The breath she draws is as slow and deliberate and deliberately vacant as his or Rebecca’s when they’re dragging on tobacco. “Do, dear?” And he responds just as impatiently as she does to their stinky habit, as if the whole world knows better. “For Pete’s sake, Ma. About Dad?” As if they can do anything, as if it’s up to them, doctors included. “The respirator, the drip—?” he prods, as though she’s stupid. His voice a tired whisper as if he’s small again, rubbing his fists in his eyes, resisting bedtime. A strange, sweltering feeling weaves through her, a wooziness so off-putting she wishes she could put her head down; if she’s patient, it’ll probably pass. “Well, my darling,” she sighs, the heat twitching and jumping above her left eye. “You know what they say: It’s up to the good Lord, I suppose.”
AFTERWARDS, SHE AND THE MAN had huddled together, God have mercy on her weak, slovenly soul! Instead of running, fleeing, after grabbing at life—admitting her own craven, singing need; not only that, but letting it push inside her—what had she done but eaten biscuits? He’d opened the root beer on a nail; glug glug glug, it went down his gullet. Then he’d picked and eaten the crumbs off his coat.
As Jewel woke and started fussing, the man had mimicked her shush, making a sound like the sea inside a shell. But by then she was glad of the barn’s dinginess, pleasure having fanned itself into shame, a hot, thick feeling moving up her throat and filling her ears. The baby wiggled upright, chewing his mitt and whimpering. The man’s eyes had filled with a cool, bitter longing, and before Jewel could work up to a proper howl, she’d bundled and slipped away with him, lingering just long enough to straighten his little hat. Turning once, she’d forced a grin—one she hoped was brave, or at least dogged—and she’d wondered, would a woman like Lil have been that brazen? In the dimness the man’s eyes were opals; his face was drawn. As she ducked into the light, he raised the mug she’d brought, and might’ve begun to speak.
The rocks and trees jumped into sharp relief—even the pine needles on the path—as if freshly minted, unseen before. Harry was home early, pacing, wondering what a man had to do to get fed. Then he’d grabbed his coat, shouting that he wasn’t hungry anyway. Heating water, she’d filled the washtub and climbed in, Jewel gumming the edge and grabbing the cup for rinsing, christening her and the floor.
After that day, she’d returned to the barn once more, stopping first at Ida Trott’s, dropping the baby into her arms. She’d seen her going to church, Ida said, blinking as he struggled. Ignoring his shrieks, Lucy blew kisses, all the way uphill past the rusty anchor, Ida’s look twisting through her. Whatever it was inside her like an engine, cranked.
The clothes were gone, the only sign he’d been there a sprinkling of spruce needles. The air smelled of dust and flies. Pulling off her gloves, she’d clapped her hands together, watching her breath. As if she’d dreamed the man—and their behaviour, as Father Marcus might call it, his homily yawning through her: True life is avoiding sin. All its pulses and beats, sin like garden seed, endless varieties waiting to sprout: she’d been the ground in spring, the man a rake and hoe. As the emptiness spread around her, she’d thought of Harry’s good eye: how he turned the bad one to the pillow when he moved on top of—the last time, when?
The man’s gaze, his mouth on hers…what the body remembered, the soul forgot? As she groped the walls for his ghost, slivers pushed into her palms till they resembled a gardener’s tearing up roses, tracked with thorns. Stumbling downhill, she ignored Ida’s offer of tea. The bottle she’d left was almost empty, syrupy milk rolling in the bottom like an eye. Sit, Ida’d coaxed, bundling Jewel into her arms—glad to, clearly. Clutching him, Lucy’d pushed money at her, and Ida’d pushed it back, those eyes squinting through her lens-less spectacles. Then she reached for Lucy’s hand, asking if there was something she’d like to know. Stroking her palm, those scratchy fingers pushing the slivers deeper; saying she didn’t want nothing for it, if that was a worry. “Ah, let’s see,” she said, “Babies: them two tiny creases in the side of your hand?” She told Lucy she had a heart line like a skipping rope, and a good strong lifeline, asking if she’d been chopping wood, then out of the blue: “That fella of yours an’ Artie are chummy, I hear?” Lucy’d pulled away, Ida swatting at something, saying she’d never tell anybody nothing bad, but if she wanted to know about that fella…
That night when Harry asked what she’d done to her hands, she answered with a shrug, the dishwater a salve.
