Mercy of St Jude

by Wilhelmina Fitzpatrick

  Gerry taps her gently on the nose. “And you’d be the first to stop her if she did.”

  “Would not.”

  “You would so. You got a soft spot for our Mark, you know you do.”

  Sadie shakes her head, but she’s smiling. “Anyway, you want cake or not?”

  Gerry is so full there’s no room for guilt. “I’ll have it for breakfast,” he teases.

  Sadie frowns. “Gerard, not for breakfast—”

  “I’m just codding you, girl. We’ll have some after the burial, how’s that?”

  Her face brightens. “Yes, the funeral. Tomorrow be here soon enough.”

  Gerry smiles despite himself. Leave it to his mother to perk up at the mention of Mercedes Hann’s funeral.

  7

  1999

  Annie catches her reflection in the mirror above the laundry sink, the puffy skin, the eyes that have forgotten how to be happy. Is this what she’s been reduced to, crying her heart out in a dingy basement storeroom? She presses a damp cloth to her face and holds it there. The cold wetness feels fresh against her skin.

  She gives herself a few minutes then heads back upstairs. Her mother is talking on the hall phone. Annie wonders crossly who would call so late. As she nears the kitchen she hears Aiden’s voice, still bleating on about the Griffins.

  “And you know Sadie. Thinks the sun shines out of her darling Gerry’s very arsehole.” His voice rises. “There she was on the church steps, bragging about ‘Gerard’s wonderful job in international investment’, like she got a clue what that is, and his car and his fancy apartment. Pitied poor Father James, her paws were all over him.”

  Joe chuckles. “Sadie loves the priests.”

  “Then she says, ‘Oh, and the women! Dear Father, sure they’re always after him, not a lick of pride these days, ’ and on and on she went. I thought she’d never shut up.”

  “Sadie’s one to be talking about pride. Her own husband had to leave town to get shed of her.” Pat lets his wrist go limp. “Not that she was really his type.’’

  Sadie is the last person Annie wants to defend but she can’t listen to them slag the wife and excuse the husband. “Like he was any prize,” she says as she walks into the room. “Leaving a wife and youngsters to chase gay tail in Montreal. Men!”

  “Now Annie, don’t be bitter. It makes your face go all scow-ways,” Joe teases gently. “You puts me in mind of Mercie herself when you gets that snarl on you.”

  “Quick, cheer me up,” Annie retorts, reaching for a clean mug from the cupboard.

  Lucinda comes in. She waits for a quiet moment. “That was Tom Kennedy on the phone. He wants to see the family back here after the graveyard to read the will.”

  Annie whirls around. “What do you mean, read the will?”

  “That’s how she wanted it done, everyone together in the same room.”

  “Sounds like one of them soap operas on TV,” says Pat.

  “So that’s how you spends your time off the boat.” Aiden pushes Pat lightly. “You’re a real little woman, aren’t you, cooking in the kitchen and watching the soaps.”

  Pat swats at his brother. “Get on, Aiden, I do not.”

  “Anyway,” Lucinda says, raising a hand to her temple, “Tom’s been called to Toronto on some emergency and so we have to do it tomorrow, right after the burial.”

  Joe arches back to look up at her. “Can’t we let the dirt settle on her first?”

  Lucinda shakes her head. “He said Mercedes’ exact instructions were to do it as soon as possible and before anybody left St. Jude. With Tom having to go, it can’t wait.”

  Annie plunks the empty mug down on the counter. “Her and her exact instructions. Bad enough she insisted on a home wake. Who does that in this day and age? Even the poorest bunch in town goes to the funeral home. But no, not Queen Mercedes, she’s got to take over the whole house and everyone in it on her way out.”

  “Annie, if we can’t do her one last wish, what’s the good of us?”

  Annie is ready to argue the point until she notices her mother’s eyes. The whites are streaked with red and the skin beneath is dark and wrinkled.

  “What the hell’s she up to now?” asks Aiden.

  Pat tugs at his beard. “Three days dead and soon to be buried, she’s still at it.”

  “Always in control, even under the dirt.” Annie waits, expecting someone else to comment. The only sound is the drone of the fridge, amplified by the unusual silence.

