Mary Cyr

by David Adams Richards

  Mary had visited the shrine where the children had spoken to the Blessed Virgin, who had promised a miracle and so made the sun move to touch the earth so that thousands of people, intellectual and ironic and sophisticated, who had come to jeer, fell to the ground in terror.

  At Fatima Mary had said a private prayer—many private prayers to the great Lady in the sky. She asked forgiveness.

  It was after she had lost her grip on Lucien.

  She said the Our Father.

  She wanted forgiveness now.

  They all walked up the street, their bodies strangely illuminated in the storm appearing and disappearing in the wind and rain, coming for her like spectres out of her childhood dreams.

  They started toward the cell.

  “No te perdono,” Lucretia said, looking in at her, while men and women cheered her on to say something to the whore. Say something to the whore!

  I do not forgive you.

  * * *

  —

  The week before—or about a week before, when she knew she would die—she had phoned Garnet about Perley. Garnet was very surprised to hear her. He asked her how she was.

  “I am fine,” she said. “But you must do something for me—you must go into the linen closet—the one up on the third floor near Bobby’s playroom—there is a small leather chest—it is where your son, Perley, keeps his passport. You must take it and throw it away, so he cannot come here. And,” she added, “do you think you have treated him well—I mean—as well as you should have?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  Yesterday morning she woke to a faint smell of some Mexican flower and farther away a haze and the smell of diesel and the thud, thud of a great excavator at the mine site. The clanging and the monotonous thud of the excavator had come into Mary’s cell. It had started over a week ago.

  She stood on her tiptoes to better see and listen to it. It certainly sounded foreboding to her.

  “What are they doing?” she whispered, to one of the women.

  “Oh,” the woman said, trying to sound formal. “Oh, they are proceeding with a plan to recover the bodies.”

  “The bodies?” Mary asked.

  “Oh my dear—the bodies buried there seven weeks ago.”

  So yesterday the paper Gringo Gazette reported that the two million Mary had on her was all the proof they needed that Tarsco was guilty of trying to bribe someone to stop an investigation.

  Ca Cug went the machine. And the men with oxygen tanks and helmets with giant lights began to work with security ropes attached to each other and walk downward, slowly—so slowly they looked like robots from some strange movie long ago.

  But others heard the Ca Cug as well. And one was Gidgit DeRolfo.

  The house was in shambles—doors were open, hallways were blocked with clothes, rugs rolled up, paintings were taken down and laid against the wall—trunks moved out—yet most of this would have to be left behind.

  “Spring cleaning,” she said to anyone who asked.

  Neither she nor her husband knew of the dozens of documents in Bara’s office that condemned them, and exonerated the woman in that jail cell. Nor did they know a microphone was finally placed in their car. Or that Maxwell the truck was now with the police.

  They still believed it was simply a matter of them doing one more thing to make their own innocence sacrosanct.

  So they had Lucretia driven to their house. Señora DeRolfo looked into her eyes, startled by the black roots that intertwined within her blond hair, and her coarse mouth, and said:

  “I know you as a mother who has suffered like me.”

  This was exactly what Lucretia was waiting to hear—though for the life of her she did not know it until that moment.

  “¿Quién es esa mujer?” Little Boots Baron asked in a phone call three nights before. “¿Es ella la madre?”

  Who is that woman? Is she the mother?

  “No,” Gidgit said, “she is insane.”

  “Well, show her the body—it will make the whole town hysterical—” Little Boots said. “Then you two leave town and go where I tell you to.”

  “And no suspicion will fall on us,” Gidgit said.

  “Of course not—you have my word on that—” Little Boots answered.

  The DeRolfos sped away toward their appointment. Everything they said now recorded, even the unfortunate sudden shock when they learned they were trapped.

  What was curious is that Fey and John had discussed sneaking Mary Cyr out of town the night before. And it almost happened. Norma and her husband were there as well.

  “I will take her—and I can get her across the border—I will have someone help us—you must help us—before it is too late,” Norma had asked. Fey said okay. Then he spoke to his fiancée, the little prison guard, and became worried for her sake. For her sake he did not know what to do. If Mary Cyr escaped, his fiancée would lose her job—she might go to jail herself.

  He went back to his office and telephoned Alfonso Bara. He had Principia’s tape in his pocket. He told Bara what had transpired.

  “It is time to let her go,” he said.

  Bara was looking out the window at the giant square—the evening lights were on, the sounds of buses rounding the circle and stopping, in the distance with the sunlight casting over it, the historical waterway that existed from the time Mexico City was an Aztec domain.

  He paused. Then he said:

  “No, it would alert Hernández and Little Boots Baron.” And that is who he was after. “Everyone would start to scurry away.”

  Alfonso Bara told him to put John in jail until the case was solved. “It is for his own good—too many people know he is here.”

  John was in jail when Norma van Haut stood guard with a little stick. He was in jail—and looked out on the trial about to take place. His face was cut open because he had fought to remain free. And that was that. They put him in protective custody and informed the Canadian embassy that he would be leaving Mexico on Flight 967.

