Bishop's Road

by Catherine Hogan Safer

  Those women buried something and it looked like an old rug but it was heavier. And that Indian was hanging around yesterday so he thinks they might be up to something which doesn’t surprise him at all since no good ever comes of letting a crowd of women live together without a man around to keep things normal.

  Ruth doesn’t know Patrick all that well yet but she’s in love for sure. Tuned in. She knows what’s wrong before he says hello. Knows that whatever they have begun is over. Can’t make up her mind whether to cry or scream so she just sits and does nothing for a minute before calling to the others.

  “The arse is out of her now, ladies. The arse is out of her now.” And she laughs. Bitterly. “Sergeant Fahey is here on official police business. Tell them, Patrick.”

  “I think this missing person is Mr. Miflin. He looks a lot like the man in Mrs. Miflin’s wedding pictures. No one has seen him for a month or more. Has he come around at all? If it is Mr. Miflin, it makes sense that he would show up here. Does he look familiar, Eve?”

  “You would have to pick on Eve first. Nice going, Patrick. It’s okay Eve. You don’t have to lie. Go ahead and tell Sergeant Fahey everything you know about Mr. Miflin.”

  One by one they tell him the story but when it comes time to take Mrs. Miflin’s statement things get confusing. There’s no way her dear husband is dead. It can’t be true. He just went out and he’ll be back any minute. She doesn’t know who the man in the picture is but it’s not her husband.

  “She’s out of it,” says Ruth. “She knew all about this until he thawed. I guess she just kind of snapped, lucky bitch.”

  “Are you going to arrest me?” asks Ginny Mustard.

  “Yes,” says Patrick. “You’ll have to come to the station with me now. There’ll be other policemen here in a few minutes to dig up the body and take it away.”

  “Well that was a friggin’ waste of time!” yells Judy. “What are we supposed to do with those friggin’ trees? I’m not touching another shovel as long as I live so someone else is going to have to plant them next time.”

  “You’d best keep a civil tongue in your head, young lady,” says Patrick. “Neither of you is in the clear. Ginny Mustard is not the only one in trouble.” He calls the station and in no time there are a good dozen officers all over the place, who haven’t investigated a murder for years and can’t wait to get their hands on a real crime. Sirens blaring and brakes screeching they come tearing up the road. Important. Cool. Digging out their spiffy sunglasses even though it’s a drab day and looks like more rain. They take their own sweet time wrapping Mrs. Miflin’s house in yellow tape. Block the street to traffic but not pedestrians and they’re every-where, rumors flying so thick and furious you need a swatter to get through them.

  With promises to take care of her little baby the others wave Ginny Mustard goodbye. Watch the police car inch its way around neighbours they never knew they had. Mrs. Hennessey rushes home to bake up her famous tuna casserole for the bereaved. That’s what you do when someone dies no matter how they meet their end but when she brings it over she doesn’t get a peep inside the house, has to give it to the policeman standing at the front door. Several of the other women on the street do the same. By the time they figure out that a satisfying meal is no ticket to the inner sanctum and give it up the tenants have enough to keep themselves fed for a month.

  Aside from missing the baby and Dorrie’s dolls, things on the inside aren’t much different than anywhere else for Ginny Mustard. Patrick lets her bring along the little CD player and one of the hookers takes a liking to her so nobody steals it. She has her music and plenty to eat. And if she can’t walk to the river whenever she wants, well, it is still better than going hungry and having people yell at you all the time, listening to children crying and being beaten for no reason at all every time you turn around. As long as she never has to be a little girl again, life is grand for Ginny Mustard.

  Under the assumption that she is as poor as a church mouse the courts award Ginny Mustard legal counsel free of charge. The young woman assigned the case is having a hard time making heads or tales of the story. Asks that Ginny Mustard be freed on her own recognizance until the trial date. If Mr. Miflin had been a person of any importance she might have been held forever, but he wasn’t, and after a few days in the lock-up she is sent home to wait it out.

