Bishop's Road

by Catherine Hogan Safer

  Only Judy cares for variety in any shape or form but no one wants to be stuck with cleaning toilets for the next three months either so Eve goes to the kitchen to find scissors and a nice bowl to put the chores in. All she comes up with are pinking shears and a pickle jar but they will do for now.

  Ginny Mustard who doesn’t know her ass from her elbow in a kitchen must have Judy’s help to read recipes. It’s fine and dandy to say let’s have pork chops for dinner but if no one can tell her how to cook them they’ll surely starve. Judy’s prior experience erasing serial numbers from stolen goods makes her one of your better pot scrubbers. Maggie can dust and wax the old furniture with the shoebox tucked safely under an arm. Ruth can sing to her heart’s content under the noise of the decrepit vacuum cleaner with no chance that anyone will accuse her of being in a good mood. Eve encourages Ginny Mustard to throw her bit of this and bit of that green things in with dinner but put a plate aside for Mrs. Miflin first since she might not like the taste.

  At table they are tired now. Neither has worked this hard in eons and other than the odd, “How does she do this every day?” and, “What’s this stuff on the pork chops?” there is little talk. With no Mrs. Miflin to fill the space with her ramblings they will eat in silence until someone stumbles upon the art of conversation.

  Within a day or two they are trading chores. Ginny Mustard likes cooking and Judy wants to wax the long front hallway. Wants to slide up and down it in her sock feet until it gleams or she breaks her neck, whichever comes first. Ruth talks Eve into reading again to Mrs. Miflin and in exchange cleans toilets and tubs. Maggie takes what’s left and finds herself washing dishes with her shoebox in a plastic bag to keep it dry. When she’s feeling brave she puts it on the counter near the sink and only grabs it up again when she hears someone coming.

  All goes well. Busy, they keep out of one another’s sight for the most part. Mrs. Miflin insists that even the unoccupied rooms be kept clean and tidy and ready for the tenants she dreams of. Judy went out for milk one day and came back with a bag of kittens that some old fellow was dragging to the park. He was going to leave them there and if someone came along and took them home - fine - and if they just crawled around for a day and died - that was fine too and he didn’t care one way or the other since he’s had his fill of friggin’ cats and it’s hard enough feeding himself these days with the friggin’ prices on everything and if he never saw another friggin’ cat in his life it would be too soon. And what’s worse, the poor little momma cat was trailing after him and the bag of her babies and no matter how many rocks he threw at her she wouldn’t leave and she wouldn’t stop her crying. What was the girl to do? She took the bag and, with momma cat close at her heels, brought the whole mess home and plunked it down, though gently, on the kitchen floor.

  Ginny Mustard has found a pretty picture of an apple cake in the recipe book and is pleased to see Judy coming. Maggie is putting away the last of the lunch dishes. Eve walks in just as Judy loosens the drawstring of the noisy brown bag.

  “Don’t anyone go yelling at me. You know you’d have to bring them home too. Well, maybe not Ruth, but the rest of you would. He was just going to leave them there in the park and the dogs’d have them killed in a minute. Look at them. They’re so pretty. We have to keep them. No one else is gonna want them. I didn’t know what else to do. Stupid old fucker. I’d like to put him in a bag and throw him away. See how he likes it.”

  And now they are all sitting on the floor. And six kittens waddle every which way on fragile legs, blinking in the sudden light until Ruth comes stomping in and they skitter to Maggie and hide among the folds of her big skirt. Momma cat sits tight. Stares at Ruth with golden eye. Dares her say anything other than welcome.

  The cat stares and Ruth stares and before either cracks there’s a loud knock at the front door and Ruth leaves to answer it. The sudden collective out-breath is audible above momma cat’s wonderful purr. Ruth comes back. “There’s someone who says his name is Joe Snake and he wants to see Ginny Mustard. I don’t like the looks of him so he’s waiting outside.”

  Eve says, “You didn’t invite him in, dear?”

  “No I didn’t. That cousin of Judy’s was here the other day smelling up the place and this one doesn’t look much better. Why is it the only people who come around here aren’t fit to live? And what the hell are you going to do with those things? You’d better get rid of them before Mrs. Miflin gets a whiff. She hates cats more than I do.” And she’s gone to her room.

