Fall on Your Knees (6 page)

Kathleen thrived. Silky red-gold hair, green eyes and white white skin. Materia wondered where she’d come from. Surely she had been changed in the night. Mrs Luvovitz didn’t care to speculate.

James watched Kathleen grow more beautiful and hardy every day. And what a set of pipes — he’d carry her out to the stony fields for yelling contests. They’d holler till they were hoarse and hilarious. He loved to hear her laugh. She could do no wrong.

Feeding the child some lovely mush at the kitchen table, Materia leaned forward and cooed,
“Ya Helwi. Ya albi, ya Amar. Te’berini.”

The child smiled and Materia said a silent prayer of thanks, because at that moment she’d felt a faint breath of something not far from love.

“Don’t do that, Materia.”

“What?”

“I don’t want her growing up confused. Speak English.”

“Okay.”

A Miner ’Forty-Niner

Kathleen sang before she talked. Perfect pitch. James was a piano tuner — he knew: his eighteen-month-old daughter could carry “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms” flawlessly, if wordlessly, after hearing him play it once…. He sat perfectly still on the piano bench and regarded her. She looked straight back at him with adult gravity.

It was a moment of equal parts anxiety and awe, like the striking of a wide seam of gold. The prospector sinks to his knees — he’s only been looking for coal. At a gush of oil he’d hoot, baptize himself and buy the drinks. But the sight of gold is different. He observes a moment’s silence. Then he rises, eyes watering. How to get it properly out of the earth? How not to be robbed in the meantime?

Eventually it would require real money. For now, he set aside his own studies and started teaching her himself. He read up on it. He bought a metronome, a gramophone, and began a collection of records. He ordered whole scores and song sheets from New York, Milan and Salzburg. He decided it wasn’t too soon to start in on the
Vaccai Practical Method of Italian Singing
. Mozart composed at three. At three, Kathleen sang,
“Manca sollecita Più dell’usato, Ancor che s’agiti Con lieve fiato, Face che palpita Presso al morir
.”

Materia was permitted to play piano again, this time exactly what was put in front of her:

scales, intervals,
i semitoni

“this lesson must be sung
adagio
at first, and the time accelerated to
allegro
, according to the ability of the Pupil”

syncopation, ornamentation, literal translation, “The flame fails rapidly/more than usual/even if it flickers/with a light breath”

appoggiatura, introduzione al mordente

“the
acciaccatura
differs from the
appoggiatura
in as much as it does not interfere with the value or the accent of the note to which it is prefixed,” intervals of thirds, intervals of fourths,
salti di quinta, salti di sesta

“the little bird in a narrow cage/why does one never hear it sing?”

Lesson XI, The Shake, “I would explain my anguish”

Lesson XII, On Roulades, “I cannot believe my thoughts”

Lesson XIII, Per Portare la Voce, “I cannot keep silent about everything.”

Materia played. Kathleen turned seven.

Materia watched it all from a great distance, and as the years flew by she missed her father more and more, forgetting everything but that he had once cared enough for her to find her a husband. All memories soften with age, and the good ones are also the most perishable — her mother and sisters had long ago been caressed to disappearing soapstone, conjured up till they faded to nothing. Like cave paintings by candle-light, she could only glimpse them now in the dark from the corner of her eye. But her father’s memory was durable. Obelisk eroded to a dome of rock, the touchstone of her loss.

“You’re too fat.”

Materia looked at James from afar and said, “Okay.”

He shook his head. Other men went strolling with their wives of a Saturday evening. Took them to church on Sunday, sat at opposite ends of a row of children. But not James. He didn’t want people thinking he’d married a woman old enough to be his mother, for one thing. But mainly, what with Materia gone slack in mind and body, he didn’t want his child stigmatized. For on top of everything else, Materia was dark. He tried not to see it, but it was one of those things that was always before his eyes, now that the scales had fallen from them.

He took Kathleen everywhere. They went on long walks — Kathleen in the beautiful English pram at first, and then hand in hand. Their walking language was Gaelic. With her faery hair and fine deportment, people stared because she looked like a princess. Her clothes came from England. Nothing showy, all quality, like a real-life princess. And James trusted his immaculate shirts to no one but himself, shaved his face clean every morning. Together they turned heads.

