A bird on every tree

by Carol Bruneau

  “Don’t forget the wash,” Sister calls. “Man the fort. Good luck!”

  Waving, I think of the Juju market where people purchase wares for voodoo: shrivelled heads of animals, paws and teeth. You’re not to think of luck, we counsel the sorrowful, who appear at odd hours seeking our prayers. It has nothing to do with luck: it is grace, we tell them. God’s will, I remind myself, reeling our habits from the line. Dancing stiffly in the bitter gusts, they resemble pieces of sky, their cotton the same lavender blue of forget-me-nots, Sister says. To me it is the Virgin’s blue: the blue of sorrows, abandonment.

  This is my afternoon for contemplation, but first there are chores: mending, the basement pews to be polished. With its red candle burning day and night like the Sacred Heart, our chapel is Golgotha, a place of bones bleached white as this landscape. But we have no Stations of the Cross, nor do we have a regular priest, which grieves us when the faithful come to say confession. You are marching in the light of Christ, an inner voice promised when I departed Nigeria. With gunshots echoing through the heat, I was glad to board the plane. But the rosy light of the sanctuary brings back the sound of soldiers, and I trudge upstairs.

  Sister Marcetta has collected the clothing from the supermarket bin, a mountain of it serviceable with repair. I contemplate her machine in the kitchen, on which she plays her CDs, inspirational ones like Eternal Light: Music of Inner Peace, my favourite. But it’s all too easy to get lost in it, and one must be ready, always ready, not just for the faithful, but for all seeking respite from woe. Since the priest stopped coming, Sister and I have been forced to break rules, our duty being to listen and lighten burdens.

  “I’m addicted, Sister,” a woman confessed once, “to that stuff on the internet.” Her hands flapped like helpless doves. “Every Wednesday Satan tells me to play the slots. He’s there, Sister. Honest to God, right there in my bathroom, under the sink.” What does one say? Go forth, my child; gamble your life away? It is meet and right to take chances?

  The bell rings as I thread the needle, a small pair of trousers over my knee. The sound jars the stillness. I descend the stairs. The caller’s shape looms through the entry’s pebbled glass. Blurred, he appears agitated, his hair a bush in a fierce gale. Hesitating but a moment, I quickly open the door, hear a gasp—my own. I recognize his coat; it is gold and puffy, with stains on the front.

  “How may we be of service, brother?” It takes extra breath to push this out.

  He holds a shoebox in his gloveless hands. My eyes flit to the label: Airwalk.

  The man snarls like a wild dog. Before I can speak again, he lifts the lid. What I see surprises me, shocks me a little but not very much. Not when you have seen the dead in rivers and roadways. It is a pigeon, its feathers layered grey like billowing smoke. There’s a greenish-pink shine around its staring eye. Its wing sticks up like that of a chicken about to be roasted.

  “Service,” the man mutters. “Please ma’am. Help me. I have to bury him.”

  It takes me a moment to comprehend. He tugs at my sleeve, tugs so sharply I fear it will rip. I explain, rather quickly, that the priest no longer makes regular calls, the need being insufficiently great.

  “All things bright and beauteeeful,” the man says. “Don’t you think he deserves a decent burial?”

  But I am thinking of the priest’s final visit, to hear the confessions of a grandmother and her daughter. The faithful are seldom men; of course, it was women who found Jesus risen from the tomb. Women like the gambling lady who came to me, asking, “Life is about taking risks am I right, Sister? God spoke to me in a dream,” she said. “There’s this man, see? He’s gonna meet me in Kissimmee.”

  “What is this Kissimmee?”

  “Sister, you don’t want to know: it’s warm there.”

  “You must listen to what your heart tells you.”

  “Like, I met this guy on the ’net.”

  “Listen to the Spirit. He’s there to guide you.”

  “Now Sister, the heart and the Spirit, ain’t they the same?”

  After a time their faces—those of the faithful and the afflicted—are faces in a river.

