“That looks like Annie all right,” Daisy pronounces at the end of it.
To keep the forces of decay at bay, Florence puts on the ice machine behind the bar and we collect bucket after bucket of ice cubes and set them out under and around the table at close intervals. Florence switches on the air conditioner — a small unit but it will help — sets the temperature to fifty-five degrees and turns on the fan. That’s when she notices the rapping on the back window and gets all nervous again. There’s a magpie peeking in.
“Oh, dear,” she says. “Annie would want me to see to that.”
“What in heaven’s name?” Daisy says to me. “What has come over the woman?”
I just shrug.
Five minutes later, when I go to check on her, it sounds like Florence is talking to someone. But it’s just a couple of birds on the back deck. She’s feeding them.
“I was just telling them that they have to find another restaurant,” Florence jokes. But then she makes us close all the drapes before we leave, check all the doors for cracks and find more towels to block leaks of light and air.
All in all, the preparations take about two hours.
Finally, Florence insists that we take the washing water with us.
“It’s wash water,” Daisy says. “Dirty water. Annie wouldn’t want us saving it.”
“No, it has to return directly to the earth.”
“What?”
“I mean it needs its own special drain, just like the holy water and the consecrated wine at church on Sundays.”
“Like Jesus? Well,” Daisy says, after she stops the laugh that had begun to rise in her chest, “why don’t we take it up to the church then. It’s just up the block.”
But no, Florence won’t hear of the water going near the church, and I give Daisy a warning look.
“It has to be the rose bushes in Annie’s own backyard. It has to be those.”
“Okay,” Daisy and I both say at the same time. Florence has got it in her head and there is no arguing. Daisy, ever the practical one, hauls out a pail from the cleaning closet. “Will this do?”
Florence has to clean it within an inch of its life before we can pour the used water from our basins into it. The three of us make a funny-looking procession with the sun at its highest point overhead, Florence in the lead, Daisy and I taking turns carrying the pail, till we reach the roses, white and pink and yellow, even the odd red, just starting to bud out. Annie’s are always earlier than anyone else’s. Some say a microclimate, warmer, backing onto the old creek bed, all those old bricks in the soil. The bushes are so tall now, they just about blot out the old brickyard. And I have to admit, they probably need the drink.
ANNIE
Outside the window there are magpies. The three mourners won’t notice them right away, but I do. They are missing their peanuts. I strain to hear their family talk. Babies. When the parents are training them, they produce low sounds at the back of their throats “ah eh ah aaaa, ee, ah ee ah ya hmm.” And low clicking sounds, like they’ve lived with the Inuit up on the Arctic circle. They’ll make that sound with you too if you feed them.
When they leave the nest, the parents take them on rounds of the town. First the grass. They poke at it unsure of what they’re looking for. Hop, hop. Look to their mothers. We all look to our mothers. Then garbage cans and the dump. They learn how to forage in tin and among plastic. How to turn everything over and get the best bits of leftover pizza in the schoolyard or the half-eaten steak out back of the hotel. How to spot a dead ground squirrel on the road. Finally they come to the bird feeders, to sunflower seeds and peanuts, and to us humans.
One pecks at the back window a light rap, a knock. Without turning I know it’s Mother Magpie looking in, wanting attention, talking loudly to herself but really she’s talking to me the way some people talk while pretending not to. They won’t look at you while they are telling you the most intimate details of their lives. Family talk. She is wanting to be fed and I am her nana. I try to greet her. I can’t come right now. I’ve got company, can’t you see? I do my best to give a little sigh, a shiver. Florence looks up.
I have my tin of peanuts sitting right on the porch by the backdoor, on a weathered, wooden-slat sun chair. Mother Magpie jabbers again, this time louder, swivelling her head with one eye in my direction, fluttering, pausing an instant. She reaches to clean her beak on the windowsill, like a branch, just a small swipe on each side as all birds do just before or after eating, the smallest to the greatest. Her offspring fly up to a nearby limb.
Florence puts down the sponge she was using to wash my body. She goes out the screen door and Mother Magpie flies up and perches on an eave. Florence digs in the tin where the magpie was sitting a moment before. Takes out three peanuts and puts one up on the fence ledge that runs behind the hotel and steps back. Magpie barely hesitates, half hops, half flies, dips her beak, then flies with her prize to the nearest crab apple tree. Barely lands before she starts gabbling again, rolling the peanut over and over in her beak, then her feet, testing it for weight and freshness. Finally bites into it, oohs and aahs softly. Wipes her beak, again, starts to preen her feathers. Florence steps back slowly, leaves another handful on the top of the nearest post. The birds swoop down in turns, carrying more peanuts off, one at a time, to eat and to hide.
The sun is a fiery orange out the back, the thunderclouds all but gone. I watch from my new perch, which is everywhere now, eyes in the back of my head. In a minute the magpie leaves, on to its other rounds, the schoolyard, the main hardtop highway just the other side of town. Florence comes inside, picks up her sponge and squeezes the water out again, gently. She looks at me carefully, her head at an angle, but I don’t meet her gaze.