  “You know what this means,” Aiden finally says. “It’s probably true.”

  “What is? Mom, what’s he talking about?”

  “Well, Annie,” Aiden says before Lucinda can answer, “it seems Mercedes may be having the last laugh after all. You see—”

  “Aiden Hann, you’re just making matters worse with your gossip,” Lucinda interrupts. “Listening to the likes of Bessie Foley!”

  “Bessie Foley?” Annie sits down next to Joe who gives her hand a gentle squeeze. “She still at Kennedy’s office?”

  Pat nods. “Just what you wants in a lawyer’s office, Sadie Griffin’s apprentice.”

  Annie turns to Aiden. “So what did Bessie say?”

  Lucinda raises her hand imperiously. “To make a long story short, Annie, Aiden here has been dating Bessie’s niece, although I’m not sure that’s the right word for what those two have been doing.” She gives Aiden a harsh, disapproving glance. “Never learn, will you? Anyway, Janet, the niece, she said Bessie hinted that the will’s going to be a bit of an eye-opener.”

  “What Janet said Bessie said,” Aiden interjects, “and I was there, remember, and in all my glory, I might add, was that some people were in for quite a surprise.”

  Pat snorts. “Who wants her few lousy bucks anyway?”

  Aiden cocks an eyebrow. “Few? How about half a million?”

  Lucinda’s hand slaps the counter. “The gall of that Bessie Foley. I’ve a good mind to report her to Tom Kennedy.”

  Annie eyes her mother. “Yet you’re not surprised at the amount.”

  “Oh, don’t mind that one. Besides, it’s nobody’s business.”

  She pauses. “There is something else, though. Tom let it slip just now that Gerry Griffin is in the will too.”

  “Wouldn’t you know it!” says Aiden. “I always knew he had an ulterior motive.”

  Pat, who has been tilting his chair back on its rear legs, lets it falls forward with a thump. “What is it with her and that son of a bitch? She’d do anything to spite us, don’t matter we never did a thing to her. And he’s the biggest bastard I ever met. Well, I’ve had it with the pair of them.” He stands up. “I’ll sit with her tonight and then say good riddance, once and for all. Come on, Aiden.”

  As Aiden follows him out, Lucinda drops into his chair. She seems on the verge of tears, a state Annie has become uncomfortably familiar with since arriving home.

  “That bunch never were any good.” Joe is suddenly wide awake. “What can you expect the way they carries on, bedding their own kin? God, them Griffins been at that long as anyone can remember. No wonder half the youngsters don’t make it.

  Look at Sadie, sure, burying two of her own.”

  “Really?” says Annie. “Sadie had two more children?”

  Lucinda frowns and shakes her head at Joe. He ignores her and leans in close to Annie. “According to rumour, one was a dwarf and the other was so handicapped they said it was lucky it died.” He lowers his voice. “Thing is, no one ever saw them. Home births, they were. And Sadie had them in the ground so fast it’d make your head spin.”

  “Poor Sadie. I actually feel bad for her.”

  “It’s all in the blood, and Sadie and Angus got the same in their veins.”

  Annie says nothing. She’s not so sure she wants to know any more.

  Joe is undeterred. “They were all originally from Little Cove before they moved into here. There was only a few families there, and the brothers and sisters from one family married
brothers and sisters from another family, and so they got more related. After that it’s the luck of the draw for the youngsters. Some are okay, others not.”

  “For heaven sakes, Joe,” Lucinda pleads, “it’s all gossip and hearsay. Don’t be talking about stuff like that, not tonight.”

  “All I knows is that half the Griffins were bad in the head.” His lip curls up in distaste. “The worst of the lot was that Paddy though, a sick dirty thing from day one, he was.” He slaps the Formica table and the cups and spoons rattle in their saucers. “I should of took care of him when I had the chance. Nothing but a goddamn pervert, that Paddy Griffin.”

