When it was all over, Mary lay still in her own blood and looked at the snowy landscape outside her window. It was a late spring snow and covered the tulips and daffodils that had already bloomed in the yard. It was a soft white blanket that covered the ground and the flowers and the budding trees and its whiteness blended with the whiteness of the sky. As she looked at the tangle of branches that leaned toward each other, weighted down with the snow, she let her eyes follow the delicate tracery of black lines, the dark wet undersides of the branches, that seemed etched on the sky as exquisitely as the lines of silver frost on the windows in the deepest cold of winter.
But it warmed up on this spring day and the sun emerged, pale at first and then brighter and finally began to melt the snow and the colors of the flowers came through at last. The red tulips looked like drops of blood on the white blanket of snow. Mary herself felt as if a soft and numbing blanket had been laid over her and she could not move her legs or arms, only her eyes, and she drifted off to sleep, dreamless, and when she awoke it was completely dark in her room and outside her window.
At first she experienced the familiar regret of having missed the daylight that she always felt when she fell asleep in the afternoon, and then she remembered that this day something unspeakable had happened to her, and it was her poor unhappy father who had done it. But Mary remembered, with some effort, wondering if it was memory or imagination, that he had done something terrible to her mother as well. Sometimes she forgot, thinking that her mother was simply away for a while as she had been often enough. It was frightening to Mary that her memories, even of that very morning, could be so deeply buried so quickly, and that she could be so confused about her own life. It had been a relief when her father refused to send her to school, because she was afraid of talking to the other children about herself. She never knew how to answer questions whether from the children or the teachers, and they all thought there was something wrong with her mind. Sometimes she was afraid they were right, even though she could read better than most. But then sometimes she got confused and felt like she lived in the stories she read, the stories were more real to her than her own life that she contemplated, when at all, as if through a fathom of water.
She was only twelve that day but felt as tired and bone weary as a grandmother. She first curled up on her side and tried to go back to sleep, but then her father called her to fix dinner, and she had to get up slowly and walk painfully and with difficulty to the basin and begin to clean herself.
Her father said nothing while she prepared the evening meal and nothing while he ate, but when he finished, he complimented her on her cooking and said to her softly, as if remembering her name for the first time, “Mary Queen of Scots. What a beautiful name. And you are as lovely as your name, as lovely as the flowers in the garden, the loveliest flower of all. You know that I love you?” And Mary could say only a quiet “yes” and then she watched him for a clue to what would happen next.
Nothing happened, and Mary was not sure how to end the day, so she asked her father if he remembered the last Christmas, what they had done and he remembered it fondly and reminded her about it, and feeling encouraged, Mary asked him about the Christmas before that and again he remembered it fondly and reminded her of what they had done and the gifts he had made for her. So then Mary asked him about the Christmas before that, and her father became angry, wondering why she kept asking about Christmases and remembering that the last one she asked about was only a few months after Rose of Sharon had died, had died, had died. He didn’t want to remember how and why he had killed her. He told Mary to stop chattering, to stop bothering him, and he went out into the night to walk in the woods.
So Mary kept track of the years since her father shot her mother by remembering the subsequent Christmases. Sometimes she would whisper the litany to herself, reciting the gifts, whether there had been snow or not, whether they had gone to a neighbor’s house to eat and what had been served. In this way she kept her life in order and would do so until she died in 1960, each year adding the new details and rehearsing them so she would never forget. Whatever else she might forget, she kept track of the memories of those days when the mundane horrors of everyday life were set aside and everyone worked at joy.
When her mother was alive the garden had been a family effort under her mother’s supervision, but now her father never went into the garden. He spent almost all daylight hours in his workshop, where he made the furniture that he sold in White Sulphur and only came to the house to eat his meals and never went outside at all during the days. Mary heard him get up in the night to wander the woods in the dark, and sometimes she watched out her window to see him disappear up the road in the moonlight and said a little child’s prayer for his safe return. After the terrible thing happened, she continued to look after him and pray for him with the same love and pity she had always felt for her lovesick father. She thought perhaps in his pain and confusion that he sometimes thought she was her mother. Certainly in the dark of night, in the haze of too much whiskey or simply too much pain, this was possible. So reasoned Mary, longing to love her father and trying to understand the terrible thing that had been done.
