As far as finding a saint went, I was stumped. I read over the criteria again and again.
Did nothing for self-gratification,
worshipped God in their every endeavour, both independently and through their church affiliation, and would perform good works no matter what the influences or what the personal sacrifice,
etc. I showed the list to Roy and he was equally baffled. We couldn't come up with one woman who was independent except for the five Kelly sisters who lived together in one house. They were independent, in that none of them married, but they didn't do much other than grow really old, breathe, eat, break their hips, and live in the big house that they grew up in. The Hooker family was a possibility because they had helped slaves cross the border to Canada, but that was a hundred years ago. I didn't think modern-day saints could live on the laurels of previous generations. There was Mrs. Aungier who taught piano and played the church organ. Unfortunately I had already had a run-in with her in my brief time on earth, when I suggested her daughter get “fixed” by Marie Sweeney. Mrs. Glish, the local baker, was always in a good mood, but I didn't think she'd do well on the questions about how she'd overcome adversity. She was too happy to have made a lot of sacrifices. Her worst day was when a cake failed to rise.
I became completely obsessed with this project, and talked over all my possibilities with Roy as we drove to the garbage dump. One thing I had to admit was that Mother Agnese had forced me to think about what a saint really was. I wondered aloud if you could be a saint if you had no adversity in your life.
Roy said, “Everyone has their own cross to bear, and the saint part comes depending how you carry it.”
I told Roy I'd do him as my saint if he wasn't of the male persuasion. He thought that was a scream and could hardly drive the car. He said delivering wasn't his “only prowl.” He said he
committed all his sins after I'd gone to bed. I knew he was kidding because he never took praise well. I didn't understand why he shied away from compliments while I loved them. I basked in the light of praise as a cold-blooded lizard absorbed the heat from the sun. I told him how he always put on Marie's joint cream, and he always got a coffee for ol' Jim when we picked up the mail. I was a little embarrassed to say these things to Roy, so I tried to make them straight facts with no tinge of the admiration I felt. I told him it was the
gospel truth
that he made others happy. He said that he only bothered with people he liked, so that wasn't saintly. I retaliated, “When we're bone-tired after delivering Mr. Harlan's Digitalis, you always listen to his war stories.”
He protested, “Come on, I love them stories about Saint-Mihiel, how he was talking to the guy next to him in the trench and never knew till the next morning he was stone cold dead.”
“Roy! You know Mr. Harlan had a bad heart and never left the supply depot at Fort Niagara. I would have told him to stop being so silly, but you always listen to the same yarn about how he got trench foot in the Marne and lost two layers off his foot. You even
ask
him about the time he met Pershing.” Roy shook his head, unconvinced. Not one to give up, I plowed ahead. “You even showed justified anger like God showed in the temple when merchants tried to sell their wares in God's house of worship.”
Roy looked puzzled. “Now when was that? I swear you can conjure up whoppers to put Pinocchio out of a job.”
“I got you this time,” I retaliated. “Remember two years ago when Mr. Clifford â you know, the guy on the escarpment who gets the thyroid extract and is always working on his rock garden â wanted me to sit on his lap and I said no, and he kept going
on and on about it and then started to pick me up? Well you stepped in front of him and said, in a real back-off kind of voice, âShe don't like that kind of thing.' Old man Clifford scurried mighty quickly right back to his rocker.”
Roy looked at me, surprised that I'd remembered, and said, “Land sakes! Why, you're an elephant in a dress.”
As we headed into the long narrow bumpy road to the dump, Roy said something I'll never forget. “Who you think is paying my salary when I doin' all this stuff you think is so good? Who you think pays for Marie's medicine, or ol' Jim's or anyone who havin' a hard time?