  But little cat softness and little cat sounds follow, and the tiny pads of little cat feet - she can feel them on her face as surely as if she had picked one up and pushed her nose into its round belly. Paper thin claws, sharp baby teeth on her fingers. And her kitten ghosts are with her as she falls on her bed, face in the pillow, back to the door. Behind closed eyes she sees her father with yet another brood in a cardboard box and the car running and the hose attached to the tailpipe and in a few minutes kitten bodies in the garbage can. And that last one. The one she loved so much. The one she hid from her father and he had to go and kill the rest of them anyway because he was late. And she prayed hard. If God would only let her keep this one she’d never ask for another thing as long as she lived. She’d go and be a missionary in Africa with the heathens. She’d do anything He wanted if only she could keep this one. And her mother told on her when she found the kitten in the laundry hamper and her father was tired and cranky. Squeezed its sweet neck until there was no life left in it and threw it away. Ruth hasn’t touched a cat since she was eight years old. She hates them with a passion pure and harsh.

  Ruth refuses supper. When Eve comes to fetch her, says, “Get out of my face you old hag.” Turns to the wall again and stays there until the house is quiet and everyone sleeping. Goes to the park and wraps herself around the hyacinth and when she stands up she is all purple and smells of them. And she is them. And she goes to the ocean high up on the rocks and puts her arms in the clouds and she is wave and salt and hyacinth even after she goes back to her room at the very end of the house beyond the linen closet. She turns on a lamp and cuts her hair all the way to the gray and leaves a pool of black curls on the floor surrounding her chair for someone else to clean up.

  There are no dreams. Nothing gets her up in darkness and forces her outside for a walk at three in the morning, though when she wakes her pillowcase is wet as if she has been crying in her sleep.

  Outside and through most of the night, someone watching. Leaning against a tree in front of the old orphanage and staring at the house. He watches Ruth come and go. He watches lights and he watches dark. Before the sun peeps over the hill on the left side of the harbour he is gone and nothing to show for his being there but footprints and the strong scent of something ugly that follows the children who pass by on their way to school. Makes their skin go all shivery. Makes them think of damp places.

  Mrs. Miflin smells it when Eve opens her bedroom window and demands that she shut it again. Eve doesn’t notice it at all and doesn’t understand what Mrs. Miflin is upset about. Judy smells it when she goes outside to work on the compost bin and grins a little fox grin to herself. Maggie just feels cold and piles on a couple of sweaters and Ginny Mustard thinks of nuns. By the time Ruth appears for the day, the sun has warmed the ugliness away and she can’t smell it over breakfast.

  Her hair is a hit, although Judy thinks it too gray and suggests red dye. Eve thinks it softens Ruth. Makes her look almost approachable but she doesn’t say that. Smiles her approval. Ginny Mustard memorizes it so she can make a picture later on and Maggie cuts her own thick braid with pinking shears over the garbage can in the kitchen after the table has been cleared.

  Mrs. Miflin won’t eat. Pushes her eggs around the plate and doesn’t drink her tea. The burning has left her legs and she spends much of her time under painkillers. All last night she moaned in fitful dreams of cradles and dark anger. She dug and dug time after time until she found the little bones. Again and aga
in she carried them, washed them, wrapped them. For all her work she woke with empty arms. She has to get out of this bed, this room. She is suffocating under the weight of her helplessness. They won’t move her. Follow the doctor’s orders. She fears the worst. They are taking over. She heard laughter on the stairs. Someone humming a nothing tune. She hates the noise. She hates the quiet more.

  After supper, unrecognizable but certainly edible, the sitting room is fully occupied for the first time since the nuns blew away, and seems pleased with itself. Eve is guiding Maggie through her project. Maggie, feeling brave, has tucked the shoebox under her knees to facilitate a smoother stitch. Ruth is writing her letter. A full notepad gone and she is still on the first page. Judy lies on the floor, her long legs up on the seat of an armchair, her body crawling with kittens, momma cat close by. Ginny Mustard comes in and presents Ruth with a paper place mat, one side advertising events upcoming four years ago, the other showing a likeness of Ruth in her new hair, sketched with colored pencils. Says softly, “I made this.”