Sometimes she wondered if she had done something to bring it on herself. She had begun to develop breasts and bleed once a month. She knew she was a woman now, but she knew that she didn’t feel like a woman. She had felt old since she was a young child, but she was not comfortable with the idea of being a woman. She wanted to be that wise old child forever, and she hated it when the boys in town looked at her and tried to flirt with her and laughed at her when she would not flirt back. Now when she went to town with her father, she stuck close to his side and kept her eyes on the ground, and if the boys wanted to try to flirt with her, let them face her father. When she went into town with her father, she felt protected and began to think that maybe what he had done to her was not so terrible, because he truly did love her and now he would make sure that no one else ever touched her that way. Mary read the Bible through and through with a great attention to detail, and she knew that in the Bible, fathers lay with daughters. She wanted to ask the preacher about it, ask him about Noah for instance, and then she could find out what he thought without giving anything away. For her father hadn’t said much, but one thing he had said, and that was that she was never to tell anyone about what had happened. “They will take you away from me,” he had said and didn’t tell her who the “they” was. Anymore it seemed that the whole world was “they.”
By the time Mary went to church again with her father the terrible thing had happened again, and she was so worried that the preacher would see into her mind that she didn’t have the nerve to ask him about Noah. The second time had been at night in the dark, and Mary had pretended to be asleep and then she did fall asleep and tried to imagine that it had been a dream, but her father’s silence at the breakfast table told her it had happened. He almost seemed about to apologize, but couldn’t, and brought her some wildflowers at dinner. By then the wild laurel blossoms were all over the woods like exotic miniature orchids. Mary knew all about orchids and read about them and knew that her mother had dreamed about having a roomful of them. Mary loved to see these orchid-like flowers in the woods and wished her father wouldn’t be picking them, because they wilted within hours, even in water, but of course she thanked him over and over and made a fuss over his gift because she couldn’t stand to see his pain. He was so sorry, so sad.
The next day, Mary began to prepare the garden for planting. She had a map in her head of where everything would go and measured off her design with footsteps in circles. The sweet peas going in first along with the onions went around the outer edges, and she would arrange everything else in concentric circles until the middle where she would plant the tomatoes ringed with marigolds. In between each row of vegetables, Mary planned flowers. Like her mother, Mary could not get enough of flowers. Her father came in for the evening meal and stood a while watchin
g her pacing off the circles and he seemed puzzled, but didn’t say anything. “We’ll be having fresh greens soon,” she told her father as if nothing unusual had happened.
After that second time, her father always came to her in the dark of night and after a while Mary became accustomed to his visits. She would pretend she was sleeping and dreaming, and neither of them talked about it. When she finally felt up to asking the preacher about Noah, he simply expressed his astonishment and disapproval of a girl so young reading that particular part of the Bible and recommended other readings to her. So Mary knew it was absolutely wrong and that she was all alone in the world with no one she could talk to about anything. But by then, Mary had reasoned that most of what occurred among human beings in the world was wrong. It was only in heaven that there existed any hope of right living and true happiness and that was the point after all, wasn’t it? All this singing and praying on Sundays? She would watch all the people in church and be able to tell by their expressions from one week to the next who was in trouble or harboring evil secrets. No one was pure, no one without shame, no one truly happy, even though everyone pretended to be all those things. It was a lesson that seeped into her soul and made her kind, judging no one harshly, not even herself.
