“I thought I might be all right, but that first night I couldn’t stand the sight of ya. I bawled like a banshee and you just kept lookin’ at me like you wuz questionin’ every single thing—and I could tell you didn’t like me no more than I liked you.
“I said to Tom, ‘B’y, I don’t know if I can handle this. If I has to spend the night, and every night after, with that thing lookin’ at me… I’m as like to smother it with a pillow as beat it against the wall.’ You shoulda seen his face.” She started to cough violently, the bed shaking with the strain on her body. Finally, after several minutes of trying to regain her composure, she resumed her tale.
“Tom looked absolutely mortified,” she said hoarsely. “But he never said a thing, just took off. Not much longer, they came. They had me on painkillers and booze to take the edge off. Your father was the ringleader, along with Phonse Dredge, that bloody sleeveen. I remember the priest and the nun. Your mother was in the doorway lookin’ like she wanted nothing to do with it, and yet there she was. There was one or two more, but I couldn’t say who.
“‘I’ll take care of ’im like he was me own,’ Elsie said. Tom took you and handed you off to her, and I can still remember the relief. I wasn’t sure it was right, but it felt right. I’m still not sure, though. Anyways…” she paused as if to appraise her options, while appearing to choke back another fit of coughing. “… it’s neither here nor there. They gave you to Elsie and the goddamn thing dropped ya. Ya still never cried, mind ya. All she said was ‘oops’ or some useless thing. The nun picked you up and shoved ya into her arms again.
“They all left then, except for Tom. He said, ‘We all agreed this was best, Miss Bridie. You’re in no state, and we’ll gladly look after him. When he’s old enough, we’ll tell him what we did. But for now, it’s best to pretend he’s ours. Best for you. For Morgan. For Elsie. Everybody.’”
I was sobbing like a youngster meself then. I remember touching Tom’s face and sayin’, ‘What about him?’ I said, meaning the baby.” She looked at Finton then, and he thought his heart would stop. “Meaning you.”
“What did he say?” Finton asked.
“‘Especially him,’ he said. He was on his way out, but he stopped and said one last thing. ‘I’ll let him come to see you once in a while. But you can’t tell him or anyone. Not even Morgan. ’Cause if the boy finds out, he’ll never forgive you. Or us.’
“‘God have mercy on our souls,’ I said, and I bawled my eyes out long after he was gone. I wanted to say something all this time. But I figured you’d hated me and everyone else. And that would leave you all alone, for sure. Worse than meself.”
She coughed and looked at Finton again. “I weren’t very good after that. I sent for Morgan a week or so later, but I wasn’t ever the same. I weren’t much good after Gordie drowned, but I been worse since they took you. I knows that much. I knows when I’m not feelin’ right. But I got the cancer, see, now. And I figures it’s time.”
As Finton fell stunned and silent, a gust of wind came up and rattled the window pane. He didn’t know what to think, but he had the urge to run home and confront his mother—he needed her to put it right, to tell him Miss Bridie was a lying old witch who only tormented him for pleasure.
“Oh, I s’pose they meant well,” Miss Bridie said, as if she’d been reading his thoughts. She coughed again and had to close her eyes, to keep herself from vomiting. “So did I. It was some hard.” She reached out and laid a feeble, cold hand atop his young one. “And you wanna know the kicker? Your father is still your father.”
The words were like a riddle, the answer all too obvious—but, surely, there must be some other meaning. It felt as if she was consuming his soul, drawing his breath and spirit into her own body. The room closed in around him, and he turned to flee. But Morgan grabbed him tighter. He struggled to wrench himself free, but she wouldn’t relent until he had ceased squirming.
Finton looked to his captor. “Do you believe her?” he asked.
An eerie light flickered in Morgan’s eyes. “You know as much as I do.”
He turned to the old woman, whose eyes were still shut. “I don’t believe you.”
Her eyes opened and pierced his soul. He tried to bolt again, but Morgan caught him, wrapped both arms around him, and forced him to stand still. There, he felt strangely safe and significant, as if they were part of the same body.
