The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish

by Allan Stratton

  I wonder if folks went strange on account of the heat or something in the mayonnaise. Whatever it was, it was madness, and above it all the squeals of a child. “Apple cider! Apple cider!”

  I looked over to the boys. Timmy Beeford was standing on the front-row pew, pointing at Brother Percy with one hand, while he made the crazy sign with the other.

  Right then and there, I should have marched off that stage and given those kids what-for. Instead I froze. And in the seconds that followed, I lost the chance to act forever. For I wasn’t the only one to hear wee Timmy. Brother Percy’s eyes bulged and his index finger flew forward. “THOU SHALT NOT TAKE THE NAME OF THE LORD THY GOD IN VAIN. EXODUS 20, VERSE 7.”

  The congregation snapped to attention. A moment of silence, except for the storm. Timmy woke to the rage before him. Too late.

  “WOE TO BLASPHEMERS, FOR THEY SHALL BE STRUCK DEAD, AND GREAT SHALL BE THE TERROR THEREOF!”

  No doubt Brother Percy only meant to give the lad a scare. But no sooner did those words fly from his mouth than lightning hit the metal cross on top of the tent.

  A roar like Armageddon. The pole split in two, cords severed, wires fried, bulbs exploded, glass sprayed, as the bolt shot down the line outside and hit the generator. An explosion. In the pitch black, the creak of bars bending! The tent was caving! Bedlam! Everywhere, a mob of screaming worshipers scrambling to escape!

  I feared the boys would be crushed underfoot. A raging bear, I tore through the dark to find my cubs. Found them. Grabbed them. Carried them to safety.

  But something was wrong. Timmy was a lump, as pale as the moon.

  “He got tangled in wire,” Billy wailed. “It sparked something crazy. Mommy — Mommy — he’s dead!”

  As God is my witness, so he was.

  Resurrection

  Mary Mabel could swear on a stack of Bibles about what happened when she arrived at Riverside Bridge. She’d climbed on top of the railing, peered down, and felt a chill at the sight of the river rocks. Her mama’s voice had rung in her head like church bells: “Let go. Let go.” She’d closed her eyes, stretched out her arms, and then … and then? She hadn’t a clue. The next thing she recalled was twirling barefoot, like a dervish, before a radiant young man bathed in light.

  At the sight of the angel, she’d dropped to her knees in wonder. “Am I in heaven?” she asked. “Are you God’s messenger, Gabriel?”

  “No, ma’am,” he replied, “I’m George Dunlop. Ambulance driver from London General.”

  Mary Mabel shielded her eyes from the sun, and saw that her angel had chin stubble, pimples, and a grass stain on his left knee from scrambling down the embankment. They were standing on the rocks by the river’s edge. The driver looked embarrassed. “The Petersons spotted you,” he said. “They called for help. Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know. Am I?”

  He said she ought to come with him, which seemed a good idea. Though otherwise unharmed, her dance on the sharp stones had cut her feet.

  Thing were slow at the hospital, typical of a Sunday. The town was taking the Lord’s Day to rest, what with Saturday night hangovers and church. Aside from a couple of orderlies and a janitor, Dr. Hammond was alone with his trusty sidekick, Nurse Judd. Dr. Hammond had been a drill sergeant on home duty during the Great War, and used his army whistle to boss the wards. He had a reputation as a crusty sonovabitch who saw the sick as a nuisance, and forestalled discussion by making their diagnoses as incomprehensible as possible. His motto, “What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” was a comforting thought, though patently untrue judging by his contribution to the local cemetery.

  As Nurse Judd wrapped her feet in gauze, Mary Mabel imagined herself an Egyptian princess being prepared for burial, her grieving Pharaoh father leading the court in lamentations so profound that the river Nile o’erflowed its banks with tears. Meanwhile, Dr. Hammond was calling the Academy. He told the porter to inform Mr. McTavish of his daughter’s whereabouts. Then he returned, took out his notepad, and began asking Mary Mabel questions so silly she thought he was teasing.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “Westminster Abbey.”

  “What is the date?”

  “1812.”

  “Is George Dunlop the Archangel Gabriel?”

  “Of course not, he hasn’t a trumpet.”

  Dr. Hammond paused. “Are you a humorist, Miss McTavish?”