The pea vines were flowering and the radish leaves were coming up by the time it was warm enough to plant the squash and pumpkin seeds. Mary spent days squatting on the warm crumbly earth, building mounds and arranging the seeds carefully around them. She imagined the large leafed vines dancing around the garden like the designs that framed the mirrors of the oak dressers her father built and carved, and she planned how she would plant the corn stalks and then arrange the tomatoes around them so the tomato vines could climb the corn stalks. Mary thought that was a very inventive way to support the tomato plants. She looked forward to dinners of juicy tomatoes with tender new potatoes and sweet young corn. She worked without noticing the time until the sun was low in the sky and she was suddenly chilled and then, as she rose, she saw her father watching her.
By the time it was warm enough to set out the tomato plants, the rest of the garden was growing in a noticeable pattern of concentric circles, and her father, who had been watching her planting as if he was watching some intricate dance step, asked her why she had planted the garden that way. “I just wanted to make a design with it the way you make designs when you carve in wood.” He wondered if anyone had told her about the idea or if she had dreamed it perhaps one night. “No, it just occurred to me when I went out to the garden. Do you like it?” And Charles seemed confused, not expecting to be asked if he liked it. “It’s very pretty,” he said and then looked down at his plate, ate quickly and went up to bed and to sleep before Mary had even finished washing up the dishes. Usually he sat up by the lamp and read some, sometimes out loud. But this night he fell to sleep almost before it was completely dark, and later Mary heard him crying and choking on his tears. She got up and went to his bed and asked him if he was alright, and he said he would be alright and told her to go back to bed, and she reached out to touch his head, but that made him cry harder, that unexpected touch of gentle sympathy, and he controlled his sobbing enough to tell her again to go back to bed, and so she did. Mary lay awake all that night, listening to the choking sounds until she also had to cry, but quietly, so he wouldn’t know she was listening. She heard him groan and whisper her mother’s name, and she heard him whisper another name she didn’t recognize, and she recognized her own name when once he whispered that too, the whole long name: Mary Queen of Scots. Such an odd name, her teachers had said, such a funny name, the boys in town had laughed. But Mary loved her name.
Mary slept late the next morning and when she awoke, her father sat on her bedside and was watching her face. When she opened her eyes, he stroked her hair and smiled and said he was taking the day off to go fishing and invited her to go along with him. He seemed well rested and well he might, having cried himself into a deep sleep that lasted well into the mid-morning. It was a rainy day, a good day for fishing, and a good day for hiking in the woods, which were fragrant with the fresh smells of pine and sassafras brought up by the rain. They put on high boots and layers of warm clothes and walked into the cathedral-like opening beneath tall oaks that bent towards each other high above them, filtering the sunlight and the rain alike, creating a sheltered world in which grew delicate ferns, soft mosses, every kind of mushroom, lacy lichens and tiny wildflowers that a man had to kneel to see. They left the road and disappeared into the forest, climbing hills and down again until they found the spring that flowed forth from a cave and followed that flow to the wide pools that formed sometimes this side of an old willow, sometimes the other side, from one season to another, and there they fished for trout, small and tender, that they would steam and eat, head and all, that night for supper. It was a joyful day for them, for Mary had learned to take her pleasure when she could, and Charles was trying to follow her example.
The next day everything in the garden was a good head taller Charles said, and Mary laughed and set about to weed, for the weeds grew twice as fast as the flowers and vegetables, as everyone in the county would be glad to tell you.
Surrounded by such fecundity, it was inevitable that Mary, too, should bear, and no sooner had she finished the planting that she noticed that the monthly bleeding had stopped almost as soon as it had started, for it had only just started. Mary would not even have known what it meant but for having cared for her mother during those times of month. Had she not been nursing her mother, her mother might not have told her anything about it. That was how Mary learned everything in life; by accident.
She didn’t want to tell her father right away, and she knew he would be upset because how then could they keep the secret? It never occurred to her to let folks think it was a boy her own age, and it certainly never occurred to her that her father might think that it was. For the summer she decided not to tell him, not to think about it even, for it was not something she had any control over. She spent her mornings working in her garden and the afternoons as they got hotter and hotter, walking in the cool forest. She liked to find the creeks and sit on a rock feeling the draft that came up from the rushing water. The energy from the creek made her feel clean and she would breath it in to clean her insides too.
