Unwed (Dovetail Cove, 1976) (Dovetail Cove Series)

by Jason McIntyre

  And the pen she was holding—Father Frye’s own blue pen—jabbed into his crisp white robe. Right under his arm, at the place just above the high waist where the robes were tied with bright gold cord. The pen stabbed into his side, a place left exposed where his arm departed to lean on the pass-through kitchen counter.

  Ha, she thought. Doc said it! Sleep under our belts! But, by God, blue ink over them!

  A tiny dash of dark, shiny blue. Then a pin prick of it, throbbing outward on the robe. But a count to two revealed red. Blood bloomed, dark cherry overtaking the ink and the otherwise perfection of white. Growing, growing. Uneven and sloppy, the circle of heavy red drooped under the point of that pen, still sticking into a place that might have been between two of the priest’s lowest ribs.

  Bexy’s vision blurred. But as she threatened to pass out, the white noise faded off. She heard rambling, disjointed shouting. But not from the priest. From Mary and from Doc. Father Frye stood there, his eyes shooting wide and veiny and going blank. Then he fell backward, his head connecting with the wheelchair ramp behind him.

  11.

  Doc Sawbones took charge. And Bexy McLeod did not pass out. At least, not yet.

  Mary started screaming but it turned to whimpers when Doc comforted her. He snapped his fingers at Bexy—not just to snap her out of the fugue that appeared to envelop her senses—but to get her attention over here on the girl. Slowly, Bexy became aware of her surroundings again. The noise in her head faded to a dull throb in time and tune with her raucous heartbeat. Still stunned, she moseyed over to Mary and started a series of pats and gentle rubs and hush-now-sweethearts. The girl climbed into the wheelchair, just a big kid in the lap of her adoptive mommy.

  Doc went to work. The splat of that pen piercing into the priest’s ribcage still rang in her ears. For all Bex knew, it did for Doc too. But Doc went into problem-solving mode. Bex knew no one was going to die over this mess, not if Doc could help it.

  Bex watched Doc rolled the priest on his side so the wound side faced up. Very little blood, that was good. Just the flower bloom that was saturated but not oozing and definitely not pouring. Bex couldn’t know for sure, but she reasoned that no major arteries had been severed and no major organs had been nicked. There was some relief there. But the priest was still out, and that made guilt ride high in Bexy’s throat.

  The Doc checked Father’s heart rate with his fingers, and then his breathing. He put his fingers in the priest’s mouth and stationed his tongue properly. He looked like he was trying to keep airways open.

  Doc then went to the kitchen and brought back two huge rolls of industrial paper towel and a roll of packing tape. He pulled the pen in one fluid movement. In his bleary stupor, Father Frye winced and moaned but did not awaken. Doc was able to absorb the new blood, and there wasn’t much. This was good news. He lay two big folded wads onto the wound over the priest’s robe, then pressed them in. Not immediately soaked through. Even Bexy could tell that was a good thing. Gingerly, he lifted the priest at the waist and looped the packing tape under him—twice, maybe for good measure. He pulled it tight around the priest’s upper belly, holding the paper towel compress in place.

  He took a breath. His face flushed with colour. He looked over at Mary and she gave him a knowing look, one that was heavy with understanding. She had done this. She knew it. She turned back to Mary and continued taking turns reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb. She kept watch on the Doc’s work while Mary tried her best to remember the rhyme.

  He took the priest’s arms up over his head and dragged the man up the rubber surface of the activity room’s wheelchair ramp. He huffed and grunted. Father wasn’t as big as the doc, but he was nowhere near the delicacy of, say, Bexy, when he lifted her from the wheelchair into the Plymouth.

  He yanked open the door to the front of the sanctuary and hauled him in. He got the priest up onto the shortest front pew, again on his side, with the wound up. He checked pulse and breathing again. “Come on,” he said through the doorway left open to the activity room a few stairs below, and then he looked back down at the priest now in his tired care. He sat next to the priest’s head, let out a heave of air, and reached into this trouser pockets. He came out with a small vial and shook two white pills into his hand. He chewed them with a vigorous crunch, discreetly—likely so as not to invite questions from Bexy.

