Leaning, Leaning Over Water

by Frances Itani

  “That’s where we pick dogtooth violets for Mother’s Day,” I said.

  “The boy made it up,” said Mimi. “It isn’t true. It’s a sin to say that.”

  I thought of the nuns, their long sweeping skirts and halfhidden enamel faces. Unlike the priest, they were rarely sighted in the village. I did not know where they bought their groceries or what kind of food they ate.

  “The nuns are married to Jesus,” said Mimi. She preened while she said this.

  But the way she thought of the nuns was the way I thought of her and of all the Catholic girls in the village: child brides of Christ. An army of them marching forward, starting their journey under flowing white veils from the time of their First Communion—from the day they accepted the gift of the white rosary. To me they were a separate order of marked children bearing the weight of the Sorrowful Mysteries, bearing the weight of the Faith.

  “Anyway,” Mimi said, “the nuns are good teachers. But when Sister gets mad she cuffs us on the back of the head with her hand. She sneaks up behind us and sprinkles water on the back of our necks.”

  We thought about this for a moment.

  “If it’s true about the dead babies,” Mimi said, “I wonder if they’re baptized before they die. If they aren’t, they stay in limbo.”

  “It wouldn’t be the same if the baby was born in a house with a mother and father,” I said. “Still, if the baby died, the mother and father would go mad with the grief.” The grief was what Granny Tracks sometimes talked about when she told us about Grandfather Meagher.

  “Limbo is where the baby would go if it isn’t baptized,” Mimi said. “It would have to stay in limbo for a long time. It might never get all the way to heaven. The priest said.”

  I tried to think of a layer of babies in gowns, all trying to get closer to heaven. It was hard to imagine. Instead, I saw rows of little boxes buried in the woods.

  Mimi handed me the oar and I turned it end to end and we changed places. The boat was tied and we pushed it back and forth in an arc, drooping our hands over the sides, our fingers darting after crayfish that slipped under the rocks. We stayed in the boat because Mimi was wearing her Sunday shoes with the black patent straps and had been told not to go into the river. She kept her feet on the wooden platform in the bottom of the boat. There was always water beneath the platform—water that could never be bailed.

  I had changed as soon as I’d come home on the bus. I’d been to Hull for Sunday school and church, and today had added a new Bible card to my collection: Job sheweth the wicked may prosper. I’d been thinking about the wicked when I’d gone up the church basement stairs and slipped into the pew beside Mother and Lyd. Eddie had stayed in the basement to be supervised, below, while we were in church.

  The wicked were all around us, we’d been told, and I thought that perhaps this was like communism. I looked at the Anglicans, their light summer coats pressed shoulder to shoulder in the pews ahead. I’d been forced to wear a hat to church, a crescent-shaped hat with a veil that tugged over my eyes. I hated the hat. The veil scratched my forehead and obstructed my vision. But it had to be worn. I looked through it at Lyd and Mother beside me, and when Mother looked back and raised an eyebrow, I slipped off the seat and kneeled on the hard planks of wood that flipped out from under the pew ahead. I tried to think of a prayer. Mother and Lyd always closed their eyes as if they knew in advance exactly what they were going to pray.

  I looked straight ahead and then up at the ceiling, where a ribboned banner had been painted onto the arch of the church. I read silently: I was glad when they said unto me. Let us go into the house of the Lord. I thought about being glad. The bells were ringing in the tower and the vibrations shivered through the seat and behind me and above. Before I said a prayer I pictured the street outside, the tiny portion of the main street of Hull. People unknown to me would be pausing and looking up. They would have no way of knowing that I was here inside, listening to the call of the bells. Surrounded by and pulled into the heaviness of oak and deep stone.

  Every night I said, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” and prayed for my entire family. “God bless Mother, Father, Lyd, Eddie, Granny Tracks, Uncle Weylin, Aunt Arra and Georgie-Porgie, Grampa King and everyone at the King farm, also the orphans and the poor and my best friend, Mimi.” In church I decided to use the same prayer but this time I left out the Now I lay me part.