It was 1907 and there was a town now. It had sprung up overnight starting with Number 12 Colliery. Numbers 14, 15 and 16 followed in short order. The railroad came in and so did the miners. At first they came from all over the Maritimes, England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. In time they came from everywhere. The Dominion Coal Company bought up land and built a sea of company houses — serviceable clapboard dwellings attached in pairs. There was a school, a Catholic church, Luvovitz’s Kosher Canadian Butcher Shop and Delikatessen, MacIsaac’s Drugs and Confectionery and the Company Store with enough merchandise to mephistophelize a miner’s wife.

Every Friday night the miners would hand over their sealed pay packets to their wives, who’d open them and fork over the price of a drink. Problem was, come Saturday shopping the pay packet — with or without Friday’s tipple — would barely feed even a small family of six. But the coal company had a solution to this: “company scrip”. This was a form of credit. The missus could spend cash at those shops in town that stocked the odd item unavailable at the Company Store. And she could spend company scrip at the Company Store on food, shoes, cloth and kerosene. Her man’s sealed pay packet grew thinner and thinner, until quite soon it contained only an itemized account of how much rent he owed on his company house, how much interest he owed on his debt to the Company Store and how much was still available to him in scrip to spend there. The Company Store came to be better known as “The Pluck-Me Store”.

Still people poured in, filling up the streets that ran north-south, and the avenues that ran east-west, every second one named for a Catholic saint or a coal company magnate. Boom Town. It didn’t exist officially and it had no name yet, but the Piper house was suddenly on a street and the street had a name: Water Street.

Materia hadn’t been in a church since she’d got married. Now that there was a Catholic church right handy there was no reason she couldn’t just walk over. But she felt unworthy. Our Lady had not answered her prayer. Materia still did not love her child, and she knew the fault lay within herself,

“Kathleen,
taa’i la hown.”

Materia sat the child on her lap and wrapped her arms around it. She sang, unrepeatable and undulating:

“Kahn aa’ndi aa’sfoor

zarif u ghandoor

rasu aHmar, shaa’ru asfar

bas aa’yunu sood

sood metlel leyl
….
”

Materia rocked the child and felt sad — was that closer to love? She hoped. The child felt cool in her arms. “I’ll warm you,” she thought. And kept singing. Kathleen stayed perfectly still, pressed close up against the rolling mass. Materia stroked the fire-gold hair and passed a warm brown hand across the staring green eyes. Kathleen tried not to breathe. Tried not to understand the song. She tried to think of Daddy and light things — fresh air, and green grass — she worried that Daddy would know. And be hurt. There was a smell.

Materia released the child. It was no good. God could see past Materia’s actions, into her heart. And her heart was empty.

Materia no longer went up to the hope chest to cry — she cried wherever she happened to be at the time — nor did it any longer interrupt her work or wrench a single muscle in her face.

“Give us a jawbreaker and a couple of honeymoons,” said James.

MacIsaac’s Drugs and Confectionery smelt of new pine, bitter herbs and salt-water taffy. Mr MacIsaac reached into a tilted jar brimming with the edible rainbow. Behind him stretched shelf upon shelf of bottles and packets containing powders, essences, oils and unguents. Whatever ails you.

Mr MacIssac handed Kathleen a sarsaparilla candy cane as an extra little treat, but she hesitated and looked at James, who said, “It’s all right, my darling, Mr MacIsaac’s not a stranger.”

Mr MacIsaac looked at Kathleen gravely, lowered his head and said, “Go on, touch it.”

She touched his billiard-bald head and grinned. Mr MacIsaac said, “I hear you got a set o’ lungs on you, lass.”

She nodded wisely, sucking on the candy cane. MacIsaac laughed and James beamed. He and Kathleen left the shop together. Mrs MacIsaac said from her perch on the sliding ladder, “She’s beautiful.”

“Yuh, she’s a pretty little thing.”

“Too pretty. They’ll never raise her.”

Mrs MacIsaac watched the shop while Mr MacIsaac limped back to his greenhouse for a drop of “the good spirit”. He’d been in the Boer War.

