By day we did cross-stitch, and cooked and cleaned, and had choir. On special occasions us girls went down to the near-by Catholic convent for tea: New Year’s Day, Mother’s Day, Thanks-giving. The nuns always wanted to know who the Catholics were among us; I kept my mouth shut.
There were others like me, knowing their labels, rid of by a judge claiming to protect the morality of a community, a parent wanting a new marriage, or by a family who had fallen on hard times and couldn’t support them, which was much in the thirties. Each of us coped in our own ways. Some were obedient nurse’s pets, friends of everyone. Sometimes, in our beds at the end the day, a few of us spoke in whispers about where we were from, what we had left behind. But most of the time, I kept to myself and preferred my own imaginings.
I could see ghosts; though at first I didn’t know that they couldn’t be seen, that they were dead invisible to others. I had to be careful not to answer their greetings out loud. Some of the residents knew and some of the cleaning staff. There was a solidity to the ghosts like they were real people, but dressed wrong for the time and place. Day or night, it didn’t seem to matter, they spoke to me.
One was a young woman, the daughter of a judge, who had been sent there to break her secret engagement to a country farmer. After a year he had married another. She had picked small field stones, collected them in her apron, one by one, and stitched them into the wide hem of her very best dress, a dark red, with heavy thread. One morning early she had donned the dress, walked into the river and set herself down. Some said her ghost slept nights in what served then as our parlour and served in her life as the sewing room. That her dark visage still walked between the fields and the river at the crack of dawn.
“How did you know that?” One older cleaning woman had grabbed my hand and looked around for anyone within earshot when I had first approached her, frightened out of my wits. When I didn’t answer her, she tried to make light of it. “It was a long time ago, when ladies were foolish creatures and men were foolisher.”
You soon learned you couldn’t tell the nurses. They moved you to the psychiatric ward, shot you through with tranquilizers. “You’ve got second sight,” an old cook told me finally, “but don’t tell no one here. It’ll only bring you trouble.”
After the ladies, came the broken young men, truckloads of them wandering around dozing on their feet. My father had told me about the ghosts of the dead on the battlefield, so I knew who they were when we first met. How they rose to charge the Germans from the same trenches where they’d fallen a week or a year before. How they warned those still living, of the enemy in this trench or the mines hidden in the field. How they succoured the wounded, carrying them to clearing stations, talking all the time to keep them conscious, fed them from rations and canteens full of fresh water. My father used to tell the old priests who came to the bar, the scriptures are wrong where they said that the dead no longer look like themselves. Yes, they are no longer a body, but they look like themselves, the image of themselves, down to the same rings on their fingers, the scapulars on their neck, the cigarette case in their hand, the St. George’s medal hanging from their throat. Even their tag numbers. The timbre of their voices. The same. They were instantly recognizable.
One soldier was said to have hung himself in the pantry at the training school. The old cook swore meat would spoil if you let it thaw on those shelves. Several convalescents had never left the institution. They’d left their very souls in the walls, the staff said.
I heard them some nights. Young men groaning, frightened by sudden movements, loud sounds. Hungry for earth times. “Larks,” they told me. Larks were singing and shells exploding as men were screaming, falling among the orchards, with green apples. The dying screams of men, the mating songs of birds joined. Friends drawn and quartered by a shell.
And so we suffered the dying young men, their dreams fused with ours. “Haunting us who still have our wits and those who haven’t,” the old cook said. Even animals, dumb beasts, can sense the texture of grief. I made what offerings I could: a handful of strawberries, a robin’s feather, a prayer.
Nights in my bed when all was quiet, I pretended I was Rapunzel. I lay waiting for my hair to grow long enough and one of the young soldiers to come by my window. We’d make rope of my long hair and tie it off on the bed post and he would take me away from this place, take me home to my father. But by morning waking, my hair was cut short again.