I don’t remember the day my mother left. All I remember is that she was like a ghost at the window staring out hour after hour, in a white night dress to the knee, her black hair tangled, long past her waist. Her face dark. Her eyes a deep brown the opposite of mine and my father’s, our eyes blue and our hair yellow. She was ravishing. My maman was French. My father’s parents, Cornish Irish. That is when we still had the brickworks. Nana Gallagher had to come to cook for us at night. She tried herbs on my maman, healing teas. Maman kept saying she herself had made a mistake. She took her tea dutifully and shook her head and kept repeating, “I am mistaken. Taken by mystery, I am.” The tea helped her sleep for a time.
There were only two small windows in our little house. Maman paced from one to the other, singing to herself and watching. She would tell me she was waiting for a special visitor. A neighbour would rap on the front door but she wouldn’t move. Not this one, ma petite, she told me. The priest would stop by and she would turn her head away from his knocking. Nor this one, she said, and she would put fingers to my lips until the knocking ceased.
And then she was gone. When they were in their cups, the old people used to say to my father that she’d fallen in love with the leader of a brass band and escaped to the west coast.
I was there when she first opened the door to him. A Lebanese pedlar who played the accordian and made the rounds of the towns with his cloth, his thread, and his spices, his visions of the Old World. My father was at the brickworks stoking the fires, as he often was, days and nights at a time. The music worked a spell on her; she became possessed by the dark-haired man. From then on, she told me to watch for him; him and only him we allowed to enter.
I grew to love those visits and that man for how happy he made her, how much light she carried in her body when she was around him. And I grew to hate him when she was gone, for the opposite reason, the darkness that fell around us, my father, my nana, and me.
I took that nightshirt everywhere after she left, bundled up like a doll or a teddy bear, wore it to bed with me, would not let it be laundered.
For a few years, she sent money. Envelopes postmarked from all over the world. Wrapped in blank letter paper with three words roughly marked: pour ma fille, for my daughter. Currency with e
xotic colours and faces from far off lands, that no banks in Majestic or Victoire could cash.
5
FATHER PAT
Florence phoned me at the rectory this morning just after breakfast. Then Daisy, then Vera. The three furies. Like they planned it. Wanting me to meet them at the hotel after lunch, to book a Christian burial for the body of Annie Gallagher. In the seminary they said on my final field evaluation, Tends to passivity. Needs to work on self-confidence. I am not passive when it comes to leadership. I’m not afraid to speak up. I can say no.
No, no, no, I said three times.
“She never took communion and she never came for confession. She set herself apart. How can I bury her?”
“Yes, she was there. She rose and she sat and kneeled at the appointed times. But her mouth never moved, nor her feet.”
One time I asked her why she didn’t partake with the rest of us; she gave me a cryptic answer. “My hands won’t let me.”
“She was in church every Sunday. She was a member of this Christian community. I don’t know about a leader,” I said.
“No,” I repeated. “No. I’m sorry for your loss.”
But I couldn’t say No to the meeting. Now it is past lunch and we are standing in the lobby at the hotel.
“The new rubric is—”
“I know the new rubric, Father,” Vera interrupts. I ignore her.
“That we don’t eulogize the person as much as their Christian life and celebrate our belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I’m reluctant to give someone a full church burial whose communion status is irregular.”
“That’s just it, Father. She lived it.” Vera folds her arms and digs in her heels. “She didn’t just show up on Sundays.”
“She had a drinking problem, I’ve heard. Among other things.”
“Oh, Father, that was almost thirty years ago, now, according to the oldtimers. Besides, we all have our pasts.” Daisy fixes me with a big smile. I can instantly feel my cheeks flush. Of course. Everyone knows. They all live in each other’s back pockets out here. But I won’t be intimidated from my duty.
“Don’t you see? She chose to excommunicate herself! She didn’t trust anyone with her reasons. She didn’t seek forgiveness.”
“She didn’t have the benefit of a deathbed confession, Father.” Florence straightens up.
“I would be going against her will.”
“But who knows the heart, Father?” Daisy Goodchild, smile gone, all innocence.
“She wouldn’t meet my eyes. She never stopped to visit.”
“Well, I don’t know, Father, she met everyone else’s eyes.” Florence gives me the once over. “Maybe she was trying to show respect? You know in the old days how women were taught not to meet the gaze of a priest. . . .”
All I know of Annie is what I’ve witnessed. Her striding between the hotel and the church every Sunday. And all those cats she kept out back of her house, on the roof, around the yard, on the picnic table out front as well as that family of magpies. Someone else seems to be feeding them now. If it’s true about the drinking, I don’t know how she kept the hotel all those years without relapsing.
“She had cats,” I say out loud.
“What’s wrong with cats, Father?” Daisy narrows her eyes as she says it.
“Dozens of them.” I can’t help myself. No one believes in witches anymore, least of all me, still I can’t help myself. I realize I was a little afraid of her.
“What is wrong with you, Father?” Florence Enders is staring at me, her hands firmly planted on her hips.
“Well, she was out witching or whatever you call it. Doesn’t sound particularly Christian!”
