Finton Moon

by Gerard Collins

  GERARD COLLINS

  St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador

  2012

  © 2012, Gerard Collins

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing program.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any requests for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.

  Cover Design by Todd Manning

  Layout by Joanne Snook-Hann

  Printed on acid-free paper

  Published by

  KILLICK PRESS

  an imprint of CREATIVE BOOK PUBLISHING

  a Transcontinental Inc. associated company

  P.O. Box 8660, Stn. A

  St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador A1B 3T7

  Printed in Canada by:

  TRANSCONTINENTAL INC.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Collins, Gerard, 1963-

  Finton Moon / Gerard Collins.

  ISBN 978-1-897174-90-6

  I. Title.

  PS8605.O465F55 2012 C813'.6 C2012-901096-0

  For Norma,

  Healer, Inspiration, and Goddess of Weekends

  The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.

  Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

  Sylvia Plath

  It is believed by experienced doctors that the heat which oozes out of the hand, on being applied to the sick, is highly salutary. It has often appeared, while I have been soothing my patients, as if there was a singular property in my hands to pull and draw away from the affected parts aches and diverse impurities, by laying my hand upon the place, and extending my fingers toward it. Thus it is known to some of the learned that health may be implanted in the sick by certain gestures, and by contact, as some diseases may be communicated from one to another.

  Hippocrates

  That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Contents

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Nativity

  Confirmation

  Sawyer

  Battenhatches

  The Girl in the Pink Coat

  The Gathering Storm

  Gods and Devils

  Dreams of the Lost

  The Devil’s Greatest Trick

  The Cathedral

  The Sunday Dead

  Ordinary Days

  Finton Moon Lassos Moon

  Questioning

  The Turning

  The Days After

  Confirmation Redux

  On the Run

  Something Wicked

  Crowley

  Some Other Place

  To the Moon

  Lone Wolf

  Trials and Tribulations

  News

  Ever After

  Lost

  Found

  Meet the Dredges

  Recovery

  The Time of Survival

  Last Leaf

  Exodus

  Foreword

  The savvy reader understands that this is a work of fiction and, as such, the people and places represented in this novel are products of my imagination. Darwin isn’t a place I’ve lived, but it has characteristics, foibles, and a certain je ne sais quoi that are common to all small towns.

  Likewise, Finton Moon`s family is not my family, but, rather, like all families has its share of good fortune and misery, arseholeishness and kindness. A family of any other kind, as Frank McCourt writes, is “not worth your while” in literature.

  And, while I’m at it, the school represented is not a school I’ve ever attended, the teachers not like any I’ve ever had, and the clergy far removed from any I’ve known personally.

  However, the burgeoning disillusionment with certain institutions, the endless search for answers in a confusing world, and the unmitigated sense of wonder and love of life are all mine. Those, I own and did not make up.

  GC

  Prologue

  A few days after his eighth birthday, Finton Moon scaled the large, burly spruce at the edge of his parents’ property and nestled into the sturdiest branch. High above the earth, as the morning sun arose, he felt safe from the clamour and concerns of daily life and the need to adapt to his ill-fitted surroundings. The branch yielded to his body and bent to the wind as the climber surrendered to the comforting bough.

  In the distance, his mother yelled: “Finton Moon, where the hell are ya?” Her shrill voice stung his ears. “Get your arse home!” she called. “It’s time for mass!”

  He closed his eyes and went invisible, became but a breath upon the wind. Now and then, he opened one eye and watched various family members scouring the property—his mother usually enlisted one of his brothers, either Clancy or Homer, to find him. At last, he lay back and smiled, drew a deep, calming breath and shut his eyes. The tree spoke to him in creaks and groans, telling the tale of supple saplings in another time.

  “Finton!” Elsie Moon shouted from fifty yards away, coming closer to his tree. His eyes came open in a state of alarm, and his body jerked upright, the involuntary maneuver causing him to slip. As he grasped for something firm to ease his fall, a painful explosion seared his left elbow. The ground was hard and unforgiving. At the base of the tree he sat, dazed and relieved, gripping his arm and hoping it wasn’t broken.

  He whimpered only once, then swallowed the pain. The last thing he wanted was for them to discover his place. There were other trees, sure, but not like this one. So he sat, with eyes closed, rubbed his arm and whispered a prayer. As the world went dark, he grew lighter of mind and body, and he drifted skyward—far above the burly spruce, beyond the clouds, and into another dimension.

  He reached a great height, far above the earth, then slowly descended towards a lush, grassy surface and, from every direction, a celestial object mesmerized him. High above, shooting stars. Across the horizon, a blazing comet. Suspended in the air and all around him, dazzling orbs of every hue. Far below and gently approaching was his Planet of Solitude—a prominent, white apple tree kept him transfixed with its soft, green leaves and fruit-bearing branches bent low. When he’d finally landed, he found a spot beneath the tree and leaned back to gaze in wonder at the indigo sky. He’d been there before, in dreams and visions. But never before had he felt so alone. Never had it looked so stunningly real. As he scanned the vast plane, a prayer came to mind.