  “Well shit, Ginny Mustard. Is that supposed to be me? I’m flattered, girl, but you really should get your eyes checked.”

  “Oh no,” says Eve. “That looks exactly like you Ruth. You are quite lovely, dear, when you aren’t frowning. You are a very good artist, Ginny Mustard.”

  “No kidding,” says Judy. “Do another one but this time make her hair red so she can see how much better it would look. Can you do one of me too? This is way cool.”

  Ginny Mustard doesn’t know what to do with a compliment. She stares at the others for a full thirty seconds before running to her room. Brings back pages and pages of her pictures. And they examine them carefully, with pleasure, surprised. Even Maggie finds the corners of her mouth in a twitch. Second one this week. But after flowers and faces and the river, the hills and the ocean, small bones in a cradle, wrapped in pink blanket, begging touch and feel how soft.

  “What the fuck is that Ginny Mustard? What have you got against babies you didn’t put any skin on it?” Judy is upset.

  “Oh dear,” says Eve. “Why would you draw this kind of picture? It is very sad, isn’t it? Where would you have seen such a thing?”

  Ginny Mustard recoils - a puppy kicked. But they are all looking at her. They all want something of her and she beckons them follow. Leads them to the attic. Around ancient dark furniture. Brushing cobwebs aside. Under dim light shows them the cradle of tiny bones in pink blanket.

  “I found this baby when I looked for a lightbulb. Judy said there might be one. So I looked but I didn’t find one. I found this baby. She has a pretty blanket and a little rocking bed. I don’t think she is sad.”

  In silence they stare. First at the cradle, then Ginny Mustard, cradle again, Ginny Mustard. There is nothing to say. It is unbearably hot in the attic. A fly buzzes on a dirty window. Eve is the first to head back to the sitting room, the others not far behind. Ginny Mustard closes the attic door ever so gently. They sit wordless for five minutes or more before Ruth speaks.

  “I guess we’ll have to report this to Her Majesty’s finest. I’m sure they have a dead youngster nothing but bones department. Do you think the old nuns did it? I wouldn’t put it past them.”

  “Whatever happened to that poor little baby,” says Eve, “someone must have loved it very much to want to keep it for so long. It must be dead forty years or more. There’s nothing left on the bones at all.”

  Judy interrupts. “You’re giving me the creeps, you guys. And anyway - it could be dead only last year. You can boil bones in acid, you know, to get all the flesh off. I saw a movie once and the guy had some kind of bugs that could clean bones in a week. He was a cop or something and they use those bugs when they want to get at a skull real fast. It was a true story. Well I’m not sleeping in this house anymore until those friggin’ bones are gone out of here.”

  “Shut up, Judy. I don’t know what the hell your problem is,” says Ruth. “Nothing ever happened in this place until you showed up. And now here’s Maggie hitting people and Mrs. Miflin crippled in her bed and you even managed to talk her into a com-post bin. I never would have cut my fucking hair if you weren’t stirring things up. I don’t know how you do it but you do. You’re a pain in the ass. And I, for one, will be only too happy to see the tail end of you heading out. Why don’t you leave so we can get back to normal?”

  “Normal? You call this normal? Bunch of old bats holed up in a freak house? Sure Eve wasn’t in a store for years until I took her out for groceries. You had a good time, didn’t you Eve? And if freaky Maggie there can do something besides creep around like a zombie - even if it’s just hit someone up side the head - well who cares? It’s better than going around half dead all the friggin’ time. And if you didn’t cut your witch hair Ginny Mustard wouldn’t have made that picture of you and if she didn’t show us her other pictures we wouldn’t know about the bones up there and - oh - right - I see what you mean. Well excuse me for living!”

  Eve gets up and stands next to Judy’s chair. Reaches to stroke her orange spikes. “There, there, dear. We’ll get to the bottom of this. None of it is your fault.” She’s not sure that’s the truth but she did have a grand time shopping and wants to do it again.

