by Joan Crate
“Rose Marie.”
“Sorry. Rose Marie.”
He went on, telling her about the town. At least he didn’t bring up Billy Nimsic. Besides, his banter tempered her silence, making her feel less awkward. She was starting to discover that she liked being informed. At St. Mark’s, Mother Grace told her about a tenth of what went on, and the girls in the dorm kept things from her too. She was nineteen years old, for crying out loud, and it was time she learned about life outside St. Mark’s. Learning was probably what the Mother House expected her to do for three months, though she couldn’t imagine they wanted her to experience everything she had in just two days in Black Apple. She had even tried coffee, and she liked it, at least with sugar and a bit of tinned milk.
“Time to turn in,” Cyril said, and he waited for her to rise from the step. “Real nice talking to you, Rose Marie,” he added as he held the door open. “Maybe see you tomorrow evening.”
Once she was in her bedroom, she remembered to write to Mother Grace. She pulled a pad of foolscap from her suitcase. But she was restless, her situation in Black Apple was difficult to explain, and she couldn’t think of what to put on the page other than the obvious.
Dear Mother Grace,
I arrived at Black Apple safe and sound. I am boarding at a house in town run by a widow. Unfortunately, Father Patrick has died.
No, that was too abrupt. I am truly sorry to be the bearer of such sad news, she added. She was about to ask if she could return to the school, when she remembered Mother Grace telling her that the Mother Superior of the order had made it “very clear” that she would have to serve her time in a parish before being admitted to the Mother House, that no special accommodation would be made. Heavens, they might send her someplace even worse than Black Apple—a town where every house had a “no Indians allowed” policy, and there was not one friendly face.
Father Patrick’s housekeeper is very nice, and I have met Father Seamus, the priest of Coal River who is filling in for the time being. Now I’ll say my prayers and go to bed. I will write you a letter once I’ve settled in.
She got up, tucked the note in one of the stamped envelopes Mother Grace had supplied her with, and stuffed it in her raincoat pocket to mail the next day. Idly, she flipped open the Bible: And after all thy abominations and fornications, thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth, when thou wast naked, and full of confusion, trodden under foot in thy own blood. Oh my. She slammed the book shut.
As soon as she heard Cyril leave the bathroom, she went in. Her face in the mirror looked drawn, her eyes, staring back at herself, startled. She was frightened, yes, of course, but something else. She examined her expression. Alert. Well, she had to be alert here; danger was everywhere. Not that she was a stranger to it. If she thought about it, she had to admit that there had been all sorts of danger at St. Mark’s, but like most of the other girls, she had finally grown adept at avoiding furious nuns and mean girls. She had even, more or less, become used to the shadow sister. But Black Apple was different. Here she didn’t know what the dangers were or where they might come from.
She pushed onto her tiptoes and leaned closer to the mirror, examining her eyes. Yes, alert and even bright. Though the town scared her, she had met all kinds of people, and some were even nice. She had more room to manoeuvre than she’d ever had at St. Mark’s, and maybe a bit of freedom to act and not just react. Maybe. She recalled the sound of bone hitting concrete and shivered. Maybe not.
After washing and brushing her teeth, she went back to her room and undressed. She was nervous, scared stiff, in fact, but the flutter in her breast felt something like excitement. She knelt by the bed and said five full decades of the rosary and then two run-throughs of the Orphans’ Prayer. An hour had gone by before she had settled down enough to sleep.
36
The Letter
MRS. REES LED Rose Marie to the back of the rectory. Standing at the door of a large office with a picture of a sun-stroked Jesus hanging over the desk, she said, “This is Father Seamus’s office when he’s in Black Apple.” She shook her head. “He wants me to wash his office floor and dust the shelves twice a week, but he cancelled the monthly Friday-night dinners for the needy because he says I don’t have time for them. Peculiar, he is.” She took Rose Marie’s hand. “Follow me,” she instructed, leading her past a spartan bedroom to the small room at the end of the hall.
