Good to a Fault

by Marina Endicott

  “What was I thinking?” she said. “You need your own.”

  She led them through into the opening arches and pillars, the airy height. They were early, plenty of empty pews. Clary chose one near the front to give the children a better view. She tried balancing the baby-seat on the pew, but it slid off sideways, so she left it on the floor and took Pearce out to stand on her knee. He stared up at the stained glass windows arrowing high above, which Clary had not noticed for years.

  Paul walked by in his black cassock, not yet robed for the service, going to check the readings. What a pure face, Clary thought. A medieval knight’s face. He was thinner. In a month he would be reduced to eyes and a nose. Hard to advise the congregation on love and understanding and human relationships, when his own had failed.

  Trevor watched Paul striding along up to the front. Wearing a long black dress! Nice buttons, and a long pleat in the back, swish, swish—with each long step the dress swung open and closed, swirling around the bottom like icing, or curtains. Paul went to a carved golden eagle with wings holding a big book. Up on the wall was the cross, bare. A big Jesus was right on it in the Catholic church their mom had cleaned in Espanola. Trevor could not look at him poked up on the cross like that: big nails through his feet, between the narrow bones, and a big drop of purply-red blood. Just plain wood was easier to take.

  Dolly found church very irritating. The organ playing too quiet to hear was like something pressing on her. Behind the altar green velvet curtains hid the room of God, the inner secret part, she guessed, where only Paul would be allowed. He came back down the aisle, and Dolly thought he looked happy to see them, like they’d come over to his house by surprise. He leaned over and smiled at Dolly so his face made clean creases and he looked like an older angel. He must like us, Dolly thought.

  “Good to see everybody here,” Paul said to Clary.

  Pleasure welled up in her at the achievement of getting them all here, all dressed and fed, all in a row.

  Behind Clary a woman leaned forward to touch Pearce’s cheek. “You have a lovely baby!” she said.

  The music changed, and everyone was standing, so Clary didn’t have time to explain. She helped Trevor and Dolly leaf through their hymn books, and sang softly to help with the tune. Pearce pulled her head down toward his face. He smelled good, he was all right. No more Benadryl. Clary prayed the first successful prayer she’d managed lately: thank you, thank you that he was not hurt.

  Church was like a movie, Trevor thought, but you’re in it. The words mostly washed over him, but when the bald guy from the audience walked up to read, he heard parts of that: I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks, I bent down to them and fed them. Like Clary’s cheek. Everything tucking in so nicely there beneath her pointy little chin. When she lifted Pearce to her cheek Trevor always wished it was him. When she bent to kiss him at night, he saw the lines on her face, and breathed in her looping shiny hair and her neck. She smelled like soap. His own mother smelled like apples. He could feel the middle of his body empty, a dark cave running up and down through him, because his mother was sick. He decided he would kill Jesus, and be the new Jesus, and then he could get her better. Who cares that he would be the devil then.

  Dolly prayed at first—since she had to be there—a short ferocious prayer that was no question but an order: Get her well. Her forehead pressing on the pew, staring into her clenched fists. When she stopped, exhausted, she watched Pearce’s foot dangling beside her. His foot trembled like a bird’s as he reached up to touch Clary, to be sure he was still being held. Poor Pearcey, Dolly thought, and tears began the long ride up into her eye. Then she remembered how boring stupid church was, and tears receded, and she yelled at God again in her head.

  Clary was pleased by how peaceful the children were. This meditative time was good for them. Unfortunately the lesson was that difficult letter of St. Paul, put to death fornication. But maybe they had drifted off to whatever thoughts children drift to. Watching Pearce’s intelligent gaze she wondered what he was thinking, with his white-paper mind; what images were being painted on his brain. What indelible photographs were printed on Trevor’s and Dolly’s, already.

  “You must change your life,” Paul said, and it was obviously the opening of the sermon, so she’d missed the Gospel. “Rilke says that—and I know I’ve quoted Rilke before,”—he glanced at Clary—“In the poem called The Archaic Torso of Apollo… St. Paul says it too, in the letter to the Colossians. He promises change in the new life in Christ, in which all are equal.