  Maggie gathers the kittens in her big skirt, pours them on to Judy’s lap. “See, dear?” says Eve. “Maggie isn’t mad at you. She’s brought the kittens to take your mind off all of this. Your hair looks really nice, Maggie. If you like I can give it a trim around your eyes there so it’s not all hanging in your face. Maybe we can do that tomorrow. Now I think we should get ourselves to bed. Why don’t you just let me think on this for awhile and we can talk about it again in the morning. There’s nothing to be done at this late hour and since the baby has been here for a long time I’m sure it won’t be any harder to sleep tonight than it was last night.”

  The others are skeptical but Ginny Mustard smiles. She likes the singing and the creaking of the cradle and feels much better now that the others know her secret. It’s not that it weighed her down, but it did get in the way now and then.

  Across the road he takes his place under the aspen. Listens to it whisper above him, a greasy frown on his mouth as the fog moves in from the harbour. Up Water Street. Beaton’s Row. Caine’s Street. Settles thick and gray in his eyes until the house disappears and, nothing to see, he limps back to the river.

  In the morning, even before Ginny Mustard begins to prepare breakfast, they gather again in the sitting room, silently, as though the slightest sound will wake whatever else might be sleeping in this crypt of a house. Mrs. Miflin is still dead to the world and Eve’s first whisper convinces them to keep her ignorant of the situation. “She’s had a rough go of it, poor thing, and there’s plenty of time when she’s feeling better to let her know what’s going on.”

  “Poor thing, my ass,” hisses Ruth. “She probably knows all about it. It’s her house. You think she doesn’t know what’s in the bloody attic? She probably put it there. I’d never have taken her for a killer, though. She doesn’t seem the type.”

  “Fat lot you know about killers, Ruth.” This from Judy, who hasn’t had much practice whispering and they all jump slightly when she opens her mouth. “You think they run around drooling and knives hanging out of their pockets. Well let me tell you, some of the nicest looking people in the world are bad to the bone. Take my friend Geoff. He’d do in his granny for a dime of hash if he could get away with it. Anyway -1 think he did because one day when I went over there was a hearse taking her away and she was okay before that. Just kind of old is all.”

  Ginny Mustard doesn’t like where this conversation is going. She concentrates especially hard to keep up. “Do we have to give it back? The baby? Can we keep it? Judy got to keep the kittens.”

  “And who the hell would we give it to?” asks Ruth. “Put an ad in the paper and ask if anyone is missing an old dead baby? Check your graves and give us a call? For God’s sake, Ginny Mustard, you don’t have the
sense of a turnip.”

  “Well, I’m at a loss,” says Eve.

  From Mrs. Miflin’s room comes a weak plea. She needs to get to the bathroom, most likely, and Judy leaps to her duty.

  Patricia Hartman waits for her plane to board, purse on her lap, ticket in hand. Since the funeral she has debated the wisdom of going and still ponders her decision. Her mother would have disapproved. They had been over it several times in the last two years, each conversation ending with her mother’s insistence that in everyone’s interest the past was better left alone. Let the lawyers handle it. Her mother died unaware that Patricia had been watching. Never saw the letters written. Never heard the phone calls. Patricia Hartman is not the kind of woman to let go willingly, no matter how calmly she might appear to do so. Her mother never knew that about her. The announcer calls her flight. She leaves her seat and walks tall to the gate.

  While Judy attends Mrs. Miflin and Ginny Mustard waits with the kittens for a breakfast recipe, Ruth tells Maggie to come with her to the corner store and help her carry back a load of beer. No one has ever brought alcohol into Mrs. Miflin’s house. That would be ungodly. But, as Ruth reasons, what the old doll doesn’t know won’t hurt her. If they can protect her highness from bones in the attic, it shouldn’t be too damned difficult to keep a few brews tucked away in back of the fridge.

  Shocked by her own willingness to leave the house, but more amazed by Ruth’s audacity, Maggie pulls her shoes on and slowly, slowly goes down the front walk with Ruth to break the rules. It’s normally a three minute walk but it takes a good ten with Maggie having to step aside whenever anyone comes by, a statue until they pass, with her head down and her shoebox clutched tight against her chest. But she made it. She made it. Spent ten minutes in the world. Didn’t fall down. Wasn’t struck dead. Nobody hurt her. Only when she hears a transport truck does she realize the extent of her folly, but briefly. Ruth sees the panic and stays close enough to touch if Maggie feels the need.