WHEN THEY DROP HER OFF, there’s a whisk of coolness and crunching gravel, then just the tail lights like cigarette ends as the car pulls away. Woven into the twilight and the curtain lace is Lucy’s silent, sketchy prayer. God willing. On earth as it is in heaven, a tiny voice seems to mimic from the empty rooms and hallway, a voice from the past chased by a country tune. Some blonde bombshell’s twang: “Heaven’s Just a Sin Away,” that song Harry’s been dying to learn to play. But as she takes off her sweater, the voices and music explode, the emptiness of the house closing swiftly around her. She thinks not just of Harry, but suddenly, jarringly, of Helena. And in the thickness of memory, caught off guard as she is, once more the sky rains soot and the boiling, greasy sleet of splintered steel.
WHEN HER MONTHLY WAS FIVE days late, she went to confession, set to barter. The empty pews hummed a silence deeper than any secret inside her, candlelight guttering as her innards crawled; she ought to have studied the catechism, its recipe for making a good confession (was there a bad one?). But the click of rosary beads had pressed her forward into the casket-like cubicle. The small, screened square had filled with light and Father Marcus’s shadow. How long since your last confession? There’d been the smell of shaving soap, the priest’s weary coaxing: “Through Penance, my child, all sins are forgiven.”
All sins? Venial? Mortal? It was as if the man, the prisoner, were breathing beside her, his fingers on her skin. “God forgives the contrite,” Father Marcus prompted, asking if she’d been impure, entertained unclean thoughts?
“I lied,” she’d fibbed. “To my husband, Father.” How many times? he wanted to know. Times?
A rustle then—had someone been listening? “Once,” she said. “I lied to him once.” Never mind the falsehood; she’d longed to beg an excuse, the excuse of life dug from despair. Also, she’d have liked to ask about someone’s drinking and repeated “lying.” But the priest’s forgiveness was without zeal, her penance five Hail Marys, and the advice to honour her husband with heart and mind.
The Virgin’s statue had smiled down as Lucy worried the prayer, its words tumbling inside her, and that familiar numbness returned as if she’d been knocked on the head. Mater dolorosa, Mother Mary full of grief. A voice like Ethel’s seemed to chant: Mother May I? Queenie Queenie…But compared to the Virgin’s sorrows, what were hers? Smooth as oil, the mildness of that sculpted expression slid through her; and at bedtime that night she’d started to bleed.
IN THE KITCHEN, THE RED of an oven mitt jumps from the table, out of its usual spot and as jarring as tail lights blinking down the street. What other things, she wonders, has she dropped—misplaced?—in the darkness of these past couple of days? Restless, needing the sound of a voice, a real one, she turns the knob on Harry’s little radio there on the counter, dust—or flour?—caked into its grill. The radio clicks on, its tiny red light like a bunny’s eye, but all that comes out is static, as though it can’t quite work without Harry around, either. Still, though, the little light’s a comfort, red as a Christmas ornament. Which makes her think of Jewel, and Harry too, back when Harry was still pretty green, and so was she, too green to know it! But like the remnant of a good dream, the image that floats up is airy as sheets billowing on a line: Jewel in his father’s arms, his tiny hand closing around something from the tree, something pretty and bright as a cardinal.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT, HARRY HAD sniped, salvaging wood from Babineau’s toppled outhouse. The plan was he’d figure out how to bui
ld a shed first, before going all out and buying land. A voice like her father’s had filled her: You wouldn’t know a plumb line if it snuck up and bit your arse. But Harry stood firm, the rum talking no doubt, as if riveting plates to hulls was the same as building a house. Then Lil had rattled the screen, her lacquered face looming; she was wearing what appeared to be a dressing gown. He’d forgotten the seat.