  The man replaces the lid and shakes the box. Its contents thud against cardboard. “Sister!” His voice relocates me, the look in his eyes angry, indignant. He clutches the shoebox to his chest. I think rather idly of the security system—the sign on its post beneath the snow. A buzzer meant to deter intruders will sound unless you disable it. The buzzer makes Marcetta nervous. Once it went off accidentally, the police came, and the convent was billed—an amount that could have provided food for many. His will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

  The man gazes at the front of my habit. Someone—the gambler making her confession—called us bluebirds, Marcetta and me. She seemed a decent person, put five dollars in the donations box on her way out to her car. She has not returned, and I wonder how things are in Kissimmee, whether she and the internet man have tied the knot, been blessed in Holy Matrimony.

  My brother with the pigeon slackens; his shoulders droop. I no longer see the man who spoiled the sofa, and whom the volunteer cast out. He isn’t much more than a boy, really. Below his wild hair his face is flat, white, swollen, with a spray of pimples on his jaw. His mouth resembles a fish’s. “Help me, Miss,” he begs. The look in his eyes is one I have seen before, in the eyes of men running with knives through the streets.

  “You got a church here,” he says, and his gaze climbs the small flight of stairs to the kitchen, to the clean white curtains, the sink, the table, walls spotless and bare but for a crucifix. Cold, cold air blows in past him, filling the stairwell.

  “There’s no priest, I’m sorry. No one to conduct a funeral, I’m afraid.” I keep my voice gentle, imagining Sister Marcetta at the soup kitchen, her nervousness if she returned now. You are not welcome in this building, she too has told undesirables.

  “We must open our hearts to the stranger,” I’ve reminded her, but Marcetta can be set in her ways.

  The man-boy begins to weep, a gruff coughing.

  “Come with me,” I say softly. “Are you hungry?” Sister Marcetta would not approve, but I lead him to the kitchen, take a sandwich from the refrigerator. The bread is very white; everything about this place is so. He looks like he is eating snow, devouring it—a jackal that has not eaten in some time. The food soothes him. The dominion of God is suddenly vast and in the man’s calm I am a refugee, nation-less before God’s will. My life exists without borders. Sometimes it seems I will never comprehend the ways of this frozen place, but as Marcetta says, it is up to us to cast the seeds. Only the Lord can make them grow.

  I boil water, stir the powdered coffee in. His dirty hands reach for the cup.

  “Will you take care of it for me, Sister?” he says meekly, and I remember the box on the stairs. “Can you gimme a lift somewheres, Sister?”

  I think of my car, how it will need to be scraped again, and Sister Marcetta’s instructions as she loaded the pot into hers.

  “Sister. I need a drive to my girlfriend’s.” Once more the man looks around like a hungry animal.

  Allow me, Lord, to open my heart, to open my life to you. The stranger.

  “I know you got the keys to your car here someplace,” he says.

  I take them from the hook beneath the cupboard, and put on my coat. He ignores the shoebox by the mat. “Leave it,” he says, when I go to pick it up.

  The car does not want to start at first. “Don’t flood it,” he says, and I think of the river full of rags. His breathing makes an ocean sound in my ears. “I shore appreciate this.”

  My hands on the wheel tremble, not from the engine’s vibration so much as the pulse of fear, as he directs me through a zigzag of streets. Oh Holy Spirit, Counsellor: what wilderness have you led me into?

  Outside a small house he orders me to stop. The tires skid on t
he icy road and my chest contracts. Holding my breath, I pray for the guidance of the Counsellor, the blameless, ever-present Comforter.

  “Wait here.” His coat rides up as he gets out. The motor tick-tick-ticks as he slouches to the door and lets himself in. I think of Marcetta finding the shoebox but no sign of me.

  “Cherished and Holy Infant,” I pray aloud.

  The man reappears with a paper bag under his arm and gets in, telling me to drive again. I hear the slosh as he uncaps the bottle inside and drinks, a long slurp, as I try to keep my gaze on the road.

  The Spirit led the Saviour into the wilderness, not in the wilderness. Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, He said, and Him only shalt thou serve. I want to cross myself but my hand won’t leave the wheel.

  “Got some thirst, boy,” the man apologizes. “Just a little errand, Sister.” But his voice grows sharp again. “Right here. Left there. Right, now! At these lights,” he directs. “Now drive. That’s right. Now. See them lights?”

  Deliver me, Lord.