  When he awoke, he was bent over near the spruce at the edge of his parents’ property, holding his arm. But the pain had subsided and, upon examination of his elbow, the only sign of injury was a small, dark bruise.

  “There you are,” his mother said as she stepped through the high grass and crossed the boundary between meadow and woods. She was wearing her Sunday clothes, including the white, silk scarf he’d given her last Christmas. “Where did you go?”

  “I’ve been here all along,” Finton said. “I didn’t hear you.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Did you hurt yourself?”

  “Just bruised.”

  “Well,” she said skeptically, “it’s time to go to mass.”

  He nodded and patted the tree trunk, then followed his mother h
ome.

  Nativity

  1960 (Darwin, Newfoundland)

  Finton Moon was a spring baby with a natural propensity for falling.

  In his younger years, Finton loved to hear the story of when he was born, but the constant revision of details worried him—his parents, Elsie and Tom, sometimes forgot the doctor’s name, the number of nurses, or the time of delivery. There weren’t any pictures either—not of his mother’s pregnancy nor of Finton’s infancy. Sure, his parents didn’t own a camera, but he wondered if some relative might have taken a photograph or two. Still, he wouldn’t inquire too deeply. He was terrified of discovering an awful truth: that it didn’t happen the way they said it did, or that he’d actually never been born at all.

  According to Elsie, when Finton was born, the nurse dropped him on the bed and said, “Oops!” But he didn’t cry. “You just lay there,” his mother told him. “Deep, blue eyes, just lookin’ at us all like you had a hundred questions.” She shook her head and put a hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh. “You were quiet as dirt.” The nurse scooped him up and examined him, but there wasn’t even a mark on his tiny body.

  According to Elsie Moon, the delivery was easy—a mere forty-five minutes from first contraction to famous first fall. “Time enough for a good shit,” her husband Tom added as he sat at the kitchen table smoking a Camel and projecting a wispy grey “O” of smoke into the air. Nanny Moon peered up from her Bible, silver-rimmed glasses perched on her nose, and mused that her newest grandchild was merely doing penance for the fall of man. “’Twas just as well he get used to the cruelty,” she liked to say, then returned her gaze to the consoling lines of the Good Book.

  In the rest of the story, he didn’t cry until two days after he was born. “The moment I set foot on that doorstep,” Elsie said, “you started yowling to beat the devil—and we thought you’d never stop.” For the next twenty-four hours, nothing—not his mother’s coddling, his father’s swearing, his grandmother’s prayers, nor his brothers’ funny faces—could halt the howling.

  She deposited him in the hall closet with the door closed, but an hour later she took him out and set him in the back room that was undergoing construction. “Tom’s a wonder for startin’, but he never finishes,” his wife often said. When Elsie went to fetch him, she noticed that the crib had attracted several spiders. “Nasty buggars,” she clucked as she brushed them away and sent the ugly creatures scurrying back to the shadows.

  Five-year-old Clancy suggested they sing, but Elsie frowned as she jostled Finton in her tired arms. “I don’t know any songs,” she said.

  “Elvis!” Clancy began hopping around and swiveling his hips, singing, “Since my baby left me!” into his fisted right hand. Elsie shook her head and cleared her throat before trying “Love Me Tender,” which only heightened his bawling. “Amazing Grace” caused the child to gag until his face turned a light shade of blue, which nearly sent his mother into a panic. Resisting the urge to shake him to a more natural hue, she forced out an “Irish Lullaby,” which only made him cough and spit as he clenched his upraised fists in mounting frustration.

  It was Tom who snatched him up by the armpits and crooned, “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You,” while both boys, the mother, and even Nanny Moon hummed along on the chorus. Finton stopped coughing from the middle of “somebody,” ceased choking on “loves” and slowly abated his whimpering by the end of the first verse. Before the song was done, the vexed baby committed to slumber, the sign of which was the steady rise and fall of his tiny chest with every life-affirming breath. “A bloody miracle,” the grandmother whispered as she blessed herself.

  “Thanks be to Jesus,” Elsie Moon declared. He slept through the night and, from that day on, Tom’s version of the Dean Martin ballad became Finton’s lullaby even though no one knew why that song, and seemingly no other, would serve.

  And that, more or less, was the story of Finton’s birth.

  Confirmation

  Morgan Battenhatch, the eleven-year-old babysitter, kissed Finton’s forehead and buried her nose in his little neck, inhaling the dueling smells of sweet talcum powder and Sunlight soap from his freshscrubbed skin. “He’s adorable, Mrs. Elsie.” She cooed and cradled him in her confident arms as she crossed the threshold to take him to church on the first Sunday morning in April—Finton’s first mass. The child gazed up at the underside of Morgan’s chin, occasionally waving a chubby hand at the split ends of her straight, blonde hair and warbling a pleasant, private language.