  2.

  NOW IT WAS JULY. IT WAS EVENING IN A HOUSE OUTSIDE SAINT John. Still fog had settled in, and John had the remnants of a struggle—a hand that had been badly broken, and a mark across his right temple ending just above his ear—both in the process of healing away, but leaving a silver-white energetic question mark that seemed to pose a futile question to the world.

  John told them that sometimes the script for a great actress is not the one she desires, but the one she deserves—or more to the point, he decided, the one she cannot escape. For weeks Principia begged Lucretia not to pretend. Lucretia did not know her final scene would be carrying the decomposing body of a child she never liked up the street as trees and power lines toppled. She had no idea that this would become her greatest scene.

  At first no one paid attention to her. But little by little as the wind wailed against them they gathered near her. When they tried to take the child from her, she pushed them away, and continued.

  “¿Quién va a hacer algo con esa mujer miserable?”

  Who is going to do something about that miserable woman?

  But Tallagonga, whose office was in the building next to her—just across the street from the café where they stood—came out and tried to reason with them.

  “You must let the law decide.”

  She pleaded—but the script had already been written, and she had been instrumental in acting her small part. She called as well for the police, but they were gone. So that, too, was futile.

  As futile really as the little stick Norma van Haut held in order to prevent them from advancing.

  “Mary Cyr es inocente,” she screamed over and over, and over.

  Half the men, who broke into the cell, knew the child was not Lucretia’s. But it was a child and the mine disaster made up for it. If they only had waited one more day, they would have realized the mine disaster was not her doing either.

  “‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,’” Mary Cyr said, when she saw the
m coming, as the mob got closer to the jail and John tried to get the guard to let him out.

  “No es posible,” the little guard said, looking at him strangely. “Usted está bajo mi protección.”

  (It is not possible. You are under my protection.)

  “‘Render unto Caesar.’”

  John heard.

  For a long while John wondered why she had said this.

  “What then does Caesar have—what does Caesar own?” John asked them back in Saint John. All of them were silent. Fog rested against the window. Then in spite of it a small bird cried—a bird on the wing going somewhere.

  “Nothing,” John answered for them.

  “Caesar owns—nothing—not a thing.”

  3.

  ERAPPO POLE OPENED HER CELL DOOR GRAVELY—AS IF, EVEN though he had been ordered to obey the law, law had its limits and honour was honour. The human condition is one of deceit punctuated by moments that overcome it. It is what Little Boots Baron knew—as she spread her deceit into the town of Oathoa nine years before with her friend Hulk Hernández. So the Amigo Company was doomed. If Mary Cyr had not come by, they were planning to take Gabriella that autumn—now that she was old enough to go.

  Mary Fatima Cyr held a comb in her hand, looking at them, sitting on her little bed, her feet on its crate.

  “¿Estás luchando?” one of the men said,

  “Fighting back, are you?”

  Aghast that she would dare.

  Haul her out onto the street, they said.

  Puta.

  Cunt.

  Fucker.

  Cock licker.

  Slut.

  Whore.

  All of the things most of them wanted a woman to be.

  When they turned to take her, Ángel Gloton was there.

  He looked at her. She was holding Plu, her childhood comforter, in her arms. She smiled.

  He did not know what he would do.

  Great lightning flashed and down the street the whole cement floor of the fish market was now under water up to the stalls, and dead mackerel floated and live crabs scuttled away.

  Mary Cyr looked at Ángel with a sweet kind of curious ambivalence, thinking he was the Angel of Death. She looked up at him, and then looked at the two men holding her, as if she was awaiting a discussion to take place about her future. Until one of the men took her Plu and threw it down. Ángel’s expression changed. He began to hate them, and what they had done to her.

  “Dejarla con nosotros, amigo,” one of the men said to him.

  Leave her to us, friend.

  He said, “No!”

  “Debes dejar que vaya,” they said.

  But again he said, “Let her go.”

  They simply decided to drag her by him, but he stood in the cell door. He threw a hard right hand.

  One man went down—and then he got his right hand high on another’s forehead and drove him across the cell, breaking his hand—then another, he hit hard with his broken hand, and that man’s two front teeth broke and he fell. So Mary was free from them for a few seconds. He smiled tenderly at her, and held her under her left arm.

  He began to haul her away from them, thinking he could get her to safety, but she turned and said:

  “Una momento,” and tried to find Plu.

  Ángel looked away from Erappo Pole.

  Erappo Pole was standing in the corridor. The man he had trusted walked up behind him and hit him four times with a billy club. He tried to grab the club, but after the first blow he was almost unconscious. He fell, blood gushing from the back of his head. He was not yet seventeen years old.

  “Help him,” Mary said, trying to bend down and pick him up out of the water that was now coming into the cell.

  “Where is Plu?” she asked. But she had it in her arms.

  Ángel had left his scooter across the street. He had worked extra days to buy it. That was over now.

  “Muere por la belleza,” Erappo said. “Los Glotons—están todos en él.”

  He dies for beauty. The Glotons are in on it.

