“Annie was a work of mercy. She took in a young girl that needed a home. She was hungry and Annie gave her food. She was naked and Annie clothed her. Annie was a power for good.”
And that is partly where the idea takes hold in this new way that Annie was special, like some of us thought, but he is the first to say it out loud.
“Blessed,” he says. “She is blessed.”
And this lends credence to the notion that she is on the first leg of the road to sainthood.
KRISTIAN
First the bishop says that thing about the lightning and then I hear her speak. I’ll never forget that voice.
Kristian, you want the good. Follow where it takes you. And I realize the colour I am seeing around her coffin. The colour green. Green puts me in mind of earth, of fields, and I feel a sudden calm strung on a line through my head, down my gut to the heels of my feet, all the twisting gone inside and out. All the pieces of me fitting together again. And I want to weep for joy, but I don’t deserve it, I almost say out loud, when the big guy sitting behind me, the same one I saw at the wake and again this morning, gives me another pat on the back and tells me, “All will be right.”
ANNIE
People’s eyes bug out of their heads. Someone clears his throat. No one’s ever told them the unvarnished truth before from the pulpit. The place has run quiet. The young priest’s neck rises, his mouth gapes open like a gander on full territorial display.
It took half my life to get over my anger. As soon as the bishop makes his peace, I let go my body. Shuck it off, permeate the air in this place.
This is what I can say of the time I was taken. My mother had gone away when I was very small. No one said how or why till much later. My father on his death bed told me how her father was a town administrator, how they lived in a comfortable villa near the border, how her parents were shot by the advancing German army at the start of the war, the village burned to the ground. How her sister stayed with the German soldier who had taken them in and protected them. How Francesca had to cross the line alone.
She and my father had fallen in love and married quick-like as people did in those days, thinking that they were about to die. And I came just at the beginning of their new life in this land, which was the best thing that could have happened.
He had been selfish to woo her and bring her back. She had grown up with comforts he could never give her. He recollected how she had watched at the window every day, except in the heat of summer. Then she might be outside for a few minutes. But if a breeze stirred she would say “I feel chilled” and want to go inside. She left off eating, and feeding me, too. My father started to come home at noon rather than eating dinner with his men at midday and would try to feed us both in his fumbling way. My nana lived across the street, and she began to spend evenings with us and cook our suppers.
By the end of her time with us, Maman was as thin as a ghost, and she disappeared, as my nana used to say, into thin air.
This was when I started to live between my father’s house and my grandmother’s and where I first learned how to name the waters in me and the other bodily humours. My nana told me about the moon’s power and its cycles in a woman’s body. She showed me how to listen for the water. Told me how it was a gift in our family, how when all else failed — we could live by witching.
My nana saw me raised a Catholic, my first confession, my first communion, confirmation. I memorized all the questions Sister Aloysius read out of that blue and white book they called the Baltimore Catechism.
Who is God?
What is man?
What must we do to save our souls?
And I memorized all the answers because the words came up backwards for me on the page. It took me longer to understand what others were seeing; it took me longer to read.
I turned eight the first year of the Great Depression, though no one knew what it was at first. The banks were starting to fail and people couldn’t get credit. The next year the drought came and the crops failed too. There wasn’t much call for bricks and my father thought it best we make a change. People wouldn’t build when there was no money, but they needed a place to be with friends. That is when he started on the hotel.
All this time, I know now, the powers that be were growing in their interest in me, watching me fill out, suspicious of my sprouting breasts and my rounding hips, of my face that was lengthening, sharpening into focus like my mother’s so that when my nana died in her sleep, and I reached the cusp of womanhood, they took me for my own good, they said. Took me from out of a corrupting influence, a hotel and a young girl living alone with her father. No place for a growing girl who even the teachers said was in need of special training.
15
FLORENCE
A big silence envelops the church as the young Father takes the bucket from its place by the altar, walks down the centre aisle and round and round the casket sprinkling it three times three, sprinkling the holy water on her casket and all of us praying, so powerfully silent. Till he nods at the choir that it is time to go.
He sings, “Into the womb of God, we commend our sister, Annie. May this water of life speed her on her journey.”
He stares down at the place where the words leave his mouth, where his breath meets air. The young priest can’t seem to stop himself. The words keep coming out at odds with what he has planned.
“Carry her on her way! Great rainclouds full. Thunderheads.” There’s surprise in his eyes. I call that Godsmacked.
“This holy water blessed by the church, by nature, a meeting of waters, waters above and below. Bring her to your bosom. Remind her of her origins.”
“What did I tell you? The power of the water,” I say to no one in particular.
All of a sudden the front doors blow open.
JACK
I swear I see her rising. For a split second. Annie pulling herself up from her coffin, her white hair rippling around her. It might be a trick of the light, an old man’s vision and the view up here in the choir loft. The way the beams of sunlight shiver over her face.
ANNIE
This is how I was taken. It was a Sunday afternoon in spring. Pubs were always closed on Sundays then, and there were no guests staying at the hotel that weekend, so we were home. My father was dozing on the couch; he had been drinking whisky the day they came, as he had more and more since Maman had left and Nana was gone.
