The Memento

by Christy Ann Conlin

  I worried all the time Pomeline would appear. I had dreams of her looking for us, with that whispering voice singing like a quiet breeze that stirred the leaves of my mind for years to come, asking me where was her body, why was her body missing, why hadn’t we brought her home, why had the dead been left behind? Last night she came to me, my dead love came in. So softly she came that her feet made no din. The days were a blur, and despite that wicked storm the sweltering dry weather came right back and sucked out every bit of moisture, and the world of Petal’s End was as dry as Jenny’s eyes. The heat scorched over us as though Holy Mother Mercy was white-hot with wrath, and there was no relief.

  Years later Jenny would tell us that jubilation filled Estelle when she closed up Petal’s End for there was no one to oppose her. The hired men nailed boards over the windows as Loretta and I left. We passed between the wrought-iron gates on either side of the immense stone walls, gates that would be locked shut for years to come.

  As we headed toward the valley my head was heavy and I’d eaten hardly a thing in days. We drove in silence through Lupin Cove and across the mountain on the Lonely Road by them fields of hay and wildflowers. Loretta finally spoke, with her eyes fixed on the road the entire time.

  “You know I was a Believer,” she said. “The Church of Believers in the Second Coming of the Lord.”

  That was the full name of the church, but people just called them the Believers, and they called themselves that as well. She said nothing more as we drove along the foot of the mountain on the back road until we were in Believer country, surrounded by big farms that encircled the village. She turned down a long lane and we come up to a big house in front of a huge barn and outbuildings. Two children come out, followed by a woman—their mother—and a man who looked like her husband. Next, the grandmother, an elderly lady—Loretta’s mother, as it turned out—stood there in the door with her hands on her heart. All them generations in one house.

  Loretta was close to tears as we got out of the car. The man walked over. “Loretta … Sister.” It was her oldest brother. He didn’t say it in a mean way. He was acknowledging her, like she’d been gone on a trip and they was expecting her back.

  Loretta bowed her head and said, “Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.” Tears then broke through her veneer. Those were the words they spoke to her, she told me later, when they shunned her, when they turned their backs to her and she was sent out from the church and community.

  The grandmother came over and took Loretta by the hand as the man responded.

  “I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

  This is how we come to live with the Believers. I saw then that Loretta’s kitchen bonnet was a version of their head covering, and how she’d never stopped wearing the dresses. They’d cast her out when she was sixteen, and she kept making her clothes in the same style, just with bright flowered fabric. At first the fullness of her secret was astonishing to me. Then I thought of what she and Grampie had concealed, and the secrets I was then keeping myself—there was no more marvelling.

  We lived with Loretta’s family in that house. We had two rooms in the attic at first, and eventually they put us in a house down the road where we lived together like mother and daughter. They had me go to the church school and attired me in their clothing. We went to prayer meeting every Wednesday and Sunday. The women would sit on one side and the men on the other in the meeting hall they’d built from divine inspiration. The Believers were as plain as the Parkers were grand, but they both paid immaculate attention to detail. There was no preacher, just elders in the community, men with short clipped beards. You could not do much as a woman. You kept the hearth, tended to the home—you did as told your life entire. The Believers did not take oaths or vows. There was only one bond and that was with God, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. It was an unforgivable sin to take an oath, for when you undertook this you adopted the dark ways whether you knew it or not. When they talked of this I thought of Art and Jenny, and a fear would come upon me that would take days to settle.

  Our first night in the attic Loretta told me how she’d worked as a cleaning lady in the community and she’d been with a man. She didn’t say much, just that he was full of flattery and told her she was pretty. She wasn’t anything but plain but he knew just what to say. He’d come home at lunch, and she could not resist him. Don’t say a word, he would say, not a word. Her soul had been seized by the burning claws of lust and she’d succumbed and had fallen into sin. That is how she spoke. I tried to resist. I prayed and prayed but the lust rose up in me, Fancy Mosher, and it hung on me like cherry blossoms hang on the trees in spring. She talked more and more like this the longer we lived among them, speaking in a funny way, and speaking often of the Lord and blessings and sin. Over time, she said, her belly had swelled up, and finally her mother spoke to her. Loretta was infatuated with the man and he was going to leave his wife, but of course he did not. She put her baby up for adoption by a family outside of the church. The Believers spoke not of the past to Loretta, for that was part of their way as well—what was done was done and the Lord called you forward. You paid mind to living well and therefore there were no regrets to be had, no sins to carry. If you were weak but willing, the Believers would carry you forward until you could walk on your own, and this is what they did for me. We lived with the Believers for three years, and it seemed that Holy Mother Mercy had finally come. I did not speak of her to them for they did not have the beliefs of the Mountain people.

  It was a simple life. There were no photos or mirrors. We baked our bread and made our preserves. We cooked the meals and sewed the clothes. We had a modest kitchen garden and not even a posy on the kitchen table. The Believers weren’t ones for decoration. It was nothing like Petal’s End. It made me think of Jenny’s revulsion for cut flowers, but not for long—Jenny receded until she was but a silhouette in my mind’s eye.