12
FLORENCE
The bishop barely makes it through the front door of the hotel when he throws himself to the floor, beating his breast as he falls and landing hard on his knees. Vera, Daisy, and me are sitting at the Table of Truth, moved back out to its original home by the postal wicket, already drinking our Saturday morning coffee. We think the man’s had a stroke and all get up at the same time, to help His Grace off the hardwood. He begins to address us.
“I am the most wretched of men! I am not worthy to touch the hem of your cloaks.”
Vera makes it to him first, crouches down. “Your Grace!”
“No, leave me here. This is where I must be, for I have come to wash the feet of the women disciples. I have so much to repent.”
“But Bishop,” Daisy tries to intervene.
“No. I speak the truth. I am out of my mind with grief, but I know fully the sin I have committed.
“Please bring me a basin of water, towels, and a washcloth. I am sorry I cannot carry it myself, that I must rely on you for that.” The poor man is breathing heavily.
Vera gets up and does as he says.
Then he asks us to push our chairs together and make a small circle in one corner, off to the side. We take off our shoes and our socks, such as they are. Daisy has only her sandals.
We are all of us, the bishop included, already sobbing before he even lifts a cloth. Such is the feeling among us. A kind of joy, I try to explain to the men afterwards, wondrous, like everything that day. The water of tears and the water of our washing mingling. “Isn’t that what you call an absolution in your religion?” Buster teases me. “Only usually it’s done on women by priests, not the other way around and without the washing,” the grand order of things, the irony not lost on him.
One by one the bishop washes our feet. Each dip of water, each stroke of the cloth, he tells us something of the story of his tortured actions with regards to Annie Gallagher. We tell him the parts of the story we know, our own and Annie’s mingled together, and of how she ended up, a water witcher. His tears, more liquid than the water by the end of it. “Purified,” I said later. We and him washed in salt.
Finally, Vera is the one to appeal to his common sense. “Bishop, we need you to be able to stand through a full funeral today, an hour, maybe more. Let me help you off that floor.”
Oh yes, yes.” He seizes the chair she brings him, then grasps the coffee I hand him and drinks greedily. Daisy removes the wash water not to the sink but out the back door, where she pours it over a flowerbed.
ANNIE
The first time my father saw my mother, he told me, the vines that curled around the doorposts where she stood were dark with fruit. The walnut trees were full. The apples, the pears, the yellow plums were ready to be picked. The walled gardens, shot through here and there from mortars, were planted with lettuce and radish and cabbage, hollyhocks and roses growing taller and fuller than any he’d seen back home.
My father said she was from a place of old cities that remembered waves of occupation in their very foundations: Celtic, Roman, Frank, and Viking; pagan and Christian. A place where civilization had prospered for thousands of years before Majestic had even been settled. A place of art and eight-hundred-year-old churches, all of them made from stone, hewn in the traditional way. A place for opera and theatre. Grand gardens with plants collected from the four corners of the world and laid out in the manicured French fashion.
Before the war, Lorraine was a place where almost anything grew without effort. Afterwards, all that was left
were craters as treacherous as quicksand, oozing with rains, coughing up bits of barbed wire, unexploded shells, and putrid bodies. A colossal ossuary, a bone field that snaked for miles.
My father told me that she was not much older than seventeen when they met at Bar Le Duc on the approach to Verdun, the road they called La Voie Sacree, the Sacred Way, because it was the only way by some miracle still open to the front and the lone reason the Canadians were holding the line. She stood on the threshold of an estaminet, wearing the black of mourning, common to the women of that time, no hat, her long hair tucked up at the nape of her neck, a basket in hand. She was smiling. The allied reinforcements had arrived and they were packing in supplies day and night. When there was a halt called in the line, my father said, their eyes caught and held. My mother reached out to stroke the face of his horse. She looked so thin, my father offered her some of his rations. There were tears in her eyes as she accepted and gave a little bow.
They met again by chance, he said, in Paris. From then on, all my father wanted was to protect her and there was no question that she would come home with him. After that he took all his leaves in Paris.