Later, outside in the frosty gloom, his voice was gleeful: “I’m not building another shitter, dolly.” The air had smelled of snow, and a foghorn’s moan was as needling as flying metal. Taking her back to that hillside, straight back to the feel of greasy, spiked grass, the sound shook then dangled her, suspended. As though, if she’d held her breath, listened carefully enough, it might’ve disclosed something. But then the baby gurgled, and tickling his chin, she’d chanted: There was a crooked woman in a crooked little house…As if Lil had been a two-bit traveller at the door selling rags.
Quickly the shack took shape, an eyesore rising out of the grey woods: Harry’s little haven, while hers became the gleaming womb of St. Columba’s in the hush of Advent. Who knows what he got up to out there, but on Christmas Eve, surprisingly sober, Harry brought in a pinwheel he’d whittled then painted red, and a scrawny spruce for a tree, which she decorated with bows made from an old red shirt. The pinwheel looked like a bird sitting in the branches. O Tannenbaum. She’d wished with all her heart there’d been two.
“I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down!” Holding Jewel she’d tried to make the pinwheel spin, but it wouldn’t, not till Harry greased it with butter. And then he’d said, “Sometimes I dream, you know.” Of what, she’d wanted to know, thinking, oh Lord, Lil Marryatt? But then he’d rambled, “Like what happened to us never happened at all,” and he swore to God that sometimes he could hear her laughing, and those games Lucy would play with her: London Bridge, Sally Saucer. His good eye, clear and blue, had gazed out at the island, the prison under the soggy snow, and lacing his tea with cheer from next door, he said how he’d always had this idea how she’d look grown up: “a princess, maybe. Beautiful, like—like someone, anyways.”
1919
THAT WINTER, ICE BRIDGED THE channel, clotting the Arm till it looked like a floating mackerel sky. Once she saw men playing hockey in their boots, which only socked in her loneliness. There was always Ida; she could’ve visited her, but something held her back; and slowly, eventually, the days lengthened and the ice melted, stranding seals on the rocks. One March evening Harry came home early. He was like a little kid; there was land for sale up behind the Big House. Room for a garden and everything, Artie’d said, the owner a buddy of his gone off to the States.
Her skin prickled as if she’d rolled in sand. Then he’d started in, wanting to know what he’d done, calling her the Queen of Sheba, saying if she’d wanted an estate she should’ve picked another fella. But at dawn he dragged her out of bed to see it.
The land was across from where she’d spied those little boys playing in a puddle, fighting over candy. A skewed rectangle hemmed by picket fences, the plot was mostly rock dotted with spruce, the houses on either side small but almost tidy. Curtains twitched: someone watching? “So, dolly?” he’d said.
Building a shed was one thing, a house quite another. And she couldn’t help thinking, too, of Artie and Lil, and Ida, of course, through the woods and down the hill, eyes in the back of her head. “What about something in town,” she’d answered, where he could take a tram to work? But Artie’d told him he could get it for a song.
“Can’t go wrong buying land,” he said, making eyes at Jewel. As if it were a done deal, the cabin with its mould and the crib crammed by the bed a piece of rotting history. Swaying her with the promise of space for flowers. Rounding up the last of their relief money, he never did tell her the price, and she didn’t ask, though there was no doubt his poker playing helped. Soon as the ground thawed, he promised; by the fall they’d be in it.
Artie and some cousins of his helped dig the hole for the basement. Harry’s muscles bulged from moving rock, and suddenly Lil Marryatt seemed to have fallen off the planet. He’d crawl home after dark, happy despite complaining that it was work for jailbirds; lowering himself next to her he’d soon be asleep. Listening to his snore, in the shadows thrown by the prison lights, some nights she felt high and dry as something washed up, lying there wanting him.
But at least the long, bright evenings allowed her to watch the progress. Clamouring to walk, Jewel would push her away when she tried lifting him. “Never seen such a kid,” said one of the cousins. “Mine would rather hang off his ma’s tit.”
“Can’t blame the blighter for that,” Artie grunted as he drove the pick, his shirt riding up to show his crack. Harry gave her a look, mopping sweat with a rag the same colour as that shirt he’d never missed. “Never seen so much goddamn rock in all my life,” Artie ranted. “Me, I’d leave a crawlspace.” So it was her fault they had to dig to frigging China! Laughing, Harry gave him a shove and called him a lazy bastard who didn’t like work.