“This is Father Patrick’s office. Or was. I’ll get you to clean it, dear. I just can’t.” She sighed heavily, and Rose Marie, afraid Mrs. Rees was about to weep, hurried over to the desk.
The shelves overtop were crammed with books. Das Kapital, she read, The Communist Manifesto, The Ninety-five Theses, Psychology and Religion, NAACP and Labor, The Man Who Never Died, Heart of Darkness, The Origin of Species. Heavens, she hadn’t heard of one of them! Looking to the next shelf, she was comforted to see what looked like a row of Bibles, though their various names and sizes confused her: Wycliffe’s Bible, the King James Version, Tanakh, the Quaker Bible, the Geneva Bible, Webster’s Revision, Concord Literal Version, Douay-Rheims Bible, Confraternity Edition.
“I’ll fetch the cleaning supplies,” Mrs. Rees murmured, bustling away.
As soon as she was out the door, Rose Marie picked up a photograph of a young nun from the desk, noticing how the frame was worn from handling, the glass spotted with fingerprints. Studying the sculpted ridge of cheek, the uplifted eyes, the inspired expression of a refined young woman ready to go forward and do God’s work, she wondered if it was a picture of Mother Katharine Drexel, who had “worked with the less fortunate races of America”—Mother Grace had impressed upon her the previous year after Mother Katharine’s death. Her gaze fell to the delicate hands pressed together, the shaped nails, and when she looked back to the eyes, she suddenly knew, despite the black-and-white of the photograph, that they were blue.
“Lovely, isn’t she?” Mrs. Rees said, coming up behind her, almost causing her to jump out of her skin. “Father Patrick was always looking at that photo, he was.”
“It’s Mother Grace.”
“They correspond, you know. Corresponded. A letter from her always put him in a good mood, and he’d read it over a few times before writing her back. Had me mail the reply at the post office, and sure enough, when I returned, he’d be burning her letter in the stove. Once I said to him, ‘Father Patrick, is there something there you don’t want me to see?’ That tickled him. ‘There’s nothing in our letters you’d find anything but ordinary, Mrs. Rees, but I’m not so sure about some.’ ”
Rose Marie wondered who the some were, and after Mrs. Rees left, it came to her that one of them could be Father Seamus. It was normal for priests and nuns to send letters, she knew, at least concerning church business. But only when necessary. Father Seamus, she was certain, would object to anything more.
“Sacrilegious,” old Father David and Father William used to warn students, “not to give a man of God the utmost respect.” But she wasn’t listening to Father William anymore. She wasn’t so sure about Father David either.
As she dusted, washed, and polished, the room grew warmer and a soft chuckle rolled through the air. She liked Father Patrick’s office; it was comfortable, and she took special care of the old leather chair he had sat in, rubbing in oil with her fingertips. When she picked up the cleaning supplies to go, she took a last look at Mother Grace—Sister Grace, then. Good night, dearest, she heard a man’s voice murmur.
* * *
“You have written, haven’t you?” Mrs. Rees asked Rose Marie during the afternoon snack she called “tea.” “That school of yours? Mother Grace?”
“Yes, I dropped Mother Grace a line, but I was too tired to write much.” Anxiety. “I don’t know what to say. Mother Grace will worry if she knows I’m boarding in a house full of men.”
Mrs. Rees looked troubled. “Rose Marie, there’s something I need to tell you about that landlady of yours.”
“I know about M
rs. Mooney’s past, if that’s what you mean.”
“You do? Who told you, dear?”
“Cyril.”
“Cyril Brown, my, my. Mr. Rees and some of his mates call him ‘Tiny,’ they do. Such a big man but gentle as a lamb. He’d make some girl a lovely husband.”
There was no reason for her to feel embarrassed, but she did.
* * *
Her first Sunday at Black Apple, Rose Marie slept until noon. With the exception of two, possibly three times over the years when she had been ill, that had never happened before. Thankfully, she hadn’t dreamt the whole night through. She had simply fallen into a deep, black pit, and then climbed out of it, stiff and groggy, at midday. She had missed Mass.