  “No, sir.”

  There followed a heavy silence animated by medical jotting. Mary Mabel glanced from Dr. Hammond to Nurse Judd. It was clear they thought she was crazy. She decided not to mention her conversations with her mama. “May I go now?”

  “No. You’re to spend the night under observation, subject to your father’s approval.”

  “Oh, he won’t approve,” she assured them. “I’m to be at work come five in the morning. Even if I was dead, Papa wouldn’t let me off my chores.”

  Dr. Hammond furrowed his brow, muttered “melancholia,” and scrawled furiously in his notepad. At the mention of melancholia, Mary Mabel giggled, which made Dr. Hammond scribble even more. But the truth was, since her escapade at Riverside Bridge, Mary Mabel had been suffused with a joy so warm that nothing could extinguish it — not even the realization she was alive.

  Nurse Judd escorted her to a sickbed to await Brewster’s arrival. “He’ll be along shortly,” she said. Mary Mabel knew otherwise. By the time the ambulance driver had found her, her papa would’ve read her suicide note and hit the bottle, terrified of impending scandal. The porter knocking would have sent him scuttling under the bed. It would be supper before he got word that she was alive, good news that would occasion a fresh bottle by way of celebration.

  There were thirteen other beds in the ward, a long rectangular room divided by yellowing muslin privacy screens. Mary Mabel wasn’t sure how many souls she had for company, but counted at least eight: five coughers, two snorers, and a woman across the room with hiccups. Together with the hum of the ceiling fan, the rattle of the dinner trays, the squeak of the medicine carts on cracked linoleum, and the periodic buzz from the fly strips, they made napping difficult. By dusk it was more so, a snap storm beating a tarantella on the window panes.

  Still, Mary Mabel daydreamed happily till eight, when she was overcome by an acrid waft of body odour, booze, and raw onions. Her papa had arrived, a buzzard in from the wet. She listened to Nurse Judd give directions to her bed, then closed her eyes tight shut as she heard the approaching squish of his soaked boots, the screen rolled back, and the sound of him slumping heavily onto the chair to her right. He sat in silence, save for the drip off his rain slick.

  She opened her eyes. He was peering at her with the intent gaze of a stuffed bird. She pictured him on a mantel. “Shall

  we go?”

  A heavy groan. “I love you.”

  “I know.”

  He groaned again. “No you don’t. I love you. Very much. Very, very much.” A shudder. “Do you love me?”

  “Of course, Papa. So, shall we go?”

  “We can’t. We have to wait. The doctor’s with a patient. You’re the picture of your mama. I love you, Mary Mabel. I love you very, very much.”

  Lord, Mary Mabel thought, how many times will he tell me he loves me before Dr. Hammond comes and rescues me? Spending the night at the hospital was beginning to look attractive.

  Brewster horked a wad of phlegm and spat it in his handkerchief. More laundry. “I haven’t said a word to your Auntie Horatia,” he confided.

  “I don’t have an Auntie Horatia.”

  “Suit yourself. I’ve kept this from her all the same. It would drive her wild. And after all she’s done for you. “

  “Please, Papa.” She indicated the world beyond the screen. “You’re shaming me.”

  “No more than you shame me, with that cow face of yours.” He rose from his chair. “Hey, you folks with your ears in our business, my slut of a daughter ran off to kill herself!”

&n
bsp; The woman across the room stopped hiccuping. Mary Mabel hid her face in her pillow.

  Brewster fell back into his chair. “I’m sorry,” he wept. “I’m a bad father.” He wanted her to contradict him, but she wouldn’t. “I’m a bad father,” he snivelled again.

  “So you say. Now be quiet. I’m alive. There won’t be a scandal. Lucky you.”

  “How could you think I’d care about scandal if my little girl was dead?”

  Mary Mabel laughed. Her papa looked so startled that she forgave him despite herself. She got up and kissed him on the forehead. He let out a wail. And that’s when the mayhem struck.

  Down the hall, the emergency doors burst open and a flood of Pentecostals washed into the waiting room. A clatter of chairs and trays. Cries of “Doctor!” “Devils!” “Save us!”