I
ain't in charge of that running tab. You check the prescription ledger and see who pays for what.” I was shocked into silence, which for me was fairly shocked. Roy pushed ahead, seeing it was his chance to get a word in edgewise. “You know the Parker Pen set we delivered to Mr. Harlan that said âIn appreciation for the war pictures,' signed âFrom the Chamber of Commerce.' Everyone knew they weren't of Mr. Harlan. Who you think sent that pen set? You think it was the Chamber of Commerce?” I nodded, indicating that I thought they had. “Think again. They knew those war pictures were cut out from
Colliers
magazine and then mounted in Mr. Harlan's scrapbook. Why, they even had print on the back. They just threw them out. Who you think got that pen set, paid a pretty penny for it, and had Irene wrap it and write the card? I'll give ya one hint. It weren't me. I'll give you another hint. You think one of those boys at the breakfast meeting will ever hear any of that?”
“No,” I said quietly, realizing Roy was not the only one who didn't need the limelight.
As we drove along I tried to figure out the world. It was like a
map that I could see but for which I had no legend. I
thought
it was wrong to lie. Yet Mr. Harlan was a
normal
man, retired from Niagara Mohawk where he worked at a desk job, had a wife and grandchildren, owned a home, cut his lawn, decorated for Christmas. Yet he lied, actually told whoppers about the trenches and the time Pershing inspected his unit, and even foisted this bilge onto the Chamber of Commerce. For some reason Roy thought that was OK, and so did my father. It was incidents like this that made me realize how complicated morality really was. Was Mr. Harlan sinning? Obviously he had some kind of need to have fought in the war, and making him feel better was more important than his actual presence in France in 1917. Did each situation have to be judged individually or what? Who judged them? How much
time
would it take to judge each situation? I liked rules and I was happy to live within them or
know
I was disobeying them. It was the same in high jumping. I could make it over almost anything if I knew where the bar was, but I hated it when the coach kept moving the bar.
Noticing I was lost in thought, Roy said, in a precautionary tone to bring me back to the scene at hand, “Listen, girl, I hope you separated that garbage. I can't abide the wrath of Warty. You know she sent Irene's husband home last week with his tail between his legs, toting his garbage, telling him he best read the signs about sorting.” Roy stopped in front of the locked gate that said Lewiston Dump. Roy knew the rules. He beeped the horn and waited. “Lord, she's coming toward us now,” Roy said as he rolled his window up except for the top inch and braced the steering wheel with his long arms outstretched.
Warty, her real name, even on her prescriptions, lived and
worked at the town dump. She had a truly astonishingly grotesque appearance. Her skin was covered with brown lumps varying in size from warts to baseballs. The lumps were a much darker colour than her skin. It looked as if someone had spilled hot coffee on her and her skin had puckered and then shrivelled in those burned spots. Some of her larger skin tumours had the consistency of cauliflower. A number of the growths were on top of the skin and some grew under it, stretching the skin on top, making it smooth. Her head was so misshapen one could only tell its function by its location on her shoulders. Her cranium had a number of cauliflower protrusions that were so large they flopped over from their own gravity. Her skull looked as though she permanently wore a Harlequin hat with a pointy floppy crown. Her matted black hair grew around these lumps and looked as though it may have been naturally curly at birth, but had become too tangled to move, let alone curl. She had a fibrous growth below one of her eyes which pulled her lid down, exposing the red capillaries of the socket. This made her eye gape, and ooze like an open wound. Her other eye was masked under a floppy growth that looked like a wad of rolled-up pie dough protruding from her eyebrow. Yet she knew exactly who we were from fifty yards away, and she could tell any car horn from “the lot,” as she called it. She had some growths on her back the size of footballs which were porous and looked like shrivelled heads. Some people in town said they were suitors who had kissed her and immediately shrivelled. Her spine had grown in an arc like a croquet wicket, instead of straight up, and she was so bent over that she used her hands for balance on the ground when she had to. Living on the steep shale escarpment was ideal for her condition because
she could climb anything steep. While most of us teetered on the edge of the cliff, she scampered up the rocks with ease. Her feet were wrapped in filthy bandages to hold in her lumps of flesh so she could fit huge men's rubber boots over them. She was very tiny, and her voice had an unearthly pitch that frightened dogs and made them tilt their heads. Her voice sounded as though she were being choked and this was her last moment on earth. She also exuded a terrible strange smell. It was hard for her to keep the entire surface area clean and she would always have some infection. Maybe that's what caused the odour. In fact, that was why we were at the dump today. We had Mycostatin anti-fungal skin cream to deliver to Warty.