I had attended church on my own as I was wont to do after my nana died. Washed and dressed myself as best I could that morning, tried to go to confession before mass and take communion. But it was no good. I was growing out of everything. Dresses were tight across the chest, my good shoes pinched. Father Leo was curt with me in the confessional before mass, sharp even. He insisted I was lying to him. “You are guilty of the sin of omission,” he said. I shook my head; I didn’t understand. It was not enough to say I had talked back to my father, that I had called someone at school a name, that I had shoved a boy that week who had teased me. Father Leo refused to absolve me or give me communion that day.
Four of them came to the house: the young doctor from one town over with his leather medical bag; my teacher, Mrs. Burke, from school; one of the ladies from church, also a member of the United Farm Women; and young Father Leo.
I was in the backyard pruning the roses, clearing out the brambles from the raspberry patch, turning the vegetable garden with a spade so that we could plant that year. I had been taught how to tend all of it. I had on a pair of my father’s old jeans. Each leg rolled up to my ankles, cinched tight on the waist, and an old plaid shirt of his with the sleeves cut down. He wanted me to wear Nana’s clothes, but she had been a completely different shape than me, elongated as she was like a string bean. My father was long too but with heft to the shoulders and a waist closer to my own.
They had knocked long and loud, till finally I had to come around from the back to let them in. They did not wipe their feet. They did not remove their hats or sit down. They looked angry,
indignant, righteous. I thought they had come to give my father a lecture. But they motioned for me to step inside too and closed the door. My father stirred, cracked open one eye, saw the black Model B Ford of the RCMP parked outside, sat up as straight as a robin in a field, and tried to pull himself to his feet but his legs betrayed him. The two women stood by me; Mrs. Burke tried to pat my shoulder, but I shook off her touch. The doctor took up a position in the passageway to the kitchen; Father Leo blocked the front door. One by one they stood over him till he signed the order. And on it were listed the reasons for my removal:
Truancy
Unkempt appearance
A minor in a public house
Public drunkenness in a guardian
Immoral behaviour between father and daughter.
It was true after my nana had died there was no one to make sure I took a bath, combed my hair, washed and mended my clothes. It was true I helped my father at the hotel some evenings, but no one had ever bothered me. They knew I was Declan Gallagher’s daughter. It was true I had been kept back a grade that year. Nana wasn’t there to help me with my reading, and I missed her in ways I cannot tell.
It was true about my father’s drinking. But it was the accusation of incest that sealed it for the doctor. He made notes, nodded to the others.
“Father Leo,” I said, trying to rush to him. The doctor and the two women grabbed my arms and held me back. “Stop them! Tell them! There’s no truth to the last. You know that.”
“But I don’t know that, my child. I don’t.” His eyes flashed.
“Living alone with this man. And you the temptation of Eve.” He clenched and unclenched his fists. “I have a responsibility to see that you grow into womanhood uncorrupted.” He turned away from me then, and opened the front door to the waiting officers.
“Papa!” I sobbed.
My father tried to rise again, his face flushed, breathing hard: “I’ve never touched my Annie. I’ve never. . .” but the drink was too much in him.
They took me as I was: brambles in my hair, an old cut off pair of rubber boots on my feet, a shirt torn on one sleeve where the thorns had caught. They told my father they would just burn my clothes at the institution anyway, and that there was no sense throwing good after bad.
I fought them: I scratched, I kicked. When I bit one of the officers in the arm, the doctor took out the straitjacket. It took three men to bind me: my arms wrenched into the sleeves, crossed and pulled tight over my chest and cinched. After three hours in the back seat of the car, my elbows were swollen, my hands were numb, and I was screaming for release.
“Don’t fight,” one of the officers said to me. “You only make it worse.”
BUSTER
The door blows open and all hell breaks loose on earth or heaven, however you see it. As soon the wind starts to stir up the proceedings, I start to laugh out loud. And that old bugger talking off the cuff like that. All the ladies and the priests trying to keep their skirts in place. The choir clutching their sheet music, such as it is, to their breasts. Little picture cards of Annie with her obituary on the back tear out of hymnals, out of hands, blow up and out of the open windows. Some of us try to hang on to our folding chairs. I can feel her plain as day. Irascible. “That would be Annie,” I yell back at Jack. He just nods and smiles. Alex and Mike are ushering today, so it’s their job to plough through the mob and get the door shut.
The young Mueller fellow in front of us is finally enjoying himself. He’s on his feet cheering and waving both arms in the air. Around the church, people reach to slam down any casement that is handy to them. I say to Bob who is sitting next to me in the pew, “I reckon we’re about to get a tornado.”
“Better find the basement,” he says to me, but neither of us moves.
ANNIE
I still grow the fève in the back garden. Nana saved the seed from that first generation in the new land. We sowed them every year after she left. A row for Maman. They are still flowering, putting forth seed, seeking, rising to meet the light.
Do you or I or anyone know how oats, beans and barley grow?
