Part 12 (1/2)
”Yes. They are kin.”
”They can't be,” said the girl. ”The old man is black.”
”Your eyes are deceiving you,” Mary said. Then she continued, ”I don't suppose you learned their names?”
”No. I didn't give them mine.”
But of course she hadn't - not even Mary knew the girl's name.
The following Sunday, the girl said they should go to the morning service. She wanted to see how Sylvia was getting on with Mr. McCahon. ”They'll both be there. Everyone will. It's Founders' Day.”
”Do you expect your potion to have worked?” Mary mocked. The girl was falling for her own fictions.
”I expect Sylvia's bared b.r.e.a.s.t.s to have produced some result.”
They washed at the pump and put on their cleanest clothes. They went out into the street, one following the sight of the cathedral's towers, the other the sound of its bells. On the steps of the cathedral, Mary sensed the people parting around them, and a babble, as of troubled waters. She understood that she'd forgotten her place and all her own promises. She seized the girl's skirt and stopped her in her tracks.
”What?” The girl was in a hurry. Then she said, ”How silly of me. Of course you can't go into a church!”
Mary released her.
”Wait for me. Look, here's some shade.” The girl hustled Mary into a corner and placed her hand against a stone pillar. Then she was gone.
After a moment, ”Ma'am?” a voice said. A warm, worn hand took hold of hers. ”Are you waiting to go in? You can sit up the back with me, if you'd like.”
Mary listened. She made sure there was no one else near them. ”I can't be seen in church,” she confided. ”I'm dead, you see.”
”Ma'am?”
”You must have heard the talk about us?”
”I don't hear anything unless it's said in front of me or my young friend deigns to tell me.”
”And he doesn't?”
”He's his own man.” Mary heard the old man rummaging in his clothes, and she waited with a kind of cool disenchantment. He took her hand again and placed something in it. ”That's a plug of chaw.”
Mary put the chewing tobacco into her mouth. Her mouth grew wet and her head hummed. They stood side by side, chewing companionably.
”You're missing the service,” Mary said.
”G.o.d is here, too.”
Mary thought, G.o.d isn't anywhere.
When diphtheria had come to Mary's village, the houses closed against one another. Mary's door was shut even to the friend who had helped her with her children when her cataracts began to rob her of her sight.
The disease was well known to all cane cutters, and Mary had had it as a child. Many people in the village had. There were a number of deaths. But in Mary's house, her Maeu husband and half-Maeu children all died. They went one by one, the baby first, and quietly, then Mary's husband, who struggled fearfully and ended draped over a windowsill trying to draw breath, as if his only trouble were the stuffy room. Mary carried her six-year-old and then her ten-year-old to the church, where they lay together along two pews pressed seat to seat. They lay gasping like beached fish, then died only an hour apart, and for a long time after that, Mary sat beside them, pa.s.sing her hand back and forth across their lips, hopelessly feeling for breath. Finally she lay down between them. Her world had been turned upside down, and someone had shaken it till the last things had fallen out.
Mary's friends found her and led her back to her house. They helped her bury her family. After that they'd come with food, and to sit with her, or to water and hoe her vegetable patch. Some weeks went by, and it came to Mary that there was still something she didn't want, a positive something. She didn't want her friends to feel that they'd failed her. So, one night, she packed a little bit of food and put on her stoutest shoes. When the village was asleep, she set out from her home. She walked for days, through cane fields and salt marshes. She went along the road north. When people pa.s.sed, she turned her head away from them so that they wouldn't see that she was blind. She stepped into the dry litter at the roadside whenever a cart, or coach, or rider went by. The road went along in lazy curves, and was easy for her to follow. And Mary wasn't going anywhere, only away, far enough away that she could sit down and die where her death wouldn't trouble her friends.