Almost a week had gone by, and she was still confused by the behaviour of the people of Black Apple: the friendliness of Frank, Cyril, Mrs. Mooney, Ruby, and Mrs. Rees, but the suspicion of Father Seamus, the coldness of Mrs. Derkatch and some of the ladies’ auxiliary members too, not to mention the catcalls from men outside the Dominion Hotel as she walked past, always on the far side of the street.
The day Billy Nimsic’s funeral was held at Our Lady of Sorrows, she stayed late to help Mrs. Rees and some of the church ladies wash dishes in the church hall, fold the tables and chairs, and put them away. Then she and Mrs. Rees took the good china back to the rectory to place carefully in the sideboard. It was past seven when she left, and the sun was sliding down the western sky.
Near the Dominion, as she was about to cross to the far side of the street, she noticed two women outside the gents’ door. Both had long dark hair, and one was Indian, she could see, one probably Italian or part Indian—“half-breed,” the miners called it—and they were both in tight dresses, their legs exposed to the cool evening. Despite her darkened eyes and bright lipstick, one of the women looked familiar.
Rose Marie slowed to study her, the shrunken yellow sweater buttoned over a stained blue dress, the broad shoulders, a prominent chin dropping as she slumped against the side of the hotel.
“Bertha,” she called before she could stop herself. “Bertha Bright—”
Bertha gazed sleepily over at her, looked away, then jerked her head back, eyes narrowing.
Immediately, Rose Marie regretted calling out to her. From her very first week at St. Mark’s, when Taki stole the name “Anne” from Bertha’s little cousin, all their dealings had been unpleasant. Bertha had stopped physically picking on her after Sister Margaret beat them both, but once Ruth died, she started name-calling and pointing. Then, years later, when Anataki got so sick, Bertha came down sick too. Rose Marie had heard her boast to the other senior girls that she almost died. But she hadn’t died. Bertha got better, and Taki died instead. It had taken that terrible equation of loss to neutralize their quarrel. Until right then, when Rose Marie had so stupidly called attention to herself.
“Well, well,” Bertha jeered. “If it isn’t a midget in a school dress. Are those the only clothes you got, Rose Marie Whitewater, who thinks she’s the goddamned Virgin Mary?”
It wasn’t that Rose Marie couldn’t think of anything to hiss back at Bertha. She didn’t have all the words for what Bertha was doing in front of the Dominion, but she had an idea. Hey, Miss Black Apple, what ditch did you wander out of? she was about to yell, when, from the corner of her eye, she spotted a man approaching Bertha. Dead Fox Man. Head down, she darted across the street and didn’t stop to look back until she was safely tucked in the shadow under the awning at McBride’s.
Dead Fox Man’s hand reached from his dirty coat and gripped Bertha’s wrist, wrenching her from her slouch against the building. Teetering towards him on high heels, she protested, but weakly. As he clenched an arm around her shoulders, she struggled, but half-heartedly. He steered her towards the side door of the hotel.
Rose Marie fled to the old Mooney house, but once she arrived at the leaning fence, she turned and walked around the block. Breathing deeply, she surveyed the other houses, some jumbled into one another, with old fridges and car parts rusting on leaning porches, others well groomed with harvested front-yard gardens. She was taking a walk, partly to calm down and partly to familiarize herself with the neighbourhood as best she could in the waning light. And partly because no one was supervising her. No one was there to tell her she couldn’t. Again, a faint flutter of excitement in her chest.
Back at the house, she went into the dining room to find the table crowded with boarders talking over each other as they slurped coffee and shoved green Jell-O in their mouths. Mrs. Mooney slapped a plate in front of her—a dried pork chop and a heap of crusted potatoes—and Rose Marie ate silently, rising to help in the kitchen once she was done.
Later, on the porch, Cyril pointed out a group of stars called Orion’s Belt, and she told him about the Wolf Trail, where the spirits of the dead wandered. Mama. Anataki.