  “Don’t get distracted by the list, the fornicating and the unclean desires and so on. Go straight to the core: when we have clothed ourselves with the new self, there will no longer be any distinctions: Christ is all and in all.” Paul stopped and shuffled his index cards, which he never referred to but seemed to use as a prop against nervousness. “It’s a tempting list—to be on the lookout for nasty stuff, in ourselves and in other people, that dingy side of life. But the injunction continues: we must get rid of all the dross. Anger, wrath and malice, slander and abusive language—Of course I include myself in this. We must struggle against the temptation to malice, even when it’s clothed in a self-righteous vestment of indignation against someone else’s perceived sin.”

  His own indignant energy made his face look burnished. He needs to let himself be angry, Clary thought. Candy Vincent sat in the choir, her permanent can-do smile in place.

  “One of the failings St. Paul warns against comes up again in today’s Gospel—greed. Jesus warns us against a specific kind of greed in Luke 12: greed for the future. The rich man has had a miraculous harvest, too big for his barns. Instead of allowing the extra to flow into the hands of the poor he says to himself, ‘I’ll tear down these petty little barns and build big barns so I can keep all this for my Self, and eat and drink and be merry for a long time.’ I’m paraphrasing, of course.” Paul had an unassuming smile, acknowledging his own inadequacy but relying on your great mercy and kindness. “The rich man glorying in his harvest and thinking ahead to the party is going to die. He forgot that.”

  He looked down to Dolly and Clary, with one arm around Trevor and Pearce in her lap.

  “We forget. It’s hard to live with the constant understanding of death in the forefront of our minds. Scholars of old kept a skull on their writing desks to help. The reminder of imminent death, memento mori, is one of the greatest spurs we have to right action.

  “When I was a boy my mother fell gravely ill. I knew she was going to die, and that I would be left an orphan with my younger sister to look after. My mother knew it too, and our conversations during those months of her illness have been of use to me all my life. She was given radiation treatment and had a radical mastectomy—they were very radical in those days—and in fact she did not die. But the strength my sister and I received from her in those hard days stayed with us even when we returned to ordinary life and were able to go back to taking her for granted, which I still do, to this day, unless she phones to scold me for it…”

  He allowed the congregation to laugh, to release some tension. He could not tell how Clary’s children were taking this. They didn’t seem to be listening, but of course appearances meant nothing, with children. With anyone.

  “And there are other deaths. As you all must know by now, my wife Lisanne and I have separated.”

  He stopped, he remembered to breathe.

  “A little death, the death of a marriage, is another one of those hard times when life becomes clearer. We thought we had stored up for the future, but we’ve had an early frost…”

  His mouth turning down as if he disliked his own phrase, he shifted his cards again.

  “God directs us to be joyful and free, unhindered by anxiety, and not to hang on to the stuff of this world, material goods or relationships, as our salvation. They cannot be. He tells us to have the courage to be open to one another, by compassionate understanding and by abiding, kind attention to our neighbour
s. To see God in those around us. If we are lucky, we see the God Hosea reminds us of, in those who lift infants to their cheeks, bend down to them and feed them.”

  That time Paul looked directly at the children, and at Clary, and smiled at them all.

  She bent quickly to rearrange the car seat, unable to bear his approval. She’d been the catalyst for this disaster, let’s not forget, she thought. The least she could do was try to keep them safe for a while, before…She prayed one word, Lorraine.

  Then the congregation were rising for the hymn, and automatically she rose too.

  Dolly and Trevor stuck close to Clary at coffee hour. Weaving through the heedless crowd of congregation to the coffee table, Clary carried a glum consciousness that, like her own goodness, church was a fraud and a sham, and she should not be there herself, let alone dragging children along with her. But Paul was not a sham, and he seemed to be pretty stalwart in faith.