  Obeying, I turn onto a road that climbs a hill higher than the one on which our convent sits. Children slog over the snowbanks. A few look slightly familiar; perhaps they have visited the Helping Hand. We pass rows and rows of buildings, their homes perhaps. Many have boarded-up windows.

  Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.

  “A ghost town,” I observe, my voice quaking, and he smirks.

  “Shut up!”

  Quietly I pray, “Our Father, who art—”

  “Shut up with that God stuff!” He pushes the bottle at me, its neck nudging my coat.

  Oh Lord, forgive me all my transgressions.

  Up and up the hill we drive, miles and miles it seems, past more of these houses. Some have Christmas ornaments flapping in the wind. Big sheets of foil in the windows, big metal doors, barricades. I think of the faithful and all their confessions, of the woman in Kissimmee.

  “Welcome to Greystone, Sister.” He laughs.

  “When”—I swallow—“did your bird die, sir?”

  He scowls, and the liquor slides back down the neck of the bottle. “Bird?” he says, and barks something unrepeatable. Before us the top of the hill shines, the snow’s brilliance reflecting the afternoon sun. In front of the last row of houses the man shouts, “Right here, Sister. This is where my girlfriend lives. You better wait, though, till I see if she’s home.”

  The tires bite into ice. I’m perspiring. In the name of the Father, and of the Son…against my heart’s advice I park. The heater has finally come on, emitting a dry burst of heat. Perspiration twists under my clothing, a clammy wetness. Still I am grateful for the heater and for my heavy coat, and give thanks—for it and for Sister Marcetta and even her catalogue, the one she brought to me before the snow arrived, filled with every imaginable good. Choose a good warm coat and boots, she said and placed the order; such was her welcome.

  In the name of—I imagine her juggling the empty pot, wrestling it and the shoebox upstairs.

  A child answers the door and the man pushes inside. Through the strips of tinsel in the window he waves to me, like a priest passing benediction. Lord have mercy.

  Tears of gratitude blur my vision. Wiping my eyes, I bow my head and breathe. Next door someone appears with a large black dog on a chain. Neither looks as I pull away. By now Sister will be warming our supper, dividing the bowl of potato, mixing it with leftover meat.

  My stomach races with hunger; this climate feeds the body’s appetite where heat would stifle it. The sun is a low orange glare shining off every surface now, and carefully I proceed downhill, wondering about the man’s girlfriend and the child—his child? Perhaps I should have stopped, knocked, made sure the child was all right, that there was food. Something other than the brown paper bag under his arm.

  The same children are still climbing the snowbanks uphill. They look like small, bright-coated animals squirming towards me.

  Please, Lord Jesus, forgive my selfishness and sins of omission.

  A car comes racing up behind, passing, its tires making a hissing sound.

  I see the boy, the one from this morning, from the Helping Hand, the one with the plastic gun. He is walking the top of the snowbank like an astronaut exploring the moon. His face is wide and pale, so pale, like all the faces in our mission. Even his hair is pale as he turns and shouts to his friends. He has the blue rucksack strapped to his back, and takes big floppy steps in his boots.

  As the snow breaks and spills, he slips and the car before me skids and spins.

  The thud is like the Lord’s fist coming down. All I see are the boots flying up, one a little higher than the other, then falling like heavy, flapping birds.

  I don’t even feel the slip of the seat belt as I jump out. The rusty blue car sits across the road. Its driver takes a long moment to appear. A white man with a dirty growth of beard and a ball cap, he could be the boyfriend of any of the mothers we minister to, Sister Marcetta and I. Perhaps he is coming home from the supper Marcetta has helped serve.

  He sucks a cigarette, sucks it as if it were a mother’s nipple, as the two of us kneel over the boy.

  My heart turns hollow, my soul like the hot-cold roar inside a seashell plucked from the scorching sand of a beach.

  Children, rosy-cheeked and smelling of school and damp clothing, press around us, the driver and me, and the boy who lies limp and cold on the icy pavement.

  Only my soul hears. An anguished noise, hysteria. If there are words, voices, they float far above us, like a hurricane wind threshing the palms.