  After the choir sailed by I cast my attention to the stainedglass window on my right. Jesus was there, the same likeness that was on my Bible cards. The milky glass made Him look as if He were already dead. He was meant to be alive though, because He was beckoning to a circle of little children dressed in cream-coloured tunics. Two of the disciples were trying to turn the children away but this did not please Him. The words in the window read: Suffer the little children to come unto me. Not one of the children with cropped black hair looked anything like any child Yd ever seen, in St. Pierre or in Hull.

  Mimi had brought licorice pipes to the boat and we sucked on these while we pushed each other back and forth. I knew that nothing I could conjure would ever compete with Mimi’s Catholic underworld—peopled with sinners and confessors and the constant threat of terror. Her sisters, she told me, had always made things up when they went to confession so they’d have something to tell the priest. Except for the time they’d put on new brassieres and walked to the corner bus stop and paraded past the driver when he had to turn the empty bus around and head back to Hull. “The driver’s face was beet red,” they told Mimi. That time, they’d all confessed the truth to the priest.

  In my church, the Anglicans I’d watched that morning—except for a girl who had one brown eye and one blue—were insipid by comparison. I had stared into the face of the girl with the mismatched eyes so I could tell Mimi about her, later.

  “In my family, everyone has hazel eyes,” Mimi said now. “Every single one. They aren’t green and they aren’t blue. They’re somewhere in between. Except Bee-Bee,” she said. “But he’s not part of our real family. Anyway, he’s gone again.”

  Bee-Bee had disappeared for weeks and then turned up and moved back into her mother’s bedroom. Pierrette had been furious that their mother had taken him back. I had not visited when Bee-Bee was there; Mimi had come to my house, or we’d waited until the coast was clear. Mother didn’t seem to notice that we were hanging around our place more. Now Bee-Bee was gone again.

  “I know a song about the Sisters,” Mimi said. “I can teach you in English and French. We call it ‘Back of My Auntie’s House.’”

  If you become a nun,

  Nun in a convent ground,

  I’ll turn to preacher then

  And preaching will you hound.

  Si tu te mets prêcheur

  Pour m’avoir en prêchant,

  Je me donn’rai à toi

  Puisque tu m’aimes tant!

  I spotted a flash in the water and dug in the oar to steady the boat. I handed the oar to Mimi. “Hold it there,” I said. “I see something.” I shoved a rock aside and lifted my prize from the river.

  I shook the water from a string of brown and bloated chunky beads from which a tiny cross hung straight down. It was the first rosary I’d ever held in my hands.

  “Mon Dieu,” said Mimi. “If you lose your beads, you lose your luck.” She added grimly, “Maybe somebody threw them in.”

  I leaned over the boat and washed every wooden bead and then I carried them up to the house. Mimi showed me the Hail Mary beads and the Glory Be bead but she did not want to handle them herself.

  “They could keep us safe,” I said. “We could make things up to say over each one.”

  But Mimi had her own white beads, and she did not want to say anything over these.

  Lyd was the only one in the house when we went in. She was standing in front of Duffy’s long mirror. Lyd was the tallest girl in her class at school and at Sunday school. Because she would soon be thirteen, this was the cut-off year for her to leave Stone
and start Brick. We’d still be taking the same orange bus out of the village but we’d be going to different schools. We knew that the one-room schools would be pooled together in a new school, but before that could happen the new school had to be built.

  “All I did at Sunday school was pass out animal crackers to the little kids,” Lyd said. “I get claustrophobic on that stage. I don’t know why they close the curtains.”

  “It’s just babysitting,” I said. “Don’t you give them Bible pictures to colour?”

  “I did,” she said. “Moses in the bulrushes. And while they were crunching their little brown camels I closed my eyes and prayed to God to keep my feet from growing as quickly as my height.” She snorted.

  The last time Father measured us, Lyd’s mark had jumped an inch and a half on the pantry door. We both knew there were genes in the family to be reckoned with—the genes of our Giant Ant, Aunt Lucy King. The two of us were always on the lookout for women with wide shoulders and huge bones. We were on the lookout for Big Feet. We knew that a wild and erratic gene might already have skipped, Amazonlike, into our own bones. I remembered Aunt Lucy in Darley, hooting with laughter as she held up one of her own sizetwelve feet.