“She did all kinds of good for this community, Father.” Daisy juts out her chin and waves her arms in the air. “Wells for twenty miles around. And that young girl. She took in that young girl, Father, in her time of need. Your altar girl.”
“Not for long.”
“What do you mean ‘not for long?’” Florence elbows her way into the fray again.
“I mean it’s not appropriate for this young girl to be on the altar in her — condition.”
“She’s baptized and had her first communion in this very church.”
“Years ago, I understand.”
“She’s enrolled in confirmation class for fall already.”
“There are a number of irregularities in this parish which I’ve overlooked under the circumstances. The girl altar servers, the excess of lay preaching and presiding. I have to draw the line on this.”
“But Father, the Vatican approved girls for altar service almost ten years ago!”
“Approved but never mandated; the local pastor, as presider at the liturgy, has the final decision.”
“Annie had every intention of helping Kelsey get a start with her baby. Now it’s up to those of us who remain. You included. Are you a pro-lifer, Father, or are you not?”
“Of course, but this is not a matter of pro-life or not pro-life, Florence. I’ve been tolerating the situation on the altar till the church closes. But with the bishop coming out . . . and now this death. . . .” “We have no boys who want to serve on the altar, Father,” Vera says quietly.
“And it’s no wonder! They see a girl up there. . . . Boys at that age. . . . It’s completely irregular!”
Florence takes a step forward and looks me right in the eye: “You’re what’s irregular here.”
“Oh, all right! I’ll give Annie a church funeral if you agree to have the wake at the church as well.”
For a moment, Florence hesitates, frowns. “Father, if it were me, I’d agree with you, but this hotel is Annie’s second home. People knew her here. They came and took their coffee here and picked up their mail. They got the news. That is the nature of a public house. It’s not just a drinking establishment.”
“It’s — it’s so undignified! A wake at a bar. And for some, just an excuse for excess.”
“Her body is in the next room, Father. Can you stand beside it and say that?”
“Fine. I’ll do the wake if you promise not to serve any alcohol.”
“Not till the end of the evening and then only in moderation.”
I can’t help but sigh. “Meanwhile, you should be praying for her soul. And there’ll be no Eucharist since she didn’t avail herself of communion when she was alive.” I turn towards the bar, meaning to go visit the deceased.
“Oh, but there will be prayers, Father. . . . The glorious, the sorrowful and the joyful mysteries. One of each in the morning, afternoon and evening tomorrow. The Catholic Women’s League has it all organized. A wake, Friday night, and a Liturgy of the Word, as you say, for the funeral which you or the bishop will celebrate on Saturday.”
Perhaps my face betrays my disbelief. Annie a devotee of Mary?
“Oh, Annie was a great devotee of Our Lady. She often said she owed her recovery from the drink to her. Had shrines set up inside the house and around the garden.”
But that wasn’t the end of it. Another half hour of haggling before they finally let me perform my priestly office and bless the body.
DAISY
We decide the three of us to go back to the hotel after lunch and meet the priest together to haggle about the wake.
“Several of the parishioners want to say a few words, Father,” I start, giving him my best smile.
“Well,” he says, “they’ll have to wait till I’m done the service.”
“Nonsense, Father,” says Florence. “The vigil is the place for stories about the deceased.”
Vera is more diplomatic. “According to the rubric, Father, the vigil is the place for the bereaved to express their grief.”
The man looks like a strange bird floating around in those heavy black robes summer and winter. I can’t help but think he could use some style coaching. This is Majestic, after all, the middle of oil Alberta not Europe in the Middle Ages! Trousers have been in style for four hundred years.
Oh, word
gets around. There’s more going on in that heart under those cassocks than he lets on. There isn’t much you can keep to yourself in a place like this. There’s always some story with the priests they send us. Majestic is a backwater. Nobody chooses us.
Florence dares him to go in and say his intentions in front of the body. He struts and he preens and straightens his clerical collar before marching us in like a small parade to the Table of Truth. Father Pat sniffs when he sees the rose Vera found on Annie’s person, sitting in a small bowl of water beside her head. Then he spots the suspenders above the top of the quilt (the crazy quilt we found on her bed), spots the farmer’s shirt and wonders at the choice of resting clothes we have given her.
“Are those hers?”
“Yes, the very same,” Florence tells him.
“What about dressing her—” He hesitates, but we all know what is coming, “prop—” He catches himself. “In a more appropriate manner.”
“Do you mean like a lady?” I say loudly, drawing out the last word. I think about suggesting he donate something from his wardrobe. Size him up. Nope. Too skinny in the hips.
“She didn’t own a skirt, Father,” Vera says evenly.
“Surely one of you must have something to donate to the cause.”
The three of us look at each other. For heaven’s sakes! What a maddening man.
“It didn’t seem right to put her in a dress,” Vera says with just the right amount of deference.
“She worked all her life, more a man’s work than a woman’s,” I snort.
“Bad luck to dress a dead person in someone else’s clothes,” Florence agrees.
“We did find a rosary in her things and put that in her hands,” I offer with as much innocence as I can muster.
The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning Page 6