  But Bexy was still distant. She and Mary came up the ramp and into the church’s main sanctuary. “Close it,” he said of the door. Mary did. She wore a red, troubled face, like a frightened child not ready to question what’s happening but waiting for the inevitable shouting match between Mommy and Daddy to begin.

  “Bexy,” Doc said, not with impatience, but with business in his voice. “Lock it. That group outside—if they haven’t already—they’ll split off and someone will head around back. They mean business.”

  In a half-fugue, Bexy figured out the latch. She tried it and was satisfied that it would hold. The door opened out into the activity room so the jamb on this side would hold it. Trying to slam through it from the other side would only result in a dislocated shoulder, not much else.

  Bexy turned in her chair. She had a semblance of reality in them again. “Oh God, Doc, I’m so sorry—”

  Doc cut her off. “Think nothing of it now, Bex. It’s done. Purty shor he’ll be fine. But not t’night. And not for a while. But I do believe it’s nothing serious. It only went in an inch. Maybe less. The blood flow stopped up. And it was only warm through the wads of towel, not hot. That was good.”

  Doc rubbed his bloody hands. He looked about the vast, high-ceiling church. Darkness and shade adorned the edges, clung there like bulky ghosts ready to flourish in the room and haunt it.

  “Thing is,” he said, craning around to look at the far end of the room. “We gotta figure this out...” He trailed off, thinking.

  “Why we in here?” Mary said.

  Doc smiled. “Oh, child, you’re precious, do you know that?”

  Mary nodded. She gave an embarrassed smile and hid her teeth with her hand. “God just made me this way,” she said.

  Bexy’s chest swelled at that. “We’re in here because there are some bad folks outside who want to get at us,” she said. She used a variation on a grown-up talking down to a baby, but it wasn’t meant to be hurtful, just curt. Fast, and to the point.

  “Isn’t that a silly thing?” Doc asked her, tacitly agreeing with Bexy’s approach to label the others as ‘bad folks’ but trying to soften it some.

  She nodded but said nothing. Still, she acted like a girl being teased by Santa Claus.

  “So, dear girl, do you see that room back there?” Doc asked.

  He nodded in the direction of a chunk of the sanctuary cut off from the rest at the back. It had two glass windows and a door that opened into the aisles. Some pews on that side at the back may have been removed at some point to build that room. It was dressed in slightly lighter shades than the rest of the woodwork, and it had the only plain glass in sight, not stained and colourful like all the rest.

  “Uh-huh,” Mary said.

  “That’s called The Crying Room. That’s silly too, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is,” Mary agreed.

  “It’s called a crying room because that’s where mommies take their babies during Mass when they just won’t stop fussing—” He looked at Bexy now. “And there’s a telephone in that room too.”

  He looked back at Mary. “Can you help the Ol’ Doc out, sweetie?”

  “I can do it,” Mary said rubbing her own arms in a gentle hug.

  “That’s just super. Can you come sit here?” She came over to him and looked down at the Father on the pew beside him. This was the pew that Doc and his wife Agnes nearly always sat in the last couple of years. “Father Frye here, he’s a bit...sick. And if he wakes up or if he does anything—anything at all—you shout for me to come.” He looked Mary in the eyes. “Okay?”

  Hesitantly, Mary said, “Okay. Doc?”


  “Yeah, hon?”

  “Is Father gon be okay?”

  “He sure is, honey.” Mary sat in the pew next to the Father and Doc gave the girl a kiss on her forehead.

  Looking satisfied that he had the girl settled, Doc got up. He looked considerably better than he had a few minutes ago, after dragging the big man in here and hauling him up onto the wooden pew, but he’d still seen better nights than this one.

  12.

  Without a word between them, Bexy followed Doc down the aisle. He pushed open the squeaky, barely-used door of the crying room. He flicked on a light switch and the hum of one old bulb started. It began to warm and the room swam into light, revealing two old, unmatched easy chairs, neither of which went with the stately decor of the old church. Beyond them, an upright piano and mounds of stacked boxes. Those had not been visible through the windows.