  1943

  It was a typical spring night in St. Jude, the ground still frozen, a hint of a thaw in the air. Joe Hann had spent the evening playing darts at the town bar, Patron’s Pub. Joe liked his beer and he liked his whiskey. He also liked to spend time with the ladies, unlike his older brother, Callum, who, at twenty-one, found himself tongue-tied around women. Callum had passed the night at home reading, alone except for his father, whom he’d carried upstairs earlier. Through the open window he could hear the shrieks and laughter of children playing hide and seek in a field down the way. His ten-year-old sister was among them. At nine-thirty, he went to call her in. She came right away. Mercedes liked to curl up in bed with a book before sleep.

  Joe decided to go home early so he could go fishing the next morning and still get back in time for Mass. He took a shortcut through the woods, past the bog meadow, which would bring him up behind his family’s rundown house on the outskirts of town. This route also made it easier to enter through the rear door and avoid the squeaky hinge in the front that Mercedes had been complaining about for weeks and which he kept forgetting to fix.

  The sliver of moon that lit his way through the woods gradually withdrew behind a mist of clouds. Rounding the last clump of trees on the final approach to the house, he came upon Paddy Griffin, pants undone, grunting in the darkness.

  Paddy was Joe’s uncle, sort of, not that Joe had any respect for him. When Paddy was well into his thirties, he had married Joe’s mother’s stepsister, Nell - she was sixteen at the time - and taken her to Toronto. Nell returned six years later, alone, pregnant, the mother of two girls. She gave birth to Paddy’s son, Angus, six months later, by which time she’d taken up with Henry Byrne. Two months after Angus was born, Nell was pregnant again. When she died giving birth, Henry, heartbroken, went out fishing one night and never made it back. With Nell and Henry dead, Henry’s parents took on the job of raising the baby. They named him Dermot.

  “What the hell are you up to, Griffin?” Joe called out.

  Paddy started frantically pulling his clothes together. “Just having a piss. Who the fuck wants to know anyway?”

  “It’s me, Joe Hann. Christ sakes, piss into the trees at least so I don’t walk in it.”

  Paddy started to stagger and sway all of a sudden, mumbling incoherently.

  “Get on home,” Joe advised. “Don’t want to pass out. Gets awful cold at night.”

  Paddy spun around and, with a surprisingly sure step, ran off into the darkness.

  Heading once again towards the house, Joe’s eye was drawn upward to where an oil lamp illuminated his sister’s room. Through the window he could see the back of Mercedes’ head. Her small hand came up to guide a hairbrush through her long dark hair, past her bare shoulders. Joe immediately dropped his eyes back to the ground.

  He wondered why she hadn’t pulled the shade. Then he remembered. Weeks ago, maybe even longer, she’d asked him to fix it. It hadn’t seemed important at the time.

  Swinging back around, he searched the empty darkness. Nothing was visible except the shadows of a late-night wood.

  First thing the next morning, he repaired and hung Mercedes’ shade. Fishing could wait for another day. The front door’s hinge continued to squeak.

  One evening after supper, when Mercedes went out to play ball, Joe asked Callum what he knew about Paddy.

  “Nothing good. Mona Burke was talking down at the store, said her cousin up in Toronto heard some pretty nasty rumours. Apparently the reason Nell left him was she caught him doing something to one of their little girls, the dirty bugger. Mona hinted Paddy had some kind of disease too, from a whore up north. Not that I believe everything out of Mona’s mouth, but there’s something about that man makes my skin crawl.” Callum reached for Joe’s plate. “Why you asking?”

  Joe had a queasy feeling in his gut. “Well, I was heading home through the woods last week and I bumped into him taking a leak, at least that’s what he said he was doing with his hand on himself. I don’t know why he’d be back there at that hour, and it seemed some queer the way he was staring right at the house. After he took off, I saw Merce was up in her bedroom, and I still hadn’t gone and fixed that shade yet.”

  Callum was staring at the ceiling, up in the direction of Mercedes’ room. “That filthy disgusting pig.” His voice was bruised with rage.

  “Now Cal, slow down.” Joe laid a calming hand on his brother’s arm. “We’re not sure what he was up to. Let’s just keep an eye on him.”

  “We better tell Merce so she can stay clear of him.”

  “Go on, there’s no need for that, is there?”

  “Sure there is, so she keeps her distance.” Callum stood, his hands full of dishes.