  They worshipped through holy music, but not with musical instruments. These things were of the world, they said, but the human voice was made by the Lord for speaking words of praise and singing words of worship. We were called to raise up those voices in songs of rejoicing and exaltation. They sang in four-part harmonies, voices united. There were no solos. One voice singing alone was vanity. It was not a sin to sing alone but it was what you did when it was just you and the Lord and He would sing with you. Everything with the Believers was an act of worship. The Believers taught the children to read music once they turned eleven and we sang out of the black hymnal and tune book, the Harmonia Sacra. They had a youth choir and I sang in it, praising the Lord through song, and it seemed that the very act was purifying, reclaiming me from the summer at Petal’s End the year I was twelve. We’d go out singing at Christmas, into the hospitals and the nursing homes. Once during that time I glimpsed Margaret, standing in the back of the room where she worked, all proper in her uniform, and when she turned I saw where she’d been burned. We had been marked.

  I knew not to speak of my family memento among the Believers, and in truth it seemed nothing but a silly story, for I began to believe with all my heart in what they were teaching me, that I could know the spirit of clemency and healing. When I sang in the church, or in the orchards picking apples with the other girls, the fear lifted out of me and flew off like a white bird into the sky, getting smaller and smaller until there was nothing left but eternal blue. The letter Grampie gave me had been left behind in my room at shuttered Petal’s End, forgotten and entombed. The rare instance the shadow of death did reach out from the mountain and cast itself down upon the valley, I prayed and studied the Bible stories. I sang the hymns and heard the melodies of exaltation, but I did not tell Loretta that sometimes, despite all of this, I would wake in the night and think there was no salvation for me.

&n
bsp; My mother did not try to see me, or if she did they never told me. It was later I found out that Ma had finally stopped drinking for good. She had not seen the Light but she was tired and beaten down. Maybe it was Holy Mother Mercy looking after her. I liked to think it was. In church they spoke of fallen angels who lived among us now as dark spirits. I knew Loretta worried that those dark spirits had whispered to Grampie, to the Moshers. She told me I must keep my ears closed to the voices, and if I embraced the Lord then I would be protected, should those voices ever come to me.

  2.

  A Pale-Blue Dress

  WHEN I was fifteen I worked weekends at Spencer’s Country Things. It was a sprawling store in a barn on a nostalgic country road. Tourists and city people loved to come and spend endless time and money. We made wooden furniture and sold country-style home decor furnishings. We had a café and served lunch and tea, down-home cooking. At first I worked in the store, ringing in sales. It was there at the cash, ringing in a lady’s apple pie–scented candles, where I saw Hector come in from the shop, carrying a new furniture set they were using for a display. I recognized him right away, even though he looked older than his twenty-two years. He’d been out of jail a few months and got the job through the church he was going to, the Greater United Church, the one that ran the Bible School. His eyes met mine and he looked at me in a manner that even going to church didn’t take away. Then Hector realized that the teenager in the long dress and bonnet was Fancy Mosher. He blinked slowly, squeezing his eyes open and shut. They called his name—Hector, Hector, are you all right, boy?

  I told Loretta when I got home and she already knew he was working there. Everyone deserves a second chance, she said. For it is not by chance when paths cross again. And of course I would not be telling you this story if it had been any other way.

  At first Hector kept his distance. Sometimes there is so much water under the bridge it can drown you. We got used to each other being in the store and our occasional interactions. We was different versions of ourselves for we were born again.

  The manager, Mrs. Whick, watched us closely. I normally came with Bernice, another Believer girl. In the summer we worked six days a week, Monday to Saturday. In August Bernice came down with summer flu and she took a day off. I covered her shift, cleaning the outdoor tables in the café, and there was a creak behind me. I knew it was Hector from his footstep, but when he spoke my name in his low voice my hands shook. I was the young girl against the stone wall possessed by ecstasy and shame. “Fancy Mosher,” he said again. I lifted my head up and looked into his dark eyes. His face was creased as though he’d taken five years on for every one that had passed. “They sent me for coffee,” he finally said. I poured takeaway cups, with creamers and sugars and stir sticks. There were fresh muffins from the oven and I put them on the tray.

  “It’s been a long time, Fancy,” he said. “I reckon the past is the past.” We didn’t speak of Petal’s End or the fire that ate up his green ferns. He did not ask about the wretched time on the island. He took the coffee and the muffins and his fingers brushed mine.

  Bernice came back the next day still with a cough and they transferred her to the shop and kept me in the café, sweeping and baking. Every morning Hector would come by for his coffee, leaning there, telling me about the furniture the same way he talked about cars and their engines. He would always offer me mints from a small tin he carried in his pocket.

  Though she professed to believe in redemption, Loretta was not fully convinced. “You can feed a wolf all you want but it always glances toward the forest,” she said, which did not seem in keeping with our new beliefs and I told her so, for it seemed he really had changed. Hector was radiant with his new pure ways. He’d join in for the weekly prayer meeting we had on Fridays. In truth it was a staff meeting but the Spencers were religious people and we opened and closed with a prayer, asking for prosperity in our work, and that we might serve the Lord through what we were offering at Spencer’s Country Things.