* * *
The next afternoon, on her way home from Our Lady of Sorrows, she kept her eyes lowered as she crossed the street, walking quickly away from the Dominion even though it was only five o’clock and neither Bertha nor her companion was leaning against the building.
“Hey, little lady,” a voice called from the other side of the street. “Wait up. I’ll walk you home.”
She looked up. Frank was running over to her, and for some reason she stood there, waiting for him.
“Explosion at the mine,” he said, moving so close she could feel the heat seeping from his body right through her school dress. “I think Jake Catelli got his eardrums blown out. They closed down operations for the day.”
“Oh dear.”
He reached for her hand, but she pulled it away. “Just tryin’ to be friendly. How was work today?”
She told him about Mrs. Rees, the ladies’ auxiliary meeting, and Father Seamus, “who isn’t exactly welcoming.”
“He’s another one don’t like Indians. Meesy.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“That’s an important Blackfoot word for people like that priest,” he said, grinning. “You forgot your language while you were at that school.”
“It’s okay. I’m going back in a couple of months. I don’t need it.”
He opened the front door of the house, and at the bottom of the stairs, he leaned towards her. Before she could push past him and run up to her room, he pressed his nose to her forehead. “You never know, you just might.”
Since arriving in Black Apple, she was acting the way Sister Cilla sometimes did: blushing and flustered. For no reason at all!
In her room, she thought about Frank, how he changed around people. Mornings when Reggie or Dwayne, and especially Cyril, were at the table, he was jagged edges. But the times when the other miners were on nights and went straight to bed instead of eating breakfast, Frank seemed serene, his colours falling around him like rain. “How are you, Rose Marie Whitewater?” he would ask her gently.
And Cyril. Easy to talk to, like an older brother or a young uncle. When she was finished with the after-supper cleanup, she chatted with him on the porch about this and that: the mine and the church, people they each encountered, and local gossip. Once she thought she saw Frank peering at them from the parlour window.
So much had happened, was happening around her, all the people, every kind—rough, kind, dead, sad, mean, snobby, and dangerous—Mrs. Mooney, Frank, Cyril, Father Patrick, Bertha Bright Eye, Father Seamus, Mrs. Derkatch, and Dead Fox Man. Whom should she include in a letter to Mother Grace? What should she leave out?
And what could she say about herself? So much had happened to her in such a short period of time she didn’t know if she was coming or going, as Mrs. Rees put it.
First came Papa’s healing dream, which had left her with a sense of calm. For the month or so before Mother Grace had sprung the assignment on her, she had felt loved and something else: that the world was larger and more wondrous than she’d ever imagined, and that she even had a place within it. Then she came to Black Apple with its dirt, lac
k of routine, and strange characters. How could she cope, let alone fit in?
Lead us not into temptation, she prayed at night. Deliver us from evil. She had the uncomfortable feeling that St. Mark’s was receding, shrinking to a dot on the road map that was thumbtacked to the wall at the bus depot, and that the person she had been at St. Mark’s was altering bit by bit, altered by this town.
* * *
The next day, when Mrs. Rees came back from the post office, her bag full of church letters and bulletins, her face was chalky, her step unsteady. Remembering Sister Lucy’s decline, Rose Marie hurried to her, helping her out of her coat and into a chair. Then she put on the kettle.
“Are you all right?”
The colour started to seep back into Mrs. Rees’s face after she’d had a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit. She reached into the shopping bag at her feet and pulled out the clump of mail she’d taken from the church mailbox. Sifting through it, she withdrew a letter and handed it to Rose Marie, who recognized the flowing script.
“From Mother Grace. Oh, it’s to Father Patrick.” She examined the postmark. “It was mailed the day after I left. Our letters must have crossed.”
“I didn’t know what to do with it,” Mrs. Rees said, sniffling. “You take it, dearie. You can always send it back.”
* * *
That evening at supper, Rose Marie hardly noticed the squeal of sauerkraut, a food she had never before eaten, or the burn of mustard on her tongue. All she could think of was Mother Grace’s letter.
“You’re miles away, little girl,” Cyril commented.