He turned his face away from Miss Bridie, into Morgan’s breast, even as he yelled at her. “You could’ve told me ages ago.”
For several seconds, the old woman couldn’t speak, though her lips kept moving, attempting to form words. When she licked her lips, Finton could hear the scraping of tongue on dry flesh. “Telling you now, sure.”
Tears rose to the corners of his eyes. “Why now?”
“Everything in its time,” she said, and as she resumed coughing, her eyes squeezed shut. The bile in her throat seemed to squeeze out from under her lids, and Finton feared they would never reopen. But she did open them. Her face contorted in anguish. “None of us were fit, sure.” She gasped for air, licking her lips and wheezing. “That one over there... she belongs to me brother Jacob.”
“Morgan’s your daughter, Miss Bridie. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Have mercy on me soul,” she said. “It warn’t wrong or nuttin’. That’s what they told us. What did I know, out there in that shitty old house on the Shore? Sure, who could we tell? How did we know what was wrong or right? There was no one to be tellin’ except for the priest, and he was the worst of all, sure.” When she coughed, he thought for sure she would die, as each bark seemed to come from the pit of her being, straining to turn itself inside out. Finally, when she’d managed to calm herself and was able to stop coughing, she continued. “That’s why I called for you. You can make it right.”
He shook his head. “It don’t work like that.”
“Don’t it? You don’t even know how it works. Anyone talked to you about it?” Her eyes narrowed as if to slice him with her gaze. “They’re all scared of you.” This time, the way she’d said “you” made him feel accused.
“Ya got the dirt in ya, b’y—and we both knows where you got it from.”
Finton nearly choked with indecision. Morgan appeared ready to grab him again, and although he struggled to maintain his distance, he nonetheless fell forward into her arms and buried his face in her bosom. Once there, he wanted only to remain until that crazy woman had died or stopped talking.
“What do you want from me?” he murmured into Morgan’s chest, confused by a hideous cocktail of nostalgia and nausea.
“You already know,” Miss Bridie wheezed.
“I can’t do it.”
“Not to make me better, b’y—is that what you thought?”
Lifting his head from its haven, he looked towards Miss Bridie and shrugged, unsure of how to respond. But she saved him the trouble.
“No one loves me.” He kept staring at her, fascinated at the things he was hearing. She coughed again. “I need you to do… what no one else could.” She trained her eyes towards Morgan and nodded. “She don’t have it. Destructive little bitch. You got it all, sure.” Again with the “you” as she stared into his soul.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’m dying, b’y.”
“She’s not,” Morgan interjected, wringing her fingers.
“Listen to me. Like this.” Miss Bridie took his hands and placed them over her left breast; Finton feared he would faint, and yet he allowed it. “See, it’s the cancer in me. It hurts so bad I could kill someone.” She licked her lips again. “Just think of the pain—of stoppin’ it. Then picture me not breathin’ no more.”
His palms throbbed, suddenly craving the blood inside her chest. “I don’t want to.” He jerked his hands away and, stepping backward, struck his leg on something sharp.
Morgan stepped forward and pressed a hand to his shoulder, shooting her mother a questioning look.
> “Sure, he can always go,” Miss Bridie rasped. “I just thought he might like to do me this. Himself.”
“I can’t.”
“Please, b’y—if ya have any pity for me at all.”
He closed his eyes, inhaled wearily, and thought about what she was asking. All his life he’d been told it was wrong to hurt anyone. He’d devoted most of his life to healing, not destroying. And yet, he had to wonder, if sometimes destruction was necessary if healing was to truly begin—or maybe destruction was healing. Finally, he opened his eyes and tried to sound confident in his choice. “I’ll try.”
“Thank you.” Her smile was unexpectedly radiant. Again, she placed his hands on her chest, above her heart, its rhythm unhurried, the odd beat skipped. He imagined the gradual slowing of her pulse. He heard the last breath leave her body and felt her heart stop, her pulse fade to nothing. Even with his eyes closed, he could feel her gaze. She was inside his head, her mouth bursting wide open like that painting of “The Scream” a teacher had shown him.