  We only talked of uncomplicated matters. Hector seemed grateful there was no question that came out of my mouth about what had happened to him and Buddy, his incarceration. Hector did tell me once when he took the morning tray how he had seen the Light in jail. It illuminated a new road, one he had never seen before, one his father scorned—he knew this road was the one for him to now turn down.

  Mrs. Whick had been listening at the door. “The Lord offers salvation to all,” she said, patting his shoulder with each word like she was tapping out a sacred rhythm.

  Hector started coming to our church, on Wednesdays and Sundays, showing up for the long service. He came to Bible study. He studied for his conversion. Hector wanted to believe, just as I did. He took his baptism as I had, in front of the congregation, baptism by pouring—the method of affusion. The Elder held up the shining metal pitcher. The pure water gushed down over Hector’s head. He wept as he accepted the Lord through the cascades covering his face like a moving veil. I had not wept when they’d baptized me, when that veil of water poured down over my eyes. There was nothing pure about me. It did not mean I wasn’t grateful to hide behind it. But inside I knew my prayer for cleansing was futile for I was not born innocent.

  I wore a pale-blue dress and a formal black headdress. Hector wore a white shirt buttoned up, his beard trimmed tight, in the way of the church, according to scripture. It was autumn. We declared our intent to be married by the Lord-in-front-of-His-holy-witness, the congregation, and to receive their blessing of our union. Our families were not invited for we lived separate from them now, since they were of the world and we were God’s people.

  Loretta left the house we lived in and went back to her family, and we began our life there as husband and wife. Hector was just as he was at Petal’s End—muscles rippling through him from his hard manual labour, the way they do in a young man, his tattoo prominent on his arm. A baby came in me right away. A gift from the Lord, they said.

  It all went well and fine until Hector joined the local volunteer fire department. The Elders in the church thought it would be a good contribution to the larger community, and he had all them skills they needed for working on the trucks. The only condition was he didn’t do nothing on Sundays. He started as soon as our baby was born and the problems began almost immediately. He’d got a pardon for his crime, and maybe he’d thought he could start fresh in the world we’d left behind. It was the people he took up with, though. Worst of all, Buddy and his idiot laugh. Hector started staying out later and later, saying there was things to be done at the fire hall, a truck to be polished, an engine to be tuned. The Believers weren’t idiots. We were trusting and willing to give the benefit of the doubt, but not indefinitely. I knew what he was up to soon enough. If there was an idiot, it was me, not wanting to consider he would go back to his old ways. Hector couldn’t stay with nothing for long, moving from this to that. He began coming home late stinking of women, liquor and cigarettes.

  At first I didn’t say a word in protest, hoping it was a stage he was passing through, maybe from the anxiety of being a father. He would hold the baby all careful like he thought she would break. Hector loved his child in a fearful way. And it made him reckless. The worst moment was when I finally did speak up. I told Hector when he come in late one night I knew about his transgressions. First he said nothing. His lips were moving, like he was counting. Then he lifted up his arm and his fist came swinging into my cheek.

  It is a terrible thing to tell.

  The baby cried in her crib and a look came over him. Hector knew he’d made a horrible mistake. He walked out and didn’t come back. Loretta come by the next morning to pick us up to go down to the church to quilt and I wouldn’t let her in. She saw my black eye through the crack in the door. She put her hand on the door and forced it open. The baby was sleeping in my arms. Loretta’s sister come to the door followed by the brother-in-law who was driving the car.

  The men went later and found Hector. The Believers would work with
him, help him find the road again, but Hector was finished. He quit Spencer’s Country Things and got himself a job on an apple farm and started living like he was a teenager again, working all week and partying when he wasn’t.

  The Believers shunned him. They cast Hector out as they had Loretta. He come by the church one day and they knew he was lying when he said he hadn’t been drinking. They said unto him: But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such a one know not to eat.

  For two years after he left I lived back with Loretta and her family.

  When my girl was three I saw Hector driving through town and he saw me. Such a sad, wistful look come over his face as the car moved along.

  I didn’t even think about it. I just did it. I took our little girl and I went to find him at the farm. He wasn’t surprised. The Believers turned their backs to me because I went to him. Even Loretta wasn’t allowed to see me. She wept and said that I could return if I was willing to confess my sins to the Lord.

  It was easy falling back into familiar ways. I wore worldly clothes and high heels, dressing like Ma. Hector’s friends stopped by, and Buddy joked about how Hector had joined a cult but he’d seen the light and come away. Hector lit into a rage, and they ran out the back. Then he closed the door and pressed his forehead on the wood.

  He’d take us to his friends and there wasn’t one house we ever visited that wasn’t rundown and dirty, weeds where a garden should have grown. His drinking, dope-smoking and scheming friends was either older or younger than him—it was like Hector belonged to no generation. I would sit in the car with our child while he’d go in, remembering when Ma would leave me in the car when I was the same age. Then I’d start walking home and Hector would come after us, sometimes in a rage and sometimes calm as could be.