  Trevor tugged her arm, wanting to get closer to the cake: the August birthday cake, made by April Anthony, who remembered the birthdays of the parish. She had listed the August people in icing down one side, and Trevor badly wanted a piece with writing.

  “Two pieces, please,” Clary told Mrs. Anthony. Did she make birthday cakes because she was named after a month, Clary wondered, or had she even noticed that? Was April’s birthday in April? Clary’s mother would have known. Mrs. Anthony handed her two pieces of cake, one with plain icing, and one with names.

  Trevor snaked his hand up and grabbed the name piece, so rudely that Clary stared at him in surprise. He crammed part of the cake into his mouth and ducked down, disappearing under the table.

  “Trevor!” Clary said, remembering that last table he went under. “Dolly, take this—” She bent and reached blindly under the table for his skinny arm, and pulled him out. “Trevor, it’s okay, you’re allowed to have cake. There’s lots.” She was speaking almost in a whisper, her face close to his. “Do you have to pee?”

  Trevor shook his head. Then he nodded.

  “Okay, come on, I’ll show you where the bathrooms are.”

  Dolly had vanished in the crowd, but Pearce, thank God, was still slumped sleeping in the car seat, safe enough among the church women. Clary took Trevor to the washroom.

  Dolly was looking for the way into that secret room back there, behind the green velvet curtains. Everybody had left the church part, it was all hushed. She climbed the chancel steps on quiet feet and dodged around the altar to where Paul had stood. It was weird back there. She stroked the green velvet drape along the wall, searching for a break where you could go through. Nothing. Impatient, she reached over to the far edge and scooped the velvet up sideways.

  Nothing! Just the wall. Well. That was a lesson all by itself.

  “Dolly?” It was Paul. Her stomach swooped—what if she was trespassing?

  “Hey, sweetheart,” he called. “Your—Clary is looking for you. She’s got Trevor and Pearce and they’re ready to go home. Are you finding your way around up there?”

  If the room behind wasn’t even there, how holy was it anyway? Dolly skipped down the stairs and ran down the aisle, past Paul waiting at the back door. There might be seconds of cake.

  Paul stood outside the church hall after they’d gone. The light blinding through the branches, a fluting bird’s cascading whistle. A lost meadowlark, singing in the noonday sun, to the silent city around them. It wasn’t so far for him to have flown from the river fields on a Sunday. Quam deus in mundi delectus est—God so delighted in the world…Paul lifted his face to feel the sun and thanked God, thanked God, as he did almost all the time. When he wasn’t carping, carping for whatever ills he felt afflicted by at the moment. When light glanced around him and the bird poured light in his ears and the dust rose off the asphalt from the recently departed cars of his parishioners, he was convinced that he lived on God, that the earth itself was God itself, as self and selfless as—

  He went inside, leaping up the stairs three at a time. This was a workday, after all; there were doors to lock and service reports to sign, and then his hospital visits. And remembering his duty toward Joe Kane, he thought there might be a magnetic chess set in the Sunday school cupboard.

  18. Clearwater

  While they were eating lunch after church Moreland came back, with Grace in full overdrive, wearing knife-pressed aqua, her grey hair permed tight. Up since four herself with Pearce, Clary felt a little bedraggled.

  “You need a break,” Grace announced to the children. “Moreland’s going to hang around here getting in the way, helping your uncle, and I’m taking you out to Clearwater.”

  Grace and Moreland had a cabin at Clearwater Lake, a large slough in the middle of the bald prairie, where a sandy beach waxed and waned depending on the water level. By this time in August it would be drying, but it had its own charm. Impossible, though.

  “Grace, we can’t go anywhere, I have to be at the hospital—”

  “Nonsense, Lorraine can do without you for a couple of days.”

  “And I can’t leave Darwin to do all this by himself.”

  “Not by himself, I just told you. Moreland’s got a bee in his bonnet, he thinks they can get it done by Tuesday. He’s got Henley for the wiring, and Henley’s cousin has end-of-roll carpet from when they redid the golf course—they’ve got it all figured out. We’ll get the kids out of this rubble and dust, who knows what it’s doing to the baby.”