  Mary Mabel ran to the door of the ward and looked down the corridor. It was a war zone. Home duty had not prepared Dr. Hammond for a horde of Holy Rollers. He let rip with a toot on his whistle. “Smarten up. Get in line. Take a number.”

  No one paid heed, least of all a frantic couple who’d clawed their way to the front with a lad as limp as a rag doll. “Doctor, please help,” the woman cried.

  “Shush,” Dr. Hammond roared. “Can’t you see I’ve a riot to take care of?”

  “But this boy may be dead!”

  “Then take him to an undertaker.”

  Her companion clutched the doctor by the throat. “Examine him now!”

  Dr. Hammond peered at the youngster. The child’s face was a light blue, the lips purple. His jacket was burned through, the exposed skin raw. Orderlies kept the crowd back as Dr. Hammond ripped open his shirt, and listened through a stethoscope. “There’s no heartbeat,” he said. “How long has he been like this?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Then you’re right. This child is dead.” Dr. Hammond scratched his initials on a death certificate handed him by Nurse Judd. The woman howled, but the doctor had no time for consolation. “I didn’t kill him. If you want a second opinion, go down the road to St. Mike’s.”

  That was too much for the man. “Sorry, Jesus,” he exploded, “but I got business to attend to!” With that, he decked Dr. Hammond, leapt on top and pummelled away.

  Mary Mabel felt her mama’s presence. “Go to the boy,” her mama said. The room disappeared. All Mary Mabel could see was the child. As if in a dream, she floated beside him. She knelt, smoothed his hair, and clasped his hands within her own. There was a whirring, a dark fluttering. Heat flooded her body, coursed down her arms, and out through her fingers.

  It was then that the boy gave a cough. And a second. His chest began to move as he inhaled. His cheeks flushed. His eyelids twitched. Opened.

  “Ow,” he said. “I hurt.”

  Mary Mabel glowed. With her mama inside her, she’d raised the dead.

  II

  ENTER MISS BENTWHISTLE

  Miss Bentwhistle Girds Her Loins

  Miss Horatia Alice Bentwhistle, founder and headmistress of the Bentwhistle Academy for Young Ladies, president of the Middlesex county chapter of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, and guiding light of the St. James Ladies’ Auxiliary, clutched her covers to her ears and prayed for the private telephone on her bedside table to stop ringing.

  What time was it? She squinted at the grandfather clock to her left, in the hope that its hands might swim into focus. Oh, never mind. Whatever the hour, it was too damn early. Yesterday, her handyman, Mr. McTavish, had inspected her pipes. As usual, he’d been very thorough with his plunger, clearing the full range of her ductwork. The drainpipe in her basement was a particular revelation, in memory of which she’d toasted herself with champagne till the middle of the night. Now her entire body throbbed; she ached for rest.

  The telephone fell silent. Thank you, Jesus. It rang again. Christ Almighty.

  Miss Bentwhistle eased herself up, placing a brace of goose-down pillows between her back and headboard. She lifted the receiver gingerly to her ear. “Miss Horatia Alice Bentwhistle. I trust this is an emergency?”

  “It’s more than an emergency,” declared the Reverend Brice Harvey Mandible, rector of St. James. “It’s a scandal.” According to the rector, the London Free Press had reported that an American tyke was electrocuted the previous night at the Tent of the Holy Redemption.

  “A tragedy, surely,” Miss Bentwhistle allowed. “But a scandal, why?”

  “They say he was resurrected.”

  “Resurrected?”

  “Resurrected!” The rector’s stout tenor pitched two octaves north. “Miracles are well and good in their proper place. But their proper place is in the Bible. They don’t belong now. And they don’t belong in London, Ontario. And even if they do, they most certainly don’t at a Pentecostal freak show.”

  Miss Bentwhistle’s bum hurt. She rolled to her side. “Harvey, dear, what time is it?”

  “Miss Bentwhistle, I don’t think you appreciate the seriousness of the situation. If this miracle is believed, what temptations lie in store for followers of the true Cross? Who may be led into prophecy? Or tongue-speaking? Good Lord, tent evangelists are next to pagan! Rumours of this so-called ‘resurrection’ must be discredited! Squashed!”

  “I see. And you have called upon me to set the record straight?”