  But out there now, from this side, Mary’s head was a blob above the regimented lines of pews at the front of the church. Her black head of hair hung on a steady tilt as she stared down into the face of the man that had started all this madness tonight. As she said she would, she watched him carefully, and as she did so, Bexy studied her carefully.

  How had this all spun so out of control?

  Doc fished in his pocket and pulled out a small address book. He fiddled through the pages, grabbed the receiver from the cradle on the wall, and tested the hook. The dial tone was loud enough for Bexy to hear it too.

  Doc dialled a number scribbled in the small booklet.

  In a moment, the click, and for Bexy, the distant tone of someone saying, “Hello?”

  Doc said, “Yeah, Ian, this is Doc. Is he there yet?” Bexy watched Mary, hoping the Father wouldn’t stir, hoping that nothing would happen. Doc seemed to have taken charge here—and that was a good thing—they just needed nothing else to go wrong.

  Bexy only heard Doc’s side of the conversation. “Good. Put him on.” A pause. And then: “Get Ian to give you directions to St. Dominic’s Cathedral. He’ll drive you. Bring everything. Yup. Everything. Yes, I’m serious. You’ll be in and out of here in a half-hour. Come around the north side. There’s a bit of snow. If there’s no tracks, that’s the right way. I’ll have a door open for you. Put Ian back on.” A pause again. Then: “Yeah, Come down the avenue, not the street. Be discreet. And if'n ya can, grab my doc’s bag out of my trunk. The Plymouth is out front, down the street a ways. You’ll see it as you come. Yuh, that’s right. Okay then. See you soon.”

  Bexy waited a moment, then asked, “What’s happening?”

  Doc didn’t answer. He crinkled his brow and leaned forward on the telephone jutting from the wall. Then he turned. He gave Bexy a solemn look and then moved across the squarish room to the upright piano.

  He grabbed hold of one end and slid it out and around in a big arc against the back wall, right up snug to the easy chairs. It had wheels so it wasn’t as much effort as he expected.

  “Twenty-some years gone by,” Doc said, “A couple came to me. All hush-hush, like. She was Roman Catholic, he was Protestant-United. They’d gotten together only after they found out she was expectin’. The wedding was a big to-do, biggest the island had ever seen, yuh, shorely was. But the young hubby, he wanted the baby circumcised. Just had to have it. Here, in a ceremony, of all things. I did it, but the priest at the time—this was before Father Frye even—I made him promise me a quick exit. Ain’t right, some said, baptizing a baby Catholic and then cutting him...down there. Wasn’t morally justifiable. Not much different, I guess, from what they say we’re doing to Mary. I mean different, a’course, but people still put their backs up in a similar way. Any-who. I did the procedure in the presence of about eight or nine family members. No one else came in. N' just like tonight, there was a crowd outside—front and back.”

  Behind the piano were several baffles with orange rug covering them where kids could pin their coloured pictures of Jesus on the cross, maybe. They had wheels too.

  Bexy said, “It was the Banatynes, wasn’t it? I mean, Christopher Banatyne and his first wife. It was, wasn’t it?”

  “I won’t confirm nor deny,” Doc said breathlessly as he paused. Then he gave her a wink and repeated, “Won’t confirm nor deny.”

  He cleared the baffles out, one at a time, while Bexy smiled at the thought of the rich Banatynes getting caught up in a religious, island-wide scandal.

  The Doc started work on the stacks of boxes that had been to the ceiling behind the baffles. He made a tall hole in the mound and there appeared a set of three steps and a doorway at the bottom.

  “Right after that circumcision, I made my getaway. Right through here.”

  He headed down the three steps and opened the door to the cold night.

  “The specialist,” he said with heavy breath, “is coming to us.”

  13.

  Bexy asked what she thought was obvious. Doc looked out and eased the door shut. Again. It was the fifth time he’d done it. He looked like a secret agent hiding out from the KGB and waiting for the coast to clear.

  “If we have an out, why don’t we just—?”

  “We can’t, Bex,” he said. “There’s swarms of them out there. There is. I see ‘em milling about. Waiting. People from town. People from St. Dom’s Parish. I saw the Troyers. They’re circling like vultures. Mad as hell, they are, lemme tell you.