  “If we goes telling her that stuff, she’ll be scared to leave the house. Besides, she’s too young to know about what he was doing at himself.”

  “Joe, if she’s old enough for him to be looking at her like that, she’s probably old enough to understand what he was doing.”

  “Lord’s sake,” Joe whispered, “she’s ten years old. Just because he’s a dirty bastard don’t mean she got to hear about it.”

  “She got a right to know so she can protect herself.”

  “Go on, Cal, she don’t need to be knowing stuff like that yet.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Who’s going to tell her, anyway?” Callum hesitated. “Well, you saw him there, but I can talk to her if you want.”

  “Look, I probably got the whole thing wrong,” Joe backtracked. “I bet he was just having a piss. Yeah, now I thinks on it, that’s all it was.”

  Callum eyed him doubtfully. “If he comes near her…”

  “Don’t you worry,” Joe promised, coming over to help with the washing up. “If he shows his face near here, I’ll cut the legs out from under him. All three of them.”

  As it happened, the problem resolved itself. Model citizen that he was, Paddy had gotten into debt with several local businesses and abruptly left town. Nobody was disappointed. Even his mother at the post office appeared relieved to have him gone.

  By the time Callum and Joe decided to try their luck in New York a few years later, their biggest worry was how their sister would manage left in the questionable care of their father. To make life easier for her, Callum had electricity and plumbing installed and arranged for Burke’s to extend credit to Mercedes, and Mercedes only, for food and supplies.

  They’d forgotten all about Paddy Griffin.

  1946

  St. Jude was originally a fishing village. As such, it had its share of widows. When the sea took a man, it took his family’s livelihood as well, leaving his wife and children to make do. A few ounces of meat would flavour a pot to feed a family of three or six or ten. Hand-me-downs were handed down a few more times. With no man in the house, life was extra hard. When Sadie Griffin’s father drowned, her mother was six months pregnant. Sadie had been making do since the day she was born.

  “Big bow wow, Tow-wow-wow…”

  Five-year-old Sadie Duffie sang a ditty as she swished the broom across the wood plank floor. Her singing stopped at the sound of someone running across the gravelled yard and up the rickety front steps.

  Mabel Duffie’s plump body burst into the kitchen. “Ma! Ma!” she yelled, sending the cat scurrying into the neat pile of dirt that Sadie had just swept together.

>   “Mabel!” Sadie yelled.

  “I saw the toilet!” Mabel panted.

  Sadie turned to her mother. “Look what she done.”

  “Weren’t me. Stupid cat did it.”

  “I hates that thing.” Sadie smacked at the cat with the broom. “Go away, cat.”

  Edna Duffie’s crooked arthritic fingers placed a small piece of salt beef onto the boiling cabbage. She peered at her older daughter over the steam. “Get on, girl. They really got a toilet?” “Who? Who got one?” Sadie asked. She’d never seen a real toilet.

  “The Hanns. Merce bragged about it all week. Wouldn’t shut up for nothing.”

  “So they don’t got to go to a outhouse no more?” Sadie could not imagine that.

  Mabel shrugged. “Don’t know, but the toilet’s right next to her bedroom.”

  Sadie tried to picture needing to go in the middle of the night and only having to walk to the next room. She couldn’t. “Did you go pee on it?”

  “No. I wanted to but she didn’t say to, and I wasn’t going to let on like I cared.”

  “Why? She’s our cousin.” Sometimes Mabel didn’t make much sense to Sadie.

  “Some cousin. Wouldn’t even show me the answers on the history test the other day. Thinks she knows everything, that one.”

  “That’s the Hanns for you,” said Edna. “Chock full of their-selves. Don’t know why Mary ever married that Farley. The death of her, he was.”

  “That Merce is nothing but a tomboy,” said Mabel. “Whenever we plays ball she always wants to be on the boys’ team.”

  “I likes playing ball,” said Sadie, sweeping around Mabel’s feet.

  “So she got a eye for the boys, eh?” Edna eased herself into the rocking chair.

  “Nah, don’t know they’re alive other than to kick the ball. A few of the older fellows were teasing her the other day and she swore at them, right out loud, too. Sister Anne heard her though the window. Got in some trouble, she did. Serves her right.”