On the fourth evening of her walk, Mary was at a place where the road ran east to west and the sun shone right along it. There was no shade, and the wind had dropped, and the cane had stopped its usual percussive rustling, and the air over the road began to thicken into a syrup full of flies. Mary stopped at the roadside and stood still, her body and hands and feet burning, and her head in the faintly cool halo of her hat. As she stood there, she heard horses coming toward her. She shuffled closer to the wall of cane. She knew she must look distressed. She couldn't help it - the heat had peeled her of her skin of deathly indifference and was trying to prove that she was alive under it. Mary didn't want to draw any notice, or sympathy, so she dissembled. She took off her hat, closed her cataract-covered eyes, raised her face to the sun, and fanned her face with her hat. She stood as relaxed and flat-footed as any old cane cutter woman. Between her eyelids the world was pure white, as it always was when her eyes were aimed at the sky. And then a shadow fell across her face, a shadow from where there should be nothing that could cast a shadow. Mary knew that whatever it was, it was too high.
It was the girl. She had been hot and had stood up on her saddle to try to catch any breeze coming over the top of the cane field. Her horse was ambling along, two other horses tethered to it.
The girl stopped to ask whether the cane cutter woman wanted a ride. ”I don't have a saddle,” she said. Then: ”Are you blind? Did I frighten you?” Then: ”You can't see them, but I have two more horses. They're my father's. I've stolen them. I'm going to sell them in Gethsemane and use the proceeds to establish a new life for myself.”
And, at that, Mary decided to go along with the girl to see what she did, how she managed. Mary postponed her death; after all, it wasn't as if death were going anywhere.
Mary and the old man were still standing in the shade of the church portico, turning their tobacco over with their tongues, when the girl arrived. She was in a rush, and in tears.
”Honey!” The old man was concerned.
Mary didn't say anything. She was shocked. The witch never wept. Mary heard the girl say, ”Please”- choking -”will you see Mary home for me? I'd be very grateful.”
”Of course,” the old man said. Mary heard the girl's running steps recede from them.
They waited for the service to end, and the man's ”young friend” to appear, before setting out for the alley off Market Square. The man questioned the boy. ”Did you see anything? Did someone speak unkindly to the girl?”
”No,” the boy said. ”She ran out during the service. Everyone else was attending to the guy in the pulpit.”
They went along quietly, puzzling it out. And then Mary asked, in a whisper, ”What was the text of the sermon?”
”It's Founders' Day, so it was the Agony in the Garden. You know, What? Could ye not watch with me one hour?”
Mary woke up in the middle of the night because all the cages in the courtyard were rattling, as though filled with a bunch of agitated, voiceless poultry ghosts.
The girl cried out, then came fully awake and said into the diminis.h.i.+ng rustle of dry timber or of the air, ”What was that?”
Two days after Founders' Day, the mismatched couples went up Mount Magdalene together. The boy was carrying the girl's basket, and the man was guiding the woman. The man and woman were in conversation; the boy and girl were silent.
The boy kicked a stone ahead of him, then looked unhappily after it when he finally knocked it off the path and down the slope.
The girl asked him how he got his black eye.
He fingered the cut on his eyebrow. ”I got into a fight, and the sheriff decided to take exception to me and not to the other fellow. He was in a bad mood because he was having trouble with his horses - they came out of the fort all s.h.i.+vering and crazy.”
”So it was the sheriff who gave you that?”
”Yes. And that's why I'm up here, taking the air with you.” He sneered. ”I'm supposed to stay out of town, and trouble. The sheriff has been drinking with my captain, who has said something indiscreet, and now the sheriff has decided he doesn't like the cut of my jib. And we have to give up our evenings ash.o.r.e.”
”Then it's true?” she said.
”What?” He looked at her narrowly.
She pointed at the old man. ”If you're confined, so is he, because he's paid to keep an eye on you.”
The boy scowled, and his jaw clenched, and he strode out and overtook the others. He got so far ahead on the path that looped up the mountain that, after a few minutes, he was nearly out of sight. They could still see him, his figure dark against the afternoon sky, his shoulders hunched and his fists thrust into the pockets of his jacket.
There came a ma.s.sive thump under their feet, and the sky before the boy filled with streaks of orange. The fiery bouquet spread, turned into a fountain of fire, and dropped burning matter onto the slope below the path. There was a roar, so deep it was almost inaudible. Its tone rose and blended with a ba.s.s hiss, and then the fountain was quenched and swallowed in a cloud of steam.