FLORENCE
When Father Pat arrives early to vest for the funeral, I feel compelled to prophesy. I swear to the others later, I felt moved. I’m not sure what moves me. Maybe it’s the events of these last days, the BSE plague of these last weeks, maybe the drought of these past three years, coming now to a critical point in Annie’s passing. Maybe it’s me playing my devilish part to help Daisy and Buster and Mike to keep the priest occupied and out of the way for the Project. Maybe it’s the humility of the older priest I’ve just witnessed that has made me bold. Or my schoolteacherly orneriness. Maybe it is the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is all of these things.
It’s Daisy Goodchild’s job to lay out his vestments, change the altar cloth, find the readings in the lectionary, and set up the microphone. I’m just here to help her with a bit of folding and sorting.
“Such a wind there is today, Father, blowing the living green branches off everything. As if there’s a hundred thousand souls out there wanting in.”
“Yes, Florence, yes,” he says absentmindedly, glancing at me over his glasses, standing with one leg bent, flipping through the sacramentary to find his prayers. Like in the old days, like turning the clock back in time, like when I was a small child, these priests, their noses in books all the time, praying words on a page, forgetting to pray the people.
“The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head, I tell you.” I raise my voice and I don’t stop raising it. “Not the creatures of the world, not even the foxes or the birds: the ducks, the swans, the geese. This year’s migration none of them stayed, they didn’t even stop. I saw them — clouds of them — all spring, circling overhead, riding the thermals, trying to spot a patch of water. Pretty soon, they pulled up their tails, headed north. All except for the magpies that is. The magpies will stay through summer and winter; they never leave.”
They never mass, I almost add. I’m not sure how they’ve survived the drought; maybe they fly to water? It doesn’t matter. I have his attention now and Daisy’s too. The young priest looks up from his book of prayers. Daisy has stopped mid-stride, prayer stole on her arm, her eyes playful around the edges, her mouth round, threatening to giggle.
“The weather in these times, Father, is epic.” I don’t know why I’m forced to speak. But I want him to hear this testament. To take it forward with him when he leaves this place.
“We’re witnessing a fundamental change. Lightning storms at the crack of dawn. What killed our Annie.” I cross myself. “Windstorms, Father, in the middle of a clear summer’s day, the sky as blue as blue can be. Winds that blow nothing but dirt and air and bear no moisture, not a cloud. Only one other time in living memory when that happened in these parts.” I know I have taken on the voice of the dead.
He’s shook up now. He’s distracted, but good.
“The Great Depression, Father. The dust bowl. Like when Annie and I were growing up. Only we’ve got it summer and winter. A sign of biblical proportions. It’s not a good sign, Father. It’s not a good sign at all.”
FATHER PAT
Ever since I got here, that’s all I hear about. The winters not as cold, not as much snow. The falls wetter, the springs and summers hotter and drier. The extremes of moisture. Everything’s backwards. They keep telling me, looking to me, but I don’t have any magic for them. I can’t dig them any wells like their friend, Annie. It’s one of the reasons I’m glad to leave this place. I don’t know how to help. All I have to offer is doubt, doubt about myself more than anything, and a fistful of rules. I doubt myself, which is more dangerous than any other lack of faith.
BUSTER
I knock twice, twice again, then wait. Goofy signals — the womenfolk’s idea with the plan moved up by one day with Annie’s funeral. I nearly drop my pants when the young Father opens the back door of the church. My eyes bug out of my head, like a badger caught stealing into someone else’s burrow. Instinctively, I want to duck and hide. Instead I grunt, try to look nonchalant. I’ve always wanted to see what was behind the altar. Not much to it from this angle. Shelves, a closet, a few cupboards, a couple of sinks, one with a big sign over it: “Mass wine and holy water here.” A curtain in the corner. One looks like an exit stage front. I want to look closer in the cupboards, but Father Pat is assessing my curiosity.
“Buster is here to give us a hand with some of these vestments,” Daisy calls over her shoulder, nonchalant-like too. We had told him we were getting the linens cleaned and mended before handing them over to the Diocese. Florence smiles and gives me a little wave, the closest thing to a wink from that woman.