  Already the boy’s face is turning grey as the slush. A sliver of orange plastic sticks out from his jacket, but there is no blood. His eyes are closed. His mouth is serene, peaceful, without a hint of astonishment or surprise. I put my hand over his heart. Someone folds a scarf, places it under his head.

  Tenderly, trembling with the love of Jesus in my throat, I make the sign of the cross.

  The driver waits in his car, the engine running. Glancing back, I believe I see the pigeon man’s face in the window, but he does not come outside. I take off my coat and cover the boy with it. It covers him from head to toe, his body is so small. It surprises me, how small.

  The air freezes my breath. I don’t want to leave the boy; I will not leave him. The wind pulls and tugs at my habit. It is a cold that scorches, but I no longer feel it. The sting is in the wait for the authorities—the ambulance and the police—who eventually arrive and take our statements.

  I do not even know the boy’s name. His mother is merely a voice scratching in my head, a pair of hands holding mittens.

  “Sister Berthe Uledi Adumi,” I offer my identity, “Order of the Eucharistic Heart.” No one blinks, or bats an eye. It was an accident: God knows this, I tell the authorities and everyone who will listen. No one contests my statement. The driver, whose name becomes a single sound, smokes and kicks the snow, smokes and scratches beneath his cap, keeping his lips drawn tight.

  It is dusk when we are free to go, the orange sky aflame and the street lights blazing as I drive slowly through the blackened streets. The traffic lights remind me of Lifesaver candies and the colours of Kwanzaa. In this wilderness everything is black now, red and yellow and green.

  At the convent Sister Marcetta has placed the shoebox under the back step, and taken up the mending that I have neglected.

  She lays her hands on me as we kneel before each other to pray. It is a special prayer, which we offer before the tiny altar, with the light of Christ’s sacred gift burning brightly. The kingdom of heaven is like the tiniest seed, a mustard seed, He said, which grows into the largest of bushes for the birds of the air to come and lodge in its branches.

  Through my tears I promise to do one thing: I will bury this bird in the back yard, as soon as the ground thaws enough to work. With this promise made, we pray deep into the ni
ght for the rocks and the trees, the grass and the soil; for the good of all children, the seeds of our mission, whether or not they take root.

  Blue Shadows

  The day began with greenhouses, Kremlin-esque domes of icy glass, the glitter of sunlight through vapour—or costume jewelry set in the snow. That’s what they resembled, rhinestones in the middle of a park ringed by the down-and-out congregating on benches. Passing these people always felt like an issue, the promise of steamy warmth and silence drawing me forward—the breath of plants—my baby asleep against me in her carrier. You know what it’s like, holding a newborn bundled against winter. Such compact warmth, a miraculous heater against your chest.

  That baby smell, the powdery skin, the rip of razor-sharp little fingernails contained by mittens. I’d just clipped Anna’s with my teeth before setting out. The thought of bringing anything remotely metal near those tiny fingertips enough to make me quiver, my inner parts slowly knitting back together after giving birth—the shock of it, and the bearish feeling, that you could claw someone’s eyes out to prevent their harming the baby: my baby.

  So, this morning. Sleep-deprived, addled, and needing warmth I sought company, only the kind that didn’t talk. Just to know that life breathed beyond Anna and me, and her dad of course. The moistness of her angora scarf against her mouth, her pink tuque squeezed down over her eyes—rosy cheeks, tiny nose showing, three miniscule white dots there: infant acne. The perfect weight of a helpless child was my shield as I moved past the benches, past outstretched hands, gloveless, burled with cold and bloodied knuckles. “Spare change, miss? I need a cuppa coffee, miss.” My worst fear that one of those hands would touch Anna.

  Morning was always trickiest—the nearby shelter emptying till nightfall—but the best time to visit this place. The greenhouses were open year round. But the winter light and the loneliness of new motherhood made them attractive now, though riding the streetcar the long months of pregnancy I’d barely noticed them. Mat leave felt like retirement from my media job, the job I’d left Halifax for, the one that had led to my meeting Tom. This time off was a strange hiatus, a soporific suspension—a guilty pleasure somehow, though I’d done nothing wrong. Unless you’re one of those types who fault people for bringing children into the world. “Must be nice,” Tom sniped, trundling off to work, his final year of articling. This morning he’d left early to focus on a special case.