That night Harry’d made love to her like a skinny machine, all muscle and bone. Afterwards they whispered in the dark, as she mulled over a picture in her mind as simple as a child’s drawing: a house with two walls and a roof and a pigtail of smoke curling from the chimney. It was too much to imagine rooms and being inside looking out, until Harry’d prodded, asking what she wanted. Then the list had gone on: a letter slot, an upstairs with a landing, closets. “Mid-October,” he promised, “November at the latest, Christmas for sure.”
All summer he worked long past dusk, framing. The day they put up most of the roof she almost cried watching him drive nails up there in the muggy heat. With brawn he’d gained grace, scaling the catwalk over the stairs like a one-eyed tom. Wary of his vision, never mind his balancing act, she’d close her eyes, hold her breath. But he was an acrobat swinging a hammer, nails between his teeth; it could’ve been her dad in his carpenter’s apron, the thought setting off the whirling, dusty sting of loss.
“Frigging cock of the walk up there,” Artie would sneer, swigging beer. If the place came together square, he’d eat grass; they all would. Harry’d yell down at him to shake a leg, saying he and his cousins weren’t much use half cut. Gophers, he called them behind their backs, and she wondered why they let him boss them. “They owe me,” was all he would say. God forbid he was paying them by the hour! “Who’s up there hammering,” he’d turn on her, “me or you?” Still, bringing water to quench his thirst, she’d be stopped by the sight of him bent over a sawhorse, his shirt off, his chest slick with sweat, that scar like a streak from a leaky pen. As she and Jewel made shaky towers out of scraps, all she wanted was to have Harry lay down his tools. She missed him, was the truth of it, and who’d blame her after so many nights watching the stars by her lonesome?
TRY AS SHE MIGHT, SHE can’t seem to tune the radio to anything solid; voices and songs drift in and out, the static like someone feverishly crumpling paper. At first, putting up with it is better than going to bed. She can’t face the upstairs, not yet, the quiet worse up there, gathering the way heat does at the top of the house, lingering and close even from the landing. Like heat, better to brave it gradually, and the front room’s a sojourn from the kitchen anyway, a resting spot like a rock in a river. But Harry’s absence soon weaves through the soothing darkness bathing her. There’s the photo, faded and curling inside its frame, taken when the house was built. The darkness obscures their faces, hers and Harry’s, but who needs to see to remember? The image of that day is fixed in her imagination: she’s chewing her lip, trying not to look too proud; Harry’s curls are plastered in a little wave atop his broad forehead, and he’s looking down. The picture cuts off his hands and most of his body, but she has no trouble filling them in; his fingers wrapped around the beer bottle, the baby clinging to the knees of his trousers, which is why his braces look taut.
Harry
. As she holds the photo close to her face, its coolness touches her lip: the coolness of skin, almost. It’s easy to imagine him peering back, his gaze a little off-centre, almost but not quite avoiding hers. An idea bubbles up: if she were younger, if the hospital would permit it, she’d pack a suitcase and camp out there. Not only that, and the idea grows practically into a plan, something they’d pull off on TV: she’d lock the door and untie that useless strip of gauze around his jaw, yes, she would, and she’d breathe. Straight into his mouth, like those St. John Ambulance people with their stretchers and first aid. Oxygen pure as the Holy Ghost himself, straight into Harry’s lungs until, rejuvenated—reborn?—he’d open his eyes and look at her, maybe just a little startled. Even better, he’d speak, her poor crippled Rip Van Winkle: Lucy? Where the hell are we? Where’ve I been?
But that wouldn’t be the half of it. Shhh, she’d whisper. Get dressed. Because, like Lazarus, he’d be up and walking around in his johnny shirt. But on second thought, maybe they wouldn’t worry about clothes, and he’d just stroll right out of that room and down the hall in his bare feet, his skinny white legs and bum showing. And to complete this pearly scene, Jewel would be waiting outside, chewing bubblegum in the getaway car—Harry’s favourite jalopy, that 1940s Dodge, or had it been from the ’30s?—and he’d have Rebecca and Robert with him, and the engine running. They’d slide in back, Harry in the middle, she and the boy hemming him in so there’d be no more fears of losing him.
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