As I reached into the back seat to get the medication, the cyclopean Warty shambled toward us almost doubled over. She asked Roy if he had his garbage separated. Roy assured her he did and got two boxes of empty pill vials and crushed ointment tubes from the trunk. She opened the gate, and he waved as he went through. He said out the crack in his window that we had her ointment, and she screeched that we should throw the bag to the right and proceed on into the dry lot with our garbage. The closest she ever got was twenty feet from the car.
The garbage dump was a totally orderly sight where every wayward piece of garbage had its own home. Everything was divided up by substance and then further subdivided by use. (As it turned out, her obsession with garbage order and recycling was ahead of her time.) She never let anyone into the dump who didn't have everything sorted by bottles, paper, organic matter, large objects, dead animals, etc. She had an uncanny sense of smell and could tell if you'd cheated on the organic matter. If you
didn't have everything sorted neatly, she simply didn't open the gate. She knew the cheaters and refused to let them in again, and they had to drive to the Niagara Falls dump.
To me the dump was an amazing, almost enchanting place. It was like a huge castle of many rooms with invisible walls filled with different glittering objects. I loved the heap of glass, especially in the sunlight when it glittered like a mountain of pirates' bounty. The pile of tires, when covered with snow and ice, looked like a glistening Tower of Babel. The old furniture was set up in room arrangements of couches, end tables, and various conversational areas. Sometimes when you drove through in autumn, the “rooms” would look beautiful with the red, orange, and yellow fall maples forming magnificent wall hangings and the fallen leaves forming soft carpets. As you drove to your destination you'd catch tiny Warty in a rocking chair swinging with the leaves. She'd wave and smile as you drove by.
All the roadkill was lined up flank to flank at the edge of the gorge so the smell would be carried away by strong wind from the river breezes coming from the Falls. The animals were lined up according to size and at a certain point of decomposition she'd cover them with ashes she obtained from burning the papers, to prevent rat infestation. All organic mass (
compost
was an unheard-of word in the fifties) was turned over regularly and made into what she called “Warty gold.” (Roy said maybe “Warty” was short for “Rumplewartkin.”) She used it as fertilizer on her four hundred tomato plants. No one had bigger or juicier tomatoes than Warty and she always gave some to each storekeeper who had helped her out in the winter. She also turned a profit on old appliances when she sold them to a scrap-metal dealer who came all the way from
New Jersey once a year with a cavalcade of trucks.
Warty was the self-proclaimed administrator of the town dump. She greeted all cars with authority that no one questioned, because if you did then you'd have to deal with her personally and
no one
wanted to do that. There wasn't a soul in Lewiston who didn't know Warty, since everyone had garbage and everyone had to dump it. Besides, she stood out in any crowd. Every family I knew had a box in the basement marked “Warty” and they put all their used clothes in it for her. She could wear children's clothes since she was so tiny. Once I saw her in winter with one of my outgrown orange toques hanging off one of her head growths. It looked as though a carrot was growing at a forty-five degree angle on her head. In the post office there was a big cardboard Modess box labelled “Warty” and everyone put their used clothes or canned foods in it for her. If someone had a party and there was food left, it was dropped off to her. At the Volunteer Firemen's Peach Festival there was a “go fish” booth with prizes donated by the Chamber of Commerce, and the profits went to Warty.
Although the town took care of her basic clothing and food needs, people were frightened of her. Not only was her appearance terrifying, but people were most afraid of catching her “warts.” She was often used as an example of what a child could grow into if she disobeyed her parents. Mothers would say, “If you don't want to grow up to look like Warty, then you'd better wash your hands before eating.”
Warty had twelve Dalmatians who always barked at the gate of the dump, and they alone didn't seem frightened by her high-pitched squeak that sounded as though she'd swallowed helium. Warty said she had Dalmatians because her spots looked like theirs.
Some carried this further and said that Warty was half-Dalmatian.