to grin up at Lily, the left side of her face all bloody, her Guide neckerchief soaked. Tears sprang to Lily’s eyes but Frances said as though stating the obvious, “Don’t worry, Lily, it’s not real blood.”

And she was gone.

Lily went up to the attic but all she found there was the empty coal scuttle. She touched the lip of it and her finger came away red. She tasted it. Salt and iron. She washed the scuttle in the bathroom and took it back down to the cellar.

Lily can’t tell Mercedes that Frances beat herself up. Mercedes might think Frances is crazy. That too can be grounds for specialness to God.

“Go get dressed, Lily.”

Mercedes has never driven the car before. James always parks it in second gear so it has stayed in second the whole way, Mercedes gripping the wheel and peering forward into the lit-up darkness.