  “Poor Morgan,” Elsie Moon would say whenever she recounted the event. “She was always a bit… strange.”

  “Finton was the sacrifice,” Nanny Moon would become fond of saying, glancing under her glasses from her knitting or the Bible.

  Morgan was being confirmed that day at the Sacred Heart of Mary church, and Finton’s presence would render the occasion more auspicious. “Poor Morgan,” as she was often called, looked quite refined for a girl whose mother was a witch and whose father had died when she was a child. Given the squalor of the Battenhatch house, no one questioned Morgan’s preference for eating the occasional meal with the Moons, and now that they had Finton, it gave the girl something to keep her occupied. The Moons, simply put, were her anchor in the world. “It’s like bringing the savage to God,” said Nanny Moon. At a young age, Morgan spent a lot of time with the Moon women, learning about religion, men, and the evils of the world. She didn’t get along with her own mother and, almost imperceptibly, she had gained the status of unofficial adoptee and babysitter.

  With Finton nestled in her arms, she proudly stepped over the threshold in a perilously long, white dress. Because of the heat, Elsie had shortened the sleeves of the second-hand garment, but she had neglected to hem it for ease of gait. The two siblings—Clancy and Homer—were already stuffed into the sweltering Valiant, where they squabbled over the back seat. While Clancy repeatedly punched him in the shoulder and ordered him to sit up, three-year-old Homer lay stretched across the seat, determined to have it all to himself. Their father leaned indifferently against the side of the car, stealing a last cigarette before committing to the drive. Their mother, meanwhile, was rummaging through her black handbag, preparing to leave the house and asking, “Now have ya got everything, girl?”

  Morgan’s occupied arms were trying to nudge Elsie through the door. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Prayer book?”

  “In my purse.”

  “Got yer purse?”

  “Yup.” She hoisted her right shoulder as evidence.

  “Envelope?” The envelope contained money for the church collection. Elsie had laid it on the fridge, and Morgan had forgotten to slip it into her bag.

  “Shit!” She wheeled around, an abrupt about-face motion that instigated an unfortunate chain of events. Morgan’s weak knees, shaky hands, and silky white gloves combined with the forward momentum of tripping in her hem to generate a thrust and lift that launched the child into the bright April air, a flight that was aborted by the kiss of his tender cheek on the jagged corner of the concrete doorstep. His blanket picked up some pebbles as his tiny body rolled over three times, falling away from the step.

  He did not cry, but lay peeping up at them from the ground, dazed and confused. “He’s bleeding!” Morgan squealed as she rushed forward.

  “Oh, bloody Jesus, he’s gonna lose an eye!” Elsie nudged the girl aside and snatched up the child. “You’ll be a state, girl, if ya handles him.”

  Mistrustful of her daughter-in-law’s maternal abilities, and equally suspicious of any physician as young as Abel Adams, the grandmother insisted on accompanying them to the hospital. Since Morgan still had to be confirmed, Tom dropped child, mother, and grandmother off at Emergency. “Church would do him more good,” Nanny Moon clucked to no one as she sat in the waiting room, smoothing her starch-stiff, blue dress with her white-gloved hands and needlessly straightening the brim of her straw hat. “Nothing heals proper without God’s help.” Tired
of being ignored, she took out her Bible and read.

  “Nothing for me to do,” Adams shrugged. He had arrived in his lime-green softball uniform, complete with catcher’s knee and chest pads. Finton’s bleeding had subsided before they reached the hospital, and the cut had closed over by the time Adams could be reached. Upon carefully checking the baby, the doctor declared, “He’s healing fine on his own. Take him home and…” Adams glanced at the grandmother, leaned in closer to Elsie, and lowered his voice. “I’d be more careful with him if I were you.”

  “The nerve of that quack,” Nanny Moon muttered on the way home in the taxi. She was just as perturbed by Adams’ whispering as by his warning, which Elsie relayed as they waited for the cab. The mortified mother sat fuming in the back seat with Finton staring up at her with his guiltless blue eyes. When Elsie finally could stand his gaze no longer, she averted her eyes to the passing scenery. As they passed the Battenhatch house, she glanced worriedly at Nanny Moon, who pretended not to notice.

  “Adams says Finton healed himself.”

  Tom Moon sat at the kitchen table where he practised blowing Camel rings. He watched disinterestedly as Elsie placed Finton in the crib and stood staring at him, hands on hips, shaking her head. Now and then, she’d back away slightly, then circumspectly approach the crib, arms folded across her chest, and peer anxiously at the child.

  “That’s just foolish,” Tom said and squished out a cigarette when his mother darkened the doorway.

  In the dim light, Nanny Moon squinted and said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a bit odd, that one.”

  Taking notice of his wife’s dismay, Tom sat blowing zeroes over his son’s head. “He’s branded now,” Nanny Moon said with a toss of her silvery head. “He might be took for a Moon with a mark like that.” She made the sign of the cross over his head, then ambled away, still mumbling to herself.