  “But Mrs. Pell—”

  “I’ll take her too. She better not give me any grief, that’s all.”

  Mrs. Pell stumped into the kitchen as Grace said that, but Grace was hard to faze. “Hey, there,” she said immediately. “I was just telling Clary that I’m going to take them out to the lake for the weekend. You get yourself packed and you can come too.”

  Mrs. Pell wheeled around and headed to her room to pack.

  “That was quick,” Grace said. “Now can I have a coffee?”

  Dolly wouldn’t be allowed to see her mom anyway, so what did it matter where they went? She rode alone in the Pontiac with Grace, who blabbed on the whole time about Fern (interesting) and Davina (boring), so Dolly didn’t have to worry about talking. At Rosetown, Grace got chicken for supper. Clary stopped too. Grace had told Dolly that Clary would see their car, but Dolly was still relieved. They sat at dingy picnic tables to eat, while trucks roared and blew fumes past them. It was a hot day.

  South from Rosetown—stupid name for an ugly town, Dolly thought—another half hour, and another, and then Grace turned down on gravel and then bumped along a dirt road, and over a little rise they found the lake, shining pinky-silver in the evening sun. Around it the land was flat. On one side of the lake stood a row of cabins and a few old trailers parked forever, grey plywood skirts nailed in around their bottoms. They drove along the row of haphazard huts, Grace pointing out a round one made of concrete blocks, and one sparkling green and brown with broken beer bottles set into the plaster. At the end of the row Grace turned into a little parking place behind the last cabin, and turned off the car. She stared back along the road.

  “Hope she remembers the turnoff,” Grace said.

  Dolly hoped so too. She was worn out from being alone with Grace.

  “We’ll take our things in anyway, and get the cooler set up. Take your shoes off on the porch there—we don’t need any housework here.”

  Dolly was embarrassed not to have known to take her shoes off, even though this place was a tumbledown old shack. She left her new pink shoes side by side and hopped in the door. Inside, the cabin was painted pale green, like school bathrooms, and the walls were made out of flimsy pressed board.

  “Moreland and I started building this place when we were in high school,” Grace told her. “You go pick a bunk.”

  The other room was long, with three sets of bunks, curtains strung between to make fake bedrooms. A window looked out on the water. Dolly sat on the closest bunk. She thought she would wait there till Clary arrived. It all smelled
funny.

  “Hey,” Grace said from the doorway. “I need some wood carried in from the back, and then you can run down to the store and get some pop.”

  Dolly stared at her, this woman who was not her mother, or her grandmother, not even Clary who was taking care of them. It was on the tip of her tongue to say no, but she didn’t mind going out by herself. When they’d finished with the wood Grace gave her a twenty and told her two cartons: one cokes, the other any kind she liked. Twenty dollars. It looked big in her hand. She put it in her pocket and walked back out to the little road. Way down by the road was the orange-painted shed that was the store. She walked along the dirt track, hearing the pop, pop of grasshoppers exploding from the grass and sinking back down with a click of their legs, or their wings, she didn’t know which. A coyote looked over the tall grass behind the fence, only twenty feet away, the same colours as the dry grass: half grey, half blonde. She walked closer, thinking she might tame it and then they’d have a dog, but it turned and loped away. Lope, that was the word for that kind of running. Lope, lope, she tried running that way herself, but it was too hot.

  A pickup truck and another truck sat by the pumps in front of the store. A woman in the pickup putting on more lipstick. The closed-in truck was empty.

  Dolly climbed the step onto the wooden slat porch and pulled open the door.

  For a second she thought it was her dad standing at the counter. From the back his skinny legs reminded her, and the way his jean jacket hung over his butt. Her heart jumped and she took two quick steps forward, but the guy turned with a mean look to see who was there, and it was not him, of course it wasn’t. Her dad was far gone. This guy went out past her, walking too close so she had to pull back against the rack of candy. He had sunglasses on. When he got to the door he looked back and saw her still staring at him. He stared back, then went out.