Bishop's Road

by Catherine Hogan Safer

  Judy arrived this morning. Mrs. Miflin has convinced the powers that be that her house is the ideal place for wayward girls. Being God fearing and all, who better than herself to shape up degenerate youth? Aside from the weekly visits to her probation officer and a counsellor, the bulk of Judy’s rehabilitation now rests on the capable, albeit sloped, shoulders of Mrs. Miflin, a position of power that pleases the old doll no end.

  Judy is seventeen, a little beyond foster care even if anyone would have her. The last child after three rowdy boys, Judy’s only flaw, if you don’t count her height of six feet, is that of being too damned smart for her own good. When she dares to dream, her ambition is to become wealthy beyond belief at which time she will go home and burn the place to the ground. If you catch her smiling you can be sure she is imagining the part where they all come running to her for help and she tells them they are shit out of luck, go to hell the lot of you friggers. Judy has been stealing make-up and clothes since she was ten and has a record as long as her wingspan. She has dropped out of school for one reason or another a good seven times already and has the IQ of an Einstein.

  Judy owns five pairs of jeans and six tee shirts with things written on them. She has a short black dress and her underwear has seen better days. She has running shoes and hiking boots, socks and a pair of men’s pyjamas, never worn, because she sleeps in her day clothes just in case she has to leave in a hurry. On the dresser on a pink plastic doily that Mrs. Miflin bought on sale - five for a dollar - is a black wooden jewelry box that plays a rusty Fur Elise when you wind it and a little spring inside goes around and around without the ballerina that used to be there. In the box is a pair of tiny real gold earrings and a few other odds and ends. And there’s the cover of another box wrapped in brown paper, with small shells glued on in a daisy pattern and a red velvet lining with two satin strings that once attached it to a bottom that is somewhere else.

  If Judy hadn’t suggested that Ginny Mustard take a look in the attic this morning when Mrs. Miflin was out and they couldn’t find light bulbs, then Ginny Mustard might not be having a hard time of it now. But she did and Ginny Mustard did and there’s a tear in the fabric and time tugging the edge. Someone might want to lay a hand on that girl’s yellow hair and smooth it back. Tell her everything will be okay.

  Mrs. Miflin has been away for much of the day, signing papers and assuring the probation officer and Judy’s counsellor that of course the girl will behave herself and make her appointments on time. Tonight she will formally introduce her latest acquisition to the rest of the household. She has already squeezed another chair into the dining room and if they ever felt tempted to put elbows on the table they can forget about it now. Four might be comfortable here - with six and Mr. Miflin’s place it’s a stretch. Here they come - right on time. Bladders newly emptied for the duration. Once you’re sitting there’s room for no other movement but fork to mouth.

  The room is the size of a breadbox and packed to the rafters with furniture, old and intimidating, dark and forlorn and smelling always of Murphy’s Oil Soap. There’s a useless window never opened, its sill crawling with porcelain puppies. From the centre hangs a plastic geranium, bathed weekly in warm soapy water. Sprayed with a bit of air freshener. It is the only plant in the house but Mrs. Miflin is thinking of getting another like it for the front porch. This is where every meal is taken and if you’re a minute late and no money in your pocket you’ll go hungry until the next one. Breakfast at seven, lunch at noon and dinner at six, that’s all there is to it and nothing in between unless you manage to hide a box of crackers in your closet, or an apple.

  “Eve,” says Mrs. Miflin, “Mr. Abe Hennessy over on Blake Street thinks one of your old hedgehogs could be in his shed. He was cleaning up and it looks like something or other made a nest in a barrel what he had turned over on its side and slept the winter. If you want it back you better go get it because he needs the barrel. It might be a rat he said but it didn’t move nearly so fast as one and it’s more roundish. I don’t know why you don’t just pour salt on them slugs, you know. Kills them quicker than anything and not nearly so costly as buying hedgehogs every year and they taking off soon as they got their bellies full.”

  “Well, Mrs. Miflin, I’m not all that fond of killing things. If the Creator wanted me pouring salt on His slugs He would never have come up with hedgehogs in the first place. I think He might have done something about their wandering habits while He was at it but who am I to question His ways?”