My father didn’t know that it was any one thing. The shock of the mud road. The two-room wood frame house. The wide flat plains. The sudden vicious thunderstorms. The cold. A new language in a strange place.
There were no books, no music. The closest thing to an instrument, a fiddle that he couldn’t play.
The women were suspicious of her; her beauty looked exotic to them.
At first, the nuns from Victoire visited and spoke to my mother in their slurred and guttural Quebecois, an old French gnarled by harsh winters. My father said they tried to cheer her up, urge her to adapt to the snow, to the empty land, the new language.
They should have known it can take generations to adapt a people, my father said, but they were innocent women without knowledge of evil. My mother had lived through war.
My father said she was almost giddy with expectation waiting for me to be born, but some days after she had me, he found her by my crib clasping and unclasping her hands, my diapers full, crying to be held, to be fed. As I grew, her mood swings took on a quieter temper.
She tried to make croissants, kneaded, rolled in butter, then kneaded a second time, but it was hard to get the dough right. She complained the flour here was too coarse, the butter too thin. She spent hours in the kitchen, her dresses streaked with flour and oil, and by the end of it, she was in tears.
She tried to garden, but the tomatoes and the cucumbers almost always froze. There was never enough water for the squash, never enough heat for the eggplants and the sweet peppers. Finally she gave up on gardening except for the fava bean, le fève, the one thing that came out all right. She would fry them in butter, fresh. The only thing she would eat some days, sitting in front of the house’s largest window, straight out of the pan with a wooden spoon. I remember near the end, her reaching down, the wooden spoon, the fresh green fava bean. She would spoon it right into my mouth.
MIKE
I’m not sure how to paint what happens next. Maybe like old prayer cards. A light coming through the roof. A dove overhead. A tongue of fire. Maybe the lightning bolt that found Annie has followed her here to this place, has split the mind of the old man in two. Even the young priest is too overtaken to protest. Maybe this is a mini-Pentecost what we’re having, all jammed into this place, expecting a visitation, expecting Jesus, and walking out with tongues of fire over our heads, babbling in strange languages instead.
The whir of winds came through like a heavenly rock and roll band, all bass and drums and a lead singer that was telling a hard truth in an even harder blasting tone. Others heard opera and old Jack said he heard country. Somebody else said it was in another language: Latin or what they imagined to be Greek. Doesn’t matter, we all heard the music. Yet when the doors and the windows were finally shut and the overhead fans kicked off, it was gone.
The young Mueller boy was so overcome he was weeping practically through the whole service, shaking in his seat. I didn’t even realize he knew Annie. Just goes to show the kind of effect she could have on people. The kid didn’t let up till the bishop’s homily and then he straightened up his shoulders, wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, and made eyes with the altar girl. Servers, I guess they call them nowadays. She seemed pretty happy about that and started weeping like women do when they’re overcome with emotion.
DAISY
“It’s the wind,” someone says.
And such a wind as I’ve ever seen in that church, lifts the cross laid on the pall, lifts the book of gospels, opens it, plays with the pages, before it’s swept aside. Lifts the pall off the casket like a white cloud.
The wind whips through the church, raising handkerchiefs, mourners’ hats, orders of service. Hymn books slam shut. Funeral cards whirl through the air.
The two priests clutch at their vestments, try to hold their cassocks below their knees. Father Pat loses the stole from around his neck. The mitr
e topples off the bishop’s head and rolls on its side down the steps.
The sound of laughter and then she is gone.
“The Son of Man, lifted in glory,” someone cries.
“May the Angels of God lead you to the Holy House of Wisdom.” The old bishop is crying, his face jubilant, his robes whipping around him. “May Jesus, Child of Wisdom, welcome you to his table, heaped and ready for feasting!” The young priest looks terrified. “May they lay you down by Wisdom’s streams and give you rest.” “Yes, come holy angels!” Florence prays.
Mrs. Cummins opens her mouth and sings a solo, she who has never sung a word in her life. A simple run up and down the C chord, a kind of improvised chant on “Alleluia,” still, the rest of the choir looks giddy.
“Journey with her and stand beside her in the presence of the Holy Most Wide!” calls the bishop.
I let out a laugh. The pallbearers scramble to get the cloth back on top of her, to retrieve the gospels and the cross, but the wind won’t let them. It’s all they can do to keep the white pall on.
It takes Buster to yell, “Close the damn door!”
Mike and Alex have to climb through several lines of mourners, standing room only. Mike acts as the anchor, the two of them clasp hands to keep from blowing outside. The mourners who were on the steps have found shelter in their cars. Alex leans out from the ledge, pauses there as if he’s getting a good look at the storm, smiles at something, then finally grabs the handle and gives it a good pull. Makes sure it’s latched.
Inside the church, all falls still. The air is itself again. No one says anything for several seconds. No one moves. It was as if they sensed it too, the great rushing in of the Spirit. The bishop is on his knees, the young priest beside him, looking suddenly repentant and small, like those children at Lourdes in the holy pictures you see.
The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning Page 17