  Lucretia was standing outside the cell door, looking at Mary as she was being dragged. She still had Mary’s sunglasses on, but her new blouse was soiled with live maggots from having carried the dead child.

  The little guard, Constable Fey’s fiancée, took her revolver, and came down from the upper cell where John Delano was, as the men proceeded dragging Mary along the black hallway.

  But they had locked the side door, and she had to try to find the keys in the back office under that stairwell. Then, when she finally found them in a cup in the cupboard, she had to find the right key and rush back.

  They dragged Mary Cyr into the field near the donkey. There, as far as the reports went, they held her down. She said nothing—at all—as a bunch of men clipped her hair with a pair of scissors the barber brought from his shop. It is said the wind was so strong that the hair flew up and up in the wind, as it was being snipped away, and one could see her bald head, rough and bruised, looking like the inside of an orange peel.

  None of this is verifiable.

  “Wait,” Lucretia said. “Leave her alone. I am not the mother—I tell you I am not the mother! You know me. You all know me. I made it up.”

  But no one paid any attention to her. In fact they turned on her and told her to get the fuck out of the way.

  Then a man ran to Ángel’s scooter, which had been tossed up in the wind, and took the gas tank that had been broken off it, and ran back to her.

  “Pour it over her—get that rag of hers and soak the whore with it—”

  They poured it, holding the gas tank up, with the spigot opened, and gas flowing over her body and the man’s white long nervous fingers.

  Lucretia started to back away.

  “No,” she said, “NO.”

  The priest who had given Mary Cyr Communion very early that morning, and spoken of courage in the face of evil, watched from the far end of the churchyard, beside himself and without the courage to act.

  Everything was quiet as they tried to get something lit.

  They kept complaining about the wind and the rain.

  “¿Por favor?” Mary said, as a plea. The only plea she would make.

  Then ten of them (as were indicted in the murder charges filed by Tallagonga) finally got a newspaper with a picture of her on it lit, lit her old childhood comforter, Plu, and managed to set her afire, then chased her around, continuing to sprinkle the gas on the burning blanket. Then her whole body was smoking, but some hair and clothes began to burn. It did look very strange.

  “The bitch smokes more than burns,” someone yelled.

  “There is nothing we can do—it is the weather.”

  Mary staggered, tried to find her way forward, and stumbled to her knees, rose again, and began to walk toward her tormentors with her hands out, as if seeking someone to hold her. But one man pushed her in the direction of another and then another tossed her, going back and forth in a circle. All or most of them shouting and laughing.

  “She’s starting to burn better now,” Erappo said, rather stoically.

  Some were terribly silent. Smoke and flame billowed from her clothes and sparks came off the tuffs of hair left on her head, which she kept trying to put out. There was a smell of burning skin.

  Now and then good people shouted from buildings:

  “For the love of God, leave her alone. Someone help her to stand—look she has fallen again—help her, someone.”

  A man came out to help her, but they threw him down. John kept yelling to her—that he would come and help—he would come and help. But he knew he couldn’t get out.

  She turned and looked at him—up, toward the sky—for a second—and he saw that her left eye had been beaten shut.

  Then suddenly Mary began to run around again. She was trying to escape the circle, and the flames started to creep up against her pants.

  Lucretia watched as Mary Fatima Cyr ran, waving her arms in the air like a young girl
as if looking for something. She kept running and running round in circles, trying to get the sparks out. But the flames grew.

  The little guard had by now opened the door, and heard:

  “Snow.”

  It was Mary Fatima Cyr’s last word.

  She fell sitting up, her childhood blanket on the ground beside her, still waving her hands for a while. Then she fell backward, her right leg really trembling. Plu was burned to a crisp. She still held it.

  When it was over, Erappo Pole said:

  “The gringo officer in the cell—he wants the same, let’s give him the same as her.”

  He started toward the jail again. He stoically carried the billy club with which he had beaten Ángel Gloton.

  The little guard, with her big hat and a revolver in her hand, walked up to Erappo Pole and shot him in the head. He gave her a startled look, as if he was a child once again, then fell.

  She arrested the men who were there.

  Subdued and terrified, no one said another word.

  Not for a long time.

  * * *

  —

  John told the family this. He did it because he had to. Because it was in the papers anyway—on the News of the World.

  Then he said:

  “He who wrote A Discourse on Inequality left his five children in a foundling house—”

  He did not know why he said this. It seemed he had to.

  4.

  PEOPLE IN TOWN TURNED AGAINST HERNÁNDEZ. THEY SPOKE about Little Boots and the evil she had done. Then the bodies of the DeRolfos were found. They died two days after they had got to Texas. Little Boots told them to wait in a safe house there and she would send men to help. The money they had on them was gone. Little Boots stood only five feet two, and was defiant to the end.

  “A criminal empire,” she said. “I am a housewife who plays bingo and works at church suppers.”

  But she was extradited to the US in 2009 and now sits in a Texas prison.

  After a week or so, people found out all about the mine.

  Not a new timber had been put in place.

  They found the men, three weeks later.