At home, Materia stood at the counter rolling out dough for a pie — steak and kidney like James’s mother used to make — and finally twigged to a thing that had been nagging her all along. It was this: Kathleen’s baptism hadn’t taken. It had been done by a Prostestant minister. The child needed to be properly baptized, in Latin, by a Catholic priest. And then everything would be all right. She told James when he arrived home with the girl but he said, “Kathleen has been baptized. It was done by a man of the cloth, a Christian man, and that’s all there is to it.”

Kathleen’s cheeks bulged with hard candy, her green gaze directed up at her mother. She didn’t look all that baptized to Materia.

James had taught his daughter to read words soon after she learned to read music. At three and a half she’d shared his lap with a terrifyingly illustrated book more than half her size and sounded out, “‘In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray….’” He’d started her on Latin when she was five, teaching himself at the same time — it would help with her Italian singing. He ordered another box of books. Children’s classics this time, and they read them aloud, taking turns.

He hadn’t much time for his own reading, though his books now numbered twenty-three not counting the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
— “Read that end to end,” thought James, as he gazed at his glass cabinet, “and you’d know just about everything. Go anywhere at all.”

At the local schoolhouse Kathleen learned to sit in rows and not to gawk at those less fortunate, but little else. The lady teacher got the creeps from the porcelain girl with the mermaid eyes. The child seemed to be in disguise. Staring up at a corner of the ceiling or out the window, waiting for something, a sign — what? — yet always ready with the answer: “Wolfe died on the Plains of Abraham, miss.” Hands folded on the desk, spine straight. “The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the other two sides, miss.” Every feature formed to preternatural perfection. “It’s i before e except after c, miss.” It wasn’t right in a child. Perhaps she wasn’t a child at all.

In the schoolyard Kathleen came alive but in the oddest way, showing an alarming tendency to play with boys. Hurling sootballs, schoolbag raised as a shield, shrieking with joy in her linen sailor dress, ringlets flying, for ever banishing herself from the society of girls.

Blackened knees and torn silk were the stuff of high spirits, and James never scolded her for ruining her clothes, but when Kathleen came home and said, “Pius MacGillicuddy gots a finger in a jar what his da found in the mine, that he b’ought up from a wee tiny sprout,” it was time to send her to Holy Angels in Sydney.

The Sisters of the Congregation of Notre Dame were in the business of educating the whole girl: from grammar to botany, physics to French. But above all, Holy Angels offered an excellent music program. James had been going to wait a few years, till Kathleen turned twelve and he’d saved enough for tuition, but there was no help for it, she’d be tarnished by then. He’d find the money.

He started a garden in the backyard on the far side of the creek. He bought a new old horse and cart. He travelled across the island to the Margaree and collected topsoil with no trace of coal-dust. The missus would have to learn to make soap, butter and her own clothes. From now on they’d have to pay only for meat, and Benny always gave them a special price. Benny gave James a special price on manure too.

“For you, free. That’s kosher cow shit, mind you, you’re going to have kosher carrots and potatoes, you’ll be a Jew in no time — you want, I’ll throw in a circumcision, no charge.”

James went out to the woods and cut down a young apple tree. Stripped it of branches, sharpened it at both ends and drove it into the centre of the garden. Nailed a plank of driftwood across it, and dressed it in one of Materia’s old frocks that she’d grown out of and a fedora he found blowing over a field. It wasn’t effective till he fashioned a head and torso from two flour sacks stuffed with straw to fill out the clothes, and impaled them on the stake. Every so often he changed its attire, now a dress, now a pair of trousers, but always the hat, keeping the birds on edge.

“Kathleen, come.”

Materia no longer spoke Arabic to the girl. What for? Kathleen followed her mother into the kitchen. The big tin tub was full and steaming. Tomorrow was Kathleen’s first day at Holy Angels and James wanted her spick and span. That meant hair. Materia used to dread washing the child’s hair because of all the fuss. James would holler from outside the kitchen door, “Are you trying to kill the poor child?” But Materia was used to the girl’s hysterics, and performed the task briskly, scouring the scalp, dunking the head, wringing the tresses, getting the comb through, keeping her still. James could holler, but he would never intrude on his daughter’s ablutions.