  Mrs. Miflin does not much care for arguments she can’t win. “Okay everybody. Enough of this chit-chat. This here young lady goes by the name of Judy and is living with you now thanks to Social Services who couldn’t find anyone else who’d have her being as she’s what you’d call a delinquent. She is in the habit of stealing anything that’s not hammered down so keep that in mind if you catch her in your rooms. She is supposed to keep her nose clean from now on or she’ll be in the jail for the rest of her days. Judy eat them peas. I got no patience for fancy eating diseases in this house. I made a nice trifle for dessert and I’m not bringing it out until them plates is polished.”

  “Which means,” says Ruth, “that our Mrs. Miflin has constructed a sponge cake and flung a can of fruit cocktail at it. You’re welcome to my share, Judy. There’s been more than enough trifle in my life already.”

  “Ruth. Don’t be testy. Everybody likes trifle. Don’t mind Ruth, Judy my dear. She’s always like this, but nice enough if you can manage to ignore her. And Ruth, don’t you think for one minute I didn’t see you hauling them sheets down to the laundrymat last night. I go through all the trouble of hanging them in the lovely fresh air and you take them there. I don’t know why you can’t be like everyone else and sleep on them nice and outdoorsy smelling.”

  “Because they’re like bloody sandpaper, Mrs. Miflin, and it’s cheaper to take them for a quick tumble in a dryer than to pay good money for the amount of lotion I’d need to keep my skin from falling off if I don’t. Fifty cents and ten minutes makes them at least livable.”

  “Well don’t come complaining to me when they go getting holes in them from all that tumbling. I buy my linens once a year and not a minute sooner.”

  In the attic the rattling of small bones muffled by pink soft knit blanket. Soft knit blanket with hope and dreams set in delicate stitches - seven months’ worth of delicate stitches. On a satin pillow. Singing. Low. Ginny Mustard hears it from her place at the table. Hush little baby don’t say a word. Momma’s gonna buy you a mocking bird. And she drops peas from her fork, who loves her food and would never waste a mouthful, drops peas from her fork and they roll under the table. Mrs. Miflin frowns and after that everyone is conscious of her feet and there is no movement from below. The little voice is clear above the plate scraping and Mrs. Miflin going on and on about nothing, but no one takes notice except Ginny Mustard.

  Ginny Mustard’s mother left her in the hospital where she was born. There was no talk of adoption or anything else. She just up and went when her time was through and she didn’t take the baby. She was not a young girl in trouble. She had a toddler and a husband and a fine home and she was thirty-two years old. She kept Ginny Mustard in the room with her but she never nursed her when she woke or changed her wet diaper or bathed her small smooth body. She sang hush little baby while she sat and stared but she never stroked her sweet face. Only once did she touch her fingers and frowned when Ginny Mustard curled her tiny brown fist into the centre of her own strong pink hand. Then that woman packed her suitcase and put on her blue dress and make-up and high-heeled shoes and left the hospital and no one ever heard tell of her again. Ginny Mustard cried for a long time before one of the nurses discovered that she was alone and nobody wanted her. And she grew tall and brown and her hair grew long and yellow and most people didn’t bother with her after those first few days.

  When dinner is through, Ginny Mustard tells Mrs. Miflin that she is not feeling so good and can’t help with the dish
es. Mrs. Miflin says Judy can have her turn tonight and that way she’ll stay out of trouble. And while they clean up, Mrs. Miflin fills the girl in on the dos and don’ts of life in her house. What not to touch, where not to go and there’s no point in thinking she won’t be found out if she crosses the line because Mrs. Miflin has eyes in the back of her head and will be quick enough turfing Judy out on her ear if she messes up. And then she tells everything she knows and more that she doesn’t about the other tenants.

  Ginny Mustard walks to the harbour. Tries to think things Catherine Safer over but there’s a boat in and the gulls are hanging around looking for scraps as the fish are cleaned and life being the way it is for Ginny Mustard, she forgets all about the little song and the tiny bones and sits on the dock to watch the birds awhile. She stays until the sun is down and the moon fat over the water before she trudges back up the hill. Way inside her head, Ginny Mustard knows that she needs to tell someone about all of this - the bones and now the singing - but it is hard to remember sometimes and for all her good intentions she can only keep her mind on one thing at a time and is so easily lead astray by birds and cats or any number of interesting things in the world. Something is wrong and it nags away at her but for such brief intervals in her living that it may be someone else’s duty to work it all out.