“Yes, indeedy,” I say. “Let’s see how much you’ve got to carry, my girl, then we can join the — group,” I almost stumble. I was thinking “the party,” but that wouldn’t be proper under the circumstances.
Mrs. Cummins is trying to play the organ again. That’s what I tell Daisy every time I hear her. I’ve attended enough weddings and funerals and midnight Masses here to know. She doesn’t play, she tries to play. This time, though, there’s a purpose to the cacophony. They know it will keep him away from the sanctuary till the last possible minute.
“Now Father, you were going to check on the bishop before you vest, weren’t you? And don’t forget the pallbearers. Still an hour till the service.” Daisy steers him past me. He swallows it like a lamb.
“See you in a bit, Father.” I make sure to pump his hand on the way by.
When he’s gone, Daisy whispers, “Mike’s already started.” I just nod and slip through the curtains. Not much reason to come inside a Catholic Church over the years. The odd wedding or funeral, like today. Daisy’s the Papist in the family. I’m just a token member of the United Church.
The young Mueller fellow is there too, near the back, though I’m not too worried about any confrontation from that quarter. He looks pretty absorbed in himself, still twisted up like a cork, rubbing his hands together, and tapping his foot like there’s no tomorrow. I give him a military salute, as if to say I’m glad you’re keeping the faith. He cracks his knuckles, gives me a quick nod, goes back to staring at the floor, rocking himself back and forth.
No sign of Jack. Mike says he went home to catch some rest.
Mike’s on a ladder, unscrewing the Stations of the Cross. “Here,” he says, motions me towards all the cardboard on the floor, the roll of unbleached paper, the utility knife and the tape gun.
“Help me wrap this up.”
We work through all the stations that way. Jesus: falling and falling and falling, Veronica wiping his face, the soldiers nailing him to the cross. It’s a good story this way, handing it down, laying a cover of protection over it.
We take turns on the ladder, passing each scene down, wrapping it, till we get to the big picture of the Madonna with the scar under her eye. An awful lot of pain in this religion, that’s what I’ve al
ways said to Daisy. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry grimacing or dead. She always says back, “There’s an awful lot of pain in this life.” And there’s nothing I can say to that. Except that I’ve always liked the look of that Madonna, dark and alive, her eyes piercing right through you. We fold her up like all the rest, blank newsprint up against the paint, wrapped in thin cardboard and sealed with packing tape. Load them all in the box I have under my arm. Convey them past the lone communion rail, the altar, to the priest’s quarters again. Daisy stops us at the back door to give the all clear and we move them into the back of Mike’s camper. Later, after the funeral is over and everyone is gone, we plan to take them down the hill to the hotel for storage in the back pool room.
MIKE
I do recall the first holy pictures I saw. The nuns would give out small cards with a Mary or a Joseph or a Jesus on them. Oftener than not Jesus had blond or brown hair and blue eyes and creamy-coloured skin, wore white billowing robes and looked happy. Joseph always looked the more sombre of the two, like someone who had found himself in a tight spot but had shouldered his responsibilities. Mary was always serene, like nothing rattled her. If you did well at catechism, if you answered a question right in class, if you scored high on the test, if you made your first communion, you would get a picture card. Each one had a story and a little prayer on the back.
There was Bernadette and the devotees of the Lady of Lourdes. Dark swarthy complexions, black eyes and olive skins, the way all mountain girls must look I imagined. Any of them could have been my best friend on the playground; each one, brave and pious.
Lourdes herself had roses growing at her feet and rays of light escaping from her crown of gold as if she were the sun itself. The heavens in her picture were like a prairie heaven, big black thunderclouds arrayed behind her. Little sheep drinking from her waters.
Fatima had skin and robes whiter than light, had rosaries wrapped around her praying hands, had little shepherd children kneeling at her feet, swaddled in rough clothes.
The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning Page 14