  “Where is everybody?” I said.

  “Mother and Father are at Rebecque’s,” she said. “Duffy stays at her place overnight now, but he can’t marry her because his runaway wife won’t give him a divorce. Anyway, the Church won’t allow. Eddie’s playing in the Pines with his friends. He’s trying to prove that Brébeuf was tortured at the top of our road, where it turns into chemin Brébeuf.”

  “Brébeuf wasn’t killed anywhere near here,” I said. “He only canoed past. We studied him in school. He died somewhere in Ontario.”

  “Try to tell that to Eddie,” she said.

  I showed Lyd the rosary. The circle of it was large and she slipped it over her head and draped it around her neck. Then she went to the window and checked the path through the field to see if anyone was coming. She began to take off her clothes one by one in front of the mirror. Mimi and I stared. Only the rosary was around Lyd’s neck. It lay heavily over her tanned bare skin.

  “Somebody might come in,” I said. I didn’t know why she was doing this.

  “They’ll be a while,” she said. She was scrutinizing the new patch of hair, the height of her leg bones, the length of her feet. She stretched her neck and lifted the rosary and turned sideways to examine her breasts. Mimi and I looked at each other; she and I still played outside, sometimes, with our shirts off, but Lyd could never do that now.

  “I checked Mother’s name book,” she said. “I looked up my name to see what it stands for. Lyd means the voluptuous one.” She scrambled back into her clothes. “I hate my arms,” she said. “There’s dark hair on my arms. And I don’t have my period yet. It’s taking forever. I’ll be getting it this year, I’ll bet. And when I start, I’m going to call it Jennifer. That’s what girls call their periods when they talk about them so no one else will know. You two are babies,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about this yet.”

  Mimi and I went to Mother’s sewing bench where the name book was kept. We looked up the girls’ section and found Trude, which was from Gertrude and meant spear-loved maiden. The name made me feel fierce. Mimi was from Mary so we looked up Mary, which meant bitter. I wanted to know what Mother’s name meant, too, so I looked up Maura, which was from the Moor, and meant the dark one.

  “Look up Jennifer,” said Lyd.

  But all we could find under Jennifer was “See Guinevere,” and Guinevere meant white.

  “It’s a disguise for red,” Lyd said. “That’s why periods are called Jennifer. It’s the perfect disguise.” She took off the rosary and handed it back to me and we returned the name book to the sewing bench.

  I went into the bathroom and examined the stubby bottles of nail polish lined up on the bathroom shelf. Sometimes Mother let us borrow one so we could paint our toenails while we sat by the river in the sun.

  I chose Siren Red and carried it out to the lilacs in the backyard. Mimi and I crouched in the shade while I painted the river-swollen beads, one by one. When they were dry, I slipped them over my head and hid the cross at the back of my neck. We headed for the front of the house.

  “No one will ever know,” I told Mimi. “It’s a new necklace I found. A necklace with powers.”

  But while I’d been painting the beads Father and Mother had returned and Father was slumped into his canvas chair in the front yard. He squinted against the sun and spotted the necklace right away.

  “Off!” he yelled. “Get the damned thing off!” He pointed to my neck and shouted again. “Take it off and throw it away!”

  “I found it,” I said. “It’s mine. I found it in the river.”

  “Then you just throw it right back in, young lady. Now.”

  Mimi cast a baleful look in Father’s direction and we headed down to the river. As we did, I heard Father mutter, “Damned mumbo-jumbo,” and I said to myself, “The beads must give him what Granny Tracks calls the heebie-jeebies.”

  When we reached shore I took off my Siren Red beads and pretended to throw them into the water. Instead, I kept them in my palm. I turned to see if Father was watching but he was not. He’d left his canvas chair and had gone into the house. Probably to tell Mother.

  “He’s going to kill you if you keep them,” said Mimi.