  Eve and Maggie are in the sitting room. It is rare that any-thing happens in this room but for some reason Eve decided to draw Maggie out tonight and has come up with a project that might do the trick. On a white cotton tea towel she has printed large letters. The kiss of the sun for pardon. The song of a bird for mirth. We’re nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth and expects Maggie to embroider the whole thing. Not all at once of course. Eve would never ask that.

  Maggie has never embroidered anything that she knows of and is having difficulty with the concept so Eve does a sample. Whips up a blue Y as slowly as she is able. In a little tin can that once held English toffee, the kind with pretty shiny wrappers, are needles and a dozen skeins of floss and Eve suggests a colour scheme. Now she threads a needle and places it in Maggie’s right hand. Steers the white cloth to her left, just clear of the shoe box.

  “And after you’ve done the letters you can put little flowers and birds in the leftover space. I didn’t draw them. I think you’ll have more fun doing them freehand.”

  Maggie, to whom the concept of fun is as foreign as that of needlework, nods rapidly and takes a stab at an ‘h’. The shoe box is in the way and there’s a bit of a struggle to get the needle out of it to make the return stitch but it’s really only time it takes and neither of them has much else to do tonight. Eve has brought home the errant hedgehog and settled it among the new shoots of the hosta and the moon won’t be on Maggie’s bed until after ten.

  Eve would like to talk about Judy - she’s never seen a girl as tall. Or as well decorated, with rings and studs all over her body and that orange hair. But each time she speaks Maggie stops her embroidery and stares straight ahead of herself so Eve gives it up and says nothing until she feels Maggie has had enough drawing out for one night and tells her she can quit until next time.

  By moonlight, the moonlight on Ginny Mustard as she walks from the waterfront, the moonlight making its way to Maggie’s room to turn her skin soft blue, that irritates Ruth and makes Judy want to do bad things, that Mrs. Miflin never sees, Eve walks to the garden. The hedgehog snuffles by and she can just make out the smile on its pointed little face. Moonlight pushes its way through her hair and into the deep lines around her eyes and mouth. A small wind with summer at its back rustles the lilac and bathes her in perfume. She sits on the damp grass and listens to it grow awhile with her red sweater pulled tight around her and the sleeve ends tucked in the palms of her old hands.

  Ginny Mustard keeps walking. It’s one of those nights when people leave their windows open and she knows of a big house that has music. The kind that starts off slow and sad and grows up and up until it seems she will break from the sound of it. She climbs over the fence to the backyard and waits at the base of a rhododendron, takes off her shoes and rests her bare toes against the back of the marble Buddha that waits with her, has waited with her every spring as far as she can remember for the music to begin. Knees to her chin and arms wrapped around her legs, she is small and hidden.

  And at the appointed hour someone walks to the kitchen sink and pours water into a glass. Stares out the window for a minute or two. Ginny Mustard knows that he doesn’t see her. Even when the moon is full, he never sees her. And then the music comes. And she closes her eyes and lets it crawl through her for a while until there is no room for anything else. And it becomes an aching so fierce that she trembles all over with the strength of it and the Buddha becomes unbearably hot with her heat and she pulls her toes away and lies folded on the ground.

  Sometimes she stays there a long time. Now and then she has fallen asleep and awakened with the sun on her face and the little ants in her clothes. Other times she has had to leave and run as hard as she can to get the pain out and on those nights she promises herself she will never go back but it’s been a long winter and here she is again.

  Ruth sits and stares at herself in the mirror. She brushes her hair that hasn’t been colored for two years or more and is streaked gray to her chin and solid black to her waist. It took three bottles of dye the last time she did it and she dripped some in the sink and on the hall rug when she walked back to her room. Mrs. Miflin never did get the stains out and complains to Ruth when-ever she’s pissed about something and happens to be anywhere near the third floor bathroom at the same time Ruth is. There’s nothing to be done about it. She tried bleach and steel wool and gave it up for a bad job.