Thank you, she kept saying to him, over and over. He could feel the pain leave her body. Could feel her recede, slipping away. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek and, suddenly, he was on the Planet of Solitude, sitting beneath the familiar white apple tree, with Miss Bridie in his arms, her head on his lap. No wind. No light. No breath. Eyes open. Hair fallen to red, closer to the colour of the young woman’s tresses in the picture in the hallway. The lines faded from her face, leaving only a peaceful girl with silent features.
As he leaned over and kissed her cold forehead, a tear slid down his cheek.
Lifting his head, he could see what the Planet of Solitude had so long hidden from him. All around, as far as his eyes could see, the corpses were piled high like sandbags in anticipation of a great flood. Unfamiliar, dead faces peered out at him with unseeing eyes. The ground was sand covered, with grassy green knolls rising up at random. Beyond the rotted corpses stretched endless miles of smouldering bog beneath a sky comprised of ink-black clouds racing across a dark, distant plane.
A voice called out to him. His head jerked backward.
“Finton.”
He opened his eyes. Morgan was beside him, shaking him by the shoulders. “Let go,” she said. “Let go. She’s gone.”
He pulled his hands away from Miss Bridie’s chest and wiped them in his shirt. Eyes wide open, her face was frozen in the shape of a moan. No more wheezing. No rise and fall of her breast.
When the phone rang the next afternoon, it was for Tom, and everyone knew why. “Yes, Father,” he said as he wrote down some details on a piece of paper provided by his wife. When he hung up, they were all looking at him—the entire family, united in various forms and degrees of melancholy. “Father Power wants me to dig her grave.”
Both Elsie and Nanny Moon complained about the injustice of the request, but Tom said, “I’m lucky to have the work—and maybe it’s only right that it’s me, after all.”
Homer stood up and said, “I can help.”
A glimmer of gratitude rose to his father’s eyes, prompting Finton to say, “I’ll go too.” Even Clancy nodded and said, “I might as well go too, I s’pose.”
“Fine.” Elsie folded her arms across her chest. “It’ll make your father’s work go faster.”
All four Moon men got aboard the Galaxy and made the long drive through Darwin and up the winding, dirt road to Darwin Cemetery. Following the instructions he’d gotten from Father Power, Tom knew where to go and what to do. He stopped at the shack and grabbed four shovels, then they walked for a long time, around hundreds of graves, until they found the spot marked with a white, wooden cross. “Grab a shovel, b’ys.” Each young man took a shovel and followed his lead. He showed them where to dig and told them how far down to go.
Finton followed the instructions, but his heart wasn’t in it, and his mind was elsewhere. He felt dead inside, his thoughts paralyzed, fixated on imagining what his father and Miss Bridie had done together in her bed. How must Elsie have felt when she found out? Surely, she must have wanted to kick his arse outta the house. But with two youngsters already, maybe it was the prospect of getting another one that caused her to hang on. Either way, he didn’t think much of his father. And he didn’t care much for his mother’s actions either. Whose boy was he now? What place did he belong to? As for his relationship with Morgan, well, he didn’t even want to think about that part just yet because the ramifications were horrifying. And now Miss Bridie—supposedly his mother—was dead and gone, and she didn’t even have to worry about any of it anymore.
“I don’t see the point in this,” Clancy said, even as he tossed a shovelful of dirt to one side on a mound he’d created. “She won’t know the difference.”
“We’ll know the difference,” said Homer.
“And Morgan,” said Tom. “It’ll matter to her.”
“Miss Bridie don’t know the difference,” said Finton, looking at no one, even though he could feel their collective gaze upon him. He wondered if Homer and Clancy knew the truth, but, given the family propensity for secrecy, he was almost certain of their ignorance. “But we’d all want the same done for us,” he finished.
While the boys kept digging, Tom leaned on his shovel and stared at his youngest.
“Wonder if she’s goin’ to heaven or hell,” Clancy mused.
“I don’t believe in either one,” said Tom. “So it don’t make no difference. All we get in the end is a hole in the ground, a pile of dirt, and a few prayers said over us.”