  “Quick!” I said. “Come on.” I led her farther downriver and squatted beside the chokecherry tree. I broke off a piece of shale and dug into the earth at the base of the tree. I scraped a hole six inches deep and lowered the beads into it and filled the hole with dirt. Then I raked the dirt with a twig and spread dried leaves over the top and marked the cache with a tiny scroll of bark. I walked ten paces away from the river and took my bearings. I memorized the line-up of trees and the formation of shale. Just beyond the cache there was a giant maple, the one that threw a wide shadow at dusk. When we ran through the shadow we had to hold our breath. If we breathed while we were still in shadow, the curse of Brébeuf would be upon us. We would feel hands around our throat and we would choke. I had never breathed in the shadow.

  “Never mind,” I said to Mimi. “We’ll always know where the rosary is and we can dig it up when we need it. No one will ever find it. It’s too well disguised.”

  We kept on walking, up through the Pines, past the cliff and the high wild rapids and the old hydro wall. Logs were jammed like pick-up sticks against the wall and waves rushed around them as if they were beating their way through. When we got to Mimi’s house, we found Grand-mère in the kitchen.

  “We’ll be going on our holidays soon,” I told her. “Back to Ontario. My Giant Ant always wants to know everything. She makes me sit on a chair and she says, ‘Talk French!’ I have to say: ‘Comment allez-vous? Quel dommage! Il a un chien. Il s’appelle Pitou.’“

  Grand-mère laughed with delight.

  “That’s good,” said Mimi. “If you keep saying the same things over and over, your big auntie won’t know the difference.”

  When we went upstairs, Mimi’s Tante Florence was at the Singer, pumping the pedal. She was feeding a long panel of material that looked like crêpe under the bobbing needle. The day after the King had died, one of Lyd’s classmates had carried in a picture of him, framed and edged in the same kind of black crepe. Lyd had a picture in her Royal scrapbook of the Princess at the door of a plane. She was in deep mourning, the caption said. Even before she’d returned to England, the world had known that she was already Queen.

  “I’m making a black dress for Tante Noelle,” Tante Florence told Mimi. She turned to me. “Noelle is our one sister who can’t sew worth a damn. She heard a rumour that the Pope is sick, and she wants to be ready. He’s seventy-eight this year,” she said, and she crossed herself.

  Mimi and I sat on a hope chest and cross-clapped our hands.

  One’s joy

  Two’s grief

  Three’s a w
edding

  Four’s death!

  On my way home I walked the long way and headed through the village and up into the woods. I was careful not to trespass on the priest’s property beside the church. The two-storey Catholic school was beside it, a black fire escape spidering up the side. Set back into the woods was the convent, which I skirted and came at from behind. I scuffed my feet along the main path, where I knew the Sisters walked, and I kept watch. I was completely hidden by trees.

  I knew that I would have to look for twigs and branches spread over a larger cache. I scanned every bit of dirt around and between trees and then I left the path and searched and searched but could find no sign that anything had been disturbed. There were no tiny mounds, no splinters of wood from hastily nailed-together boxes, nothing that I could tell of attempts to disguise the patterns of earth. I was both disappointed and relieved but told myself that I might come back to look, another time. I left the shade and shadow of the woods, being careful not to be seen from the convent windows, and I walked slowly home.

  When I sat down for supper, Mother brought a platter of pickerel and another of French fries to the table. She always made the fries at the last minute so they’d be fresh, and now she scooped a sieveful out of the hot oil and dumped them onto the brown paper she’d layered on the oven door. She threw in another handful of potatoes and the oil flared up and sizzled and spattered. This was my favourite meal.

  “Where did you and Mimi go?” said Mother.

  “Nowhere,” I said.

  We bowed our heads and Mother perched on the edge of her chair so she could get up again to check the fries. Father intoned from the head of the table:

  Be present at our table Lord

  Be here and everywhere adored

  These creatures bless and grant that we

  May feast in paradise with Thee.

  “Amen,” we all said together.

  I opened my eyes. Mother passed the ketchup to the end of the table and Father thumped the bottom of the bottle with his palm. A splurt of red blurped out onto his plate. Lyd and I exchanged looks.