  Judy is going back to school. Her probation officer and Patrick have worked it out. If there’s any chance of her getting away with aiding and abetting the criminal, Ginny Mustard, those men will see that she takes it. She’s not thrilled with the idea. School has always been a pain for her. Not that she isn’t smart. She surely is. But it’s just so difficult to sit still and listen to some deadhead teacher drone on and on about wars and kings and the economy of Brazil and where to put your commas and who really cares about the square root of anything when you get right down to it.

  Maggie wants to go as well. She never did finish up, what with being dragged away and all. When Patrick comes to deliver the news to Judy he says that since this particular school takes just about anybody that no one else will, he’ll talk to them. It might help to have Maggie on board. At least she’ll get Judy out of bed in the morning. Maybe even out the door.

  “That’s what we can spend all my money on, Judy. We can buy some new school clothes. My dad used to do that every first of September and we’d have lunch too. He would take the whole day off. Do you want to do that?”

  “When can we go? Do you want to get some tattoos while we’re at it? I know a guy who does them dirt cheap down the end of Water Street. It’s really a video shop but he has all the gear in the back room.”

  Ruth doesn’t want to see Patrick and he’s been asking for her. Eve has tried to get her to come downstairs but she won’t budge. She has locked her door and no one is allowed in. Late at night when the house is asleep she wanders about. Stares at the streetlights from the sitting room window. All of the hurt she has ever swallowed is a monster that she cannot get around. She doesn’t even try. She is as flat as if someone had run her down with a steam roller. Raw. There is nothing but the pain. She slows her existence to a series of deliberate movements. Says to herself, “Now I am walking down the stairs. One stair, two stairs, three,” all the way. “Now I am turning on the tap. I am filling a glass with water. I am drinking water. I am rinsing the glass.” Nothing more. She does not think. She cannot think. She can only hurt all over. One foot in front of the other. Carefully. Carefully. Slowly. She is broken. There is nothing anyone can do to help. Her agony fills the house. Dorrie opens every door, every window, but there’s not enough sunlight in all of creation to dispel the darkness.

  Eve says they must stop trying. Says that when Ruth is ready and able she’ll come back. Eve tends poor Mrs. Miflin, assures her that her dear husband will be here soon, helps her fix up her hair and holds the mirror to show her how pretty she looks. Mrs. Miflin won’t go back to the hospital to have her cast removed, she doesn’t want to chance not being home when he arrives, so Judy carries her to the tub and they soak it off. She still won’t walk though, no matter how Eve coaxes. Sits at her bed-room window and watches the road. Waits.

  The school that Judy and Maggie attend is just like a real one except it’s not crowded and the teachers treat them like human beings. Judy says, “This is a nice friggin’ change from the last place I was.” Everyday they walk home past Maggie’s old house and if the car is gone they go in to visit her dad. When he knows that Mrs. Eldridge will be out for the day he makes cookies and they all sit at the kitchen table and talk about what’s happening at school and he helps Judy with her math. When they leave he makes sure they take the leftover cookies with them so his wife won’t know and she can’t figure out why there’s never any flour or sugar around when she needs them. They don’t acknowledge the existence of Maggie’s mother except for one day when she came home early and they had to hide in the backyard until Mr. Eldridge signaled that it was okay to run around front and disapp
ear.

  Fall is much too soon this year but pretty enough anyway that most people don’t care. Along the river the leaves are changing to yellow gold and burgundy. Now is the time to stake out a blueberry patch on the hills; it’s so easy to find the bushes when they turn flame red. Draw a little map for yourself and keep it tucked away until next year. Some nights there’s a dusting of frost and only the calendula and marigold, the marguerite daisies, alyssum, malva have the tenacity to hang on, wait for the sun to warm their cold petals and then they’re as nice as you’d want. In Eve’s garden the zinnias and poppies are blooming over and over as though to please her one last time. She washes her pots and wheelbarrow but the flowers keep on growing.