“That don’t make sense,” said Homer. “That would mean there’s no point to anything.”
Finton thought about so many possible responses to the speculation that he started to get a headache. But what he finally said was, “You don’t know what to believe, so you might as well believe in something as nothing. It’s all the same thing.”
Again, they all exchanged glances while continuing to dig. Tired of their company and filled with gloom, Finton lay down his shovel and went for a walk among the graves. He read the ancient dates, some going as far back as the 1600s, and he read the inscriptions, every one of them beseeching God or the angels to “take this beautiful soul to heaven,” or words to that effect. They all made him sad, but none sadder than the tiniest graves inscribed with dates in months instead of years.
The work was done within an hour, and Tom led the other two boys in a moment of silence while Finton watched from a distance. All three dug the blades of their shovels into the ground and leaned on the handles, with their dirty, white gloves tucked beneath their chins.
When they returned to the car, Finton was waiting in the front seat on the passenger’s side. Then they drove home, Clancy, Homer, and Tom making jokes, laughing and breathing easier than they had all day. But Finton only stared straight ahead as Darwin came into sight, his mood growing darker with each passing moment.
Ever After
Week’s end summoned a surprise hurricane. Morning afforded rain, but the wind arose in the early afternoon with a violent shout that must have rattled every house in Darwin. When the lights went out in the lower part of town, the school closed early, and Finton walked home. His parents had offered to give him a respite from school, considering Miss Bridie’s funeral a couple of days earlier, but he’d gone anyway, sombre and silent, as though something terrible were brewing in his brain. These days he didn’t much care what they wanted him to do.
The hurricane had toppled trees that were older than Nanny Moon, and across the doorstep lay a sprawling spruce. The simple act of wrapping his arms around the lifeless tree and dragging it away to a place where it could do no harm was, in itself, deadening. He couldn’t stop thinking about what Miss Bridie had said and wondering what he should do. Eventually, he would have to confront his parents, but he dreaded the moment, hated the necessity of it. Gradually, he had retreated into his own mind, detached himself from family, and distanced himself from life. More and more, he felt like an alien who’d been dropped
on a doorstep with a note that said, “Please feed my baby,” and the Moons had followed the request to its letter. They fed his body, but not his soul. And now here he was, nearly fifteen years old, bereft of connections.
Inside the house, things never changed. Nanny Moon was in the kitchen, reading or knitting while the wind howled outside like a wounded demon and threatened to separate the house from its foundation. He felt every gust that slammed against the bungalow, and he shuddered in the armchair where he was sprawled, pretending to read The Scarlet Letter. The family had scattered—Homer watched television; Clancy went down the road to his girlfriend’s house; their mother paced the floor and wrung her hands as she gazed out the window. When a particularly bad blow made the windows buckle, she took out her rosary beads. Finton bolted for the bedroom. He wasn’t speaking to God these days and, in fair turnabout, the Lord wasn’t exactly communicating with him. They’d taken a timeout from each other, but, for Finton, it was more than that. There was a black cavern in his heart that tunneled right to his soul. God had taken more from him than he could ever replace, and, furthermore, didn’t seem concerned with making amends; quite the contrary: the Lord seemed intent on absolute, irreparable destruction.
Around five o’clock, Elsie knocked on the bedroom door and opened it a crack.
“Finton, supper’s almost ready.”
Silence.
“Are you coming?”
More silence.
“Battered chicken is your favourite.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Insensible to his hope that she would just give up, she slipped inside, closed the door and sat on the bed. Despite the gloomy darkness and the rain that lashed the window pane, she didn’t turn on a light.
“Are you all right?” she asked. With her right hand only inches from his leg, she could have offered a consoling touch, but didn’t. He was glad. He didn’t want her comforting—not now, not ever. His mother had never been good at mothering. Food and shelter, sure. Check those off. Clothes? Always second-hand, nothing fashionable. As for love and affection, well, motherly hugs were hard to come by. She’d never said she loved him, but probably her own mother hadn’t said it to her. Finton once craved those things, but now he yearned only for solitude—a goal he approached with every moment that passed. More than a goal, it seemed his fate.
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