  “And, honestly, there’s no way we’d make it, all three of us—you in that chair—without them descending on us like a pack of locusts. My car’s way around the other side. I don’t know if they mean to bring violence to us, but I don’t want to find out. Do you?”

  “No,” Bexy said, putting her eyes down. “No, I don’t.”

  “It’s not perfect. I give you that. But the specialist is...well, he’s a specialist. This is a cake walk for him. We bring him in. We send him out.”

  Doc rubbed his white whiskers and pulled his thin hair back over his balding pate. “And look at it this way,” he said at last. “We take away the commodity and their money’s no good no more. Nothing left for them to barter for. Nothing left for them to bang into us over. Still be mad as stink, but it’ll be done. Game over.”

  Bexy let that sink in. Take away the commodity. Their money’s no good.

  “You sure we can’t—?”

  “I’m sure,” he said. He didn’t snap at her but it was curt. “I’m an old man, Bex. You’re no spring fowl, either, my dear. My ticker ain’t what it used to be. I can’t go head-to-head with an angry mob. Aggie, she’s not right in the noggin, she ain’t, doesn’t know who I am half the time, but I gotta get home to her t’night. I just got to.”

  They remained in their stations in silence. He, at the doorway, checking every two minutes, and her by the two recliners, checking on Mary who was checking on the Father.

  It wasn’t more than ten or twelve minutes before Doc peeked out and his demeanour changed. He met the men as they came in through the crying room’s side door, all of them blowing white breath in the chilly air.

  Doc took some pieces of what looked like luggage but had more pockets and compartments than most suitcases. Bexy recognized the Doc’s own bag that he often carried with him, even though he wasn’t the town’s practicing doctor any more.

  “Anyone see you?” Doc asked, helping the men pile in the bags and equipment.

  “No,” said the youngest. “I don’t think so.” Bexy recognized him as Ian, a man about the same age as her daughter. He worked at the ferry terminal these days, though she rarely had the opportunity to see him. Bexy couldn’t remember the last time she’d been off-island.

  The other man was dark-skinned and dark-haired, wearing small spectacles, a little older but not much, she didn’t think. Most of the immigrants Bexy saw around town were the farmhands from up north or the fishers who came in for their time off. Usually they spent it at the pubs or with ladies of the evening. Or maybe that was just how Bexy remembered it.

  “Hello,” she said, not really sure wh
at to say. Ian nodded at her as he piled things into the crying room. “Mrs. McLeod,” he said. “Doc told me what you’re doing for Mary. I think it’s...well, it’s a real nice thing, you looking out for her.”

  Bexy’s face flushed a touch. “Well, thank you, Ian, nice of you—”

  ”—But I really have to be getting back. Say hi to Teeny fer me. Nice to see you,” he said. And then he added, “Good luck,” before disappearing out the side door and into the blackness of the night.

  “Hello, ma’am,” the dark-skinned man said. “I am Roilo,” he said in a thick accent. “Please. Call me Roi.” He put his hand out and Bexy took it. He looked over at the Doc, still managing with a thing or two and then swinging the door shut and sealing off the cold night air. He spoke with gentle intent and soft voice. He was quite different from the Mexicans she knew who parlayed with the girls downtown after dark. He also spoke with hitched English and no slang. “I will be conducting the procedure this eve-e-ning. I am happy to help you with this routine. I owe the doctor a great debt of gratitude. My whole family does.”

  Doc said, “Roi here, he’s from the Philippines. I uh, well, let’s just say, I got him and his wife and daughters into the country a while back.”

  “Oh,” Bexy said. “And you are a doctor? Roi?”

  “Certainly, ma’am. I do not possess the credentials to practice medicine here, of course. Not yet. But I was fully certified in Philippines, my home country.”

  Bexy gave the doc a look that that might have said, Are you sure about this?

  To which, Doc responded verbally, “Absolutely one hundred per-cent safe, Bex. Roi here is the man to do this. Quick and tidy. Out and about in a half hour.”

  Doc looked tired but he had a renewed sense of vigour in his face. He clapped his hands. “Well, Roi. Tell me what you need. I’m your assistant tonight.”