  Ruth has gone away. She borrowed Dorrie’s car and some money from Ginny Mustard. Judy made sandwiches for the trip. She put a few things in a small suitcase and no one knows the wherefore and the why, just that she’ll be back and they should keep their chins up. The darkness went with her or maybe it got off at the overpass as she was heading out of town. Either way the house is bright again except when Patrick comes by, which he does a couple of times a day to ask if anyone has heard from Ruth and to see if they need any heavy lifting done or walls painted. Their answer at first was no but now each tries to think of a little something to keep him busy since he doesn’t seem to want to go home. They feed him and get him to change a lightbulb or move a dresser or take a look in the basement to find out what the strange sounds might be coming from the water heater. He’s easy enough to have in the house even as gloomy as he is all the time and they tolerate him the way they do the kittens, stepping around him when he’s underfoot and shooing him to another room when he takes up too much space in the kitchen. They send him outside to rake leaves or spread compost. He’s building a potting shed and replacing some of the rotting boards on the back step. But he doesn’t whistle while he works or smile very often.

  Ruth has gone home. Home to the place she was born. Home that is empty now, but for the sad thing that haunts the landing at the top of the stairs just outside her old bedroom door, sits and listens in cold bare feet and flannelette nightgown. Blue. Frayed at the edges. Much like Ruth herself. She has come to do penance in the only place cruel enough and hard enough to grant her absolution.

  Ruth’s mother despised this village. The rocks and the cliffs and the pathetic scraps of earth around the clapboard houses that hang on for dear life and at first glance seem fragile but are as tough as the coltsfoot sticking out of the pebbles at their feet. She hated all of it. The people were ignorant and dull as dishwater, she used to say. She wanted more than this. Nagged her husband to move away to a real town with a decent school and social opportunities but he never would. The fishing was fine. His family had been here for generations and besides, they owned their home. They would never find better than this anywhere else. He had been through the war. Had seen as much of the rest of the world as he cared to and would live and die here thank you very much. What was he thinking to marry a teacher? He might have known she’d get fancy notions one of these days. Grand ideas about what was proper and what wasn’t and how to dress and sit and eat and speak and she drove him right up the wall with her picking all the time. When she took to drinking it got worse. The fights lasted long into the night and Ruth wouldn’t sleep until they were finished. Listened from her perch on the landing at the top of the stairs.

  The house stands back from rock a few hundred feet or so. Nasty cruel vertical layers razor sharp and a million years from Africa or wherever they were before the earth shifted and the waters rose. From a distance they look inviting. You think, I’ll sit here with my sandwich and apple and watch clouds and dream awhile but up close you can see that the only place comfortable is underwater where the waves have beaten the stone to submission. So you must have your lunch on the grass at the land’s edge with the seagulls that scream if you take too long to fling your scraps.

  Behind and to the sides of the house are rose bushes gone mad. They push hard against the walls and might crush if they ever felt the need. Among them, stunted pine and alder and way at the back aspen to keep you awake at night with their gossip. Lonely looking from the rocks. Derelict. There’s a wind blowing through the rooms and the roof makes heavy sighs like something in very old pain.

  The village was abandoned thirty-five years ago. Resettled. Its inhabitants moved a few miles down the road where there was more of what Ruth’s mother wanted in her life. Forty houses, once yellow, red, green against the fog, boat launches, the wharf, church, school, all lonely grey and crumbling with nobody home except the feral cats. If Ruth had ever wanted kittens she has them now. And they are about as friendly as she feels, snarling when she comes upon them, backs arched and tails puffed three times normal size.

  Gardens abandoned went wild. Everywhere the remnants of a summer that must have been beautiful. Hollyhock, delphinium, foxglove grow year after year wherever they damn well please. Mint, rhubarb and lavender. Ivy, unchecked, filled ditches, climbed over fences and down the road, in through broken windows and rotting doors.

  The house is cold. Ruth wants to light a fire but doesn’t know if the chimney is safe. She fills a bucket with water from the well and drags it to the living room, just in case. It’s all the care she feels like taking now. She hauls wood from the shed. She peels paper from the walls of her parents’ bedroom. It has been there for a hundred years and comes away easily once she gets a corner pulled up. She feeds her fire faded flowers and it works. Her toes are warm. She falls asleep on the rug and the sad thing is crying, shivering, on the landing at the top of the stairs.