  The moon laughs at Ruth and she becomes more and more irritated. Itching all over. She trudges to the bathroom and scrubs her face. In the shower she turns the water cold and hard on her skin and leaves it that way for a long time. Back in her room she sits again and stares at her hair. The moon is still laughing but not so much at her as near her, inclined to share some cosmic joke if only Ruth will listen.

  Ruth’s hair has always looked as though it wants off her head and to fly. Her mother had combed and tied and buckled it down in vain. The minute her back was turned it was gone again. Her father called it ‘nigger knots’ and wouldn’t let Ruth out in the summer unless it was raining. If she was tanned she would look like one of those friggin’ coloureds and he wasn’t having that. When he caught sight of Ruth with her hair all over the place he would go into a rage - yelling and hollering there was no way he could be the father of a youngster with a head on her like that. And he would find a pencil and paper and try to figure out where he was when Ruth’s mother got pregnant and who might have been around in his absence. Hours he spent at it, but not being mathematically inclined, never did come up with an answer though he asked the question often enough.

  And now here is Ruth with the moon over her shoulder and her hair dries soft and floats about her face. How long since she let it free? How long since she was free? How long since she supported the warm weight of a strong man? How long since she dug her heels into a mattress and howled? And why the hell is she thinking this way? It’s that damned moon! She curses as she yanks the curtains to shut it out but they never did close properly and a thin streak of blue winks in the mirror when she turns off the overhead light.

  Ruth is wrong, though, and while the moon may be in on it, she is not the cause. This particular disturbance hitched a ride with Judy. It is in her pockets and on her face and finding the inhabitants of Mrs. Miflin’s house needing a little more than they had bargained for, has decided to stay awhile. With the moon’s blessing it is creeping under doors and through closets leaving a smudge of itself on shirts and underwear, photographs and letters. And it goes to the attic for a quick look around before sliding under Mrs. Miflin’s pillow to nap.

  Tonight Ginny Mustard doesn’t leave her nest under the rhododendron until the music stops and th
e lights go out in the big house. At midnight she walks home with the moon to guide her steps. Lets herself in the front door. Climbs the stairs to her room and crawls under her covers, the creak creaking of a cradle lulling her to sleep.

  The new day begins with a bang. Judy is furious because Mrs. Miflin has forbidden her to visit friends on Caine’s Street. She started off asking nicely for permission and when that didn’t work she took to stomping around the house, slamming doors and yelling about what a bitch Mrs. Miflin is and how she’s going to report her to the authorities for keeping her locked up. Maggie is hiding in her room with her shoebox tucked under the bed and both hands pressed to her ears and she hums as loud as she can to drown the terrible sounds, lies on the floor and curls in a ball, rocks back and forth, back and forth.

  Ruth is pissed. She has been trying to write a quiet letter to someone she hasn’t heard tell of in years, who visited her dreams last night. She can’t think with that racket going on and twice has pushed pen through paper in exasperation.

  Eve is in the garden looking for signs of new life. She went back inside when the fight began and found a pair of blue earmuffs for silence and is quite content to pick away at the earth despite the battle.

  Old Father Delaney poked his head out of the rectory at one point and wondered briefly what the fuss was all about but he hasn’t been in that house since it was a convent and it will take more than blood-curdling screams to entice him there again.

  It would be easy enough for Judy to overpower the round Mrs. Miflin and escape, but she chooses not to. Would rather do some screaming and slamming. Mrs. Miflin is right, of course, though that’s the last thing Judy will admit aloud. She just wants to get over to Jimmy’s house for a bit of weed, is all. She hasn’t been high since last week and Jimmy owes her big time since she’s the only one who knows he beat the crap out of Frankie and the cops are still looking. When Frankie gets out of his coma he’ll tell for sure but right now only Judy can point the finger. It’s killing her to have the upper hand and see it go to waste. Still and all she has to clean up her act. She has had as many chances as she’ll ever get. The joke is they don’t know the half of it but they might any day now and a bad move will have her in shit so deep she’ll never get out again.