  “Well naturally I’ve called you. Who else would I call? After all, you —”

  Miss Bentwhistle placed the receiver on her bedside table and sucked a lozenge. She had no need to listen to the rector of St. James prattle on about her importance to the community. As he had pointed out, who else could be called on a matter of such importance? She was, after all, the last of the Bentwhistles, a family of United Empire Loyalist stock that traced its lineage to a barony in the north of England — in commemoration of which the Academy dining hall boasted a Bentwhistle Coat of Arms and Family Tree as certified by the Heralds’ College of Westminster, inscribed on parchment in gilt with the royal seal, thank you very much — and that had established and maintained the social parameters of local society since the end of the eighteenth century.

  Without question, Miss Horatia Alice Bentwhistle knew that she was the one to be called. The voice on the end of the line appeared to have petered out. Miss Bentwhistle retrieved the receiver. “Never fear, Harvey,” the dowager sighed grandly. “I shall address the situation as is my duty. I am, after all, a Bentwhistle.”

  “Yes, and the girl’s employer.”

  The lozenge stuck in Miss Bentwhistle’s throat. “Beg pardon?” she choked.

  “The miracle worker. It’s Mary Mabel McTavish. She’s yours!”

  Miss Bentwhistle reached for the smelling salts.

  Ten minutes later, she stood naked before her bedroom mirror, considering the weight of responsibility under which she laboured as she girded her loins for the confrontation at hand.

  She had already rung the porter, instructing him to summon Mary Mabel and her father to the office. They’d be there this very moment, sweating. Let them sweat. An hour more and she’d descend to tell that brat, in no uncertain terms, that in the laying-on of hands she had exhibited inappropriate behaviour, and in so doing had threatened the hard-earned reputation for sobriety and moral rectitude of the Bentwhistle Academy, indeed of the Bentwhistle family itself. Let the trumpet sound. There would be hell to pay, with Miss Horatia Alice Bentwhistle, B.A., the instrument of God’s will.

  Hmm. There seemed to be more of her today than there was yesterday, an observation Miss Bentwhistle had been making with frightening regularity. “I look like a teapot!” she exclaimed, surveying her Rubenesque charms.

  She hoisted her corset: “Deny and contain!” The motto of her late father, Horatio Algernon Bentwhistle V. If he had overcome scandal, Miss Bentwhistle determined, so could she. Wrestling with laces and clasps, she drew strength from the great man’s battle with the clutch of elderly widows who’d sought his ruin. East-enders, Miss Bentwhistle sniffed. What right had they t
o do business with a Bentwhistle in the first place?

  The vixens had asked her father to put their money in government bonds. More wisely, he’d invested the funds in stocks, depositing profits equal to bond interest in their accounts while pocketing the balance in his own. These transactions went unnoticed during the run-up to the Great Crash; but when the market collapsed, taking the widows’ money with it, they’d had the effrontery to charge him with fraud.

  Lesser mortals might have crumbled. But not the Bentwhistle paterfamilias! “Deny and contain!” Horatio had bellowed and headed to the court house. He claimed — and who could doubt it? — that the widows had insisted he speculate wildly. “They were thrill seekers; desperadoes, the lot of them.” And why had he withheld profits in excess of interest? “It was for their good that I sequestered the dividends. Otherwise those insatiable grannies would have run hog-wild, squandering the treasure of their declining years on trifles.”

  Oh, how the little people howled for his blood. But as their betters well knew: wealth is the backbone of virtue; the wealthy, models of probity. Judge Benjamin T. Vanderdander, a fellow Tory and one-time school chum, found for the defence: “In the absence of written instructions, the charges are without merit or foundation.”

  Horatio promptly sued the widows for libel. Unable to afford a competent lawyer, they were found guilty and sent to the slammer.

  Miss Bentwhistle indulged a smile remembering her father’s boozy victory party, following which he’d died “happily in his sleep,” as the Free Press put it, when the car he was driving crashed into a telephone pole. His venerable remains, eulogized by the premier and local dignitaries, were trundled to the family mausoleum in a horse-drawn carriage led by the Royal London Regimental Pipe Band whose members, in addition to comforting the bereaved with “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes, intercepted pensioners throwing rotten eggs concealed beneath their hankies. The poor can be so spiteful.