Her father never asked her about where she went every afternoon, until the fall when her belly grew in contrast with her small, thin limbs, and she could no longer hide the fact that she was pregnant. Then he became very angry and asked her about boys in town, boys whose names she didn’t even recognize, but he didn’t believe that and insisted on knowing who the father was, as if nothing had ever happened between them. Mary found it hard to say, but she finally said, very quietly, crying through her words, that the child was his, of course, whose else could it be? Would it be? But his, his, his.
The secret was out, because they had treated it like a secret, had never talked about it, this thing that happened in the dark of night while Charles was drunk and Mary pretended to be sleeping. He had pretended something too, Mary didn’t know what, perhaps that it never really happened and now he was confronted with the proof that yes, without any doubt, this thing had happened, because Charles knew that Mary didn’t really know those boys in town, had kept her eyes on the ground and let him protect her from them.
Charles stopped his furious questions suddenly in the middle of a breath and caught his breath and turned away from Mary and into the woods, into the dark places where animals lived and magic existed and his mother’s spirit still wandered, he was certain. He did not come back until morning, and Mary prayed for him, for his safe return, for she loved him still, strongly and fearfully, promising to take the blame, casting about in her mind for a way to keep the terrible secret. She could not go to church anymore for her condition betrayed not just her father but everyone there, threatened to expose the abyss of evil that everyone hid so carefully behind the smiles of contentm
ent and righteous talk…everyone had something to hide and bringing one secret out in the open would threaten all of them. Mary knew this and thought long and hard, trying to think of a way to hide, a story to tell, something the town could accept. But she couldn’t discuss this with her father, for they had never discussed this terrible thing, had never acknowledged it and she knew he needed to pretend it had never happened, just as she had pretended to be sleeping when it did. She would ask her father to take her away to another place, maybe the place where she had been born, far away from here. Even in the frenzy and fear of her thoughts, she already regretted the garden, the waste of it. When Charles returned at dawn, he found her sleeping among the pumpkins, covered with vines, crawling with ladybugs.
Charles had gone to the cave and asked for a dream to guide him now that his daughter was pregnant with his child. He had slept there in the mouth of the cave and dreamed of carefully cutting her throat and then he dreamed that he was drowning. In his dream, he fought first for breath and then let his body be carried by the flow of the river, until he was surrounded by gray water and gray skies and rain, and he heard his mother’s voice and thought he must have already died, but he woke up with the sun in his eyes and went to find Mary. He knew that to save her from the boys in the town, he would have to carefully cut her throat and let the river carry her away and he would let the river take him too, and they would both be free and both be safe, for this was a cruel world, a sad world, and he couldn’t protect her anymore.
Charles never loved his child more than when he gently lifted her from the garden and carried her to the river. She slept in his arms, exhausted with thinking, with fearing, with planning and praying. He had picked the last roses from the garden and put these into her hands, she grasped them in her sleep, oblivious to the thorns that pierced her skin and tiny veins and oblivious to the blood that streamed down her hands and arms as her father carried her to the river that would be her grave. He held her close to him as he walked in long strides, stepping over rocks and small ravines and snakes that wound, sluggish with cold, toward their winter holes. The day grew colder with each step he took, and then they were there at the river and he lovingly lay her on the ground in a thicket of wild mint, and he took out a knife that he had sharpened so he would not cause her pain, and he carefully cut her throat, feeling a magical strength and sureness in his cold benumbed hands. Carefully, he held her lovely head and carefully, he made the cut. Then he walked with her into the middle of the river and set her adrift upon the current. Then he aimed his knife at his own innards and fell into it and into the river, which carried him down, and down, and down, under the roots of trees and around boulders, and he was never seen again.
But Mary’s light body drifted toward the banks of the river, gently on the surface of the water, and in the morning sun she shone luminous, and in the morning sun she appeared as a miraculous vision to the young John Banks, who had been camping by the river and just that very morning had been praying for a miracle.
XI
Stillbird Page 26