  Ruth wakes to sunshine through dirty, cracked windows and a brown mouse just beyond her reach, staring with black eyes. “You’re the fool. There are cats everywhere. It’s a good thing the old man is not around - he’d have you mashed to nothing with a broom and flung in the trash before you could blink.”

  The house is cold again, the fire long dead. Ruth finds rags in the kitchen, wipes a circle clean in the living room window, stares at the ocean for a few minutes before washing her face, brushing her teeth. She walks the village one end to the other again and again. Sits in the old church for hours with the cats that lie about the altar and leap over pews, fight in the aisle. She closes her eyes and hears Father Murphy sing the mass, preach eternal damnation, salvation, take your pick. I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible. She can smell incense.

  At the house she scrubs with cold water, no soap, the living room. Windows. Floor. Furniture deemed unacceptable for the new home, what will people think if they see us dragging that garbage along. Job’s Landing is not like this place you know, it’s going to be hard enough fitting in anyway, I won’t have them taking us for a crowd of peasants. And they had gone, her mother thrilled with the idea, her father grumbling all the way, her brother ready for his own place with his new bride and Ruth not caring one way or the other.

  She scrubs the walls higher and higher as far as she can reach and that’s not good enough so she stands on a rotting chair and by the time she is done even the ceiling gleams, and the light fixture. She takes the rug she slept on outside to the fence and beats it with a stick and the dust is in her eyes and ears and nose and she is crying. She goes to the ocean. Stands on the rocks too close for comfort. Thinks she might let the waves take her but knows they don’t want her, will throw her back bloodied and broken. She is no longer part of water and water knows that. Even a lake would tell her float. Her toes curl in her shoes to grip the slippery rock. She is not brave. She does not want to die.

  For days she wanders the house. Takes her rug and a bucket of water, scrubs her parents’ room and sleeps where their bed was, her brother’s room and sleeps where his bed was, her room and sleeps a while, sits at the top of the stairs and listens, sleeps a while, sits at the top of the stairs and listens, sleeps a while. She has eaten all of her sandwiches and is down to water when the house is
finished, clean as it can be with no soap. She gathers lavender and branches of rose hips, fills the bucket and puts the arrangement in the middle of the living room floor. Tells the sad thing at the top of the stairs in bare feet and shivering to get in the car, you might as well come with me, and drives to Job’s Landing.

  It is late and dark when she arrives at her brother’s house but she knocks at the door anyway. When Matthew answers he does not recognize her until she speaks. He makes coffee. Joanna wakes and prepares the guest room. They are happy to see her, to know that she is alive after all this time. They sit quietly at the kitchen table. Ruth showers and sleeps. Time enough tomorrow to find out why she’s here.

  “I’ve been to the old place. Spent three days there. Or four. Hard to tell. I cleaned it top to bottom. The village looks so much prettier with no people. Nature just kind of moved in and grew all over it. The gardens have gone wild. I met a man. The first one worth knowing for as far back as I can remember. But I’ve been unbelievably stupid. Fed him a pack of lies. He’s come to see me but I can’t even look at him. Knowing I lied. I’ve been feeling like crap so I went to the old place. Considered throwing myself into the ocean but I’m too much a wimp.”

  Matthew and Joanna take the day off. Listen to Ruth. “We didn’t know what had become of you. The last letter was twenty-five years ago. From Jamaica. Where have you been all this time?”

  “Around. You can’t go wrong being a great waitress. Especially if you don’t care how seedy the bar. If you stay one step ahead of immigration. Not all that difficult, really. But when you start looking your age it’s not so easy. They like the young ones with perky tits. Once your ass starts to fall down around the back of your knees you’re pretty much washed up. I got tired. Now I do nothing. Your taxes have been feeding me for a good six years now. I have a room in a nuthouse and I pretty much do fuck all.”